It is hard to speak coherently about something as huge and useless as the Canyon. A week there can cause a most extraordinary sensory overload -- everything is beautiful, beauty becomes the norm, thinking becomes irrelevant. Ideas are gone, and in their place are rocks, water, and wind.
The landscape speaks of vast time and space: Downstream you see what seems to be a fresh rockfall descending to the river. It seems tiny and incidental, close in the desert air. But that is a false impression. It's far away and huge, made up of boulders the size of cars and houses. When you finally drift by those boulders you see their weathered and worn surface, and you realized it was many centuries ago that the cliff gave way.
In quiet sections you vanish in the silence. You can hear an insect buzz across the river, the sound of a sparrow's wings in flight, and tiny bird sounds in the far distance. You ship the oars and drift because rowing is too loud, and no one moves because it would break the spell. As the silence deepens you become aware of sound of the river -- the subliminal hiss that is the sum of the sounds of all the microscopic ripples and wavelets from the water flowing by the shore.
...There were two moderate rapids the first day -- Badger and Soap Creek. Mostly we drifted with the current. That night we camped at Hot-Na-Na, just above House Rock Rapid.
[Songbird]
[Webmaster]