Bad Run
Unlike most of my trips in the Grand Canyon, this year we stopped at Phantom Ranch to let hikers off and to meet new guests for the second half. Most often, we simply float by, eschewing the opportunity to call home from the one phone accessible to river runners during the trip. After putting one of Tides’ longtime clients on a mule to ride out (he’s recovering from knee surgery), I called home. No answer. Then I called Ellen Friedman, Tides wonderful EVP, to find out how things were going at the office. Big mistake.
I learned from her that the NY Times had published the story identifying me as the person who purchased the note held by ACORN obligating Dale Rathke to repay money he had stolen 8 years ago. I was shocked, both by the news and by Ellen’s depiction of the deep, unsettling response the news provoked among staff, board members, and among some of our clients and allies. And there was nothing I could do. A line of other river runners was waiting to use the phone, and our hikers, including my daughter, were waiting a half-mile downstream. I simply had to take it in and imagine what was happening back home.
This occurred on the 22nd – day seven of our two week trip. Phantom Ranch sits at the confluence of Bright Angel Creek and the Colorado River in the middle of what is known as the Upper Granite Gorge, a section of the Canyon where the river’s extraordinary erosive power has revealed in one of the few sites on the globe the “metamorphic” rock that underlies our oceans and continents. Formed by the pressure and heat of the earth’s core, the Vishnu Shist is a hard, black, intense rock that erodes at near vertical angles and produces the most challenging rapids of the trip.
Three hours after talking with Ellen, we arrived at Crystal Rapid, one of the most dangerous runs of the trip. After an upper section where one has to avoid a series of huge “holes” (where the main current flows over obstacles below and then recirculates, making passage without flipping a boat highly unlikely), the river then divides around a “rock garden” into two separate channels. It is this rock garden that terrifies people. Already this year, three boats have wrapped on rocks and stranded passengers and crew alike – requiring helicopter rescues and huge effort to extricate them. For a river guide, to go into the rock garden is a failure. It means you made a bad decision, you reacted poorly, you failed to read the water, and you messed up big time. The whole trip is stalled for a day or two during the rescue, and then has to run out the rest of the trip as quickly as possible to make the scheduled take out day at Diamond Creek, 127 miles away.
Dwelling on my call with Ellen while running three major rapids leading up to Crystal, I was distracted and off. And my daughter, having just hiked in, was my passenger. At the scout, I looked very carefully at the “river right” entry to Crystal and the upper part of the rapid because we were running at nearly 20,000 cubic feet per second – nearly twice the level we’ve been seeing over recent years. It’s a different run that I hadn’t done in 5 or 6 years. So I was very careful. But I failed to scout the lower part of the rapid. I didn’t see how at this level the water moved strongly to the right, and to miss the Rock Garden, you had to keep working the boat right as strongly as you can. At lower levels, once through the upper section, you can simply push left and have a clean run, but not at 20,000.
We clambered back into the boats and began to peel off, trying to catch the entry just right. I thought I timed it a little late, and we ended up on the side of one of the big holes, but squeezed through and had a clean run. Whew. Now it was just a matter of choosing to go right or left above the Garden. I’d come out a little more center than the others, so I started to push left in relief we’d made it through.
At the top of the Rock Garden is a rock called “big red” – a huge piece of sandstone that has tumbled down here over the thousands of years from way up on the Rim. As I was pushing left in relief at having gotten through the upper section, I glanced downstream at Big Red and realized that I was floating straight into it. I acted quickly and spun the boat around so I could pull, instead of push, on the oars giving me much more leverage. But pull as I might, the water wanted to go right and my raft, weighing at least half a ton, was losing the bet. I began to curse at myself. How could I have been so stupid?! I was putting my daughter at risk, I was embarrassing myself, I was about to wrap a boat on Big Red like a rookie, private boater, and it was all my fault for not having walked downstream and looked at the water. A simple step that would have given me the information I needed to make a good decision. And, I was terrified.
I stopped pulling on the oars as I looked to both the left and right of Red to see that the left side of the Rock Garden was unrunnable. So was the right, but there was more water going that direction, so I got in a couple of push strokes on the oars – not a lot of leverage, but some, as we bounced into Big Red. Thunk. One more stroke in the water moving to Red’s right, and then we were stopped dead on a large grey rock – perched as they call it. Going nowhere, but somehow the tubes stayed afloat and we didn’t wrap the boat. I recalled the kind of technical moves we use in the Sierras, dipped my right, upstream oar into the fast moving water, and miraculously, we spun off, bounced over several other pour-overs, and were back in the current.
Lessons learned? I could write a book, there have been so many.
Two come immediately to mind: first, confidentiality is largely a 20th century idea that is entirely unreliable in the modern, technical age. My attempts to act personally on my convictions would have been far better done in the full light of day where I could have been clear I was simply trying to help the new leadership of ACORN move on. I created many more difficulties, including with colleagues I hold in the highest esteem, by trying to be anonymous.
Lesson two: never call the office when you are running rapids.