Surviving a rafting adventure on the Colorado River

Tag : waterproof tarp
routinely overshadowed by a more famous section farther west andsouth, which Cataract in fact resembles in just about every wayexcept depth.
We are a party of nine, eight men and a woman, ages 22 to 50,divided between two rafts. It is a sporty bunch (ridiculously fitin some cases; men in their mid-30s with six-pack abs?) connectedthrough college or childhoods around Aspen, Colo.
We rendezvoused the night before in Moab, the mountain biking meccain southern Utah, and in the morning climbed aboard a bus at WorldWide River Expeditions. At the river, our group settled into therafts, while two families traveling together climbed onto theS-rig, a big, stable rubber vessel with a 35 hp outboard and asunning area between the pontoons that's dubbed the piazza.
"It's pretty mellow for two and a half days," Marcus said.
And it is. There are few more luxurious sensations than moving onwater through scenic beauty, in summer. The rock formations visibleabove the rim suggest life beyond the canyon, but your world ishere: Bake on the fat yellow tube. Sip something cold. Slip intothe stream.
The brown water is bracing, in delicious counterpoint to the desertair. Find the current and there's a pleasing sense of acceleration(so pleasing it appears in my notes as "excelleration"). You glidealong at the pace of the boat, where Pedro, as everyone calls Pete,reads aloud from "Cadillac Desert," Marc Reisner's masterpiece onwater and the West: "until they made a Mesopotamia in Americabetween the valleys of the Green River and the middle Snake."
After lunch we tie on to the S-rig, less idyllic but faster, andthere's the piazza. The man at the outboard is huge: Lorenzo is 6feet 7, 340 pounds. Without announcement, he launches into "A BoyNamed Sue," declaiming it, with very little tune involved.
Camp is a rare break in the cliffs, extending back into a grove.While the lasagna cooks, the Aspen boys discuss the best way tofield-dress an elk in bow season. Then one of them faces the riverand lifts a leg straight out, doing yoga. The New West.
Gentle pounding
Day 2 unfolds like the first, after a night as cinematic: moonlightlike a lens filter, clouds moving across a day-for-night skyneither blue nor black. Cinerama.
The whole 100 miles between Moab and Lake Powell can be covered ina day if you take a speedboat to the rapids. Stretching it to fiveleaves time for hikes: Lorenzo leads us to drawings left by NativeAmericans 1,600 years ago. We climb 500 feet to see the famous"oxbow" where the river nearly doubles over on itself. At IndianRiver, we hike a mile to a natural water park, a grotto ofsandstone and falling water that is at once haven and playground.We sit in the bowl formed by the pounding water of the topmostwaterfall and take a stab at staying upright beneath the poundingtorrent.
A few miles down, the Green River joins the Colorado, lighter watercurling in from a bend on the right. And a bit beyond that, asobering sound: water rushing over rocks. We drift toward therising racket as Lorenzo makes a loud, hurried briefing onwhitewater safety. "Rule number one: Don't panic. Rule number two:Hold on."
The light is failing. The rumble draws closer, like thunder. Therafts cut loose from the S-rig, and we coast around a bend andburble over just a few hundred yards of low curls, hang a right andbeach ourselves on a gorgeous strand of sand.
Two nights on this beach, outlasting two other expeditions alreadyset up when we arrived like Marines, fire-lining cots andkitchenware and smartly snapping out three parallel lines ofrecreation: Frisbee, football, horseshoes.
From shore, the sound of rushing water is paradise itself. Butbobbing against each other through the night, the rafts groan likethey're thinking about things.
Tempest builds
Day 3 is ashore. You can sit in the blistering sun, hotter forreflecting off the sand, or make the hard hike to the Doll House, aphantasmagoria of sandstone atop the canyon rim. From the top youalso see the La Sal range, almost empty of snow after a week of100-degree highs.
We return to find the river a couple of feet closer to our cots.When we left Moab it was running at 45,000 cubic feet per second.It's higher now. The record was in 1984, more than 90,000 cfs. Therafting companies ceased operations.
"Oh, these are itty-bitty," Brian said as we hit the first wall ofbrown water on Day 4. Everyone in the boat got soaked, yelped andloved it, but the initial stretch was so manageable he let two ofus ride atop the coolers, the tall orange ones highway crews use.
Ahead, a tree lay sideways in the center of the rapids, held by thecurrent against a huge rock. "That's called wrapping the boat,"Brian says, pointing out the furious "back current" curlingupstream against the boulder. "You could stay in there forever."
Marcus' boat disappears for a moment. Never a good sign. Theriver's hydraulics folded it forward at two points, "taco-ing" theraft with a violence that tears open Pedro's toenail, his footcaught in the seam.
"I've never seen that happen before," Marcus says. "These boats arereally stiff."
It's that kind of day. Another mile down the river, beyond thestretch of water waiting around the bend, both guides will declarethat in five years on the river they have never seen a day sointense and chaotic.
Getting blasted
Brian takes off first. The plan is to swing around the bend, thendrop Pedro on the left bank and wait while he photographs theaction. But it becomes clear the current is going to carry us pastthe drop point. Trying to help, Lorenzo steers the S-rig our way,hoping to nudge the raft toward shore.
But the big boat pushes us the wrong way, farther into the currentwe're trying to escape. Brian looks downstream. "I think I canstill make it," he says.
He can't. The river that meandered through the canyons at the rateof one inch per mile is about to drop 30 feet in less than a mile.The first wave buries us. It is an immense amount of water. Thethree of us in the front of the boat disappear under it. Brianstays put, but nothing looks right. The S-rig, which was going tohead down ahead of us, is frighteningly near: just to the left,and, ah, overhead. It's riding the massive, 20-foot "ledge wave"that blasts out from the left shore.
The "compression" waves we face are in the middle of the river, andthe next one carries Brian away (Pedro, too, from his seat on theback tube, but he clambers right back in). We have fallen into ahole called Little Niagara. Lorenzo sees the boat go straightupright, its entire bottom visible. But it lands right side up.
"Fletch," I say to my neighbor, who rows float boats on trouttrips. "It's time to row." He just looks at me. "Fletch. You've gotto row now. That's Brian out there."
His look says: Oh. He hops into the well and bends to the task sodiligently that Brian almost has to throw him out when he returns.
I am weirdly cheerful. "We're doing great," I holler, after Brianmakes his assessment and says the bad words that will pass the lipsof every guide today. Normally they are cocky fellows.
A moment later we are upside down, hit by a torrent so hard thatDraper, seated next to me, lands 20 yards upriver. He's the onlyperson I see when I surface, still clutching the line (Rule No. 2:Hold on) attached to the overturned raft.
Bragging rights
It's not fun now. I can't see anyone else, including Emily, who is23 but looks 16 and was in the back. Pedro will feel her, tug herout from under the boat and tell her she's fine, though her nose isbleeding and she's pale as death. Something has hit Brian's head sohard his vision blurs. But everyone makes it back to the raft,which has drifted right, and here comes Lorenzo with the S-rig.
A hand grabs my life vest, and I'm on the piazza, scrambling topull up my shipmates. But Lorenzo shouts there's no time, so theyride the next set of rapids clinging to the overturned raft.
At the bottom, Lorenzo pushes the capsized raft onto a beach that'sthe final night's campsite. A quarter-hour later, we're in awestern again: a boy on the overlook shouting, "There's a yellowboat coming!" A minute later: "It's upside down!"
Marcus watches from Purgatory, the eddy his raft retreated intoafter hitting a wave so fierce it bent an oar. He grabs a spare,then tries to figure out how to escape Purgatory without beingdrawn into Satan's Gut, a hole so steep you see only flat waterbefore it. He calculates 70-30 against and offers to put thepassengers ashore.
Instead, they go at it together, Marcus pulling on the oars and oneof the six-packers, Matt Holstein, pushing. While they row, otherpassengers throw themselves against the tube, forcing momentum likea kid on a bike until, at the decisive moment, one of them tosseshimself against Matt: It's the other Matt (Reid, the Portland,Ore., physician) screaming and throwing his weight into the push,and it works. The boat shoots past the bottom corner of the gut,soaked by just enough spray to feel like deliverance.
The next day, Marcus is so hoarse he can hardly speak. In the flatwater of Lake Powell — where the passengers will be ferriedto planes that will fly back to Moab over the water they've justseen, the whitewater looking from the air like flour spilled on akitchen floor — the bragging will fall to Lorenzo. When wecome upon guides from a competing raft company, he hollers over:"We had boats run every hole except the marker. We had a boat onLittle Niagara."
"Little Niagara!" the competition says.
"We had a boat on Frog's Hole. We had a boat on the Gut. It wassick."
Brian smiles and says, "Ah, the stories."