Like I said a couple of posts back, at this time a year ago I was paddling, floating, drifting through the one and only Grand Canyon that the Colorado River has cut through the Plateau Province of North America. This is just one of many photos that my buddy Rob Lieb captured between August 27 and September 11 of last year.
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I continue to get in the boat a few times each week. Some days I'm rarin' to go, and other days I don't feel much giddy-up at all.
This week we've had a run of very hot weather. We've hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit at least a couple of times. Going out and paddling is sort of my outside time for the day when it's like that; the rest of the day, especially when the temperature peaks in the afternoon, I'm sticking to the air-conditioned indoors as much as possible.
The oppressive heat motivates me to get good and wet. This is definitely the time of year for practicing remounts. And nothing feels better in this weather than a cool hose bath on the dock after paddling.
Of course, the most fun way to get wet is surfing some wakes. I had a couple of opportunities to do that earlier this past week; one barge rig in particular was generating some very nice waves. But these waves reminded me how important balance is: a number of times I let waves get away because I was too off-balance to execute the strokes I needed to.
Balance is something I've always struggled with to some degree. Or, to put it another way, one of the ways elite paddlers separate themselves from everybody else is through their ability to execute strokes even when their bodies are in the most awkward, off-balance positions. It's not surprising to me that a lot of world-class paddlesport athletes did some gymnastics when they were younger, or diving, or some other activity that requires some acrobatic maneuvering. U.S. slalom racer Casey Eichfeld, who is currently hoping to make his fifth Olympic team in 2028, did some ballet dancing when he was a kid.
That's not my background at all. I was never that kid who was always turning cartwheels, or doing backflips, or showing off tricks from the high diving board. Even doing a simple dive was something I couldn't really manage: throwing my whole body into an upside-down position was just beyond me. Aside from that, I wasn't really athletic at all until I reached middle school, when I found that endurance-oriented sports (namely distance running) were what I was good at.
But around that same time I found that I really enjoyed navigating rivers in a canoe. Some of the people I was doing it with paddled kayaks and knew how to roll, and that made me want to learn to do that, too. I spent the next few summers trying to get my roll down, and the sensation of being upside down, heels over head, was not easy to deal with for this non-acrobat. But eventually I figured it out, and my whitewater skill level took off from there, once I was no longer so worried about swimming whenever I flipped.
Mind you, I still would never be mistaken for an acrobat. The ability to roll is really just the bare minimum for paddling whitewater at a high level. Because the surface of a whitewater river (and also the ocean, which I would get into paddling later) is not flat, a paddler must constantly adjust his center of gravity to stay in control. Elite-level whitewater (and ocean) paddlers have a keen awareness of their positions in three-dimensional space that I've just never been able to achieve.
But before my readers smother me in pity, I'll just note that years of trying my best have resulted in at least a modicum of competence. When I paddled a double surfski with Jasper Mocke in South Africa last January, Jasper remarked that I was much better than their average camp attendee at moving my hips with the motions of the boat and not resorting to braces to keep myself balanced.
This story has a familiar moral: you never know what you might achieve if you just keep going at it. Even though these days my life is full of all the usual fallout from a death in the family--cleaning out the house, sorting out personal effects, probating the will, all that stuff--I'm still making time to get in the boat and, at the very least, go through the motions.
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The pain that's been present in the right side of my neck since early February shows no signs of going away. Most of the time it's a low-grade sort of thing, but once in a while it gets really bad--for several days last week, it was quite a bit worse than usual. And in recent weeks I've also noticed some "floaters" in the vision of my right eye, along with some occasional "lightning" when I twist my neck a certain way.
I guess I really ought to seek some kind of medical attention. Having spent a good bit of this year navigating the healthcare system on my mother's behalf, I just haven't had it in me to look for answers to my own issues, too. And besides that, I'm pretty sure this is all related to the impinged nerves that an MRI revealed three years ago; the treatment options for that are few and not very appealing.
So, for now I continue simply to live with it. The bright side is that I can still paddle without any detectable hindrance. I continue to follow my usual Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday paddling routine most weeks. If there's barge traffic out on the Mississippi, I paddle out to explore the surfing opportunities; if all is quiet out there, then I just paddle steady for 40 minutes or 50 minutes or an hour.
One thing I've been reminded of lately is how much better I feel, in terms of mood and energy level, after doing some higher-intensity paddling. Hard, fast efforts generate endorphins, of course; and in the case of surfing barge wakes, you also get an adrenaline rush from riding a big wave that's powerful enough to toss a surfski around like a toothpick. So I always feel sort of a glow when I return to the dock after that kind of activity. Long, steady paddles certainly have their place, but I usually feel more beaten down afterward.
In other news...
This past Saturday, the 29th of August, there was a catastrophic flash flood that raged down Bright Angel Creek, which flows into the Colorado River at Phantom Ranch in the Grand Canyon. If you check You Tube and social media sites, you can find plenty of photos and video footage of the debris flow emanating from the creek's mouth: it included bridges that had been washed out, buildings from the Phantom Ranch area, lots of logs and sticks, and, sadly, at least a couple of human bodies. The flooding was caused in part by heavy rain that fell in the burn-scar area of the Dragon Bravo Fire that took place in July and August of last year.
At this time last year, I was engaged in my 16-day paddling trip through the Grand Canyon. The events of this past weekend have led me to contemplate the challenges my party would face if our trip were on the same dates this year. Our Launch Day was August 27, and so August 29 would have been Day Three. We camped at Nankoweap (Mile 53.5) at the end of Day Three last year. That's 34.6 miles above Phantom Ranch, so we wouldn't have been directly endangered by the flash flood. But in the wake of the flash flood this past weekend, the National Park Service temporarily halted all river-running parties. So if we were on the river at this time, we would have had an unplanned layover day, and instead of passing Phantom Ranch on Day Five, we'd be doing so on Day Six (today, the second of September). Instead of using the spigot at Phantom Ranch for replenishing our water stores, we would have to do more of our own filtering with the equipment provided by our outfitter, and that's a tedious, time-consuming process.
Proceeding downriver from Phantom Ranch, we'd be encountering all kinds of floating debris in the eddies, along with fragments of those washed-out bridges and buildings and other random stuff that could present a variety of safety hazards. And having lost a day of progress through the canyon, we'd be harder pressed to make the takeout at Diamond Creek by Day Sixteen. Surely the N.P.S. would understand if we had to extend our journey into a 17th day... but then again, I have no idea.
Let's just say I'm glad we got our trip in when we did. I remember being very concerned about the impact the Dragon Bravo Fire might have on our trip last year, but in the end we had very few problems. The flash floods that took place during our time on the river were nowhere near as severe as last Saturday's, and they occurred when we were not nearby. About the only evidence we saw of such an event was the dark-grey color the river was running when we woke up the morning of Day Thirteen.
In short, we enjoyed good luck. I believe most river-running parties in the Grand Canyon manage to get through it with no serious issues, but the events of last weekend are a reminder that the dynamic processes of our planet always move forward with no regard for who might be around.
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