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Glen Canyon Raft Trip
Entry 5 of 8 | show all | print this entry |
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That night I dream of the boy in the coolie hat and kilt, though of course he isn't wearing those things in the dream. I'd been thinking that I was proud of his bravery and of his mother for her acceptance of it (we saw her with him and you could just tell she didn't have a problem with his clothing choices). Anyway, the kid in the dream isn't fitting in at school and somehow I get involved to help him. Then it turns out we are in England and he's from the Netherlands and wants to go back home. He wants me to go with him, so I do. (There is a reason for me to tell you this....)
It's morning, and we have to get over to the Maswick Lodge to catch our bus for the tour. It's a half-day, smooth raft trip on the Colorado River from the Glen Canyon Dam (NE of the GC) down to where the Grand Canyon officially starts at Lees Ferry. About 15 miles. The only problem with the trip is that there is a 2.5 hour bus ride each way. When I booked it, I thought the experience would be worth the hassle.
My legs are even more swollen than the day before and there's no way I can fit into my jeans, so I wear shorts with a pair of loose rain pants over them. We get up at six and head over to the Maswick Lodge for breakfast. It's acceptable, but overpriced. Then we board the bus.
The driver tells us interesting information about the Grand Canyon. For example, back when it was just becoming a tourist attraction, in the late 1800's, you got there by stagecoach (from nearby towns) and it took 20 hours and cost $20. But things really took off when the train went in in 1901. That took two hours and cost $3.50. Eventually the driver runs out of Grand Canyon trivia and puts on a CD of folk music, loud. I hate folk music. Julie has the window seat and promptly falls asleep, so I crane around her to look at the view. Some of it is boring, some of it is interesting.
We enter the Navaho Nation, a huge reservation that extends into Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico (aka the Four Corners area). Presumably it's where the Navaho who got thrown out of Indian Garden went. It looks pretty desolate from where we are. Presumably we didn't think the land was worth anything when we gave it to the Navaho. They found coal on it, though, and built themselves a power plant to supply their own electricity. Now environmentalists want them to shut it down. Go figure the politics of that one. There's a Hopi reservation in the middle of the Navaho land, totally surrounded by it. I wonder how the two tribes work that out.
There are lots of stands along the highway selling Native American jewelry, pottery, and rugs. There's not much traffic out on highway 64, and I wonder how they can make a living. I also wonder if they have cats as pets. Dogs at least can work, but cats are just coyote chow.
At the intersection of Highways 89 and 64, there's a town, if you can call it that, named Cameron. According to our driver, the Navaho are the last tribe in the United States to decide to get into the casino business. The most likely spot for their first casino will be Cameron.
Two hours of driving later, we make it to our destination, the Glen Canyon Dam. Our driver gives us some facts about the dam and Lake Powell, which owes its existence to the dam. One fact that stuck because I heard it so many times (at least four) is that Lake Powell has over 2,000 miles of shoreline.
Since 9/11, security at dams has been tightened. The protocol for getting us down to the river (on the non-lake side of the dam) is to unload us all from our tour bus and then load us up again onto a bus that is known to be "clean." Any bags we want to take with us have to be sent down in a separate bus. So we pull up to the gate and wait. And wait. Eventually a woman comes on board and explains that they are changing out one of the turbines today and that they weren't supposed to do it until after the tour busses had come and gone, but had decided to work on it early. As a result, there was a giant truck blocking the end of the one-lane tunnel that leads to the river, and we could not go down until it moved.
Another tour bus pulls up behind us. We wait. After maybe half an hour, a couple of busses come up out of the tunnel, turn around, and pull in ahead of us. We are told to change busses, and we all file out into the first of the new busses. Then we wait some more. Suddenly, the bus behind us pulls out. The gate opens for it and it goes down the tunnel. The gate closes again. I am so pissed off I could complain about it incessantly to Julie, which I proceed to do. "It's unfair! They came after us! How come they get to go first?"
[Later we find out what happened. Apparently, there was some kind of power struggle going on between the daughter of the owner of the tour company and the woman in charge of organizing the trips through the tunnel. Ms. Corporate-Daddy-O pulled rank and sent the later bus down first. Bitch.]
So we wait and wait and wait some more. It's been a total of about an hour since we arrived at the dam when the other bus finally comes back out of the tunnel. We are free to go down, FINALLY. I am still grumpy about the whole thing.
The tunnel leading to the water is one-lane wide, like a mile long, and at an 8% grade (steep). Our driver (a different one who is certifiably clean of terrorist hardware) is a funny guy and turns the headlights off briefly as we go down. It's utterly black and I am so not in the mood for his joking around. When he tells us that one time he did that and couldn't find the knob to turn the lights on again, I'm really glad I was not on the bus that day.
At the end of the tunnel is a very small parking area, and as we exit the bus, we are handed hardhats. Apparently, people like to stand on the cliffs 700 feet above and throw money down into the river. The problem is that they sometimes miss, and you don't want your head be the landing pad of a metal disk hurtling toward the earth at something like 200 feet per second. Once we've passed the danger zone, we hand over our hard hats and get onto the raft.
Except it isn't so simple. It seems simple to me when the man organizing the groups for the rafts asks who came on the bus and who came in a car. If you came in a car, you get on the first raft. But some people are saying they drove their car and then got on a bus and they don't know which group they belong to (note: no one is allowed to drive their car down to the dam, so they all came on a bus). Those of us from my bus don't really care, we just want to get onto our own raft and wish some people would get a brain and get their butts down to the water before we kick them in ourselves. Or maybe I am the only one feeling that way.
The rafts are large, with big outboard motors. There are two pontoon things on either side. When our raft comes, Julie and I get a seat in the middle part, while other people sit on the pontoons. As soon as we can, we raid the soda cooler and start passing sodas out to other people as they get on board. I figure I've been through enough hassle that I should have as much free soda as I want. I just hope we'll have a bathroom break before I get desperate.
Our guide is Nick. He's a happy, outgoing guy with teeth that look like they could be in a shark's mouth they're so gnarly. I don't think I've ever seen teeth so bad. I guess the dental plans for river guides aren't so hot.
We start down the river and Nick asks everybody to say their name and where they are from. There are a number of people from South Carolina, and some from New York, and even though they came from the same places, they aren't all together. Nick said it was like that sometimes, a bunch of strangers all from the same area on the same boat. Weird. Another weird thing... there was one foreigner, a woman from... did you guess it? ... the Netherlands.
So, the river trip goes like this. It's a very pleasant day. Nick steers us to different spots and tells us stories, often about himself, since he grew up in the area. There was the canyon where he and his friend used to sit and use a spud-gun to shoot potatoes at boaters. There was the lizard wall, which had a bunch of little brown lizards sunning on it. Nick explained that if you picked those lizards up and lightly squeezed their bellies, they'd open their mouths. He and his friends used to sneak up behind girls and attach lizards to their earlobes.
The farther we go into the canyon, the higher the walls get. Nick explains that in this environment, things look smaller than they really are. He decides to demonstrate. He pulls the boat up to the shore and points at an agava plant whose stalk has fallen over. "How big do you think that stalk is?" he asks us. People are throwing out their guesses. "Six feet." "Ten feet." Nick grounds the boat. "I'm five-eleven," he says, and runs up the hill toward the plant. He gets smaller and smaller. Then he is standing by the agava and he looks tiny. He lifts the stalk and holds it straight up next to him. It's at least three times his height.
The power of perspective. It explains why the Grand Canyon didn't look as Grand as I thought it would.
We stop briefly at a sandy beach (with composting toilets) and walk to a rock wall where there are some ancient petroglyphs (petroglyphs are carved into stone and pictographs are drawn on). I wonder what was going through the carver's head. It was very hot right there, and I couldn't imagine him or her doing it on a day like this. And what were they trying to say? Was it like graffiti? Were they bored? Were they saying deer hung around in this spot?
Our next stop is lunch. They've got a boat set up waiting for us that has a sandwich buffet laid out. I'm starved and eat every bit of my sandwich and even go back for more chips. There are a number of children on our boat, and one of them is proud of himself for making the weirdest sandwich ever: turkey, roast beef, cheese, and peanut butter. We notice he doesn't finish it, though.
Julie had been a little concerned about the children because sometimes they can be obnoxious. The group on our boat was just fine. The mother of three of them sat on the opposite pontoon from her kids and literally spent the entire trip taking pictures of them. I only saw her look up at the canyon a few times. She'll have a great record of a trip she never experienced.
We get back on the boat and Nick tells us about how crazy he thinks birders are. "I was the guide on this bird-watching trip," he says. "We passed this bald eagle on a rock. I'd never been so close to one before. It was amazing. The bird people are hardly paying attention. One or two snap some pictures. Then this little tiny bird flies by and they're all screaming, 'stop the boat! stop the boat!' and taking pictures like crazy. Totally nuts. But they did tell me something about the difference between crows and ravens that I didn't know. You know ravens are bigger than crows. But they also have ten pinion feathers, those feathers at the end of the wing that look like fingers, while crows, because they are smaller, only have nine. So the difference between them is a matter of a pinion."
Well, I think it's funny.
We're running a little late, due to that bitch of a CEO's daughter, and after lunch we seem to really hurry. It's gotten windy, and the water is quite choppy. Nick deliberately runs us into it so we get a good spraying. No one seems to mind.
Nick points to a wall straight ahead of us. "Those are the Vermillion Cliffs," he says. "They are about two and a half miles away." We look. The wall looks a lot closer than that. Nick points at Echo Ridge (or something like that) tells us another story to illustrate how big things really are down here. There was this guy named Powell who was one of the first white explorers of the canyon. He'd lost part of an arm somewhere, so he needed an assistant to row the boat. His assistant was also an artist and was documenting the canyon. When they came around a curve and saw this point, Powell wanted his assistant to climb to the top and draw what he saw. The assistant looked at the height and said he could do it in a day. Well, turns out it's all sand, so it took the poor kid two days to get to the top. When he did, he fired off his pistol as a signal, and the echos were so amazing that they named it for them.
Then Nick said that if they'd just gone downstream a little further, they'd have found a solid ridge straight up to the top and it would have taken the kid maybe three hours to climb to the top.
At this point, the canyon walls tower 2,000 feet above us. There's a lookout spot at the top, and there's a person up there. S/he is so tiny, s/he looks like a thin little twig, barely visible. We wave and shout and see a tiny bit of movement up there that we believe is a return wave.
Nick stops the boat. He has a surprise for us. He's half-Hopi, and he tells us how when he was bad, his mother would send him to the reservation to stay with his grandparents as punishment because there's nothing to do out there. But Nick loved it. And one of the things he loved was his grandfather playing the flute. Nick never was seriously into his heritage, but when his grandfather died, they sent Nick the flute. So he decided to learn to play. He opens a big PVC pipe that's a carrying case and pulls out a flute. It's not his grandfather's--once he dropped that one into the river and almost lost it, so he purchased one on eBay for casual use. He tells us a little about the tradition of Native American flute playing, and serenades us for about five minutes. It's very beautiful and relaxing. Then he puts it away and we are zooming down the river again, crashing through the waves.
Someone asks Nick about weird passengers. He says one woman was convinced that the boat ran on tracks, like a ride at Disney World. Another person asked about Powell (who explored back in the 1800s) and wondered how he got around all the dams.
Eventually we reach Lees Ferry and disembark. Gratuities, once again, are expected, and we are happy to give something to Nick because we both enjoyed having him as our guide. Then it's back on the bus for a two hour trip back to the Canyon. This time the driver tells us about food options at the Canyon. One thing he says that we didn't know is that the restaurant at the Yavapai Lodge (where we are staying, but never went into the restaurant) is a cafeteria, like the one at Maswick, but the locals and residents prefer the one at Yavapai. So that is where we eat. It's not really very good, frankly.
It's our last night at the Grand Canyon, so we get ourselves packed up and ready to go in the morning. Tomorrow we're driving down to Flagstaff via highway 89, with stops at the Wupatki and Sunset Crater Volcano National Monuments.
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