River Journal 9-1-25

Day 2: Mile 24 (Lone Cedar) to Mile 65 (Carbon Camp)

Monday September 1st, 2025

Nate was up moving around in the cot next to me before the coffee conch, and I could already smell bacon cooking. Dad, Sam and the rest of camp still seemed to be asleep, so the two of us just hung around companionably as the darkness shifted gradually lighter. The coffee conch blew between 5 and 5:30am. Near the kitchen we found two giant metal carafes with long hooked ladles and a funnel each were waiting for us on the hors d'oevres table from last night. They had a tupperware of tea and hot chocolate choices (I had earl grey) and hot water in one carafe, and the other was the coffee - it was good, at least according to Dad! We packed up after filling our steel water bottles with our morning drinks and by the time the breakfast conch blew, the morning sun was hitting canyon wall opposite camp. It wasn’t gradual at all, but lit a swath of canyon wall across the top, then crept down to light more and more as the sun rose, with the rock wall below the line still in deep shadow. It was so magical!

Dad showcasing the light climbing down the canyon wall in the morning

Breakfast was just as extravagant as dinner the night before. In addition to the bacon, we had fried eggs, hash browns, cantaloupe, pineapple, and not one but two giant dutch ovens’ worth of perfectly baked poppyseed, and blueberry “muffin” bread. Sam was one of the first through the line, and modeled their plate to “oohs” and “ahhs” as they went to find a seat by the beach. I heaped my plate with hash browns and felt like the luckiest person alive! They really set the bar high for the next 5 days of meals. A few people I talked to during breakfast had seen the Milky Way in the night, late after the moon had risen and then set across our strip of sky. I hadn’t, first of all because I passed out, but second because I didn’t have my glasses in the cot pocket so even if I had woken up in the middle of the night I wouldn’t have been able to. I resolved to have my glasses handy for future nights and try to see it at the next possible opportunity. After breakfast, we cleaned and sanitized our plates and packed them in plastic bags stuffed into our sleeping bags for safekeeping, as we were instructed yesterday. Once the crew had packed up the kitchen, we formed a fire line - our second go at the twice-a-day camp procedure - and passed all the big dry bags and cots back onto the boats. I think we were on the water probably by 8:30am, which seems pretty early to me but the morning felt so chill and laid back at the same time! I guess since we started so early, we did have 3 hours to start the day, which I call a good, slow morning.

From left, Nate, Kenzie and Sam at the front of the raft on Day 2 morning

We loaded ourselves and our day bags onto the rafts once camp was all packed in, and did a round of intros for the passengers. The theme was family groups and couples. On Marc’s boat (ours), there was Dan & Claudia, Angela & Mike with their teen twins Max and Jake, Colorado couple friends Annie & Ken, Becky & Doug, and then Dad, Nate, Sam and me. On Lattimer’s boat, there were Nancy & Gordon, retired siblings Scott and Carol with Scott’s adult daughter Bethany, dad Matt with his preteen son Nicholas and Matt's cousin, dad Bill with his adult son Will and Bill’s cousin Western, and an older trio whose names I didn’t catch because of the sound of the river. In each group it seems there is one person with a preexisting deep love of Grand Canyon, and the rest are family and loved ones along for the ride. During these introductions Sam established themself as “the bird guy,” (a name given by Claudia); that is, Sam said they have no actual knowledge of birds, but a few days ago they picked up a Birds of Arizona book, and they have a pair of binoculars! They invited anyone upon seeing a bird to shout “Bird!” and point to get Sam’s attention. As we were pushing off the shore, Lat’s whole boat shouted a great chaotic chorus it: “Bird!” I don’t remember what the bird it actually ended up being, but that raven from last night probably had a great meal of left-over roasted chicken last night and swooped in to clean up any crumbs as we pushed off.

We started off right into Georgie Rapid, in honor of the Woman of the River who popularized passenger rafting trips. The guides wore leopard print shorts in Georgie’s honor for the day, since she was known for wearing leopard print. We entered the redwall limestone area of the canyon, and took a midmorning stop at Redwall Cavern, a big open gorgeous cave of that redwall limestone just past mile 33. Full of soft sand, Nate found this the ideal place to practice how to suplex. He did it to Sam, and me, in opportune moments right after photo ops. It was a rowdy stop!

Looking out from the back of Redwall Cavern

Lunch was at the Marble Canyon Dam test site, where we also got to climb back into the test cave used to check if this was a good place for the dam. At the back of the manmade caves, Marc held court and told the story of David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club, who fought the dam proposals to prevent the Grand Canyon from becoming the Grand Lakes. He and his river running friends combatted the national ads showing beautiful women waterskiing on the "Grand Lakes." The conservationist ads read, “Should we flood the Sistine Chapel just to touch the ceiling?” It was enough to sway public opinion and save Grand Canyon at the time. What an amazing story.

Day 2 was another hot day. By midday my eyes were hurting, because I hadn’t been able to get my sandy contacts in and I didn’t feel like wearing sunglasses over my glasses for the whole day. I got tired in the heat and felt like napping in the chicken coop - the more protected part of the raft in the middle - but the guides reminded us lethargy was an early sign of dehydration, so instead I dumped buckets of water over my head, rode in front for rapids, and kept chugging water. Becky sat back in the chicken coop with me and showed me her copy of Belknap’s Grand Canyon River Guide. We read about the miles we’d already run, and I read the chapter on native peoples of the canyon and archaeology. Near Nankoweap Canyon our guides pointed out the remains of ancient puebloan granaries. We saw a flock of 5 snowy egrets, sandpipers, and a couple of blue herons, ID'd by Sam's bird book! I loved the look of the Tapeats sandstone layer, from a coastal environment 500 million years ago, which we started to see a lot of. Sam likened it to the flat topped mushrooms that grow horizontally out of the sides of trees. We also started to see rainbow or Bright Angel Shale, the namesake of the trail I'd entered from the South Rim, in blocks of slices of browns, greens and purple.

Bright Angel Shale close to river level

A few miles before stopping to camp, we reached the confluence of the Colorado with the Little Colorado River. We didn’t know how lucky we were with the crystal clear water for the first day and a half, because at this point in the river, the clear water turned to swirling chocolate milk. You could see the zig zag in the water where the silty sediment-filled Little Colorado water met the clear water of the Colorado, and then past that point, it was all brown. We also began to be able to make out Desert View Watchtower as a little speck in the distance on the South Rim far downstream of us.

The water turns to chocolate milk after the confluence with the Little Colorado, South Rim in the distance

Three miles later we made camp at Carbon Creek. This camp is a totally different environment than Day 1. A large ridge spreads out among boulders 4-6 feet tall, with little scrubby bushes near the canyon wall. The whole area is covered with sand, but it feels more like a desert than a beach. We laid some clothes out to dry on top of a couple of boulders, set up our cots and exploded our duffels again to find stuff to bathe with. No tents again, the sky was clear and I planned to see the Milky Way! After that Sam, Nate, and I combined three clotheslines to create one long line from one boulder to another, since there was nowhere else to hang our stuff to dry. It lies across the most obvious walking path from a few other campsites, but there are other paths around, so we got some good-natured but snarky comments as we set it up, and we made sure to hang it full of colorful clothes especially in the middle so nobody got literally clotheslined in the middle of the night trying to go to the toilet. Sam tested out whether the chocolate water would stain our clothes if we tried to wash our clothes in them - surprisingly, it didn’t stain! On top of that, it felt great to bathe in. Just some extra exfoliation! My shampoo was Wilderness Wash which I learned was a terrible idea and did nothing to conquer “river hair,” but the view was of course amazing.

The water was high, but Lat knew it would get so low overnight (due to dam water release scheduling) that we would be completely beached. So he and Lando drove around the area looking for a place to dock the boats, while Marc and Joe prepared dinner. It took them a long time, meanwhile Dad, Becky and I speculated about their plans, all of our speculations a lot more complicated than the actual plan, which was for 3 guides to sleep on the boats in the deeper water, and leave one guy to sleep at camp with us. Another notable thing about this campground is the spot for the outdoor toilet was a totally awesome view!

Lat and Lando kept searching for a spot until after dinner was called, but they eventually found a place on the opposite bank, marked it with lights so they could find it after dark, and came back to camp to eat. Speaking of dinner being called, this is when we learned that Joe does not know how to blow a conch, he tried a couple of times and produced some wet fart sounds, so there was a mixture of hilarity and encouragement until he made a slightly longer pitched sound and we cheered his success. Dinner was as excellent as the first night: trout and brussels sprouts! My eyes were hurting still and I was so tired from the hot day, but I chatted a bit with the group down on the rocks. There were different kinds of ants near there, some red, which I was very wary of because I thought they were fire ants - but it turns out they were much less aggressive, people walked through the industrious line of ants across the path a ton and I don’t think too many people got bites. I remembered to put my glasses in my cot pocket before bed.

Nate, Sam and Kenzie at Carbon Camp, Day 3

In the middle of the night, I woke up and saw a smudge on the sky. I put on my glasses, and there was the Milky Way, clearer than I’ve ever seen it! I fell back asleep satisfied. Previous River Journal Next River Journal