Notes of a River Sitter

River running, i've decided, isn't the best way to see the Grand Canyon. Neither is hiking. Both turn the canyon into a human adventure, a place of obstacles and effort, worry and triumph. To see the canyon truly, you need to see it on its own terms. I came to this conclusion while viewing the canyon from a unique perspective, camping at Hance and Crystal for nearly three weeks and watching river runners run. From a boater's perspective, every inch of the river and every moment of the canyon may seem like an adventure, but when you sit on the shore, you soon realize that river trips are a brief interruption of the natural order. Most of the time, the river isn't an adventure, it's simply itself. The rocks sit there content in their geological identities. The river flows through them in praise of hydrology. The only names the rapids have are signed by waves that can hold no memories.
But then humans show up, and suddenly the river is saddled with the identity of a quirky asbestos miner of a century ago. Suddenly the rocks and waves become monsters with legends of all the evil they've done. The river becomes tension and dread, then a glorious feat. But soon the humans disappear around the bend, and the river goes back to being itself, flowing as it has for ages, completely oblivious of all the commotion it caused. The rocks go back to dreaming of the mountains they once were.
I do not mean to trivialize the tension and dread of guides arriving at Hance or Crystal, for I have felt worse than dread in their place. My whole purpose in being here now was to take seriously the dread in their faces and words, to make an official record of their troubles. But it was precisely because these had been places of dread for me that I was now brought to recognize the warped perspective of river runners, for it turned out that these places were far from dread-full. I had expected as much, for I had already seen the ultimate temple to boater angst turned into a delightful front porch. For six days during the 45,000 spike flow, I had camped just above the scouting boulder overlooking Lava Falls, and this boulder had become my lawn chair for eating, reading, bird watching, and gawking at the old power of the resurrected Lava Falls. At night I sat there watching the giant waves in full moonlight. The roar massaged my dreams. I would never be able to return to Lava Falls again without feeling a warm sense of homecoming.
The same thing happened at Hance and Crystal, but in a different way. Since the rapids weren't so compelling a sight at 8,000 cfs, my attention was more free to wander. I watched the comings and goings of the daylight, shadows, and moonlight on the walls and water. I watched the comings and goings of beaver, herons, and snakes. The lizards with whom I shadow-migrated all day accepted me as a friend. For an evening stroll I could visit the rock garden, the ruins, or go up Crystal Creek. One day after a fierce storm that sent cascades pouring over the schist, Crystal Creek and Slate Creek both flash flooded, turning the rapid into an Oreo cookie, dark on both sides and light in the middle. It was a wonder to watch Crystal Creek building a considerable delta of small cobbles; I was seeing a legend at work, if in a modest way, like seeing Babe Ruth hitting a single. Hance and Crystal became familiar and friendly places, in short a home.
If guides would like to arrive at Hance, Crystal, or Lava and feel a warm sense of homecoming, I'd suggest you try a bit of river sitting. Doing a layover day there will turn the rapids into mere scenic backdrops. It doesn't count if you are just stuck waiting for the water to rise at Hance or fall at Crystal. You have to sit there on purpose, for the sake of identifying the geology of all your favorite rocks in Hance, or to watch for the big horn sheep to come down Slate Creek to drink. You'll also watch river runners coming through, and see that their agonies and ecstasies are but a small part of the stories the canyon has to tell.
Unfortunately, few trips would have time for river sitting during the 8,000 flows. Trips were pushing themselves to stay on schedule, getting up earlier, rowing or motoring all day, losing hikes. Even guides who appreciated the historic significance of a major dam being used to repair the ecological damage it had caused did not feel particularly honored to be participants in this event. Instead, there was a mood of deep frustration.

Guides who had long ago resigned themselves to “The Powers That Be” treating the guiding profession with insufficient respect, who had watched trip lengths shrink and bureaucratic red tape grow to suffocating dimensions, now felt betrayed from a new source. Guides had thought they'd formed a partnership with the research community in addressing the impacts of Glen Canyon dam, but now the researchers had turned down the river without consulting the guides, in disregard of the hardships it would impose, with hardly any explanation of why an entire summer of precisely 8,000 was the necessary formula for the fish. Guides who had done the most trips with the fisheries researchers took this more personally, and expressed the greatest skepticism about the scientific rationale for the whole project.
Less than three weeks into the low flow, the owner of one of the river companies came downriver to assess the impact. He kept his trip waiting atop Crystal to talk with me. Already, six motor rigs had been stuck in Hance, and props and motors were being smashed at an unsustainable rate. He said that the last minute notification of the low water had left him scrambling to order more motors and parts. He had long supported environmentalist efforts, and he was dismayed that the outfitters and issues of river trip safety had been left out of the decision-making loop. Thus far only gear and profits were being lost, but wasn't it obvious that if people started getting hurt, it would hurt the environmentalist's cause?
On my last night at Crystal, a fisheries research trip chanced to camp there, so I tried to get some answers to the questions guides had been asking, such as: would 9,000 have hurt the fish? When I said that the guides community was being alienated, the head researcher launched a tirade of scorn for the guides: “The guides are always bitching. They wreck lots of props at higher water. There was a motor rig pinned here at 20,000. The companies shouldn't have fired all their old guys and hired all those kids.” When I suggested that the guides had been very supportive of the researchers, the researcher acted as if the guides were trespassers in his science lab, and repeated that if river trips were having trouble, it wasn't the fault of the low water, it was totally the fault of the guides for being so incompetent. Then he went on about how it wasn't the researchers' job to educate the guides or public or Park Service about the low flows; if the guides didn't understand something, it was because they were lazy and stupid. Then, though this was their Official Park Interviewer opportunity to counterbalance the dozens of comments expressed thoughtfully and courteously by guides, passengers, and privates, the researcher ordered me, in words that can't be printed in a family publication like this, to get lost.
You can see that being a river sitter hardly made me geologically aloof from the concerns of river runners. On the contrary, I saw the big picture there too, and was quite immersed in its human drama, as when helping carry a backboard from a raft to a helicopter at Hance. This trip was one of only two commercial rowing trips that didn't scout Hance. They also had the worst runs (36% of their rafts going over the bottom dome rock vs. 10% for trips that scouted), and one produced the only swimmer of the week and the other the only evacuation. Of the two private trips I met at Crystal who had flipped in Horn Creek, one hadn't scouted and the other didn't scout long or well, for they claimed they never noticed any big hole at the bottom. As I've been trying to tell you, there are benefits to river sitting, even ten minutes of it; there are bigger perspectives it gives you, such as distinguishing waves from holes, or showing passengers just how long they need to hold on tight. Even ten minutes of river sitting serves the same purpose as ten days of it; it shows you that river runners are a very humble thing beside the ancient power of the Colorado River. If there was one lesson that stood out from nearly a month of studying boaters at Hance, Crystal, and Lava at flows that required not habits but complete mental engagement, it was that the best guides were those who best understood the river's power and who showed the river exactly the right amount of humility.
Don Lago