Secrets and Mysteries of Rafting the Grand Canyon

May 20, 2013| cometary| 0 Comment | 10:50 pm

Categories:

So, for the next month and more, this blog, or at least most of its available posting space, has been claimed by a fan of the Grand Canyon. Yes, a fan of a really big hole in the ground. It’s not as big as Valles Marinaris, but there is still a river at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which greatly facilitates travel by river raft. The goal is to take you along on a fourteen-day expedition, from Kaibab Sandstone to Vishnu Schist, through rapids, slot canyons, waterfalls, and thunderstorms, and along the way reveal a few of the deep dark secrets of these trips so few of us take. We’ll cover over 180 miles on the river plus many miles afoot on canyon trailways. Why use up a month to take you on a two-week trip? Because that’s what it feels like. You forget what day it is, how long you’ve been gone, how much time is left. If you don’t keep a journal, you’re lost.

I kept a journal.

I also took about 3,000 photographs and an hour of video.

Yes, there will be a fair amount of “what we did”, but I also want to share the background information the guides (and other travelers) shared with us, the additional tidbits I’ve gleaned from research (the addiction of the Ph.D.), and perhaps even paint the picture well enough that if you can’t go on this trip you can claim you did and provide your friends with a verisimilitudinous description. Just pick one of the falsified names in the diary segments & say “yeah, that’s me”. Also, if you’re a well-heeled adventure traveler planning your own expedition, I’d hope you’ll come away with enough information to know where you should not take short-cuts—and with some clues about how to find experienced, capable guides to get you through safely.

In the meantime, I don’t want to wear out your eyeballs with more than a few photos and a thousand words of gushing per post. There will be directions to see more photos, but, I promise, this won’t be a session of “Watch my Vacation Slideshow”.

Time for the first installment of Secrets of Grand Canyon River Rafting.

Deep, dark secret #1. Not everyone wants to go on this trip. Three husbands who could have joined their wives refused the chance to walk away from work, television, and electronic connectedness for a week. A young backbacker—who had completed the climb of Mount Whitney with his mother just a few months previously—turned down a free ticket and sent his retirement-age Mom on her own. She said he didn’t like the idea of not being in control on the trip. Another traveller’s wife sent him off with a (female) friend he’d recently reconnected with after a thirty-year hiatus, because the wife just can’t stand camping. His son, a golf enthusiast, only agreed to chaperone them if they took the shorter trip, to be sure he’d be home in time to watch the Master’s. Me? No, actually, I didn’t want to go on this trip. The only person who couldn’t tell was my husband, he was so excited about going. Why would this nature/science/ancient-peoples-loving photographer want to sit this out?

First of all, it’s frightfully expensive—if you want to travel the Canyon and not spend a fortune, you need to be able to work there. I am not the correct age or physical type to start a new career as a river guide. Nor do I have the right background or training to get hired by (or even volunteer for) the Park Service or any of the scientific research teams with feet on the water down there. So when my husband Clark declared that it had “always” been his wish to make this trip and that he had, after all, a big landmark birthday coming up, I made him pay for it out of his IRA. That was the only place we had enough money set by.

Second, Clark got the idea from a friend of his, a childhood friend who’s facing the same landmark birthday this year. When these two get together, they tend to devote a significant amount of our time to recalling those good-old-days. Days I did not share. Oh, great, my jealous heart predicted: two weeks of traipsing along behind while they play “remember when.” Well, I did end up trailing along behind, but not quite the way predicted. You’ll see.

And the third and most sensible reason: I broke my shoulder in January and my orthopedist’s solid opinion about my going river-rafting in April was: “I wouldn’t recommend doing that.” The bone knitted on schedule, but shoulders are complicated messes of tendons and muscles that don’t take kindly to the whole process. I was told it would be a year or more before I’d be back from this injury. My physical therapist did what he could to get some of my range-of-motion restored and added a couple of exercises to build back a little strength, but I went off with one arm fully-qualified to hang on tight and one that complained bitterly about any extension beyond a basic stretch while it simply refused to raise my hand beyond about 80 degrees. One upside was that Clark got to haul all my gearbags, because I just couldn’t handle them.

The other upside is that I would not want to have missed out on this trip. Even though we couldn’t afford it, it was worth it. Does that make any sense at all? Well, it will.

So, all right already, let’s go. For a teasing sneak-peek, here is a picture from Day 5. Oh, aye, it’s the Grand Canyon.

Walking to Pluto: Step 1Walking to Pluto: Step 1

Compare the sizes of Earth and Pluto & Charon Image Credit: NASA

Compare the sizes of Earth and Pluto & Charon (Pluto’s shadow isn’t that big on Earth!) Image Credit: NASA

It’s been a super-fantastic #PlutoFlyby day (see the video for a Pixel Gravity simulation of New Horizons’ close approach path on 7/15/2015), and I can’t resist going to one of my favorite astronomy projects: building a scale model of the Solar System that takes you out of the house, out of the classroom, and under the sky. (Where maybe Pluto’s shadow, cast by a distant star, will pass over you.)

As a reminder, you can look for the following in any Messy Monday project:

A set of notes for project leaders, sketching the key elements of the project and the science topic it is meant to address
A detailed supply list, structured to make it simple to purchase supplies for either a one-shot demonstration or for a classroom-sized group activity.
A set of instructions for working through the project with students, including commentary to help cope with common classroom-management issues, questions that are likely to arise, and issues to keep in mind from safety to fairness.
A rough estimate of the cost to run the project.

As before, I’ll break down the presentation into four postings, to spare readers trying to scroll through a 5000-word document, but I’ll post them quickly, so you can jump ahead if you are raring to go or want to access the reference materials first. In other projects, we built our own comets. In this project, we travel out into the solar system, hoping to reach the source of that comet.

Step 1: Space is Big

It’s a long way to Pluto. But as far as the Universe is concerned, Pluto’s in our condo’s tiny back yard. What would it be like, though, to take a hike to Pluto? Like the New Horizons Spacecraft spacecraft buzzing past Pluto and its cluster of moons, but, well, maybe taking a bit less time about it. Nine years (the explorer was launched in early 2006) is longer than even the above-average student’s attention span. What if we could shrink the Solar System down to a reasonable size for nice walking field trip?

Paths of the nine planetary objects orbiting the Sun for many years (A Pixel Gravity simulation result.)

No surprise here: it’s been done. Six ways to Sunday, in fact. While no one person claims to own the idea of building a scale model of the solar system, my favorite advocate of such models is Guy Ottewell, who likes a scaling factor that makes the model a reasonable size for the average person to walk. You can buy his book on the subject (now with cartons!) at the books page on his website. As a bonus, you’ll also find the most current editions of all of his other books on astronomy and much more. (He self-effacingly describes his annual Astronomical Calendar as “widely used”; a more-accurate description would be “fanatically used by serious amateur astronomers”.) No disclaimer necessary; we’re not friends, I’m just one of his (many) Twitter followers.

The goal of this project is for everyone involved to obtain a personal sense of the feature of Outer Space that is hardest to conceptualize by reading books and trolling the internet: Space is BIG. (Yes, you may pause to reread the opening to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.) Indeed. Really Really Big.

Our neighbor galaxy, Andromeda (Image Credit: ESA/Hubble)

On top of that, the places you can stop—the non-empty bits—are few and very tiny compared with the distances between them. And it takes a long time to get from one stop to another.

So, when assembling materials and presenting this project, keep these two key goals in mind. It’s not important whether you model Earth as a peppercorn (Ottewell’s model) or an allspice seed (easier to find in my own kitchen) or a spitwad from the ceiling that happens to be about a tenth of an inch across. What’s important is that the Earth is not only extremely teensy compared to the Sun, but you can’t even fit the Sun and Earth into an ordinary classroom. And you have to hike at least a half a mile (a kilometer) if you want to make it to Pluto. With any luck, you can make practical use of the excess energy in a classroom-full of kids and also amaze them. If you’re doing this as a classroom helper and the teacher is used to taking advantage of the time to catch up on infinite paperwork, this is a time to persuade that teacher to shove the paperwork aside and join the expedition. There will be no regrets!

The objects used to represent planets and other bodies should be chosen for familiarity, because you want the participants to absorb the scale comparisons effortlessly. “Everyone knows” how big a jellybean is, a pin is familiar—both the pushing end and the painful poking end—a soccer ball is a known object, and so on. It doesn’t matter if the object you use is not exactly the design diameter—and no one is going to care that jellybeans or coffee beans are bumpy ovoids, not spheres. The next time you’re eating a jellybean (or slurping a Starbucks), at the back of your mind will be “I had to hike a half-mile just to get to this little Neptune here”. Plus, “Yum, astronomy is delicious.”

If you’re interested in the underlying concepts, I encourage you to stop by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s website and read Guy Ottewell’s original 1989 description of his Thousand Yard Model; however, if you consider yourself a mathphobe, don’t let the arithmetical computations worry you. I’ve made you an Excel worksheet to do that task. Running a mind-expanding science project should help relieve that condition, not make it worse.

If you have visited a museum’s scale model, read Ottewell’s book, or done a similar project in the past, there are a few differences you may encounter in this project. In particular, I suggest you avoid having planets represented by peanuts. Including nuts in school projects, can be problematical if any student (or parent helper) with nut hyper-allergy could possibly be affected. (I have relatives with this allergy, and there is nothing quite like coping with anaphylactic shock to ruin a day’s outing.)

Dwarf Planet Ceres Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

I’ve included a few more “destinations”—such as the ever-popular asteroid “belt” and my personal favorite of Pluto’s fellow dwarf planets. The number of steps taken between planets (and other destinations) is greater, because kids take shorter steps than grown-ups. (Also, other models I’ve seen assume a stride length more typical of men—and the majority of teachers and parent volunteers are still women, with shorter strides than men.) And I’ve included the current (for now, at least) locations for a few more distant “destinations” that we can look out towards from our turnaround point at Pluto.

The tables I’ve provided are in both English and SI units. The scales are slightly different between the two, in order to yield intuitively-scaled results in either set of units. And I’ve provided a “cheat sheet” of the key data for a teacher or other presenter to carry as a reference source on the walk. If anyone would like to get completely precise and build their own model matching their pace length exactly, or adjusting to a different scale, you can request a copy of my Excel workbook for this project to create your individualized pace-off. Or if you know a Senior Girl Scout or Boy Scout in need of a Gold Star or Eagle project, a community solar system model would be a very cool service project. (C’mon, Scouts, do you really want to build another park bench?)

Speaking of space, and coolness, and peanuts, and bigness, by the time your group finishes this project—everyone who participates should wholeheartedly agree: Space is Big

A Sign From NASA

Redbud at dawn, Flagstaff

Patience, patience. It will get better. There will be pain, terror, comic interludes, amazement, all that. Soon enough.

So today we think we are getting up early. How naïve we are, believing ourselves totally on-the-ball as we deposit our overstuffed drybags in the lobby at 6 a.m., first ones ready. And first to the breakfast buffet as well. I have a strong hankering for a lovely waffle, but we all decide on the no-waiting buffet. So. Well. There is a great big pan full of sausage. English muffins. Hard-boiled eggs. This could work.

The other folks filter into the dining room. We don’t know each other yet, one meeting with the trip leader last night was not enough for bonding. And with my personal brand of dysnomia, we’ve been together far too little even for adequate identification. At least some people make a bit of an effort to be memorable. Isn’t that the wise-cracking guy who made sure to poll the group to establish he’s the oldest among us? But who are those people he’s with? Thank goodness we are only a group of sixteen. And I already know three of us. Of course, that’s counting myself.

We are all in our carefully assembled river-rafting outfits, so we are now instantly recognizable to the hotel staff as Those OARS Guests. What’s that uniform like?

Quick-drying pants—seems to me pretty much all the passengers are in long pants, and those of us with new gear are sporting the sun-protecting fabrics.

Quick-drying shirts—experienced types have layered short- and long-sleeved shirts. Me, I’ve structured a Nerd Look, with a white long-sleeved “base layer” (ultra-comfortable, some fancy brand, UPF 50 fabric, and snagged off the REI heavily-discounted Outlet page) under the polo-style shirt I had on yesterday. (Already counting days. Each shirt gets 4 days.)

Everyone has a hat. Shade is the name of the game on the water, anywhere. Doesn’t matter if you’re revving one of those horrid Personal Watercraft across a reservoir or balancing the outrigger on your 20-foot ocean-going catamaran, the brain requires protection from Sol. Most everyone has gone for the wide-brimmed Ranger Rick hat. At least one has chosen the Sahara-style cap with the side-drapes to protect the neck and ears. It looks comfy. I debate. Should I dig my backup cap out of my bag or stick with the wide-brimmed one?

Footgear is a mix. Some of us are wearing our hiking boots; others are already in their boat sandals, anxious to get their toes wet in the Colorado River. Most of us have purchased Teva-style water shoes, some have added neoprene socks, a few have simply packed neoprene booties—a low-mass choice, but requiring a shoe change for even a short hike. Again, I am full of myself for having found a pair of Keen sandals for 25 bucks. There are some benefits to knowing one’s size in children’s shoes.

And, given it’s 7 a.m. in Flagstaff on the first of April, virtually everyone has layered on a fleece jacket. A few have their rain jackets on top of that, too, serving double duty as a windbreaker. The raingear is mostly tucked in our “day” drybags, as suggested at last night’s pre-trip meeting. Later on, when we are all tucked into our rain-suits, it can be difficult to tell each other apart, as most have gone with basic black.

The 14-Day Five: Clark, Lois, Lana, Eliza, Todd

The five of us who will be taking the full 14-day trip: “Clark, Lois, Lana, Eliza, & Todd”

So, as we gather in the lobby, stuffing last-minute additions into our daybags and packs, the river-guide crew begins to appear. Either that, or there’s a new robbery scheme in which people dressed in shorts, tee-shirts, and flip-flops drop by hotels and make off with fully-packed drybags. Which brings us to the uniform of the river guide:

Pants? Nay, shorts are the required day wear. In the event of actual severe weather, say, a cold day with heavy rain, neoprene pants may appear. And a very cold early morning may prompt a brief stretch with an outer layer, but not likely, no.

Shirts? Optional for the men. (Well, keep in mind that on the river everyone, absolutely everyone, wears a life vest every minute.) Most of the time, it’s a short-sleeved shirt or a tank top. Our wise Team Leader previewed her clothing choices by advising us (at last night’s briefing) to choose clothing over sunblock whenever possible, will be found wearing long-sleeved shirts and fingerless gloves on sunny days, but this is the choice of a nonconformist.

Shoes? Optional, though often sandals are chosen. Well, not really sandals, but flip-flops. It is rumored that the guides own hiking boots. More on this topic later, when hiking becomes a factor.

Coats? Well, maybe a shirt for a little while on a chilly morning.

In short, there is no chance that one would mistake a guest for a guide, or vice-versa. In each party, we will have one person who fits in rather well with the guide class, but attire keeps them distinct no matter what.

While we are staring at one another and fiddling with our backpacks and daybags, the crew have arrived and are lightly tossing our lumpy twenty-five-pound drybags up to the top racks of a pair of white passenger vans. One van also has a trailer with a big yellow thingy on it. So we have our first glimpse of a raft. We all sort of wallflower-it, clumping around the benches in front of the hotel, taking pictures of each other. But eventually we have to wriggle into the vans.

Our van and raft, at Cameron Trading Post

So it’s a long drive to the put-in at Mile Zero, aka Lees Ferry, so we are promised a “rest stop” at Cameron Trading Post. This is a wonderful combination of a tourist trap, an art gallery, a grocery store, hotel, church, and post office. Basically, it’s a town. Cameron’s perched on the edge of the gorge of the Little Colorado River, where the original founder of the trading post launched the business by building a bridge over the Gorge. Now, there’s a standard highway bridge, but there’s still also an older suspension bridge (no, not the original one). At this hour we have the place pretty much to ourselves. I find a bracelet and a couple of T-Shirts in the shop before stopping in the grocery for a tub of Vaseline. But first, of course, I have to run down and snag a photo of the bridge. The older one, of course.

Old Cameron Bridge, over Little Colorado River Gorge

The rest of the drive is longer and affords a chance for naps. Billie’s friend Krista is sitting in front of me. She spends the time carefully braiding her barely shoulder-length hair and tying off the ends with colorful yarn–all without being able to see what she’s doing.

A peek at our first rapid, Paria Riffle, from the Lees Ferry Campground

Finally, we pull in and stop at the campground above Lees Ferry. We learn that a traveler with another group which had used the campsite facilities down at Lees Ferry had turned out to have rotovirus, so we’re going to avoid those places. The Campground has a set of restrooms we can use before we go on down to the put-in spot. While we wait for one another, we can take some photos of the the Colorado river below us and Vermilion cliffs glowing above us beneath the deep blue sky.

But we are finally rounded up and pile into the vans for the half-mile drive down to the water. Finally, we’re at the River. Time for more lectures!

Gearing up at Lees Ferry

Convention Time is a-Coming, Ha-HaConvention Time is a-Coming, Ha-Ha

I’m all kinds of happy about convention time this year. It makes up for a lot of crummy stuff that happened in my little world in the first third of 2018.

BayCon programming liked some of my program ideas. They even put some of them on the program! Even better, though a little scarier, they plunked me down as a panel member on two of them and asked me to moderate a third. I’m getting better at this panel thing, though. I’ve discovered I do have a few things to say, and I have managed to steer a group around to keep the panel on track or at least bring the quietest panelist back into the conversation. I’m solidly on science track this year, so I will make sure to brush up on my Real Facts before I show up.

Here’s my schedule, just in case anyone’s looking for me. Or at least so I have a place I can look this stuff up, myself:

What?	Who?
Sunday, May 27 at 1 pm Science and Politics in the USA: Latter Day Lysenkoism? Can US science recover from the anti-science policies of politicians? Where will the damage be most significant?	Edward Kukla (educator, biologist, mathematician, a moderator who knows how to make Ph.D.’s behave themselves) Bradford Lyau, Ph.D. (historian, political activist, literary analyst) Vanessa MacLaren-Wray, Ph.D. (science activist, writer, engineer) Howard Davidson, Ph.D. (turns science fiction into real-world stuff)
Sunday, May 27 at 4 pm Bad Science: Pseudoscience, Hoaxes, and Illogical Thinking When we’re reading or writing science fiction, we’ve got some poetic license, but we want the science to be fundamentally right. When looking for science resources, how do we winnow the chaff from the wheat? As a bonus, really bad science and hoaxers provide excellent fodder for parody SF. (I’m a big fan of Phil Plait, whose “Bad Astronomy ” column is a good example of this kind of thinking.)	Vanessa MacLaren-Wray, Ph.D. (writer, mechanical engineer, writer, used to managing a roomful of smart guys) Howard Davidson, Ph.D. (physicist, inventor) Arthur Bozlee (aerospace entrepeneur, oughta have a Ph.D., should hire the rest of us) Jim Doty, Ph.D. (writer, electrical engineer)
Monday, May 28 at 11:30 am Wild Weather For the first time, science can show that three extreme weather events would not have happened without global warming, including the rain bomb that drowned Houston. We’re also seeing tropical cyclones cross into the Bering Sea, and cold snaps bringing snow to the deep south. What can we expect to happen with tornadoes?	Patricia MacEwen (writer, physical anthropologist who also uses her knowledge for our kind of stories, all-around awesome person) Vanessa MacLaren-Wray, Ph.D. (writer, engineer working on energy efficiency to fight climate change) Heidi Stauffer, Ph.D. (real-life educator and environmental geologist, i.e., this stuff is her field exactly)

My BayCon program schedule has some holes in it, so I plan to take some time and scoot down to Fanime that same weekend. I love the costumes, and I’ve lately acquired a taste for Japanese pop music, and have even watched some of the anime (especially, of course, the science fiction) that rolls through on Netflix. I have an in-house anime expert who can give me insider tips so I don’t have to watch everything to find what I’ll like.

WorldCon is in San Jose this year! I am so stoked! I submitted some program ideas to that group as well, though haven’t had any feedback from them. Though I don’t expect to actually be on program, if they use any of my ideas I will be sure to go around claiming credit for them. I’m finally paid up on my membership (thank heavens for installment plans). My last WorldCon was in Spokane, and that trip was super-fun, but it kind of broke the family bank. With the con in San Jose, it’s an easy daily commute. Niiiiice.

Al Gore sitting with Angie Coiro on a stage with a screen behind them and cups on a table in between their chairs. Angie is holding her laptop computer as she listens to Al answer a question. — Climate science advocacy up close and personal. (Al Gore and Angie Coiro, December 7, 2017)

Al Gore won’t be coming to BayCon, but we’ll do our best to cover for him.

Secrets and Mysteries of Rafting the Grand Canyon

You might also like to read:

Walking to Pluto: Step 1Walking to Pluto: Step 1

Day One: From Flagstaff to Lees Ferry ( Mile 0)Day One: From Flagstaff to Lees Ferry ( Mile 0)

Convention Time is a-Coming, Ha-HaConvention Time is a-Coming, Ha-Ha