August 28-Lava Canyon (Chuar)

– Jay read about the rain: 

“Suddenly I notice that a storm is coming from the south.  I seek a shelter in the rocks; but when the storm bursts, it comes down as a flood from the heavens, not with gentle drops at first, slowly increasing in quantity, but as if suddenly poured out.”  Powell was drenched, almost washed away.  Half an hour later the clouds had passed, the sun shone again, and Powell started his downhill climb.  Desert thunderstorms are unlike anything familiar in more evenly watered regions of the globe.

  “People die in Chubascos (the proper term for what are commonly called monsoons”” writes the natural historian Craig Childs, “when twenty minutes earlier they didn’t even think there would be weather.  Most of a year’s precipitation can easily be unloaded in six minutes, while one mile away the ground might not even be dampened.”  The storms truly come out of the blue, often in groups “like packs of feral dogs” and then they vanish as suddenly as they appeared. 

The rains bring floods.  “The waters that fall, during a rain, on these steep rocks, are gathered at once into the river,” Powell noted, awestruck. “They could scarcely be poured in more suddenly, if some vast spout ran from the clouds to the stream itself.”  Tiny streams that an eight-year-old could hop over become angry rivers.  A pickup truck parked in a dusty, eroded gulch can suddenly be swept away like a twig blasted by a fire hose.     

“I have stood in the middle of a broad sandy wash with not a trickle of moisture to be seen anywhere, sunlight pouring down on me and on the flies and ants and lizards, the sky above perfectly clear,” the writer Edward Abbey recalled, “listening to a queer vibration in the air and in the ground under my feet….like a freight train coming down the grade very fast---and looked up to see a wall of water tumble around a bend and surge toward me.” 

In canyons, the flood system plays out at its most dramatic.  “Canyons are basically nets that catch water,” Childs explains. “Branches and fingers and tributaries scour the land above, sending everything down, so that when a storm passes, all of its rainwater is driven toward a single point.  Water can run from tens of miles down hundreds of feeder canyons, spilling into deeper and deeper, fewer and fewer canyons until the volume of the flood has jumped exponentially into one final chasm where everything converges.”

Rain muddied the Little Colorado, but did not stop our hike up and float down

New friends keep us close to the fire

(Little Colorado visit – where’s the blue water?  And, then there was wind….lots of wind.  Took a walk with our headlights, as Kenny and Kristian had found a cave to share with us.  Jen’s SL-UT shirt was a hit!  The canyon is changing – wider, more layered, increased dimensions side to side, not the steep walls of Marble Canyon where we began this journey.  All the chairs blew over!)