Rolling on a River

I went on a four-day canoe trip with the excursion club to the Colorado river on the border between Nevada and Arizona. It was quite an adventure.

It started off Friday morning 6 AM when we gathered outside of Embarcadero Hall. It was 24 people on the trip so we got into the cars and drove off. After an hour we got a call from one of the other cars, their vehicle had broken down, it was oil all over the floor, so they had to rent a car and would be delayed. 

Well then, we drove happily to Las Vegas, stopped on the way for lunch. There was an outlet just beside the restaurant so I added two more pairs of Converse to my collection, the classic red and some pink-orange-ones with bright blue laces. I cant help it, they cost $15 each.

After Las Vegas approaching cars started flashing their lights at us, we didn't know why until the car started wobbling. There must have been sparks from the wheel. One of the tires was almost blown away. Something had stuck in the wheel and cut up the tire so it was almost falling off. We called the others and told them what had happened and that we would be delayed. 

There was a full-sized spare tire and it took only 10 minutes to change it, so soon we could continue. It took us 8 hours to get to Colorado river, 12 miles downstream from Hoover Dam. 

It was already late so we didn't start paddling the first day but cooked dinner and camped  instead. We slept  under the stars. In the middle of the desert the nights are warm and dry.

Saturday we paddled 7.5 miles upstream. It was hard, especially when the dam was open and the current strong. We paddled two and two and we soon figured out the necessity to keep close to the shore to avoid the strong current in the middle of the river. The sun was cruel and I wore my hippie hat and classes and one of the leaders soon gave me the nickname Residental Hippie. It was beautiful. The water was deep green like a melted red wine bottle. I stared into it mesmerized. The canyon walls rose infertile on both sides, yellow, reddish and gray. We found a nice little camping ground along the river. There where hot springs, one of them had a waterfall with hot water that worked as a shower. The water was warm and clear like a jacuzzi. In the dusk, the air swarmed of bats. Other animals we saw were snakes and mountain sheep. The excursion club had planned the meals for the entire weekend and brought gas stoves and pots and everything. It was pretty advanced, they had even taken two gallons of pancake mix with them for breakfast. We had a campfire and were taught the art of making s'mores. The recipe for s'mores is the following:

two graham crackers

one mashmellow

chocolate

there are two ways to make them, the traditional way is to roast the mashmellow until it's golden, put it on a cracker, add a piece of chocolate on top of the melted mashmellow and then add the second cracker creating a biscuit. The improved way is to put the chocolate inside the mashmellow and then roast it.

I slept in the open close to the rock wall. In the middle of the night there was a loud bang, like a gun shot, and sound of some scattering. I thought the rock wall was bursting and falling down on us. In the morning one of the leaders got up to make breakfast, then there was another bang. It was the pancake mix that exploded. The baking soda had been heated for one day so the containers were full of high pressure gas. There was pancake mix all over the camp.

On Sunday we left all the back packs and some of the canoes at the camping ground and paddled upstream to Hoover Dam. We were three people in each canoe without any load. The current was very strong. Our team consisted of two girls and one guy, we were not very physically powerful and rather unexperienced paddlers, but we were cheerful, kept close to the shore, planned ahead before attempting to round a corner with strong current and kept the same rate when paddling. We even had a motivating song "Na na na na, oh yeah!". This was a winning strategy and our power team was one of the first boats to reach Hoover Dam. Only half of the teams managed to do that.

On the way back we stopped on a small beach and totally randomly found a long deep cave with a hot spring inside, it was like a sauna. We needed a flashlight to explore the 20 m deep pitch black cave.  Even more downstream we went hiking. We walked along a little stream of hot water that sipped from the mountain walls. The rocks were covered with brown-green algae that was soft as jelly and hot from the water that fell like soft rain. The path had ropes so that we could climb steep passages, some of them were vertical walls and we had to walk on the rock with the legs pointing horizontally out from the wall, pulling us upward with the rope. 

During the second night we sat at the campfire. Most of the group had gone to sleep, but a few of us stayed for a while. One Norwegian guy wore "capris", shorts that end on the calves, which is very non-American. An American dude with the old-fashioned German name Hans, mercilessly teased the Norwegian for it. Whatever the Capri said he got a retort from the American about the trousers. They were not manly enough, obviously foreign and simply ridiculous. Finally a German guy intervened: "Some people wear capris, some are named Hans, it's OK". Not much later, words were abandoned and the fireplace turned into a no man's land in a marshmellow war. In the morning the entire hillside was covered with small white pillows, as if the marhmellow trees had shed their seeds.

We had dreamed about the last day, when the current would carry us all the way back to the cars without a single paddle stroke. Something went wrong.The dam was closed and the wind blew in the wrong direction, turning the waves upstream. We had to fight against the current both up- and down the stream!

It was Memorial Day, but we avoided the traffic jam on the 15 between Las Vegas and LA and took a detour through the Nevada desert. The air conditioning in the car was on -40, it was cool as long as we were in the desert but I woke up in the car freezing. Now I got a cold.

My camera battery died on me, so I will add pictures when I manage to get some from other people.