"Every man has to go down the river some time"

-Paul Revere Abbey, 1959

We had a really great canoeing trip down the Green River, west of Moab, Utah shortly before it joins the Colorado River, thanks to Dave and Julie, canoers extraordinaire and trip planners. We were joined by their friends, Brian and Mimi, all the way from Maryland; and John back in Chinle from Cleveland for a stint.

But I'll let Ed Abbey tell you about our trip.

About a week prior, I finally went to one of my new favorite features of our new life in Tsaile - the library! Got meeself a library card and came across a title of Abbey's I had not heard of: Down the River. The first chapter tells of a trip he took down the Green in 1980 (in fact, they put in at Mineral Bottom, the very boat ramp we took out at). He pretty much sums it up:

The river flows. The river will not wait. Let's get these boats on the current. Loaded with food, bedrolls, cooking gear... We scramble on board, the swampers untie the lines, the oarsmen heave at their oars.

The water here is smooth as oil, the current slow. The sandstone walls rise fifteen hundred feet above us, radiant with sunlight, manganese and oxides, stained with old tapestries of organic residues left on the rock faces by occasional waterfalls.

Two ravens fly along the rim, talking about us.

We did not go far yesterday. We rowed and drifted two miles down the river and then made camp for the night on a silt bank at the water's edge.

we cooked our supper by firelight and flashlight, ate beneath the stars.

One horse, unhobbled and untended, thirty miles from the nearest ranch or human habitation, it forages on its own. ... That horse has chosen, or stumbled into, solitude and independence. Let it be.

A gallon or two of coffee, tea and - for me - the usual breakfast beer.

On down this here Greenish river.

Wherever the river makes a bend - and this river comes near, in places, to bowknots - there is another flat area, a bottom, covered with silt, sand, gravel, grown up with grass and brush and cactus and, near shore, trees: willow, cottonwood, box elder, and jungles of tamarisk. The tamarisk does not belong here, has become a pest..."

Oars at rest, we drift for awhile.

The sun comes up, a glaring cymbal, over yonder canyon rim. Quickly the temperature rises five, ten twenty degrees, at the rate of a degree a minute...or so it feels. We peel off parkas, sweaters, shirts, thermal underwear. Ravens croak, a rock falls, the river flows.

My friends lie sprawled on their boats beyond, floating and sunning and dreaming. The fiery sun beams down. A great blue heron sails ahead.

Fresh slides appear on the mud banks; a beaver plops into the water ahead of us, disappears. The beavers are making a comeback on the Green.

The canyons go on and on, twisting for miles into the plateau beyond.

Yes, indeed we are a lucky group. Priveleged, no doubt. At ease out here on the edge of nowhere, loafing into the day...

Check out the whole album here.