More than that, the Colorado is considered a "navigable body of
water", I believe -- wasn't there some strange deal a couple of years
ago about the *Coast Guard* taking over management of river trips from
the NPS?
> My personal experience is that we did use one (Or,
> rather, the commercial trip we lent ours to did.) and we did not hear one
> word about it being an illegal activity. I am sure that if that was the
> case, we would have been so informed. But if the question is still in your
> mind, I think that a call to the rangers at Lee's Ferry would answer it.
> I can't imagine a saftey device such as an EPIRB would be sited as illegal
> when it saves lives.
Even if it was illegal I might be inclined to take one, to tell you
the truth. It just seems better suited to the job than an aircraft
radio, somehow...
> I would also like to add that I am against cell phones
> in the Grand, and I agree that it should remain as pristine wilderness as
> possible.
It is good to remember, however, that the river corridor is actually
an artificial ecology -- the steady flow of silt-free, cold water from
the dam has completely altered the environment from what it was before
the dam. Trout, for example, are now fairly common, and were not
there at all before, while several species of native fish are extinct
or endangered. The relatively stable river level has created a much
different riverside plant community, and in fact many of the rapids
would probably not remain, because the very large periodic floods
tended to remove the rock piles...the current Canyon has been altered
substantially by humans.
But no matter what we do to mess things up, in the Canyon it turns
into something beautiful.
> Having spent 7 years sailing on the oceon, I embrace the
> philosophy of self-sufficiancy and minimal camping (existance) I think it
> makes us all stronger and better people to do without the frills and do-dads
> of modern life for awhile.
> I also watched some of the people in my last Grand group rush to the phones
> at Phantom, and they all asked me why I wasn't calling to find out how my
> business and home were...... I replied that it didn't matter at that point,
> there was NO way I was going to leave untill Pierce Ferry, and any info that
> I could have gotten at that point was irrelevent. My mind was on that nasty
> little eddy just past Phantom that I invariably get caught in. Let me know
> what the rangers say.....
I hear what you are saying about the frills and dodads of modern
life. I kind of come at it from a different point of view, though.
Hmm. I don't know if I can really explain this...
I'm sitting in front of my computer right now typing this, and
thinking about river sand. It gets into everything, and, as someone
once told me, you can get it out of your clothes, but you can't get
it out of your heart. So, when you come back from a river trip you
bring something back with you, like a glow of true life. But after a
few weeks back on the job you are back in the rat race full time, and
the river is just a memory. It was the same before I discovered
rafting, and I would do backpacking trips in the Canyon -- after a
trip the precious glow would last a while, but too soon it was just a
memory.
And part of the reason the glow fades was because life on the river
or on a long hike is so different -- you divide your life up into
compartments, and there is that wonderful compartment when you are
living the simple life in the wild, and that other compartment, where
you work, and get a paycheck, and talk to people on the phone, and
all that.
Somewhere along the way I decided I didn't want to have those
different compartments -- well, there wasn't really a *decision*
anywhere about this, and I don't really know where this different
thing I now think came from. But now I deliberately try to avoid that
compartmentalization. So, yes, I might take a cell phone into the
Canyon. I have taken a little computer, and, like I mentioned, I took
a GPS receiver. The idea is that I want help something from the
Canyon to flow back into my "regular" life, and to do that my
"regular" life has to flow into the Canyon.
-- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html ==================================================================== To subscribe, send email to majordomo@songbird.com, with "subscribe gcboaters" as the only line in the message body. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe gcboaters". For further information send "info gcboaters", or see http://www.songbird.com/gcboaters ====================================================================