I have emerged

The Grand Canyon adventure has come to an end.  My fourteen-member party reached the takeout at Diamond Creek this morning.  It took us a few hours to load our gear on the outfitter's trailer and make the trip back to Flagstaff.  Now I'm relaxing in an Air B&B in Flagstaff before heading back toward home tomorrow.

I'll have much to say about the trip later, and lots of photos and videos to share.  But these things will probably come out in dribs and drabs, given all the many things I must catch up on back in civilization.

For now I'll just say that the trip was just about everything I'd expected.  I expected the Grand Canyon to be beautiful, inspiring, awesome, and majestic, and it was.  I also expected the trip to be exhausting and physically demanding, and it was that, too.

I figured that traversing the canyon with thirteen other people, many of whom I'd never met and probably didn't have a lot in common with, would feel like a challenge at times.  But for the most part I enjoyed their company, and most importantly, I was able to experience the canyon my way, on my terms.  I can't recall doing anything I didn't want to just because I was outnumbered in the group.

I am dead-dog tired and fixing to go sleep a very long time.  I'll have more here later, I promise.

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Monday photo feature

Not that the picture does it justice or anything, but I had a pleasant trip across the Painted Desert in northeastern Arizona this morning.

I am now in Flagstaff, the staging area for my Grand Canyon trip.  The other thirteen members of my party are trickling into town.  Tomorrow morning we'll go to the property of our outfitter who's providing our rafts and other equipment, and we'll ride the outfitter's bus to the putin at Lee's Ferry, where we'll spend the day rigging the rafts and meeting with the National Park Service ranger and stuff like that.  We'll camp at Lee's Ferry and, on the 27th of August, our official Launch Day, we will launch.

This is probably the last post you'll see here until after the trip concludes on September 11.  We'll have a satellite phone for emergencies, but otherwise I plan to be off the grid for sixteen days.  And I'm hopeful that'll be a good thing.  Putting this trip together has been kind of a stressful process, and I'm ready for the planning to end and the actual adventure to begin.  Meanwhile, I think it's becoming better and better documented that the Internet and social media and everything are not the greatest asset to one's mental health--never has it been more difficult to "get away from it all."  But for two and a half weeks I hope to be away from it all, with no regrets.

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The not-so-young man heads west

Scheduled to launch from Lee's Ferry, Arizona, on August 27, I'm making my way across this nation.

I left home mid-morning Friday, and spent that night in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, a couple of hundred yards from the Oklahoma state line.  Yesterday morning I got up and had breakfast, and then crossed into Oklahoma and went a few miles south to the WOKA Whitewater Center.

It had been one of my objectives to tune up for the Grand Canyon by doing some whitewater paddling while crossing the state of Oklahoma.  That might seem like a funny thing to say, since Oklahoma is not exactly known for its abundance of whitewater streams.  But it does have Riversport OKC in Oklahoma City, an artificial whitewater course that has hosted national-level whitewater slalom competitions and will be the venue for no less than the Olympic Games in 2028.

Several weeks ago I visited the Riversport website hoping to find a reasonably cheap way to drop in there and paddle for an hour or so.  Sadly, there didn't seem to be any such accommodation.  The fee schedule encourages people to sign up for annual memberships and seasonal passes and stuff like that, and the cheapest option seemed to be a $60 day pass--more than I wanted to pay for just a quick session during a long day of traveling.

I started looking for other offerings along my route to Arizona, and that's when I found WOKA.

WOKA, which stands for "Waters of Oklahoma and Arkansas," is located next to a dam on the Illinois River (a different river from the one that flows in the state of Illinois).  A side channel has been constructed that runs downhill from the surface of the reservoir above the dam to the level of the river below the dam, as shown in this image from the WOKA website:

The river flows from right to left in this photo.  The channel's developers used the gradient to construct a few whitewater features, and it has become a popular park-and-play spot for paddlers in the northwest Arkansas and northeast Oklahoma region.  The Illinois River is spring-fed, assuring a minimum level of flow even in the summer months when the natural rivers and creeks of the Ozarks have dried up.

And it was ideal for my purposes, because all I had to pay was a 10-dollar parking fee.

I put my boat on the water at WOKA yesterday morning hoping to make up for my lack of whitewater paddling in the last year.  Even after all those drills I put myself through at home this summer, it quickly became apparent that I was rusty.  There's no substitute for having genuine whitewater (even the man-made kind) under your boat.  I spent an hour surfing and trying various moves on the canal's drops, and by the end of it my confidence had risen markedly.  I'm glad I invested the time, so that I won't be putting on the Colorado River completely cold.  This photo that I shot of one of the other paddlers gives an idea of the kind of whitewater one finds at WOKA.  This is "Drop 1" on the map above:

Interstate 40 runs from Memphis all the way to Flagstaff, so it would have made sense for me to drive that road all the way.  But getting to WOKA required that I make a bit of a detour up into the northeastern portion of Oklahoma.  So when I finished paddling yesterday, I found myself poring over the map for the best way to get back to I-40.  I had competing desires: to make efficient progress in my drive to Arizona versus to see some interesting sights.  The route I chose probably leaned toward the latter desire even though I think it added the smallest amount of distance to my overall journey.  Basically, I took a bunch of secondary roads across largely-rural northern Oklahoma before finally slanting southwestward into the Texas panhandle to re-join I-40 at Amarillo.

The going was slow at times: in almost every town I had to reduce my speed to 30 or even 25 miles per hour, and getting stuck behind slow drivers on two-lane roads was the norm.  But I generally enjoyed watching the landscape roll by, making its transition from the deciduous forests of the Mid South and lower Midwest to the open grasslands of the Great Plains.  Back in the 1990s I drove out to the Rocky Mountains to paddle whitewater every summer, and it was the attitude of my friends and me that one must traverse the Plains as rapidly and painlessly as possible en route to "the good stuff" in the mountains.  But the truth is, I like the Great Plains.  I wouldn't want to live there or anything, but I enjoy taking the time to observe what life is like for the people who do live there.  And contrary to many people's impression, the Plains are not flat as a pancake; the terrain is actually quite rolling.

What's more, my involvement in open-water paddling in a surfski has made me appreciate the paddling possibilities in the Plains.  The wind can blow relentlessly there, and back in July of 2021 I had a sure-enough downwind session on the Missouri River where it crosses from North Dakota into South Dakota.

However, my mood was darkening a bit as I passed through the little towns on the final approach to Amarillo.  Those towns were rather depressing, with lots of boarded-up storefronts and virtually nothing of interest going on that I could see.  It was getting on into suppertime, and from what I could tell, the restaurants and diners and cafes these towns once had have long since gone out of business.  I had to go all the way into Amarillo, the urban center of the Texas panhandle, to find a place to eat.

I bunked for the night in Amarillo, and now I'm enjoying a more relaxing morning than I had yesterday, when I wanted to get my paddling in at WOKA and then cover some miles on the road.  I'm feeling sore after stressing my muscles in a way they weren't used to, but now they've got time to recover and steel themselves before I put more such stress on them starting Wednesday.

Today my goal is Gallup, New Mexico: it's less than six hours from here, and since I'll gain an hour when I cross into the Mountain Time zone, I should get there at a very reasonable time of day.  From there, it's less than three hours to Flagstaff, so tomorrow I should get to Flagstaff around midday and have time to visit with my trip's outfitter and start making final preparations for my expedition through the Grand Canyon.

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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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