I spent a week in July, 2000 rafting down the Green River for the Orme Summer Camp.

Another counselor and I drove the eight and a half hours up to Green River from summer camp. She'd never seen Monument Valley, the Navajo res, or the strange scenery from Blanding north. The weather was warm and dry. The landscape, even beyond the res, looked like an old man wrapped in a sand dune.

We spent the night in the Green River state park for a modest $14, packed our things into waterproof bags and day-time unsunderies into ammo cans. The kids tagged each other while we played rummy and drank 3.2.

In the morning we headed out to the airport. A class zero airspace, takeoff procedure involves getting on the radio and saying, "Is anyone up there?" The kids fell asleep on the thirty minute flight to the put-in point.

We unloaded, walked down a bluff to the river, and were motoring four rafts lashed together in short order. The water was low. So low that the mesquito ponds hadn't been flooded-- deer flies and gnats flew on the shoreline, but from the river it was all sun and still water.

Lunch was thick with sandwiches and chips. The kids took the opportunity to float in the river and scream. Their conversations ranged from one cliff to the other and back to Britany Spears, Not Another Teen Movie, and whatever TV shows they found to be relevent. The water waxed poetic better than a tired guy typing a blog at midnight ever could.

Dinner, 3.2s, then bed. The next morning the water quickened and the Fun Yak was inflated. The Fun Yak, later deemed by my co-counselor to be the Not-So Fun Yak, held two kids who couldn't paddle worth ducks and did so with such a feaverish pitch that it looked like moire patterned creatures who have evolved beyond our visual capacity. They were all sick of it by the end of the day, which came early. Everyone unloaded and napped in the shade. One of the guides brought a kite and some of the kids skipped stones.


The next morning was overcast, but warm. I took the Fun Yak and one kid, who will be henceforth termed "ballast" and rowed for the next 26 miles.

It was the fourth of July. We met up with another kayaking group from back east. They shared our sparklers and we shared their 3.2.

Exhausted and relaxed, I rolled into my sleeping bag-- which, by this point, felt much like a rock tumbler. The sand on the beaches was more akin to dust than sand, more like tomato than June, more like crooked than water. My skin was nicely ground each night of the trip and still has a plesant red hue-- like I've just stepped out of the shower. Full body Lava soap. Excruciating.

More Fun Yakking the next day. Through rapids that were less challenging than fun. I charged full paddle into the biggest swells I could see (secretly hoping to knock the ballast out of the Yak) only to be pushed gently aside. The afternoon brough gales upstream which made rowing... unplesant. The ballast had fallen asleep and it took a few miles to catch up to the first raft (where he was deposited in favor of a conscious weight).

Storm clouds swirled overhead as the canyon got wider towards the end of the day. Low flat hills replaced nearby buttes and the vegitation thinned. The cottonwood trees and tamarisk bushes retreated from the shore and wind blown dunes replaced them. Hotter, wilder, but with that sand all the same. Sand got in my eyes as I sweated the last five miles in the Fun Yak (or Not-So Fun, depending on who you ask).

Dinner, 3.2, and bed.

We'd motored the rafts through several still miles of water in the past few days, but I'd never rowed it. The last day was nothing but still water-- when I stopped paddling the Fun Yak stopped moving. My ballast sunk into a depression, "We're never going to get there." "Where's the civilization?" "I want a real bathroom!"

We did, in fact, get there. We unrigged the boats, put them in steak trucks, drove back to the warehouse where we rigged the van with the kids' stuff, ate lunch, and drove the eight hours back to camp. Just in time for my day off.



Beautiful.