BY CYD AND STEVE MARTIN
We are packed into the cab of a truck big enough to move a three-bedroom house, loaded with gear for a 16-day river trip though the Grand Canyon. On the 45th anniversary of our first trip on the Colorado River, we have come full circle and are once again running baggage boats, this time for OARS Grand Canyon Dories. We’re excited and apprehensive at the same time. The guides we’ll follow, and whose gear we are carrying, are some of the best — Río, Howdy, John, and Bram have done this hundreds of times. Together with fellow baggage boaters Zach and Mallory, we are the domestiques for this journey.
CYD MARTIN
2019 is a benchmark year for the Grand Canyon as it commemorates its 100th anniversary as a national park. The Grand Canyon is perhaps the most recognizable landscape on Earth, shaped by time and water-sculpted rock. Traveling through the canyon on the Colorado River has become one of the world’s premiere wilderness river journeys. It provides an experience and evokes a sense of awe that few places rival. But this vast landscape has been impacted by a variety of human actions that threaten its integrity and wildness. It will need dedicated citizen action and passion to preserve it for the next 100 years.
Our truck rolls into Lees Ferry and we swing into action, unloading a mountain of gear, inflating and rigging our boats for the journey downstream. We work all afternoon, our boat the usual Lees Ferry jumble of bags, buckets, boxes, coolers, jugs, helmets, and other awkward, heavy gear.
We row upstream at dark, tying off to a large motor rig so we’ll be in the deep water overnight as the water level drops. (Water is released from Glen Canyon Dam in response to electricity demand from Phoenix so the water level fluctuates daily. When the water rises or drops at any given point on the river below depends on its distance below the dam. At Lees Ferry, 15 miles from the dam, the water drops during the night and can leave unwary boats high and dry by morning.)
With three rafts and two dories snugged up to the bigger motor rig, we drink beer and eat our dinners, watching the crescent moon slide down in the west. It disappears behind the Vermilion Cliffs, yielding the sky to the glowing band of the Milky Way.
Fifteen miles upstream from Lees Ferry is the 700-foot-high Glen Canyon Dam. Once completed in 1966, the Colorado River changed dramatically. Every aspect of the living force that created the Grand Canyon was altered. Now, 50 years after the dam inflicted its destruction, most river runners have accepted it as the norm.
In 1992, in an attempt to reduce the effects of the dam, the Grand Canyon Protection Act was signed into law. The act directs the secretary of the interior to take decisive action in order to protect and restore the Grand Canyon. But the resulting science program, which has spent over $150 million dollars, has had little effect. Congress should amend the act to require the secretary to name the National Park Service as the lead in this process instead of the Bureau of Reclamation, and redirect the current science program to allow funding to help with restoration.
We awake to a chilly morning at Lees Ferry. The cliffs are already catching the sun and stand deep orange and pink against a perfect blue sky. The ducks, who talked loudly amongst themselves all night, are finally quiet and the Paria Riffle rumbles downstream, reminding us that the river won’t stay glassy and calm for long.
Our passengers arrive and dubiously eye our baggage boats, mounded with gear, sitting next to the small, sleek dories. We assure them that, with luck, they will float and provide safe transport for the camping gear and food. The guides review basic river protocols and safety, we help our guests adjust their life jackets, and then we load up and push off. On the river, we slide down the emerald-green current and take a deep breath, reveling in being back on the water, headed down into the canyon.
Our river careers included two seasons of commercial river running in the early 1970s and then six years as park rangers at Grand Canyon National Park, helping develop and manage the river program. After 45 years of doing other things, we feel especially lucky to have returned to the canyon, rowing the same currents that we encountered when we met while working on the river in 1973. Much of the canyon, river, and rhythm has stayed the same: the geometry of cliffs, reflections of orange walls wavering in the currents, the sound of the oars pulling and lifting in the water, the liquid descent of the canyon wren’s song.
Just before lunch the first tendrils of an upstream breeze stir. We eat lunch on river right, near the top of the Hermit Formation, behind a thicket of tamarisk and tall grasses that completely blocks the wind. Back on the water after lunch, gusts whip upstream to meet us, ruffling the water in silvery sheets, racing past and disappearing upstream.
The wind is a formidable element down here. A whole range of superstition has grown up around it in the rowing community. Otherwise rational people refuse to say its name, lest they call it down on them, some referring to it obliquely as “Mr. W.,” or some other nickname. And, if there is no wind or only a downstream wind, we just don’t mention it. It’s akin to a hockey goalie getting close to a shutout — the team and fans are silent, for fear of jinxing it.
Rowing any boat against the wind is difficult, but a high-profile, heavily loaded baggage boat is especially so. We strain at the oars, unable to develop any momentum unless we are in strong current. It feels like rowing through peanut butter. Sometimes it blows us upstream in spite of all of our efforts. We just hold onto the oars, keeping them in the water, until the worst of the gust passes.
We pull in to our first camp just above House Rock Rapid, and immediately the beach looks like a combination construction site and military landing zone. Quickly though, the guides organize camp and get dinner started. The golden evening light settles on the cliffs and sounds of moving water and birds filter into our awareness; we are the lucky ones.
After camping at Island Camp, just below Silver Grotto, we muse about how things have changed for the better over the last 45 years. Beaches that were gray with ash from cooking fires now gleam pristine and pale against the shadowed cliffs. Trees and shrubs no longer hide caches of toilet paper and waste, and the sandy dunes around the camps smell sweetly of riparian life instead of reeking of urine. In the 1970s the guides worked with the National Park Service to help write the rules to clean up the beaches, to construct the first attraction-site trails, and stabilize archaeological sites.
The river has become a citizen-managed system, where the conduct of guides, private boaters, and passengers has resulted in excellent care of the river corridor. It is an interesting transformation.
In 1975, in an effort to address degradation along the river, the National Park Service started a guides’ training trip and forum. We worked with the start of the program and brought scientists and conservationists, including David Brower, speak to the group. Now, in 2019, the guides themselves run the training program. As we initiated new rules (and nobody likes rules) it was the guides who advocated for the changes. It was cooperative work based on a common passion. Today the boating community has assumed the responsibility and pride for the care of the canyon. It is so satisfying for us, after so many intervening years, to return and find the canyon cleaner than it was — more pristine and wild, in spite of increased visitation.
CYD MARTIN
We push off from camp, float down to Fence Fault, and climb up the broken, sharp limestone ledges to the top of the Redwall, a route made possible by the massive faulting in this area of the canyon. We hike in the still cool morning air back upstream along slopes littered with Supai boulders, prickly pear and hedgehog cacti, and clumps of fine yucca, to Silver Grotto Canyon. It is a lovely basin of polished limestone scooped out by seasons of floods and sculpted into U-shaped declivities hiding pools of green water and multitudes of pollywogs and jewel-like red-spotted toads.
Sitting on the side-canyon floor, we admire the geologic sequence stacked up across the river. Pale pink-brown Kaibab, Toroweap, and Coconino, underscored by the deeper red Hermit shale and Supai below.
The hike back is hot. The shade is gone and the day’s heat is building. Returning to the boats, we jump in the river to lower our body temperatures and, with the chill, revel in the satisfaction of doing a hike that is new to us. It’s good to get off of the river sometimes and walk to measure the canyon and your place in it.
After lunch, clouds form above the rim. They are innocuous at first but gradually thicken. With the clouds and a bit of wind comes smoke, a pale yellow, forming a filmy layer between us and the deep blue sky. A fire is burning on Saddle Mountain and the wind and heat have kicked it up.
The fire on the rim reminds us of the recent changes in climate that have increased fire intensity throughout the West. In this era of climate change and water scarcity, it is a particular gift to float by tiny springs dropping into the river from the base of the Redwall limestone. Drifting down to Redwall Cavern through Marble Canyon, its fine bedding of limestone alternating deep green and pale gray or pink, and brilliantly polished, small crystalline springs fall straight into the river, robed in monkey flowers, the emerald-green plants lush against the hard gray rock. We slide past, the sound of the springs a counterpoint to the cadence of our oars.
We camp at Nautiloid, with great views up and downstream, as the canyon deepens. The camp is named for chambered relatives of the nautilus that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. They are found in the rock here, giving us a pause to contemplate geologic time and the many varieties of life represented in the rocks.
There may be nothing better in this world than getting on the river in the morning in the middle of Marble Canyon. We drift by sheer limestone walls broken by gothic-shaped solution chambers — caves that should have gnomes peering out of their shadows. And the light! It is early so the sun hasn't reached the river yet, but the upper cliffs are lit orange and pink and throw reflections down to the water, rippling green, golden, and sky blue. Even the few riffles are hushed, contributing to the feeling that we are in an immense cathedral.
Headed down to hike Saddle Canyon, we think about how it has changed in recent years. Geologic time is measured in millions of years, but significant geologic events can happen in minutes or even seconds. The huge boulder that was the gatekeeper to the waterfall up Saddle — requiring visitors to climb a dicey route around it — was in place for the entire 45 years we’d run the river. It was an icon in the river running community. Yet three years ago a flash flood came down from Saddle Mountain and swept the boulder away. The flood cleared the side canyon’s channel and lined its floor with a fine, level bed of gravel. Now boaters can simply stroll up the canyon to the waterfall. This event reminds us that change in the canyon is ever-present and continuous, even though, to our human perspective, the canyon itself appears unchanging.
On the water we float by the first lenses of Temple Butte limestone, deposited on a surface incised with stream channels, then eroded away until all that remains is the rock filling the ancient channels. It appears as small curved-bottomed deposits of rock that are more lavender-pink than the surrounding Muav limestone. We speculate that it is softer than the surrounding Muav, since alcoves often form where a lens of Temple Butte interrupts the surrounding beds. Water gets a footing there and accelerates the erosion process.
CYD MARTIN
Rowing by the proposed site of the Marble Canyon Dam, through rippling reflections of cliffs and sky, we think about all that would not be here had the dam been built. Although dams are mere blips in geologic time, their effects are major on a human scale. From a personal perspective, our lives would have been completely different had the dam gone in. On a natural level the entire riparian world here along the river would have been wiped out — no wrens, no willows, no rapids, no magical living river.
The effort to stop Marble Canyon Dam is one of the great conservation stories — people taking action and prevailing, in spite of what seemed like insurmountable odds. This story is a good lesson for today. With the ever-present threats of development, pollution, and overpopulation, citizen conservationists need to join forces with conservation organizations to ensure that our most precious landscapes are preserved.
We float by the Marble Canyon Dam site at mile 44. If you are a Bureau of Reclamation engineer, it is the type of place you dream of: narrow canyon walls reaching hundreds of feet straight up. The effort to build the dam almost succeeded. The Sierra Club, led by David Brower and Martin Litton, paid for full-page advertisements in large-circulation newspapers and magazines and generated a massive campaign to lobby Congress and the administration to nix the idea. These efforts — truly citizen action — changed minds in Washington, D.C., and halted the project.
We float down to the Little Colorado. It’s running pretty muddy so we pump water through our filter system to fill all of our water jugs upstream of the sediment load. Though the river in its natural state, before Glen Canyon Dam was built, was full of sediment, we’ve gotten used to the clear green water — easy to drink, and to cook and wash with.
Here at the junction of the Little Colorado and the main Colorado, sacred to the Hopi, Navajo, and other Native peoples, it’s hard to imagine what it would look like if the Escalade project to build a tram from rim to river had gone through. It’s hard to imagine the immense steps and slopes descending from the canyon’s east rim marred by a tram and all of the attendant machinery and visitor amenities, the serene beauty and cultural significance overwhelmed by the commercial infrastructure of mass mechanical tourism.
Shortly after it became a national park in 1919, the Grand Canyon hosted fewer than 40,000 visitors a year. Today over 6 million tourists arrive annually. Regional tribes need to be included in plans to accommodate more visitors and increased visitor opportunity needs to be provided while limiting adverse impacts to the Grand Canyon.
It would not be the fault of the visitors themselves — they respond to opportunities presented to them. The solution is just to not present opportunities that mar sacred sites and threaten the cultural heritage of the Grand Canyon’s Indigenous peoples. There are more sustainable ways to support long-term economic growth on tribal lands, as a project like Change Labs shows.
CYD MARTIN
Running Granite Gorge is always a rush — starting with enormous Hance Rapid and its chaos of huge waves and pour-overs, on through Sockdolager and Grapevine until we float under the Black Bridge to arrive at Phantom Ranch. The trip has gotten into a rhythm and arriving at the relative civilization of Phantom is a bit of a shock. We try to fill our water jugs at the National Park Service faucet but find that the pipeline that carries water from Roaring Springs to the canyon’s 6 million annual visitors is once again broken.
The national park, with a $300 million maintenance backlog, constantly has to temporarily repair infrastructure to keep the park running. We troop up to the ranch for ice-cold lemonade and postcards. We can stamp our cards with “mailed at the bottom of Grand Canyon” and drop them in an old leather pannier to be carried out by the mules that haul visitors and supplies in and out every day.
After Phantom we continue through the gorge, running Horn Creek with its elegant slick of steep water plunging over the rocks at the top, through Granite Falls’ chaotic mishmash of diagonal waves and Hermit’s gigantic roller coaster waves. We camp at Crystal, and enjoy an easy hike up the side canyon along the small clear creek.
Contamination has occurred near older mine sites, including Hack Canyon and Orphan mines, where erosion and problems with containment have allowed uranium to seep into waterways such as Horn Creek.
It’s a sparkly bright morning, and busy, starting with a left-hand run through Crystal and on down through the gems — Agate, Sapphire, Turquoise, Ruby, Serpentine. Enormous blocks of pink granite and polished black schist catch the slanting light — setting up little still lifes of rock, acacia, and cactus. The sun is already hot, the river still celadon, even after the rain.
We run Sapphire and, at this low water level, the hole beside the big hole is huge. It pops under our front left tube, sending a waterfall over the boat and washing Steve into the middle of the rapid, pulling the oar out of the oarlock as he goes. He gets himself back in by the time I get the oar back in the oarlock. We are fine, but both soaked and humbled, though we know that anything can happen at any time on the river, no matter how carefully we run. Seeing that we are okay, the guides call out that Steve is the first member of the Canyon Swim Club for the trip. Everyone is a member now and then.
We stay wet a while, running through the rest of the gems — it is a technical stretch of river and endlessly fascinating with all of the rapids foaming below almost sheer walls of broken and polished schist.
CYD MARTIN
We camp at the Dune Camp, on river right below Elves Chasm and above Blacktail Canyon. It’s a lovely, expansive camp on a big dune tucked under purple and tan sculpted Tapeats ledges. The sunset illuminates the cliffs upstream and down so that they appear to glow with an inner light — the light picking out rock faces and slopes stepping down to the river. People play bocce as we cook green-chili pork and cornbread. A small rapid roars downstream, tiny bats flutter overhead, and the evening is alive with laughter, water, and light. It is ridiculously beautiful.
The river gets a bit muddier overnight, going from light green to weak coffee tan. We walk up Blacktail Canyon in the morning, out of the already hot sun and rushing river noise into the cool, still space between Tapeats walls. Blacktail is so narrow and buffered by overhanging ledges that it generates its own quiet, absorbing extraneous sounds and packing them like grains of sand into the sandstone shelves.
Not everywhere on the river is quiet. Though far from perfect, and certainly still distracting in many parts of the canyon, the overflight situation has improved over the last 45 years. The Federal Aviation Administration caps air tours at 93,971 flights a year. This limit doesn’t apply to the Hualapai, who have established a tourism industry in the lower canyon. Aircraft operate over the core of the park from dawn until evening, leaving sections of the park echoing with continuous noise. No increases should be allowed to any scenic flights affecting the park no matter where they originate from.
Old beyond imagining, the unconformity here is 1 billion years — an eon of deposition of sediment and life gone, marking a line between the lowest Tapeats beds and the scoured surface of the Precambrian basement rocks. Outside, framed by the side canyon’s walls, rise the Paleozoic strata — Tapeats, Bright Angel, Muav, Temple Butte, Redwall — over 1,500 feet of rock whose collective age of 250 million years cannot compare to what is missing here below, ground away by ceaseless erosion.
The intricate, gothic, river-carved fluting of the schists and granites, accomplished over thousands of years, is insignificant compared to the time it took erosional processes to grind down the hundreds of feet of rocks representing the Great Unconformity. Everything is relative, though — from our perspective the fluting of the Inner Gorge has taken hundreds of lifetimes and it is difficult to imagine that water could carve rock that is this hard.
CYD MARTIN
We arrive at Deer Creek, one of the most spectacular and tranquil places in the canyon. Our passengers are hiking here from a spot upstream, so we hike the opposite direction to shuttle the boats down. We climb up to the horizontal canyon floor above the falls, called the Patio, then cut up the slope to the right and meet the guests and other guides who began the hike upstream. We chat a while then head out, cutting in and out of small drainages.
We pass Puebloan ruins built into a cliff base — our route obviously much-used for centuries, connecting the water-rich drainages of Tapeats and Deer creeks. We find some of the tools of these past residents — an arrowhead, a mano, and a lovely black metate, made from the fine-grained diabase sill that forms a distinctive layer in this area. We leave them where we find them. The canyon is the past and present home to many tribes. Much of the land we float by in the canyon is sovereign tribal land, not national park land.
All of the Grand Canyon has a rich history and significance to Native Americans. Almost anywhere we travel in the canyon we see the artifacts or structures of prehistoric peoples, signs of thousands of years of continuous Native American presence.
CYD MARTIN
Now we camp on the right, a ways below Lava Falls. Everyone is especially festive after making it through the huge rapid. People were up late celebrating with tequila and music. It is hard to describe the euphoria that prevails after running Lava.
The tension builds beforehand for a couple of days, getting to the point where none of the guides will talk about it except in the most passing manner. Certainly no stories of past runs are told. Then we scout the rapid, climbing up the steep, hot trail onto the black rocks to gaze at the giant waves that form and crash back on themselves endlessly — familiar yet always changing. We plot what we hope is our route through, confirming again the path of wavy burbles that leads to the ideal entry. Then back to the boats to put on helmets, tighten life jackets, call “good runs” to our fellow boaters and push out onto the still surface that is the lake formed above the rocks that make the rapid. It is the quiet water above a waterfall.
One by one we drop in, each boat charting its own course through the waves — frontwards, backwards, sideways — but below, all whooping with a rush of adrenaline and relief at making it through unscathed once again. The glee and merriment last through the night, resurging in the morning with Bram playing guitar and singing ballads by a breakfast table brimming with hot biscuits and gravy, potato pancakes, bacon, and fruit salad. It is a festive meal.
Once the run is done and celebrated, the cycle of anticipation and dread starts again. We all know that the rapid will cast its spell on us by the time of the next launch, or even before. Someone said, as we celebrated below Lava, “We’re always above Lava.” Once through, we are already anticipating our next run.
Floating down toward Diamond Creek, we stop on the polished Muav ledges to see a series of perfectly cylindrical grinding holes, worn vertically into the Muav surface. About 10 inches in diameter and 10-12 inches deep, with curved bottoms, they invite speculation about what the ancient Indians made them for. Were they grinding mesquite beans? Or perhaps roasted agave roots? Whatever it was, we imagine the scene — women (probably) gathered on the ledges above a rolling red river, gossiping and chatting as they grind the meal. Perhaps scolding children back from the edge and enjoying the shared work on their perch at the river’s side.
These places in the canyon, with obvious importance, but without a clear explanation of just what was going on, fuel our imaginations and bring alive a human way of life in this land.
The trip we’re on covers the full length of the canyon, from Lees Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs. At Separation Canyon, river mile 240, we discuss the Powell Expedition that traveled through the canyon 149 years ago. At Separation, three members of the crew walked out, never to be seen again. Powell concluded the trip and spent a lifetime thinking about his journey and the arid West — the people who lived there and water.
Powell predicted that water would be the issue in this landscape. In 1893, he spoke to a conference in Los Angeles about water in the West, explaining there was insufficient water to support widespread irrigation agriculture. Powell was not well received, but time has proven him correct. Water use has taken us far beyond the point of sustainability.
At Separation Canyon, where Lake Mead’s influence becomes evident, his prediction becomes a startling reality. Climate changes have dried up Lake Mead. Towering silt banks squeeze the river, jungles of living and dead tamarisk line the shore, and the dancing river flattens to a braided backwater full of sandbars.
This night is the last night on the river. In this day and age, sixteen days in the wild is significant. The impacts of the canyon and the river on the group are evident: People are mesmerized by the last sunset rays sweeping up the walls, boisterously recalling shared adventures, and of course there’s lots of hugging. We all hope that the experience gained and the lessons learned will stay with us as we reenter the “real” world.
Grand Canyon Trust Board Chair Steve Martin is former superintendent of Grand Canyon, Denali, and Grand Teton national parks. Cultural anthropologist and artist Dr. Cyd Martin was director of Indian affairs and American culture for the Intermountain Region of the National Park Service and the first female boatperson for the National Park Service at Grand Canyon National Park.
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