My least favorite thing about white water river rafting is definitely the rapids.

I LOVE the small stuff like pulling away from eddies and keeping the boat in the current or bouncing over a nice wave train and just slipping by a minor rock. These are the things that test our strength, skill and timing with minor consequences and clear successes; I don’t even mind getting splashed by some horizontal waves or getting rocked by some hydraulics.

But the big rapids, the really scary monster holes and rocks that can shred your tube, trap you under a ledge and flip your boat all in under a second, those things I could do without.

The moments leading up to a dangerous rapid are the worst; you can feel the group’s tension and everyone is quiet – oarsmen worried about the safety of their passengers and passengers worried about the confidence and focus of their captain. We pull over a few hundred feet above the rapids to scout, many times leaving a few people to wait with the boats and other times tying our gear to rocks or trees so we can all take a look at the rapid below.

Hopefully the scout goes quickly; we’ll hike to a good spot and see a clear path to take between the rocks and largest holes in the river. Other times the scouts take longer, conflicting opinions arguing over the best routes and which vantage points hold enough information to make an informed decision. Sometimes we’ll decide to float across the river to check out the rapid from the other side, usually rowing back across again to get one more look before we go. On long scouts like those the group usually comes to some sort of resigned consensus, telling each other that we have to get down somehow and that choosing the least of multiple evils is all we can do.

Then we throw on our wetsuits and check that our lifejackets are tight, reminding each other to buckle helmets and strap down dry boxes. Sometimes we’ll add air to the boat tubes and reread the guide book’s route suggestions, but we’re all just killing time until someone offers to go first. No one ever wants to.

We take deep breaths and push off from shore, repeating to ourselves that the worst won’t happen, that we’d gladly take a boat flip as long as no one gets hurt. Prayers to Mother Nature and the river gods flow from our minds, promising respect and reverence in exchange for safety and passage. We remind ourselves that focus and will are more powerful than our fear, convincing ourselves to trust that we’ll know what to do if things get bad. The only way to go is down, if other people can do it, then so can we.

Once you’re in the rapid all the fear fades into immediacy, all your thoughts working towards pointing out rocks to your oarsman or holding on through a big swell. I don’t flinch as I lean head first into cold waves that try to knock me backwards or think twice about letting go of my straps to climb to the high side of the raft to avoid a flip. There is no fear in those moments, only the things I can do to help, to stay upright.

This trip in particular I was more worried than I’d ever been; in the Grand Canyon there aren’t many opportunities for help if you mess up. The water is much, much colder than any other river I’ve done; released from the middle of Lake Powell, the river temperature is a solid 50 degrees, sending a person into hypothermic shock after ten minutes even wearing a wetsuit. There are only three points of access for cars along the entire 226 mile river: the put in, Phantom Ranch 100 miles later, and the take out another 100 miles after that. There is no ambulance that can pick you up and fix you on the spot, no hospital you can get to in a reasonable amount of time, there weren’t even motorized boats passing by us that could have helped if we’d really found ourselves in trouble.

The only options we had were to either not get hurt or call the Park Rangers on our battery operated satellite phone. Each call lasts maybe 20 seconds, if it gets through, and we were instructed to start each call with river mile number and injury, just in case the call never gets through again.  If they deem your situation worthy they’ll send in a helicopter and even then you have to hope that they can land nearby and that only one person is hurt; they’ll only carry one patient at a time.

It was jarring to hear that even if a group member got injured (or worse) the rest of the group was required to finish the trip, no matter how traumatized or worried we were. Can you imagine watching a loved one be flown off to an unknown hospital and then having to spend another week or more out of cell phone range?

Luckily, everything went beautifully for us on this trip. No major dramatic days, no injuries and barely any damage to the boats. We definitely got lucky with a low water level since Californians need less power in October than in the summers, our trip running between 6 and 10 thousand Cubic Feet per Second (CFS) instead of up to 25,000 CFS in the summer. I’d rather have a technical river (low water and rocks to avoid) than a big one (insanely huge waves and flipped boats left and right).

A friend of ours went down The Grand in September, right on the tail end of that rainy week that we spent in Cataract Canyon. Due to the floods, she said, the water levels for her trip were around 37,000 CFS, almost 5 times as big as ours. Rapids that we considered floating in our life jackets flipped boats daily on her trip, their group routinely spending hours to put everything back together.

Before we got back and heard how our trips compared I was worried that ours had been so amazing that nothing would ever top it; I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to enjoy it if I was given the chance to take the trip again. Wouldn’t I just wish the conditions were as perfect as they’d been my first time around? But hearing about her trip of chocolate milk colored water (ours was sea green) and how they’d floated down routes that were impassable for us I realized that every trip is different, that even though it seems like nothing will ever top our adventure again, every trip has that one thing that will make it more special than all the rest.

While we had a few problems here and there, the Grand Canyon rapids were good to us and our oarsmen were stellar, each oarsmen finding his own mix of strength, agility, and preparation to get us down the drops. My dad even rowed a rapid so well that now the Green Highway of Hance is nicknamed Dave’s Wee Riffle because he pulled so far left that he missed all the holes at the bottom entirely.

A few days later we came up to a rapid called Bedrock, taking our guide books to heart as they told us it wasn’t an option to go left of the giant boulder in the middle of the drop. If you did they said, you were a lost cause.

The first boat stayed so far right he bounced off rocks and spun his way down, risking minor damage to avoid the catastrophe on the left. We went second, barely making it right as the fast moving water slammed us into the boulder in the middle. I grabbed the oar as my dad pulled it in to avoid snapping it against the rocks and a few seconds later we were out, floating past the danger and looking back upriver to see the rest of our group through.

The third boat followed suit, hitting the rock and bouncing right like us, but the fourth boat was heavier than the rest and he was too far left to start, not even bothering to attempt a right run once he got half way through the rapid. We all watched from below as they disappeared behind the rock, powerless as they entered the lost cause left side. For what felt like hours we waited, hoping to see anything come out from behind the rock but getting nothing. We had little hope they’d stated upright.

But just as I was starting to really panic they popped out next to us, all safe and right side up. Apparently they’d gotten trapped in a nasty eddy, only getting out by pushing off rocks and rowing as hard as they could. At bigger water, they said, that side must be hell.

As we gathered ourselves and listened to their success story we saw one of the groups we’d launched with packing up their boats on a nearby beach. It was close to 4pm, so we slowed down to talk, finding out that two of their four boats had flipped on Bedrock rapid just after lunch. A few days earlier they’d waited for us below a big rapid, ready to help if our little boats couldn’t make it through. We’d surprised them by doing great (and having an awesome ride) so it felt kind of great to float by on our light catarafts as they had to repack their 18 foot inflatables.

When we launched both the other groups had giant rigs and tons of experience, it felt good to prove to them and ourselves that we and our smallish boats deserved to be here. Yes, their boats were twice as heavy as ours and would do better if they hit the big stuff, but ours were light enough that we could avoid the big stuff altogether. At the end of our trip one of their oarsmen even took pictures of our setup saying that when he buys a boat it will be one like ours.

The only day we had people in the water was Day 4, right at the end of a group of rapids called The Roaring Twenties (they were 20 miles from the put in). Unlike other western rivers which are measured on a scale from 1 to 6, rapids on the Grand Canyon are measured on a 1 to 10 scale, 10 being the most difficult. Everything is bigger in the Grand Canyon, so it makes sense their difficulty ratings would follow suit. We stopped to scout every rapid rated 6 and higher, sometimes pulling over to check out a Class 5 like Georgie’s if its reputation had preceded it.

A few of our group members had run the Grand Canyon before, 20 years earlier, so by now the story of our boat’s flip on Georgie’s had become legend:

The story more or less goes that our friend’s boat (the very same boat that my dad and I were using this trip) was overloaded in the front so when it hit the hole straight on the captain didn’t stand a chance, falling backwards into the water with his boat crashing on top of him. After being thoroughly rocked he and most of the gear were fine, but taking an unexpected hit like that so early in the trip definitely earned Georgie’s notoriety ever since.

Needless to say we took extra time scouting it, doing our best to find a balance between overconfidence and pure fear. How bad could a 5 really be?

Since our boat had a history with Georgie’s we opted to go last, watching in horror as the rapid knocked out a passenger on one boat and the captain of another. We tried to delay as best we could, rowing upstream until we’d seen them climb back into their boats, but we had to get down somehow, bracing ourselves for what seemed like an inevitable demise. But my dad was on his game, maneuvering past all the holes at the top and positioning ourselves squarely between the two giant holes at the bottom just like we’d planned. As we hit the waves the front of our boat stood straight up instead of breaking through and even with all my weight leaned in I knew that I’d need to do more to keep us from going over. I let go of my grips to climb even further to the front, throwing my weight into the waves. When it didn’t do anything I felt the boat shift backwards and knew we were going over. We were about to flip.

But a moment later we were coming down the other side, my grip on the water jug tight enough to hold me in the boat as we pitched forward into the flat water. I laughed and let out a relieved whoop, glad the rapid was over and proud that we’d hit the route exactly like we’d planned. It was only when I turned around to congratulate my dad on his expert rowing skills that I realized he was gone.

The thing I hate most about rivers is looking for people in the water.

Seconds seem like minutes as you search the foamy waves for their heads, your brain racing through all the places they could be, all the ways they could be hurt. It’s happened to me more times than I can count; I remember screaming my mother’s name when she went over a few years ago and feeling helpless as I watched my brother’s raft flip on top of him. There is nothing you can do against the power of the river, you can only wait and hope.

This time was no different, though thankfully my dad’s head showed up in a reasonable amount of time just behind the raft. He swam and grabbed the back as I hopped on the oars, looking forward to make sure the current wasn’t taking us into any danger and taking a deep breath to reassure myself he was okay.

I rowed the boat to meet the others in the nearby eddy, attempting to smile as we all looked around to make sure everyone was accounted for. We joked later that at least this time Georgie’s didn’t get a raft and that next time we’d get through clean. Third time is the charm.

But all in all it was fitting that Georgie’s was the only rapid that we lost people on, it brought us together as a group early on and sometimes it’s the ones you underestimate that end up causing the most trouble.

And sometimes it’s the ones you worry about most that end up being no big deal at all.

The last major rapid of the trip is called Lava Falls, a drastic 20 foot drop in a fairly short distance. The surroundings are beautiful, actual lava flowed down to meet the river here a zillion years ago.  John Wesley Powell, the leader of the first known boat trip down the entire length of the Grand Canyon, imagined the event in his journal, writing, “what a conflict of water and fire there must have been here!” He’s right to imagine it, if I could have an alien take me anywhere in space and time it would probably be to see that.

One mile before the rapid we passed Vulcan’s Anvil, a large lava chunk in the middle of the river, warning us of our oncoming doom. We spent a long time scouting this rapid, hiking to an overlook that did more to intimidate than illuminate us. There is no clear route through the holes and waves of this rapid, and even our guide books gave conflicting suggestions. Eventually we filed back to the boats, resigned to our fate. There is your life before Lava Falls and your life after, we’d been warned, it was time to find out the difference.

But guess what?! It was EASY. We just stayed slightly left of the right route, pulling away from the side holes and letting the water push us to the right of the giant hole at the bottom. Looking back up at it’s insanity from the bottom I did feel different, suddenly sure that fear wasn’t real and that I could do anything. I felt lighter, like all the ridiculous things I used to waste my time worrying about just disappeared.

So as much as I hate the apprehension and tension that comes with the lead up to rapids, I also have to admit that I love the feeling of accomplishment that comes after them. There’s nothing better than looking up at a rapid from below, knowing that you’ve survived and that your body and mind are capable of getting you through difficult and impossible things. You feel proud and lucky and relieved and exhilarated. As stressful as it is, it’s always worth it.

And besides, what is a river trip without rapids anyway?! A boring lake?! I’ll take these trips any day.