Monday September 11th 2017

The events of my day began in Page AZ at 9:30 this morning. I checked in for my raft ride down the Colorado River at Colorado River Discovery. It is advertsed as a “15.5 mile smooth water rafting trip”. By 10am everyone was loaded into two buses for the five mile trip to the river.

The bus ride to the river is part of the adventure. To get to water level, 700 feet below the top of the canyon, the bus enters a two mile long tunnel down an eight percent grade through solid rock. The tunnel was built during the construction of the dam. It has portals that allow light in through the canyon wall. At the bottom under the bridge in front of the dam we unload from the bus and walk down to the rafts to meet our guides. Each raft takes fifteen to twenty people. Our raft had seventeen.

Glen Canyon Dam from river level.

One of the outflow tunnels

There are two stops on the journey. The first is at an area with ancient petroglyphs and the second is a sandy area they call a beach. Some people seem to think that taking a dunk in the forty seven degree Fahrenheit water is a fun thing to do. The actual purpose of the beach stop is to eat the box lunch provided. In reality most of us had already eaten on the way down the river.

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Other than the planned stops, the nature of the raft ride is very much dependent on the guide. The guide on my boat was an old hand on the river that was full of knowledge. He also tended to wax poetic on the glory of the river, the geology and John Wesley Powell. At one point he pulled the raft up to the shore, got out a guitar and started to serenade us. It turns out he is also a musician when not piloting a raft. Some of his characteristics went against my give me the facts attitude, but the scenery was worth it.

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The raft part of the trip ended at Lee’s Ferry after about four hours on the river. We boarded buses for the return trip. It was about an hour back to Page by land. I was back at my campsite before 4PM.

I had a lot of difficulties uploading pictures tonight.  I wanted to include several others but the quality of my Internet connection wouldn’t allow it.  When I get a better connection I will upload all of today’s pictures and provide a pointer to the Google Photos album in a future blog post.