A hundred miles upstream of Lava Falls, lines of snow striped red citadels of rock. A wave crested into the sky in front of us. Bethany thrust oars forward and shouted, “Get down!” A crush of icy water crashed over my head as I threw myself to the high side of the raft.
It was February in the heart of the Grand Canyon. We were eight days in, staring down 16 more, as the cliff walls grew higher around the ribbon of water ahead. After an intimidating scout, no one had made their intended lines through Hance — a class 8 rapid formed by a 30-foot drop and long debris field. But everyone had great runs nonetheless, blasting through waves under a slate sky.
"That’s boating," my brother Will liked to say — not floating comfortably down a warm, languid river but fighting through big water a few degrees above freezing, no matter the snow or sleet, far away from anything but a canyon and a wave train.
To raft the whole Grand Canyon is a long and isolated venture — 280 miles from Lee’s Ferry, just below Lake Powell, to Pearce Ferry, just above Lake Mead, cut off from the world on the Colorado River. (For Texans: That’s the real Colorado River, whose 25 major tributaries water 40 million people in seven states, not the smaller river of the same name that runs through Austin.)
We were a crew of 13 — 12 at a time, with two who hiked in and out to swap places on day nine — of family and old friends. My brother Brady and his wife, Aparna, organized the trip with the expertise of our brother Will and his girlfriend, Bethany — professional river rats who’d run the Grand twice before with others.
As ski town kids, raised in Steamboat Springs, we grew up outdoors. Middle school meant “winter survival” trips camping in snow caves in the woods, being tested on building fires and using avalanche beacons. High school meant skiing most afternoons, backpacking and remote foreign travel.
Our dad and stepfather had both done stints as raft guides, and Mom bought a raft in the ‘90s for family trips in Colorado and Utah. Brady and Will took up kayaking in high school and Will stuck with it, becoming a career guide in northern Idaho and the kind of kayaker who drops 40-foot waterfalls. Brady got a wilderness EMT certification and a master's degree and took teaching jobs.
I chased a journalism career and wound up in Texas, where people seem to think I’m pretty outdoorsy.
We’d always talked about running the Grand, but permits are hard to get. Most who raft the canyon go with commercial operators who use motorized boats to zip guests down in a fraction of the time and helicopter them out midway through. Permits for nonguided trips are awarded via a high-odds lottery implemented after the waiting list stretched decades long.
In October, on a road trip while job-hunting, Brady’s phone buzzed. He’d won the lottery for a February cancellation.
For the three of us, the timing couldn’t have been better. I’d spent so long in the heat of flat Texas I barely remembered who I was. Brady’s master’s had meant three years trapped in the concrete of Chicago. We needed a month together in Will’s world. (Our youngest brother, Andrew, who was flipped out of too many rafts as a child, opted to stay on dry land.)
We needed to see if we could make it through big water, back in our world.
Badger Creek
Like any worthy odyssey, the early days were a trial.
Which is to say, they were awful.
For two days, we faced hellacious upstream wind and howls of anguish as boatmen strained against oars. Upstream wind is common in the Grand and many other western canyons, but this was as intense as any of us had seen. Trying to follow the current between powerful upstream eddies was like walking a tightrope in an 18-foot boat.
Some of our group were old river hands. Others were complete newbies. Four were Idaho raft guides, but three of them were kayaking. That meant that, aside from Bethany, our primary rowers were in for a challenge. Brady, Jennings and Mickey were all experienced on rivers, but they’d never rowed rapids anything like on the Grand. Nerves were high, and none more than Brady’s.
Brady started the trip sick, then spent hours rowing against the wind. Slowly, we inched our way toward Badger Creek Rapid, the trip's first piece of whitewater. The rapid’s relatively nonthreatening — rated a 5 on the Grand’s 1 to 10 scale — with just one thing to avoid: a nasty pour-over on river right.
Deubendorff
Of course, early adversity turned to wonder.
On the third day, Will jumped in with me and Brady for a sibling boat through the Roaring 20s, a string of seven midrange rapids. The sun came out and the W relaxed its fury.
The following days, more and more hoots of joy hit the air. Oars dipped in and out of water with increasing deftness. So much of a river’s magic is in its small moments. The blue heron dipping over a whisper of current. The rhythmic rowing to stay warm under snow-capped bluffs. The sheer cliffs, pockmarked by caves, meeting dappled mud banks. The lone beaver out for an early-morning paddle.
Uncovering magic
As we rowed, a rare world unfolded. We’d all spent extended time in the deserts of the West, but you can’t know the Grand Canyon until you row it. Probably not even then.
It was the breathtaking canyon curve from above Nankoweap camp and the sobering timelessness of the Anasazi granaries alongside it.
It was a long day hike up Tapeats Creek to see Thunder River shooting from nowhere out of a canyon wall. I struggled as blasts of snow rolled in and my asthma flared, but my brothers stuck with me. We walked for hours talking about careers and cousins and where we want to go next.
Lava Falls
For most of the trip, the biggest rapid loomed over us. Lava Falls.
The only rapid rated a 9-10, the run is a complicated 37-foot drop of savage whitewater. Looking at it from above was, to use a quaint understatement, daunting. Brady later compared it to God’s whirlwind in the Book of Job — a demonstration of fury and power designed to terrify to the core. Aparna likened it to Kant’s discussion of the sublime, the awe and terror you sense in nature when you realize its indifference to whether any person lives or dies.
As we scouted Lava from a rocky trail above its cresting waves, however, there was no debate over literary references. There was just Aparna stress-eating trail mix and Bethany hooking her thumbs over her life vest as her mouth twisted tighter and slack-jawed Jennings moaning “Oh, God” over and over again.
“I’m going home,” Brady said. “It’s boiling and churning and —”
“Don’t worry,” Will said. “It’s what we said. There’s lots of big rapids, and then there’s one that’s bigger and tougher than the rest.”
The boatmen hashed out a plan between outstretched fingers that traced the lines of the holes. Will agreed to forgo his kayak and ride with Brady to give advice, while Sam did the same for Jennings, but they remained confident Brady and Jennings could row it.
This, after all, was what we’d come to do.
We pulled out from the bank and moved across the river to the tongue of the rapid in slow motion. Brady, then Mickey, then Jennings, then Bethany. Brady’s white boat moved deliberately, and nearly flawlessly, through the rapid. It threaded to the right of the fearsome Ledge Hole, to the left of another big hole and the massive V-wave. It rode the churning surf and teed up straight to the Big Kahuna wave slamming off of Cheese Grater Rock.
Then, with the raft knocked slightly askew, its momentum slowed, another huge wave behind Big Kahuna broke right on top of it. I watched the white raft come up sideways, hang for a moment perpendicular to the water, then topple over, its black floor to sky.
I cussed to Bethany. “They flipped!”
“I know,” she replied calmly.
Below us, Jennings’ boat teetered dangerously sideways, thrashing in the waves, and my blood ran cold. I thought: We are going to have multiple flipped rafts. There was no time to say or see anything else. We were dropping into the maw of Lava, and it was time to high-side and hang on.
Carnage
As the last wave crashed over my head, I leaped up and grabbed our rescue throw bag from the bow. Miraculously, Jennings’ boat was still upright. The white raft was heading into a second rapid upside down. Bethany’s voice was tense as she scanned the current.
“I see two people, I don’t see Aparna,” she said. “Look for Aparna!”
A moment later, we exhaled relief. Three figures. Will, the consummate pro, had hooked two fingers into a hole in the raft’s underside to pull himself onto it, then pulled Aparna and Brady up with him. But they were still in a rapid on the smooth underside of an inverted raft, with no way to row and nothing to cling to. No one had caught up to them yet. And we still had one person left to run Lava — Walker in his kayak.
Bethany and I waited in the eddy, letting the others pursue the white boat. We saw the kayak come through the V-wave and then turn upside down. “Come on, Walker!” we chanted as watched him try to roll upright. One, two, three tries. Then Walker’s head was bobbing alongside his green boat through the crashing chaos of Lava.
The next half-hour was a chaotic scramble of rescue. Grabbing for Walker and his kayak. Ashley, in Mickey’s boat, throwing a rope to Will. Mickey rowing with all his might to pull them into an eddy. All three boats trying to row 2,000 pounds of upside-down gear to shore. Circling the eddy as people’s arms wore out. Icy water knocking the wind out of me as I tried to get a rope to land and went in over my head.
Eventually, someone got a rope to shore. Loaded with a month's worth of gear, the raft was too heavy to flip with human strength alone, so we rigged a mechanical advantage pulley system known as a Z-drag. Then we lined up and heaved.
The ropes cracked loudly as they tightened. The raft slowly lifted upwards. Then, with 12 sets of hands pulling, it came over on the first try — dry bags, ammo cans, coolers and Will’s kayak intact.
There’s something about camaraderie.
We got drunk on the rafts in the sunshine after that, next to an unnamed shore where we would camp that night. Telling and retelling versions of the flip. Aparna gushing over Will and recalling her dark moments stuck under the raft. Jennings realizing he’d used up all his luck. Passing around bottles of tequila. Laughing and trying to remember if I’d ever been more happy.
Upstream of Lava
Will, at 4 years old, was the littlest kid in town to go off the 20-meter ski jump with lighted flares at that year’s Winter Carnival, and by 9 was pretty used to hiking home alone after getting a snowmobile stuck in a faraway field.
Brady, who was never without a book in his pocket and took notes in movie theaters, would sleep until 2 p.m. for days on end and then strike out at dawn to summit a mountain or go ice climbing.
I spent most of my childhood exploring the nearby woods on horseback and writing novels for my friends to read.
We’re still those people. We’re just older now, and we’ve chased and distilled our passions. But we still know there’s not much in life more important than a canyon and some whitewater.
Before and after the trip, various urban Texans have asked me the same question: “But why?”