Grand Canyon whitewater dory trip

[WI-Tom]

Thought I'd let people here know about a neat trip coming up; five wooden boats (replicas of 1950s-era Grand Canyon whitewater boats) are making a three-week (or so) run through Grand Canyon. I'll be going along as neophyte rower (in a raft, not a hard boat) and semi-official blogger/freelance journalist. Starting on March 20 or 21, there will be daily updates of the trip here:

http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/12/...ghosts/log.htm

You can find out more about the trip planners and boat builders here, with lots of photos:

http://www.historicriverboatsafloat.org/

I met Dave Mortenson, one of the trip leaders, at the Port Townsend Festival this year. If you were there, you might have caught the screening of his Grand Canyon whitewater documentary. I believe he's filming again this year.

Anyway, I'm excited to be heading out on my first big whitewater trip. Wish me luck--as a relative novice, I may be in a bit over my head (but only metaphorically, I hope...)

Tom

[SMARTINSEN]

Sounds like wicked big fun. I had always thought that I would like to try a raft trip though the Canyon. Maybe someday, but probably not in a wooden boat!

The usual requests,\take lots of pictures.

Water is going to be COLD.

[WI-Tom]

Water is going to be COLD.

Yep--I'll be in a drysuit. Big snowstorm in Flagstaff tomorrow...

Tom

[Chip-skiff]

Might want to take a neoprene hood as well. Put it on for the thumpers. Take it off for cruising.

In any event, you'll love the Canyon, and remember it the rest of your life.

[WI-Tom]

So I got off the river yesterday after a 24-day run through Grand Canyon--one of the very best trips of my life. I'll post some pics later today. Lots of fun, good people (one guy on our trip was former river guide Tom Martin, who wrote the current Grand Canyon river guide and has done over 50 trips), and not TOO much excitement, even for a novice rower. I did end up in the water at Lava Falls but my boat did just fine without me.

Twenty-four straight days of blue skies, sunshine, and shorts & not shirt weather!

Tom

[Chip-skiff]

Glad to hear it!

Can't wait for the photos.

[James McMullen]

You swam at Lava? Damn! That's one hell of an introduction to whitewater rowing.
Glad you're back!

[WI-Tom]

So, pictures finally. I flew into Phoenix a couple of days before the launch, then stayed with new friends in Flagstaff, where they were enjoying a blizzard that closed every Interstate in Arizona:



Two days later, we were enjoying blue skies at Lee's Ferry, getting our boats (five rafts and five wooden dories, replicas of 1950s boats) ready to launch:



The guy in the tall boots in the photo above is Tom Martin, an ex-guide (over fifty river trips trhrough Grand Canyon) and Canyon historian. He just released a new book about the early history of recreational boating in Grand Canyon, especially the development of dory hulls for whitewater. You can find his book at http://bigwaterlittleboats.com

[WI-Tom]

Here's our flotilla at the Lee's Ferry camp the morning we set out:



The white boat is the Susie Too, a replica of one of Pat Reilly's modified McKenzie River boats from the 1960s. The red-white-and-blue dory just behind it is a replica of the Portola, a sister ship. The original boats were used to create the Sierra Club book Time and the River Flowing, which helped persuade Congress to deny funding for two additional dams in Grand Canyon that would have made much of the Canyon a lake, and the rest a mere trickle of water.



The photo above is a replica of Moulty Fulmer's Gem, probably the first dory-style hull used to run the Canyon. The original was built in 1953; this replica was built by Tom Martin in 2009, and has been used in four Canyon runs so far. It did flip twice on this last trip... once in Crystal Rapid, and once in 231-Mile Rapid.

[WI-Tom]

Here's the far less glamorous baggage raft I rowed:



It's named after Georgie Clark White, the first woman to run Grand Canyon. However, her legacy is mixed; she was also instrumental in establishing commercial trips, especially motorized ones, in the Canyon. But after I discovered how little a fully-loaded 18-foot raft resembles a performance rowing boat, I took to calling my boat Fat George instead.

And it will never be this clean again until its wash on take-out day 24 days later...



And that's another one of our replica boats, the Susie R. Designed and built by Pat Reilly in the 1950s, this was a modification of Norm Nevills' earlier cataract boats.

And here's another Pat Reilly boat, the Flavell--another evolution of the cataract boats. (The Gem is just to the right).

[WI-Tom]

Another look at the replica Susie Too:



And the Portola:

[WI-Tom]

Here the replica Flavell and Gem row past Boulder Narrows.



When Pat Reilly and Moulty Fulmer ran this section in the original Flavell and Gem in 1957, the river was over 120,000 cubic feet per second (these days 30,000 cfs is considered very high water). Their 1957 trip was the highest water levels ever run in the Grand Canyon. When they passed this spot, the house-sized boulder was completely underwater.

Lots of good historical photos from that trip (and others) in Tom Martin's book, Big Water Little Boats (http://bigwaterlittleboats.com). Those 1950s guys were cool--built their own boats and ran the river when rescue wasn't an option.

Here's a pitiful attempt on my part to capture a rapid--I'm not a good enough photographer to do it justice. This one is Soap Creek, I think, a pretty easy one early in the trip:

[gstanfield]

Keep the pics coming, thanks for sharing. Your original post led me to start researching the canyon and it's history, I'll bet I've spent close to twenty hours now reading about the canyon and I've added several books to my amazon wishlist. After all this reading and that to come I know that I'll have to run this river before I die.

[Yeadon]

Dammit Tom. 24 days! Very impressive stuff.

[WI-Tom]

Yeah, do this trip--drop everything and do it if you ever get the chance. I didn't even know you could do a non-commercial self-guided trip before I got invited on this one.

Here's an excerpt from the blog--Day 18, when we ran Lava Falls:

Lava Falls, it turns out, may be over-hyped. Sure, it's a 9 of 10. And yes, the waves are big. But at today's water flow--about 10,000 cubic feet per second (less than a tenth of what Moulty Fulmer and Pat Reilly faced on their 1957 trip, though they didn't make it as far as Lava that year, and wouldn't have run it if they had)--it's about as friendly as it ever gets. Which is not a guarantee.

The whole trick here, apparently, is to NOT go into the Ledge Hole. The Ledge Hole is a big raft-eating hole beneath a large pourover, a five-foot vertical drop over a rock ledge. This vicious entry blocks the center of the river, right at the top of the rapid.

Hazel Clark knows firsthand what the Ledge Hole is like, from a run on an earlier trip:

"I felt like I got halfway across, and then it pulls you back," she says. "And I'm like, 'Oh, ****, I'm not getting out of this.' I didn't jump off until the boat flipped," she explains. "Normally I wouldn't do that--I want to stay with the boat--but I've seen the videos. Quite often when a boat flips there, it stays in the same place."

"This is where the term "maytagged" comes from," Tom Martin puts in. "Getting turned over and over and over and over."

If you want to see what the Ledge Hole can do, search Youtube for a video called "Carnage at Lava Falls," posted by Duwain Whitis (the co-author of Tom Martin's river guide). Luckily, there's no internet access here while we're waiting to run Lava ourselves.

We'll run Lava on the right side--the left run is too rocky today--so I want to position my raft to punch through the far right side of the Ledge Hole, barely brushing its tail, where there's a big lateral wave. Hit this right and you're pretty much on autopilot for the rest of the run. The rapid will funnel your boat toward a crashing thunderous white frothy spot in the river that the veterans call the V wave. I nod and pretend to see something V-shaped as they explain it to me over and over. The V wave, apparently, is a narrow slot that your raft will shoot through, where a four-foot lateral wave will break over each side of the boat, burying you in white water.

Once you come through that you'll meet the BLR--the Black Lava Rock--a name that confuses me at first, until I figure out that the BLR is no longer black but is a light beige to tan instead. I reorient myself by mentally translating the B in BLR to Big, which still fits. The BLR is a giant rock at the bottom of the run's right side. Its foot is coated with green slime, and there are big waves which might wash a boat partway up the rock. But Lava is a relatively beginner-friendly rapid, I'm told. It flushes everything downstream one way or another. Assuming you make it past the Ledge Hole.

The Run

Finally most of the other groups' boats are out of the way and it's time for some of us to make the run. My boat, Fat George, is tied directly to shore, with about half a dozen other rafts tied to it. I'll be one of the last boats down. First I watch Yoshie shove off, rowing Cece toward the rapid. Then David shoves off and rows out into the currrent, disappearing around a corner. Some of the dories have already gone through ahead of them. I'll be next.

I scramble along the shore and untie my bow line, coil it neatly in my hand. Take a long look around my boat to make sure everything is strapped and double-strapped. Look again. Tighten the straps on my PFD, and on my hat. Then a shove off from the rocks and I'm coasting out into the current.

I quickly slide around a corner where the top of Lava Falls comes into view. As in other big rapids, the top is a horizon line below which the world drops away. The entry ought to be easy to line up; I'm aiming to slide down the far right side of the smooth V which pours over the Ledge Hole. I keep Fat George sideways so I can make small lateral adjustments, keeping my boat pinned to the edge of the V, far away from the Ledge Hole. I'm right where I want to be--I think.

And then the V steepens and I'm sliding faster. I'm vaguely aware of the camera crew and other people watching from the rocks on river right, but my attention is focused on lining up right. I'm pushed past the Ledge Hole--I think my entry is still about right, but everything looks different from water level and after all there are no guarantees--and then I'm into the first lateral wave.

The rest of the run--the brief time I spend aboard the raft, anyway--is a series of snapshots rather than a continuous memory of events. I'm in my raft, and we seem to be at the bottom of a large hole in the water. I look up. Above me is a small circle of blue sky. On every side, and closing in on that circle of blue sky, squeezing it smaller and smaller until its no bigger than a vaguely benevolent eye staring down from the Canyon rim, is white. Frothing waving crashing thunderous white. Left. Right. Forward. Back. Above. White.

And then a brief sensation of being catapulted through the air, the oars yanking me from my seat like a rag doll, and I'm in the water, hanging onto the side of my raft. I've joined the Colorado River Swim Club.

Later, dry on shore, I ask Norm Takasugawa what happened. He was running the camera on the high scout point, so he had a good view.

"So what happened?" Norm says. "You fell out of the boat and went swimming."

Hoping for further explication--I really have no memory other than a trampolining feeling as I was thrown from the boat--I ask Norm to tell me more. Apparently I made it past the V wave, where white water was pouring in from all sides at once, but didn't get quite as far as the BLR at the bottom of the rapid. I slid up on a wave at the base of the BLR, Norm says.

"And then you were leaning," he continues. "And the angle of inclination caused a slight ejection."

A slight ejection, it turns out, is enough to put me in the water. This is water from the bottom of Lake Powell, four hundred feet below the surface. Water that has not felt the heat of the sun's rays for a long long time before being released from Glen Canyon Dam to float our rafts through the Canyon. Water so cold I can't even stand to wash my face without a rigorous iron-willed determination--a determination I'm unable to manifest on a daily basis, or--let's be honest--even once every three or four days. Water so cold that I don't even like to wade out knee-deep in it.

If you want to be scientific about it: 47 degrees Fahrenheit, 8 or 9 Celsius.

Seriously cold water.

And I'm immersed in it, wearing nothing but K-Mart board shorts (they have a nice flowery pattern), my newly-donated Patagonia rain jacket, a cotton tank top, a ninety-nine-cent thrift store fleece my wife gave me in 2001, my new pre-seasoned river hat, and Teva sandals.

And I have not even the slightest awareness of the cold. I'm laughing my fool head off, laughing so hard that it doesn't even occur to me to try too hard to climb back into my raft. And when I do try, I find it's a lot harder than i expected. The fat rubber sides of the raft give no purchase for my feet. I try to step up on a dangling oar--it's been popped out of the oarlock and is hanging from its leash--but finally just give up and keep laughing.

Meanwhile whistles are blowing and rescue boats are converging from all directions. A raft. Another raft. A couple of inflatable kayaks. I'm in the tail waves of the rapid and there are no rocks to hit, no dangers to face. Finally one raft crew grabs my raft and pulls it to shore while a kayaker maneuvers close enough that I can climb aboard his boat and then hop onto my raft.

My new river hat is still in place.

I start whistling the theme from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" as I pull on a dry shirt and jury-rig a clothesline from my boat to a tree on shore and hang my wet clothes to dry. Then I pull out a celebratory gourmet lollipop, Pina Colada flavor, courtesy of the Original Gourmet Candy Company of New Hampshire, via Greg Hatten, and watch the remaining boats make the run through Lava.

While I wait for the camera crew to pack up and make the final run, I'm already dreaming up T-shirts for the Colorado River Swim Club. A map of Grand Canyon, I decide, with a red X and a swimmer's name at each rapid someone swam.

Hance: Hazel Clark. Granite: Randy Dersham. Crystal: Tom Martin (with an asterisk denoting a boat flip). Upset: Yoshie Kobayashi.

And Lava Falls: Tom Pamperin.

[WI-Tom]

Here I am scouting Lava Falls. Seventeen days so far and I haven't swum or flipped--but this is the last photo where that's true...



The hat was my best find of the trip. I brought a new-ish hat on the trip and lost it in Unkar Rapid. A few days later I found this perfectly broken-in and pre-seasoned river hat floating in the river below a minor rapid.

Here's another view of Lava Falls, with my friend Cece scouting it on the boulder:

[WI-Tom]

But people who claim that the trip is over after Lava Falls don't quite have it right. Our group had some other interesting runs. For instance, David Perez let himself be talked into taking his raft through the hole at 209-Mile Rapid (all the photos in this post are courtesy of Tom Martin):



And Greg Hatten had a close call at the Fangs in Killer Fang Falls (he and the Portola replica dory came through unscathed);



And Norm Takasugawa had an even better run at Killer Fang:

[WI-Tom]

Here's a nice little clip (NOT from our trip!) to show you why it's a really really bad idea to hit the Ledge Hole at Lava Falls:

[WI-Tom]

But most of the trip was just plain hard work, as you can see from this photo of me, searching for optimal rowing efficiency (Tom Martin photo):

[WI-Tom]

Now a few pictures of the dories in action (all photos in this post are courtesy of Ryan Choi); the first one shows Tom Martin rowing the replica Gem he built through a small-ish rapid:

[WI-Tom]

And here's Richard Carrier, a French kayaker and raft guide from Chile, rowing the replica Susie Too:



And Leif Mortenson in the replica Flavell:



(Both photos courtesy of Ryan Choi)

[Chip-skiff]

Nice pics. The paint jobs are very low-key and subtle, too.

For those who've not experienced it, here's a pic snapped just before tipping down the first big whoop at Lava— notice the weird perspective ahead, which tells you how much drop there is.



And here's one I took from the bank just above the V-Wave. There's an 18-foot raft barely visible: you can see the nose just popping up to the right.



Despite the dire look of the thing, they made it upright, no swimmers— a good run for Lava.

[WI-Tom]

Nice pics. The paint jobs are very low-key and subtle, too.

Yeah, they take some getting used to, don't they? These are the same paint jobs that were on the original 1950s and 60s boats. The Flavell's red-white-and-blue was actually designed by Disney artist Harper Goff, who was apparently Walt Disney's right-hand mand and creative genius at the time.

I was usually rowing alone in the big rapids, so I never had the chance (or was never dumb enough) to try any pictures with my non-waterproof camera. Some of our group had boat-mounted cameras, though (we were filming a documentary as we went) and if I ever get my hands on some of that footage I'll post it here.

Nice to see your pictures of Lava. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by how idiot-proof those 18-foot rafts are; if you're lined up right, you generally seem to make it through ok. I was also surprised at how hard it was to keep your raft in the current and out of the eddies in the flat water--and by the headwinds! Plenty of days when, if you're not rowing, you're not moving...

Tom

[Chip-skiff]

That part about lining up and then letting the boat run the rapid is true for about 9 out of ten rapids in the Canyon. There are a few— Hance and Bedrock— where you need to make a critical move or you end up in serious trouble.

Since I was paddling a very small cat—



I had to pick a line and then paddle like a madman to get up enough inertia to bust lateral waves, and do some insane ferrying to miss holes, which tend to flip this boat and take me for a submarine ride. I swam five times and did quite a few sneak runs. One cool thing about a small boat is when you hit a steep wave you actually launch into the air (I could see sky between the tubes.) Jack tried to get a pic of me in flight, but never caught it.

Also rowed a solo cat— a Jack's Cutthroat— for a couple days. Here's a nice photo of me in that boat:



Between the rapids, there's lots of dreamtime.

[WI-Tom]

That part about lining up and then letting the boat run the rapid is true for about 9 out of ten rapids in the Canyon. There are a few— Hance and Bedrock— where you need to make a critical move or you end up in serious trouble.

Since I was paddling a very small cat—


I had to pick a line and then paddle like a madman to get up enough inertia to bust lateral waves, and do some insane ferrying to miss holes, which tend to flip this boat and take me for a submarine ride. I swam five times and did quite a few sneak runs.

Wow--that'd be a very different trip in such a small boat! How many boats in your group?

As for Hance, we had one swimmer who fell in at the top (she missed the entry and went in sideways over the right-side pourover) and was lucky to come through unharmed. I was next in line and took off after her, which meant I ran the right side and completely missed the Duck Pond; still came out ok. By the time I was down the first drop she was already back in her boat.

And Bedrock--well, one of the replica dories (the Flavell) missed the move to the right and ran the left side of the island. Came out without losing anything, which surprised us all. A lot.

Still, even the "must-make" moves were never too bad in a big raft. Granted, we only had about 13,000 cfs at the highest, and usually lower (8-10,000) for the big ones. I think I'll do my next trip in either a dory or a smaller raft if I can.

Tom

[Chip-skiff]

Wow--that'd be a very different trip in such a small boat! How many boats in your group?

One 18 ft. raft, two 18 ft. cats, three 16 ft. cats, one Cutthroat (12 ft. oar cat), a Culebra (12 ft. frameless paddle cat like a Shredder), and my Fat Pack Cat (10.5 ft.) I carried my personal camp gear on the Pack Cat, with the beer on an 18 footer.

The guy with the permit has a company (Jack's Plastic Welding) that builds inflatables, so he supplied most of the cats, and encouraged us to swap around. I was the only one who wanted to paddle the Pack Cat for more than a few hours— I have two pack Cats of my own and have done quite a few self-support expeditions, so I know what can be done (and when to sneak it).

Paddling a boat that small definitely makes the waves look bigger. Mostly fun. Occasionally scary.

PS- Those Ryan Choi pics look like there was spring runoff or a flash flood out of the Paria— that really red silt tends to come out of S. Utah. Pretty striking color for a river.

[WI-Tom]

PS- Those Ryan Choi pics look like there was spring runoff or a flash flood out of the Paria— that really red silt tends to come out of S. Utah. Pretty striking color for a river.

Yeah, there was some snowmelt somewhere, maybe off the Little Colorado? We had green clear water the first week--the Little Colorado was striking turquoise--and then it redded up for about a week, and we were back to green by the end. Havasu Creek was perfect Turquoise, too. Neat to see.

A group a couple days behind us found the Little Colorado running red/brown when they passed by.

Tom

[Chip-skiff]

We launched in late August and the Paria, which drains the Bryce Canyon watershed, had flash-flooded. The water was red and there were thick floating mats of debris the first couple days.

I left out one boat in our party: a hardshell kayak. The guy didn't have his combat roll down, and took a lot of swims. The other small-boat people got a bit tired of retrieving his booties, paddle, and other loose gear several times a day. So he spent much of the trip riding a big cat with his 'yak strapped to the rear. He dumped at the top of Lava and swam the whole thing. A masochist, I reckon.