A Few Words from the Trip Leader--What Came Before

A few words from the trip leader.

In 1993, after my second trip through the Grand Canyon, I realized that I too could have the opportunity to lead a group of my friends through the amazing and unique experience of a trip down the Rio Grande del Colorado, (big red river) as the early Spanish explorers called it, through one of the greatest canyons on Earth, and enjoy the transformative journey through space and time that is possible there. I sent in my application to join the list maintained by the Grand Canyon National Park River Office for allocation of river permits for private river runners.

Early in 1994 I got back a notice from the National Park Service (NPS) assigning me a number on the The List, which was in the high 4000's. That was not real encouraging to me, given that at the time they were issuing about 350 permits a year. The friend I had just gone with in 1993 had waited about 7 years for his permit, which seemed a long, but not interminably long time, and I began daydreaming of leading my own trip around the turn of the millennium...what better way to celebrate the New Millennium?

If you do the math, you will realize that it would take quite a lot longer than that to get to the top 350 spaces on The List, but I figured that there would be attrition of some people, and maybe 8 or 9 years was more realistic, and I put it in the back of my mind, and made plans for other rivers and other trips.

Years passed, including 1998, in which Wendy and I were lucky enough to get invited on a third trip with friends who had been more proactive than I, but that was the only one I could do, as NPS regs only allowed people waiting on The List to take one private trip during the period they were on The List, or forfeit their position in that very long (and growing longer every day) list. More years passed, including some in which more opportunities to go on trips came and went, since I now had a decade invested on The List. As each year went by and the end of the line a bit nearer, The List, and my place on It, became an entity for which I had increasingly ambivalent feelings.

Not long after the turn of the New Millennium, the NPS was sued by a citizens group demanding that the allocation system for user days for private river runners be changed, since the proportion of days allocated to commercial trips favored the commercial users 70/30 over the private users, and demand for the commercial spaces was falling at the same time demand for private trips was rising. In about 2004 or 2005, the court's decision forced the NPS to devise a more equitable and timely system for allocation of permits, in other words, The List was going to be eliminated. By this time my number had fallen into only 3 digits, and I was starting to think I might actually get a permit in a year or two more, when suddenly, all the rules changed.

The NPS devised a 3 stage process for converting The List to a lottery system, much like the systems used on virtually every other river where permits are required here in the US. The NPS did not change the proportions of river days allocated to commercial vs. private trips, but they did increase the number of days available for both, and they started aggressively promoting more off season (Winter) trips by private users. All manner of enticements and hijinks were used to try to get as many people off The List as quickly as possible, such as allowing several people to combine their trips into one, and thereby get more points and an earlier launch date, and launch dates for smaller, 8 person trips (the standard maximum group size had been 16). None of the options offered by the transitional process appealed to me much...I could have shared my trip with a friend and his son who were both on the The List, but then I would only have been able to bring a small number of my own friends, and who would really be the trip leader? I declined that offer.

Finally in '07, my wife Wendy and I decided we should act, and we entered what was called by the NPS the weighted lottery. We got one chance in the lottery for each year spent waiting on The List, that was 13! Then we got one for each year since I had last been on a trip, up to a maximum of 5...that was 9 years, so we got 5 more chances! With our 18 chances, we selected 50 (fifty!) dates from a list of available future launch dates, in our order of preference. We wanted a Fall trip, since the weather generally is best then, so we chose dates in Sept. in '08, '09, and 2010 and '11. So did a lot of other people apparently, because even with the 18 chances, we got our last choice, Sept. 25 2010, when we heard back from the NPS a month later when the lottery was held. Three years off still! We chose to look at that as a positive, plenty of time to plan and organize.

Fast forward to '09...those 2 years sped by like lightning, and we had by then already made a few invitations to people we hoped might like to join us and so already had a short list of candidates. I wanted to have a strong group of experienced paddlers and oarsmen to get us safely down the many difficult rapids on the river, but I did not necessarily want a crew who had previous Grand Canyon trips behind them, for whom this would be just another of many such trips, ho-hum. What I really wanted was a group that would have the right attitude, that being enthusiasm, and a willingness to be part of a close knit team, and who would put aside personal ambitions for the welfare of the group. I knew how much work a canyon trip is, and the immensity of the challenges we would be facing as a group as well as individuals, although many of the the particular challenges we would face are unpredictable. Whiners and prima donnas need not apply!

My wife Wendy's brother Brad and his daughter Erin, and more recently Erin's husband Dan had been on several very memorable trips with us, the last being a sea kayak trip in Prince William Sound in '08 and we knew we enjoyed expeditionary trips with them. We contacted Erin and Dan and got back a rapid and enthusiastic affirmative. Brad was less certain but hoped that he would be able to figure out a way. My old Alaska pal Tim Kennedy, who now lives in Astoria, Oregon, was another instant and unqualified yes!

We had some disappointments. One close friend that we always imagined would be with us on our Grand Canyon trip was terminally ill with cancer. Another friend who had been on several past river adventures with us has Parkinson's and is no longer able to row or paddle and had to decline. Another friend who had been on our long term invitation list accepted but then later decided that with the downturn in the economy, he and his wife just could not afford to take the time off from their business.

One major challenge for us was going to be finding enough competent oarsmen or women to row our rafts, and we needed at least four, with some back-ups for contingencies. Since we are mostly kayak and canoe paddlers, and so are most of our friends, we don't know many rafters. I asked a few of the people I know who are rafters but none were able to commit for various reasons. So I asked a few people I know who have what I considered good related skills if they'd be interested in rowing, and had better luck. We ended up with 3 Alaskans: Sam Lamont, who I've kayaked with for years, Larry Freeman who is a sailor, and canoe and inflatable kayak paddler with a lot of river savvy, and Dan Solie, a very experienced canoe tripper and long distance racer, and all-round adventure junkie, reasoning that reading water is at least half of rowing a raft, and most of the rest is strength and coordination. I convinced Larry and Sam that buying a raft for training purposes was a good idea, and they spent the summer of 2010 rowing as much whitewater here in Alaska as we could all squeeze into one summer and all our busy schedules. Dan Solie joined a couple of those outings as well. Meanwhile in Oregon, Tim K. had one friend who initially was on board but had to pull out, but Tim then managed to find Max Bigby, a retired PE teacher with 2 GC trips in his past who was gung-ho for another, so we had our raft captains.

I had myself down as one alternate for rowing, and Larry's son Michael, who also happens to be a kayak buddy of mine, as well as experienced sailor and boatbuilder, seemed like he could also be a stand-in at the oars. Another kayak buddy from Alaska, Jim Herriges signed on, and so we had a good core group and more than half our roster. We gave all our oarsmen the option to bring a friend or spouse. Sam's wife Martie was coming, Dan's wife Diana planned to come but had to drop out because of work commitments. Max recruited David Cook, who works as an arborist for Max's son, and all of a sudden our roster was almost, but not quite, filled. We then started to think carefully about who else we wanted along to fill the few remaining spots. As time passed we had to lean on a few people for commitments, and Wendy's brother Brad was able to commit for a partial trip by hiking in from the S. Rim to join the trip in progress at river mile 88 where trails from the rim meet the river. Our friend Scott McEwen, from Anchorage, could only manage the first part of the trip, so he would hike out where Brad came in. Our friend Alison Carter had had to cut short a trip in '09 due to the illness of a friend, so we asked her and she was onboard in a heartbeat. A few weeks out from the launch we were left with one open slot, and no inspiration of who among our friends would be able to do such a long trip on short notice. Tim suggested his friend Marshall Anderson, but an important piano concert prevented him doing the whole trip (he is a piano tuner) so Tim asked his brother John from Seattle who agreed quickly to do the latter part of the trip while Marshall did the first section, so we had 2 exchanges to make, in and out, on the 8th day of our 21 day trip, and our roster had grown to 18 people. I trusted in Tim's judgement when it came to the people he had invited being good solid team members, and we were not disappointed.

In the whole group we had only 5 of us with Grand Canyon river experience, but the rest of the group brought an impressive array of knowledge, experience, and skills, including lots of wilderness travel, emergency medical skills, swiftwater rescue, pharmacology, geology, astronomy, fishing, physics, mountaineering, orienteering and navigation, jokes, card playing, music, cooking, wildlife biology, botany, history, yoga, photography and videography, and maybe most important of all, organization. At this point I must mention that my wife Wendy's skill at organizing and orchestrating a venture of such size and scope was essential to making it all happen, she was as much a trip leader as I was, and I am soooooo grateful to her for her help. That and her portable solar power plant, with which she managed to keep all our batteries for a dizzying array of electronic devices up and running through 3 weeks of hard use. All of which contributed in small and large ways to making the trip the memorable and fun experience it was.

Now that we are back from the trip, when I get the question from friends, "so, how was your trip?", I feel pretty frustrated at my inability to relate the enormity of the experiences we had there. It was like being on another planet, and anyone who hasn't been there will have a hard time grasping much beyond the dimmest outlines of the wholeness, immensity, and intensity of our experience.

It truly was a transformative experience, and I am really grateful to all in the group for their contributions to making the trip the great thing it was. I am also grateful for the photo, video, and written documentation of the trip, which will all go a long way to make our experience more easily shared with friends and family, as well as keeping it in our memories. And a special thanks goes to Dan and Erin for their creation of this blog and their stellar documentation of the trip.