It's been quite a while since something was written on our page and surely this means that less is happening to Karo and I. For something of a change though, Karo is now 35 weeks pregnant! Less than 5 weeks to go if all goes well. Ouf, that's short! So because I know everything will be quite different very soon, I just HAD to go out again and find some new adventures before fatherhood. A descent of the Colorado river through 70 miles in the Grand Canyon seemed like the most perfect way! Of course I left Karo at home! What were you thinking!?
Not so many people had gone down the fast flowing rapids in the bottom of the Grand Canyon by packrafting. Gerard our true American teammate from Vermont, friend of a post Montrealer Paul, is a total fan of packrafting and got a permit through the new (since 2006) lottery system to paddle down in the Grand Canyon National Park. For most of us, we wonder what in the world is packrafting??? Well I discovered that it's actually a pretty awesome and lightweight way of discovering those hard to reach parts of the world where rapids and hiking can coexists. It's a single person mini raft that you carry with you deflated when you hike and once inflated, it allows you to paddle or cross any river that's on your way. On the water, you strap your backpack to the boat and you follow the main stream using a 4 pieces paddle. It is indeed quite instable in big water but what the heck, lots of
people went down the Grand Canyon with much less than us! We'll look for ourselves. Here's a practice run we had pictured in big water in the Lachine rapids (one of Montreal's jems) as a test of the little boat's manuverability. It's early January of 2011 in Arizona, we have been talking and preparing this for the last few months.
I have been spending at least the previous four days on food preparation and dehydrated a whole bunch of ingredients following a fantastic camping recipe book by Odile Dumais. This trip will not be about not eating well OK!! As we gather some of our last stuff in Flagstaff, we all feel excitment and anxiety. Is this totally absurd or is it completely ridiculous to go down packrafting the Grand Canyon rapids? 
Our meeting with the National Park rangers shows them we are all but unprepared (see following picture). Our levels of experience are quite varied: one is a pacraft adept and works often outdoors , two of us were rafting guides and avid whitewater kayakers, two of us rockclimb a lot. A great melting pot of experiences ready for a new adventure. Day 1: January 7th 2011
Ceiba owner Scott Davis (www.ceibaadventures.com) arrives at the front door of our hotel 5 minutes ahead of time at 5h25AM. He has been working in or around the Grand Canyon for something like 20 years and yet never drove to our trailhead on top of the the Shinumo Wash. That tells a lot about the orientation our trip has already taken. Once off the 
map on dirt roads, we take a bad turn, the Michelin tire landmark has been found absent and we take a 30 minutes detour/route finding through some partly snow covered totally flat desert scene. Yet, no visual sign of a Canyon as the sun gets above the horizon until suddenly the trailhead is finally at the door with a sheer drop. We get our first glimpse of the greatness of what any side stream going down the Grand Canyon looks like. The Canyon will be empty of anyone. It's January, colder but not so cold for the canadians, mostly sunny and we will be in the shade for most of the trip. TAM TAM TAMMMM (dramatic sounds...) 
Shinumo Wash is already awesome. Looks like there's many rockclimbing cracks all around us! Looks like poor quality rock 
too... The descent is so sheer we wonder where we'll be able to go down to the creekbed! What creek!? It is dry! Most likely, it looks like we will be using the Colorado River for water consumption. We will need to filter the silt out of it before treating it. A couple of hours pass by as we continuously head downward and wonder where the river is!? The scale of things is soo great that we don't really fully understand all features that surrounds us! There are no buildings or other people around the scale. But finally we make it to the steepest part down the Silver Grotto. It's the last 200 feet down to the river with 4 small rappels (longest has about 65 feet) down these dry waterfalls, some swimming through some green algae filled pools with an inch of ice in some of them. Water defenitely feels cold even though we wear neoprene gloves and our full dry suits. Realising how little physical training we had done for this kind of day, we make it down to the river finally before dusk somewhere around 17h30PM totally exhausted. The first meals are going to be big, fast and Good, unlike the few curious mice smelling it at the noisy campsite next to our first rapid... Today, we lost 2200 feet in elevation from the South rim to the river.
Day 2 : River mile 29.5 to 41 = 11.5 miles day
Our first sight of the bottom canyon under daylight is remarkable. It takes us quite a while to get the pack and boat all organised as what configuration we find the best will follow us for the next 7 days. We leave our campsite at 10h30 with as much as 11.5 miles to do. We figured at first that our progress was going to be slow but had a great surprise as we discovered that we didn't get to paddle at all and still move at an average speed of 4 miles an hour!! Such great news since our flat water speed estimates were of 2 miles an hour with continuous paddling! Our trip seemed much more relax from that point on because we knew our farthest take-out point was 70 miles down the river, 7 days later with Ceiba coming to get us back at Hermits Rest on January 16th, no matter what happened.. If we would have wanted to go any further quicker, it would have been either a super long hike back or 170 miles of river to paddle to the nearest road access.
On the way, we got across a super SUPER big cave: The Redwall Cavern. Again, the scale of things made us think it was a small cavern but it's only as we got closer and closer to it that we started to realise the immensity of it!!!
By now, you probably want to know how were the rapids right!? Well that day was a small day for rapids as we only had two rapids, the two were around class 2, drops of 7 feet and 4 feet. Nothing powerful.
Day 3 : River mile 41 to river mile 53.3 = 12.3 miles day
0 comments:
Post a Comment