INTREPID

INTREPID

As the current swept me further away in my canoe, I held my breath, waiting for Gloria’s head to pop up from the latte-colored waters of the Rio Grande. Her capsized canoe, with two days gear bungy-corded to its yoke and thwarts, was too heavy for her paddling partner Jerry to pull over by himself if he could even see her behind the hull. I heard myself start screaming “Gloria is under the canoe.” John, quickly turning his boat toward the disabled craft, jumped out of his canoe and swam quickly over. Jerry frantically kept reaching around under the canoe trying to find a hand, a leg, anything that let him know Gloria’s whereabouts in the murky, chocolate milk water.

Finally Gloria’s hand found Jerry’s and he knew she was still at least alive. With Herculian effort, John hefted himself on the other end of the canoe to tip the opposite end up and out of the water so we could find our friend and paddling comrade. Gloria’s head was above the water, alive and well, having found an air pocket under the upturned canoe. And that ended the worst three minutes of my recent 2-day paddle down the Wild and Scenic Rio Grande, just east of Big Bend National Park.

I had been working on this trip for months. As an organizer of a Tucson group of adventurists, I think up trips I would like to knock off my bucket list and then I post them on the Meetup page of my group. Max, my organizing partner, and I have done several trips before – I do the logistics and he is responsible for what happens during the trip. It’s a good partnership. We’ve taken 20 people canoeing down the Colorado; we’ve backpacked 25-miles into and out of Shoshone Lake in Yellowstone National Park. But this trip – this wild and scenic trip – was the most remote and potentially dangerous of any we’d done before.

I originally felt confident we could pull this off without incident or injury. The usually calm, wide Rio Grande, the headwaters of which are three states away in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, winds its way down through Northern New Mexico, then past its verdant chili fields near Hatch, turning toward the enormous cattle ranches of West Texas.  Usually it is a pretty sleepy paddle – running generally between 200 to 400 cubic feet per second. Some stretches you might even have to help your boat over a dry or shallow part of the river.

Not this time. Recent rains had pushed the cubic feet per seconds (cfs) up well over 1500 the first morning of our paddle. High water is usually safer but certainly faster water. We were headed from our put-in at La Linda to our take-out a little over 11 miles downriver in Miravillas Canyon, part of the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area. I confess, looking at the quickly churning river from the overlook above La Linda, I began to question the advisability of taking 15 paddlers of differing abilities down the fast-running, muddy river. Was this insane? Was my need for remote, perhaps slightly dangerous experiences foolishly pushing me to drag 14 of my closest adventure buddies along with me on this trip? Would all fifteen of us come back safely?

Honestly, I am too much of a scaredy-cat to try this alone. The Rio Grande is not only CLOSE to the border; it IS the border between Texas and the largely wild and open northern part of the state of Coahula, Mexico. The canyon walls on the American side of Temple Canyon, just east of Big Bend National Park, are pretty dang intimating – enough to encourage me to rent a satellite phone just in case we suffered injury or worse on this stretch of wild river.

In addition to the extremely wild and remote nature of this stretch, several paddlers originally interested in this trip canceled because this particular river, the Rio Grande, has a long history of being the swim for a better life between Mexico and the United States. But the Mexican side of the Rio Grande in the Temple Canon area rises high above the river, defying the most desperate undocumented immigrant and even the most avaricious and determined drug dealer. We were safe from above, I was sure. But were we safe from below?

The rains had made the ‘road’ into the La Linda put-in soft and clayey. My truck, Yiha, as faithful and as good of a truck she is, might get stuck and tow trucks are pretty darn far away. The outfitter providing the canoes would only take the trailer with our 7 shiny red canoes part-way down the alternately powdery or slick, rutted clay path. We had to carry the heavy canoes and all our gear about a tenth of a mile to the actual muddy bank that would serve as our put-in point.

Finally, we were all in the water and headed down river to the beautifully rugged canyon called Temple. Thank goodness the river was wide and smooth for a few miles. Even though most of us had been paddling before, our usual gig is backpacking. Many of us had never paddled with our particular paddling partner for this trip and we all took time to learn paddling together and relearn how to make the boat turn or even stay bow first in the water.

Most importantly, we had to be confident we could keep our craft from crashing into the tall, sturdy and grasping reeds lining the river. And that’s what happened to Gloria and Jerry. When they hit the reeds, Gloria reached up to protect her face, moving slightly up and off her seat and the canoe, precariously perched on the reeds, tipped over, depositing Gloria and Jerry into the river.

Gloria and Jerry’s unplanned swim in the muddy water had the effect of calming us all down. We started to get serious about our paddling – just in time for a series of riffles which call for some hard and coordinated paddling in order to avoid being pulled into the reeds. And then, the magic happened. We began to relax and enjoy the extreme beauty of this rugged patch of Mother Earth.

 

 

 

Max had spent some time studying the satellite images of this stretch of the Rio Grande and, confirmed by our informative shuttle driver Tim from Far Flung Outdoor Center in Terlingua, Texas, already had an idea of where he wanted us to stop for the night – atop a wide grassy shelf above the water on the MEXICAN side of the river. Yeah. Mexico. But with no Border Patrol to question our motives. No Park Police to even check our permits. Just us and the Rio Grande and the rock and the sky – and the pissed off wild burros and black-tailed rattler who usually consider this stretch of grassy bank exclusively theirs. We were in heaven.

We all pitched our various tents and prepared for a warm night on the river bank. Shortly after most of us retired, flashes of light crept over the cliff. Somewhere, people were being hammered by lightening. Would we be? Close to midnight, when most of us had gone to bed and just a few were up swapping stories, the wind picked up, pushing the walls of our small dainty backpack tents in and out like bellows, startling even the bugs that had crept into our tents for shelter. Whatever would be would be. We had faced all kinds of weather before; we certainly could live through this. We slept.

In the morning’s overcast light, we checked the condition of the river-several inches higher and it seemed much faster. With only 4 to 5 miles to go and without further incidents, we could get to the take-out lickety split.  Or we could have another boat overturn on the briskly running water and be late to our outfitter’s shuttle.

A third very real option was that we would miss the take-out altogether. Unlike our other paddling trips, if we missed our take-out, a very narrow and steep stretch of mud in a heavily reeded stretch of river, we would be faced with a very long and ill-prepared 98-mile trip down the rest of the Lower Canyons. Ninety eight miles of rugged canyon with no roads or helio pads. No help. No cell service. Miss the take-out and we were pretty much toast.

Back to Max. I am his organizing partner because I fully trust his knowledge and planning on a river or a trail. Every time we passed a likely take-out point, however, I admit to thinking “it THIS it? Did Max miss this?” Then my rational self would kick in and I would remind myself that Max is my partner for a really good reason. He takes his responsibilities to get everyone back safely very seriously. When I saw his red canoe pull over to a tiny, barely perceptible split in the reeds, my trust in his abilities was once again verified. We were at the end of our journey. And as soon as the first canoe was pulled up and out of the water, our canoe shuttle and my trusty YiHa with her ‘driver on loan’ arrived and backed up to get us. Our two glorious days on the Wild and Scenic Rio Grande were over. All that was left was the celebrating.

One thing about this group – they are intrepid. They are the ones you want on speed dial during the Apocalypse.  They have your back and expect you to have theirs. They have fun in the heat, the pouring rain or a blowing windstorm. They have gone with me to other remote and supposedly dangerous parts of this magnificent planet. And as long as I offer the right remote places, they will happily join me again where few others dare to tread – or paddle – or ski – or…...  In language my son would be embarrassed for me to use, they are my ‘peeps’, my outdoor family. Without these particular peeps, I would be in a constant state of wilderness deprivation. I’ve already planned next year’s paddle and they have already hit the ‘yes’ button. They are intrepid.