Tonight we are the guests of Steve and Pat from Big Water, Utah, who have agreed to shuttle us from Antelope Marina to Lee’s Ferry to put in for the Grand Canyon. Waiting for us at their off-the-grid home on the range: a hot meal, a hot shower, a hot-tub, and a wi-fi hot spot. We have spent fifty days on the river, all but two of them rowing our blue boats, and it’s good to be dry, clean and drinking real beer. Pat and Steve are avid river runners and happy to help us on our way.

Depending on how you look at it, this is either the ending or the beginning of our trip. Getting to the Grand Canyon was a greater challenge than running it, but running the Colorado River through Marble Canyon is still one of whitewater rafting’s greatest challenges, and it lies yet before us. Don’t ever get cocky on a river. They don’t like it, and evidently reservoirs don’t like it either.

Just eight miles from the dam our trip had almost ended when the wake from the Canyon Explorer, a large ship that ferries tourists to Rainbow Bridge, almost flipped our rafts as we were having some granola on a tiny beach just off the main channel. Suddenly our world was rocked violently and we were in danger of being crushed by our own boats. To avoid disaster, we had to quickly jump aboard our craft and attempt to row out into the lake where the waves would be in the form of large swells instead of the white-capped haystacks the local boaters call pyramids.

We had barely gotten on board when the pyramids hit, with all the fury of a Class 5 rapid, and I was forced to hit the deck and hang on for dear life. I looked over and Jen was knocked out of the boat, bobbing in the water, Josh was holding onto his oars as his raft stood nearly vertical, heading towards the steep canyon wall on which our tiny beach hung.

Then, just as suddenly; stillness and silence returned to our beach. We finished our bowl. Humbled once again, we continued on to the take out, where we arrived, flying our DRAIN IT flag, almost 45 minutes late for our shuttle. That’s right, 720 miles, 50 days and we are only 45 minutes late. That’s because Josh Mahan, our expedition leader, is a brutal, crazed, slave-driving maniac who insists on rowing 16-hour days and sleeping in the mud, waking up at dawn and doing it all over again.

Fortunately, on the Grand Canyon portion of the trip, none of this will be necessary. We will have current, so rowing will be more enjoyable and we won’t have to row more than ten or twelve miles a day, and we will have real beer.

Utah beer is not much good for rowing flat water or whitewater. You need to drink a lot of it, and of course you have to get rid of it. Drinking beer while rowing is not easy, as it takes several hard pulls on the oars to get our heavy boats up to their maximum speed of two miles per hour. One pull on your PBR and that speed drops by half, and you will have to pull harder after you put your can down to regain your momentum.

Getting rid of beer once drank in a crowded reservoir poses another set of problems. That problem cannot be overcome without exposing yourself to someone. This also causes the boat to stop altogether, and even to spin (May as well flash the whole lake, eh?), ensuring that even more effort will be needed to get the boat up to cruising speed. Utah beer is a crime against the art of brewing and yet another reason why this whole state should be turned into a National Park with a visitor center in Salt Lake City.

One of the things I have come to realize on this journey is that the Green River and the Colorado River do not belong in Utah. They are just passing through. These two great rivers carry water from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and Wyoming to the Sea of Cortez and Utah rivers contribute very little water to them. The Green River hugs the state’s eastern border and forms the de facto boarder with Colorado, just as the Colorado River forms the de facto border with Arizona. Very few Utahans’ live on the Green. Vernal, the larger of the two only real cities on the river, is 12 miles away and the town Green River. Utah has only a few full time residents. Mostly motels, restaurants and gas stations.

The distinction between the Colorado and The Green Rivers is a false one. While the Green and Colorado rivers converge at Echo Park, most of the water in the Colorado comes from the Green. This stretch of the Colorado River above Echo Park used to be called the Grand River (hence the name “Grand Canyon”) but the name was changed for self-serving political purposes by the Colorado legislature in 1922. So in a way, we never left the Green River, and tcurrent geology backs up this theory perfectly. John Wiseshiet has said that it is not possible to understand the Grand Canyon without understanding the history of the Green River. Floating the Green from Wyoming to Nevada provides an extraordinary opportunity to glimpse back into the history of our planet that can be seen in few other places.

Like an ancient encyclopedia, the Colorado Plateau, which we are floating through, has had the history of our Earth inscribed on its millions of pages. Since earliest times, what is now the plateau was a vast basin. Sometimes a sea, sometimes a desert, alternatively a forest, a swamp, a savanna, the basin accumulated layers upon layers of sediment, as mountains rose and were ground down by the elements, as seas formed and evaporated, as life formed, evolved, and decayed,  the history of the Earth was recorded day by day, year by year, century by century, eon by eon, epoch by epoch, as if some crazed, studious monk was dutifully writing down everything that happened.

This was the case for hundreds of millions of years, until twelve million years ago, not really that long a period, the Rocky Mountains began to rise in the same region where they had risen hundreds of millions before. This new phase of mountain building forced our friend the Green River to give up its course to the Gulf of Mexico and look for a new route to the sea.

The broad, low plain of what is now Utah was the logical choice, and it soon cut a new winding path to the Sea of Cortez, evidently in no hurry, as the dozens of large oxbows and other wide lazy turns in the river’s current course testify to. Had things continued this way, the Green River would continue to write history on the surface of the basin, depositing sediments from the newly formed Rockies.

But the mountain building didn’t stop in Colorado, and in time the whole plateau would be pushed up, squeezed, submerged and in places rolled up like a jelly roll. The Unita Mountians began to form along the Utah border, as if Utah was trying to push the river back. The Green would have no part in thin, and while the Uinta’s continued to push up, the Green held its course, slicing through any layers that dared to rise against it. It cut through like a hot knife through butter.

By the time the first humans arrived about 11,000 years ago, the Green River, which had for so long been a slow winding river crossing a broad flat plain, found itself trapped in a rut of its own making. It was now totally committed to the winding meander of the lowlands, yet now ran swiftly through the new uplifted canyons.

Since Utah is mostly arid, not much erosion happens along the banks. The river is the sculptor, cutting the rock only if it dares to rise against it. The weather, on the other hand, is the painter, and the steep canyon walls are a canvass for the elements, and are covered and stained with streaks of color.

During this process of mountain building , the river stopped recording history here in the basin. Rather, it began to erase it. The problem with newly formed rocks is that they often lack the hardness of older ones. They wear away, and so much of the recent history of the Green River, the last 12 million years, has been lost. It lies at the bottom of the Sea of Cortez. But what has been revealed in these winding canyons is much of the rest of our planet’s history, with a few pages gone here and there and in some cases whole chapters inexplicitly missing, but surprisingly complete.

So here in the Grand Canyon, we will be floating through the whole of this great ancient book. On the rim are the more recent stories of dinosaurs, and on the bottom lies the first chapter, the Vishnu Shiest, formed before life began. Much of the history of evoloution lies in between. This is why floating the Grand Canyon was described by author Colin Fletcher as a journey through time.

So I think about this now because Chris Hatch, my old friend from British Colombia has just forwarded me the newest report from our friends on the International Panel on Climate Change. It’s a real buzz kill. Readers of my past posts will remember that last year when the preliminary IPCC report came out I flatly stated that this was old data, sugar coated for political reasons, and did not reflect the current consensus by serious climate scientists. Well, now they seem to be saying we have already crossed the threshold on carbon dioxide, and that serious changes are already underway.

Who knew?

So we are witness to the beginning of the end of history. We either make massive changes to our behavior now, or we are likely to perish. If we survive, we will be very different humans living on a very changed planet. If we don’t change at all, civilization as we know it will perish, and possibly our species as well. Part of the reason for coming on this trip was to ponder this situation we are in, and ask these cliffs, who have witnessed so much, for guidance. Here, in the greatest library on Earth, maybe I can find some answers.

Yet so far, it is not the rocks that speak to me. I can only think of my old departed friend, the late Ed Abbey. It is here that I truly hear his voice, perhaps for the first time. I have always resisted his conclusion that there was not much hope for the human race. Ed always respected wilderness activists, maybe even envied them, because they held out against impossible odds and maintained hope for the planet and belief in the human spirit. He held neither. I wonder about the nature of hope itself.

I have spent much of my life as a campaigner. A campaign is a struggle, one with a strategy, which seeks a victory. The world of a campaigner is a rough and tumble existence where one seeks advantage over one’s opponents. It is a world of triage, where sacrifices and trade offs are made to achieve results. It is not about doing the right thing, but stopping the wrong thing. I could never figure out how to save the Rainforest. I could figure out how to get a company like Burger King out of the rainforest. The hope was that a symbolic victory against such a powerful adversary would inspire more to rise up and take action. It works, but only incrementally, and much too slowly, but at least it’s something. The big problem is that in order to get folks interested, you need to filter out everything but a simple goal. Good for the Whale, bad for the ocean, so, no, not really good for the whale after all.

These kinds of efforts no longer seem reasonable to me, as much, much more is now needed. At this point, we need leadership from the world powers, we need a Marshall Plan scale response, and that won’t likely happen until the people of the world demand it. This will be the last great environmental campaign, we either win, or we pack up our tents. I simply see no reason to launch another campaign that focuses on a small part of the problem while ignoring the elephant in the room. It is way past time for the masses to storm the castle with their torches and pitchforks.

We must set a goal, of, say 80 percent reduction in carbon dioxide by the end of this decade, and we must meet it. We must appear at every campaign event at every political rally and ask hard questions of the would-be leader of this nation and shout “What are you going to do about climate change?” The changes we need now are political. We need a pro-climate government, and we need to install one in this next election, and then we need to hold their feet to the fire.

In football, when you are down and the clock is running out, the quarterback will sometimes call for the “Hail Mary” play. This consists of having everybody on the team run down the field while the quarterback throws the ball into the end zone with the hope that somebody will catch it. The QB often clasps his hands together in prayer after releasing the ball, hoping one of his team will come out of the pile with the ball, which is why it’s called a Hail Mary pass. It is a play of desperation, and one with a low success rate. Yet, there are times when it wins the game when no other play would. We need a Hail Mary!

There have been periods of time when great change occurred. You can see the evidence in here in these canyon walls. Some were good, like the first appearance of multi-celled animals or flowering plants, while others were not so good, and involved great extinction events. Yet even those extinction events had advantages for humans, as it reset the clock for the next round of evolution, which gave us the opportunity that we are now squandering. The challenge is for us to continue.

No doubt that in the future, the rocks will testify to the coming mass extinction. Ironically, they may offer no evidence of our passing. All of the fossils we have of early homo species would fit neatly into an orange crate. This includes a dozen species of proto homo sapiens, some that ranged far and wide for millions of years. There may be a lot of us, but we have existed for a very short time, a razor thin layer of sediment in geologic terms. Soon, the great feats of our collective efforts will be long gone, and perhaps nothing more than a femur and a few teeth will ever be recovered, and some alien scientist might indeed make some assumptions about this interesting monkey who was smart, but ultimately not a good survivor, an experiment that failed, an evolutionary dead ender.

I am an old warrior and I will go down to the wire fighting no matter what happens. I don’t know how to do anything else. And someday, just as we ran a newly liberated portion of Cataract Canyon on this trip, I want to run Glen Canyon. I want to float Flaming Gorge. And by God someday I will.