Post Season Armchair Rantings—
More Thoughts on the CRMP

Some vignettes from recent trips. The river’s been muddy, muddy since the Little Colorado. It’s as brown and filled with debris as I’ve ever seen it, and we’ve been after our guests about not using those clear, warm side streams that they (and we) would love to bathe and wash our clothes in. We’re hiking up Stone Creek and two women from a private trip are there. One is washing her hair in the creek. With soap. When I mention that using soap in the side streams isn’t allowed, she says “it’s biodegradable.” And then the other woman points out that she’s not soaping in the creek, but using a bucket, and pouring the soapy water about fifteen feet away, still in the gravel creek bed. I know she’s aware that there is a rule about using soap a hundred yards up or downstream of the mouth of a tributary.
Below Lava, we’ve all had great runs and we’re enjoying the long afternoon to mile 194. Around Whitmore we come upon another private trip with boats lashed together, celebrating. Buck naked, hammered to the gods, screaming and yelling and trying to climb onto our boats, shaking various body parts at us, pretty rude remarks, a general Party Barge. Later on downstream at mile 220 we pass them again and they are still yelling and screaming and celebrating loudly in our general direction. It was kind of hard for our folks and definitely affected their day.
Lest you think this is a diatribe about private river trips: Come around the corner at Saddle and there are several women from a commercial river trip peeing up in the trees, not down by the water. Three times, with three different companies, I’ve seen this in the past couple of years.
Talked to a passenger from another trip who saw one of our folks carrying our day tripper off to use and asked what it was. When I explained, he said “they just give us a shovel and a roll of toilet paper.” When I pressed him, he wasn’t kidding.
A friend on a private trip was pulling into the eddy at Bass when a commercial motor rig roared around them and took the camp. When my friend’s group went on down to Shinumo to play before heading downstream, the commercial trip loaded up one of their boats with all 25 or so of their people, motored down to Shinumo and offloaded their people into the creek with my friend’s group.
Cigarette butts on the beaches, algae-covered pee holes in the sand well above high water line, general trash in camps, new trails where none should be. All these things seem to me to be worse than just five or six years ago.
As I listen to the newly resurrected Colorado River Management Plan (crmp) gripings and arguments, these and other similar incidents keep coming to mind. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t really give a damn who is down there, and how easily and how often, as long as they are taking care of the place and safeguarding everyone’s experience.

Soap of any kind in the side streams? If the water’s muddy, deal with it. Screaming obscenities and barging in on other people’s private time on hikes? No one cares if you take a camp because you get there first, no one cares if you’re naked and drunk. Just don’t make it impossible for other trips to ignore you. Peeing in the trees? You get the point.
Right now the Park is broke. There isn’t any money for monitoring and making sure that we are all taking care of the place. All that fee demo money? That goes to building projects, not safeguarding the tributaries, archeological sites or your neighbor’s experience. We’ve got an administration in Washington, dc that is probably more hostile towards environmental protection than any has ever been, and the chances for any help coming from them are pretty slim. That means it’s up to us, all of us—private and commercial—to do it. I hear rumors about increasing the number of user-days as a potential solution to access problems and I am worried. I think that until we can prove as a community that we can really take care of not only the place but our neighbors and their experience as well, not one more user day should be added to that pie.
Do we need to increase our educational efforts as guides? Quite possibly. There’s a whole new crop of young guides out there that may not have been trained as rigorously as they should have been. Do outfitters need to make it very clear to their guides what the rules and the general polite protocols are, and let them know they will back them up if a passenger complains that some young whippersnapper guide was telling them where to pee? Definitely. It’s hard to be a 24 year old second year guide and try to tell a 65 year old ceo or grandmother of seven where he or she can go do their business. What is our recourse if someone just won’t listen to us, and keeps doing harmful things to the canyon? Will our outfitters back us up on this? Do people need to remember that whether it’s a fifteen year wait or a $3,500 price tag, no one wants to have someone else’s experience thrown loudly in their face? Seems so. Do we need to police each other? Absolutely. We’re the only ones who can do it—and while we’re arguing about selfish concerns such as how often and when and how much and me, me, me—let’s take some time to consider the most important players in all of this: the river and everyone’s experience while on it.

Christa Sadler