River Journal 9-2-25

DAY 3: “Big Rapid Day:" Mile 65 (Carbon Camp) to Mile 110 (Mile 110 Camp)

Tuesday September 2nd, 2025

The coffee call was later than we expected, probably because it had taken a while to maneuver the rafts back around the new sandbars that had emerged from the night to our beach, just as Lat expected. Thanks to the rafts staying overnight in the deeper water, though, they were not beached! Apparently in the past, massive J-Rigs like our boats have gotten stuck for days on flat sand bars like these. In the morning calm of the campground, Dad wrote in his journal.

Breakfast was french toast and sausages - our second gourmet meal! We packed up our Slottow campsite while the crew packed up breakfast, then did our fire line to load back all the bags onto the boat. We had gotten a briefing on today's plan the night before, but Lattimer gave it to us again before we set out: Day 3 is what the guides call “Big Rapid Day.” He named a long list of probably 20 rapids, some 9s or 10s on the 1-10 rating scale, that we would be running today. We tested each other's life jacket tightness in case we needed to be hauled out of the water, and got reminders of how to ride in front safely and Suck Rubber. We pushed off around 8:30 or 9am. Floating along in the morning we moved into the widest part of the canyon that I recognized from looking across the South Rim in earlier visits to the canyon. JT pointed out the Grand Canyon Supergroup formation: a layer cake of colorful rock jutting diagonally up that just starts to appear at this point in the river. The youngest layer of the supergroup rock is 742 million years old and the oldest 1.2 BILLION years old! That's literally prehistoric. As the river cuts deeper, the rock gets older, as we go downstream the canyon cuts all the way to the igneous basement layer of rock and then climbs back out. Desert Watch Tower on the South Rim became more distinguishable, as the rock of the canyon grew softer and turned into slopes. Then the rapids started to grow too. It’s a good thing we got so much practice on smaller ones the first couple of days!

Lounging up front in Upper Granite Canyon when the water is calm

Seat choices for running the rapids in the J-Rig have a lot to do with the layout of the raft. You've got three options: There’s up front on the tubes, where you hold the ropes and get soaked. More people up front means the nose of the raft stays closer to the water which makes for a smoother ride in the rapids. J-Rigs are the only type of raft that has this section. Behind that there’s a row of coolers with seat pads on top. These are the best views and the comfiest seats that face forward, and you can only have six people there at once otherwise the driver can't see through the people and read the water. The cooler seats are a bit further back from the waves, but you can still get splashed a lot. Nate, Sam and I spent most of the morning of Big Rapid Day on the coolers, bird watching and observing the rock formations and the widening canyon. Behind the raised coolers is a giant tarped mound of our gear bags, tied down with straps which we clipped our water bottles and day bags to during the day. To either side of that big tarp is more storage with seating pads over it, where we can sit viewing the sides of the canyon, and stay pretty dry and protected during rapids. That area is called the "chicken coop," and Dan called it the "lounge," which felt accurate because it is really chill back there even when it's crazy up front. And behind that there's more stuff, like water and lemonade coolers, and Marc driving the boat, but you can't sit there. Sam, Nate and I went up front (I was probably last) once the rapids started to get big - Dad went up front for many of them too. Our biggest rapids in the first half of the day were Hance and Sockdolager. They had big "holes" where there would be a big drop and the waves wash completely over the people up front. I think it was also on Hance that it felt like Marc was really nailing it with the driving, but then it turned out we had dinged a propeller. He had spares, though, so pulled over to replace it after, and it didn’t slow us down much.

Front seats are full as the canyon widens: Mike, Ken, Dad, Max & Jake, Becky, Doug, Angela, Annie

After Hance and Sockdolager (an old-timey word for "sucker punch"), we entered a new section of the canyon: Upper Granite Gorge. We were down in the igneous rock, what they call the “basement layer,” the foundation of the continent, with the 1.7 billion year old shining metamorphic rock. Black Vishnu schist came up out of the sides of the river like jagged towers, a villain’s domain. Laced through the black rock were veins of pink Zoroaster granite, topped in places with mushroom-like Tapeats sandstone. It felt like another planet.

We passed by Phantom Canyon midday, and saw a couple of helicopters with long lines flying in to drop supplies, which was fascinating. After lunch it seemed like we’d run a rapid and five seconds later we were getting our briefing from Marc on the next one around the corner. We all had rain jackets and rain pants on as splash gear. At Horn Creek Rapid (mile 91), a 9 on the 1-10 rating scale, I was sitting in the first position up front and my butt came completely off the rubber, I was just holding on to the ropes in front and behind! The others had done the same. Lat’s raft wasn’t so lucky - seven of them lost at least one of their hand holds, and people ended up in all different parts of the raft, front to back, side to side! No one fell off completely, though. Through the afternoon, Doug showed himself as king of one-liners and had a rating system of his own: “Piece of Cake!” was most everything, until toward the end of the afternoon he got to “that was nasty” and “ugly.” Sam rallied us going into almost every rapid, with chants like “1,2,3, STAY IN!” and Doug contributed some off-the-wall motivational phrases like “let’s meet the devil!” For one of the bigger rapids, we pulled over so that Marc and Lat could hike up to a ridge and study the rapid before running it.

We stopped for lunch in the gorge just above a longer rapid, and most of us hiked up a hill to look down at it. We found a nice rock and a big open space at the top for Dad’s handstand pic! There was ominous thunder and gray clouds moving in, so we didn’t stay long at the top. Then it was back to rapids.

Handstand with storm clouds

In the afternoon, Doug stayed up front where he had started - he'd been counting the rapids as we went and later in the afternoon eventually lost count around 12 or 14, but doggedly continued up front all the way to the end, even when he finally moved into his "nasty" and "ugly" rapid ratings! Ken was a daredevil and had been riding in the 1st position since the first big rapids of the day. Angela and Becky rounded out the up front group, and Nate, Sam, Dad, Dan and I came forward for some and back for others. Max and Jake were finally convinced to ride up front with their parents at some point during the afternoon, while Claudia, saving her back from a preexisting condition, cheered us all on from the coolers as she had been for the previous days.

The big event of the day was at Crystal Rapid. Marc came up to share with us the story of just how big Crystal Rapid could get, how a debris flow in 1966 had dropped boulders and transformed a mild Crystal Rapid into one of the most challenging runs on the river. In 1983 there was a standing 50-foot wave, I can’t even imagine that, it sounds like a tsunami! The park service was having people get out of their boats and walk around it. Marc described a bit of the technical driving bits, how there’s a big gravel bar in the middle at the top (Big Red), and then still a lot more to do after that. Lat’s boat went first - they’d been in front of us most of the time, which made for great photos because you could see the scale of things with a raft in the picture. They took the left channel around Big Red and disappeared from view. Once we saw them reappear at the bottom, it was our turn. Marc took us on the right channel around Big Red, but we were too close to the right bank and the current carried us to the wall and wrecked the motor. We floated along with some shouts of “Bump!” to warn ourselves to tuck in and not get smashed by the rocks, until our raft got pinned on a big rock near the right bank about halfway down the rapid. It wasn’t a sheer cliff, but a slope of rocks and boulders. For a while we sat there while Marc and JT worked out a plan of action. Then all 9 of us who were in front transferred one by one to the high side til we were piled in the chicken coop. The problem seemed to be it wasn’t much of a high side, we had gotten so far on top of the rock that it was kind of in the middle of the raft. So JT and Marc couldn’t push us off. They were all nerves, meanwhile we passengers were all kind of excited, like “now THIS is an expedition!” and laughing as we all piled on top of each other.

We saw Lat’s boat pull over down at the bottom, and eventually down on the rocky slope we could see two guys walking up the bank to save us. How, we didn’t know. It turned out to be Lando and a passenger, Will. I had talked to Will before - he and I had both thought the trip was going to be a little more physically demanding, we thought we might need to be paddling our way down the river. So I thought it was fitting that he got to have a little adventure. Will and Lando scrambled up the rocks by their boat then rock hopped up toward us. Once the reinforcements arrived, they had some disagreements about the best course of action, but we ended up moving 3 of us to the rapid side of the boat to redistribute the weight. Then all three guides pushed from the back and Will pushed from the bank side, which in retrospect was a really weird decision! Will was balanced on a rock where his footing was sure to disappear if we succeeded in pushing the boat off of where we were pinned. So Sam and Mike held onto his life jacket at both shoulders and hauled him in as we slid back into the rapid.

Now we just had to float with a dead motor through the rest of Crystal. We dubbed the maneuver the Darling Pinwheel (Marc Darling) after the fact, as we spun slowly down like a pinball from the right bank into the current. Marc had switched out the motor for a fresh one while we were waiting for Lando and Will to arrive, and he found a window in the spinning to start it up and get the raft back under control. We made it down to Lat’s boat and I saw the old motor as they stowed it away, crushed inward on two sides at the bottom. We passengers were all pumped up with adrenaline, having had total trust in the crew’s ability to get us out of the situation. But JT and Marc were shaken. No one had passed us while we were stuck, but just as we were regrouping at the bottom of Crystal, two S-Rigs full of a tour group came down the rapid, made it out fine and waved merrily. I think Marc was relieved they didn’t see us stuck and we were able to get ourselves out of it, because it was a different tour company.

Piled on one side of the raft, stuck in Crystal Rapids but having a great time

We still had rapids every half mile to mile and at least 10 more miles to go before we could start looking for camp - Lat planned to get us to the bottom of the Gems. That’s a group of rapids in succession: Agate, Sapphire, Turquiose, Emerald, Ruby, Little Ruby, and then Serpentine. Our group was pumped up from the adventure of Crystal, and we laughed and cheered all the way through the gems. We sang Ruby Tuesday ath the rubies, and Sam, Nate, Dad and I got in some Don’t Stop Believin’ in honor of Dirk. When it was time to start looking for camp, we started to see all the groups of people who had started on the river before us! National Park Service had a group out, there were some people in big rowboats called Dories, another tour group in a couple of big S-Rigs (but not quite as big as our J-Rigs), and other private groups with umbrellas, canopies, and more familiar looking camping accoutrement rigged on their boats and in the campgrounds. The family group at Bass Camp, one of the most popular for privates, even had a covered kiddie floatie on the water, they seemed like they’d been there all afternoon. The time we spent stuck in Crystal had made us late to the typical camp time - around 4pm - so we kept going and ran several more small rapids before we reached the first open camp that could fit our group, Mile 110 camp, later than usual, maybe closer to 5:30pm. Lat said this camp was one of his favorites. I was feeling like maybe the trip could be shorter at this point, it was a long afternoon, and if every day was gonna be rapids like this, I already had the sense of the experience.

The fire line unloading the bags had a playful air. We all knew each other a bit now, so as we passed the numbered gear bags down they were judged a bit - “number 23, that’s heavy!” or “number 16, nice packing!” There was more vegetation by this point, patches of tall grasses full of small birds in the evening, and lots of campsites along the beach and along the cliffs. Large smooth stoned and rocks were packed into the sand, like they had been smoothed out when the water was higher. There were more bugs around too, not mosquitoes but little spiders and things, so I didn’t walk around barefoot at all like I did in the sand the night before. We decided to use tents for the first time, but put our cots outside and just use the tents to string clotheslines around and as shelter in case it rained in the middle of the night. Nate was so used to the routine of exploding his bag onto his cot though that he couldn’t put stuff on the tent floor without the cot - so he put his cot in the tent right away. Sam did some birdwatching. There were lots of tiny birds at this camp, and hummingbirds that got really close to us!

We bathed in the river and then the hors d’oevres call sounded - chips and guac. Sam loved it. The burrito dinner was not bad but after the first two nights of cooking I realized they put their best at the beginning to get us in good spirits, and standard camp fare made more sense in the middle. Or maybe I just have unreasonably high burrito standards living in Texas. After dinner, Joe broke out his left-handed guitar for a little concert, but I was so tired from Rapid Day that I just got in my cot and closed my eyes. I startled Sam when they came back to camp and thought I was a pile of stuff that just started rearing up and moving when they shined their light on me!

In the middle of the night, it started sprinkling and we all packed our cots into our tents. It didn’t rain hard so we probably didn’t need to, but we didn't want to get poured on - we had gotten soaked enough for one day!

Previous River Journal

Next River Journal