Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 36: Down the West’s Grandest Canyon | The American West About this episode With its many diverse, stupendous landscapes and public lands, the West has long been a region of bucket list adventures. A descent down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon has always been near the top of the list for almost everybody. Here’s what it’s like.
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1:45 Speaker 02 What John Wesley Powell accomplished first in the 1870s float the length of the Grand Canyon you can do today. And it's still the Western wildlands experience of a lifetime. I'm Dan Florys, and this is The American West.
2:22 Speaker 02 Down the West's grandest canyon.
2:27 Speaker 02 Our personal motives for experiences in the American West have always been many. Some of us move west or relocate within the West for a new start in life. Some come to seek wealth and become rich. Some of us are lured westward because everything from scenery to wild animals is new and exciting. But in a region of America where the landscapes are supersized and grand eloquent, the rivers mysterious and even furious, the animals often large and occasionally dangerous, the human search for adventure has forever been a part of the West's mystique.
3:07 Speaker 02 From hunting buffalo on yellow grasslands under a dome of blue, to making an ascent of every one of Colorado's 53 official 14,000-foot mountain peaks, the possible interactions with the Western world are colored by the excitement of living large. It's entirely possible to reside in the West or come to the West and spend your days checking account balances, watching sports, sitting in front of a computer screen, or endlessly scrolling on your phone, but you can still be your own personal version of Amelia Earhart or Bob Marshall here. The West's wildlands and rivers offer adventures enough for several lifetimes.
3:53 Speaker 02 I've lived in the West and in different parts of it almost all my adult life. Luckily, with good health, a strong constitution, and since I'm a biped, a propensity for seeing the world around me from on foot. So like a lot of us, I've hauled a pack into many of the remote corners of the West to be able to breathe the champagne air of the heights of ranges like the Winds, the Tetons, and the Sierra Nevadas, or pass into sleep as a juniper fire pops and hisses while the Escalante River whaxes lyrical feet away.
4:29 Speaker 02 I'm not quite as addicted to seeing the West by river as many Western adventurers I've known, but I have canoed the White Cliffs of the Upper Missouri, shot through the rapids of Cataract Canyon and Canyonlands National Park, descended the canyons of the Rio Grande and Big Bend, soloed in inflatable kayaks through Idaho's giant wildernesses on the Snake and the Salmon, and paddled a raft for 12 days down the Hula Hula River through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at the top of Alaska. But with strong competition from the Hula Hula and Anwar, no wildlands trip I've done
5:09 Speaker 02 so far has been quite the equal of that top tier of all Western adventures: a two-and-a-half-week descent by rubber raft of the Colorado River through America's grandest canyon. I've hiked the Grand Canyon on foot, and while nothing remotely like walking the park rider Kevin Fedarko's year-long trek down the length of the canyon with a buddy, that rim-to-rim passage from south rim to north rim over the course of a day isn't a bad taste. You get some 24 miles of trail through spectacular canyon scenery and an ever-changing ecology,
5:54 Speaker 02 plus a combined 10,000-plus feet of elevation change for your trouble. Even that, however, pales against the wildlands rhythms that come with descending the river through this magnificent canyon day after day after day. Knowing what's looming ahead, but not knowing, because of course, every descent through a canyon like this is new and fresh.
6:28 Speaker 02 I've long been in the habit of taking a little notebook and a couple of pens with me to record immediate firsthand accounts of wildlands trips. Here then, is what one Grand Canyon descent was like. September the 26th. Rafting the Grand Canyon has to be high on the bucket list of half the people who live in the American West and a good percentage of those who are from elsewhere. I'm not sure exactly when it climbed close to the top of mine, but I do know that my first readings of Rod Nash's Wilderness in the American Mind and Ed Abbey's Desert
7:09 Speaker 02 Solitaire had the idea teasing my consciousness way back in the 1970s. I've been telling myself I would do this trip for a very long time, and with university life out of the way, the time has come. I'm at this very moment on the banks of the Colorado River, our party of 14 having launched into the Grand Canyon from Lee's Ferry mid-morning today. Everyone on this adventure is connected in some way to Betsy Rogers, a New York patron of the arts and biographer of Central Park, who's had a lifelong dream of rafting the Grand Canyon.
7:53 Speaker 02 We're all from Santa Fe, New York, or London. This is no applying for a permit and waiting 15 years kind of trip. We're on the sort of guided rafting excursion most people get to do in the Grand Canyon these days. So in addition to our 14, there are river guides and boatmen, starting with Krista Sadler of Flagstaff, a veteran of this trip and many others in the West, who's our guide. The boatmen include John, originally from Kentucky but now of Durango, who rows one of the oar rafts. Ally, who is a nurse in her day job, rows one of the passenger rafts and is also from Flagstaff.
8:37 Speaker 02 Greg, a former National Park Service archaeologist from Las Cruces, pilots the fourth raft. Gearboat rowers are Chris from California and Marcus, a Navajo from Bluff, Utah, who's rowing the canyon for the first time. So our whole party is 20-strong. The guests are a willing group, no question, a majority of whom have done wilderness river trips. But there are some folks among us who have barely ever camped or done outdoor things of any sort. For them, this is a bit like never having left home to travel, then landing wide-eyed
9:18 Speaker 02 in Paris for a first try in a new place. We've made camp on a high bank on the east side of the river well before sunset this afternoon to give everyone a chance to sort through tents and gear and find their spots within a bankside grove of willows. Most of the people on this trip are couples. I'm traveling solo myself, and as is my inclination, camp a bit apart from the rest. Dinner setup followed the plan of most river trips like this, with everyone helping fashion a public space so we could eat and drink and get to know one another.
9:58 Speaker 02 Because even if you know someone in the city, you don't yet know them on a long, multi-day river trip like this. September 27th and 28th. We made 17 river miles down from Lee's Ferry two days ago on a first day on the river with fine sunshine accompanying us. But the normally turquoise Colorado was brown and muddy as we set out today, and soon enough we found out why. The first fall storms of the year often drop around the autumnal equinox, and sure enough,
10:38 Speaker 02 today a weather system hit with much cooler temperatures, and not long after we'd pulled over for lunch, then set out downstream again, rain began to fall. That shortened the day's float on a Colorado river that took us into a great many early trip rapids in what's called the roaring twenties, and finally to a camp at mile 28. While we were dining and the river rolled timelessly past us, bighorn sheep worked carefully through the rocks nearby.
11:13 Speaker 02 Like day two, today's day three started with sun obscuring cloudiness. It gradually became a lovely descent through narrowing canyon cliffs. Although at Redwall Cavern, where we stopped for lunch, light mist fell through the sunlight to produce a kind of gossamer magic of scores of tiny rainbows. I overheard this snippet of conversation nearby this morning.
11:43 Speaker 02 So it's not just a tent, it's a tent without national public radio.
11:54 Speaker 02 September the 29th.
12:00 Speaker 02 It's daybreak of day four, and at the moment, everyone is outside their tents to gaze on an arcing rainbow that's formed over the canyon in the light morning rain. Today is beginning with overcast and light rain. It ought to clear up soon, I think. By now, the classic rhythms of a river trip have set in, and the first three days down the Colorado are already running together in my mind. I remember it being hot and sunny as we started down the river, although it hasn't been like that since. But this system, which clearly dumped some significant rains up the tributaries to the west of us by the looks of the river this morning, shows every sign of retreating now.
12:44 Speaker 02 As an indication of how the days are already beginning to bleed one into the next, I forgot to mention here that soon after lunch on our first day, I spotted the gliding black form of a California condor circling through the intense blue, higher up than the rim above us and ascending with each circle. But the forward cant of the wing set and the white stripes running from body to wing tips on their forward edge made us know this was a bird not seen before. A condor with its nearly 10-foot wingspan is a worthy sighting in a canyon this grand.
13:30 Speaker 02 This trip entire will include 16 days on the river, so we're really just underway. Camping now at mile 39, not yet out of Marble Canyon. Today, we're going to float past a proposed dam site from plans back in the 1960s, when Uber engineer Floyd Dominey and the Bureau of Reclamation were designing a reservoir some 40 miles long in this part of the Grand Canyon. I've had students at the University of Montana read about this almost incomprehensible attempt to compromise one of America's grandest national parks.
14:11 Speaker 02 But I've not confronted Dominey's plans in the flesh like this until now. This part of the national park, Marble Canyon, is a gorgeous red rock marvel. A reservoir here is an even more horrifying thing to contemplate when you actually witness firsthand the beauty of this canyon. It's brick red, multi-layered, and deepening and narrowing by the mile. During slack moments in camps, I'm reading John Wesley Powell's account of his first descent of the Colorado River in the early 1870s. But right now, in my progression through his narrative, he's still up in Echo Park,
14:55 Speaker 02 far upstream of where we are on the river. September 30th. It's day five on the Colorado, and we're camped beneath the famous Granary View, an iconic scene looking down the winding river that's so famous, it's actually on the Arizona Quarter. It's the southwestern version of the view of the Tetons with the Snake River coiling below their jagged peaks up in the Northern Rockies. We hiked up 1,500 feet or so to the Granary Ruin itself yesterday late, and I shot probably
15:36 Speaker 02 too many photos of this scene, but the setting sun reflecting onto the water from the last cliff face at the end of the view was mesmerizing, changing repeatedly as the sun dropped.
15:50 Speaker 02 We're at mile 53 now, about 20% through the 230 total river miles of this trip. We had calm waters and lovely floating yesterday, but the river water is like chocolate sludge from the storm runoff out of side canyons like that of Pariah Creek. As we raft through rapids, the spray spatters every inch of us and the boats with latte-colored spots that simply won't wipe off. It's impossible to bathe or wash your hair in the river lest you become a permanent mudhead. While we drifted in the current yesterday, though, a pair of coyotes hunting for mice
16:32 Speaker 02 along the right bank paid no attention whatsoever to a flotilla of colorful rubber rafts spiraling by. The skies having cleared, we're getting glimpses through the cliffs of a waxing moon well up in the afternoons and just now beginning to bathe the canyon in silver light before it sets. It's going to be full in a few days and no doubt still up in morning skies until we're off the river. Throughout yesterday's descent, we continued to pass the high bore holes of the Marble Canyon Dam once proposed for this section of the park.
17:14 Speaker 02 Teddy Roosevelt's line about how humans could in no way improve this canyon should thus leave it as the ages had fashioned it came to mind every time I saw one of these initial, very real attempts to transform this sandstone cathedral into something unrecognizable. It was significantly cooler on the river this morning. Everyone was bundled up against the instant chill of the icy river spray, but we're clearly in a warmer ecology at least now with mesquite trees and catclaws appearing along the banks. I rode in the raft with Ally yesterday.
17:55 Speaker 02 She's a long-distance runner and a climber and waxes romantic about the climbers in Yosemite who she refers to as "dirtbag climbers." That would seem a slight. In fact, it's high praise.
18:13 Speaker 02 October the 1st.
18:17 Speaker 02 I woke before daybreak this morning to see Venus and Jupiter in the dawn sky on day six of our adventure. Yesterday, we emerged from Marble Canyon and soon came to the mouth of the Little Colorado, which enters the main river on its left bank. Here we saw for 45 minutes to bask in the bright sunshine, and that gave me a chance to walk a mile or so up the bed of this famous tributary before we loaded up in the rafts and began swinging around to the west and into the big soaring Grand Canyon proper. The Little Colorado was not running its classic turquoise, in fact was even redder and muddier than the mainstream.
19:01 Speaker 02 Helicopter overflight tours now began appearing overhead as we approached the developed south rim of Grand Canyon National Park. At lunch yesterday, Krista led about half the party on a canyon ascent back up into the Kaibab Formation's watermelon, through which the Colorado long ago cut its present course. We passed the Tapetez Formation and the Bright Angel Shale via a steep handhole climb, saw 1.7 billion year old fossilized Sinobacteria Boulder near a major fracture fault atop
19:42 Speaker 02 the Divide, then descended a gradual stream bed down another canyon to our river camp, where the rest of the party had already set up for the night. This was another fine beach campsite beneath looming red walls with a nearby rapid providing an oral background. I sleep deeply with river sand beneath me and the rising and ebbing of a nearby rapid. I can tell at breakfast that most of us are falling into that rhythm. The rapid near camp had another meaning, too. On this sixth morning in the first day of October, we face big rapids,
20:24 Speaker 02 including Hans Rapid, a Class 10 on a river that has redefined whitewater classification to include 10 categories rather than 5. Wild rides are in store today as we drop into the deep gorge of the Grand Canyon. The weather is now entirely cleared, but it's still cool, and the rapids today require a full splash outfit to stay warm against these frigid waters out of Lake Powell. The Colorado is still too muddy to wash your hair in, although most of us bathed yesterday despite the swirling marl. My reading material now has John Wesley Powell below today's Dinosaur National Monument.
21:10 Speaker 02 His party is traversing the canyons on the east side of the Uinta Mountains, Bound for Desolation Canyon. We've planned 20 miles of river travel today, from the river miles in the 60s to those in the 80s, as we have to be at Phantom Ranch on October 2, where two more members of our party are hiking from the south rim down the South Kaibab Trail to join us at the ranch. As everyone has been suiting up for the rapids, I've continued reading Powell this morning, tracking him through what he calls "The Land of Standing Rocks", present Canyonland's National Park, through Labyrinth Canyon to the Greens Junction with the Grand
21:55 Speaker 02 to create the full Colorado River. Down from there, they're in Cataract Canyon, and Powell begins discussing whether they might encounter at some point a fall too violent to run with walls too steep to land and portage. Their barometer shows they have thousands of feet left to descend to sea level. I'll snatch quick reads of Powell for the rest of the trip. On numerous occasions, I've looked down canyon and wondered how much anxiety it must have created to run a river like this, through canyons like this, with absolutely no sense of what might lie ahead.
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23:08 Speaker 04 Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Hunting trips, remote cabins, quiet mornings in the woods. Places people go to get away, but instead, get more than they bargained for.
23:23 Speaker 05 And then all of a sudden, my buddy is radioing back and saying, you know, we're hit. Bring guns.
23:29 Speaker 06 I believe someone at the cabin knew something happened to Noel.
23:33 Speaker 07 Who throws their dead family member in a suburban and drives him straight to the funeral home? The husband of this dead wife immediately calling his mistress from the funeral home. When Brian finally gave up the body, his body was found on my turkey lease.
23:49 Speaker 04 So for four, or five, or six years, I sat probably within 100 yards of Mike's body. Murder, disappearance, betrayal, and questions that refuse to stay buried. I'm Jordan Sillers, and this is Blood Trails. Get season three now, wherever you listen to podcasts. Plus, check out the brand new Blood Trails TV YouTube channel. There, you can find video versions of every episode, that feature images from each story, recorded interviews, maps, and much more. We'll also be dropping bonus content between seasons, so make sure you're subscribed. That's at Blood Trails TV on YouTube.
24:36 Speaker 02 October the 2nd.
24:39 Speaker 02 Hans Rapid yesterday was a twisting, yanking, thunderous Class 10 that got everyone's pay attentioner dialed up to full game. But accompanied by whoops of exultation, all the rafts got through unscathed. Then, an early float this morning through the brown and black shifts of the Grand Canyon Gorge got us to Phantom Ranch before 9:30. Here, we picked up Betsy's 30-something sons, lolled around picturesque little Phantom Ranch, where Bright Angel Creek bounces down from the north rim with its clear water and cottonwood canopy, and got ready for more big rapids.
25:23 Speaker 02 Horn Creek Rapid, with really big waves, looms just ahead. It's now mid-afternoon, and we're camped at about mile 93 at the top of Granite Falls Rapid, whose thunder absolutely fills the oral space of this camp. From Phantom Ranch, I sent a card to Sarah, who's buried in the fall semester teaching her university classes up in Utah, telling her all was well, and I now know how this canyon became grand. Mail is still call out of Phantom by Burrows, but Burrow Mail is efficient enough that she should get my card within three or four days. I'm sitting on the beach with a handful of others of our group this afternoon, drinking
26:08 Speaker 02 beer and reading Powell, whose venture into the unknown 150 years ago is catching up with our present location. Today is day seven on the river. Tomorrow, we're halfway through the canyon.
26:26 Speaker 02 October the 3rd. It was a gorgeous, clear night last night and calm and lovely this morning. Day eight of our journey. With cold air settled into the deep gorge, it was a little chilly in the tent last night. We've got a Category 9 Rapid soon after we start today, and another 9 and our second 10, Crystal Rapid, in the first 5 miles today. Crystal Rapid is at mile 99, and we need to make about mile 113 for camp tonight to be halfway down the river in terms of distance. I'm well and healthy, happy, very alive and present on this adventure.
27:09 Speaker 02 And an adventure is what it is. Ours may be without the mystery of Powell's descent, but that one can still travel the length of the Grand Canyon, means an enormous piece of high drama America is still there for the asking. One of our group I've struck up a friendship with is a quite famous actor named Mark Rylance, who's managed a sabbatical from a movie he's filming with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, working title "Bridge of Spies." Mark's prime directive for the trip: "Don't get sunburned." Mark, Marcus Buck, our Navajo boatman, and I spent much of the evening in conversation last night.
27:53 Speaker 02 Mark's career has primarily been as a stage actor, which led us into a long discussion about the actual identity of William Shakespeare. In Mark's opinion, Shakespeare's plays weren't written by an individual, but by a committee of writers directed by Francis Bacon. Somehow, that topic veered into the peyote religion—I'm not quite sure how— which further digressed to Marcus's account of the discovery of a skeleton in comb wash near his Utah home that some thought might be the remains of Everett Ruas, the young vagabond for beauty who disappeared into the Colorado Plateau country more than a century ago.
28:39 Speaker 02 I'm enjoying both these guys and our long, late-night digressions as the river murmurs by.
28:47 Speaker 02 Krista once again wants me in the front of her lead boat today to help provide an extra safety net for some of the group that's riding with her. I'm concluding that this is one of the great experiences of my life.
29:07 Speaker 02 October the 4th.
29:10 Speaker 02 On the morning of day nine, we're at a terrific camp, my favorite one so far, in the sand of 110 mile rapid. Yesterday was another day of running big daunting class nine and 10 rapids, including Granite and Crystal, the latter a rapid famous for upsetting boats and sending swimmers downstream into a rock garden. And as we watched from shore, damned at the very first boat from another party didn't end up capsized in the big waves of Crystal. Our boats, however, all got through safely, although Ally did lose an oar. The weather remains calm and sunny and gorgeous.
29:51 Speaker 02 This was a moon camp open to the sky, although we're still in the Upper Gorge with its black schists and narrow canyon and rapid water. But the canyon spread out here and the waxing moon bathed us and the spot in a beautiful moonlight last night. Once again, had a late night confab with Marcus, Mark, and David, one of the new additions to the group at Phantom Ranch, who lives in Manhattan and is also an actor. We have only one big rapid coming up today, but there's a promised hike to one of the river's fairyland alcoves, Elves Chasm.
30:36 Speaker 02 October the 5th.
30:39 Speaker 02 This is day 10 in the Grand Canyon and it's breaking at a splendid camp on the right bank at mile 118, which means we made only eight miles yesterday. We stopped to caress schist polished smooth by water, then scouted Waltonburg Rapid, while the other party that flipped the boat yesterday, kids from Colorado and Bozeman, never bothered, just crashed through the rapid on every line imaginable and somehow stayed upright.
31:13 Speaker 02 By the time we got to Elves Chasm at mile 117, we were out of the Upper Gorge and back into the Tapete Sandstone and the Redwall formations. I must prefer this section aesthetically to the Black Granite Gorge that so lights up the geologist among us. The falls and pools at Elves were magnificent, and we all jumped into the cool, clear water. Returning to camp, we saw five bighorns, and Marcus played his flute for them to their utter astonishment.
31:47 Speaker 02 Friends from Santa Fe, who've been setting up a tent near me, Robert and Jackie, invited me to share a flask of 25-year-old Scotch while we were fashioning our camp this afternoon. That whiskey was smooth, smoky, delicious.
32:04 Speaker 02 We had a fine dinner and camaraderie around the campsite in the twilight of the evening today, while Marcus told us his skinwalker story of a Navajo family attempting a cure with a peyote ceremony when he was 13 years old, during which the entire family, he said, grew sharp, pointy teeth. Whoever isn't mesmerized by a story like that as the River of the West murmurs by and red cliffs soar overhead, isn't tuned into life. We have a big hike coming today, and there's still 108 miles of river left to descend and only six and a half days to do it.
32:53 Speaker 02 October the 6th.
32:57 Speaker 02 This is day 11 and follows another silvery moonlit night. A perfect flawless sky morning is going. We're just above Dubendorf Rapid, and the abyss has yawned at us throughout the night.
33:12 Speaker 02 We're camped at River Mile 132 with five and a half days of travel left. There were two prize moments yesterday. One was getting to ascend the wonderful slot canyon and the tapete sandstone of Black Tail Canyon. It was narrow, deep, and ended in a pour-off cascade into a small pool. I was the first in, so had it to myself for a couple of minutes. Then some of the women, including Krista, tried out the ringing acoustics of the place with song. Some of them a song for the Colorado River film several of our group are working on.
33:53 Speaker 02 Moment number two took place in the moonlight last night when several of us learned a peyote song Marcus taught us. The song was quick to master, and singing it in the moonlight somehow made you feel remarkably fine. The flask full of premium El Tesoro's silver tequila I'd brought on the trip no doubt contributed. The song went like this. Yahah huwee nini yohana. Yahah huwee nini huwee yohana. But now we're donning splash gear in preparation for heading down the river again with a Class
34:33 Speaker 02 IX Rapid for an immediate warm-up to another day on this roaring river. October the 7th. This is day 12 of life in the Grand Canyon and we're at mile 138 with nearly 90 miles to do over the next four days. But the river is running faster here and our hikes are growing fewer. Knowing I was writing a biography of one of the West's most famous and malign native animals, the coyote, some of the party prevailed on me to tell a few coyote stories after dinner last night.
35:16 Speaker 02 After which Marcus and Mark and I sat on a rock and sampled the weed someone brought and drank the dregs of my tequila flask while coyotes howled most appropriately, we thought.
35:29 Speaker 02 Yesterday's highlight was Deer Creek Falls. A straight plunge of eighty feet into a blue pool. The force of the water on impact so hard you couldn't stand beneath it. Followed then by the climb some of us made up to the patio, several hundred feet higher in the cliffs above. The patio features a winding creek, pools, and falls beneath cottonwoods and cliffs. With eighteen rafts and a dory tied off on the river below this spot, though, there were too many people up there. And the climb featured one of those narrow ledges with two spots maybe twenty-five
36:10 Speaker 02 feet long where the cliff face bends over and wants to push you off and into certain expiration in the waters of the roaring defile fifty feet below. It was a dicey little passage. We have Havasu Creek with pools and falls of turquoise-blue waters coming up today at mile one fifty-seven. The main river, though, continues ruddy red. October the eighth. It's day thirteen. We've been in the Grand Canyon almost two weeks, and we're once again breaking into morning twilight with the roar of a rapid.
36:52 Speaker 02 This river has dominated our intake of sound so long now, I can hardly imagine silence. Every act for two weeks has transpired enveloped in the sound of rushing waters. The sheer immensity of this canyon has also become a constant presence in the psychology of the trip. How long can these cliffs and rapids continue, for Christ's sake? This canyon is the biggest thing I've ever experienced. On some otherworldly Jupiter-like scale, it's almost impossible to hold in the mind as a single piece, as one landform.
37:30 Speaker 02 We're camped on limestone ledges in the Malvi Formation on the right bank at mile 159, a couple of miles below the confluence with Havasu Creek. The day was a little disappointing. The sky was overcast, obscuring both sun and moon, and making the day too cool to ascend Havasu Creek by swimming up it, which was the general plan. The biggest rapid on the river, Lava Falls, now remains our only major obstacle to a safe and successful descent. We'll get to it this afternoon and run it either today or in the morning. Krista has again asked for me in her boat for this rapid.
38:13 Speaker 02 She's run Lava more than anyone here, and we'll go first to see how it goes. As we rafted downriver, there were asks that I tell more coyote stories. I'd related the Orpheus-like nest purse story called Coyote and the Shadow People to the group the night before. There's an awful lot of pathos in that story.
38:46 Speaker 02 October 9th. It's daybreak on day 14 in a camp on the beach just below Lava Falls Rapid. Huge masses of black lava protrude from the cliff behind my tent. We're now at mile 180 with 47 river miles to go to take out. So, our biggest rapid and biggest test is behind us. We floated 22 miles under cool, overcast conditions yesterday with a lunch stop and a hike in National Canyon to set us up to run Lava Falls Rapid as a last act before camping last night. I was in Krista's lead boat, and I'm obliged to comment
39:31 Speaker 02 that I've never been in a rapid as big as Lava. It's quick and over in seconds, but it's enormous, with troughs that can devour you and waves curling 10 to 12 feet overhead. Hell of an adrenaline rush. All six of our rafts got through without mishap, though, so we ate steaks and broke out the bucket of stupid vodka and fruit juice to celebrate. Stupidity was rewarded as Old Man America Coyote smiled on us and yodeled, and a stunner of a double rainbow formed over Lava Falls as we drank. Clearer weather and a calm float await us today.
40:16 Speaker 02 Three decent rapids, two sevens and an eight come up tomorrow, but that's about it till we get to takeout on the morning of day 16.
40:29 Speaker 02 October the 10th.
40:33 Speaker 02 It's our 15th day in the Grand Canyon and our last full day. We'll make our final camp at about mile 222 tonight to set us up for takeout the next day. Presently, we're somewhere around mile 200. Yesterday, I rode alone with Marcus in the baggage boat all day, standing up behind him for much of it, a fine way to see the river and the canyon. Marcus and I had a splendid day hanging out and talking, during which he told me this story, which was as appropriate a way to bring this adventure to a close as I could imagine.
41:14 Speaker 02 Among the Indian and white homes of Bluff, Utah, where Marcus lives, a particular coyote had been causing trouble, killing sheep, chasing pets, attracting attention to itself. Bluff is a town of about 350 people, and like towns big and small in America these days, it has resident coyotes. Occasionally, one becomes a problem. So the DNA chapter leadership asked Marcus if he couldn't hunt down this coyote and take it out.
41:47 Speaker 02 A few mornings later, Marcus was in his truck on the edge of town, bouncing slowly along a dirt road, his rifle in the gun rack behind his head, when out of the waist-high sagebrush, a coyote steps into the road no more than 25 feet away. Marcus braked to a stop. The dust from the truck tires rose into the air, briefly obscured the coyote, then settled. The coyote was still there, standing broadside to the truck. Marcus reached behind him and grasped his rifle. At that moment, we were floating through a calm, Mojave Desert-looking stretch of the Grand Canyon on the way to our final camp.
42:32 Speaker 02 Crenulated black lava flows and irregular dikes and blobs of lava decorated both banks of the river. The rest of our group was bobbing along in five yellow craft downstream of us. I was sitting behind Marcus, so couldn't see his face as he described what happened then. This coyote walks nonchalantly right in front of me in the road, looks at me, sees the rifle. Then you know what he does? He yawns right in my face, kind of stretches. Then he turns to look back where he had come from, and I hear coyote's howl a ways back.
43:15 Speaker 02 So he raises his nose, throws back his head, and howls back at them. I've got my hand on the stock of the rifle, but I still haven't pulled it down. Now he stops howling, turns back to me, looks straight as can be right at me for probably half a minute. Then he strolls casually across the road in no hurry at all, as if he knew something about me. So you never shot? I'd known how this was gonna go. No, I never even got the gun down. He was just too damn nonchalant, too confident, something. And I didn't know for sure if it was the coyote everybody was looking for,
43:59 Speaker 02 but you know something, even if it was, I wouldn't have shot. That coyote was so cool-looking, so perfect. He was way too pretty to shoot. I nodded. Marcus had obviously experienced one of those sympathetic moments with the world. It was a moment of animal to animal mutual understanding and identification. Moments like that can be unforgettable because the shared dialogue of body language isn't getting filtered by the cultural thoughts in our heads by loaded language. Both see the other for who he is.
44:42 Speaker 02 It was exactly the kind of story you want to tell or hear after more than two weeks in a place like the Grand Canyon of the American West.
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45:31 Speaker 04 Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Hunting trips, remote cabins, quiet mornings in the woods. Places people go to get away, but instead get more than they bargained for.
45:46 Speaker 05 And then all of a sudden, my buddy is radioing back and saying, you know, we're hit, bring guns.
45:52 Speaker 06 I believe someone at the cabin knew something happened to Noah.
45:55 Speaker 07 Who throws their dead family member in a suburban and drives him straight to the funeral home? The husband of this dead wife immediately calling his mistress from the funeral home. When Brian finally gave up the body, his body was found on my turkey lease. So it was.
46:13 Speaker 04 Four, five or six years, I sat probably within 100 yards of Mike's body. Murder, disappearance, betrayal, and questions that refuse to stay buried. I'm Jordan Sillers and this is Blood Trails. Get season three now, wherever you listen to podcasts. Plus, check out the brand new Blood Trails TV YouTube channel. There you can find video versions of every episode that feature images from each story, recorded interviews, maps, and much more. We'll also be dropping bonus content between seasons, so make sure you're subscribed. That's at Blood Trails TV on YouTube.
46:58 Speaker 02 So Dan, in this episode, you took us down the Colorado River. And I want to begin where you did, which is you began this episode by discussing the endless possibilities of the Western landscape in terms of just getting lost and pure adventure. And what struck me is then as you embark on this trip, you're describing the lottery system to get a permit to go down the Colorado.
47:30 Speaker 02 And I sort of wonder what your thoughts are in the tension between recreation management and the endless possibilities. I mean, I'm in the camp that there's too much to do and too little time. And there's endless opportunities out there. But obviously to live in the West today with the crowds that some of these parks experience and the interest in them, there are more and more constraints on outdoor recreation and just general exploration. Yeah, there are. I mean, there's no question about it. It's a consequence of.
48:08 Speaker 02 A burgeoning population and excitement about all the things one can do in the West. You know, what I will say about Western experiences is that if you use some imagination, you can always figure out a way to to experience something a little more in a little more solitary fashion than than if you don't use your imagination and you just kind of waltz up and stand in line and and end up, you know, immersed in crowds. So you have to kind of do that today, you know,
48:48 Speaker 02 and, you know, this is a part of modern life in the West or in any part of the world, I think, that's in demand. Right. And where people are excited to be there. This particular trip down the Colorado River, I mean, we did this trip in October, which is a little bit off the prime time for doing a trip like this. I mean, my friends who have done this trip at other times of the year like to go in April, same reason, because it's not quite the prime time. So it wasn't, it wasn't a, it didn't feel like you were competing for camping spots. The one time, which I did mention
49:32 Speaker 02 in the script, that it seemed like there were too many people as we stopped at a particular spot where you climb up to these beautiful pools and waterfalls and cottonwood trees. And when we came down, I mean, there weren't that many boats there when we went up, but when we came down from that, there were like 14 rafts. Yeah. Parked at the spot where you you ascended to go up to this really delightful kind of alcove.
50:01 Speaker 02 Otherwise, we actually didn't really have that much company on the river. I mean, when you're at Phantom Ranch, obviously, there are some other people coming through and you see groups of people who are doing the rim to rim hike. Or if you're there for a couple of hours, there'll be another trip, maybe, that comes in behind you to eat breakfast or something. But we didn't really have much of an experience of feeling crowded, I would say, on this particular trip. And I think it was because we waited until October to do it, which is a fantastic time to be in the Grand Canyon, I gotta say.
50:39 Speaker 04 Yeah. The, um, throughout this chapter, you reference various proposals to dam the Grand Canyon. And I think it's, in some respects, it might be overlooked by the general public, just how crazy we were for dams at one point in our history. I don't know that the average person recognizes the name Floyd Dominie, but when you think of Hetch Hetchy and Echo Park, you know, dams have really been sort of pivotal moments in appreciation for public lands and these types of things.
51:24 Speaker 04 So I wonder if you can sort of contextualize dams within the broader story of American environmental history.
51:31 Speaker 02 Well, one of the ways to settle and inhabit and live in the West has been to manipulate the waters of the West. And, I mean, those manipulations go a long way back, you know? John Wesley Powell and the United States Geological Survey, I mean, one of the, the big projects they undertook in the 1880s was to canvas the West for potential dam sites. So, I mean, we've been confronting the whole idea of damming up the West to the point where, you know, as we all know, virtually every river in the United States is dammed. In the West, most rivers end up with multiple dams on them.
52:16 Speaker 02 You know, we've got a piece of the Yellowstone that we're all proud of that is an undammed river and everybody remains excited about that. But the Missouri in Montana, for example, is dammed in multiple places, including within the state. I mean, this is true pretty much everywhere. And we, we had a government bureau, the Bureau of Reclamation, that started in the early 20th century that, that really endeavored to put Powell's plans into action. And so we kind of designed dams on every, every running piece of water.
52:54 Speaker 02 To the point where in the 1960s, under the direction of Floyd Dominie, this fellow I referred to as an uber engineer, the guy who couldn't see a river without planning some way to dam it up, had the idea that we were also going to dam the Grand Canyon. I mean, and this is, so we had, of course, sacrificed a piece of a national park earlier in American history, when the city of San Francisco, following the earthquake and the great fire of 1906, decided that it needed the waters of Yosemite National Park. And Hetch Hetchy Canyon in Yosemite ended up being dammed. John Muir fought it to the
53:35 Speaker 02 end. He was not able to stop that dam. And the O'Shaughnessy Dam is still there, still blocking up the waters of the Tuolumne River and Hetch Hetchy Canyon. So we had that precedent where a national park, we assumed was for perpetuity, except if things, you know, reach a really bad turn, we may just sacrifice a particular canyon in a national park. So Floyd Dominie, with that kind of precedent in his mind, decided that we were going to have to dam up the Grand Canyon. I mean, and this was a suite of a series of dams
54:17 Speaker 02 that included Lake Powell and Echo Park Dam that we were going to construct on the Colorado River. Fortunately, at the time when Dominique was doing this, uh, this is another Stuart Udall victory as the Secretary of the Interior, uh, under Kennedy and Johnson, Stuart Udall stepped up and said, no, we're not going to damn the Grand Canyon National Park. But floating through it today, if you pay attention, when you're in Marble Canyon, which is one of the first big canyons you come into after you depart from Lee's Ferry, you can see the boreholes where they were already, where the engineers were already planning
55:00 Speaker 02 on putting their pylons in, in order to start this project. And that sort of gives you a cold sweat to see that. I mean, they got that close.
55:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's amazing. I, uh, one of the things that you talk about in this episode is just the sheer scale of the canyon and, and your inability to sort of comprehend how big this place is. One of the other things that came to mind for me is the scale of the Colorado River. Because as someone who grew up in the Midwest, you know, I, we learned all about the Mississippi. But I don't think I fully appreciated the green and Colorado River system until I moved out west and just sort of got a sense of where it comes from and where it goes. And along the Grand Can, or along the Colorado, you not only have the Grand Canyon, but you
55:53 Speaker 04 mentioned in the, in the episode Canyonlands, Echo Park, Desolation Canyon. I mean, it's.
56:01 Speaker 02 Cataract, yeah.
56:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's sort of an unbelievable chain of these landscapes, um, along a single river system.
56:09 Speaker 02 It is, and you know, I mean, the waters, you can argue that the waters of the Colorado River, I mean, there are several sources, um, high in the Colorado Rockies is one of them, but to me, the, the real start of the, the Colorado River is in the Wind River Range on the west side of the winds, uh, and, and Wyoming. And so, and down then through Flaming Gorge.
56:35 Speaker 04 Yep.
56:36 Speaker 02 Obviously reservoir now, but Flaming Gorge Canyon and then into Echo Park. And then, as you mentioned, all these, and I was, because I was reading John Wesley Powell's account at the time we were doing this float, you know, I was sort of imagining in my mind all of his descents through all these places. And, I mean, it is a marvelous system of canyon country and deep gorges and rushing waters that starts all the way up in Wyoming and of course, ends up in the Gulf of California, Baja California. Uh, the Colorado, what's left of it flows into Mexico. So it's a gigantic river system. It's the river of the West, really.
57:20 Speaker 02 I mean, so is the Missouri.
57:22 Speaker 04 Right.
57:23 Speaker 02 And so is the Columbia.
57:24 Speaker 04 Right.
57:25 Speaker 02 Uh, but the Colorado tracks through more of the today's existing West than any of the others. And it's also the river that's of course, the most threatened, uh, in terms of continuing to provide water for, uh, perpetuation of the West. I mean, the Colorado River Compact of 1922, that divided the waters of the Colorado up between the so-called Upper Basin States and the Lower Basin States, had far too optimistic, uh, an assessment of what the actual flow of the river was. And it turns out dividing it up was like giving everybody a third again, too much water than
58:10 Speaker 02 was actually going to be in the Colorado. And so we're confronting a situation now, of course, where, I mean, Deadpool lurks for places like Lake Powell.
58:21 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah, it's one of the, one of the most endangered, consistently endangered rivers in the country.
58:28 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
58:29 Speaker 04 Um, I think you, you, you talk about Powell in this.
58:38 Speaker 04 Episode quite a bit because you're obviously reading him.
58:43 Speaker 04 And I, I think one of the things that always fascinates me about the Grand Canyon and the Powell story is sort of what an eye opening moment it is for science in terms of geologic time and, and some of Powell's observations. So I wonder if you can talk about that and just, just what it was that Powell experienced and what he brought back to the world. Because his, his journey is one that really changed a lot of minds about what we think of the, the Western landscape.
59:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's, it's one of the great epic journeys and the whole Western story. Um, I mean, and he did it twice, but that first trip in particular in the early 1870s is, uh, I mean, it's kind of chilling in a way to read it, particularly when you're going through the Grand Canyon today and confronting some of these giant rapids. Because you know, for one thing, they had no sense, Powell and his men had no sense about what was ahead. I mean, they just didn't, they're going down this stupendous river through this landscape, as I described in the,
59:59 Speaker 02 in the script that, and in my experience of it, I mean, I couldn't comprehend the size of this. We were going day after day after day through this immense gigantic canyon, and it just seemed to go on forever. And the whole chilling aspect of Powell confronting, getting up every morning and having no idea really. And of course, some of his men on that first trip bailed from the expedition. They were so freaked out by it. But what he did do to speak to the question that you asked is he gave us a sense. I mean, geology obviously is still a science that's discovering
1:00:40 Speaker 02 itself and discovering the world, uh, in the late 19th century, but he gave us a sense of,
1:00:48 Speaker 02 ...time. He began to realize that particularly as you get to the bottom of the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon in this black schist, this granite, that you're looking at rock that is older than most of the rock that's observable anywhere on the planet. And Powell was able to, although he wasn't able to, to come up with a precise dating of all these specific levels that he was seeing, he was able to make it known to the scientific community that this was a canyon that cut into really the innards of the earth and
1:01:28 Speaker 02 was exposing a kind of a core geology and a core rock, an ancient rock that, that conveyed, I mean, this is a century, remember, when only 50 years before, people were saying, well, the earth's like 6,000 years old. I mean, the Bible says it's 6,000 years old, so it's no older than that, probably, and possibly even younger. What Powell, of course, is demonstrating with this voyage is that you don't get rock like this and these kind of levels in a 6,000-year-old planet. Yeah. Well, Dan, it's always good to talk to you. Oh, enjoyed it. Appreciate it.
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