SWAMPING THE GRAND CANYON

Swamper Wayne & Boatman Adam - Mile 124

I slid face-first off the raft and ker-splashed into the frigid Colorado River. My plunge surprised me as much as the thirteen watching passengers. We were in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where it’s not a great idea to go for an unplanned swim. Too late, Boatman Adam had yelled, “Grab his feet!”

As a volunteer “swamper” (crew), I found myself in over my head – in more ways than one. We were barely half-way through our eight-day trip. An old-hand boatman had told me three rules for swampers: “Don’t get hurt,” “Wash your hands,” and “Drink water.” Unspoken was a fourth: “Don’t fall in.”

I fell in while trying to retrieve a lost water bottle floating along the cliffs. Just two days earlier, with brilliant form, I’d snagged an errant red bag that had fallen off our boat, while lying on my belly on the front of the giant, gray-and-aqua-colored raft as it chased downstream, my outstretched arm directing Adam at the Honda outboard, then leaning down to the water at the last second to swoop up the bag. Voila! Just like I’d watched Swamper Shaun do on our rafting trip a year earlier (that time, me riding as a passenger). I was pretty proud of myself, and the onlookers clapped. But as Proverbs says, “Pride goeth before a dunking.” Or something like that.

Fortunately, I’d executed my dive in relatively calm water and out of the river’s vicious currents and rapids. After assuring all the downturned faces on the raft, “No damage done,” I swam to the water bottle, handed it up, and started to crawl back on board. Then came a chorus of, “ChapStick! There’s a ChapStick floating behind you.” Oh, shit, it had come out of my pants pocket, which meant an ignominious swim back to capture my fucking lip balm. As if my predicament wasn’t mortifying enough already.

Finally, I dragged myself back onto the raft, to discover that our second raft, with another thirteen passengers, Boatman Trevin, and Swamper Shaun, also had watched my performance. All gave me a well-earned round of applause. I slunk back to my seat next to Adam in the motor well, where he brushed off my apologies. “I’ll say this,” I added. “That’s a damned good pfd (life jacket).”

Later, I learned that one of the passengers had christened my dive a “Half-Wayner.”

CANYON SWAMPER

Your biggest job as a swamper on a raft filled with more than a dozen paying clients/passengers, is to learn really fast what the hell you’re supposed to be doing. I know that every job has its own arcane details – truck driver, Walmart cashier, bank manager – but you get eased into those jobs. Swamping has a steep learning curve. Like, go, now!

The only thing I insisted on being shown by Boatman Adam ahead of time was how to tie bowline knots. He did, and I practiced in the warehouse, where the rafts are loaded over two days, with supplies and ice, before getting trailered to the river to meet the passengers. One of the coolest things about the swamper job, as I’d watched other (far, far younger) swampers do on prior raft trips, was hopping out first at stops to tie up the raft. You jump off onto sand or rocks or scramble up cliffs to find a secure hold for the bowline. It’s not something you want to screw up in front of an audience of rafters waiting to pee. Plus, your knot actually has to hold, for obvious reasons.

Then there’s this complicated looping of the bowline when you depart, keeping it compact and ready for the next stop. It is a lovely routine, sliding the rope through your fingers, giving the coils an awkward twist with your left hand, and finishing it all with some wraps and winds and pulls and a clip to the bow strap, and you hop aboard as the current sweeps you and the raft away.

There’s a right way and a whole lot of wrong ways to do a thousand things, and as many questions:

            -How to tighten your pfd.

            -What’s a pfd? (personal flotation device)

            -How much bleach to put in the hand-wash bucket. And in the fourth in-line, dish-wash bucket.

            -Precisely how to load and strap down, then unload, once a day, 50 bags, 13 folding chairs, 13 ammo cans, bags of cots, a full cook kitchen with tables, etc.

            -Do you wash this greasy pot first in the river? Where’s the scrubby?

            -How to store eight days of ice, food, soft drinks, and a whole lot of booze.

            -Where do I sleep?

            -How do you steer this thing?

            -Should I wash my hands again before chipping ice for drinks? (yes)

            -How to filter river water into 20-liter cans, then heft them around to refill water containers on a bouncing raft, and in camp.

 

While learning the routine, you’re fetching drinks from three drag bags (juice, soda, booze), for passengers throughout the day, refilling the bags morning and night. Watching out for the safety of the passengers, ensuring their pfd’s are buckled. And answering questions. “Wayne!” More questions. “Wayne!” Endless questions. “Wayne!” I loved it.

And fortunately for me, my dear friend, Adam, was a boatman of infinite patience with my amateur swamping. Shaun, swamper on our other raft, checked my knots when I asked, and helped me figure out which end was up(stream). 

Swamping is exhausting, but here’s the thing. The boatmen have longer lists, way bigger responsibilities, do the cooking, and safely drive the boats through some of the gnarliest rapids anywhere. Even after having been on four previous trips, I was surprised to see, close-up, how hard the boatmen work. Then turn around and do it again, sometimes more than a dozen trips in a season.

CANYON THRILLS

As Adam lined up for our first really big rapid, I couldn’t convince anyone to sit up front. “I guess I have to set an example. Okay for me to go up front?” I asked Adam? He grinned.

There’s nothing like it, except maybe surfing, which I’ve never done. The 37-foot raft nose-dives down the back side of a modest wave, into a massive hole, then folds back on itself as it climbs the curl of a gigantic standing wave that crashes over the front of the raft, threatening to sweep you away in its power. You sit on the raft’s floor and hold on for dear life to straps and ropes, with both hands, as a good share of the Colorado River crashes on your head. Perhaps there’s a second wave waiting, then a series of smaller splashes, as you take stock, completely drenched in the triple-digit desert sunshine, your adrenaline high and laughter slowly subsiding.

Grand Canyon rapids are legendary, such as House Rock, Sockdolager (one-two punch), Granite, Hermit, Crystal, and Lava Falls Rapid with its infamous Ledge Hole, to be avoided at all costs. The boatmen make it look so easy, but my view from the back of the boat showed me first-hand the complexities of threading the right line through hundreds of rapids, avoiding rocks almost all the time. Flying by, sometimes you see, lurking just below the surface, boulders carved into jagged saw blades. Or, backed by dark, unforgiving whirlpools.

It’s not enough to know one way to navigate through each of these rapids. Water levels significantly change daily, due to changing water releases upstream from Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam’s power generating plant. Rainstorms, and resulting flash floods in side canyons, also affect water levels (and sometimes flush boulders into a rapid and change it). So, for every rapid in the 277-mile trip, a boatman has to know how to run each in low water, high water, and everything in between. And whether anything has changed since last time. It’s awesome!

Eventually, our passengers ventured to the best seats up front on the raft, and whooped it up. I shared with them advice I’d gotten on another trip: “If you feel like you’re underwater, just don’t let go.”

CANYON ALCHEMY

It was a magical start to our trip. Even Adam, with 130 trips down the Canyon, had never experienced it, though he knew it happened once every year. We were in the right place at the right time. So affected were we by our happenstance, that days later, sharing the memory with merely a mention, was enough to well up tears.

After the first night of group camping on the river, a hike up North Canyon is typical. It’s a good walk into one of Grand Canyon’s famous side canyons, mostly in morning shade, up some rocks and not-too-steep cliffs for about 50 minutes. The trail is bordered by hallucinogenic jimsonweed; canyon cliffs glow red in the early sunshine. At the end of the trail is a series of slick, rock water slides, dropping into a chest-deep pool. Because of the drought, however, no water was flowing down the rocks, and the pool at the base was muddy and unappealing. (I jumped in anyways.)

None of that mattered, since at that point we all were still mesmerized by what we’d just experienced. As we had approached the end of the narrowing canyon, we’d heard hints of music drifting down. Adam hushed our group, and we crept closer in silence. We heard a bit of chatter, as if an introduction was being made, then the music of strings. Ethereal melodies emanating from the depths of the Grand Canyon.

Still out of sight of the musicians, our group stopped, each of us sprawled on rocks or sand, as the notes of a live, string quartet filled the canyon with Beethoven and other composers unknown to me. The profound beauty of the moment was beyond description, and many of us wept openly in our great fortune.

(The musicians and their instruments were accompanying a special, annual raft trip, wherein they played at various Canyon locations for their passengers.)

CANYON CONNECTIONS

Sharing the music of North Canyon brought an emotional cohesion to our group of strangers. How could it have not?

Connections are made in the Grand Canyon. Connections to the Earth. Connections to history. Connections to other passengers. Connections to our true selves.

Something about the encompassing whole of the Grand Canyon rafting experience reveals people’s essence. Whether we want it to or not. Meeting that person in the Canyon can be life changing.

I discovered that our rafting group was a good one, not an asshole in the bunch, with all seeming to possess a basic goodness. In eight days of travel and camping together, I heard only two complaints: (1) The full moon was too bright to see the Milky Way, and (2) The beer drag bag was too small.

Our passengers included a group of badass women from a hiking club in Lake Havasu City. It was a place I’d lived years ago, so we made an easy connection. The women, most in their 50s and 60s, were single or had left husbands at home.

“That doesn’t worry you?” I asked one.

“He’s had three wives. He’s 71. He ain’t got time for another one.”

I remembered the feeling of empowerment that my wife had felt on an earlier raft trip, when a spectacular hike up a thin, slot canyon pushed her beyond her comfort zone. But she did it, and never forgot the lesson. And then there was something another boatman had told me while on another hike, which I thought had verged on overly dangerous: “It’s good for passengers to push themselves, to do something they never thought possible.”

 

That’s why I was a cheerleader for some of the women doing things they might not have done, otherwise. Hiking to unbelievably beautiful places, jumping off cliffs, taking chances. As reward for my chivalrous behavior, in one week I got more hugs from strange women than in my entire life.

CANYON HISTORY

In Redwall Cavern, an icon of any Grand Canyon rafting trip, I touched history, and it moved me. It was an artifact no more impressive than a one-inch X, whacked into the top of the boulder with a cold chisel.

We’d heard about the mark from another boatman, back at the raft company’s bunkhouse in Kanab. Adam knew just the place she was describing, and he found it. We put our fingers on the spot that Robert Brewster Stanton in 1890 set his tripod to take a photograph of where the railroad he wanted to build would blast a tunnel through the cliffs above Redwall Cavern. Stanton chiseled that X.

One evening after dinner, I told the story of Stanton’s failed scheme to our passengers – gathered with their folding chairs, like a classroom on the beach – of how we almost built a railroad right through the Grand Canyon, but for the fortuitous drowning of its visionary, Frank Mason Brown. We had earlier seen the dark whirlpools where Brown met his watery fate, and the bend in the river where his body last was seen floating away. (My ebook, Hubris, A Railroad Through the Grand Canyon, and the Death of Frank Mason Brown: A Parable for Our Time, can be downloaded, free, from iBooks and BarnesandNoble.com, or read online at: wayneaschmidt.blogspot.com/2017/02/hubris-railroad-through-grand-canyon.html.)

Another fatality of Brown’s venture was the drowning of crew member, Peter Hansbrough. We camped on the beach below a spot edging the cliffs where his skeleton (identified by his boots, still attached) was buried. Marked in black on the wall above his grave: “PMH 1889” Not that he cares now, but Hansbrough got a great view, looking over the Colorado River to Point Hansbrough (named by Stanton), a spectacular headland of sheer cliffs that forces the river in a great oxbow around its base.

From Stanton’s journal: “Jan.17, 1890. 7:30 am. After breakfast this morning we took the remains of P.M. Hansbrough and buried them in a mesquite grove under the marble cliff on the left side of Canon... I offered a short prayer, not for poor Peter but a petition that we might be spared his fate, but if called upon to meet the same death, that we might each be prepared to go. We covered his grave with marble slabs, and Gibson cut on the cliff beside it ‘PMH 1889.’ Standing over the grave is a marble wall 700 ft high.”

CANYON TRUTHS

In Blacktail Canyon, I pondered a geologic mystery. This side canyon doesn’t appear all that special, until you learn that it’s a spot where your hand can span one billion years of Earth history.

You press a hand against the rocks at eye level, where two dissimilar, horizontal layers meet. Your palm is touching ancient roots of a once-mighty mountain range, worn down over inconceivable eons, to a relatively flat landscape of archaic rock – Vishnu Schist and Zoroaster Granite. Starting about a half-billion years ago, this weathered landscape sank below sea level, and the ocean advanced across it from the (now) west. Over millions of years, first came beach sand being deposited, then as the ocean advanced landward and the seawater got deeper, muds swept from the continent off to the (now) east, and covered the sea floor. Finally, as the ocean became even deeper, limestone formed on the bottom of the sea from the remains of trillions of tiny shells. Finally, the whole mélange was elevated thousands of feet above sea level, as the Earth's continents jostled about.

That steady progression of ocean deposits in the Grand Canyon, due to seas submerging the edge of the continent over a 20-million-year span, is world famous. At the bottom is Tapeats Sandstone (shallow-water beach sand turned into sandstone), sitting "unconformably" atop the much older rocks. Then, on top of the sandstone, Bright Angel Shale (ocean-bottom mud turned into shale), then Muav Limestone above the shale.

Your palm rests on 1.7 billion-year-old igneous and metamorphic rock, while your fingers touch the half-billion-year-old sandstone. Everything in between – a quarter of Earth’s history – has been eroded and washed away. Volcanoes, mountain chains, plains, ocean deposits, and islands all are gone, transformed into new pieces of the Earth.

As for my geologic mystery, it had to do with lenses of broken rocks in the otherwise uniform sandstone. Sometimes they were right atop the unconformity. I tried to picture how they got there. Certainly, rivers flowing off the continent could have carried a hodge-podge of rocks and pebbles, just like you see today where fast-flowing rivers reach the ocean. The problem with that, however, is that none of the rocks in these ancient lenses were rounded, like you’d expect from river-tumbled cobbles. Instead, they were sharp and angular, like having just been broken from cliffs of granite.

In camp, we consulted a tattered Grand Canyon geology text I’d brought along. Reading aloud to Shaun and Trevin (who knew more geology than the rest of us put together), as they cooked supper, I learned that when the sea invaded the land, 525 million years ago, the landscape wasn’t entirely flat. Hills of the ancient granite hadn’t been completely eroded. Those hills became islands, and were battered by tides and storms. Broken rocks washed into the sea, and settled on the otherwise sandy bottom.

So that was it. Science had an answer to my mystery. Ancient islands of even more-ancient rock got battered by the rising seas and storms and sluffed off chunks of rocks that got buried in lenses in the sands of the rising ocean.

One of those rocks was a one-inch fragment of purple-shaded quartz that I plucked from the very earliest layers of the Tapeats Sandstone. It’s had an inconceivably-long history, most recently being exposed to the light of day by the sculpting open of Blacktail Canyon, at some time in the last six million years.

My little rock will, like the Grand Canyon itself, outlast us all. Six million years from now, that rock will still exist somewhere. What about a billion years from now? Will it simply be buried somewhere in dirt? Or will its resting place have been subsumed by earthquakes and shifting continental plates, to return it to its molten birthplace, miles deep in the Earth? A lot can happen – has happened – in a billion years.

Though we can’t know the future of the Grand Canyon, its past is laid out for anyone to read. Truth is revealed; the story of the staggering length of geologic time is told in the Canyon’s bare walls. Much of two billion years of Earth history is on full display – oceans have come and oceans have gone, the Canyon’s ancient landscape has ridden on shifting and colliding continents, a sequence of fossils records life’s early evolution.

Despite 150 years of scientific study of the Grand Canyon, however, its truths are not universally accepted. For example, a Sahara-like desert covered the Grand Canyon region 275 million years ago. Tracks from critters scurrying on the sere dunes have been frozen in the rock (Coconino Sandstone). “The tracks all move in the same direction, proving they were fleeing Noah’s flood,” is the conclusion of Young Earthers, those loony Biblical literalists who believe the earth is only 6,000 years old, that Noah’s flood created the Grand Canyon, and that all the so-called science about geologic time is a bunch of hooey.

As long as I’m on the subject of Noah, science now understands that birds are descended from dinosaurs. That’s not hard to fathom when you watch a great blue heron, flying down the river and squawking like a pterodactyl. There are more than 10,000 species of birds in the world. I understand that Noah took only baby dinosaurs on the ark, but what about all those different kinds of birds?

That a good portion of Americans believe such Bronze Age myths, explains a whole lot about why we’ve got Trump. Anyone who buys the Creationists’ story will believe anything. Remember Wayne’s Rule No. 1 (useful for explaining irrational human behavior and beliefs): “People are fucking morons.”

CANYON FRIENDS

Elves Chasm is a magical place, a side canyon aptly named. Across a pool of water and behind a waterfall, you enter an open cave dripping with water, moss, and maidenhair ferns. You half expect a hobbit to scurry away. Climbing over slippery boulders brings you up and out on a rock platform where the waterfall drops. You gather your nerve (the first time, that can take a while) and jump into the pool below – maybe a twelve-foot drop. Your feet barely touch bottom, and you pop up to the cheers of the audience, feeling as if you just accomplished something important.

Adam brought his mask and snorkel and went diving in the pool for bounty. He came up with a bracelet made of thin, black elastic cord, braided nicely. I put it on my wrist and told him, “This means we’re going steady.”

It’s the damnedest thing. Adam is 45. I’m 27 years older. Do the math. Our friendship is not normal. But it seems to work. Adam says the Canyon is the place he’s always felt most “himself.” Same for me. I think that’s enough.

CANYON PERFECTION

“The passengers can’t possibly know what a rare, perfect day we just had,” Adam said to me, as he worked on making dinner, on the beach. “They probably think it’s like this on every trip – nobody there when we hike up Deer Creek, drifting in the current eating our sack lunches, not too hot, finding no one else at Havasu Creek, getting this spot to camp, one of the best.”

I hadn’t thought about the day in those terms, but he was right. “You’re right,” I said. “How could they know?”

“You go tell them.”

So I did. And we all reminisced about the scary, cliff-side trail to reach the oasis up in the Deer Creek slot canyon. About parking our rafts right in the mouth of the travertine-coated Havasu Creek, walking upstream in the tropical-sea-colored water to play and look for fossils. The starting point was a narrow opening in the water between cliffs, the current too fast and deep for most to wade or swim, so Adam used a rope and float to haul each passenger through, one-by-one.

As I’d done so many times throughout the week, I marveled out loud: “Who does this?!”

By nightfall of the perfect day, everyone had gone to bed, and I was alone on the beach. The full moon was blocked by immense cliffs across the river, but it lit up the tops of other cliffs farther back and downstream. A brilliant shooting star scorched across Scorpio’s heart. The raft where I slept, for a change was tied in a slack back-water, instead of run up on the sand. It rocked and shifted and sighed all night like a lullaby.

Day 6 had been perfect, but my body was not. My legs were sunburned, my fingernails destroyed, my hands covered with nicks and abrasions. I’d lost some of the spring in my step, with knees sending tiny warning signals that there better be an end to this nonsense pretty damned soon.

CANYON SURVIVAL

It was our last stop, right after our rafts hit the flat water of Lake Mead. It’s where the brawling Colorado River dies in a flaccid reservoir. It’s where the rafts’ 26 passengers, after a hurried last round of hugs, transfer mid-river to a big jet boat, that swoops them across the river’s muddy shallows in forty minutes to their waiting bus at the boat landing, ready to carry them from Eden, back to the jarring anti-Eden of Las Vegas.

Our own trip on the now-vacated rafts, however, would take more than four hours. But first, the rafts’ two, immense side-tubes had to be unstrapped, deflated, rolled up, and hefted onto the deck. For that final feat of strength, Adam diplomatically motioned Shaun to help him, allowing me to preserve what little was left of my back.

Ready to push off, Adam put the outboard in reverse. I dug my heels in the sand, my whole body pushing into the beached behemoth’s bow. After some side-to-side revving of the engine, we slid riverward. At that point, it dawned on me that my usual straps on the side tubes for hopping onto the chest-high raft, now were gone. There I hung off the bow, dragged along, feet trailing in the water, without enough strength left to pull myself up with the raft’s ropes. When Adam realized my plight, he rushed forward, grabbed me under my armpits, and hoisted my sorry carcass onto the deck.

“You guys used me up,” I explained, meekly. I had survived swamping the Grand Canyon, but barely. I had loved every minute, but once was enough.

CANYON EPILOG

After winching the rafts up on trailers and tying them down, we settled in for the seven-hour ride back to Grand Canyon Expedition’s warehouse in Kanab. Adam sat up front in the big pickup with the driver; me in back. We crossed miles of bumpy, dusty road, the landscape accented by Joshua trees, seemingly praying for rain.

I took my iPhone out of airplane mode and waited for a signal. We had been completely cut off for eight days. I checked the news only enough to determine that Trump hadn't blown anything up, then opened email.

A strange one from our insurance agent back in Oregon caught my attention. Subject: “ID CARD FOR MERCEDES.” It read: “We are processing the change to take off the Altima and add the Mercedes. Here is a temporary ID Card for you. Have fun in your new car! Chris”

Adam heard my laughing and turned. I fairly spouted: “My wife just bought a fucking Mercedes! Eva traded her Nissan for a fucking Mercedes while I was gone!”

Replies: “No shit.” “Cool.”

“That makes me very happy,” I concluded.

As if I needed more reason to be happy. Though a hard, half-day job of unloading the rafts awaited in Kanab, I’d done it. Made it through my swamper adventure with Adam, in one piece. A worn-out piece, to be sure, but at least intact. And I did it a week before my 72^nd birthday.

I’d just spent eight days with a great friend in our favorite place on earth, sharing my passion with a bunch of strangers who turned out to be really good people. My fifth rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, with a sixth already chartered for next year (Adam as boatman, me as passenger). And on top of all that, I was going home to my amazing wife and a new fucking Mercedes. I’ve never even ridden in a Mercedes before.

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Prior Blog: Oldest Grand Canyon Swamper?