Desolation Canyon 2001

While rivers is not in the title of this blog there will still be posts from time to time reminiscing about trips from the past. This trip is another is one that I was fortunate enough to share with my daughter, Stacie. I previously wrote about our first trip on the San Juan when she was just 14. On this trip she was almost 21 and fortunately for her I'm sure, I wasn't quite as much of a helicopter Dad and let her make her own decisions about what boats to run and when. It was another great trip and we shared some great experiences. Being independent and confident, a lot more than I was at her age, she chose to spend a lot of time in the kayak.

I on the other hand was perfectly content to row the raft that I was spent a lot of trips rowing. It was the smallest cataraft that was in the group and I loved rowing it because it was so easy to maneuver.

While the draw to rafting is often the idea of whitewater, the reality is that most of any water on any trip is flat water. If it's flat but still moving downstream you can float down with little effort. If on the other hand it is flat with little surface movement on the water and particularly if the wind is blowing hard, steady and up canyon, river rafting can be hard work. On this particular trip we saw a lot of up canyon wind and it made for a lot of work getting through the flatter portions of the trip. I remember laughing at our trip leader Brian Sweeney standing in the front of his boat, looking at the sky and screaming, "Is that all you have"? And the rest of us yelling at him to sit down and shut up and not risk bring more wind down on us. If you didn't like to laugh you didn't want to take a river trip with Brian.

I've often been asked if it isn't boring on the river trips when you're not on the boats. While I understand the question it is funny because there is a lot of work involved in river trips. Setting up camp, camp chores, fire, cooking, clean up, unloading boats, rigging and loading boats, breaking down and packing up camp, on so on. That doesn't mean that there isn't some down time to simply sit and talk and enjoy one another's company but there is not nearly the down time one would think. Stacie was always a hard worker in all aspects of camp life. Her work ethic was just one of the reasons that I was so proud of her on our river trips.

Additionally, depending on the particular trip location there are opportunities to hike and explore. On most river trips that we took there were pictographs and petroglyphs from early Native groups. We also saw old miners or settlers cabins made from local materials. It was like taking a trip away from civilization and going back in time. It really made me think about how difficult it must have been to survive in those challenging locations.

Another thing that was always a part of our river trips was wildlife sightings. We saw beaver, deer, bighorn sheep, many small mammals, all kinds of birds. My favorite bird was a small one whose call was something I always loved hearing because it meant I was back on the river. The Canyon Wren. And then of course there was always the wildlife you would like to see if possible as long as it was on the other side of the river. While we never saw a bear on any of our river trips we had our closest encounter with one on this trip. These tracks were right in the place we put in to camp one night. We hoped that our camp would make him decide to visit the river elsewhere while we were there and fortunately we never saw anything but these tracks.

One of the biggest challenges for many of our river trips was simply getting to the river where we were to launch our boats, the "put in". The majority of our multi-day trips started in the desert and sometimes the road to the river was tough on vehicles. This trip was the worst that I could remember, we put in near Vernal, Utah and the road was all broken, sharp rock. If I remember right, Brian's vehicle got two flat tires and the tires had to be taken back to town to be repaired before we launched the next day. Then we got ready to launch and the right tube on my boat was completely flat and had to be patched before we could get on the water. Brian and John fixed the tube and we headed out on what was another memorable trip that I'm glad to have shared with Stacie.