Chapter 48

March 24 - April 5, 2001

The Park Service Trip

A couple days later, Al drove Karin, Crystal, and Scooter up to Lee's Ferry for the Park Service trip. Two motor rigs from different companies were rigging on the ramp when they arrived. "You three have fun," Al said. "Just plan on washing that gas smell off when you get back."

The trip was unusual in a number of ways. It was very cheap for a Canyon trip; the motor rig companies provided the rafts at essentially cost, which was gas, food, trucking the rafts to the put in and take out, and other base expenses. Even the trip leader was going for free, but was getting the course as part of the deal. Since everyone on the trip was a boatman, except for a few people from the Park Service, the deal was that people would share out the running of the rafts, and of course everyone would pitch in with the chores.

While Crystal, Scooter and Karin had seen motor rigs before, it was the first time any of them had been on one. They were huge, compared to what they were used to -- twice as long, with a center section as wide as the oar rafts and sitting up considerably higher to boot. Since the center section was relatively narrow and unstable, a huge rubber side tube was lashed on each side of the center portion for stability and to raise the waterline some. Gear was piled high in the center section, and covered with a tarp; the passengers sat on a bench seat alongside the gear pile. Called an S-rig, it was powered by a thirty-five-horsepower Honda four-stroke outboard, set in a large open well at the back of the center section. Karin remembered early S-rigs when she'd made her first trip down the river back in the seventies, and remembered that you could smell the exhaust for miles and hear them about as far. In the years she'd been gone, Al had told them, the smelly, noisy two-strokes had been universally replaced with the four-strokes, which were a huge improvement, if not perfect -- Al, of course, considered no engine at all to be perfect.

As things were getting settled in, they discovered with not a little surprise that one of the two motor rig boatmen was Jim, the guy who had swamped for them as a pickup the previous fall. Scooter remembered her musings down in the Bahamas, and decided that if the chance came up on this trip, she'd try to get to know him a little better, although that might not involve bushes, considering the company they were taking with them.

Ever since she'd been in the Canyon, Scooter had joked that she "Couldn't tell a Kaibab limestone from a Tapeats sandstone if either one of them bit me on the ass." As people were still showing up, she made the happy mistake of making that wisecrack to a rather rough-looking but healthy guy, who proved to be the geologist of the trip. He told her that he'd try to fix that.

He made a good try. The geology of the Canyon is interesting and very complicated. It's moderately logical for about a third of the way down, where newer layers of rock overlay older ones, and the river progressively gets into older rock as it gets downstream. Below that it's more complicated, with a series of folds, faults, upthrusts, unconformities, and whatnot, all conspiring to make things more confusing and often debatable, even to the professional. One of them, they learned, is the age and order and process of the canyon-cutting itself. "There are things you can get geologists arguing so bad over," the geologist told them, "That they end up throwing rocks at each other."

It was an intensive cram course in Canyon geology, and at one point the guy, who proved to be a college professor, got samples of Kaibab limestone, Tapeats sandstone, and a few other samples, and pointed out the differences to Scooter; it was obvious when she saw them. "Well, hell, there's a line I won't be able to use again."

Crystal and Scooter had figured that it would be hard to top Norma Dieshu as an expert on Canyon Native American history, but the old Hopi chief who came along on the trip had her pretty well beat. One time, Scooter happened to mention Norma's name to him, and he lit up -- he knew her he said, and yes, she was quite knowledgeable for such a youngster.

There were several others -- natural history experts, a hydrologist, a man from the Park Service itself who was an expert on the recorded history of the Canyon. He was absolutely fascinating to listen to, for he could make a very informative, dramatic, and interesting presentation. Among other things, he just about knew John Wesley Powell's journal entries from memory, and several others, as well -- and when he quoted Powell it was almost like taking a trip back in time. It turned out that he'd taken several courses at the Park Service Interpretive Center in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia and had even taught there for a while. On thinking about it, Scooter thought she remembered him from high school, when a class had taken a field trip to Harper's Ferry, and had been enthralled by the story of John Brown's last stand in the engine house. The guy was so good that it was almost as if they were there. He may well have been that man; when she asked him, he said yes, he used to get called down from the Interpretive Center to help out the park staff when they got busy, and he'd given that talk a few times.

Since this group was virtually all raft guides with no regular customers, everyone was expected to pitch in with the chores, which included running the raft. Scooter knew a thing or two about outboard motors, even though she'd not had much to do with them since high school, and figured it would be pretty straight forward. It didn't help that the raft handled about like a hog on skates, and thirty-five horsepower was nowhere near enough to bully it. Randy had once likened an oar raft to driving a concrete truck on an icy road; this was worse. The raft had no keel, which made it relatively easy to get to turning, but once turning it didn't want to stop. It would also start turning whenever it took a mind to; keeping it straight was an adventure and not a sure thing. Scooter learned it firsthand when they hit 60-Mile rapids below Nankoweap, a tiddler that she hardly ever even told passengers to hang on for unless they were screwing around. But something happened as she went through the wave train, the raft decided it wanted to swap ends and no amount of power would straighten it out. They wound up bouncing off a sidewall and spinning around the other way before she could get it straight, with Jim laughing his ass off.

It could have been worse, and it was. A woman from one of the motor rig outfits was running the raft when they hit Nevills, the second rapid in Upper Granite Gorge and one of the lesser ones. But there's a rock right in the middle of the wave train that Scooter remembered being told to avoid right from her first trip. Scooter was looking the other way when it happened, but apparently the motor hit an underwater rock as they were going down the tongue of the drop, while the woman was struggling with the 'jackass arm' to raise the motor. This not only bent the prop, it bent the handle of the motor and made the throttle impossible to use -- and she was knocked out of position as well. In the confusion the raft got sideways and rode right up over that rock in the wave train. They could feel it bump against the downstream side tube, then scrunch ever so slowly on the center section. For an awful instant there, Scooter thought they were going to get pinned with the upstream rail down, a sure recipe for a flip, unless there wasn't enough water under them. She could hear everyone on the S-rig breathe a sigh of relief as the raft bumped the rest of the way over rock, then scrape past the upstream side tube to free them.

That was a relief, but the raft was still essentially out of control with the motor jammed on running at a fairly high power. With some struggling Jim and the woman were able to get the raft nosed into shore, where he had to yank out the fuel line to shut the outboard off. They carried a spare motor for such happenstance, and it turned out that motor rig crews could change them out very quickly; in ten minutes or so they were on their way.

Trying to rebuild her confidence, the same woman was running the raft when they got to Hance, a few miles downstream. This was one of the big three rapids, and Scooter was interested in seeing how this big mother would get through it. They pulled in to scout it, always a good idea, and then settled down to run it. The raft was so big that it tended to burrow through some waves, but there just weren't very many waves that threatened them on hydraulics alone. Halfway down the complex, roaring rapid the raft got away from the woman -- Scooter had no idea why, it was just that the raft took it in its head that it didn't want to go straight. They spun most of the way around, bounced the stern off a side wall, spun around the other way, went over a small drop sideways, bounced the stern off the other side wall, spun completely around the other way before she could get it under control and send it down what little remained of the rapids nose first. The whole raft got washed out pretty good; Scooter, Crystal and Karin were grateful that the combination of Upper Granite Gorge, the fact that the ride on a motor rig was wetter than they'd imagined considering the size of the thing, and a cold, overcast, windy day had caused them all to wear wet suits, because they indeed got wet.