I spent this week mostly taking it easy, not doing very much. I did some house cleaning, and cleaned up my paddling and camping gear and put it all away, but otherwise I lay around here at home. Sixteen days of paddling and camping in the wilderness, followed by some twenty hours of driving to get home, will do that to a guy.
I've been thinking a lot about how it all went in the venerable Grand Canyon. My agenda was simple: I just wanted to paddle the river and experience the canyon to the fullest extent possible in sixteen days over 226 miles. And I'd say I accomplished that. There's no particular thing I'd really wanted to do that I didn't get to do.
There's no question that my whitewater skills felt rusty. While I've been paddling as much as ever in the last decade, little of that has been on whitewater, and I shouldn't have expected to be in peak form for that particular discipline. But a river-running expedition in the Grand Canyon is really about a lot more than the whitewater. The climate is fickle in the desert Southwest, and paddling some fifteen miles of whitewater each day did a number on me. Even back in my peak whitewater days, I rarely was on a river for more than three or four days in a row. In the Grand, I had to pace myself like I'd never done before in a whitewater boat. That Day 7 layover we took was a welcome break, and I also spent a couple of days just riding a raft. By the time we stopped to make camp each afternoon, I was thoroughly whipped. Most nights I bedded down by eight o'clock.
The trip was my latest reminder that my best whitewater paddling is a thing of the past, and I won't lie: it's hard to accept that. But I try my best to keep that in perspective. If Dane Jackson (arguably the best whitewater paddler in the world these days) had been there with us, he probably would have styled the whitewater just like he does in the Green Narrows and on the Gauley and other well-known "day trip" runs. But even he would have had to pace himself and be mindful of rest and hydration and nutrition to withstand sixteen or more days of continuous exposure to that environment.
Our party enjoyed quite a bit of good luck. Flipping a raft was always a worry, but we managed to avoid such an emergency. Several times a rower piloted his craft through a rapid by the skin of his teeth, but more often our raft captains navigated the whitewater with skill and aplomb.
We could have encountered a canyon filled with smoke from the Dragon Bravo fire, but firefighters had it well under control by the time we launched on August 27, and smoke was not a problem at all.
We could have had miserable weather, but I wouldn't say that we did. Certainly, it was sunny and hot much of the time, and we guzzled down large quantities of water (which we'd had to filter ourselves out there in the wilderness) to cope with it. We also had some rain, but not enough to make the whole journey feel like an ordeal. Our worst single day of rain was probably Day 1, when a fierce monsoon blew upriver with ferocious winds for a while, and left us shivering until the sun came out again.
Flash floods are always a worry when camping or hiking in a side canyon, especially during the late-summer monsoon season. But we avoided any scary incidents. We tried to use common sense when pitching our tents, sticking to higher ground, and we always had an eye to the sky whenever we stopped to hike. We did see signs of significant flash flooding in the form of heavy sediment flowing down the Colorado River from points upstream, but that was as close to any kind of catastrophic flooding that we got.
I've heard horror stories about entire groups of river runners falling victim to food poisoning or nasty viruses or bacterial infections, but our party eluded all that. Late in the trip one person was feeling a mild version of the dreaded "tolio" foot infection, but that's the only affliction I was aware of in our group. I think we did a good job of washing our hands and doing all the other little things that prevent the spread of germs.
I could go on and on with observations about my Grand Canyon experience, but honestly, there's nothing I can write here that's an adequate substitute for seeing the place yourself. Even the most artfully-crafted photographs and video footage don't measure up to immersing yourself in the actual place, and I'm just grateful I've had an opportunity to do that.
Yesterday I finally summoned the gumption to get back in a boat. I'd brought my surfski home from the marina and stored it in the garage while I was away, and I loaded it up and took it back to the riverfront to capture what's left of warm weather for this year. I paddled for an hour and felt tired and sluggish, but it was nice to feel like I was back among the living, at least.
The Mississippi River has dropped to the low levels that are common in late summer and fall. Right now it's not quite as low as it was the last several years--it dropped to record low levels in both 2022 and 2023, and only the water that Hurricane Helene had dumped on western North Carolina and east Tennessee kept it from doing so again last year--but it's good and low just the same. Yesterday the level was about 6.6 below zero on the Memphis gauge, and this morning it was down to about -6.9 feet.
I felt a bit more energetic as I paddled today. I'd hoped that some towboat wake surfing might jumpstart my enthusiasm even more, but just like yesterday, there was no commercial traffic in sight out on the river. I'm just glad to have gotten my body moving again.
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