Grand Canyon - July 1999 - Page 1

So, after the first Deso/Gray trip, Angie decided to head home and Tom and I went down to the San Juan.  When Angie got home, there was a message on the phone, wondering if we would like to do a commercial Grand Canyon Trip.  Angie calls me on the cell phone, but I don't get her message until after the San Juan trip owing to the vagaries of cell phone communication in the middle of nowhere.  She has a choice to make on whether to go or not.  A $2,000 per person choice.  Fortunately, at the beginning of the summer, we had talked and I told her that my summer would be complete if I could get a Grand Canyon trip.  So, she risks it and pays for two places.  We are going.

When Tom and I get back from the San Juan, Angie and I prepare to drive to the Grand Canyon.  Really, we drive to Flagstaff where the rafting company is headquartered and where they hold their orientation meetings.  It's about 15 hours on the road.  The first day, we drive to some state park outside of Grants, N.M.  It's a reservoir.  Ugh.  But it's a place to sleep.

The next day we drive through the Painted Desert/Petrified Forest National Monument.

We get to Flagstaff, find the hotel, have the orientation, get our little black rubber bags for cramming our gear into, go back upstairs and then go get some Indian food.  Flagstaff is pretty cool, but don't rush to go there, the more of us that go there... well, it'll just get crapped up.

The next morning, we board the bus to Lee's Ferry.  Lee was kind of a character.  He was a Mormon sent to create a ferry across the Colorado.  He does but ends up getting in trouble with the law for his part in the massacre of some non-Mormon settlers.  Anyway, the ferry's named after him.  Just upriver from Lee's Ferry is the Glen Canyon dam.  Most rafters will hiss if you mention it.  Glen Canyon Dam is the plug on the Colorado River that makes Lake Powell.  Or Lake Foul as I've heard it called.  I'd like to see the lake renamed after Floyd Dominy who was the chief of the Bureau of Reclamation or BuRec as some people refer to it when they put the Glen Canyon Dam in.  Lake Dominy.  Then rafters will still hiss but John W. Powell won't be rolling over in his grave.

The water that becomes the Colorado through the Grand Canyon is the water at the bottom of the reservoir behind Glen Canyon.  That means, it's the coldest water in the reservoir and so the river is cold.  On top of that, the first five days of the trip, it rained every single day.  Now, that may seem like a bad trip and I'll admit that I was concerned about it, but it was actually quite rare and therefore quite special.  What's pretty neat about it is that the Paria, several other side canyon streams and the Little Colorado were all running pretty strongly and that means they were dumping silt into the river.  So, for those of us lucky enough to be there, it had the appearance of the pre-dam river.  The river ran red.  It kind of looked like hot chocolate.  It was awesome.  Anyway, the rain, the cold river and the lack of sun explain why David looks so cold here!