Rapid Descents: Mothership Downriver

October-November 2002

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Steve Crow

Floating on the sculptor's knife. Photo: Steve Crow

If a mothership is a craft that provides paddlers with creature comforts, then that's what an oar boat is to a whitewater kayaker. This rubber mule, when captained by a competent pilot, can transport almost anything needed to make river life comfortable.

Not to be mistaken with paddle rafts, which carry groups of paddlers and often travel in shrill, screaming packs, oar boats are controlled and powered by one person, and are designed to transport cargo—human or otherwise.

I had the good fortune two summers ago to be invited as one of three kayakers to join three oar boats and a dory (a Portuguese fishing boat, designed to roll over ocean waves, that had been adapted to float down rivers) on a journey down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

For me to have attempted such a trip without a mothership would have involved loading my biggest (read: least fun) kayak with no change of clothes, dehydrated everything, and ever-accumulating bags of refuse. Although that undoubtedly has its own appeal, as it was, I was able to play in my small boat for eighteen days accompanied by a floating pantry, refrigerator, bar, stove, wardrobe, bed, and bathroom.

MOTHERSHIP DAVE

Low Water exposed dozens of beaches for camping. Photo: Steve Crow

I was invited by a Washington friend who I think of as Mothership Dave. He always gathers his friends to his house or on one of his river trips where he nourishes us through the teats of his character and his kegs. Therefore, naturally: Mothership.

Dave applied for his private trip permit in 1990—ten years before he got it! That gave him plenty of time to pick paddling partners. His old rafting buddies from Colorado, Grand vets all, were shoe-ins. His new friends in Washington were screened for experience, compatibility, intelligence and good looks. In the end, however, only the teachers and the unemployed could get the time off.

Jim and I, the BC candidates, got in on the unemployment (which is how Dave interpreted our self-employment) and international flair angles. But mostly we got in because as kayakers we wouldn’t take up much valuable space on the oar boats. You see, the beer needed space.

In fact, the beer needed a lot of space. Ray, the US Park Service ranger who inspected us at the put-in at Lee’s Ferry, said he had never seen a group take so much beer. It certainly was not the least of distinctions a group could have in such a place. “I think you will have a great time,” was his comment.

How often in a lifetime does one get the chance to enjoy an experience like this? We wanted to be sure we wouldn’t remember a thing.

No, I’m joking. Please don’t get the wrong idea. We only brought it to stay hydrated. After all, it was American beer.

WATER

Water is perhaps the greatest paradox. Its very nature is contradictory. It is a liquid; liquid; two gases form it. It is soft; it is hard. It is more minuscule atoms than we could ever count; it is one thing. It adapts to its environment; it changes its environment. It flows around obstacles; it breaks down obstacles. It creates life; it causes death. It scares me; it gives me joy.

The Colorado was my first large-volume river. For the Colorado, though, it wasn’t very large. Glen Canyon dam, a few miles above Lee’s Ferry, was the reason for this. Because there are so many divergent interest groups that influence the use of the Colorado, from farmers to utilities to golf courses to wildlife advocates to boaters, the managers are constantly trying new ways to maximize benefits for the largest number of groups. Therefore, the flow is always being tampered with to test effects. Since the dam’s construction, flow has been measured up to at least 92,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). When we paddled it was running at 8,000 cfs. Barely a trickle in a place called ‘Grand’, but still the biggest I had ever encountered.

At the top of the first rapid I became very apprehensive. All I could see were great crashing lateral waves and voracious holes. How small I felt in my little bit of plastic.

It had been agreed that at big rapids the kayakers would go first to test the waters and wait at the bottom as safety boats— sort of a pay-off to the oar boat captains for pulling our camping gear all the way down the river. Now they and their passengers stood on the shore to see how we fared.

By the time I was on the tongue, Jim, who bravely went first, was lost to my sight in the trough behind the first wave. His head disappeared far more quickly than I anticipated or liked. Then, just as I teetered on the point of that same wave, I saw his white helmet and paddle blades vanish into another trough. I was relieved to see he was still upright. I slid down the back side, although it felt like a free-fall, and up the next wave as it began to collapse on itself and me. My blades slapped furiously at water and air in a desperate bid for propulsion. At the bottom I quickly peeled into a calm eddy.

Orange rocks, orange rafts, orange river. Photo: Steve Crow

Hmm…it didn’t seem so bad. By the bottom of the second rapid I came to realize that, regardless of volume, rivers flow. My job was simply to flow with this one. Soon I stopped thrashing wildly like a spawning salmon in its death throes, and began to get a better sense of the personality beneath me. Enormous, yes, but fluid and predictable. The river became the biggest toy I had ever played with.

GROOVER

As a private trip group, we had to be totally self-sufficient. Other than a couple of fresh water springs, the canyon would offer us nothing of sustenance. Everything we would need had to be brought in with us. And everything we used had to be taken out. Everything.

Crumbs had to be collected from kitchen areas to control the voracious ant population. Dish soap had to be strained and the solids separated. And the end product of digestion had to be deposited, sealed and transported in modified ammo cans called groovers. Liquids were one exception; they could be disposed of into the fast-flowing river. The other exception was paper and organic material which could be burned in a metal pan.

The groover was a necessary evil in that vertical desert where decomposition can take decades. As 16,000 people travel through there annually, it doesn’t take much effort to imagine the alternative.

NOURISHMENT

But when you're in it, the water looks big.
Photo: Steve Crow

What necessitated the groover, of course, was the pantry. With four motherships to carry food, hunger was never an issue. We ate like royalty (well, exiled royalty). At every meal we filled our plates two and three times with pancakes, pasta, chili, pasta, pancakes, spring rolls, pasta, french toast, pancakes, pasta and other succulent dishes.

The aluminum-hulled dory served as a floating refrigerator. As the river water comes from the bottom of Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon dam, it is numbingly cold (although it gradually warms up as it meanders beneath the broiling sun). We had ice until day 5—in 40?C temperatures!

But cooking in the Big Crack occasionally presented a challenge. One evening when Dorothy and I were scheduled for cooking duty, we were caught in a sandstorm. The hot air that cooked in the convection oven that is the canyon was blasted upstream in a late-afternoon air exchange. Determined to feed the hungry masses, Dorothy and I dutifully began preparation of chili and fritos in the blustery, but not yet howling, wind. Chili and fritos themselves were a wind-inspired compromise, as the schedule had us booked to cook something much more fanciful.

With the chili showing evidence of bubbling, the gale kicked in. The stove’s windblockers blew over and bowled the chili over into the sand, tipping the amount-ofsand- in-food scale to unacceptable. Admitting defeat in the face of overwhelming odds, we retired to the sand-free dory to wait out the tempest with a few glasses of distraction.

Some time later, well distracted, Dorothy and I looked at each other with dread, realizing the wind had died. Preferring to continue enjoying our floating refuge over cooking, I moved to stave off everyone’s hunger by quickly pouring more distraction. No one noticed.

DEPTH

The trip really began in Marble Canyon, where the cliffs rise about 400 feet. From there, the river begins to carve into deeper and older layers of rock: sandstone, limestone, shale and schist; and intrusions of granite, quartz and basalt are revealed. For each mile we traveled, we descended thousands of years into prehistory.

Feeding the river. Photo: Steve Crow

I kept expecting to see little elves and fairies emerge from the fantasy landscape of holes, cracks, caves and springs. The landscape, with its nooks and crannies permeating the rock, was always unreal, like a giant movie set from an adaptation of a child’s book.

The layers of rock climbed ever higher so that by the fifth day what was just over our heads at Lee’s Ferry was now towering more than 2000 feet above our tiny, insignificant selves.

On that day we came to where the glacier- blue, swimming pool-warm Little Colorado merges into its larger sister. This is where the true Grand Canyon begins. The walls, appearing at the same time tortured, exquisite, fragile and permanent, retreated from the river and resembled giant wedding cakes as the loose, sloping shale layers distinguished the solid, vertical stacks of sandstone and limestone. The scenery became more, well…oh, what is the word…? But this expansiveness was brief. Soon we were again enclosed by sturdy great corridors of rock that hid the immensity of the canyon we were in. As we floated through the days, we caught occasional glimpses of the rim as it gradually soared to 6,000 feet above us.

At that point, we drifted past the canyon’s deepest, most extraordinary layer of rock: the midnight-glazed hornblende and pink granite slashes that make up the Vishnu Schist, some of the oldest exposed rock on earth.

TIME

I was stupified trying to grasp the immensities of time and space we were among. It took millions of years for the river and its tributaries, by way of glacier melt and land upheaval, to slice this labyrinth of chasms, canyons and caves. But it took billions of years to lay down this mile-thick deposit of rock, this canvas for water’s brush. We were seeing the memories of mountains, oceans, earthquakes and volcanoes, all now fused by pressure and heat and revealed by water. But no matter how hard or for how long I stared, I never felt like I was getting it.

The erosion of the Grand was never more evident than in the colours of the river. They were in constant flux, often reflecting the colours of the walls. For the first seven days we were transported on transparent jade, which provided us a window onto the life and geology that slipped beneath us. August, however, is thunderstorm season in the US southwest. Lightning silently stuttered beyond the horizons each night, indicating distant storms.

Each flooded tributary offered its own color, depending on which type of rock it cut through. Pea soup, caramel, rust, milky lime—all these hues represented the eternal construction and destruction of the Colorado basin.

HEAT

Heat defined much of the trip. We rarely escaped it. Early mornings could be cool enough to wrap a thin cotton sheet around ourselves, but never for long. We could get relief in the water at any time, but that relief was always shocking.

At night we would try to sleep as close to the moderating influence of the river as we could. One of the subtle pleasures we enjoyed was the brief deliverance offered at night when occasional wisps of cool air, as sweet as angel’s breath, would slip into the cracks of the hot air mass, much like the zoroaster granite through the schist.

PATIENCE

The euphoria of running a rapid, for the kayakers, was occasionally tempered by impatience with the oar boats. After watching how we managed, the rafters would take what seemed like ages to arrange themselves in their boats with much—literal and figurative—pissing about. Granted, there were far more of them, and any addition of one to a group multiplies that group’s inefficiency by two.

But we kayakers were pumped! We had punched through and were still in our boats. Our bloodstreams, coursing with adrenaline and endorphins, were dissolving the butterflies that had been flapping in our guts at the top of the drop. We wanted to continue, we were restless and irritable, eager for the next rapid.

The oar boaters, however, wanted to discuss discuss lines, check life jackets and bail the last of the water from their boats and bladders. To them, it took only minutes. The butterflies fluttering within them, it seems, were speeding up time; for us, rid of our Lepidoptera, time had slowed way down. For a moment we would doubt the benefit of motherships, and we would gripe.

Then we would catch ourselves. We would have a look around, and humbly acknowledge that at least the waiting room wasn’t half bad.

Once the oar boats did finally come bounding and crashing down, with shrieks of terrified and joyous laughter, we would all be best friends again…and not only because they carried the beer.

TAKE-OUT

The last morning of paddling had only a tinge of melancholy attached. Although we knew we were about to finish an extraordinary chapter of our lives, we were ready to turn that page. As we floated towards the natural pyramid that signaled the end, everyone talked of showers, clean clothes and exotic fast food.

We arrived at the take-out to watch a daytripping tourist flick his cigarette butt into the river. The rude shock of it! This ribbon of life had just transported us through some of the most fulfilling days of our lives, and here was one of our species despoiling it with his filth. When I saw that, my head dropped and I was ready to push off and join the butt on its lonely journey away from humanity.

Instead, I peeled my spray-skirt off one last time, packed away my gear and jumped into the bus with the good humans of my journey. Along with the boats, empty beer cans and groovers, we took paradise out with us, safely stored in our memories, knowing our passage left only footsteps. As the cigarette-flicking imbecile reminded us, and the Park Service rightly emphasizes, paradise is always at risk from the destructive flood of humanity. So if waiting one's turn saves the Grand Canyon, then trust me, it's well worth the wait.

APPLY

If you don’t mind waiting 12 to 19 years (depending on cancellations), you can apply for a private permit to paddle the Grand. With such a permit, you supply everything for your trip. The Park Service will check out your gear at Lee’s Ferry to make sure it is up to snuff. The application costs US $100. Even commercial trip bookings can take up to a year. Check the internet.

Contact: Grand Canyon National Park, River Permits Office, PO Box 129, Grand Canyon, Arizona 86023. Fax: (520) 638- 7844.

He is looking for new friends who have permits for the Grand Canyon.

E-mail: stivcrowe@netscape.net

Editor’s Note: We are very pleased to announce that Steve will be writing a regular ‘Rapid Descents’ column for us.