Riverbend Journal

Lower Falls: Elves Chasm I woke this morning to a sky filled with clouds but rapidly clearing out. By mid-morning, they were gone. After a breakfast of grapefruit, eggs, bacon and English muffins, we struck camp and shoved off for a day of mild whitewater, comparatively speaking of course. The hard black schist and granite are behind and we are now in the softer Topeats layer that tends to smooth out the rapids. Around mid-morning, we pulled in near the mouth of Elves Chasm and after switching into footgear, set off up the canyon. The mouth of the canyon is arid desert and has been painted in colors of gray and brown. Inside the canyon proper, much brighter colors were used and it was a lush green dotted with lots of wildflowers like yellow columbine (the yellow version of my personal favorite flower that I love in blue), globe mallow, scarlet monkey and red orchids. Perhaps 95% of the people who visit Elves Chasm only visit the main falls and don't go any higher. Most likely that ...

Long time readers will remember that I have a particular disease called morel madness. It occurs every spring when the temperatures warm up and there is moisture in the ground. It causes me, and hundreds of others in the area also inflicted with the madness, to park our vehicles alongside roads and wander aimlessly in the woods. Really long time readers will remember that I've been in kind of a drought in recent years where I have been unable to effectively cure the madness by finding and consuming morels. Between the cold and lack of moisture during the only two or three weeks a year they grow, I have barely found enough for a taste. So this year with plenty of moisture in the ground and the weather finally getting up to what I judged a warm enough point, I drove south to the farm, parked my car along the road and wandered into the woods. I wandered the woods for well over an hour without seeing nary a morel mushroom and started feeling sorry for myself. I blamed my poor eyesight,...

Sunrise The sky was completely socked in when I woke up this morning. I wasn't in any particular hurry to get up by my farm boy biological clock wouldn't stop even at the bottom of the Grand Canyon so I joined the cooks for the early morning preparations. Today is going to be another layover day so everyone else slept in allowing me to get caught up on my journal writing and gawking. I was in awe as wave after wave of clouds disappeared over the rim line, turning a flaming red from the rising sun. I might have just gone hungry had it been going on by the time breakfast was served but it finally ended in a cloudless sky so that I could enjoy my fresh melon, pancakes and sausage. The longest hike option for today was a long ways and because I had excellent map reading skills, trip captain Bronco let me set off early with the promise to wait by the head of a particular canyon that some crewmembers and myself wanted to see. So as soon as I had my lunch packed, I did just that headi...

  Ote & Bob In Crystal Rapids Crystal Rapid is a fairly new one as far as the Grand Canyon goes. In Powell's days, it wasn't even noteworthy among Inner Gorge rapids. Then in 1969, a flood of Crystal Creek dislodged boulders out of the side canyon into the main channel and creating a demon of a rapid. Another flood in 1983 swept some huge boulders from the top of the rapid down which created a severe challenge to boats especially in lower water conditions that we found upon reaching Crystal in our dories. No one in their right mind would now purposely go through the top center of THE HOLE in the right middle of the rapid and you couldn't go left of THE HOLE if you wanted to avoid the massive rock garden below that would be guaranteed to smash you and your boat to pieces. The only option was to avoid THE HOLE on the right, which was easy in high water but extremely difficult in low water due to a rock shelf upstream of the hole that projected halfway out into the river. ...

  I saw the above on an old comment about the same problem occurring back in 2019. It explains why the option “cross site tracking had to be turned on in your browser for embedded comments. For those still having problems, perhaps a search on “third party cookies” and your browser may get things working again.