There is something strange about actually shoving off on a rafting trip. With most things in life you can turn back if things start to go wrong. With rafting once you are on the river you are committed failing a major injury or some such thing there is no turning back. On Tuesday it was time to go. First we had to have our talk with the ranger. He checked our IDs, gave us a safety and stewardship talk, and assigned us our ravens. Ours were named Sundance and Ella. They accompanied us throughout the canyon. It is just a running joke for the rangers, but if I did not know better I would swear that we really did have our own pair of Ravens. After the talk we put in. We crossed the first riffle and headed down stream. A few miles later we were staring up at the Navajo Bridges 470 feet above us as we crossed underneath. It felt like crossing a line. We were leaving civilization behind for the next 276 miles.
For the past year or so I have been trying to figure out what I would be facing in terms of the river that I would be rowing. When I asked for a comparison to the rapids that I knew I was told that, “Nothing you have rowed compares to the rapids on the Grand Canyon.” As you can imagine this was not very comforting. About ten miles into the trip, I got my chance to see what the rapids were like. Badger Creek and Soap Creek are the first real rapids of the trip. According to my map they rate a five on a scale of ten. They were fun. They were two of my favorite rapids, but my goodness those waves were huge. If those were fives, I thought, what would the nines look like? To be honest it scared me a little.
Our camp for the first day was at Hot Na Na. It was a nice little camp, and it overlooked House Rock Rapid which was just down river. House Rock is the first rapid big enough that we needed to scout, but more about that tomorrow.
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