My mood is something short of electric as I prepare to depart

I've spent my last few days at home following my usual canyon conditioning program, with some paddling and some bike riding.  I've been doing it in some pretty hot weather, too.  It gets quite hot on the floor of the Grand Canyon, but I hope the lower humidity will make it seem like a relief after the sweltering heat we've had here in the Mid South this summer.

I rode my bike Monday morning.  I did the ride I often do, out the Greater Memphis Greenline to Shelby Farms, around the lake, and back.  It takes me around 95 minutes, usually.

On Tuesday I spent 40 minutes in the whitewater boat in the harbor.  There's no better remedy for summer heat than some Eskimo rolls.

A front moved through the area Tuesday evening, bringing some strong gusty winds.  They didn't last more than 15 or 20 minutes, but they blew some tree branches that were encroaching on the power lines that serve my house, and some lines got squeezed together and blew out the transformer.  So I spent Tuesday night and yesterday morning with no electricity.  I'm sure I've had worse nights of sleep, but I lay awake for extended periods feeling sweaty and uncomfortable, not to mention frustrated at how long it was taking the power company to show up and make repairs.  I got maybe five hours of sleep, all told.

There were some 160 outages citywide, affecting several thousand customers.  The utility company finally got to my property by mid-morning yesterday, and had the electricity back on by lunchtime.  I felt a little groggy from the lackluster sleep, but I got out for an afternoon bike ride, happy that I had an air-conditioned home waiting for me when I was finished.

This morning I had my last paddling session before I hit the road.  I got in the surfski and would have been happy just paddling to the mouth of the harbor and back.  But when I reached the mouth I saw an upstream-moving barge rig well positioned for me to get to it quickly, so I went out for some surfing.  The waves were good, but not great; definitely nothing like the awesome conditions of last Saturday.  But I was able to do some interesting stuff for a short while.  Then I returned to the harbor, paddled back to the dock, and took both the ski and the whitewater boat up to the truck to bring home.  It could be a good month before I get back to the dock on the Memphis riverfront.

There's lots of packing to do, and I hope I can remember to include everything I'll need during sixteen days in the wilderness.

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Monday photo feature

Saturday before last, after I raced down the Mississippi River from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois, I rode my bike from Alton back up to Grafton to retrieve my vehicle.  During my ride I stopped to take this picture, which illustrates a big difference between the "upper" Mississippi (above the confluence with the Ohio River) and the "lower" river down where I live.

The flow of the upper Mississippi is controlled by a series of dams, just like the Ohio, the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Columbia, and other sizable rivers in North America.  Because of that, it's feasible to build a road right alongside the river, like Illinois highway 100 pictured here.

The lower Mississippi has no dams.  It's entirely free-flowing, and as it approaches its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico, it meanders wildly across a broad flood plain, occasionally adopting a new course and leaving behind an abandoned meander (an "oxbow lake").  Because of that, there aren't many roads running right alongside the lower Mississippi.  Much of the lower river is simply a remote bottomland wilderness.

That's the bike path in the foreground of the photo.  It's just a strip of asphalt, similar to the Greater Memphis Greenline here where I live.  Much of it was bumpier and weedier than my trail here, however.  The section I rode is in two counties: Madison County (where Alton is) and Jersey County (where Grafton is).  The condition of the trail improved dramatically as soon as I crossed into Jersey County.  Maybe Madison County is experiencing more fiscal stress than Jersey.  Or maybe they just don't think it's that important to maintain a bicycle trail.

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Finding ways to get wet like the ducks do

I went to the riverfront yesterday morning and paddled the surfski out on the Mississippi.  There was no barge traffic nearby, so it was just some steady paddling.  Maybe the most interesting thing was back at the dock, where some ducks I'd never seen before were hanging out.  I was surprised at how close they let me get with my camera:

Today I paddled the surfski on the river again, and it was, quite simply, awesome.  When I got to the mouth of the harbor there was a barge rig down below the old bridges, coming upstream.  I paddled around a while until it reached the downtown Memphis area, and then headed for its wake.  What followed was as good a surfing session as I've ever had on the Memphis riverfront.  It was at least as good as this session in May of 2020, and maybe even better because while the conditions five years ago gave me nice extended rides, the conditions today challenged me to work each wave either to stay on it or to link onto another wave.  I was in my relatively stable V10 Sport ski, and I was pushing that stability to its limit.  A couple of times I thought for sure I was going over, but each time I executed a timely lean to stay upright.

Eventually the towboat left me behind and the waves petered out.  It was shaping up into a very hot day, but at least I'd found a wet, fun way to spend part of it.  I returned to the harbor for the two-kilometer paddle back to the dock under a blazing sun.  I cooled off by practicing some remounts, and then back at the dock I took a cool hose bath and savored the endorphin rush from all the hard paddling I'd done.

It looks like we're in for some more oppressive heat between now and my departure for Arizona.  Arizona will be hot too, of course, but at least out there it's a dry heat.

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It's the home stretch toward this year's BIG trip

Now that I've done perhaps my one race for the year, I've settled back in at home for one last period of normalcy before I embark on my great Grand Canyon expedition.  My launch date is August 27, and I'm looking at starting the drive out to Arizona a week from tomorrow.

On Tuesday I still wasn't feeling a hundred percent recovered from the exhausting adventure up on the upper Mississippi.  I went down to the riverfront and spent 40 minutes in the whitewater boat.  I eased into it, and pretty soon I had a vigorous round of drills going.  The day was hot, just like we expect here in August, and it felt good to do lots of Eskimo rolls.  There were plenty of forward drills, backpaddling drills, and spin drills, too.  Even though it's been close to a year since I've been on actual whitewater, I'm not too worried about making the adjustment quickly once I put my boat on the Colorado.  Over decades of experience, I've never had a significant problem with that.

Yesterday I rode my bike out the Greater Memphis Greenline and the Wolf River Greenway to the Walnut Grove bridge, and came back.  It felt easy after my post-race ride from Alton to Grafton last Saturday.  I've done a nice volume of riding this summer, and my body feels good and used to it.

This morning I returned to the river and got in the surfski for the first time since the race.  I paddled to the mouth of the harbor hoping to find some wake-surfing action, but the barge rigs I saw on the Mississippi were beyond my reach.  So I returned to the dock and hopped in the whitewater boat for some more rolls and drills.  I felt good when I was finished: there's something satisfying about preparing for one of the world's more famous stretches of whitewater right here in my humble harbor.

My digestive system felt better for several weeks, but for the last couple of weeks it's been a little out of whack again.  Last Saturday morning it was feeling like it might give me some trouble during the race, but it settled down in time for the start.  I'm doing everything I know how to do to get it into a state of equilibrium before I leave town again.

Meanwhile, the news from the Dragon Bravo fire on the Grand Canyon's North Rim is encouraging: as of today firefighters have achieved 54% containment.  I think they've had more cooperation from the weather the last couple of days.

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Monday photo feature

Here we are in Busch Stadium, the home ballpark for my favorite baseball team, the Saint Louis Cardinals.  I was here Friday evening to take in a game between the Cardinals and their most hated rival, those dastardly Chicago Cubs.

It was the fourth time I've seen the Cardinals and Cubs play in person.  In 2011 I attended a game at Wrigley Field on the North Side of Chicago.  The Cubs won that game in a walkoff, and I had to sit there while the insufferable song "Go Cubs Go" blasted over the PA system.  (The Cardinals got the last laugh that year, however, by winning the World Series.)

The following season I saw the Cardinals and Cubs play at Busch Stadium on consecutive days.  The good guys won both games.  And that was the last time I attended a Cardinals game until this past Friday evening.  The Cardinals rewarded my return by playing one of the better games they've played all year: with good pitching and defense, smart base running, and timely hitting, they beat the Cubs 5-0.

Baseball is the only one of the big pro team sports I've followed in the last thirty years or so.  In general, I'd rather be participating in my own athletic pursuits than sitting in a stadium watching other people be athletes.  But baseball is an enjoyable diversion in the summertime.  Most of the time I listen to the games on the radio while I work in my shop or do things around the house.

One of the things about baseball that fascinates me is its organized minor league system.  Guys show up at the single-A level having been superstars throughout childhood, only to have to distinguish themselves in the subtlest of ways to move up.  Many a touted prospect has failed to reach the majors because his reflexes were hundredths of a second too slow, or he swung at a pitch out of the strike zone just a little too often, or his throws were a fraction of a degree off target, or there were simply too many guys with similar skill sets on the big league club.  For every player on a major league roster, there are dozens who were probably capable of being there but fell short for some tiny reason, and that has helped me come to terms with my status as a good-but-not-great canoe and kayaker racer.  If paddling were baseball I'd probably be playing out my career in double-A, and I've accepted that and try to acquit myself there the best I can.

I also enjoy hearing the radio announcers talk about the players' daily training.  Mastering the mechanics of pitching or batting sounds a lot like mastering an effective forward stroke.  A baseball player might have greater potential for fame and wealth than I do, but his daily routine as an athlete is remarkably similar to mine.

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A successful race leaves me feeling "tired" in more ways than one

I attended the Firecracker Race on the upper Mississippi River yesterday.  This event has occurred in several different locations over the years; these days it's a 24-kilometer (15-mile) race from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois.  I think it took place on Independence Day weekend years ago, and that explains its name.

Turnout for the race was robust.  Because I hadn't decided to register until just a few days before, I missed out on both a post-race meal ticket and a seat on the shuttle bus that transported racers who had left their vehicles down at Alton back to the start.  Meanwhile, race director Craig Heaton decided to split the field into two waves at the start: most boats would start at the advertised time of 9:30 AM, but a couple of men's solo kayak classes, including mine, would start ten minutes later.

Grafton is located where the Illinois River flows into the Mississippi.  As soon as the bulk of the field started in the first wave at 9:30, the rest of us lined up in the mouth of the Illinois as the ten-minute stagger interval ticked down.  Soon enough, we were off.  Within the first ten minutes I found myself all alone in first place among all second-wavers, and from there on out the race would be an exercise in river-reading, pacing, and energy conservation.

I was definitely getting help from the current: I think once or twice the reading on my G.P.S. device went as high as 14.8 kilometers per hour.  Most of the time it hovered in the high 13s and low 14s.  Pretty soon I was overtaking some of the first-wave racers, and that aided my river-reading mission, since the majority of them were local to the region and knew this section of the river better than I.

My speed made it clear that my race would take somewhere between 100 minutes and two hours.  That's well within my comfort zone, but several factors--the heat (around 90 degrees Fahrenheit), the headwind, and the fact that I hadn't been doing any racing this year--compelled me to be conservative to avoid the dreaded "bonk."  I tried to paddle at a controlled 70 strokes per minute; I kept wanting to wander up closer to 75 spm, and continually I had to make myself back off.

Meanwhile, my competitive urges were spurring me along.  While it seemed that I had my own boat class (solo race kayaks) well in hand, I was hoping maybe I could clock the fastest time of the day.  The trouble was, my main competition for that distinction--tandem race boats--had started in the first wave, and so I had no idea how I was doing relative to them.  As the race went on I passed most of the boats in the first wave, and I scanned the river in front of me to see if I could spot any of those fastest boats.

Fatigue was starting to set in as I neared the one-hour mark.  And the water conditions seemed to be getting choppier and choppier.  There was a breeze blowing upriver, as I said, and there were some barges and other motorized boat traffic as well.  By the time I rounded the bend to get my first glimpse of the bridge at Alton, some 8 kilometers off in the distance, all kinds of confused little waves were slapping at my boat.  Though the conditions were nothing I don't see all the time back home on the lower Mississippi, 16 kilometers into a 24-kilometer race my motor coordination was starting to crumble.  More and more I started to concentrate just on staying upright.

With around 7 kilometers to go my speed plummeted as low as 10 kph, and I wondered if I was losing the assistance of the current.  There's a dam not far below the race's finish line, and I thought maybe I had hit the water that was backed up behind it.  Soon, however, I realized I had simply made a river-reading error: I looked to my left and saw that there were sandbars separating me from the main channel.  I worked my way over as aggressively as I dared, and before long I was back up around 14 kph.  Such is life when you race on a big river like the Mississippi: your G.P.S. device shows a drop in your speed, and you ask yourself, "Have I moved into some slower water?  Is the headwind getting worse?  Have I hit the slackwater behind the dam?  Or am I just getting tired and slowing down?"

Ever so painfully, the Alton riverfront inched closer.  By now I was overtaking the fastest female kayakers and could see a tandem surfski in the distance.  As long as I was within ten minutes of a first-wave boat like that one, I would finish with a better time.  Little by little I reeled it in, and with less than two kilometers left I went by it.

I was continuing to move along at over 14 kph.  (I later learned that all of the dam's gates were open, providing us with strong current all the way to the finish.)  Now, the only boat I could see was a four-person "Voyager" canoe.  I tried to pull even with it, but its paddlers were stubbornly keeping it beyond my reach.  The finish line loomed a few hundred meters ahead, alongside a sea wall where the timing officials were perched with their clipboards and stopwatches.  Waves reverberating from the seawall made stability trickier than ever, but I relaxed my core muscles and sprinted as hard as I could.  I advanced to within half a boatlength of beating the canoe, but that was as good as I was going to do: I crossed the line with a time of one hour, 46 minutes, 27 seconds.  The canoe, of course, had had a ten-minute head start on me, so its official time came to 1:56:24.

The paddlers of the tandem surfski I had recently passed congratulated me on my race.  I asked them if they were the fastest tandem, and they replied, "Oh, no.  There were a couple of boats in front of us that we lost sight of long ago."

As it turned out, the fastest time of the day was clocked by a tandem outrigger canoe (OC2) paddled by Rusty Self and Thomas Selva.  They crossed the line one hour, 43 minutes, 30 seconds after they'd started.  Just behind them, a tandem surfski paddled by the husband-and-wife team of Alma and Bryan Hopkins clocked 1:43:42.  So I would have to settle for being the third-fastest boat in the field.  

I really don't think it was necessary to split the field into two waves; there weren't that many people registered, and the Mississippi is a big river that could have accommodated everybody in one mass start.  In that scenario I would have been able to compete directly with the fastest boats, trade some wake rides with them, and maybe have a shot at the "fastest overall" distinction by the end of the race.  Then again, three minutes is a lot... it had taken all I had just to go 1:46, so I don't know if I could have challenged those other two boats or not.

But, honestly... it's foolish of me to quibble over something like that.  The fact is that the paddlers of those fastest boats performed really well and clocked great times.  And I performed well and beat all the other solo racers.  I should just let myself be happy with that.

The complete results are posted here.

I was beat to the socks, but I still had work to do.  Because I'd registered too late to get a seat on the shuttle bus, I had to come up with another plan to retrieve my truck from the start up at Grafton.  And that plan involved my bicycle, which I'd left on the Alton riverfront before driving up to the start.  Now it was time to hop on the bike and start riding.  There's a bike path alongside Illinois highway 100 between the two towns, and I spent the next hour pedaling the 24 kilometers back to where my truck was parked.  All this summer paddling and bike-riding have been staples of my Grand Canyon conditioning program, so yesterday amounted to a massive training day for that expedition that's now just 17 days away.

If racing on the river had worn me out pretty good, the bike ride finished me off completely.  I drove back to Alton and joined in the post-race event at a local brewpub.  I'd registered after all the meal tickets had been spoken for, so I just paid for my own meal--a big old chicken sandwich and french fries.  I wolfed it down, received my first-place award in the men's racing kayak class, and walked out to my truck to begin the five-hour drive back to Memphis.

I was dead-dog tired and hoping I had enough energy for the trip.  But the day's drama wasn't quite over yet.  Driving south on Interstate 255, which bypasses Saint Louis en route to I-55 South to Memphis, I sensed that something wasn't quite right about how the truck was running.  Soon the whole cab was vibrating, and I wasn't sure if the problem was my truck or a bumpy road surface.  Seconds later, I got my answer: my driver's side front tire blew out.  I managed to get to the road's left shoulder, fish the jack and related tools from beneath the bench seat, and get the tire off.  It was clear that this tire had made its final spin:

Fortunately, my truck's spare tire is an actual tire, not one of those silly "donut" wheels.  It would get me back to Memphis just fine (as long as I didn't have another flat, that is).  But it was mounted underneath the chassis at the truck's rear, and to access it I ended up having to remove my bike and the bike rack (and the only reason I'd even brought my bike was that I'd missed out on a shuttle bus ticket... aargh).  Working under the blazing sun in muggy 92-degree heat, I got the spare tire put on and was thoroughly covered in grime and drenched in sweat when it was over.

The rest of the drive home, through southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas, was dull.  But I'd had all the excitement I needed for the day, and then some.  I arrived home a little after nine o'clock.  Glad to have had a sizable late lunch, I whipped up a small, simple supper.  Then I took a shower and went to bed, falling asleep in no time.

I woke up this morning feeling sluggish and achy, but not as sore as I sometimes feel the day after a race.  By way of a recovery session I did some full-body stretching at home, then went to the riverfront for an easy half-hour in the whitewater boat.  A typical round of stroke drills for me is a vigorous affair, with me putting all the explosive power I can into my strokes.  Afterward I feel like I've been in the weight room.  But today I kept the intensity low.  I've continued to feel sluggish and weary the rest of today, but hopefully I'll have some pep back in my step as a new week gets underway.

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Some impromptu race prep

I've made sort of a spur-of-the-moment decision to attend a race this weekend.  The Firecracker Race is a 24-kilometer (15-mile) trek down the Mississippi River from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois.  It's something like a five-hour drive from where I live.  I plan to leave Friday, spend the night in Saint Louis, and come home after the race on Saturday.

I don't consider myself particularly trained up, but my fitness seems good.  I've been recovering quickly whenever I do hard sprints, such as when surfing barge wakes, and that's always a good sign.  The course is on the upper Mississippi--upstream of where the Ohio River comes in--so I'm unsure how much help I'll get from the current, but I'm pretty sure I can do it in less than two hours.  I don't know what other racers might show up--the registration site doesn't have a list of registrants.  I just want to go up there and see what I can do after months of mostly unstructured paddling.  My guess is I won't be setting any kind of torrid pace, but I hope I can compete well with whoever is there.

After a bike ride on Monday, Tuesday morning I paddled the surfski for 30 minutes and the whitewater boat for 30 minutes.  With a race coming up this Saturday, I did six short (12-stroke) sprints in the surfski to give my ATP-CP energy system a bit of work.  In the whitewater boat I did the usual round of stroke drills and Eskimo rolls, preparing myself for whatever the Colorado River might throw at me later this month.

The highlight of Tuesday's paddling session was seeing a gar jump straight up out of the water right in front of me.  The gar are always very active at this time of year, but they don't often catch air above the surface--that's more the M.O. of those invasive Asian carp.  I got a good look at this gar's long, needlelike nose.  Gar are truly unique-looking creatures.

This morning I was back on the riverfront for a short session in the surfski.  I did another six 12-stroke sprints in the hope of feeling sharp and ready to go on Saturday.

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Monday photo feature

Twenty years ago, I paddled a section of the Colorado River in the state of Utah, from Moab down to the community of Potash.

In just over three weeks, I plan to put my boat on the same river some distance downstream, at Lee's Ferry, Arizona.

In the photo above, I'm paddling my old beat-up wildwater K1.  These days that boat is hanging underneath the deck on the rear side of my house, unused for years.  My boat of choice for the trip through the Grand Canyon is a polyethylene C1 that's designed for general whitewater river-running.

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Nicer weather, a mental break from the fire, and, of course, some paddling

We're finally getting a break from the suffocating moist heat that tormented the Mid South--and quite a bit of the wider nation--for several weeks.  This weekend the Fahrenheit temperatures are in the mid 80s, and north breezes have brought in not-so-humid air.

Yesterday I got in the surfski and paddled from the dock to the mouth of the harbor.  There I looked out over the Mississippi and saw a big barge rig that was perfectly positioned for an extended session of wake surfing.  It was moving up from beneath the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas Bridges, so I could make my leisurely way down to it and then surf the waves back upriver.

Maybe these waves were especially well tuned to my particular skill set, but whatever the case, I felt like a surfing stud as I carried my speed from one wave to another, linking runs.  Having spent the last couple of weeks sort of puttering through workouts, it felt good to feel like I was doing something successfully again.

This morning I paddled the ski to the mouth of the harbor again, and found no barge traffic on the river.  So I returned to the marina and got in the whitewater boat for the first time in over a week.  I did a bunch of stroke drills and Eskimo rolls.

Of course, I'm still looking ahead to the Grand Canyon trip, and unfortunately that means keeping an eye on the Dragon Bravo fire on the North Rim.  By the end of this past week it had grown to over 111,000 acres and was just 9% contained.  The smoke appeared very bad, especially in the first 80 miles or so of the Colorado River below Lee's Ferry.

On Friday evening I chatted on the phone with Emily, one of the members of my party, and I remarked that keeping my eyes glued to the fire situation probably wasn't very good for my mental health.  Her response was to order me to take the weekend off from looking at fire data.  "Promise me," she commanded, and reluctantly I said, "I promise."  And so, both yesterday and today, I have stayed away from the app and the websites I've been using to follow the firefighters' progress.  I don't say "I promise" unless I mean it.  Tomorrow morning I'll look back at those things because each Monday I send an email out to the group, and I want them to be aware of what's going on out in the Grand Canyon.  It has indeed been a good thing to take a break from that--it's not like my being informed up to the minute is going to change anything that's happening.  I'm hoping that when I do check tomorrow morning, maybe things will be a little bit better than they were, rather than worse.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Paddling, pedaling, and managing these uneasy feelings

I rode my bike both Monday morning and yesterday morning.  One thing about bike riding is that it creates its own wind chill.  It's why I don't like to ride in the wintertime, but in very hot periods like we're having right now, it makes riding not so bad at all.  Staying out of direct sunlight helps too, and the Greater Memphis Greenline, where I do most of my riding, is shaded along almost all of its length.  It's a "rails to trails" project, and thick stands of trees were allowed to grow over the decades that it was a railroad.

I normally paddle on Tuesday, but this week I took Tuesday off from paddling.  The main reason was that my mother needed me to drive her to and from an appointment with her eye doctor, but I was also just tired and feeling that I needed a break.  It actually was kind of nice just to sit in the doctor's office waiting room and read a book and not think about training or any other worries for a while.

I made it back to the riverfront this morning and paddled the surfski for an hour.  I checked the Mississippi and found it deserted, so I stayed in the harbor and did a few up-tempo pieces.

The news has not been good over on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  I've been seeing and hearing the word "historic" used to describe the Dragon Bravo fire, which has grown to over 105,000 acres as of this writing.  The fire has dropped to as low as 4% contained, because as the fire has spread the contained portion represents a smaller portion of the overall acreage.  (By this afternoon, that figure had improved to 9% contained.)  The weather has continued to be a firefighter's nightmare: apparently the humidity has been at record lows in the last couple of weeks.  Monsoon rains are supposed to be common at this time of year, but lately such events have been nonexistent.  Just today I read that "fuel moisture content is below that of kiln-dried lumber."  I'm a woodworker and I know very well what that means.

The fire is spreading primarily northward.  One reason for hope is that in some places it's likely to run out of fuel, either because of burn scars from recent years or because of barren, non-wooded land.  It seems fairly unlikely that the fire will get any closer to Lee's Ferry, the starting point of my trip.  Still, I'm worried about smoke.  Even if firefighters were to get the thing fully contained right now, it would take a while for the fire to burn out and smoke production to subside.

Meanwhile, as usual, there's absolutely nothing I can do.  I'm just continuing along with my preparation as if the trip is going to go off without a hitch in just under four weeks.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

A Mr. John Dillon posted this photo to the Grand Canyon Private Boaters group page on Face Book.  It was taken last Wednesday, July 23, on the Colorado River some 65 miles downstream from Lee's Ferry.

What would I do if I didn't have something to worry about in the weeks leading up to a major wilderness trip?  Right now the Dragon Bravo fire is giving me plenty.  Burning up on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, the fire has availed itself of extremely dry, windy conditions to swell to over 50,000 acres by this morning.  Firefighters were reporting that the fire was 26% contained for much of the last week, but this morning it's been knocked back to just 13% contained.  Sigh.  I sure hope the weather becomes more cooperative in the coming days.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Paddling a lot and getting tired

We've had perhaps a little bit of a break in the weather this weekend.  It's still plenty hot, but the intensity of the heat hasn't been quite as terrible as it was during the last week.  The forecast contains some hope for more relief by the end of this coming week.

Yesterday I paddled the surfski from the dock to the mouth of the harbor, and found no barge traffic out on the Mississippi.  So I returned to the dock and got in the whitewater boat.  I did forward stroke drills, backstroke drills, spin drills, Eskimo rolls... all kinds of stuff.  Then I put my boats away and washed up under the hose.  In the summertime, the moment when I've finished paddling and taken a cool hose bath is often the best I feel all day.

This morning I paddled the ski back to the harbor's mouth, and found an upstream-moving barge rig positioned so that I would have to gain on it a little to have any hope of surfing its best waves.  I paddled up along the Tennessee bank until I reached the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and then ferried over to the far half of the river that the towboat was navigating.  By the time I got over there I had missed out on the best waves, and I was tired from all the hard paddling I'd done just to get to that point.  Actually, I think I might have been feeling tired even before I got in the boat.  Some days that's just how it is.

In other news, out on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon the Dragon Bravo fire seems to be raging.  It sounds like the weather this past week could not have been worse for fighting a fire.  The fire's acreage has quadrupled over the last week.  My launch date is four weeks from Wednesday... two weeks ago I was hoping six weeks would be enough time for the fire to get under control; a week ago I was hoping five weeks would be enough; and now I'm hoping four weeks will be enough.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

No shortage of challenges as summer gets nasty

I was feeling some improvement in my back as this new week got underway.  By today the discomfort still wasn't gone--there's still some general soreness in the area--but at least it's not bothering me while I'm trying to sleep like it was last weekend.  So that's a reason to feel upbeat.

Another reason is that firefighters seem to be making some progress on the Dragon Bravo and White Sage fires north of the Grand Canyon: as of this writing the former fire is 26% contained, the latter 75% contained.  I've noticed, however, that the reported acreage of the Dragon Bravo fire is now more than double what it was a day or two ago.  Not being any kind of an expert on wildfires, I don't really know what the significance of that is.

Here in Memphis and the Mid South, meanwhile, the heat has risen to another level.  I understand much of the Midwest and Southeast are under one of those "heat domes."  For several mornings in a row now, it's been 80 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer when I got out of bed at six o'clock, so it's just not cooling down very much overnight.

Back before there was such a thing as air conditioning, rich people Memphis simply left town for the summer.  They repaired to vacation homes in places like Hardy, Arkansas, which sits on the clear, cool, spring-fed Spring River.  It was no different from wealthy New Yorkers who spent summers in the Hamptons or well-to-do Atlantans who went up the mountain to Highlands, North Carolina.

People who couldn't afford to do that simply gutted it out in the hot city, and I would wager that very little "work" got done during those periods.  I can imagine the whole population sitting on porches, fanning themselves and counting the minutes until darkness when they could nod off to sleep and repeat the process the next day.

Outdoor exercise is definitely something I try to get done before lunchtime each day.  Even with the 21st-century central air conditioning system in my home, I'm finding it hard to get much done once the afternoon heat has settled in.  My woodworking shop is not air-conditioned, but it's underneath my cooled living space, and it's sandwiched between the two adjacent buildings, so it's well insulated and usually not so bad in the summertime.  However, right now the oppressive heat outside is bringing the afternoon temperature in my shop up close to the limit of what I can tolerate for any substantial woodworking activity.

But my big wilderness adventure is coming right up, so I continue working to steel my body appropriately.  I did bike rides Monday and yesterday.  I don't know if bike riding is the absolute best conditioning activity for the Grand Canyon; certainly, running or even hiking (walking) would be more specific prep for what I'm likely to be doing out there.  But as I noted a while back, my knees, especially the left one, are feeling a little funny these days.  I'm still doing some exercises to bring my hamstrings into equilibrium with the opposing quad muscles.

As for paddling, I'm still splitting time between the surfski and the whitewater boat.  The whitewater boat is better for this oppressive heat, as my stroke drill sessions are shorter than my surfski sessions and I can do Eskimo rolls to stay cool.  But let's face it: in the harbor and on the Mississippi River, the surfski is a lot more fun to paddle, especially when there are some barge wakes to surf out on the Mississippi.

I can't see the Mississippi from my dock at the marina, and so the only way to find out whether any good surfing opportunities exist out there is to paddle the 2000 meters or so down to the harbor's mouth and take a look.  And covering 2000 meters is definitely a job for the ski, not the whitewater boat.  On Tuesday I went down there and satisfied myself with some drills in the whitewater boat near the marina; but after I had finished, while exiting the marina's neighborhood in my car, I saw a couple of barge rigs generating some absolutely beautiful waves.  Their location was such that they probably would have been nicely accessible to me during the time I would have been paddling the ski out from the harbor's mouth.  Curses, I grumbled.

So this morning I decided to paddle the surfski down to the mouth of the harbor to see what the barge traffic was like.  If there were good surfing opportunities, I would avail myself, and if there weren't, I would return to the dock and hop in the whitewater boat.

Down to the harbor's mouth I went, and as luck would have it... the Mississippi was deserted.  So back to the dock it was.  My thought was to do a half hour in the ski and a half hour in the whitewater boat, and because my trip down to the mouth had been a slow warmup, I had to do the trip back at a much stronger tempo to keep the ski time at a half hour.  It made me good and hot and ready to do some rolls in the other boat.

I'll probably follow a similar plan for future sessions on the water.  It's a little bit of a hassle because I have to carry gear for two different boats--two paddles and a sprayskirt, along with my PFD.  But if I do end up paddling both boats, it's a good well-rounded workout with a variety of muscle groups engaged.  And if I get to do some surfing, it's physically intense and fun at the same time.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

The year is 2019, and I'm sprinting for all I'm worth in the closing meters of the Gorge Downwind Championships on the Columbia River at Hood River, Oregon.  Photo by Sandy Yonley.

The 2025 edition of this race took place this past week.  It's been three years now since my last trip out there; maybe I should go back next year or the next.  We'll see.  Certainly, seeing the videos of the awesome downwind conditions that people were posting on social media last week got my envious juices flowing.  Then again, the place I'm going to five weeks from now is pretty awesome in its own right.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Fiery heat out West, humid heat here at home

Here we are about five weeks out from my departure for Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.  The excitement is growing, but it's tempered by the wildfire situation out there.  About a week ago strong winds fanned the Dragon Bravo fire, which had started by lightning on the North Rim, beyond the control of firefighting crews.  It destroyed the historic lodge on the North Rim, along with park personnel housing and dozens of other structures.  The North Rim village where the lodge stood is now closed for the rest of the year, and trails from the North Rim to the canyon floor are closed until further notice.  According to an app I'm using to check the conditions out there, the fire covers some 12,000 acres and is currently 2% contained.

Farther north there's a much bigger fire burning: the White Sage fire covers over 58,000 acres.  Over the last few days I've watched this fire go from 0% contained to 31% contained.  Apparently some monsoon rains have helped the firefighters' efforts.  However, today's forecast shows much drier weather moving in.

People I've spoken to with our outfitter in Flagstaff seem optimistic that everything will be fine by our launch day on August 27.  But there's no guarantee of that... those folks aren't wildfire experts or meteorologists.  One of my biggest concerns is the smoke: spending sixteen days in a smoky haze is definitely not the Grand Canyon experience I've been hoping for, and of course the last thing I want to do is lead a group of people into conditions that could be harmful to their health.

All I can do is sit here and hope that five weeks will be enough time for the events out there to run their course.  And maybe they will.  Maybe it'll turn out I'm worrying over nothing.  But I'm powerless to do anything, and that's frustrating.

Here at home I'm just doing the usual, getting in my conditioning sessions and trying to take care of my health.  During the past week I rode my bike a couple of times and paddled my whitewater boat in the harbor a couple of times.  This weekend I paddled the surfski out on a quiet, flat Mississippi River.  The only barge traffic I saw was a northbound rig this morning, and it was too far upriver for me to catch up for some wake surfing.

I think the weather this weekend has been the worst of the summer so far.  While the air temperature hasn't been higher than maybe 95 degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity has been off the charts, making it very unpleasant outside.  On top of that, I started feeling some intense lower back soreness on Friday, and it's feeling only marginally better today.  It's a condition I've had many times before, and I have no doubt it'll be better in another couple of days.  But that and the weather have me feeling pretty beaten down right now.

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Monday photo feature

Davey Hearn of Bethesda, Maryland, has some flatwater fun in his whitewater slalom canoe (C1).  The photo is a screen grab from a stroke drills video put out by the U.S. slalom federation back in the 1990s.  A few years ago I made a digital copy from my old VHS cassette, and you can now watch it here.  The video includes drills for both kayak (K1) and C1.  As you can see, the picture quality isn't the greatest: the boat Davey is paddling is actually bright yellow, believe it or not.

The drills in this video are what I'm doing when I paddle my whitewater boat in the harbor these days.  Lacking any real whitewater here in the Mid South, I think these drills are the best way to get my body used to all the many movements I'll have to pull off when I do get on some whitewater, as I will in the Grand Canyon later this summer.

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Another week of Canyon conditioning

My digestive organs have been feeling a bit better the last two or three days.  I sure hope that will continue.  Like I said, I've had a couple of hemorrhoidal episodes so far this calendar year.

And I'm pleased to report that the situation with my knee might have improved, too.  For the last couple of weeks, I've been doing some rubber band exercises to strengthen my hamstring muscles.  As I noted a while back, I've been working the quad muscles hard with lots of Hindu squats and bike riding, but I hadn't been doing much for the hamstrings, leading me to infer that the knee discomfort might have been the result of some muscle imbalance.

Anyway... things could certainly be worse on the injury front.  I mean, if I have to take crutches with me to get through the Grand Canyon, I'll do that, but I'd sure rather go in there with my whole body feeling solid and healthy.

And that's my entire goal for this summer's training routine: to arrive at the Canyon hale and hardy, fit to handle any challenge that wilderness environment can throw at me.  Physically and mentally tough, just like in days of old.

I did two bike rides this past week, on Monday and Wednesday.  On Tuesday I did a stroke drill session in the whitewater boat, staying close to the marina in the harbor.  It was not a good day to be out on the river in the surfski, as a heavy thunderstorm moved through while I paddled.  I paddled in a slip under the marina's roof during the worst of the lightning.

I paddled the surfski Thursday, yesterday, and today.  There was very little barge traffic making waves for my surfing pleasure out on the Mississippi, so it was mostly steady paddling.  It's been good and hot each day, ideal for practicing some remounts in the harbor on my way back to the dock.

My plan is to be driving out West six weeks from now.  Launch Day for the Grand Canyon is six weeks from this Wednesday.  Until then I'll just keep on doing my thing.

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Monday photo feature

I've never been to Camp Stewart, and I can't say that I know much about the place.  But a guy I went to college with in the late 1980s was a counselor there for a couple of summers, and he gave me a staff shirt that I still have today.  And so when I heard of the catastrophic flooding that occurred this past weekend in towns like Hunt, Texas, that sit along the Guadalupe River, I felt at least a casual familiarity with the area.

At this time I have no idea how the Camp Stewart property, campers, or staff fared in the flood.  Most of the news coverage has focused on the tragedy experienced by nearby Camp Mystic for girls: the latest I've heard is that they lost 27 campers and counselors.  At the very least, I expect Camp Stewart's 2025 season has been upended entirely.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Summer bares its teeth in various ways

The Gulf moisture has returned, and it surely feels as though another classic Mid South summer is upon us.  So far the conditions aren't the most insufferable I've ever experienced, but it wouldn't take but a small upward tweak to produce something much more oppressive.  I guess we have an advantage around here in that we're used to dealing with high heat and humidity; most homes and businesses here are equipped with air conditioning, for instance.  What was so bad about that heat wave that hit much of the nation a couple of weeks ago is that its affected area included the upper Midwest, where many people don't have AC.  The weather here in Memphis today would be tough indeed if I couldn't retreat into my air-conditioned home.

Meanwhile, parts of the country are dealing with another kind of meteorological ordeal: too much rain.  I made a very cursory visit to the Texas hill country back in the late 1980s, but otherwise have no experience with the area.  Nevertheless, I feel a bit of a connection to the region that has been devastated by flooding this weekend: when I was doing a lot of whitewater slalom racing in the 1990s, I knew a group of Texans who spent a lot of time training on the Guadalupe River, the drainage that has seen a lot of the worst flooding; and as summer camp alumnus myself, I feel empathy for those hill country camps that have lost campers and staff.  Camp for me was nothing if not a safe haven, and the idea of a natural disaster laying waste to the property in the middle of the night while camp is in session is hard for me to comprehend.

As of this writing I haven't heard the latest news, but another part of the country, on the coast of the Carolinas, is also dealing with heavy rainfall from Tropical Storm Chantal.

All I can say is that things aren't so bad here where I live, and for me life goes on as normal.  Yesterday I paddled the surfski and found some decent surfing out on the Mississippi.  When I reached the mouth of the harbor a small barge rig was moving upriver, and I ferried out to catch a few brief rides on the modest waves it was producing.  At the same time there was a much larger rig coming downstream, and when it reached my location I fell in behind it.  The waves were full of squirrelly water--typical of southbound rigs--and they were also wandering left and right at odd angles as the towboat pilot made the giant slalom move defined by the Hernando DeSoto Bridge upstream of us and the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas Bridges down below.  But they gave me some pretty exciting rides.  Each time I caught one angling toward the left bank, say, I looked for one angling back the other way that I could link onto.

This morning I opted to paddle the whitewater boat and do some drills within sight of the marina.  The sun was hot and bright, and I did a lot of my work in the shade beneath the A.W. Willis Avenue bridge.  I did all kinds of forward stroke drills, backpaddling drills, spin drills, blade-control drills, and Eskimo rolls.

Both paddling sessions this weekend made me good and wet, and that's something I welcome at this time of year.  I finished them both with a hose bath on the dock, and I'll take that over some chi-chi spa every time.

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High anxiety

The digestive situation has been up and down since my last post.  I continue to have that unsettled feeling down in my tummy.  The good news is that it hasn't stopped me at all from doing the physical activities I'm wanting to do these days.  I've been paddling my boat and doing some bike riding, and haven't skipped anything because of stomach distress.  While I really hope to see some resolution of this problem before I launch into the Grand Canyon, I'm hopeful that even if I don't, it won't be something that makes me absolutely miserable on the trip.

I think stress is likely to blame for these woes.  With less than eight weeks to go before I Launch Day, I've had a lot of anxiety about whether I'll truly be ready.  I do in fact think I will be, but being responsible for having everything ready for fifteen other people as well as myself is weighing on me.  It's not entirely rational: I think I've put together a strong group with a number of people whose experience makes up for my inexperience in certain areas.  Just last week I was writing here about good I was feeling about things... as I said then, the best thing I can do is trust my companions to do their thing, and give them support when they need it.  But sitting here at home without any of them around, I'm having hard time relaxing in the belief that everything will go smoothly, and letting it go.  

Again, the physical conditioning seems to be the least of my worries.  I did some good bike riding on Monday and yesterday.  Tuesday I paddled the whitewater boat in the harbor, doing lots of the stroke drills that I used to do in my slalom racing days.  When I paddle the surfski I usually paddle for 60 to 90 minutes, but when doing stroke drills in the whitewater boat, I've found that 40 minutes or so is plenty.  I think a big reason for that is the high degree of concentration I put into those drills: it's more mentally taxing than just forward paddling and taking in the scenery like I do in the ski.  In any case, I had an enjoyable time down there on Tuesday: those sessions remind me of the hours I spent 40 years ago playing around on the lake at camp, in whatever boats I had access to there.  That was a huge part of my early paddling education.  It was sunny and hot on Tuesday, but my routine included some Eskimo rolls, and that helped me stay cool.  And of course I took a hose bath on the dock afterward.

I was in the surfski this morning, and when I reached the mouth of the harbor I found not one but two big barge rigs coming up the Mississippi from below the old bridges.  I found lots of big workable waves, especially once I was behind the second rig.  I didn't really get any of those sweet extended rides that every surfski paddler dreams of, but I got a lot of brief ones, many of which I was able to carry onto other waves--similar to "linking runs" in a downwind situation.  The most satisfying thing was how well my body responded to the near-constant sprinting I was doing.  While there were moments when I was too gassed to keep paddling, each time I recovered quickly and resumed my attack.  That's always been a sign that I'm in pretty good shape, and I've been feeling good about that the rest of the day.  The session I had this morning may have been just what I needed.

It continues to be hot today, but making it more bearable is that the breeze is from the north, meaning the humidity is down.  I expect in another couple of days we'll be back to the usual south wind that carries moist air up from the Gulf of Mexico.

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Monday photo feature

You just never know what you might find when you go down to your local river.

Last Tuesday morning, when I took my whitewater boat to the Walnut Grove access on the Wolf River, I was getting ready to take the boat off the car when I looked down and saw the pictured bill on the ground at my feet.  I felt a rush of excitement at the thought of being a hundred dollars richer, but that feeling quickly faded away as soon as I took a closer look.

I wonder how a movie-prop hundred-dollar bill ended up on the ground down by the Wolf.  It's very crisp and clean and it was sitting on top of the sandy soil, so it couldn't have been there very long.  Here in Memphis we do have a rather vibrant community of filmmakers, so it's not farfetched to think that maybe a movie scene was being shot there a few hours before I arrived.  The parking area for the Walnut Grove access is underneath the Walnut Grove Road bridge, which sports its share of spray-painted graffiti.  With the right framing, lighting, and camera angle, it could easily be made to look like a gritty inner-city setting where a drug deal or similar shady cash transaction might take place.

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The darnedest thing, this human body

In most respects I've been feeling pretty good as spring gives way to summer.  One exception is the left knee discomfort I mentioned in my last post.  Another is a couple of flare-ups of my hemorrhoids, and that's got me somewhat concerned, seeing as how that's one problem I really do not want to have to deal with during a sixteen-day Grand Canyon expedition.

I suspect most people in our society first become aware of hemorrhoids the same way I did: by seeing those TV ads for Preparation H.  For the first half of my life I didn't really know what hemorrhoids were.  But in my late 30s I started having that rectal bleeding and ran to my doctor's office in a panic, only to be told it was a relatively non-serious thing.  Since then that area has flared up once in a while, but I never had any pain there.  I usually mention it to my doctor during my annual physical, and she always shrugs it off as part of the normal life cycle.  But sometime last year I had a much more irritating episode that prompted me to make my first-ever Preparation H purchase.  And then this year I've had a couple of episodes that, while less painful, involved a lot of discomfort not just at the relevant anal spot but deeper inside as well--in my stomach or my colon or my intestines or whatever.  That's where I am as of this writing, with a generally unsettled feeling throughout my digestive infrastructure.

I hope you can forgive me if I'm venturing into TMI territory here, but in the Grand Canyon one's bodily functions are a very serious matter.  All river-running parties are required to pack out their human waste, and that means bringing along portable toilets ("groovers") and setting them up at camp.  As long as you're nice and regular, you can just move your bowels during the hours that the groovers are available, and be on your merry way.  But at the moment I'm anything but regular.

To pre-empt those readers who are poised to hit me up with a lecture: I am indeed mindful of consuming enough fiber in my diet.  Various fruits, beans, green peas, lentils, almonds, broccoli, berries... I make a point of incorporating such things into my meals.  I get some roughage, too: I always eat some celery with lunch and some salad greens with supper.

Anyway... I hope this episode will run its course in the next several days.  According to the Wikipedia page on hemorrhoids, my symptoms are fairly typical, and they usually are gone in several days, and I'm somewhat comforted by that.  If I don't get some relief, maybe I'll have to get in to see my doctor and see if there's anything I can do to stave off such an ordeal in the remote wilderness.  Launch Day is now less than two months away.

Meanwhile, at least I haven't missed any training activities.  I actually had a really nice session in the surfski down on the riverfront yesterday.  After several weeks of very little surfing action, yesterday there was a big barge rig coming upriver generating some big lovely waves.  It took me several tries to get the boat up to speed, but then I got a really sweet ride that lasted a good 30 seconds.  I would guess that relative to the movement of the current I was moving at least 25 kilometers per hour; I didn't have my G.P.S. device turned on, and if I had it would have registered a much slower speed because I was moving against the Mississippi's flow.  Regardless, it was fun.  I got a couple of more decent rides in; sadly, the waves petered out pretty fast as the towboat pulled father into the distance upstream.

I paddled back out to the Mississippi this morning and found no upstream-moving barge traffic.  I headed upriver and eventually encountered a rig coming downstream.  Downstream-moving barges are much less reliable for making good surfing waves, and even when they do make them, those waves tend to contain more swirly water and they tend to wander from side to side: you'll get on a good wave, and it'll quickly disappear, and the train of good waves will have moved way off to the left or to the right.  That's how it was behind this rig I encountered today.  But I got a couple of semi-decent rides to highlight my hour-long steady paddle.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Expedition prep

Planning for the Grand Canyon trip inches along each day.  There are so many details: renting the raft fleet that we need, figuring out what camping gear and clothing and shoes I should have along, ordering the food, collecting money from the other fifteen people in my party... it's a lot.

I'm happy to say that I feel pretty good about the group I've assembled.  I've tried to recruit people whose experience fills the holes in my own.  I've never done the Grand Canyon before, but I've got three people in the group who have.  While I've done several one-night overnight trips on the Mississippi River near Memphis, I've never done a true multi-day wilderness trip, but I've got at least seven people coming along who are veterans of such expeditions.  I've never rowed a big oar-rigged raft before, but seven people in my group have, and they know how to load the rafts with gear for transport through big whitewater.

And so, my job boils down to organization, communication, and delegation of duties.

I've been put in leadership positions at various times in my life.  I guess the earliest time was as a summer camp counselor: for a few summers I was in charge of cabins full of kids, and then I ran the canoeing program.  Then I taught school for a few years and did my best to run a classroom, sometimes successfully and sometimes not so much.

Since leaving teaching I've been working on my own, and most of the time I've had nobody but myself to be responsible for.  After quite a few years of not being looked to for the leadership of something, I wondered if I still had such qualities in me.  So far, it seems that I can still manage it, and I'm even sort of enjoying it despite the occasional overwhelmed feelings.  Certainly, the basics haven't changed: make sure people's roles are clearly defined, and then get out of the way while they do their jobs.  Of course, the unpleasant part of being a leader is when somebody doesn't do his job, and you have to confront that person.  I'm doing everything I can think of to prevent such a scenario, mostly by cultivating a relationship with each individual to the extent I can by phone and e-mail, and by weekly e-mail updates to the group in which I share my expectations in positive ways.

What I know I can control is my own physical readiness for the expedition, and the sharpness of my skills.

On Tuesday I went back to the Wolf River, likely for the last time this summer.  The wet spring we've had has brought the Wolf up to very nice levels for paddling, but unless we get some more of that significant rain--and that looks unlikely according to the current forecast--the river will drop out fast.  During dry periods the Wolf, which for most of its length in this county has been channelized to make way for road construction, gets so shallow that you can't take a stroke without hitting the bottom.

On Monday I'd ridden my bike over the Wolf on my way out to Shelby Farms, and I knew it still had a decent flow.  Nevertheless, when I got to the Walnut Grove boat ramp Tuesday morning, I could see that the water level had dropped a good five vertical feet.  Still, it had the feel of a lovely tree-shaded, sun-dappled babbling brook as I worked to get reacquainted with my whitewater boat on moving water.  I attained my way upstream, doing some ferries along the way, and coming back downstream I did some eddy turns and back-ferries and other swiftwater moves.  Once the Wolf drops out I'll take the whitewater boat down to the harbor and do some more serious sets of stroke drills, but so far I've allowed myself to stick to more relaxed stuff on the "whitewater lite" that the Wolf offers.

That discomfort in my left knee has had its ups and downs since I first mentioned it eleven days ago.  For a while I thought it had run its course, but in the last several days I've been feeling it again.  I rode my bike again yesterday, and for the first time it bothered me some during that activity.  It warmed up and felt better as the ride went on, but by late afternoon yesterday I was feeling a pretty good twinge in that area.  I'm thinking I should look for some "prehab" exercises that might stop it from developing into a full-blown injury.  Besides riding the bike I've been doing a lot of Hindu squats in recent weeks, and those things work my quadriceps muscles well.  Now I'm wondering if some exercises that work the opposing muscles (hamstrings) will help stabilize my knee.  I'm still holding off on running, and that's actually no big sacrifice, seeing as how I don't especially enjoy running.  But knowing there's something I can't do always gnaws at me.  Meanwhile, it's very important to me that I be able to hike without pain in the Grand Canyon.

When I got up this morning it was already 80 degrees Fahrenheit outside.  The Mid South is definitely included in the heat wave that's been in the national news all week.  I've been trying to do my outdoor exercise in the AM so that I can stay in during the hottest part of the day.  Today I was back in the surfski on the riverfront downtown, and after an hour of paddling I took a hose bath on the dock.  That's a big advantage of that training site over the Wolf, which has no such amenity.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

Whitewater paddling had a surge in popularity in the U.S. back in the early 1970s.  Reasons included the release of the film Deliverance in 1971; the Olympic debut of whitewater slalom in 1972, where Maryland native Jamie McEwan delighted U.S. audiences with an unexpected bronze medal in the men's single canoe class; and the wilderness paddling feats of Idahoan Walt Blackadar, who in 1971 made a daring solo first descent of Turnback Canyon of the Alsek River in British Columbia.

In 1973, ABC Television decided to get in on the act by featuring McEwan and Blackadar on a trip down the Colorado River in Grand Canyon for its "American Sportsman" program.  Pictured above is McEwan as he approaches a rapid.  You can watch the episode, along with footage of McEwan's bronze-medal-winning Olympic run, here.

Meanwhile, my own Grand Canyon launch date is just over two months away.

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Summer is here, and it hurts to look

One of the big stories from this past week is that I got in the whitewater boat for the first time since last fall.  In last weekend's post I mentioned that heavy rain had brought the Wolf River up to stout levels, and though it dropped a little bit in the first half of this past week, on Thursday morning we had one of the more intense thunderstorms I can ever remember, with at least an inch of rain falling in the space of an hour or 90 minutes.  Knowing that the Wolf would have plenty of water, I loaded up the whitewater boat and drove out to the Walnut Grove Road access.  The sun was out by the time I was in the boat, and I spent a nice hour messing around in the swift Class I water and getting used to something heavier and slower but more suitable for whitewater than my surfski.

Our planet reached its summer solstice on Friday, and so summer has now begun in the astronomical sense.  And after a nice long run of pleasant springlike temperatures, hot weather has arrived to go along with it.  Daytime temperatures are rising into the mid 90s Fahrenheit, with heat indices in the triple digits.

When paddling down on the riverfront, I'm fully exposed to the sun.  Whatever breeze there is on hot summer days usually comes from the south, bringing that warm humid air from the Gulf of Mexico.  When I'm paddling southward the breeze gives me a bit of relief, but when I head north, such as from the mouth of the harbor back to the dock, the heat can be most oppressive, and sometimes the stinging in my eyes is unbearable without a breeze to evaporate the sweat from my face.

That was definitely the case yesterday.  Once I was out of the harbor and paddling up the Mississippi, the stinging in my eyes got so bad that numerous times I had to stop paddling and use my hat to mop my face.  I couldn't seem to get rid of the discomfort, even once I was paddling back downstream into the wind.  Back in the harbor I did some remount practice to cool off and rinse the sweat off my entire head.  Once I was back on the dock I took my first hose bath of 2025, and I finally rid myself of the stinging.  I didn't stop sweating, though: by the time I'd walked up the ramp to the parking lot my shirt was soaking wet.

This morning I spent another hour in the boat on the Mississippi, and while it was just as hot out there, I didn't get any bad stinging in my eyes until end of the hour, during the last few hundred meters back to the dock.

Hot summers are certainly nothing new in the Mid South.  It's time to take a deep breath and immerse myself for the next couple of months.

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Monday photo feature

Five years ago the deadly Covid-19 virus had the world in its grip and had largely shut down everyday life here in this country.  Thankfully, paddling my boat was still a safe thing to do.  Adam Davis and I often got together on weekends for some paddling on the Mississippi River, where we didn't catch any viruses but caught lots of quality time in beautiful environs.

The Mississippi was at above-average levels for much of that year, giving us plenty of liquid real estate to explore.  The photo above was shot on April 11, when the river registered 33.5 feet on the Memphis gauge.  This is a shot of Adam paddling up through the flooded Greenbelt Park.  We continued upriver almost to the mouth of the Loosahatchie River, then came back downstream by way of the Loosahatchie Chute on the west side of the Loosahatchie Bar (lots of Loosahatchies in there, I know) before returning to the harbor.

I'm not sure it's correct to say that the nation and world have returned to "normal" since 2020, but at least the virus is not quite the threat that it was in the spring and summer of that year.  The one thing that has not changed at all is that I'm still getting in my boat and paddling it on the Memphis riverfront.

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Lots of activity as the summer solstice approaches

For those of you who liked my photo of a Muscovy duck and her ducklings several weeks ago, here's another bit of wildlife on my dock.

The music is performed by Memphis saxophonist/flutist/vocalist Hope Clayburn and her Soul Scrimmage band.  I'd say it's an ideal song for this video, except for the part about the snake being a "cobra" or a "mamba"... we don't have those on the Memphis riverfront.  This guy is just a non-poisonous water snake.

So, what's been going on lately?  Well, I'm getting in the boat about four times a week.  On my lucky days, I paddle to the mouth of the harbor and find a big upstream-moving barge rig generating some big waves out on the Mississippi that I can surf.  When I'm not so lucky, I just paddle steady, usually for an hour, and try to throw in some good surges.  I'm pleased to say that lately I've been feeling really good in the boat.

I want to start paddling my whitewater boat some soon, to get my body used to those movements again before I spend sixteen days paddling it in the Grand Canyon.  Last fall, while I was up at the Gauley River in West Virginia, the pedestal came unglued from inside the boat, and since then the boat had been sitting in my garage with a loose pedestal.  Yesterday I finally went and got a tube of marine-grade cement and glued the pedestal back in place.  I thought about paddling the whitewater boat this morning--we've had a lot of rain lately, and I could have gone out to the swollen Wolf River to practice some ferries and other swiftwater moves--but the glue was still too soft.  This particular brand of cement takes a full seven days to cure completely.  So I was back in the surfski on the Mississippi today.

Meanwhile, I'm also riding my bike some.  I'm trying to get on it at least twice a week.  Usually I follow the Greater Memphis Greenline (a local "rails-to-trails" trail) out to east Memphis, where I either do a loop around Patriot Lake in Shelby Farms or turn down the Wolf River Greenway and ride to Walnut Grove Road and back.

I've thought about incorporating some running, but for the last couple of weeks something has felt a little off in my left knee.  It feels like it could be some patella tendinitis under the kneecap.  So I'm holding off on the running and hoping that discomfort will run its course.

All told, I think my summer fitness program is off to a good start.  So far it's been the easy part of getting ready for the Grand Canyon.  More challenging is the organization of the trip and keeping the fifteen other people in my group on the same page.

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Monday photo feature

We've had a lot of rain this weekend, and there's more on the way.  On Saturday I got thoroughly rained on as I paddled my boat on the Memphis riverfront.

I'd always thought that ducks love rain.  But on Saturday I found this Muscovy huddled with her ducklings underneath the kayak racks on the dock.  We had a few minutes where the rain stopped, and the ducks wandered over to the edge of the dock, as if they were considering going for a swim; but then the rain returned and they were right back under cover.

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"Adventure" fitness

Well, another month has drifted on by with no new posts put up here.  If there's anybody left who hasn't given up on me yet, I appreciate you checking in.

It's looking pretty likely that I won't do a single race this year.  There are reasons that I've rehashed here numerous times, but the biggest one is that I just don't feel like getting out and racing these days.  I'm still paddling plenty, but it's more for general exercise, adventure, and enjoyment of the outdoors than to satisfy competitive urges.  And I'm preparing for a pretty significant paddling adventure that embarks just three months from tomorrow: a trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

And that's not the only big adventure that's on the calendar.  A couple of weeks ago the Mocke brothers announced the dates for their downwind camps on South Africa's Western Cape, and I decided to sign up for one next February.

So I don't lack for motivation to get in the boat.  For the Grand Canyon I'm looking to build general fitness and stamina to withstand sixteen days in a challenging desert canyon environment; after that I'll need to put together a more specific training plan to produce the high-intensity efforts that riding the ocean swells in South Africa demands.

The Grand Canyon preparation includes no small amount of organizational work: communicating with the other fifteen people in the party I've put together; filling out paperwork for the National Park Service; figuring out all the equipment and provisions both I personally and the group as a whole will need; transportation to and from Flagstaff, and accommodations there before and after the river trip; and so on.  As far as the fitness training goes, I'm trying to get in the boat four times a week and also do some strength work and some running and some bike riding on dry land.  So far I've just been paddling the surfski, but when the hot weather arrives I'll break out the whitewater boat that I plan to use in the canyon, and do lots of rolls and other drills.  Hopefully I can work out at least one trip to paddle some whitewater, too.

Again, thanks to those of you who are still checking in to this blog.  Since I'm not doing a lot of formal race training it feels like there's not so much to write about, but I'll try to keep something going here as summer sets in.

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