Stanna has a saying from a river trip on the San Juan River, one March some thirty years ago, back in the last century: “If it’s snowing at the put-in, step off the raft and get back in the car and say: I’ll meet you at the take-out.” This photo isn’t at the put-in, rather at the rendezvous point just outside of Durango last week. Two inches of snow had fallen while we were loading the rafts for the trip to Green River, Utah, to run Grey and Desolation Canyons of the Green River. Her advice could have applied.
It wasn’t a bad trip at all, just stormed and rained more than I’ve ever experienced on a 
river trip. The online weather outlook was poor for the first day, “…high of 56 and low of 39 with 30% chance of rain…,” but the remainder of the week to warm nicely with mostly sunny days according to the forecast. We did have one nice day, thankfully, sunny enough to dare bathing in the river and drying off in the sun (while it lasted).
However, much of the time we were in long pants with fleece and rain jackets. We did manage a number of canyon hikes along the way. One unusual site was a bootlegger still and cliffside rock cabin located in such a remote river canyon that we couldn’t figure out how he got his grain in and hooch out. This was situated 45 miles downriver halfway between two towns, but it was adjacent to an Indian reservation, so he wasn’t all that crazy. Another site was the elaborate petroglyph panel featured below.
It was intimidating taking photos with my iPhone next to our trip-mate Jeff (note him in the bushes with his tripod mounted lens) and his Sherpa son carrying all his professional photography gear. His Nature Revealed photography gallery is located in Durango and it was very interesting seeing him work and appreciating his “patience.”
Several evenings we had to cook dinner in the rain and warm ourselves with a fire in the firepan (a long-running requirement for campfires and BBQ’s in the river-permitted regions).
One particularly stormy, thundering loud and windy morning, I moved the camp stove under the teetering table and made coffee huddled on the ground below the collapsed “parawing” rain fly. Luckily breakfast was just granola and yogurt with no need of a proper galley.
As unusual as the weather was for a mid-May desert river trip, so was the theme of the trips conversations. Of the eight rafters, 4 were teachers with science backgrounds, one
of which enthralled and overwhelmed several of us with details about quantum mechanics (the science of the very small: the body of scientific principles that explains the behaviour of matter and its interactions with energy on the scale of atoms – Wikipedia). “There are more atoms in a pebble than grains of sand on the earth,” “…everything is now regarded as a wave” and “all light comes from photons” – just to give you a sense of the responses to our naive questions. Electrons entered much into the camp and raft conversations, along with an ample portion of geology. Learning was going all directions just like photons and electrons.
One mystery no one could explain, was just how beavers managed to chew through a number of trees almost 7 feet off the ground, near one of our lunch stops. There was a large abandoned “lodge” close by and at least four of these higher trees lopped off above our heads. No evidence of a perch or floating vantage point. And snow doesn’t get that high at that elevation, even if the beaver wasn’t hibernating.
“My father wasn’t very careful with fire…,” is how one of the campfire stories started when Ed Zink livened up the sophomoric and socratic moods. His jokes and limericks made for great company and balance to the 101-level non-traditional student questions firing back and forth to the professor. Add in the great meals, side hikes and camaraderie, not to mention the wonder of drifting down a 90-mile section of one of the West’s remote desert rivers: this was a great trip. Now if we could remember all that was taught and said, we’d have jokes and trivia for many more gatherings.
