Monday: Lee’s Ferry to Mile 20

This is the third day of our Upper Grand Canyon Rafting Trip, though it’s our first day on the water. Today we entered the water at Lee’s Ferry and traveled to Mile 20 on the river. This was one of the coolest vacations I’ve ever been on. I can’t recommend this experience highly enough! Outdoors Unlimited is the only company offering full paddling, and this series of posts will show you that this is the only way to go!

Waking up in Marble Canyon

Monday morning started out with a scare. As we were about 10 feet from Navajo Nation, and officially away from our phone chargers, we put the phones on airplane mode overnight.

When we woke up at 6:00 for a 7:45 departure, the phone kept jumping back and forth, saying it’s 6:00am, no 7:00am , no 6:01am. We jumped up and got back to the restaurant to have breakfast.

Lee’s Ferry

This was where we received our final safety talk courtesy of Mike. We learned about what to do when we fall out of the boat. One of the main take aways that I remember is that if you fall out, especially in rapids, do not try to stand up. If you get your foot stuck in a rock and the current is knocking you down you will be in bad shape.

I had on long athletic pants from Kohls and a long sleeved Rash Guard from Amazon I also had sports sunscreen SPF 50. As a very fair individual, I have to reapply so frequently that SPF 50 works great for me. I find that sunscreens with higher SPF are too thick to apply with ease and don’t give me any additional time in between applications.

On the River

Our Guide for the Day was Sophie. She taught us some basic paddling strokes, things like “Forward” where everyone rows in steady unison. She sometimes called commands like “Right Forward” where only the right side of the boat paddled. And “Mosey,” Mosey was the chill stroke, where everyone rows forward in unison in a very relaxed pace, such as a count of four.

We stopped for lunch, ate self-assembled sandwiches, peed in the river, and kept on going. The river moves along at a pace of about 4 miles an hour. The only time it ever got really hot was right before we would hit a rapid, when everything was painfully still.

We were using our efforts to paddle less than 20% of the time. Often we’d do a stroke for a minute or so and then stop. All my fears about sore shoulders and poor upper body strength was unfounded. We started going through some baby rapids, but Sophie assured us that the rapids were rated very low on the Grand Canyon’s 1-10 scale

Camp

We got to camp around 5pm I think. The guides unloaded the luggage rafts and many people formed an assembly line of sorts to assist them. Passengers who had purchased alcohol had their goods placed into a net and dangled off of one of the rafts to cool them down.

We were given a blue tarp, a yellow pad, and a sleeping bag with a sleeve. Apparently it was available for us to have a tent, but no one used a tent the whole time. We were really sleeping out in the open. I changed into cotton clothes and relished in being dry for a little while.

Dinner came late. I was dying. But they served us fresh baked sourdough bread. We had a humongous portion of steak and loaded baked potatoes. So all the waiting had been worth it. We had a circle of camp chairs and spent the evening having a few beers and getting to know the other people who were with us.

Sleep

It’s my opinion that this was the worst night for sleep. We were excited, we were sleeping on the ground. The airplane neck pillow was a bad idea. And the beautiful beach we were sleeping on had the gentlest most deceptive breezes that would lift the top layer of sand and whisper blow it onto you. The whole tarp and everything around us was covered in sand.

But I did wake up to see the freaking Milky Way. And every time I opened my eyes the moon had moved and the stars were even more brilliant each time I looked. 

Tomorrow will be all about The Roaring 20’s.