But we did in fact have a real photographer in our group. My friend Rob Lieb of Holmes, New York, has been a very good amateur photographer for some thirty years. Like me, he's been recovering at home since our trip concluded, and is only just starting to look through the images on his memory cards. The photo above is one of just a couple of photos he's shared with me so far. I look forward to seeing more.
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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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In the Air B&B we stayed in the night before Rig Day, J.D. Terry, Wiik Ingle, and Nick Wirick study the maps and ponder the river-running task before them. Photo by Kylie Haberman.
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This is something I saw a LOT of while driving out to Flagstaff and back, especially in New Mexico and the Texas panhandle. The landscape was littered with restaurants that were boarded up or otherwise no longer operating.
I've been hearing for several years now that times are tough for the dining industry; we've lost quite a few restaurants here in Memphis where I live. But no other region of the country I've visited looks harder-hit than the High Plains. Mom-and-pop concerns and national chains alike appear to have felt the blow: in this photo we have what looks like a former Denny's restaurant in Tucumcari, New Mexico.
Okay, okay... I know what you're all saying right now: "Where are all those breathtaking photos you took in the Grand Canyon?" The answer: I'm working on it. Most of the images are stored on a couple of memory cards, and having gotten home just last night, I'm only just now finding time to sift through them. I fully intend to Give The People What They Want, but these things do take time.
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Long-time readers of this blog know that one of my goals is to paddle a boat in every state of the United States of America. The rules are simple: within the legal boundaries of a given state, I must be on a river, lake, or other body of water in a kayak or canoe, and take at least one paddle stroke. Then I will have paddled in that state.
Before I put on the Colorado River at Lee's Ferry back on August 27, I had never paddled in the state of Arizona. Now I have. Boy, have I ever. I can probably put together a list of ten states in which the combined number of paddle strokes I've taken is fewer than the number I took in the Grand Canyon in those sixteen days.
In summary, here's a list of the fifty states of this nation. I have visited every one of them at least once. I have marked with an asterisk (*) those states in which I have not paddled. And there's now just one of them: Alaska. The Last Frontier.
Alabama
Alaska*
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
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What follows is a summary of facts and figures of my journey down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. Hopefully I'll have more to say in the coming days, but for now I just want to get the basics down.
I was part of a party of fourteen, and I've listed their names below. I've included each person's age to convey that aspect of the group's diversity:
Arlyn Agababian (38), Asheville, North Carolina
Daniel Cox (23), Morristown, Tennessee
Emily Cox (51), Morristown, Tennessee
Kiley Haberman (30), Marietta, South Carolina
Elmore Holmes (58), Memphis, Tennessee
Wiik Ingle (52), Asheville, North Carolina
Rob Lieb (59), Holmes, New York
Kaylin Owens (29), Cosby, Tennessee
Nathan Rakestraw (30), Erwin, Tennessee
Brady Sleeper (53), Asheville, North Carolina
Amelia Taylor (39), Sevierville, Tennessee
J.D. Terry (45), Mammoth Lakes, California
Genevieve Verrastro (41), Asheville, North Carolina
Nick Wirick (36), Del Rio, Tennessee
The flow of the Colorado River varied between around 9000 and around 11,000 cubic feet per second during our trip. That's at Lee's Ferry, anyway; flash flooding on tributary creeks impacted the flow farther downriver.
And now, a summary of our daily progress:
Day 0 (August 26)
Met at our outfitter's property and traveled some two and a half hours to our putin. Rigged our boats and camped at Lee's Ferry (Mile 0).
Day 1 (August 27)
Headed downriver through a mixture of sunshine and heavy rain. Spent the night at Hot Na Na camp (Mile 16.5).
Day 2 (August 28)
Busy whitewater day as we ran House Rock Rapid (Class 7 on the 1-10 scale), North Canyon Rapid (Class 5), Twentyone Mile Rapid (Class 5), Georgie Rapid (Class 6), Twentyfour and One-Half Mile Rapid (Class 6), Hansbrough-Richards Rapid (Class 6), Cave Springs Rapid (Class 5), Twentyseven Mile Rapid (Class 5), and Fence Fault Rapid (Class 5). Camped at Nautiloid camp (Mile 35).
Day 3 (August 29)
A mellower day for whitewater, with just a couple of Class 4s. Camped at Main Nankoweap camp (Mile 53.5), where we hiked up to a Navajo granary.
Day 4 (August 30)
Passed the mouth of the Little Colorado River, which marks the beginning of Grand Canyon proper. Rapids included Kwagunt Rapid (Class 5), Tanner Rapid (Class 6), Basalt Rapid (Class 6), and Unkar Creek Rapid (Class 6). Camped at Upper Rattlesnake camp (Mile 74.5).
Day 5 (August 31)
One of the bigger whitewater days, with Nevills Rapid (Class 6), Hance Rapid (Class 8), Sockdolager Rapid (Class 7), Grapevine Rapid (Class 7), Zoroaster Rapid (Class 5), and Horn Creek Rapid (Class 8). Passed Phantom Ranch, which was still closed as a result of the Dragon Bravo fire. Replenished our water supply from the spigot at Boat Beach. Spent the night at Ninetyone Mile Creek camp (just shy of Mile 92).
Day 6 (September 1)
Three Class 8s: Granite Rapid, Hermit Rapid, and Crystal Rapid. Also Tuna Creek Rapid (Class 6), Sapphire Rapid (Class 6), Emerald Rapid (Class 5), Ruby Rapid (Class 5), and Serpentine Rapid (Class 7). Stopped for the night at Bass camp (Mile 109).
Day 7 (September 2)
Layover day at Bass camp. Hiked over a small ridge to the Shinumo Creek watershed and swam beneath a waterfall.
Day 8 (September 3)
The river run resumed with mostly small rapids, excepting Walthenberg Rapid (Class 6). The water had turned muddier overnight due to some flooding up on the Little Colorado River. Visited Elves Chasm, a popular swimming spot. Camped at Lower Blacktail camp (just before Mile 121) at the mouth of Blacktail Canyon. The canyon was beautiful, but the camp was rocky and inhospitable, especially in the rainy, windy conditions we had.
Day 9 (September 4)
Whitewater highlights included Forster Rapid (Class 5), Fossil Rapid (Class 5), Specter Rapid (Class 6), Bedrock Rapid (Class 7), Deubendorff Rapid (Class 7), and Tapeats Rapid (Class 5). Passed the point where the Colorado River necks down to just 76 feet wide. Camped at Across Deer Creek camp (just before Mile 137).
Day 10 (September 5)
Visited Deer Creek Falls along with a throng of customers from a commercial raft trip. Proceeded downriver and stopped for a hike up the beautiful Matkatamiba Canyon. Camped a short distance farther down at Matkat Hotel camp (Mile 149). Watched as a heavy thunderstorm created flash-flood waterfalls on a cliff face just upstream.
Day 11 (September 6)
Headed downstream and ran Upset Rapid (Class 8). Continued down to Havasu Canyon, where storm runoff had washed out the milky-blue water we had hoped to find. Camped at Lower National camp (Mile 167).
Day 12 (September 7)
Woke up to find the Colorado flowing a dark reddish-brown. Even the "whitewater" was that color as we headed downstream. We arrived at Lava Falls (Class 9), arguably the most bodacious rapid in the Grand Canyon, and the color of the water made it seem all the more intimidating. We all survived Lava and spent the night at Below Lower Lava camp (Mile 180).
Day 13 (September 8)
The water had turned a dark grey overnight--probably runoff from the Dragon Bravo fire burn area. The sediment load was so thick that I couldn't see my paddle blade at all when I dipped it in the water. We encountered mostly mellow whitewater, but headwinds picked up in the afternoon. Camped at Hualapai Acres camp (Mile 195).
Day 14 (September 9)
We spent another day fighting strong headwinds. Our best distractions were Kolb Rapid (Class 6) and Two Hundred and Ninemile Rapid (Class 5). Pushed all the way to Lower Fall Canyon camp (Mile 212).
Day 15 (September 10)
Hot weather made the headwinds strong for a third day in a row. Biggest whitewater was Two Hundred and Seventeenmile Rapid (Class 5). Camped at Two Hundred and Twentyfour Mile camp (Mile 223.5).
Day 16 (September 11)
Takeout Day. Paddled the final couple of miles down to Diamond Creek (just before Mile 226), where we de-rigged our boats and loaded everything onto our outfitter's truck and trailer. A drive of several hours back to Flagstaff ensued.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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