During the winter of 2011 the Historic River Boats Afloat team made their first rafting trip through the Grand Canyon on the great Colorado River. They wrote a blog but due to technical difficulties it didn’t make it. This is what they wrote…

Feb 16, 2011
Aced Out At Across From Der Creek

After our Galloway Layover, today would be a short five mile run from Galloway Camp to Across From Deer Creek. First thing of course is to pack up our layover camp. This involves packing up the kitchen, closing down the fire pan and all the chairs around the fire, packing up the toilet and all our tents scattered at many tent sights. All this stuff is loaded on the boats. The boat rowers take extra care in the rigging today as we are right on top of a large rapid.

Everyone in our group is very health-concious, and in addition to exercise and staying active we are also very careful about even the medicine we take. We know in some cases there are some side-effects that may make taking the medication not a good idea. Some of the medication we have found to be safer is herbal. We don’t get sick very often but when we do this form of alternative medicine has worked wonders for us. Here you can find a good resource if you want to know about herbal medicine.

Once camp is all packed away on the boats, we run Deubendorff Rapid first thing. Brynn tries her hand at fish-eyeing on the GEM stern deck. The fisheye technique involves laying down on the boat’s stern deck and holding onto the side deck lines tight. The boat is rowed stern first with the boat rower facing downstream. The fisheye person is looking downstream. In between the waves of cold water, Brynn would look back at Tom with a look intended to kill. It was a very wet ride. Surprisingly, Brynn enjoyed the ride and there was some jesting of trying this at Lava.

We moved on to Tapeats Creek and re-matched photos from 1958 there. Were today’s pull-in is at the mouth of Tapeats, in 1958 the creek ran right through today’s boat landing area. Next up was re-matching photos at Granite Narrows, the narrowest point in the river. Called “Impingement Wall” by Pat Reilly, the 1958 river runners scouted the Narrows. Reilly spent 5 harrowing minutes pinned on the river right wall with the river at a flow of about 80,000cfs. Our runs here are much more uneventful. While scouting the Wall, we discovered a very high and very old driftwood pile, possibly from the 1884 270,000cfs flood.

On our arrival at Deer Creek, we found that the trip that had passed us the day before had decided to layover at the camp we had hoped to camp at. This camp is just across the river from Deer Creek Falls. We decided to leave a raft tied to the river left bank across from the Falls, and go to the next Camp downriver, called OC’s. It’s only a 1/3 mile downriver, also on river left. This way we can walk back upriver and use our boat to get across the river to access Deer Creek and the hiking on the north side of the river.