Into the Great Unknown: Rafting the Colorado River

We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown...We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth...We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.

John Wesley Powell, on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, August 13, 1869

The Great Unknown. In 1869, all of the contiguous United States had been mapped and explored, except for one huge area centered around what is now Utah, western Colorado and northern Arizona. All that was really known was that a few major desert rivers entered the region, especially the Green River, and the Grand, and that there was a place called the Grand Canyon and Grand Wash Cliffs where the river emerged. A few Native Americans lived within the region, of course, but they often didn't count in history, and their knowledge of the landscape was more local than regional. John Wesley Powell and his team of explorers made an epic journey down the river in 1869 and put the Colorado River and its canyons on the map. It was a seminal event in American geological research as well, serving as a springboard for a new understanding of geological processes and history. It was one of the last great geographical adventures in the lower 48.

When I was a young man, I was enthralled by the writings of Edward Abbey and others who knew and loved this mostly desert landscape. I was especially influenced by a wonderful book called On the Loose by Terry and Renny Russell, who in beautiful script distilled the essence of the land they loved into short paragraphs punctuated by what they thought were substandard photographs (they were wrong). I wanted, more than almost anything else, to explore the Colorado Plateau.

I walked the Paria River as a Boy Scout in 1974, and we emerged after a week at Lees Ferry, where rafting parties begin their Grand Canyon adventures. Two years later, as a community college student seeking a career direction, I participated in a week-long geology field trip into the Grand Canyon. We hiked down the New Hance Trail, spent a few days at Hance Rapids, and then climbed out along the Grandview Trail. The experience turned me into a geologist, and determined the eventual trajectory of my life and career.

Over the years I hiked down the main tourist corridors to Phantom Ranch a few times, and last year I drove down the Diamond Creek Road to the Colorado River, the main take-out point for river rafting parties. By age 56, despite dozens of visits to Grand Canyon National Park, I had witnessed only four points along the Colorado River: the take-in, a rapid, Phantom Ranch, and the take-out. And I was quickly reaching the point in life where a grand adventure like a rugged rafting trip might become physically impossible (I may have many years left of good health, of course, but one can never know).

And then, metaphorical lightning struck. On a whim (and at the suggestion of a rafting acquaintance) my brother Mark had applied for a highly coveted permit to conduct a private raft trip on the Colorado River. Many people wait for years to get one, so it was a great surprise when he got a letter saying he was the permit holder for a 16 day trip with 16 travelers. The problem was that he knew little about river rafting, so his friend set out to gather a team of rafters who could accommodate my brother's family and organize the complicated logistics. When all was said and done, there was one space left on the rafts. And my dear brother offered it me. I said yes.

So three weeks ago I found myself standing on the riverbank at Lee's Ferry, watching the rafters preparing their rigs, and anxiously wondering what lay ahead. Most of the oarsmen had been down the river many times, but I was facing my very own Great Unknown. As I've mentioned before, I am no adrenaline junkie, so I wasn't there for a joyride down the famous and infamous rapids (though I learned to love...um...most of them). I was there to learn about the river and landscape it flowed through, and even though it has become a cliche of sorts, I was there to discover something about myself. I was stepping way outside of my comfort zone, something I haven't done much over the last few decades.

There I was, standing on the muddy bank of the Colorado River, ready to embark on the grand journey. It was a mess of feelings: apprehension, trepidation, anxiety, but most of all, excitement and anticipation. Just imagine what it is like to be just minutes away from starting a journey you've waited 40 years to undertake!

I now have two stories/blog series in process, the Great Unknown, and America's Never Never. They belong together, the later being the exploration of the land eroded by the Colorado River, and the former the journey on the river itself. I will jump back and forth between the two. Some blogging may be spotty, as school is starting up very soon, but I'm looking forward to sharing the story!

Is it the Journey or the Destination? Part 2: I now know how my students feel...

I've seen the beginning...

I'm no adrenaline junkie. When I've been at Disneyland, Splash Mountain and the Pirates of the Caribbean is about my limit. I was dragged kicking and screaming into Space Mountain, and came out also screaming, with rubbery legs. Roller coasters unhinge me. So what the hell am I doing, and why?
 
A few weeks ago I wrote about whether it is the journey or the destination that is important. And it is indeed the journey that is important. I've been to the starting point...

And I've been to the ending point...twice (below). But in-between those two points are 220 miles of wild river. I'm about to go down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon for the first time in my life, spending 16 days to get from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek. It's both a life-long dream, and just a bit mysterious and scary. The rapids are legendary. There are rumors of stunning beauty and spiritual discovery. There are groovers (don't ask). And I've come to realize that I am (re)learning just what it is like to be one of my students going on a long field studies trip for the first time, being shaken out of the every-day grind and opening up to the possibility of new and incredible experiences.

I am a rank amateur at rafting, so I've been trying to learn everything I can about trips down the Grand Canyon. I have the questions. Am I in good enough shape? Am I going to embarrass myself on the first rapid? What's it like to get dumped into the river? One thing I do know, though. I'm going to live every moment on the river. The sights, the smells, the sounds. So many of my travels have been wrapped up in organizing the logistics, dealing with student problems, keeping schedules and appointments, and making sure that everything goes somehow smoothly for everyone. On Sunday, I become a student once again, both in learning, and in responsibility. I won't be the one leading, I'll be the follower (and the chore-doer; no more of that managerial supervising crap!).

Like I said, I'm not an adrenaline junkie. I'm not too sure how I feel about running the legendary rapids like Crystal, Hance or Lava Falls. But it's the only way to see the heart of the Grand Canyon. I've been all over the rims, and I've been down (and up) four different trails to the river. But I've never been able to explore the river itself, or any of the side canyons that make such river trips so memorable. I'm looking forward to exploring as much as I can.

I am, I admit, an internet junkie, and tech addict. I'm wondering how I will survive 16 days out of contact with the cyber-world. Without my smartphone. Without my laptop. Then again, I hear there is this stuff called paper, and things called pencils and chalk. I'm told I can preserve memories and experiences on beaten wood pulp, so I may give that a try. When I return, I'll see about transferring the paper data to a digital format, and let you know how things turned out.

I won't be totally bereft of technology. I've got two nearly worn-out digital cameras that I'll be taking along. I figure at least one might survive the journey.

It's all the in-between I don't know so much about...

But maybe most of all, I'm looking forward to the time I'm going to have with my brother, my sister-in-law, and my two nephews. Their hard effort navigating the whole permit and organizational maze made this adventure possible, and they invited me along to share in it. I don't know if I can ever repay the kindness. It's going to be a grand adventure!

I might get a few more posts up before I leave, but then Geotripper goes dark for three weeks.

Movie Geo-Analysis: The Incredible Western Journey of Bret Maverick

If you are a teacher, you know that one of the chores of an otherwise fulfilling career is the massive pile of grading which must be done. I swear sometimes I am narcoleptic or ADD, because if I sit in a quiet room with a stack of papers needing to be reviewed, I will be asleep in minutes. I have to have a distraction. As such, there are about three dozen movies on my favorites list that I can watch over and over while grading. Since I know the plot, I don't have to devote my entire attention to the movie, and so the grading eventually gets done.

Unless a movie like Maverick comes on, the 1994 version with a pre-completely crazy Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and James Garner. Don't get me wrong. I love the movie. But it has the most interesting geographic itinerary of almost any movie I've ever seen.

Now, most of you know that movies like the Indiana Jones series, the James Bond movies, and the Bourne trilogy are well-grounded in their geography. Spielberg puts a little red line on a map along with flying airplanes to show where his characters are. The others label the latest exotic locale on the screen. Since the Maverick story was not so rooted in the place, they didn't do anything like that, but by carefully watching the background of the movie scenes, I have been able to discern that Bret Maverick and his co-stars completed one of the most epic of western US journeys in history. I've tried to map the approximate path they followed on the GoogleEarth image above. What they did was almost superhuman, given the transportation technology of their time!

If you are not a Maverick fan, you are forgiven for not reading any further. If you are, enjoy. If you haven't seen the movie, check it out, but spoilers lie ahead.

The movie opens with a hanging scene, but it is out of chronological order, and so will be dealt with later. The main action for the first 40 minutes of the movie take place in the desert town of Crystal River, but the cliffs (Mesozoic sedimentary rocks) and the presence of a huge lake instead of a river suggests the Glen Canyon region. The lake wasn't there in the 1800's, but we could suggest that the town could have been a stand-in for the village of Hite, Utah, which was immersed in the waters of Lake Powell when the dam was built in the early 1960's. The town was established in the early 1800's as one of the few river ferry crossings on the Colorado River. Lees Ferry, a bit farther downstream, is another possibility. Indeed, the next scenes could bear this out.

The runaway stagecoach is one of the more memorable set pieces of the entire movie. Maverick does an Indiana Jones-style ride underneath the stage coach, and then a John Wayne-esque jump onto the horse team to stop the stage at the brink of a vertical cliff over a raging river. Welcome to the Vermilion Cliffs (in the background), and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado! They are at the upper end near the aforementioned Lees Ferry, where river rafting trips start down the river. As steep and deep as the canyon seems in the photo, this is the shallow part of Grand Canyon. Maverick's life was saved by the geology; if the canyon rim was composed of anything besides Kaibab Limestone, he would have plummeted down the cliff and the movie ended prematurely. The limestone weathers in the arid climate into a spiky surface that provides good handholds. Sandstone or shale would have provided no traction at all.

What follows must be one of the greatest untold stories in the annals of the American west: these three people, their stage driver dead, supplies lost, made a 400 mile journey through the hottest, driest landscape on the North American continent. It's not clear their precise pathway, but the shortest route would have taken them across the most desolate part of the Basin and Range Province, right through Death Valley, and on to the north end of the Owens Valley. What hardships they must have endured! The privation, the misery, the thirst, the starvation! And yet they arrived at their next movie scene with a complete (alive) team of horses, and hardly a hair out of place on their heads.

It was here that they met a wagon train of missionary settlers who had been robbed. The women were, like the Donners a few decades earlier, apparently stranded on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. The Sierras are an imposing barrier to east-west travel; even today there are only a few paved roads crossing the crest, and in the movie they are next to the most rugged stretch of high peaks, the Palisades Crest, at over 14,000 feet high. They're in big trouble! But our heroes set off on a journey to wreak God's vengeance upon the heathen raiders. They ride 60 miles south with no supplies, tracking the brigands, finally cornering them near Whitney Portal, at the base of the highest peak in the lower 48 states (Mt. Whitney is the high towering peak in the background). After a shootout where all the bad guys get shot in the hand, they march the prisoners 60 miles back north to the wagon train.

Then...the Indians "attack". In Bishop. In full feather headdress and war paint and all that. Maverick actually knows them, and they are dressed up for something else, so he goes with them on an epic journey across the High Sierra (the lowest pass is about 10,000 feet) to Yosemite Valley, a distance of around 100 miles at a minimum over rugged terrain. The native people of the Sierra and western Basin and Range are the Miwok and the Paiutes, neither of which used feather headdresses, and they lived in bark structures or wikiups, not tepees like the Great Plains tribes. It turns out the Indians are putting on a show for a visiting Russian dignitary traveling with a retinue and fancy wagon (wonder how they got it into Yosemite Valley in the 1880's?). The beautiful granite monolith of Half Dome can be seen in the backdrop, especially the scene where Maverick, dressed as a sick Indian, supposedly gets shot. That scene was shot from the vicinity of Washburn Point, a less crowded destination than nearby Glacier Point. Maverick gets the money his friend owes him and sets out again.

At this point, the geography gets a bit muddled. Maverick is supposedly headed north to the big poker game, but he seems lost, because he is 150 miles south, back at Whitney Portal, when he is ambushed by the bad guys. They take him to the middle of a dry lake bed which I assume is in the Mojave Desert, based on the relatively gentle terrain surrounding the lake in the distance: maybe Silver Lake, or Searles, or Bristol? In any case, what is an old oak tree doing in the middle of a dry lake in the desert? Did the bad guys haul it out there? Oh well, in any case they took him a minimum of tens, maybe a hundred miles to find the right tree to hang him from. Inefficient bad guys if you ask me.

And now the other epic western journey for the ages! Four groups and individuals (the bad guys, Coop and Annabelle, Maverick, and the Russian) all make the trek from the eastern Sierra Nevada and Mojave Desert some 700 miles north across rugged and inhospitable terrain through Oregon to the Columbia River near Portland. The Paddlewheel Steamer is floating around Beacon Rock, an eroded volcanic vent that stands 850 feet above the river. For all the paddlewheeling, the boat never seems to move more than a mile or two from Beacon Rock. Was it treading water. Who knows?

So there you have it, a real tour-de-force of movie sets across the American West. If you ever decide to follow the path I have outlined, take lots of food and water in your car! It would be a fantastic trip, truth be told, although I would start through the desert in the spring, before it gets too hot.

I would love to hear of any other movie out there that has a more complex geographic itinerary. In the meantime, I have grading I have been avoiding...