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- [00:00]
Podcast Host (Montana Knife Company and Land.com Advertiser)
You ever get that feeling? The walls closing in the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature. Maybe in a spot all your own. Well, head over to land.com they've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage, you can search by location, you can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com it is where the adventure begins.
- [00:28]
Tab Ramos
This is Tab Ramos from inside American Soccer. And this summer topgolf is turning into the ultimate soccer destination. They've got a new soccer themed game you can play with your group, exclusive food and drink items. They've even installed full size soccer goals so you can try to hit golf balls right into the net. And every match all summer long will be on throughout the venue. And if you want to keep the fun going all summer, you can get the topgolf Summer Fun Pass which lets you play every single day and bring up to five guests every visit. Get yours now@TopGolf.com funpass you guys are
- [01:02]
Podcast Host (Montana Knife Company and Land.com Advertiser)
always hearing me talk about Montana Knife Co. I love these guys. Hands down favorite knives. The blades are incredibly solid. These are high quality tools that put in the work. Well, you asked for it and I've been asking for it. And MKC finally did it. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It'll be dropping soon. Go to mkc.com right now and sign up for email and text alerts so you don't miss the drop. MKC.com Montana Knife Company Working Knives for Working People Again MKC.com what John Wesley
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Dan Flores
Powell accomplished first in the 1870s. Float the length of the Grand Canyon
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you can do today, and it's still
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the western wildlands experience of a lifetime. I'm Dan Flores and this is the American West. Down the West's grandest canyon. Our personal motives for experiences in the American west have always been many. Some of us move west or relocate within the west for a new start in life. Some come to seek wealth and become rich. Some of us are lured westward because everything from scenery to wild animals is new and exciting. But in a region of America where the landscapes are super sized and grand, eloquent, the rivers mysterious and even furious, the animals often large and occasionally dangerous, the human search for adventure has forever been a part of the West's mystique. From hunting buffalo on yellow grasslands under a dome of blue, to making an ascent of every One of Colorado's 53 official 14,000 foot mountain peaks, the possible interactions with the Western world are colored by the excitement of living large. It's entirely possible to reside in the west, or come to the west and spend your days checking account balances, watching sports, sitting in front of a computer screen, or endlessly scrolling on your phone. But you can still be your own personal version of of Amelia Earhart. Are Bob Marshall here the West's wildlands and rivers offer adventures enough for several lifetimes. I've lived in the west and in different parts of it almost all my adult life, luckily with good health, a strong constitution, and since I'm a biped, a propensity for seeing the world around me from on foot. So like a lot of us, I've hauled a pack of into many of the remote corners of the west to be able to breathe the champagne air of the heights of ranges like the Winds, the Tetons and the Sierra Nevadas, or pass into sleep as a juniper fire pops and hisses while the Escalante river waxes lyrical feet away. I'm not quite as addicted to seeing the west by river as many Western adventurers I've known, but I have canoed the white cliffs of the Upper Missouri, shot through the rapids of Cataract Canyon and Canyonlands national park, descended the canyons of the Rio Grande and Big Bend, soloed in inflatable kayaks through Idaho's giant wildernesses on the Snake and the Salmon, and paddled a raft for 12 days down the Hula Hula river through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at the top of Alaska. But with strong competition from the Hula Hula and Anwar, no wildlands trip I've done so far has been quite the equal of that top tier of all Western adventures, a two and a half week descent by rubber raft of the Colorado river through America's grandest canyon. I've hiked the Grand Canyon on foot and while nothing remotely like Walk in the park rider Kevin Fidarco's year long trek down the length of the canyon with a buddy that Rim to rim passage from South Rim to North Rim over the course of a day isn't a bad taste. You get some 24 miles of trail through spectacular canyon scenery and an ever changing ecology, plus a combined 10,000 plus feet of elevation change for your trouble. Even that, however, pales against the the wildland's rhythms that come with descending the river through this magnificent canyon day after day after day. Knowing what's looming ahead but not knowing. Because of course, every descent through a canyon like this is new and fresh. I've long been in the habit of taking a little notebook and a couple of pens with me to record immediate firsthand accounts of Wildlands trips. Here then, is what one Grand Canyon descent was like September 26th Rafting the Grand Canyon has to be high on the bucket list of half the people who live in the American west and a good percentage of those who are from elsewhere. I'm not sure exactly when it climbed close to the top of mine, but I do know that my first readings of Rod Nash's Wilderness in the American Mind and Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire had the idea teasing my consciousness way back in the 1970s. I've been telling myself I would do this trip for a very long time, and with university life out of the way, the time has come. I'm at this very moment on the banks of the Colorado river, our party of 14 having launched into the Grand Canyon from Lee's Ferry mid morning. Today, everyone on this adventure is connected in some way to Betsy Rogers, a New York patron of the arts and biographer of Central park who's had a lifelong dream of rafting the Grand Canyon. We're all from Santa Fe, New York or London. This is no applying for a permit and waiting 15 years kind of trip. We're on the sort of guided rafting excursion most people get to do in the Grand Canyon these days. So in addition to our 14, there are river guides and boatmen, starting with Krista Sadler of Flagstaff, a veteran of this trip and many others in the West. Who's our guide? The boatmen include John, originally from Kentucky but now of Durango, who rows one of the ore rafts. Allie, who is a nurse in her day job, rows one of the passenger rafts and is also from Flagstaff. Greg, a former National Park Service archaeologist from Las Cruces, pilots the fourth raft. Gearboat rowers are Chris, from California and Marcus, a Navajo from Bluff, Utah, who's rowing the canyon for the first time. So our whole party is 20 strong. The guests are a willing group, no question, a majority of whom have done wilderness river trips. But there are some folks among us who have bare barely ever camped or done outdoor things of any sort. For them, this is a bit like never having left home to travel, then landing wide eyed in Paris for a first try in a new place. We've made camp on a high bank on the east side of the river well before sunset this afternoon to give everyone a chance to sort through tents and gear and find their spots within a bankside grove of willows. Most of the people on this trip are couples. I'm traveling solo myself and as is my inclination, camp a bit apart from the rest. Dinner setup followed the plan of most river trips like this, with everyone helping fashion a public space so we could eat and drink and get to know one another. Because even if you know someone in the city, you don't yet know them on a long multi day river trip like this. September 27th and 28th we made 17 river miles down from Lee's Ferry two days ago on a first day on the river with fine sunshine accompanying us. But the normally turquoise Colorado was brown and muddy as we set out today, and soon enough we found out why. The first fall storms of the year often drop around the autumnal equinox, and sure enough, today a weather system hit with much cooler temperatures and not long after we'd pulled over for lunch, then set out downstream again, rain began to fall. That shortened the day's float on a Colorado river that took us into a great many early trip rapids in what's called the roaring twenties, and finally to a camp at mile 28. While we were dining and the river rolled timelessly past us, bighorn sheep worked carefully through the rocks nearby. Like day two, today's day three started with sun, obscure, enduring cloudiness, it gradually became a lovely descent through narrowing canyon cliffs, although at Redwall Cavern, where we stopped for lunch, light mist fell through the sunlight to produce a kind of gossamer magic of scores of tiny rainbows. I overheard this snippet of conversation nearby this morning. So it's not just a tent, it's a tent without National Public Radio. September 29. It's daybreak of day four, and at the moment everyone is outside their tents to gaze on an arcing rainbow that's formed over the canyon in the light morning rain today is beginning with overcast and light rain. It ought to clear up soon, I think. By now the classic rhythms of a river trip have set in, and the first three days down the Colorado are already running together in my mind. I remember it being hot and sunny as we started down the river, although it hasn't been like that since. But this system, which clearly dumped some significant rains up the tributaries to the west of us by the looks of the river, this morning, shows every sign of retreating now as an indication of how the days are already beginning to bleed one into the next. I forgot to mention here that soon after lunch on our first day, I spotted the gliding black form of a California condor circling through the intense blue higher up than the rim above us and ascending with each sleep circle. But the forward cant of the wing set and the white stripes running from body to wing tips on their forward edge made us know this was a bird not seen before. A condor, with its nearly 10 foot wingspan is a worthy sighting in a canyon this grand. This trip Entire will include 16 days on the river. So we're really just underway camping now at mile 39, not yet out of Marble Canyon. Today we're going to float past the proposed dam site from plans back in the 1960s when Uber engineer Floyd Dominy and the Bureau of Reclamation were designing a Reservoir some 40 miles long in this part of the Grand Canyon. I've had students at the University of Montana read about this almost incomprehensible attempt to compromise one of America's grandest national parks. But I've not confronted Domini's plans in the flesh like this until now. This part of the national park, Marble Canyon, is a gorgeous red rock marvel. A reservoir here is an even more horrifying thing to contemplate. And when you actually witness firsthand the beauty of this canyon, it's brick red, multilayered and deepening and narrowing by the mile. During slack moments in camps, I'm reading John Wesley Powell's account of his first descent of the Colorado river in the early 1870s. But right now, in my progression through his narrative, he's still up in Echo park, far upstream of where we are on the river. September 30th. It's day five on the Colorado and we're camped beneath the famous granary view, an iconic scene looking down the winding river that's so famous it's actually on the Arizona Quarter. It's the southwestern version of the view of the Tetons with the Snake river coiling below their jagged peaks up in the Northern Rockies. We hiked up 1500ft or so to the granary ruin itself yesterday late, and I shot probably too many photos of this scene. But the setting sun reflecting onto the water from the last cliff face at the end of the view was mesmerizing, changing repeatedly as the sun dropped. We're at mile 53 now, about 20% through the 230 total river miles of this trip. We had calm waters and lovely floating yesterday, but the river water is like chocolate sludge from the storm runoff out of side canyons like that of Pariah Creek. As we raft through rapids, the spray spatters every inch of us and the boats with latte colored spots that simply won't wipe off. It's impossible to bathe or wash your hair in the river lest you become a permanent mud head. While we drifted in the current yesterday, though, a pair of coyotes hunting for mice along the right bank paid no attention whatsoever to a flotilla of colorful rubber rafts spiraling by. The skies having cleared, we're getting glimpses through the cliffs of a waxing moon with well up in the afternoons and just now beginning to bathe the canyon in silver light before it sets. It's going to be full in a few days and no doubt still up in morning skies until we're off the river. Throughout yesterday's descent, we continued to pass the high bore holes of the Marble Canyon Dam once proposed for this section of the park. Teddy Roosevelt's line about how humans could in no way improve this canyon should thus leave it as the ages had fashioned it came to mind every time I saw one of these initial, very real attempts to transform this sandstone cathedral into something unrecognizable. It was significantly cooler on the river this morning. Everyone was born bundled up against the instant chill of the icy river spray. But we're clearly in a warmer ecology, at least now with mesquite trees and catclaws appearing along the banks. I rode in the raft with Allie yesterday. She's a long distance runner and a climber and waxes romantic about the climbers in Yosemite, who she refers to as dirtbag climbers, that would seem a slight. In fact, it's high praise. October 1st. I woke before daybreak this morning to see Venus and Jupiter in the dawn sky on day six of our adventure Yesterday we emerged from Marble Canyon and soon came to the mouth of the Little Colorado, which enters the main river on its left bank. Here we stopped for 45 minutes to bask in the bright sunshine. And that gave me a chance to walk a mile or so up the bed of this famous tributary before we loaded up in the rafts and began swinging around to the west and into the big, soaring Grand Canyon proper. The Little Colorado was not running. Its classic turquoise, in fact, was even redder and muddier than the main stream. Helicopter overflight tours now began appearing overhead as we approached the developed south rim of Grand Canyon National Park. At lunch yesterday, Krista led about half the party on a canyon ascent back up into the Kaibab Formation's watermelon, through which the Colorado long ago cut its present course. We passed the Tapeats Formation and the Bright Angel Shale via a steep handhole climb, saw a 1.7 billion year old fossilized cyanobacteria boulder near a major fracture fault atop the Divide, then descended a gradual stream bed down another canyon to our river camp, where the rest of the party had already set up for the night. This was another fine beach campsite beneath looming red walls, with a nearby rapid providing an aural background. I sleep deeply, with river sand beneath me and the rising and ebbing of a nearby rapid. I can tell at breakfast that most of us are falling into that rhythm. The rapid near camp had another meaning, too. On this sixth morning in the first day of October, we face big rapids, including Hantz rapid, a Class 10 on a river that has redefined whitewater classification to include 10 categories rather than five. Wild rides are in store today as we drop into the deep gorge of the Grand Canyon. The weather is now entirely cleared, but it's still cool, and the rapids today require a full splash outfit to stay warm against these frigid waters out of Lake Powell. The Colorado is still too muddy to wash your hair in, although most of us bathed yesterday. Despite the swirling marl, my reading material now has John Wesley Powell below today's Dinosaur National Monument. His party is traversing the canyons on the east side of the Uinta Mountains, bound for Desolation Canyon. We've planned 20 miles of river travel today, from the river miles in the 60s to those in the 80s, as we have to be at Phantom Ranch on October 2nd, where two more members of our party are hiking from the South Rim down the South Kaibab Trail to join us at the ranch. As everyone has been suiting up for the rapids, I've continued reading Powell this morning, tracking him through what he calls the Land of standing Rocks present Canyonlands national park, through Labyrinth Canyon to the Greens Junction with the grand to create the full Colorado river down from there. They're in Cataract Canyon, and Powell begins discussing whether they might end encounter at some point a fall too violent to run with walls too steep to land and portage. Their barometer shows they have thousands of feet left to descend to sea level. I'll snatch quick reads of Powell for the rest of the trip. On numerous occasions I've looked down canyon and wondered how much anxiety it must have created to run a river like this through canyons like this with absolutely no sense of what might lie ahead.
- [22:31]
Podcast Host (Montana Knife Company and Land.com Advertiser)
You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high performance, durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm out in the field doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The weight is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to mkc.com right now. Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications so you get the alert the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company working knives for working people. Head to mkc.com today. That's mkc.com I can't wait to check out one of these folders.
- [23:34]
Tab Ramos
This is Tab Ramos from Inside American Soccer and this summer, topgolf is turning into the ultimate soccer destination. They're not just throwing games on in the background. Topgolf is going all in on soccer. They've got a new soccer themed game you can play with your group, Special in venue activations, exclusive food and drink items inspired by the global game and at more than 60 locations. They've even installed full size soccer goals so you can try to hit golf balls right into the net. And every match all summer long will be on throughout the venue. So it's a great place to watch with friends, hang out, compete a little bit and enjoy the atmosphere. And if you want to keep the fun going all summer, you can get the Top Golf Summer Fun Pass which lets you play every single day and bring up to five guests every visit. Get yours now@TopGolf.com FunPass Summer hits different at TopGolf.
- [24:31]
Podcast Host (Montana Knife Company and Land.com Advertiser)
You ever get that feeling? You're stuck inside staring at screens and a primal urge kicks in. You crave wide open spaces, fresh air, the chance to connect with the land. Well, maybe it's time to find your own piece of the wild. But searching for property can be a maze. That's where land.com comes in. They got millions of listings across the country, from mountain ranches to hidden fishing holes. Their search tools are like a seasoned guide, helping you narrow down what you want. Land.com isn't just about buying and selling. It's about finding a place to hunt, fish, explore, or simply sit by a campfire and listen to the crickets. So head over to land.com today to turn one day into today. Because trust me, there's Nothing quite like the feeling of standing on your own piece of earth.
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Dan Flores
October 2nd. Hants Rapids. Yesterday was a twisting, yanking, thunderous Class 10 that got everyone's pay attentioner dialed up to full game. But accompanied by whoops of exultation. All the rafts got through unscathed. Then an early float this morning through the brown and black schists of the Grand Canyon gorge got us to Phantom Ranch before 9:30. Here we picked up Betsy's 30 something sons, lolled around picturesque little Phantom Ranch where Bright Angel Creek bounces down from the north rim with its clear water and cottonwood canopy and got ready for more big rapids. Horn Creek Rapid with really big waves looms just ahead. It's now mid afternoon and we're camped at about mile 93 at the top of Granite Falls Rapid whose thunder absolutely fills the oral space of the this camp from Phantom Ranch I sent a card to Sarah, who's buried in the fall semester teaching her university classes up in Utah, telling her all was well and I now know how this canyon became grand. Mail is still hauled out of Phantom by Burroughs, but burrow mail is efficient enough that she should get my card within three or four days. I'm sitting on the beach with a handful of others of our group this afternoon drinking beer and reading Powell, whose venture into the unknown 150 years ago is catching up with our present location. Today is day seven on the river. Tomorrow we're halfway through the canyon. October 3rd. It was a gorgeous clear night last night and calm and lovely this morning. Day eight of our journey with cold air settled into the deep gorge. It was a little chilly in the tent last night. We've got a category nine rapid soon after we start today and another nine and our second ten Crystal Rapid in the first five miles. Today Crystal Rapid is at mile 99 and we need to make about mile 113 for camp tonight to be halfway down the river. And in terms of distance I'm well and healthy, happy, very alive and present on this adventure. And an adventure is what it is. Ours may be without the mystery of Powell's descent, but that one can still travel the length of the Grand Canyon means an enormous piece of high drama. America is still there for the asking. One of our group I've struck up a friendship with is a quite famous actor named Mar Mark Rylance, who's managed a sabbatical from a movie he's filming with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Working title Bridge of Spies. Mark's prime directive for the trip, don't get sunburned Mark Marcus Buck, our Navajo boatman, and I spent much of the evening in conversation last night. Mark's career has primarily been as a stage actor, which led us into a long discussion about the actual identity of William Shakespeare. In Mark's opinion, Shakespeare's plays weren't written by an individual, but by a committee of writers directed by Francis Bacon. Somehow that topic veered into the peyote religion, I'm not quite sure how, which further digressed to Marcus account of the discovery of a skeleton in Comb Wash near his Utah home that some thought might be the remains of Everett Ruiz, the young vagabond for beauty who disappeared into the Colorado Plateau country more than a century ago. I'm enjoying both these guys and our long late night digressions as the River Murmurs by Christa once again wants me in the front of her lead boat today to help provide an extra safety net for some of the group that's riding with her. I'm concluding that this is one of the great experiences of my life. October 4th on the morning of day nine, we're at a terrific camp, my favorite one so far in the sand of 110 mile rapid. Yesterday was another day of running big, daunting Class 9 and 10 rapids, including Granite and Crystal, the latter a rapid famous for upsetting boats and sending swimmers downstream into a rock garden, and as we watched from shore, damned at the very first boat from another party didn't end up capsized in the big waves of Crystal. Our boats, however, all got through safely, although Allie did lose an oar. The weather remains calm and sunny and gorgeous. This was a moon camp open to the sky, although we're still in the upper gorge with its black schists and narrow canyon and rapid water. But the canyon spread out here and the waxing moon bathed us and the spot in a beautiful moonlight. Last night once again had a late night confab with Marcus, Mark and David, one of the new additions to the group at Phantom Ranch, who lives in Manhattan and is also an actor. We have only one big rapid coming up today, but there's a promised hike to one of the river's fairyland alcoves. Elves Chasm. October 5th this is day 10 in the Grand Canyon and it's breaking at a splendid camp on the right bank at mile 118, which means we made only eight miles yesterday. We stopped to caress schist polished smooth by water, then scouted Waltenberg Rapid while the other party that flipped the boat you yesterday kids from Colorado and Bozeman never Bothered, just crashed through the rapid on every line imaginable and somehow stayed upright. By the time we got to Elves chasm at mile 117, we were out of the upper gorge and back into the Tapeats Sandstone and the Redwall formations. I must prefer this section aesthetically to the bottom black granite gorge that so lights up the geologist among us. The falls and pools at Elves were magnificent and we all jumped into the cool clear water. Returning to camp, we saw five Bighorns and Marcus played his flute for them. To their utter astonishment, friends from Santa Fe who've been setting up a tent near me, Robert and Jackie invited me to share a flight flask of 25 year old Scotch while we were fashioning our camp this afternoon. That whiskey was smooth, smoky, delicious. We had a fine dinner and camaraderie around the campsite in the twilight of the evening today while Marcus told us his skinwalker story of a Navajo family attempting a cure with a peyote ceremony when he was 13 years old, during which the entire family, he said, grew sharp pointy teeth. Whoever isn't mesmerized by a story like that as the river of the west murmurs by and red cliffs soar overhead, isn't tuned into life. We have a big hike coming today and there's still 108 miles of river left to descend and only six and a half days to do it. October 6th. This is day 11 and follows another silvery moonlit night. A perfect flawless sky. Morning is going. We're just above Dubendorf Rapid and the abyss has yawned at us throughout the night. Were camped at river mile 132 with five and a half days of travel left. There were two prize moments yesterday. One was getting to ascend the wonderful Slot Canyon and the Tapeats sandstone of Blacktail Canyon. It was narrow, deep and ended in a pour off cascade into a small pool. I was the first in, so had it to myself for a couple of minutes. Then some of the women, including Krista, tried out the ringing acoustics of the place with song. Some of them a song for the Colorado river film several of our group are working on. Moment number two took place in the moonlight last night when several of us learned a peyote song Marcus taught us. The song was quick to master and singing it in the moonlight so somehow made you feel remarkably fine. The flask full of premium El Tesoro silver tequila I'd brought on the trip no doubt contributed. The song went like Yaha huwe ni ni yo ha na yaha huway ni ni huway yo ha na. But now we're donning splash gear in preparation for heading down the river again with a Class 9 rapid for an immediate warm up to another day on this roaring river. October 7th. This is day 12 of Life in the Grand Canyon and we're at mile 138 with nearly 90 miles to do over the next four days. But the river is running further faster here and our hikes are growing fewer. Knowing I was writing a biography of one of the West's most famous and malign native animals, the coyote, some of the party prevailed on me to tell a few coyote stories after dinner last night, after which Marcus and Mark and I sat on a rock and sampled the weed someone brought and drank the dregs of my tequila flask while coyotes howled. Most appropriately, we thought yesterday's highlight was Deer Creek Falls, a straight plunge of 80ft into a blue pool. The force of the water on impact so hard you couldn't stand beneath it. Followed then by the climb some of us made up to the patio several hundred feet higher in the cliffs above the patio flow features a winding creek, pools and falls beneath cottonwoods and cliffs with 18 rafts and a dory tied off on the river below. This spot, though, there were too many people up there and the climb featured one of those Narrow ledges with two spots maybe 25ft long, where the cliff face bends over and wants to push you off and into certain expiration in the waters of the roaring defile 50ft below. It was a dicey little passage. We have Havasu Creek with pools and falls of turquoise blue waters coming up today at mile 157. The Main river though, continues ruddy red. October 8th. It's day 13. We've been in the Grand Canyon almost two weeks and we're once again breaking into morning twilight with the roar of a rapid. This river has dominated our intake of sound so long now, I can hardly imagine silence. Every act for two weeks has transpired, enveloped in the sound of rushing waters. The sheer immensity of this canyon has also become a constant pressure presence in the psychology of the trip. How long can these cliffs and rapids continue, for Christ's sake? This canyon is the biggest thing I've ever experienced on some otherworldly Jupiter like scale. It's almost impossible to hold in the mine as a single piece, as one landform. We're camped on limestone ledges in the Mauvi formation on the right bank. Bank at mile 159, a couple of miles below the confluence with Havasu Creek. The day was a little disappointing. The sky was overcast, obscuring both sun and moon and making the day too cool to ascend Havasu Creek by swimming up it, which was the general plan. The biggest rapid on the river, Lava Falls now remains our only major obstacle to a safe and successful descent. We'll get to it this afternoon and run it either today or in the morning. Krista has again asked for me in her boat for this rapid. She's run lava more than anyone here and we'll go first to see how it goes. As we rafted down river there were asks that I tell more coyote stories. I'd related the Orpheus like Nez Perce story called Coyote and the Shadow People to the group the night before. There's an awful lot of pathos in that story. October 9th. It's daybreak on day 14 in a camp on the beach just below Lava Falls Rapid. Huge masses of black lava protrude from the cliff behind my tent. We're now at mile 180 with 47 river miles to go to takeout,
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so
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our biggest rapid and biggest test is behind us. We floated 22 miles under cool overcast conditions yesterday with a lunch stop and a hike in National Camp Canyon to set us up to run Lava Falls Rapid as a last act before camping Last night I was in Krista's lead boat and I'm obliged to comment that I've never been in a rapid as big as lava. It's quick and over in seconds, but it's enormous with troughs that can devour you and waves curling 10 to 12ft overhead. Hell of an adrenaline rush. All six of our rafts got through without mishap though. So we ate steaks and broke out the bucket of stupid vodka and fruit juice to celebrate. Stupidity was rewarded as Old Man America Coyote smiled on us and yodeled and a stunner of a double rainbow formed over Lava Falls as we drank. Clearer weather and a calm float await us today. Three decent rapids, two sevens and an eight come up tomorrow. But that's about it till we get to takeout on the morning of day 16, October 10th. It's our 15th day in the Grand Canyon and our last full day. We'll make our final camp at about mile 222 tonight to set us up for takeout the next day. Presently we're somewhere around mile 200. Yesterday I rode alone with Marcus in the baggage boat all day, standing up behind him for much of it. A fine way to see the river and the canyon. Marcus and I had a splendid day hanging out and talking, during which he told me this story, which was as appropriate a way to bring this adventure to a close as I could imagine. Among the Indian and white homes of Bluff, Utah, where Marcus lives, a particular coyote had been causing trouble. Killing sheep, chasing pets, attracting attention to itself. Bluff is a town of about 350 people and like towns big and small in America these days, it has resident coyotes. Occasionally one becomes a problem. So the Dene chapter leadership asked Marcos if he couldn't hunt down this coyote and take it out. A few mornings later, Marcos was in his truck on the edge of town, bouncing slowly along a dirt road, his rifle in the gun rack by behind his head. When out of the waist high sagebrush, a coyote steps into the road no more than 25ft away. Marcus braked to a stop. The dust from the truck tires rose into the air, briefly obscured the coyote, then settled. The coyote was still there, standing broadside to the truck. Marcus reached behind him and grasped his his rifle. At that moment we were floating through a calm Mojave desert looking stretch of the Grand Canyon. On the way to our final camp. Crenulated black lava flows and irregular dikes and blobs of lava decorated both banks of the river. The rest of our group was bobbing along and five yellow craft downstream of us. I was sitting behind Marcus, so couldn't see his face as he described what happened then. This coyote walks nonchalantly right in front of me in the road, looks at me, sees the rifle. Then you know what he does? He yawns right in my face, kind of stretches. Then he turns to look back where he had come from and I hear coyotes howl a ways back. So he raises his nose, throws back his head and howls back at them. I've got my hand on the stock of the rifle, but I still haven't pulled it down. Now he stops howling, turns back to me, looks straight as can be, right at me for probably half a minute. Then he strolls casually across the road in no hurry at all. As if he knew something about me. So you never shot? I'd known how this was gonna go. No, I never even got the gun down. He was just too damn nonchalant, too confident. Something. And I didn't know for sure if it was the coyote everybody was looking for. But you know something? Even if it was, I wouldn't have shot. That coyote was so cool looking so perfect. He was way too pretty to shoot. I nodded. Marcos had obviously experienced one of those sympathetic moments with the world. It was a moment of animal to animal, mutual understanding and identification. Moments like that can be unforgettable because the shared dialogue of body language isn't getting filtered by the cultural thoughts in our heads. By loaded language, both see the other
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for who he is.
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It was exactly the kind of story you want to tell or hear after more than two weeks in a place like the Grand Canyon of the American West.
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Foreign.
- [45:45]
Podcast Host (Montana Knife Company and Land.com Advertiser)
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- [47:05]
Tab Ramos
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- [48:04]
Podcast Host (Montana Knife Company and Land.com Advertiser)
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- [48:52]
Interviewer
So, Dan, in this episode, you took us down the Colorado river. And I want to begin where you did, which is you began this episode by discussing the endless possibilities of the Western landscape in terms of just getting lost and pure adventure. And what struck me is then, as you embark on this trip, you're describing the lottery system to get a permit to go down the Colorado. And I sort of wonder what your thoughts are in the tension between recreation management and the endless possibilities. I mean, I'm in the camp that there's too much to do and too little time, and there's endless opportunities out there. But obviously, to live in the west today with the crowds that some of these parks experience and the interest in them, there are more and more constraints on outdoor recreation and just general exploration.
- [49:57]
Dan Flores
Yeah, there are. I mean, there's no question about it. It's a consequence of a burgeoning population and excitement about all the things one can do in the West. You know, what I will say about Western experiences is that if you use some imagination, you can always figure out a way to experience something a little more in a little more solitary fashion than if you don't use your imagination and you just kind of waltz up and stand in line and. And end up immersed in crowds. So you have to kind of do that today. You know, this is a part of modern life in the west or in any part of the world. I think that's in demand.
- [50:50]
Interviewer
Right?
- [50:50]
Dan Flores
And where people are excited to be there, this particular trip down the Colorado River, I mean, we did this trip in October, which is a little bit off the prime time for doing a trip like this. I mean, my friends who have done this trip at other times of the year like to go in April, same reason. Because it's not quite the prime time. So it wasn't, it wasn't a. It didn't feel like you were competing for camping spots. The one time, which I did mention in the script, that it seemed like there were too many people as we stopped at a particular spot where you climb up to these beautiful pools and waterfalls and cottonwood trees. And when we came down, I mean, there weren't that many boats there when we went up, but when we came down from that, There were like 14 rafts parked at the spot where you. You ascended to go up to this really delightful kind of alcove. Otherwise, we actually didn't really have that much company on the river. I mean, when you're at Phantom Ranch, obviously there are some other people coming through and you see groups of people who are doing the rim to rim hike. Or if you're there for a couple of hours, there'll be another trip maybe that comes in behind you to eat breakfast or something. But we didn't really have much of an experience of feeling crowded, I would say, on this particular trip. And I think it was because we waited until October to do it, which is a fantastic time to be in the Grand Canyon, I gotta say.
- [52:34]
Interviewer
Yeah, the. Throughout this chapter, you reference various proposals to dam the Grand Canyon.
- [52:45]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [52:46]
Interviewer
And I think it's. In some respects, it might be overlooked by the general public just how crazy we were for dams at one point in our history. I don't know that the average person recognizes the name Floyd Dominy, but when you think of Hetch Hetchy and Echo park, you know, dams have really been sort of pivotal moments in appreciation for public lands and these types of things. So I wonder if you can sort of contextualize dams within the broader story of American environmental history.
- [53:25]
Dan Flores
Well, one of the ways to settle and inhabit and live in the west has been to manipulate the waters of the West. And I mean, those manipulations go a long way back. You know, John Wesley Powell and the United States Geological Survey. I mean, one of the. The big projects they Undertook in the 1880s was to canvas the west for potential dam sites. So, I mean, we've been confronting the whole idea of damming up the west to the point where, you know, as we all know, virtually every river in the United States is dammed in the West. Most rivers end up with multiple dams on them. You know, we've got A piece of the Yellowstone that we're all proud of, that is an undammed river. And everybody remains excited about that. But the Missouri in Montana, for example, is dammed in multiple places, including within the state. I mean, this is true pretty much everywhere. And we. We had a government bureau, the Bureau of Reclamation, that started in the early 20th century that. That really endeavored to put Powell's plans into action. And so we kind of designed dams on every. Every running piece of water to the point where in the 1960s, under the direction of Floyd Dominy, this fellow I refer to as an uber engineer, the guy who couldn't see a river without planning some way to dam it up, had the idea that we were also going to dam the Grand Canyon. I mean, this is. So we had, of course, sacrificed a piece of a national park earlier in American history when the city of San Francisco, following the earthquake and the Great Fire of 1906, decided that it needed the waters of Yosemite National Park. And Hetch Hetchy Canyon in Yosemite ended up being damned. John Muir fought it to the end. He was not able to stop that dam. And the o' Shaughnessy Dam is still there, still blocking up the waters of the Tuolumne river in Hetch Hetchy Canyon. So we had that precedent where a national park, we assumed, was for perpetuity, except if things reach a really bad turn, we may just sacrifice a particular canyon in a national park. So Floyd Domini, with that kind of precedent in his mind, decided that we were going to have to dam up the Grand Canyon. I mean, and this was a suite of a series of dams that included Lake Powell and Echo Park Dam that we were going to construct on the Colorado River. And fortunately, at the time when Domini was doing this, this is another Stuart Udall victory. As the Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson, Stuart Udall stepped up and said, no, we're not going to dam the Grand Canyon National Park. But floating through it today, if you pay attention when you're in Marble Canyon, which is one of the first big canyons you come into after you depart from Lee's Ferry, you can see the boreholes where they were already, where the engineers were already planning on putting their pylons in in order to start this project, and that sort of gives you a cold sweat to see that. I mean, it got that close.
- [57:04]
Interviewer
Yeah, that's amazing. I. One of the things that you talk about in this episode is just the sheer scale of the canyon and your inability to sort of comprehend how big this place is one of the other things that came to mind for me is the scale of the Colorado river, because as someone who grew up in the Midwest, you know, we learned all about the Mississippi. But I don't think I fully appreciated the green and Colorado river system until I moved out west and just sort of got a sense of where it comes from and where it goes. And along the Grand Canyon or along the Colorado, not only have the Grand Canyon, but you mentioned in the, in the episode Canyonlands, Echo Park, Desolation Canyon. I mean, it's cataract.
- [57:56]
Dan Flores
Yeah, yeah.
- [57:57]
Interviewer
It's sort of an unbelievable chain of these landscapes along a single river system.
- [58:03]
Dan Flores
It is. And you know, I mean, the waters, you can argue that the waters of the Colorado River, I mean, there are several sources high in the Colorado Rockies is one of them. But to, to me, the real start of the Colorado river is in the Wind River Range on the west side of the winds in Wyoming, and down then through Flaming Gorge, another obviously reservoir now, but Flaming Gorge Canyon, and then into Echo Park. And then as you mentioned, all these. And because I was reading John Wesley Powell's account at the time we were doing this float, you know, I was sort of imagining in my mind all of his descents through all these places. And I mean, it is a marvelous system of canyon country and deep gorges and rushing waters that starts all the way up in Wyoming and of course ends up in the Gulf of California, Baja California. The Colorado, what's left of it, flows into Mexico. So it's a gigantic river system. It's the river of the west, really. I mean, so is the Missouri, right. And so is the Columbia, right. But the Colorado tracks through more of the today's existing west than any of the others. And it's also the river that's of course the most threatened in terms of continuing to provide water for a perpetuation of the West. I mean, the Colorado river Compact of 1922 that divided the waters of the Colorado up between the so called upper basin states and the lower basin states had far too optimistic an assessment of what the actual flow of the river was. And it turns out dividing it up was like giving everybody a third again, too much water than was actually going to be in the Colorado. And so we're confronting a situation now, of course, where, I mean, deadpool lurks for places like Lake Powell.
- [60:16]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. It's one of the, one of the most endangered, consistently endangered rivers in the country.
- [60:23]
Dan Flores
Oh, yeah.
- [60:26]
Interviewer
I think you talk about Powell in this episode quite a bit because you're obviously reading him. And I, I think one of the things that always fascinates me about the Grand Canyon and the Powell story is sort of what an eye opening moment it is for science in terms of geologic time and, and some of Powell's observations. So I wonder if you can talk about that and just, just what it was that Powell experienced and what he brought back to the world. Because his, his journey is one that really changed a lot of minds about what we think of the western landscape.
- [61:12]
Dan Flores
Yeah, it's, it's one of the great epic journeys and the whole western story, I mean, and he did it twice. But that first trip in particular in the early 1870s is, I mean, it's kind of chilling in a way to read it, particularly when you're going through the Grand Canyon today and confronting some of these giant rapids. Because you know, for one thing, they had no sense, Powell and his men had no sense about what was ahead. I mean, they just didn't. They're going down this stupendous river through this landscape as I described in the, in the script. That. And in my experience of it, I mean, I couldn't comprehend the size of this. We were going day after day after day through this immense gigantic canyon. And it just seemed to go on forever. And the whole chilling aspect of Powell confronting, getting up every morning and having no idea really. And of course, some of his men on that first trip bailed from the expedition.
- [62:22]
They were so freaked out by it.
- [62:23]
But what he did do to speak to the question that you ask is he gave us a sense, I mean, geology obviously is still a science that's discovering itself and discovering the world in the late 19th century. But he gave us a sense of unfathomable time. He began to realize that particularly as you get to the bottom of, of the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon in this black schist, this granite that you're looking at rock that is older than most of the rock that's observable anywhere on the planet. And Powell was able to, although he wasn't able to, to come up with a precise dating of all these specific levels that he was seeing. He was able to make it known to the scientific community that this was a canyon that cut into really the innards of the earth and was exposing a kind of a core geology and a core rock, an ancient rock that conveyed, I mean, this is a century. Remember when only 50 years before people were saying, well, the earth's like 6,000 years old. I mean, the Bible says it's 6,000 years old. So it's no older than that, probably, and possibly even younger. What Powell, of course, is demonstrating with this voyage is that you don't get rock like this and these kind of levels in a 6,000 year old planet.
- [63:59]
Interviewer
Yeah. Well, Dan, it's always good to talk to you.
- [64:02]
Dan Flores
Oh, enjoyed it. Appreciate it.
- [64:22]
Podcast Host (Montana Knife Company and Land.com Advertiser)
You ever get that feeling, the walls closing in the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe in a spot all your own. We'll head over to land.com they've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage, you can search by location, you can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com it is where the adventure begins.
- [64:50]
Tab Ramos
This is Tab Ramos from inside American Soccer. And this summer, topgolf is turning into the ultimate soccer destination. They've got a new soccer themed game you can play with your group, except exclusive food and drink items. They've even installed full size soccer goals so you can try to hit golf balls right into the net. And every match all summer long will be on throughout the venue. And if you want to keep the fun going all summer, you can get the topgolf Summer Fun Pass, which lets you play every single day and bring up to five guests every visit. Get yours now@TopGolf.com funpass
- [65:26]
O'Reilly Auto Parts Advertiser
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- [65:48]
Interviewer
Oh, oh, oh.
- [65:50]
Dan Flores
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