This
trip though, we have a bit more time and the river is helping us
out. The wind is pretty forgiving, too. We have time and,
more importantly, energy for some side hikes. Most canyons have
side canyons. Most side canyons form along fault lines. The
faults are mostly from the earth bending. Some are from the earth
breaking into chunks. The west is great for seeing geological
processes.
Rivers
in the west were once like the Mississippi. Kind of big, slow and
lazy. They wandered around back and forth. Then the land
underneath them started to lift up. The rivers kept their courses
by digging into the ground and carrying off more soil. The land
lifted more and more and soon the rivers were entrenched. The San
Juan river runs through a section called the Goosenecks, which are
entrenched meanders. Desolation Canyon has these too. The
meanders can loop so that you have a little peninsula of land surrounded
by the river. In some cases, the river can run for several miles
just to get back to within a half of a mile of where you started.
Sometimes these thin strips of land are breached and the river takes the
new, shorter rout, leaving the original long meander high and dry.
In the picture above right, Tom and I are walking on the dry floor of
the riverbed in on such meander.
One
nice thing about being on the river (and hiking has this quality too) is
that you get to some very basic needs. Am I thirsty? Am I
hungry? Am I tired? There is no worry about the phone bill
or the PTA meeting or whether or not the kids will have enough money for
college. Eating takes up a lot of your time as you are burning
through lots and lots of calories. If you like to eat a lot, this
is a place to do it without putting on weight! We're pretty basic
really, granola, cereal or oatmeal for breakfast, peanut butter and
jelly , tuna salad, hummus, or cheese sandwich for lunch, and spaghetti,
beans and rice, or something similar for dinner. Plus there are
lots of snacks like cookies, gorp (good old raisins and peanuts, aka
trail mix), chips, and leftovers.
Being
on the river, you can get back to nature. And when I say nature, I
mean you can get dirty. And if you're like me, stinky too! I
like to be dirty. I was telling people before I left work how much
I was looking forward to having dirt under my finger nails. I sit
on the ground for meals, lay on the ground when I'm tired, I sleep in a
sleeping bag that usually has lots of sand in it. Sand is
everywhere. You get sand in your ears and you wake up with sand at
the edges of your eyes. I love it!!!! But, you don't have to
be a pigpen like me. Some people bring soap and wash daily in the
river. Some people even bring showers, bags of water that get warm
in the desert sun. You can even bring a shower stall. The
key to soap in a desert environment, in fact to much of you wastes (pee
and dishwater, too) is to use the river as a way to dilute the
pollution. If you are on a river trip, you get used to peeing in
the river. In fact, crazy as this may seem, I fell like I'm not
really on a trip until I pee in the river. With dishwater, you
need to straining out the leftover chucks of food. Basically, you
are trying to keep the river corridor in as natural a state as possible.
