One is the Old San Juan, muddy and free (mostly), home of spirits of the ancients and the ghost of Nevills, last vestige of the nurturing nature that was Glen Canyon.
The other is the wretched remnant of the lower Colorado known as Lake Havasu. Land of Blue Green Waters? Not. How about: Land of Eternal Engine Exhaust. Or: Land of a Thousand Buttheads. Or: Freeway of the Oily Waters. I could go on, but it only gets worse.
My buddy Layne and I just came off one of the odder river trips in the annals of the Colorado River and its tributaries. It started with a relaxing seven-day float down the San Juan in a pair of wooden dories, and ended with two days in a sailboat on Lake Havasu over Memorial Day weekend. I'd been telling Layne about the joys of running desert rivers ever since the bug first bit me a few years back, but this was his first time on a river.
The San Juan gave us all you could ask from a river trip—gorgeous country, lively little rapids, great folks, Indian ruins, side canyons, starlit evenings filled with music and tall tales… Layne was smitten, just as I had been on my first river trip. The highlight of the trip for me was serene Oljeto Canyon—as close as I've ever been to what those legendary side canyons of Glen Canyon must have been like, before the waters of that dreaded reservoir began to rise. All of which made the second part of our trip particularly jarring. An eight hour drive from the take out landed us smack in the middle of power boat Babylon.
You know… a couple of days on a sailboat at Havasu seemed innocent enough. Yes it's a reservoir, but not all reservoirs are inherently bad. No spectacular canyon was flooded to create Lake Havasu. No white-water paradise was destroyed. But my God, the horror! The horror!
I've never seen such a display of consumption run amok as floated on that lake. Hundreds, no probably thousands of bright shiny aquatic dragsters with thousand horsepower engines belching raw exhaust into the water and the air. Houseboats with rooftop disco sound systems blaring rap music off the canyon walls—driving across the lake like miraculous Winnebagos. Dimwit sons of rich daddies trolling for women of suspicious virtue using their floating party barges as bait. We were the only sailboat on the lake. Sailing was impossible in the random chop stirred up by the endless parade of powerboats. Up the lake. Down the lake. Back up the lake. Sit still and rev the engine for a while. Smash beer can on forehead. Light cigarette. Run rings around the silly looking little sailboat…. repeat steps 1–7. I tried to close my eyes and sleep as we made our way across the lake, but I may as well have tried to nap in the number two lane of the Santa Monica Freeway on a Friday afternoon. The noise was constant and deafening. We made our way to one of only three coves on the lake set aside as no-wake zones, only to find a group of drunken water skiers tearing it up anyway.... Layne and I looked at each other and said: “Just Drain It.”
If the tranquility of the San Juan and the otherworldly experience of Oljeto Canyon weren't enough to awaken the activist in Layne, then the cognitive dissonance of going straight from the San Juan to Havasu definitely pushed him over the edge. I think Glen Canyon Institute just gained a member.
Layne has the river fever pretty bad. He says the first thing he hears when he wakes up is the sound of the river. He's still wearing the Just Drain It hat. He hasn't put his watch back on yet. His head is completely spun around. We arrived at the California border agricultural inspection station, pulled to a stop, rolled down the window, and the inspector looked at Layne and asked “where are you coming from?”
Poor Layne just locked up for a few seconds. The whole trip flashed before his eyes, and I think he considered answering the question in a broader context, found that to be impossible, and finally managed to choke out the single word “Utah.” Somehow that failed to adequately capture what he was feeling at that moment. I don't think the inspector knew quite what to make of the laughter that followed from both of us.... Just a pair of travelers, figuring out where they are really coming from, with a little help from two very different rivers.

Barton Shaler