Cataract Canyon, via Wikimedia |
They thought it was probably going to start dropping soon. The river was already higher than any flood since the gauges went in back in the 20’s, so the safe bet for forecasters was to say it had just about peaked. “Highest water ever recorded,” would be a fair statement. How much water that was in actual volume would be hard to say. It was off the graph.
Floods like this are suppose to be
a spike in the pattern. Once the level started down it was expected to fall off
precipitately, which would be good. The Green River wasn’t anything I
recognized at this level. The camps were gone, the side hikes under water. The river was painfully cold and going so fast
it was hard to get all the boats landed in one place. I’d had a sketchy time of
it just pulling in to the notch in the tamarisk trees where my boat was tied up
and the hissing current still had hold of it, bending it downstream against the
branches, everything trembling and creaking. I was tied up to a sprinkler head,
and by that I mean my boat was tied up there, as I sometimes don’t make a
distinction. There was no other solid feature on the manicured lawn along the river
bank adjacent our hotel. It was only a few steps to our rooms at the “River
Terrace,” Green River , Utah ’s (the town) most luxurious accommodations.
The River Terrace had room decors
in three colors, Too Red, Too Green and Too Gold with fuzzy wall paper, guilded
fixtures and the feel of a fin de siecle
brothel. The good thing was you could make it cool and dark as a cave inside,
even while the sun was turning the parking lot into a shimmering pool of asphalt.
Most of the floor space was taken up by coolers full of food for the second
half of the trip. A ragtag group of boatmen (gender neutral) were draped over
everything, pounding 3.2 beer with little effect and waiting for someone to
decide what the hell to do.
We’d already had these passengers
for six days through Desolation
Canyon . It was a charter
trip and they were all related. There were a couple of young kids maybe nine
and twelve, their parents and their grandmother, somebody’s sister and her whole
family. One lady had only been out of the hospital for three weeks after major
cancer surgery. Not your ideal adventure team. There must have nineteen or twenty of
them in five boats, expecting a mellow family trip. Not so. It was running fifty-five thousand cubic feet per second, twice the highest level I’d ever seen and
screamingly fast. We only needed to spend an hour on the water to make a day’s
miles but it was an anxious hour. The rapids were fine, homogenized into lengthy
sets of huge standing waves, but the eddies, boils and whirlpools tossed the
dories around like little pieces of bark.
And the drift was truly frightening.
And the drift was truly frightening.
You’d be watching a 200 year old
cottonwood tree float by, sixty feet long, root ball as big a Lincoln, in full
leaf with birds nests full of twittering squab and the sucker would just
disappear. Gone. You’re setting there in your gaily painted eggshell thinking, “Where’s
it coming up, for God’s sake?” Then, ninety seconds and a hundred feet from where
it went down, the whole crown would suddenly explode out of the water like the
skeleton of Moby Dick, execute an agonized pirouette, crash down into the river
and vanish. Lordy. There were railroad
ties, telephone poles, the entirety of a single-lane wooden bridge, a 5000-gallon cylindrical steel tank that chased us for miles, and seven hundred dead
cattle, bloated like bagpipes, all on their way to Lake Powell
with everything the river could wrench loose. There was some discussion as to
whether it would be wise to continue.
The second half of this trip
included Labyrinth and Stillwater
Canyons on the Green River and Cataract Canyon
below the confluence with the Colorado .
It’s is kind of an odd trip in that there are 120 miles of serene flat water winding through spectacular
scenery, then all hell breaks loose for a few miles, after which you find
yourself in the silted wasteland of the upper Powell Reservoir. You can do most
if it in an open canoe, but better not take the Grumman through the “Graveyard
of the Colorado.” Cataract is a different story.
I’m not sure how the decision was
made or who made it. The chain of command was a bit murky, but it might have
been me. It was probably me. We already had a two-boat trip that left a couple
days ahead of us on predictions of dropping water. The leader of that trip was one
Bego Gerhart, our best Cataract hand and no fool. Other trips were proceeding
as usual. Cataract Canyon was five days downstream, and the thinking was, it
would be manageable by then. The passengers were clueless and game. We all
were. We loaded up and left.
It was easy to make the miles. There’s
not much in the way of gradient for the first couple days, but that didn’t
matter. We were hauling ass. The problem was stopping. There was four feet of fast
water over the root crowns of the tamarisk and the banks were a continuous
thicket of palsied branches, talus and cliff. The river was backed up for a
mile into Barrier Canyon, but we rowed to the end of it anyway looking for a camp.
It finally cliffed out in the brush and most of us slept on the boats. The mosquitoes
were the only happy ones. We camped the next day on a thirty degree pitch, scattered
in the boulders like bighorn sheep. We camped where no man had camped before. Everyplace
we could actually get the whole trip stopped at once, we pondered the water
level like an oracle, the waterline brimming with portent. It didn’t look so good.
It was still coming up.
We burned five days getting to the
confluence but the water was gaining on us the whole way. It was a colorful
convergence. Colorado River really is
red. The Green is really green. It takes
them half a mile to mix. It was like pulling on to an on-ramp with the Pacific
Ocean in the next lane. Some of your boatmen types will pride themselves on
their finesse with the river, their ability to read water so well as to be able
to make the river do most of the work for them. OK, maybe I even am one of
those people, but it was not happening here. Every stroke I took was as hard as
I could pull and it often didn’t seem to make any difference at all. Suddenly you’d
find yourself on some huge hurtling tectonic plate of water that appeared under
the boat and have about as much control over where you were going as if you
were rowing say, Greenland. And this was the flatwater, of which there are
three miles between the Confluence and Spanish Bottom, a short distance above
the first rapid in Cataract.
Spanish Bottom, via Wikimedia |
Do not go below Spanish Bottom. We are evacuating our trip. I flipped somewhere in the North Seas. Paul tipped over somewhere below there and had people in the water right to the top of Big Drop One. Do not go below Spanish Bottom.Bego had finally tipped a boat over, that was about the only bright spot. He’d been doing this for eighteen years and was starting to get a big head about it.
I’m still digesting the import of
the note when we hear an outboard engine fire up. There were a lot of people standing around,
and the noise got everyone’s attention. It
was a Moki Mac motor trip whose departure marked the first to descend Cataract
in three days. “Pete said he was going to
go today,” one of the Rangers said while everyone was hustling to the bank to
watch them leave. Their people were all wearing
two life jackets.
[That's it for now, stay tuned for the next installment!]
[That's it for now, stay tuned for the next installment!]
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