San Juan - May 1999 - Page 2

.So, we made very good time even though the wind was blowing upstream the first day.  We camped in the same spot as we had on the previous trip.  We could tell that it had had a lot of visitors since we had last been there.  Some of the vegetation was trampled and new trails up from the beach had emerged.  Anyone who thinks that rafting, hiking, biking, etc. doesn't have an impact on the river corridor is fooling themselves.  We do impact these places.  We need to be as careful as we can be so that the next boating party down the river has the illusion that they are discovering the river for the first time.  

Well, where we stayed the first night became our day long resting place as it rained the whole next day.  We were making such good time though that we could spend a whole day staying out of the rain.  Tom and I read most of the day and tried to stay warm.  It's easier to stay warm when you move around.  In the picture to the right, you can see Tom making pancakes.  This is a new luxury item for this year's rafting season.  Usually, we only eat oatmeal.

On the third day, the sun came out and we were on the river again.  We headed down toward Mexican Hat and the Raplee Anticline.  A beautiful thing about the west is that the erosional and geological processes are not obscured by vegetation.  The Raplee Anticline is really a big bulge in the earth.  What you see in the picture below is the erosion of one side of the bulge.  It's really very spectacular and gives you a real sense of the earth bending.  You know that the bend means some of those layers you see off in the distance are below you right now, which means that all the earth in between you and those layers has already eroded off the anticline in front of you.  You begin to get a sense that yes, hundreds and even thousands of feet of rock were once here piled almost a mile deep and that it has all eroded away for miles and miles around you.  You begin to sense that humans haven't been around very long in the timeline of the earth.  Even if you could erode away a whole inch of ground each year, it would take 630,000 years to erode a mile.  And what about the time it took to lay down the sediment in the first place?  You being to understand the vast scales of time, but it still boggles your mind.

In the picture to the right, Tom is rowing down river with the Raplee Anticline in the background.  Notice the ever ready groover (the white box) in the foreground.  That's the bathroom!  Cool, huh?