September 8-No, no I don't want to go

– All the Way – Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek or Lake Mead, from

There’s This River – Jay Poulter reading:

            It’s one of the great experiences of a lifetime: a river trip all the way through the Grand Canyon.  You’re going to climb into a boat and float, motor, paddle or row all the way down:  two hundred and twenty-five or two hundred and eighty miles.  You might be taking six days on a motor rig; you might do it in twenty-two on a dory.  During this time you will come to know your fellow voyagers and your environment better than you every expected, and you become comfortable sleeping on sand and rocky ledges.  The routine of loading and unloading the boats is simple and welcome.  You begin to believe the old superstition about river karma and start helping with the dishes.  After all, “clean dishes, clean runs,” right?

            Something happens to one’s sense of time on a full-canyon trip.  The length of days begins to melt into the walls of the canyon and the rushing water.  People who stay to see the whole canyon sink into the rhythm of the place.  The light feels more natural than any they have experienced since they were children.  They wake up with the dawn and go to bed with the dark, learn stars never seen at home.  Someone might fall in love.

            People who are together for a whole trip often become fast friends.  Sometimes events conspire to create a situation in which everyone, guides and passengers alike, learn something.  Guides help guests stretch their limits.  Guests help guides continue to appreciate the canyon.  No one who has been down the entire river can fail to be changed somehow.  The length of time you are on the river matters some, but what is more important is seeing a canyon begin, deepen, and wind its way across the land until it reaches its end.  It is a powerful experience to watch a landscape be shaped, and you come to understand something of the span of years this place has been under construction.  That depth of time makes one feel at once insignificant and infinite.

            You may only see the canyon once, and those images will remain imprinted in your mind as images of an unchanging place.  We all take these images home with us.  We’ll be reminded how if felt to wake in the early light to the sound of the canyon wrens. We think of how good that cold drink of water tasted after the hike we thought we would never end, how that little waterfall seemed like heaven on earth after the burning heat.  And we remember how surprised and proud we were to be using our bodies, pushing our boundaries, recalling skills long unused.  These memories won’t change, yet the canyon will ever change:  day to day, season to season, year to year.  Boatmen and women who have done fifty or a hundred trips are not bored; they keep coming back to a different world every time they arrive.  There are as many reasons for returning as there are travelers, yet the ultimate reason remains the same; the river and her canyon keep calling us back……..

One more river beer

A BIG trailer for our much lighter coolers

Class 9 road

 A Little Plane

I can't even imagine how different it will be when I get home. Missing my friends and the river doesn't touch it. A spectacular place, the quiet of the canyon, roar of the rapids, ever changing light with the very best people. Each person brought and shared their special gifts. Thanks for the trip of a lifetime.

(What can one say about today……..Packing, unpacking, sorting and re-sorting, loading, unloading, and sorting once again.  It’s been an incredible 16 days…..plans of an extended trip in Idaho?  What a hoot that would be, especially with THIS group! 

Cindy, Catie, Mick and Kenny left us and flew from a small landing strip to Las Vegas.  It seems like we are torn apart after all this time together…..Kristian drove away from Flagstaff….Salli’s car needed a jumpstart…..we are back into the real (?) world….the other world……the rest of us went out to a Salsa Bar Mexican Restaurant, Senior Bravo for dinner….and so there are pictures, videos, forever friendships, incredible memories, and dreams of our next adventure together!

I am speechless….the memories will speak for us in the years to come.

From Catie:

And I'd be happy to attempt to make up the recipes for the rest of it if anyone wants. The other items from my dinners were:
Dinner 3- kielbasa w/ spicy dipping sauce
Dinner 7- corn, black bean, rice salad (added chorizo for wraps for lunch downriver); chocolate mint icebox cake
Dinner 11- calabacitas, green chile potato gratin
Dinner 15- pasta with artichokes and wild mushrooms
 

September 7-Middle Two Hundred Twenty Mile

–  These next sections are from There’s This River, Grand Canyon Boat Stories, edited by Christa Sadler, read by Saint.

There are several hundred men and women who presently work, part-time or full time, for the fifteen commercial companies in the Grand Canyon.  There are many who no longer work in the canyon as guides but remain here in their hearts.  I have come to respect these people more than any I’ve ever met.  They are a unique bunch, not given to following or joining, yet despite themselves, they’ve become a community.  They are raunchy, rowdy and kind.  They are some of the most talented people I know.  They can take a thirty-seven foot motor rig through a rocky rapid at low water, or guide a tiny paddleboat through the giant waves of Lava Falls without missing a stroke.  They can cook the best food you’ve ever eaten, bandage a wound, set up a tent during the rain in record time, play the guitar, sing opera, patch a seven-foot rip in the boat while still grinning.  In their other lives these people are teachers, doctors, psychologists, ski instructors, carpenters, artists, moviemakers, technicians, photographers, masseurs, scientists.  Good people to have on your side.

Our stories make us a community.  It’s why we came.  It’s what inspires our writing, our photography, our paintings, our lives.  It’s why we stay.  Not just for the rapids or the hikes.  Boatmen who show up to conquer the rapids don’t usually stay that long.  Only five percent of the river is whitewater, and most of this is pretty straightforward once you learn the entry and the one or two moves you might have to make.  If you’re there for the rapids, you could get bored.  There are long flat stretches of water, when the wind is more than likely going to be blowing upstream.  There is baking heat and water so cold it’s often no even refreshing.  There are sand storms that plaster everything in camp with grit.  There’s the Trip Leader From Hell.

            But in the mornings a golden band of light moves down the cliffs towards the river, and in the afternoon that same band moves back up until it is only a sliver at the top and then it is gone.  The canyon wrens are only the size of golf balls, but their songs echo off the canyon walls as you float by.  Side canyons here lead to trickling waterfalls with maidenhair ferns and columbine.  Raging summer thunderstorms create red-brown waterfalls that plummet eight hundred feet to the river, and turn it brick red in an instant.  The stars at night sparkle shamelessly in an uneven narrow band bounded by the black silhouettes of the canyon walls.  Some of the rapids make your gut curl beforehand, and afterwards you howl as loud as you possibly can, to no one, and to everyone.

            Your friends are here.  You MAKE friends here.  When a group starts out together, many of the passengers think that they are just “going on a river trip.” It doesn’t take long to discover you’ve signed up for a journey;.  You become a family, all of you together, floating through this wild and inaccessible place.  You depend on each other.  As with any family, there are quirks and oddities, good times and bad.  But there is no way you can leave this place without being affected somehow by the experience you’ve just shared.  Some of the best friendships I have began on river trips.

            River trips.  Always there is a river.  She rages, she teases, and she plays.  She keeps all of us on our toes and gives us reason for a life that we find hard to leave.  Even boatman who have left the river can’t stay away.  They come back for private trips, they bring their kids, they do science that keeps them in the canyon, the become National Park Service Rangers.

            These are people worth knowing.  This is a place worth knowing.  Few in our world are lucky enough to find something that they truly love and be able to stick with it long enough to turn it into a life.  These men and women have learned how to do just that, and this book is a tribute to them and the place they call home. 

            We are indebted to some impressive pioneers of the river – people like John Wesley Powell, Robert Stanton, Nathaniel Galloway, Norm Nevills, Dock Marston, Bert Loper, Georgie Clark, and many others.  There has been a great deal of change since those early days.  Companies have been bought and sold, equipment has improved, food has gotten fancier.  Now all the passengers and boatmen wear special shorts and river sandals, where it used to be cut-off jeans and old tennis shoes.  But the river flows on.  In time, other boatmen will stand on our shoulders and these stories will be their legends.  And so it goes.  Welcome to the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River.  Welcome to a way of life.- It changed my life

Things look a little different in the morning light.

Jay made sure the prayer flags had a prime spot in every camp.

Pumpkin Springs

Fun rain or shine

Nature provides a show. She must be special.

And then there was Captain's night

Greg, are you ready for this?

The rest stays on the river.

Jay, accompanied by Kristian:

“Grand Canyon 2010”

with some lyrical modifications from the original sung at mile 220 on September 7, 2010

(to the tune of Sloop John B, by the Beach Boys) 

If you don’t know the tune, check out this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdov2UIjUpY

Grand Canyon two thousand ten

Anticipation was building, and then

We launched from Lee’s Ferry and started our journey of dreams

The Colorado is deep

Lava Falls is quite steep, ah shit

This here is the best trip I’ve ever been on.

Chorus:

So hoist up your paddles and oars

The Grand Canyon whispers and roars

We’re heading for Diamond but memories never will end

Thanks seems really trite

For a trip that was oh, so right

She’ll never be conquered; Grand Canyon my friend.

Fourteen strangers soon became friends

At Phantom Ranch we said farewell to Jen

Dan and Sally hiked on down from Bright Angel Trail

Now our group of fifteen

Saw things most only glimpse, on a screen

Such magic and wonders, adventures unveiled

(Chorus)

Now Greg was the group T.L.

He put us through so much hell

We had to row 22 miles against upstream wind

But we all agreed

T.L.’s no easy deed

So please stop complaining, he really is kind

(Chorus)

There’s things that I can’t explain

Like the feeling of Nankoweep Rain

Or the maze at Matkatamita and Elve’s Chasm falls

The Grand’s spirit is strong

Would you please come along

You know it, you’ve heard it, the Grand Canyon calls

(Chorus)

Thanks to Cindy and Catie and Greg

For inviting us all on this leg

Such riches we all have shared, good friends we’ve become

And it’s been quite a trip

Not even one single flip

If you’re looking for Louie, he’s safely at home

(Chorus)

We get to camp here!

 Read by Kristian, in honor of Big Water Bob

The Call of the Wild by Robert Service

Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on,

Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,

Big mountains heave to heaven which the blinding sunsets blazon, Black canyons

where the rapids rip and roar?

Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it,

            Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?

Have you strung your soul to silence?  Then, for God’s sake go and do it;

            Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.

Have you wandered in the wilderness the sagebrush desolation,

            The bunchgrass levels where the cattle graze?

Have you whistled bits of ragtime at the end of all creation,

            And learned to know the desert’s little ways?

Have you camped upon the foothills, have you galloped o’er the ranges,

            Have you roamed the arid sun-lands through and through?

Have you chummed up with the mesa?  Do you know its moods and changes?

            Then listen to the wild---it’s calling you.

Have you known the Great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver?

            (Eternal truths that shame our soothing lies.)

Have you broken trail on snowshoes, mushed your huskies up the river,

            Dared the unknown, led the way, and clutched the prize?

Have you marked the map’s void spaces, mingled with the mongrel races,

            Felt the savage strength of brute in every thew?

And though grim as hell the worst is, can you round it off with curses?

            Then, hearken to the Wild---it’s wanting you.

Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down, yet grasped at glory,

            Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?

Have you seen God in His splendors, heard the text that nature renders….

            (You’ll never hear it in the family pew.)

The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things?

            Then listen to the wild-----it’s calling you.

They have cradled you in custom, the have primed you with their preaching,

            They have soaked you in convention through and through;

They have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their teaching.

            But can’t you hear the Wild? ---it’s calling you.

Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betides us;

            Let us journey to a lonely land I know.

There’s a whisper on the night-wind, there’s a star agleam to guide us,

            And, the Wild is calling….calling…..let us go.

(Watched the ram chasing the ewe up and down the hillsides on the other side of the river….happy hour entertainment, including horseshoes on the “peninsula course”. Greg, do you know what you are wearing? What a tribute to Greg as he put this entire group together!   Presented Cindy with a crown for ALL of her planning and organizing with food for this trip, and assisting Greg with the over-all plans. Kristian read Call of the Wild…..memories of so many other river trips with Bob Krautkramer, Harry DeLashmutt, or Dick Randolph sharing it with the group.  I remember the first time we heard it –  in Alaska in 1977.  And, so, traditions continue!  This was a big night for inscribing our names on the guitar, which will be retired after this trip.  Hand-print in blue on Saint’s head.  Don’s special hat returns.  Dan has the luck of the Irish with his all green beard.  We are lucky kids!)

Last day Chicken salad

5 oz can turkey or chicken, drained
2 T craisins
1 chopped orange
1/4 c shredded cheese
3 T miracle whip-no dead eggs
2 T chopped celery
2 T chopped pecans
Mix

Awesome Captain's  night 15 dinner - Pasta with artichokes, wild mushrooms and lemon

Asparagus-Paremsan Gougeres (appetizer- dinner 15)
 1/4 lb asparagus spears
3/4 c milk
5 T butter, cut into pieces
3/4 c flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
3/4 c grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
1/2 c shredded Gruyere cheese
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Snap off tough ends of asparagus spears. Cut remainders on diagonal into 1/4" pieces. Bring saute pan 3/4 full of salted water to boil. Add asparagus and simmer til just tender. Drain immediately and set aside. In heavy saucepan over med-hi heat, combine milk and butter and bring to boil. As soon as it reaches a boil and butter has melted, remove from heat and add flour, salt and cayenne. Using wooden spoon, beat vigorously til mixture thickens and pulls away from sides of the pan. Remove from heat. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Let cool for 10 min. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper and lightly butter. Add asparagus and all cheese to the dough and stir to mix well. Using a teaspoon, scoop rounded spoonfuls of dough and place 1" apart on baking shets. Bake til golden brown, 20-25 min.



 

September 6-Indian

– from my River Journal, purchased at Marble Canyon Lodge.

By Buzz Holmstrom, first to run the Grand Canyon alone – built his boat and rowed from Green River, Wyoming to the Hoover Dam in 1937

Read by:  Jay Poulter

Camp on right at lower end of rapid – mile 247 with the last bad one above me, The Bad Rapid, Lava Cliff – that I have been looking for – nearly a thousand miles.

            I had thought – once past here – my reward will begin – but now – everything ahead seems kind of empty and I find I have already had my reward – in the doing of the thing – the stars and cliffs and canyons – the roar of the rapids – the moon – the uncertainty – worry – the relief when through each one – the campfires at nite, the real respect and friendship of the river men I met and others.

            This may be my last camp where the roar of a real rapid is echoed from the cliffs around and I can look at the stars and moon only through a narrow slit in the earth.

            The river and canyons have been kind to me – I think my greatest danger is ahead – that I might get swellheaded over this thing – I am going to try to keep my mouth shut about it – go back to work in the old way and have it only for a memory for myself – I have done no one any good and a few people great worry and suffering I know.

            I think this river is not treacherous as has been said – every rapid speaks plainly just what it is and what it will do to a person and a boat in its currents waves boils whirlpools and rocks – if only one will read and listen carefully – it demands respect – and will punish those who do not treat it properly – some places it says – go here safely if you do it just this way – and others it says – do not go here at all with the type of boat you have – but many people will not believe what it says.

            Some people have said “I have conquered the Colorado River “ – I don’t say so – is has never been conquered – and never will I think – anyone who it allows to go through its canyons and see its wonders should feel thankful and privileged.        

            I know I have got more out of this trip by being alone than if a party was along as I have more time – especially at nite – to listen and look and think and wonder about the natural wonders rather than listen to talk of war politics and football scores.

            The River probably thought – he is such a lonesome ignorant unimportant and insignificant pitiful little creature – with such a short time to live that I will let him go this time and try to teach him something – it has been less kind to many prouder people than I.

Another perfect camp, fun, music, a cool spot and great people

 Cooling off on a hot day

 The judges give it a nine!

And Felina did whirl...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVDvXMbKrA  The JAY We Know and Love(Sept 5th)

It doesn't get better than this

(Dan is in the duckie-great that he and Salli joined us.  Teasing Greg that he’s flying out at the helicopter pad.  “How does Mick row his raft with his oars out of the water?” ask Kenny and Kristian. Big cannon ball jumpers off the boats.  I think Cindy wonJ  Music from up on the ledges….Out of the west Texas town of El Paso…Catie says we need to practice!)