She was no coy maiden to be seduced by a tender touch. No, assuming a river is a "she," the Colorado was a brawling, bawdy bitch who hid in the mighty Grand Canyon and grudgingly revealed herself only in modern times.
Today, the lucky (and fairly well-heeled) few can emulate the one-armed John Wesley Powell and challenge the bounding rapids. Figure more than a hundred dollars a day per person to take a guided raft trip through the Canyon, not counting travel expense.
We were three days, two nights on the river between Lee's Ferry and Phantom Ranch, 89 miles and 685 feet between. The 89 miles is on the river; the rest is the difference in elevation between the two points--what makes the Colorado River obediently follow the inexorable command of gravity.
Technically we were not in the Grand Canyon at Lee's Ferry, nor for the first 61 miles. John Wesley Powell, who lost an arm at Shiloh, but refused to let it hinder his 1869 exploration of the Colorado, arbitrarily chose the mouth of the Little Colorado as the start of the Canyon proper, though the distinction is an academic one. Upstream from Lee's Ferry once lay Glen Canyon, one of the Colorado's noblest creations, now drowned beneath Lake Powell.
"So we have a curious ensemble of wonderful features--carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments. From which of these features shall we select a name? We decide to call it Glen Canyon," Powell wrote.
For its first few miles below Glen Canyon Dam, the Colorado is a pussycat, flowing docilely between high cliffs. This stretch is heavily fished and considered a fine fishery, but it offers no whitewater thrills to the angling adventurer.
Lee's Ferry is the high put-in for Colorado raft trips. A couple of old buildings remain from the original ferry site, thick adobe walls and slotted windows holding off the fierce summer heat.
Below Lee's Ferry, the Colorado doesn't slide quietly down a smooth chute. Instead, it slumbers through long pools, whose only indication of current are the whirls and boils of its unseen hydraulics, then it suddenly leaps down rocky steps with frightening fury. It is like a drowsing lion who explodes from his bed to assault a prey animal.
That's not an overdrawn simile, for the Colorado historically claimed some of those daring enough to challenge it, and even today, kept mostly at bay by the technology of raftcraft, it occasionally feeds on the unwary or the unlucky.
But there is risk in everything and certainly the massive "baloney boats"--the 5,000 pound, 32-foot long motor-powered rafts used today--are infinitely safer than the fragile wooden boats used by John Wesley Powell and subsequent pioneers.
Depending on your whim and/or pocketbook, several trips are possible, depending on the raft company and the type of raft (oar- or motor-powered). Typical are the Del Webb Wilderness Adventure trips--the Upper Canyon, Best of the Canyon, Lower Canyon, and, for the Powell worshipers, the Entire Canyon.
Motor-powered rafts are huge, holding 14 passengers. Oar-powered boats hold six passengers. Your choice.
Boatmen are young, mostly male, and knowledgeable about the Canyon's history, geology, and other natural features. They also have a strong interest in keeping everything upright--they ride the rafts, too.
You have to have faith in boatmen named Rewalt Rakestraw and Hollywood. The two young skippers each were on their 50th trip down the river. Hollywood, a North Dakota expatriate, actually is Jon Helmer, but Rakestraw, lean and tanned, a tiny gold ring in one ear like a refugee from the crew of the Bounty, really owns his name.
Each boatman has his bete noir of a rapids, mostly each has had a bad experience there--a raft flipped or other near-catastrophe. Even the skimpiest of Grand Canyon rapids have awesome power.
There are 21 commercial raft outfits operating, all rigorously controlled by the National Park Service, which has clamped on a lid of 14,000 floaters a year, down from the high of more than 16,000.
By contrast, when young Barry Goldwater, long before his senatorial days, made a trip in 1940 with Norm Nevills, the first commercial boater in the Canyon, he was the 75th known person to make the trip. Even as late as 1948, less than a hundred had challenged the river in the Canyon.
Badger Creek Rapids, eight miles downstream, is the first rough water of consequence below Lee's Ferry. It rates usually about a six on the 1-10 rating scale, but even a slight rapids on the Colorado is beyond the experience of any but seasoned whitewater travelers.
It looked like an Ozark riffle at a distance, a choppy little rapids alongside a gravel bar. Nothing I hadn't seen on a covey of familiar streams at home in Missouri. Then we were at the lip of the first hole and I realized that what I thought was gravel actually was boulders and the little waves were 6-10 feet from crest to trough.
Ice water slapped good sense into us and our approach to new rapids from then on was tempered by a tinge of fear. The water issuing from the base of Glen Canyon Dam is a chilly 47 degrees, enough to threaten hypothermia in any but the hottest weather. After a series of several rapids, we were numb and our teeth chattered...in 110-degree heat!
Not just the geology and hydrology are awesome--so is the fishing. Let the boatman know you're an ardent angler and he'll swing into the eddy pools where you can cast spinners to the bubble line, the intersection of fast and slow water. Ask to walk the shoreline along the pools and fish the deep side, against the cliff face.
Remember--few of the trout ever have seen an artificial lure. Most are rainbows, but there also are cutthroat, brown, and brook trout.
If you're fly fishing, use streamers or wet flies. Woolly worms (or woolly buggers), either weighted or fished with a sink-tip line are prime. Or try big weighted streamers. You have to get down where the fish lie.
If you're spin fishing, use either spinners or spoons that sink quickly. Another possibility is a minnow imitation sinking plug.
You have the option of walking around the tougher rapids, which gives you a chance to fish, but loses you the chance to have several hundred gallons of icewater thrown in your face.
The average trout size is larger than many anglers land in a lifetime--15 inches is common and rainbows to 10 pounds are possible.
On our second night out, we were served us trout poached in wine, blanketed by fresh lime slices. Pierre of the Ritz would kill for the recipe.
We also had sirloin steak and corn-on-the-cob. God, roughing it is mean!
Each raft is equipped with all the food and drink necessary for the trip. There are no watery drive-ins supplying greasy cheeseburgers. Rafters pitch in to unload the boat. Old fold-up Army cots that I thought I'd left behind years ago obstinately refused to go together and painfully pinched my fingers, just as they did in a hundred National Guard bunking parties.
The outfitters furnish discount house sleeping bags which are plenty warm in the pit of the canyon. In fact, we camped at the appropriately named Furnace Flats the second night out and sweltered for the first half of the night.
Before the trip, I had read books on the history, geology, and other features of the Grand Canyon, but they were meaningless words, interesting in an abstract way, like looking at a photo of a prime rib dinner. There was no juice, no taste.
But now, having been doused by Badger Creek Rapids, survived Sockdolager, where John Wesley Powell nearly lost his life, having drifted silently through the cathedral hush of Marble Canyon, having perched high above the river at Nankoweap, and seen the shards of pots that once fed the long-vanished Anasazi Indians, now the Canyon is flesh and bone and gristle.
There are 161 rapids between Lee's Ferry and Lake Mead, the great silting basin at Canyon end, and about half of them are between the Ferry and Phantom Ranch. True, the two biggest, meanest, most frightening rapids, Crystal and the famed Lava Falls, are below Phantom, but Badger Creek, Soap Creek, Unkar, Hance, and Sockdolager all have contributed to legend and to the Colorado's necrology.
Back in 1889, Frank Mason Brown, a Denver entrepreneur, proposed to build a railroad along the river, in the Canyon. But his survey boat flipped in a fairly minor rapid and Brown's dream died with him. Before the trip was ended, two more of the party drowned. After the third drowning, the decimated exploration party was hit by a storm. Brewster Stanton, who became the leader as his superiors were picked off, one by one, wrote in his diary, "Nowhere has the awful grandeur equaled that night (of the storm) in the lonesome depths of what was, to us, a death's canyon."
River stories, ranging from those you tell at post-trip cocktail parties to professional accounts, tend to center on the rapids, for they are the dramatic manifestation of the river's power, the moment when your life is on the line. People die, but not many and, compared to life in general, rafting the Colorado is safe.
Yet the river is so much more than the pounding fury of its rapids. Red Wall Canyon is nearly 15 miles long, its sheer rose-pink walls rising more than 500 feet. Sunlight is diffused against the walls and they reflect a delicate dusty rose color. The water runs still and deep and it is as quiet as a great hall. No one talked much there.
Vasey's Paradise is a phenomenon -- springs gushing from the cliff face to spill into the river. Their constant flow creates a green garden in contrast with the red walls.
We fished at the mouth of the Little Colorado which ran white with silt and caught one endangered Colorado squawfish (released), as well as several trout.
You have three choices when you reach Phantom Ranch (actually, four, if you choose to live the rest of your life in the Grand Canyon). You can hire a helicopter, an option if you're C.E.O. of a major corporation or otherwise make big bucks; you can walk, an option if you also routinely climb the higher Himalayas; or you can ride a mule, an option if your life ambition is to walk a slack wire across Niagara Falls.
We rode the mules. Seven hours of unremitting terror for one who is acrophobic to the point of jellied bones and cardiac arrest. I guess if I could do it, so can anyone (anyone under 200 pounds and taller than four foot seven inches).
For costs and other information, write Grand Canyon National Park Lodges, Reservations, Box 699, Grand Canyon, AZ 86023, or call 602-638-2401.
For my feelings about the mule ride, read any of the more terrifying Stephen King books.
About six hours and several thousand feet after we left Phantom Ranch, I risked a quick look down between the mule's ears. The Colorado was a silver thread in the curly scalp of Arizona.
A buffeting wind blew my hat back on its restraining string and the mule laid back its ears as if contemplating suicide, and edged around a hairpin turn in a trail that would have to be wider to be called precarious.
I gulped and did what I did during most of the ride--shut my eyes.
Several centuries later we topped out, in front of curious tourists in Hawaiian shirts and pot-bellies.
I slid off the mule, groaning, and kissed the ground. The blessed ground. Somewhere below me, in a dark riffle of the Colorado, a trout leaped. A big one. vCopyright (c) 1997 Joel M. Vance. All rights reserved.