Pete left Colorado and settled down back east. He met a great woman and found a job, and he has access to all the big city culture (homeless crooners) and cuisine (spaghetti and pate-balls, chili-cheese figs, etc). But he's also a western outdoorsman, and he didn't hesitate in planning his bachelor party for a big river of the American West. We planned a Utah float trip that would take us down the Colorado River deep into Canyonlands National Park.
In Boulder, the usual suspects (Ithaca House and Lars) piled in and pointed our vehicles west. Soon, we crossed into the proper watershed (terminus Sea of Cortez) and were driving alongside the Colorado River. We'd be within a couple miles of this river for the next four days. The Colorado crew swung by the Grand Junction Airfield and picked up our mangy cohorts. Mandar, who had heard the trip would be near water and grew a pirate beard. Fil, able to float for hours like a crocodile with only his eyeballs and nostrils above water. Matt H, trained in photographic surveillance by the KGB. Matt took hundreds of amazing photos, and graciously has let me post some highlights here. All of the photos in this post are his!
That first night, we staked out in the Rabbit Valley parking lot, enjoyed the inaugural beer of the trip, and slept under a big dark sky.
The next morning, a nice drive down the Professor Valley took us to Moab and Tex's Riverways. The folks at Tex's rented us aluminum Grumman Canoes, drove us to the put-in at Potash below Moab, and would pick us up downriver at the end of the trip. The company character of Tex's Riverways shone through with the funky but functional dual-canoe platform they built. They were great folks to deal with and made the logistics easy.
We had a heck of a paddle for the next couple days. A spectacular landscape, a fantastic crew, and some really nice conditions.
The sun was high and hot. It was a lot nicer on the river than it was baking on shore, and we spent most of our days floating alongside our canoes. I don't remember much paddling.
For nutrition, we ate Doritos, which contain corn. The low water opened up some expansive beaches. There was some epic nighttime bocce.
A couple days in, we got some brief intense winds that lifted whitecaps and ripped spray off the river. We headed up a side drainage for shelter and hunkered down under a rock overhang during an intense spell of rain. The fine silt floor of the wash were amazingly slick when wet, and there were some spectacular muddy wipeouts. Within a few minutes we watched this drainage--Deer Creek--blow out. A slow tongue of pink foaming slime slid down the drainage. We booked it back to the river and watched a mad torrent of thick red water grow and spill out into the Colorado.
It was a great couple days. We spotted some nice animals, found spectacular camps, and had great weather.
And one morning, a 40' jet boat showed up at our beach. Just like that, the Tex's crew loaded the canoes on the roof, stacked our bags in the back, and we all tore off back upstream to Moab at 30 mph. A high-octane rehash of the last few days' float. The heavy, flat-bottomed boat was smoothly hypnotic as it bent around the corners and chased the narrow channel upstream. We pulled ashore at a previous lunch spot to search for a lost bocce ball--Matt H really came through and spotted the tiny white ball half-buried in the sand. Amazing eye.
