In September, Chris and I set off for a paddle down a long stretch of desert river. Putting in a few miles below the cluster of melon stands where the highway crosses the Green River in the town of the same name, we traveled down-canyon to the quiet confluence where the Green is subsumed into the Colorado River. This trip had been slowly cooked up over the course of a couple years and it was great to finally set out.
We struck west from the Front Range and made the traditional roadside camp at Rabbit Valley on the Colorado/Utah border. We talked to a couple of characters on the ham radio the next morning, ate a bunch of smoked salmon, then drove down a great piece of the Colorado River into Moab. We bought some groceries, traded cross-cultural scrutiny with the motorheads, then headed up to Island in the Sky to take in the big vistas of Canyonlands and survey the trip to come. On a lonely spur road that evening, we set up the 40-m dipole antenna and talked on the ham radio for a couple of hours. From her apartment in Leeds, England, Kelly tuned into a predetermined frequency using a web-accessible radio (based in Atlanta) and could hear us calling. Satisfied that our communication was complete, she turned off her receiver, while Chris and I, sipping port wine at the tailgate of my pickup and imagining her a rapt listener, traded off the mike and carried on about the day's events.
The next morning, we headed down to town. As on the Colorado River trip with Pete and his mangy cohort of bachelors that summer, the reliable dudes at Tex's Riverways supplied the boat and the shuttle. The driver gave us some useful beta and dropped us off just outside of the town of Green River. We put in next to the cold-water Crystal Geyser and soon were descending the Green among the conglomerate bluffs of the old riverbed. We made great time through nice agricultural country and caught an excellent view of the familiar terrain of the San Rafael Swell.
In the last hour of sunlight, we reached a dramatic stretch of river and decided to push on to darkness. Erupting from the riverbed at a shallow angle, an erosion-resistant rock layer began its climb above the water. The deepening rays of the sunset intensified the native color of the sandstone and we travelled downstream under a spectacle of rock and light.
As the evening glow in the west faded into the deep blues of twilight, cool air flowed into the river bottom like an evening tide. We floated late into in the moonless darkness, then debated where to find a dry spot to lay down. With some guesswork in the darkness, we managed to run aground on the inside of a bend. Problem solved. We dragged our gear onto the shallow gravel bar and ate some more smoked salmon. As the wind came up, I laid down into the tiny lee behind our coolers and fell asleep.
Our descent through the canyons over the next days was excellent. At the grand Tri-Alcove Bend, we beat our way through some brush and hiked up to a seep in a narrow tributary. At one camp, we staked out below a bluff, upon which the ancient canyon dwellers had built a defensive or observation tower. Downstream at Bowknot Bend, a 7-mile oxbow, we made an evening dash to the saddle and checked out the next day's paddle.
We made an particularly excellent camp on a ledge about 5 feet above the river. This rock platform was a prime patio for enjoying the evening. Across the river and thousands of feet above, tiny figures could just be seen through binoculars, peering across the expanse at us from an overlook in Island in the Sky.
As we neared the confluence, we sought to reach the canyon rim and explore the wedge of land to the north that separates the Green and Colorado Rivers. After a day looking up at insurmountable rimrock faces, our route to the rim stood out better than a yellow stripe does on blacktop. The outside river bank was a wharf-like ledge of bedrock, and with no real alternative, we pulled over and skeptically lashed our boat in the current. We loaded our packs and began the switch-backing climb. The route through the resistant rimrock was through a graceful, easily traversed pour-over.
Now walking on the top of this resistant layer, we easily covered much of the distance towards the confluence. Further on, where the convergence of the massive canyons of the Green and Colorado Rivers had whittled the plateau into a rugged neck of land, we threaded a route through a confusion of rock domes and scales.
And then, before us, opened the dramatic void of the Colorado River. Sighting along the course of the Colorado River from the edge of a sheer-walled platform six hundred feet above the water, a split in the monolithic western canyon wall marked the entry of the Green River. Just upstream from the seam of the confluence, subtle shadings of color and ripples gave hint to shallower waters and a possible sandbar just below the surface. The merged rivers traced a gentle righthand bend, and an acre of sandy expanse beckoned on the inside bend.
At this point, the seductive cool waters were an unreachable fantasy, and we turned back towards our notch in the rimrock and the descent to the boat. The beach would wait. From the riverbank where we'd left the boat, it was a few miles downstream to Shot Canyon and the next leg of our trip.
After a hundred miles of forgiving conditions, we hit some really strong winds and fought to complete this last mile of our paddle. In the front of the boat, I cranked up the power, while Chris deftly fought the gusts to maintain our heading. We slipped along the weak lee that extended a foot or two off the bank and finally made our destination at a shallow, rocky landing a few hundred yard upstream from the mouth of Shot Canyon. There, we stashed our boat in the tamarisk brush up on the river bench, and packed our bags for a couple of days of backpacking.
Heavily loaded with three days worth of water, we undertook a long, hot hike up to the Under the Ledge country. Our route included an exposed climb, which we surmounted with a rope, and an interesting ascent that wrapped around the inside edge of a broad bowl. We reached the edge of the Maze in the early evening. A few minutes before sunset, we stopped to make camp on a rocky platform along the rim of a pourover. Free from my burdensome pack, I headed for the band of high rock still illuminated by the evening sun. From the sunlit promontory, the surrounding landscape was a tight assemblage of sheer three-hundred foot sandstone walls standing above sand floors. Structured like a coarse feather ten miles long, broad ribs of tan and pink rock ran out from both sides of the central quill of the ridge on which I stood. I selected one of these rock ribs and walked out above the valley floor. Near the end of the walkway, a weathered stack of ledges descended towards a final long drop, like focaccia balanced on the edge of a baker's counter. At one point, I flushed a family of kangaroo rats, which scattered, bouncing from their rock shelter like a handful of dropped rubber balls.
The next morning, Chris and I walked out along the quill of our ridge, following a rough ranch trail down to the floor. At the junction of two sand-and-cobble drainages, a patch of water had risen, giving life to a small, but precious desert wetland. Birds and wasps landed amid cattails and the well-formed prints of desert bighorn.
We crossed the greater drainage and began to ascend the far valley wall. Up a clever route of exposed moves and moki steps cut in the rock face, we worked our way through the final rimrock and walked out onto a series of mushroom-topped pillars. Chris left to explore the rim, and I took in the view of the Maze from the north. After a long absence, he returned, and casually cracked open an (ice-cold?!) Budweiser of unspoken provenance. To his infinite credit, he shared.
Back on the sand and cobble of the valley floor, we traveled campward, ascending a different winding branch of the drainage. We again made our camp on the polished shelf of bare rock, high above the valley. In descent to the boat the next morning, I mistook our route, and we set out through a spectacular drainage of rock pools. When this ended at an impassible pourover overlooking our destination, we hardly minded.
Back in our boat, it was a few quiet miles of paddling down to the confluence. For all the thought I'd given to the confluence of these two remarkable rivers, and despite having stared down at this spot from two promontories, the entry of the Colorado River was still a giddy surprise. On our hike far above the confluence days prior, we'd debated whether some subtle signs on the water were evidence of a sandbar. Now on the water, we paddled towards the imagined sandbar and happily ran aground. We were pretty stoked about that sandbar, and stepping out onto the barely submerged land at the center of the confluence, we felt like we'd discovered a new continent.
We made a stop for some epic frisbee at the beach we'd admired, then drifted down to a small final camp, where we'd wait for the jet boat upstream.
The ride up the Colorado was a blur. At the Gypsum takeout, a long haired boater offered us a pair of beers from his cooler, flush with ice. He and his girlfriend, sunbathing on the boat ramp, were just setting out.
