River Journal 8-31-25
- Kenzie Slottow
- Sep 9
- 7 min read
DAY 1: Las Vegas to Mile 24 (Lone Cedar camp)
Sunday August 31st, 2025
At 4:45am in the morning, Dad and I went downstairs and signed in for the Western River Expedition rafting trip. Sam and Nate were waiting for us outside. There were breakfast sandwiches, coffee and tea out on the patio for us trip passengers, and we packed all of our airport clothes and electronics into my roller bag, and checked it in to leave for the week. A bus took us to the Boulder City airport, which by the looks of the gift shop and the helicoptor propeller used for an overhead fan, is mostly for canyon helicopter tours and scenic view trips by Grand Canyon Airlines, like the one we were taking to get closer to the river. I’d say it’s a bigger building than the Moloka’i airport, but not by much - an area with seating next to the check in desk, gift shop, and bathrooms. They have a great system there for properly balancing the planes with passengers, which seems crucial since they’re so small. There’s a pair of feet painted on the floor in front of the check in desk. You stand there and they don’t tell you a thing about your weight as you check in, but they assign seats and aircraft based on the info they get from weighing your person and your bag. We walked out onto the tarmac for our flight to the beginning of a beautiful sunrise, which made me feel adventurous and closer to nature even though we still had hours to go before the river.
I’d never been on an aircraft like Grand Canyon Airlines’ scenic tour planes, we flew low under the clouds the whole way, right over Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam, canyons and formations and rivers and desert landscape. The tall rectangular windows stretch two seats at a time and they have Bose headsets with narration tracks in at least 3 languages and a custom orchestral suite commissioned to accompany the hour-long flight, which was pretty fantastic and an incredible match to the landscape. I even wondered if the composer had studied the route and the narration to match it up at certain points. We could see right into the cockpit and watch the pilot and first officer fly the plane, I was fascinated.
We landed in Page, Arizona at a similar airport where our bus driver, a laid-back friendly Navajo guy named Pressley, said we had way too many people on the bus and didn’t seem very clear on what to do about it. After he came on and off a few times with us all loaded up, a few people were mumbling versions of, “why doesn’t he read off the manifest?” Pressley's response didn't inspire much confidence for a bus driver (“the writing is really small”), but anyway I followed him back out to where the lady at the airport check in desk was saying, “all I know is I just printed these out in the morning,” or something innocently unhelpful to that effect. I offered to Pressley that I could do roll call on the bus. He thought it was a great idea, so I went back and grabbed the tour bus operator's mic and announced, “Hi, I’m Kenzie, I’m just one of you guys, but I’m gonna read off this manifest,” and we had a good time with roll call, it kind of broke the ice and got us in expedition mode, where everybody helps each other out. After that everybody knew my name before I knew theirs, and good-naturedly referred to me as the Bus Operator. It turned out that the manifest listed exactly the number of people on the bus (47), however someone had written a big number 35 on the paper and circled it, and that’s what Pressley was trying to match in his head counts. To Pressley’s credit, it must have been 6 or 8 point font - actually very tiny - and his eyesight was fine! He had no trouble driving across and down into Marble Canyon to Lee’s Ferry, where we met our river guides Lattimer, Lando, Marc and JT (Joe) with their two enormous Western River J-Rig rafts.
It took some time to introduce us to the gear, which included 26-lb-float life jackets, a small dry bag for day use and an enormous dry bag with a tarp and sleeping bag provided. We stuffed our personal duffels into these big gear bags to load onto the boat, got a safety and logistics talk from trip leader Lattimer (Lat) on the opposite bank, and then set out from mile 0, 14 passengers on each raft.
Dad, Sam, Nate and I chose the boat with a Darth Vader pirate flag flying from it. That turned out to be Marc’s boat with Joe (JT) as crew. Marc almost immediately pulled over to execute a motor change, which actually gave me a lot of confidence that these guys would be ready for anything. They had at least 6 full motors on board between the two rafts, with additional lower units, in case of...not really sure, but I guess we'll find out!
It was only around 9am by this point, but the sun was heating up. Downstream we went on relatively flat water, clear and cold. JT showed us how to scoop a bucket of water as we went and dump it over our heads to cool off. We practiced the proper way to sit and hold on when running rapids. During a rapid or “riffle” (smaller whitewater patch) if you sit in the most exciting seats at the front of the raft, you've got to straddling one of the three center rubber tubes with a rope in front of you and a rope behind. These are to hold on to: you grip underhand in front and the other hand behind, under or overhand. Nine people who wanted to get splashed can ride up front, as long as you're flexible enough to “suck rubber,” or lay your head down on the raft in front of you if a big wave is about to smash us. Reminds me of how I had to learn the hard way to dive under a big wave instead of letting it smash you on a beach or surf board. I remember Nate got the same lesson on the same Hawaii trip, but he learned it harder with a few stitches. Glad we all got the training this time though, before it was really needed! A few hours in, we docked for a sandwich bar lunch, which the crew set up for us complete with a hand washing station, then continued downstream and put in around 4pm at Lone Cedar camp at mile 24. On the way, Joe pointed out the Hermit Shale painting the canyon’s limestone walls red as it washes down the sides.
At our sandy beach-side camp, Lattimer gave us a comprehensive talk on everything from cot and tent setup to mealtime procedures to toilet protocol. What's the toilet protocol, you ask? The rafts contain probably 6 or 8 portable toilet steel boxes on for solid waste, with toilet seat lids. They set up two at camp each night: one in a privacy tent with an open air top, and the other overlooking the river a bit further downstream of camp. Near the hand washing station, which is set up on the path leading to the toilets, there's an orange paddle: the “key” to the outdoor toilet. If you don't take that paddle with you and bring it back, you’d better get off the pot when somebody shows up with the key! After the speech we broke for camp setup, our first baths in the river, and dinner preparation (by the crew). Dad, Sam, Nate and I chose a little corner of high ground to set our cots side by side. No tent for us - we wanted to watch the stars, and the sky was clear even though the canyon at that spot was pretty narrow. A huge Chihuahan raven, ID’d by Sam’s bird book, sized us up from a tree on the edge of our little campsite as we set up. We’d been warned in the camp intro talk that ravens and ringtails were liable to make off with our small shiny things, so we did our best to keep our stuff in order and tidy, but we all felt crazy trying to dig in our duffel bags and find things and remember what we were supposed to be doing next, and not leave anything lying out on the cot - all of bags exploded onto our cots whether we meant to or not!
Then time to bathe. The river was COLD (fifty degrees they say) but it felt novel and marvelous to bathe in it anyway, there was a big line of driftwood at the high water line but not much else between our campsite and the river. I didn’t consider the river would have tides, but it turns out the flow fluctuates daily based on how much water is let through at night by the Glen Canyon Dam 15 miles above Lee’s Ferry.
Calls to the kitchen are done with a conch shell, and the dinner on Day 1 blew us all away. The first conch meant hors d’oeuvres, and it was delicious crab salad with crackers! Then the second conch was for a suprisingly gourmet charcoal-roasted barbeque chicken (or veggie burgers) with asparagus and a strawberry bleu cheese salad. This kind of cooking on the river?! None of us could believe it! All of us campers set up camp chairs along the beach to eat and start getting to know the 24 other people on the trip. At lunch I’d met the young retired couple Dan and Claudia, who had just sold their business and bought an RV to tour the country. At dinner I talked to Nancy and Gordon, a long distance couple celebrating Gordon’s 60th birthday. After dark, a third conch call for chocolate cake baked in a massive dutch oven - wow. It was really good! I noticed when I laid down to sleep that we were on a bit of a slope, so I had to keep pulling myself back up the cot periodicaly, but still I passed out at 8pm at the latest, after marveling a bit at the stars. Next River Journal Page
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