Cataract Canyon — December 2016

The snow in the launch photo was Salt Lake's, from the night before we left. We drove to Moab, slept on a friend's couch, moved the couch back where it belonged, and rolled out at six. By about seven the dory was in the Colorado at Potash, and the plan was simple because the daylight was short: motor on. A Honda 2.3 outboard on a wooden dory is not a fast boat, but at 5,950 cfs the approach above the Confluence is slow water, the channel braids around sand shoals, and the eddies along the walls pull at a hull that is not paying attention — and a small motor humming along beats oars for forty miles of that. We found a couple of those eddies by accident anyway. We also found out what 38-degree water does when it comes over the gunwale: muddy, sloshing across the floor between the bags, and instantly the only thing either of us could think about. We made roughly forty miles to Cove Camp, pressing on through a long, flat, beautiful afternoon of red walls mirrored in gray-green water, and pulled in with about as much warmth left as the day had. The lesson arrived early and stayed for the whole trip: in December, the water is the hazard.

Day two is the day the canyon earns its name. At 5,770 cfs the Big Drops are what the old hands call classic low water: the holes are well defined, the lines are narrow, and a wooden dory either hits them clean or takes the consequences in the footwell. The rapids were all genuinely fun. The problem was physics. The water level had that perfect frequency where every wave in every drop landed on Sam, in the bow, and the boat filled more than once. Each time, the cold got a little further in — a wetsuit in 38-degree water is a thin argument, and by the time we were below the drops the argument was lost. Sam was very close to freezing solid. There was no discussion about where to camp; the choice had already been made for us. We pulled over at the first bank that would take a boat, a left-side sandbar near Waterhole Canyon that had not existed a few years earlier — the river is cutting down through the silt the reservoir left behind, the layer boaters call the Dominy Formation — and we got a fire going before we touched a single bag. Not a polite campfire. Whole driftwood trees, roots and all. It was survival mode, not leisure, and it was exactly the right call. By the time we were lying back in the sand laughing at a flash-lit selfie, the fire had done the job the wetsuits could not.

The morning came up clear and cold, 23 degrees by the Moab readings, with the sun reaching the high walls long before it reached the dory tied at our landing. We climbed the ledges behind camp to look down at the boat and the still water mirroring the lit sandstone, which is the kind of thing you do when the fire is out and the river is 37 degrees and nobody is in a hurry to get back in it. Then we got back in it. The last day of a Cataract trip is the long, quiet water below the rapids, and the flow was down to about 5,590 cfs, which meant less push from the current and the Honda doing most of the talking. Somewhere downstream the canyon opened a gap and there was snow on the far peaks, a reminder of what month it was in case the water had not made the point. Lake Powell sat at 3,605.65 feet, and the takeout at North Wash was the end of the trip — the way it is for everyone who runs Cataract, and the way it had been the least predictable part of the trip for years. We were two brothers in a dory in December. We were cold the whole time. Epic is the word that survives.