Cataract CanyonMay 2015 (~20,000 cfs)

I picked Jordy up and we tooled around Draper longer than I ever wanted to, long enough to admire the landscaping he’d done at his dad’s place, which was genuinely impressive, and to decide at Harmons that we needed a few more things. I was itching to start chipping at the hundred and twenty miles of Green between us and Cataract. Green River answered with a downpour. We sat it out at Ray’s with a burger and a beer, and it never fully cleared, but it missed us with the worst of it.

We rigged at the state park. Jordy’s friend turned up with ice cream. Jordy took out the trash. We launched late, into flat silver light under a low sky, oars shipped and a cup raised from the tiller, Crystal Geyser’s orange terraces sliding by on the left. Then we motored on into the dark on purpose. We needed Three Canyon, and we got it.

Three Canyon in the morning was the good kind of slow. Wrens working the wall, Jordy asleep, me with a book about the Mississippi: a young Lincoln trading his way downriver, and the news that the big river once had real rapids before the locks and dams filed them off. We needed miles. The morning was better than miles.

Eventually we launched and spent day two moving through Labyrinth. Red Wingate, willow banks, groceries and a basketball riding the bow deck, the Green up to about 7,650 cfs. Then the wind came up, the way it does, and we did the only sensible thing: found a big beach and flew a kite. It worked too well. A couple of gusts had me off the sand. The kite went in the river; we went back in the boat.

Camp was a random sandy beach south of Mineral Bottom in Stillwater, a storm standing on the rim, and at dusk four jet skis and a small jet boat nosed into the tamarisk on the far bank, minding their own business.

A lazy day: a few aimless hikes and, eventually, the Confluence. The beetles had been at the tamarisk there, so we helped, pulling out the dead stuff until a clean sandy beach appeared underneath it. Fire, sunset over the Doll House, and somewhere in the stick-gathering one of them found my eye. I turned in early, early by Jordy’s standards anyway. He heated a pile of rocks, dug a pit, dropped them in, and slept warm.

I woke up with one eye. The other had swollen shut overnight from the stick, which is not how you want to start rapid day, so we packed the dory slowly and let the morning give some of the vision back. It did, mostly. I was hyped anyway: Cataract, a buddy, the dory, and about 20,000 cfs on the combined gauges.

Jordy and I were good in the boat, high-siding and moving when we needed to move. Button Hole was pouring over. Not the exploding thing it becomes around 25,000 to 29,000, but plenty to flip a dory in a second; my read, then and now, is that this level spared the boat compared with what lives up there at higher water. A read, not a measurement.

Big Drop 2 I ran left on purpose. I didn’t trust myself to make the middle move around Mother-in-Law, so it was left through the ledge wave and left of Mother-in-Law, and the line worked. Years later I figured out why: this was just enough water to float a dory over the pyramid rock on river left below the ledge wave. I didn’t know that in 2015. That July, on the same line, I found the rock.

We crossed to the Big Drop 3 beach (Kolb Camp) to scout and ran right. The bottom waves are a lot bigger than they look from up there. It tossed us around and gave us a fight; we worked together and came out upright. I’m pretty sure we floated down to Waterhole Canyon and camped. I’d been staying there because good beaches had been forming, beaches that are gone now, moved on downstream. By four the boat was tied off under a wind-rippled sand bank, driftwood stranded high on the cobbles. A fire in the pan and a headlamp on the kitchen table was the whole camp.

Morning came in grey, the storm sitting on the walls and the boulders at the waterline the only color left. We motored out. Jordy spent the slack water flat on the deck in full rain kit, hood up over his ball cap, waiting out the weather from inside the boat while the Honda pushed us down toward the Dirty Devil. Lake Powell sat at 3,590 feet. At North Wash I backed the trailer down the old ramp and winched the dory out: steep, not crazy, before the big downcutting.