When I had made up my mind to join this expedition, I knew there was going to be some rough going. I figured this might be the toughest journey I’d ever undertaken, and that afterwards I might never wish to do another. More than a few of my friends thought the whole idea was crazy. Even the notorious Dr. Doom thought the whole plan was crazy even while offering the use of some equipment.

There were many things to consider, and among them:

Dangerous Rapids. They eat boats at high water and eat even more boats in low water. The drops are 30 foot per mile in places, the rapids can be shallow and the current can be moving at a brisk 25 miles per hour. There will be lots of rocks, the boat weighs in at 2,000 pounds, and it will be difficult to maneuver.

Storms. Fall is the time for rain and winds. None of these winds will blow downstream. They will only suck. Upstream. The high winds can flip a raft, the reservoir is vast and you can be tossed about for hours before they find your hypothermic body.

Mud. Low water means lots of mud. Mud that can swallow a cow. And sand bars that straddle the river like Roman walls, barely submerged and totally hidden by the lack of current. There are rumored to be a few boats still stranded in the Uinta Basin from the original Powell expedition in 1869, their mummified remains still preserved in the scorching, dry, heat of the desert.

Left: Mike after shattering his first borrowed Smoker's oar. We've got a replacement for you, Wayne.
Photo by Josh Mahan.

If you could possibly get through all of that, then in Lake Powell, if you survived the big drops and raft crunching holes of Desolation Canyon there would await you the entrance to the Big Daddy itself, Lake Powell *.

As you enter, those with knowledge would warn you, there will be 100 foot walls of sediment. These are merely the edge of giant sediment islands. Sometime the banks of these islands would calve, falling off like battle ships being launched sideways into the sea, sending a deadly tsunami across the water that would flip a raft and plaster it on the opposing canyon wall like a refrigerator magnet.

And not only that, there are rumored to be a species of large sturgeon once thought extinct, and one which was recently caught by a local fisherman that included, among other thing, two 14-foot Moravias and a 12-foot Avon, and several canoes, in the contents of its stomach.

Rowing reservoirs is not like rowing down a river, or across a natural lake. A river is linear. A lake has only one level. A reservoir has no true level, no course. The water is dead, crystal clear, lifeless, cold as a corpse, mysterious, deep, hiding some thing terrible. Yet, on the surface, it flaunts a certain dangerous beauty. 

We entered Flaming Gorge fully knowing that here was where we would face our first test. The winds that howl only from the south, countless miles of steep canyon walls and the chances of finding a beach or even a level stone ledge to sleep on was less than finding a Mormon over twenty-one years of age riding a bicycle.

The truth, however, was much worse. We faced things rarely seen before by any river runner in the history of the sport. We faced Labor Day on the Flaming Gorge reservoir. It started Friday night. We were rowing late, as usual, and all of a sudden very fast boats would streak across the reservoir. By Saturday morning, it was wall to wall speed boats, and strangely, very few water skiers. All the boats looked new, and all had pretty much the same shape. A big bow, low cabin, small rear deck, mostly a motor with a couple of Big Boy lounge chairs bolted to the deck with room for a cooler of Mountain Dew and few baloney sandwiches. We came to the Marina, which looked like more like a floating Wal-Mart parking lot that anything I had ever seen in a lake.

We spent the day rocking and rolling to their wakes, all the time smiling as we rowed our boats along at the speed of 1.7 miles an hour. Saturday night we hunkered down on a small beach, and the reservoir was an orgy of speed boat mania. Many of the boats had large, expensive sound systems and a very poor taste in contemporary music. The larger the boats, it seemed, the larger the owners. Some of the larger boat owners were bigger than some of the smaller boats.

Right: Broken oar number two.
Photo by Jen Sauer.

We huddled in our sleeping bags (at least I did) and hoped that these fossil fuel burning crazy people would not decide to land on our beach in the middle of the night and play disco music. They did not.

No, the next morning, the water was calm, almost still. There was not a boat in sight. The sun was shining and there was barely a breeze on the water. There was only one explanation. The boaters were in church. It was Sunday.

After the Gorge, we braved the Gates of Lodore, lost two oars, broke our frame, got fixed up in Vernal by the nice folks at River Runner’s Transport and ran Desolation and Grey’s Canyon with Missoula Friends, Jimmy, Allison and Morgan, then met up with Howie and Marilyn to run Labyrinth Canyon. We then met up with John Weisheit to run Cataract Canyon, of which I will have more to say later. John is the director of Living Rivers and the official Colorado Riverkeeper. We could not have had a better guide, and that the work that John and Living Rivers does is ensuring that we have a voice in how these rivers are treated. Groups like John’s challenge the notion that the only value of a river is the water they supply to large cities and big farms.

Rivers are living ecosystems, older than the mountains, and more enduring. We can in the short term try to harness them, but the river will always prevail. We need to find better ways to live with our rivers, and to except that a wild river has a value all its own, and additionally, the value of their ecological services exceeds the price we put on a gallon or an acre foot of water.

We leave John and enter the reservoir called Lake Powell. Wallace Stegner always claimed that Powell would not have liked having a reservoir in Glen Canyon. I am pretty sure if he was alive he would support our position that it must be drained. I also know that he hated flat water. But here we are, and perhaps the first rafts to continue beyond Hite, Utah into the abyss known as Powell.

The winds are howling at 55 miles an hour. We are pulling hard into the gales and making very slow progress. In two hours of rowing after a quick lunch, we barely cross an inlet a half a mile wide. We hunker down behind a rocky outcrop, our boats ditched in the gooey mud. It is still light, yet there is nothing we can do until the wind calms down. We struggle on until we reach a beach where we can pitch our tents and wait out the storm, which has intensified.

This is how we are greeted by Lake Powell. Her cold, icy breath tossing our boats about like confetti, the waves crashing over our bows and blasting us with stinging wet spray, confining us to a windy spit in the middle of a tempest. Is this anyway for our heroes to perish? I don’t think so, but this is as much as I can tell you right now.

We are safe in our Mountain Hardware tents with a six-pack of Utah Beer and the stale end of a Mac. We are thankful to be alive. We still need a life. We will alert you when the conditions allow.