River Journal 9-4-25

DAY 5 "Lava Falls and Full Moons:" Mile 145- Mile 186 (186.4 Mile Camp)

Thursday September 4th, 2025

This was a beautiful morning, and we got another double rainbow! Cloudy but perfect weather for sitting on the beach with coffee or hot chocolate. I barely wore shoes at Cozy Camp, because the sand was so clean and felt good on my toes. We had satisfying biscuits and gravy for breakfast. The only downside of the morning was that I couldn’t find my sunglasses, which I could have sworn I packed up the night before, so I just prayed for the clouds to stick around all day! Dad found a previously missing neoprene sock, however, so the secret world of lost things balanced itself out and he was able to finally wear two socks on the river. We pushed off early, at 8am. The ravens swooped in eagerly to clean up after us.

Dad and Sam with morning coffee at Below Kanab Camp

I had Belknap’s guide wedged into my life jacket, and so did Dan and Claudia - we sat on the coolers and tried to follow the river rapids and features. The canyon was now bright angel shale at the bottom with red wall limestone climbing upward. I felt a little sad that I hadn’t been reading the book from the beginning, to fully appreciate the moments we descended down into the oldest part of the earth rock; today found us pushing back up and forward in geologic time. In Muav Canyon, the limestone turned blockier and sandy colored all over. Around 9 or 9:30, we approached Havasu Canyon in Havasu Rapid. This is the same creek that leads to the famed Havasupai tribal lands and Havasu Falls, but it's not permitted to hike all the way there from the Colorado River side (the boundary is Beaver Falls). I was worried we wouldn’t be able to get out and hike -if the water coming out of the creek was brown from flash flooding, we would have had to pass by. Luckily we could see it streaming out clear into the Colorado, so Marc and Lat executed a really technical landing with our two j-rigs in the middle of the so that we could hike up the creek! Smaller boats could turn in and dock in the creek itself, but our rigs had to u-turn upstream and get lashed to the rocks for us to climb carefully onto the raft closest to the rock wall and then from there to the wide ledge that led to the top of the canyon. This was the only hike for which we left our life jackets on. There was enough room to walk along the flat rock to the creek, then we were above the gorgeous turquoise water dotted with waterfalls. After a short hike down the side canyon, we got to frolic in the creek for a while! It was perfect that we had our life jackets: Dan and Sam discovered a fun way to ride the current a certain distance. Nicholas dubbed the "ride" Tailbone Tapper on account of the rocks under the water if you started just a bit to high that would bruise your tailbone. Nevertheless, people were doing it over and over! I just tried it a few times starting halfway down, for the fun without the sore tailbone. Joe posted up on a rock below our ride, to grab anyone who got swept up a little too far, but no one did.

Havasu Creek just below "Tailbone Tapper" little current ride

Dan and I followed the rapids in Belknap’s River Guide as we continued, calling out the names of the ones coming up. Right before lunch as I was following the book, I matched up the view with a photo labeled “Rare Exposure of Surprise Canyon Formation.” We could see the dark rock in a dip up at the top of the rock wall downstream from mile 168 - formed by a river valley later flooded by the sea, 330 million years ago. I got super excited when I saw it and read out the info to everyone from my cooler seat. People were excited and also started joking about me taking over Joe’s job as guide, since he hadn’t come up to give us a rapids briefing lately.

We docked for sandwich lunch at Fern Glen Canyon. The four Colorado friends - Ken, Annie, Becky, and Doug - donned their Hawaiian shirts and leis on in preparation for Lava Falls later in the afternoon. Sam took some handstand pics. They're not quite the same as Dad's handstand picks, the main differences being you have to snap it right after Sam reaches a good-looking position and before they fall over, and also Sam does handstands in less treacherous (read: more flat) locations. Unfortunately I think the handstand photo camera got too wet for the film to come out, but here's one at our lunch stop.

Lunch preparations at Fern Glen Canyon

After lunch, we got into “the lavas” rapids and passed by the Red Slide, slopes full of little red columns jutting out, remnants of some kind of volcanic activity. Then we came to Vulcan’s Anvil, a giant volcanic rock much taller than our rigs, one mile upstream of Lava Falls. Marc briefed us on Lava Falls: "Anybody who sits up front, you gotta suck rubber the entire time - don’t peek!" Joe switched into the driver’s seat, and we all ducked down with our face to the rubber, except Dan, who did foolishly peek, until Dad yelled “Suck rubber!!” to warn him and he ducked again. Sam got a video of the whole thing from the coolers, and nobody fell off. A perfect run of Lava by Joe! As we ran the Son of Lava (smaller rapid) and came up on Below Lower Lava camp right, we saw a line of twenty-something river runners mooning Lat’s boat: six perfect full moons. When we got to the same spot, the cheerful rafters waved at us innocently in their eerily perfect straight line on the sand bank, and then as if counted off and well-rehearsed, in unison they turned and mooned us too. We laughed our way down around the bend, and then stopped for a pit stop. The fun wasn't over: 3 inflatable rafts of young adults were coming downstream, two in each raft. Were these the same guys? Sam and Nate wanted to moon them back, but Marc wasn’t sure these were really the mooners. Now they were right in front of us while we bickered about whether to pull our pants down and we went awkwardly silent, peering at them for recognition. One of them broke the silence, saying, “Well this is embarrassing.” And so we all turned around chaotically and mooned them, in a very chaotic and unrehearsed way. We cracked ourselves up! So much fun it was to moon the mooners that we we waited for the other two boats so we could moon them too. Lat good-naturedly agreed to give us time to moon all of them. We got our little taste of river culture. The original mooners clapped and hollered as they passed.

Vulcan's Anvil, the sign you're almost at Lava Falls

Downstream of Lava there were big swaths of green grass, and bighorn sheep galore. We had seen a few in the earlier days, but these were all over. Becky was the best sheep spotter. At 4pm we made camp in the lavas among the basalt and barrel cacti. It was a desert kind of sandy, and a big winding campground with a wash that cut through it - Lat warned us not to camp in the wash in case it rained. I was annoyed that Sam and Nate had picked out a spot so far from the kitchen, but it was a cool one, in the shelter of two giant blocks of basalt way. Dad and I pitched a tent across the path from Sam and Nate. I was a little dehydrated and cranky at this point, I wanted to sleep in the open under the stars but it was looking like a storm was coming and there wasn’t enough flat ground to put both cots and tents to keep our options open. By the time we figured something out, the wind was so strong that we needed both cots in the tents along with heavy rocks in all four corners to keep the tent from flying. Sam steped in to help because at this point I was hangry and dysregulated. Our Slottow site We were further in and higher up from the river than we had been at all the previous camps, so finding a bathing spot was tricky. Nate and Sam found a patch of private beach, then Dad an I wandered through the cactus, rocks and brush, for a while before finding our way there, me complaining the whole way. As I was finally making my way back to the kitchen area to see if I’d missed the hors d’oevres call, the guides came along the path wearing vests and ties on top of their shorts, Lando carrying a platter of cups of cocktail shrimp, Lattimer holding cocktail sauce to drizzle. They had their final night shenanigans planned to make it special for all of us. Considerably cheered by the shrimp, I made it to the evening chair circle. Lattimer gave the assembled group a rundown of tomorrow’s packing and how we’d get to the helipad to be lifted out of the canyon tomorrow. Naomi missed the meeting and I got worried since no one had seen her for a couple of hours. So a few of us did a small search along the beaches and rocks before it got dark, until she turned up from a long hike about 20 minutes after the dinner conch. Apparently she had been doing that pretty much every day, so Joe wasn’t too worried and I was glad because the storm was threatening to finally come down on us.

Dinner was steak with a baked potato bar and coleslaw. The baked potatoes were great, even though my tofu strips substitute for steak was mediocre. They'd been providing delicious food for almost a week, I really couldn't complain. We gathered around to sing happy birthday to Gordon and happy anniversary to Ken and Annie, celebrating their 36th. The crew had baked two cakes in the giant dutch ovens: an impressive feat, with a not-bad result! In the community circle Joe and Sam sang a duet and I brought my tin whistle to accompany something. We ended up doing Wonderwall - a hilarious choice- and because they had to tune to the one whistle I’d brought, in Bb, they were way high up in their range and struggling and laughing about it. This had the welcome effect of turning it more into a group singing experience than a concert, and I tweedled in between the verses and lines and did a little Irish intro and outro. It was fun! We were all enjoying ourselves to the degree that when lightning lit up the sky, Mike waved it off: “It’s heat lightning,” he assured us. Somebody asked, “what does that mean?” and he replied snarkily, “It’s hot!”

The wind was roaring by the time we headed back to our tents and cots. Lots of people had decided not to put up tents, and Naomi’s tent was actively blowing away. Dad and I helped her secure it with rocks and the cot inside. I was pretty shaken by the weather, thinking of the flash flood tragedy just two months ago in the Hill Country in Texas. There were people camped closer to the river than us, and some pretty close to the wash in the campgrounds too. I went up the hill a little to Nicholas and family and told them "if it’s a downpour, you can come and shelter in our tent!" Just in case, because Nicholas was just a kid, and he was up there with his dad and uncle on just cots and sleeping bags. The teen twins Max and Jake were also at the top of the hill with just their cots, probably with the same idea I had earlier to see the stars on the final night. Around 9pm, it rained hard and the thunderstorm passed very close to us, the thunder cracking just 3 seconds after the lightning. It went on for probably 20 or 30 minutes, but the whole time nobody came to the door of our tent. I was so terrified I couldn't sleep. I was ready to float down the river if our campsites got flooded out - rain gear on, life jackets standing by in the tent and my dry bags packed. Only once the downpour subsided and I heard Nicholas sounding plaintive but talkative up on the hill, did I breathe easier. It continued to sprinkle throughout the night, but the worst was over. Dad and I had stayed dry in our tent, but I wondered what kind of stories we’d hear in the morning. Previous River Journal Next River Journal