The wordless wonder of 9 days rafting in the Grand Canyon | Travel Stories from The Post and Courier

Lava Falls is one of the most famous rapids in the world. It’s one of the only things I knew about before descending into the Grand Canyon, and I didn’t know much. Something about a cheese grater rock, which didn’t sound pleasant.

It hung out there in the future, toward the end of our nine-day rafting trip. It hummed in the background with a mix of anticipation and fear.

By the time we reached it, we hadn’t seen the horizon in almost a week.

The mind can adjust to anything, even to beauty.

We woke up at 4 a.m. on June 8 . We filled our water bottles with ice — the last ice for a while — and started walking down the Bright Angel Trail. Weather maps showed all red across the Southwest.

The Arizona Republic published a headline, “Excessive heat warnings issued across Arizona; Hiking into the Grand Canyon not recommended.”

But it was even a little cold at that hour as we took our first steps.

We were a group of nine, and our excited chatter spilled down the switchbacks in front of us.

Among the group were two of my oldest friends. We have known each other since our early 20s. We built our lives in front of each other, even as we moved to opposite sides of the country. Weddings and divorces. Careers built. Successes and mistakes. But always each other — checking in and making an effort to see each other, year after year.

I was on the trip because of one of them. My friend Tara invited Earl and I a couple of months ago in a text message when two people dropped out. The other friend, Tom, was on the trip because of me. I sent him a text just two days before when someone announced they couldn’t come because of an injury.

I wrote that he could raft the Grand Canyon, but he had to decide right now. No hesitation.

It was the true test of anyone. But there he was walking down the trail with us, mile after mile, the shade disappearing as the sun rose higher and pinned our shadows against the wall behind us.

He said that he had two rules in life. Never turn down a trip to the Grand Canyon (this was his first offer) and when Autumn invites you to go somewhere, you go. Good rules.

The first couple of miles were not difficult. The temperature was bearable. We reached the first water station and soaked our hats and scarves, then filled our water bottles. We ate salty almonds and figs before picking up our packs for the next leg of the walk.

Someone walking in front of me asked if I had ever seen the show “The Three-Body Problem.” I had not.

“I won’t ever watch it,” I said. “Tell me the whole story.”

He recounted the plot of the books instead, a three-book series of Chinese science fiction. I don’t usually read sci-fi, but as he unfolded the story while we walked, I imagined that it must have been fun to write, to create whole worlds with different rules of time and dimension.

We had all the time in the world, and I was enjoying the sound of his voice telling the story, so I encouraged more and more detail with questions to keep it going.

There is no better facilitator of conversation than a hike. Your feet are moving. You aren’t looking at each other. It’s just your voices. There’s no rush, and there’s also a small social contract that you must entertain each other.

My friend who joined the hike with two day’s notice has been on many a trail with me over the years, especially in our 20s and 30s. We have walked and talked through every detail of our lives and made big decisions by the power of perpetual motion.

By the time the plot of “The Three-Body Problem” was winding down, we were more than halfway through the hike. The temperature was climbing fast as our elevation dropped. It was 107 degrees at the bottom of the canyon, and with every 1,000 feet of downward switchbacks we started to slow down.

As the elevation dropped and the temperature rose, the trail turned into steps built of rocks and logs, and each one took effort now. We started watching ahead for patches of shade, even little slivers of darkness to rest inside, pressing ourselves against the wall of the canyon for a moment away from the sun.

Of course, as often happens when I am at my lowest, someone runs by, fit and unaffected. People were running the Rim to Rim Trail and seemed to be untouched by the heat.

In all, the trail drops 4,300 feet over 9.5 miles. We turned the last corner and saw the Colorado River and the boats.

I dropped to the ground and took off my pack and my shoes. I poured a packet of rehydration salts into my water bottle and drank the whole thing without breathing.

Just as I started coming back to life, it was time to get in the boat.

On the last night of the trip, more than a week later, we sat in a circle and looked at the map of the Colorado River. The head guide revealed that the biggest rapid we did the entire trip was not Lava Falls. It was the first one, just minutes after we got on the water. There was no anticipation or fear. I just held on.

The boat flew over one wave and then another. Water splashed into the boat and cooled me. The adrenaline focused me onto the river, and all the miles it took to get there fell away.

Water in the West

Before you go over Lava Falls Rapid, there is a prayer to be said.

As the world disappears above the rim of the Grand Canyon and the day is only water and rock, the river becomes a kind of being.

You join in the raft guide superstition to say “Hello, River” every morning. And that simple act of acknowledging the river transforms it and your relationship with it. You speak to it and ask it for things — for safe passage, for forgiveness.

For some stretches, the only sound was the occasional cry of ravens overhead and the walking of the oars.

In the heat of June, the water was green. The oars dipped into clear water at the surface and then disappeared for a moment into a grainy soup of algae.

The Colorado River is no longer a wild thing.

The Glen Canyon Dam controls the flow of water, and the gates are opened in response to demand for electricity.

The water rises, and it has the feeling of a tide. But the moon pulling this tide is human — air conditioners working overtime on weekends, swimming pool pumps in the desert, casinos and ski lifts, grocery store freezers across seven Western states. The Glen River Dam and the waters of the Colorado River feed electricity to 4.5 million people in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming.

The river that lived before the dam and after are two different beings.

But the dam also created the conditions that allowed us to raft the river.

In the evenings, I would lie on the sand next to the river and read my waterlogged copy of “The Man Who Walked Through Time.” In it, Colin Fletcher describes his exploration on foot of the Grand Canyon. The Glen Canyon Dam began operation in 1963, just four weeks before Fletcher began his walk across the entire park.

As a Wyoming native who lives in South Carolina, I can tell you the main difference between people in the West and people in the eastern United States is how we think about water.

One side of the country talks about water rights, knows who lives upstream and watches snowfall during the winter to know whether or not there will be limits on water usage in the summer.

Because of a drought that has been ongoing since 2000, water levels are so low at Lake Powell, the reservoir that feeds the Glen Canyon Dam, that many are penciling out scenarios for what happens when the dam turns from effective electricity generator into a plug for the river.

But you don’t come to the Grand Canyon to think about the problems of the world. You come to get away from them.

There is no cell service down there. No news can reach you. No emails or text messages. You are as close to a reality we all left behind in the ‘90s, the last time someone could be unreachable.

Your eyes adjust to the Canyon over the days. It’s hard to take in at first, and it’s even more difficult to remember when you leave. You start by drowning in the numbers: Rocks that formed 1.5 billion years ago, water that slowly sliced its way through the rock, 1 inch a year for billions of years in order to create this spectacle.

The word “time” is the shortcut people use to talk about the Grand Canyon. And then we use other words. To describe the calcium white curves looming over us on the 500-foot Redwall Limestone, we use the word “amphitheater.” When three upended pieces of cliff appeared on the horizon, I imagined them to be the bows of sinking ships. Pillars of sandstone look like the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.

It’s a way of mentally compressing the canyon in order to take in the mile after mile of tectonic yawns.

It’s a way to stay sane. Because if you look up and see the hardened lava that poured over the top of the canyon and spread down the canyon, bursting with its own bubbling heat, it’s hard not to realize there were millions of years when we could not have lived here, when this planet was not for us. As the days go by, the canyon walls relentlessly remind you that humans are just a dot and you are just a dot among humans.

The guides comfort us with a mnemonic device to be able to list the rock layers: “Know the Canyon’s History, Study Rocks Made By Time, Very Slowly.” We recite it back. Kaibab Limestone, Toroweap Limestone, Coconino Sandstone, Hermit Shale …

Then you lie down at night and look up through the shadow shape of the canyon walls to the endless stars and the spill of the Milky Way. You have two choices in that moment: Cling to the textbook numbers and the names and the reference points on the map or let go of all that and really experience the wordless wonder.

Spiritual journey

The Canyon is a process as much as a place. It’s almost impossible to take in at once and just as impossible to remember.

Before I went into the Canyon, I hoped for a spiritual journey.

As the days passed, I wondered if I was having one. Is this a spiritual journey? What about now? I realized that I didn’t know what I meant by that phrase. Is it just a decision?

Perhaps I meant something more like a pilgrimage — a journey with a beginning and an end and quiet contemplation in between. I imagined the silence of the desert bringing me closer to knowing something that only extended periods in nature can teach. I was longing for retreat.

But if you hope for silence, going on a rafting trip down the Grand Canyon is not the place to find it.

I told my friend Tom over breakfast one morning, “There is so much small talk on my spiritual journey.”

In all, there were 20 people on the trip. Nine of them were part of our group, and the others were strangers to me.

The first days were spent learning about each other. The middle days were spent asking the bigger questions and entertaining each other with stories and shadow puppets at night on the canyon walls.

It’s a chance to spend time — real time — with people from every generation. My social circle is diverse with friends spanning from their 20s to their 90s. I don’t spend a lot of time around teenagers.

In order to raft the Grand Canyon, you must be 12 years old. One of the men took this trip more than a decade ago, and when he came home, he started counting down the years until his twin grandchildren were old enough to go. They spent the years hearing about the Canyon and knowing they would go as soon as they were old enough.

The 12-year-old girl noticed everything.

During one day on the river, as the heat radiated off the limestone, I tried to describe the smell of the Canyon to myself. It smelled clean. It smelled like laundry.

When I talked to her later after dinner, I asked what she thought the Canyon smelled like. She had already thought about it and said the same thing I had been thinking. It smells like clean laundry.

There is no privacy.

We watched each other interact, quietly observing the dynamics of relationships, noticing the way each person dealt with the minor adversities of living out in the open, sleeping under the stars, developing routines.

The Canyon makes you face any physical difficulties you have and any fears. And if you have aged since your 20s, if there is a gap between the self you imagined and the self that you are, the prolonged social interaction will unmask it.

Stripped of so many things that normally define us, people unconsciously take on roles as the days go by, and the question floats in the air about your true place in the world of other humans and what it is you actually have to offer.

I asked one of the guides, who has been taking people down the Grand Canyon for years, what the process looked like to him. How do people change over time on the river? Is there an arc to the journey?

“People usually melt down on Day 9,” he said.

On the night before we left the Canyon, my friend Tara organized everyone to gather on the beach, and each person was to act out a scene from our trip. It was spontaneous and unrehearsed. A father and his two teenage daughters did a hilarious narrated skit, complete with an impression of one of the guides flexing on the boat, “When the sun’s out, the guns are out.” Then, still in character as the guide, he recited “Oh Captain, My Captain!” by Walt Whitman in its entirety.

“O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done / The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won …”

We filled in the gaps with interpretive dance and impressions of each other. We laughed at ourselves and saw each other in yet another light, even more walls coming down as people took the stage. It gave the trip the air of a summer camp coming to a close.

Perhaps a spiritual journey isn’t an escape from others but a chance to truly know one another.

Self rescue

The kind of people who go white-water rafting are sensation seekers. They don’t just want to be alive. They want to feel alive.

That’s why, in between rapids, everyone wandered up slot canyons that opened out to waterfalls, where people climbed up and jumped into freezing cold pools of water to great applause.

And that’s why the guide slowed his oars to give us instructions before we entered Lava Falls.

If the boat flips, he said, walk your hands in one direction until you’re out from under the boat. If you start to doubt yourself and change directions, you’ll just end up going in circles.

If you get thrown from the boat, point your feet down river. Do not stand up. Stand up and you could get caught under a rock and drown.

Once you’re in the water, feet pointing downriver, look for the boat and the guide who will be pointing you in the right direction. Swim like Michael Phelps in that direction, he said.

Earlier this year, I read the book “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why” by Laurence Gonzales. There were several stories about people dying in white water — mostly because they overestimated their abilities, didn’t take the situation seriously and didn’t participate in their own rescue.

Throughout the book, there were stories of sensation-seekers getting to that adrenaline-pumping edge and then something goes wrong: avalanches taking out snowmobilers, rock climbers misjudging up from down and whitewater rafters laughing moments before their death in dangerous water.

After all, if you pay to do it, if you buy a ticket to ride, can it really be that dangerous?

Except for a couple of experiences in Wyoming testing out some big rapids with guide friends many years ago, I had never been white-water rafting before entering the Grand Canyon.

Day 1, I was scared. I repeated a mantra to myself, “Turn fear into awareness.”

By the end of Day 2, I had figured out how to hold onto the boat in a way that made me feel like I was riding one of those desert sand worms in “Dune.” The fear disappeared, and I could see the rapids and admire the shapes of the waves. I could predict where we were going to go and looked forward to the moments when we launched into the air and came down into the trough of a deep wave, only to launch again off the crest of the next.

The knuckles of my hands turned red and then painlessly hardened from day after day of holding the ropes.

In the Canyon, your sense of sound becomes heightened. During the calm stretches of river, you unconsciously listen for rapids ahead.

You can hear the hissing miles away, like the sound of hundreds of pieces of paper tearing over and over.

I watched the guides before each rapid. Before some, they got the boat pointed toward the tongue of the wave and continued telling the story of the man or woman whose misadventure named the rapid.

But other rapids worried them. They stood up. Or they pulled over and hiked above the river to look at it. And as we approached, they said, “If the boat flips, walk in one direction …”

We had been talking about Lava Falls for days by the time we reached it. The guides hiked above it and chose a line. We would stay to the right. The goal was to avoid the monstrous Ledge Hole and to stay off the cheese grater rock.

Before the falls, there is a tower of lava rising straight out of the river called Vulcan’s Anvil, hardened there 400,000 years ago and a sacred place to the Hualapai people. We floated close to it, admiring the folds of the black rock, feeling its presence and quietly asking for safe passage.

The river takes a turn at Lava Falls so that you don’t see it until you are in it. The waves pushed us and lifted one side of our boat as if we were in the ocean in a storm, feet from crashing into the rocky shore.

We were meeting a celebrity.

Our boat rolled over the glass hump of water that flowed right into the raging rapid.

My left hand was holding onto a piece of webbing used to tie down the gear. I tied a knot in the end so my hand wouldn’t slip. As the waves threw us from side to side, I felt my whole body rise into the air, held onto the boat by my hands.

Then, just as if we reached the bottom of a roller coaster, the waves flattened out and our guide spun the boat so we could watch the boats behind us.

We broke into applause for the guide, and he congratulated us for staying in the boat.

We made it through the most anticipated thing on the trip, and it turned out that some of the earlier rapids had been bigger and some of the other rapids had been more difficult — like the Bedrock Rapid where one of the guides scrambled out of his boat with a rope, ready for a rescue that we never needed.

We still had days to go, but making it through Lava Falls was the apex of the story, and now we found ourselves flipping the pages of the book to see how many more we had left until the end.

Every last mile

The movie “Castaway” came up again and again as the days went by. We talked about how Tom Hanks changed over time on that island. His hair and beard; his comfort with his surroundings; his dry, tan skin.

Tom Hanks became a shorthand for what was happening to all of us.

We bathed in the river and under waterfalls. And as the days repeated one after the other, we slipped into routines.

Here’s the thing about simplifying your life to one bag and a mat on the ground. You would think that freeing yourself from all the constraints of daily life would give your mind the freedom to contemplate bigger things.

Instead, if you aren’t careful, you can fill your mind with a new set of minutiae, like organizing your campsite; staying cool, hydrated and covered in sunscreen; and tending to wounds and drying skin.

I found comfort in the little routines I developed. In the morning, the guides would blow a conch to wake us up and then again when coffee was ready. I woke up and went to the river to wash my face and brush my teeth. Over nine days on the river, I wore only three outfits, all in a rotation.

During the day, I wore a long-sleeve sunshirt with a hood. Baseball cap and sunglasses. A loose skirt and pants underneath, and an old pair of Sperry sailing shoes. Upon arrival at camp each evening, I changed into a fresh pair of pants, same skirt, a cotton button-up shirt and flip-flops. And before bed, I dunked a cotton short-sleeve shirt in the river and traded out my button-up shirt for the freezing-cold sleeping shirt.

I didn’t need anything more than that.

I packed my camp before walking down to the water with a cup of coffee to appreciate the cooler temperatures before the sun crested the canyon walls and we jumped on the boats for another day on the river.

The Colorado River flowed from the Sonoran Desert into the Mojave Desert. Cotton top cactus sat sentinel on the wall above us. As the sun hit them, their spines glowed red. Small thorny acacia trees grew on rock ledges, a bonsai version of the acacia seen on the savannah of East Africa. The air smelled like wet sugar.

The sun shone down overhead, as if through a magnifying glass, and put the tall spines of flowerless hibernating ocotillo on top of the canyon in black silhouette.

I rolled some Burt’s Bees balm over my chapped lips and drank the cold water in my thermos. The desert plants watched me with their dry tongues.

More than any other trip, the Grand Canyon was about covering miles and feeling each one. It was about beginnings and endings.

The journey began in Las Vegas. A Charleston friend introduced us to Savage Aviation, a company providing bespoke experiences by helicopter or small plane. They picked us up at our hotel and brought us to a hangar at the North Las Vegas Airport.

We boarded a doors-off Huey that took us 90 minutes to the airport on the Grand Canyon rim. We flew low enough that I could make out the shadows of the ponderosa.

We were buckled in, but Earl was still able to put his feet out of the door. It was the difference between riding a motorcycle and riding in a car. I felt the warmth of the desert air on my cheek as we flew over the evaporating swimming pools of the city; over the eroding calderas; and empty, salt-ringed watering holes for cattle.

When we landed, a gust of hot wind blew from the forest near the runway, and I smelled warm pine and sagebrush and had a rush of homesickness for the West.

The miles continued as we hiked down the trail and rafted down the Colorado River. The guide occasionally called out the mile number from the map.

Before we reached Lake Mead, the canyon narrowed and the river angled downhill as if we were sliding down the drain. The water was flat and calm. We tied our rafts together in a flotilla and rode the current with a finish-line giddiness.

On our last night, I doused my clothes in the Colorado River to stay cool and lay down on my sand-covered mat for one last night of sleeping under the stars. The waning moon disappeared below the canyon wall and made way for the Milky Way — 200 billion stars in the Milky Way. One galaxy among billions of other galaxies.

The light of all those stars reached me. I folded my hands on my chest and kept my eyes open as long as I could, knowing as soon as I fell asleep the moment would be gone and all the wordless wonder with it.