Grand Canyon Journals - Part 11: Moonset, Moonrise and Mooning By the River

I awaken for unknown reasons in the middle of the night and watch the moon set over the downstream rim. I've seen lots of sunsets but few moonsets. Beautiful. When I awoke the second time, clouds had moved in but would leave again by mid-morning. Trip leader Bronco was cooking breakfast this morning to let the two cooks sleep in for a change. For a half hour or so it was just the two of us greeting the morning over the smell of frying bacon. Frying bacon always greets me well.

Almost immediately after starting down the river, I saw a coyote scurrying for cover on the rocks overhead. They look smooth and graceful in the rolling hills of Southeast Iowa but here on rocks, they look out of place and slightly ungainly. We pushed through Forster, Fossil, Specter and Bedrock rapids all of which had nice waves. Dubendorf Rapids was a real dandy and we pulled into an eddy below for a half-day layover at Stone Creek. Stone Creek was a good example of Mother Nature's force having been swept clean by a flash flood several years ago. There were lots of waterfalls along the way and several old Anasazi ruins. One particular ruin built under an overhanging rock in a field of rocks on a steep slope was visible only with binoculars. The thing that set this ruin aside from all the others was that the door had been sealed shut by the Anasazi and it has never been opened in the many hundreds of years since. Not wanting to give the location away by creating a trail up to it, we all felt content to stand in the riverbed, look from afar and dream about what is inside it.

At the end of Stone Creek was a beautiful little slot canyon with a 30-foot waterfall, a perfect respite from the heated day. The baggage boat paddlers Nick and Lee along with myself, spent the better part of the afternoon in a waiting game with the mid-afternoon heat. We won. Lee is a nurse in Albuquerque but takes time off in the spring and fall to make baggage runs down the Grand Canyon. He also runs 100-mile marathons in his spare time, which for me would be more like a full career to just complete one. Nick also only does the spring and fall runs in the Grand Canyon and then moves up to the Salmon in Idaho during the summer where it is much cooler. In the winter, like a lot of boat paddlers, he supplements his income with construction work and teaching skiing lessons in Colorado.

After a resounding victory with the heat, we walked back into camp and were greeted by a turkey, mashed potato, yam, dressing and salad meal. It is amazing what one can fit into just a few boats if you really set your mind to it and in the case of food on this trip, someone spent an amazing amount of mental power thinking about it. Right after dinner, I walked down to the river in time to watch the moon rise from behind the upstream rim of Stone Creek. It was bath time for a lot of people tonight because for a while I felt as if I was the only dressed person in a nudist colony. In this particular camp is was impossible to leave sight of camp due to physical restrictions in the form of sheer cliffs and the river, so the official bath site seemed to be thirty feet upstream of where I sat. Fortunately for me, it was mostly the female crewmembers my age that were bathing tonight and they are all what I call free spirits. Had I not taken my bath the night before, I would have stripped down and joined them. As I have said before, when going on a trip like this you have to check your modesty at the door. After they were clean and refreshed and I just refreshed, a fire was started up and we all sat around talking until late in the evening.