I just finished my first Grand Canyon rafting trip. A group of us put in for permits and one of us won a launch date. None of us had rowed through the Canyon before, so we invited someone who we had paddled with on other rivers who had been on two Grand Canyon trips in the previous two years, and who we felt had excellent judgment and leadership skills. He helped us to plan the trip, plan how to run the big rapids, and led the way through all of the harder rapids. We rented four 18’ Sotar rafts from PRO in Flagstaff and also brought two catarafts that some of the participants owned. We had 15 people on each half of the trip after one person backed out on each half . We also got the meat/veggie combo food package from PRO, had them shuttle us from Flag, and rented the kitchen gear, water filter, groover, and other gear from them. PRO did well by us. They provided great boats, were very helpful, arrived early, and were easy to work with. They did omit buckets for the had washing station, but we had a couple of our own and traded for some more buckets from another party part way through the trip. But we probably would have forgotten more things had we done it all ourselves. Most of the food was great. It was a well-balanced diet with a lot of fiber and everyone stayed healthy. Some of the food was strange to us, and some was more work to prepare than we would have preferred, but we were happy overall. We could have used a few more rocket boxes for trash.

I did not have much experience on the oars before the trip, and probably doubled my experience on the oars on the first day. I did very poorly in Badger, the first rapid, missing my entry, hitting most of the rocks in the rapid, going over pour-overs sideways, and hitting rocks with the oars. But (no thanks to me), the raft stayed upright. As we went down the river, I got better on the oars and did not have to think so much about which way to move them in order to move the boat in the direction I wanted it to go. At House Rock rapid, I was not able to pull to the right as I had planned, but managed to square up before hitting the hole (the biggest hole I had ever seen) and punched through it just fine. At Hance, we planned to start just right of the rocks in the center and pull left to avoid the big holes at the bottom. I entered in about the right place, but my efforts to pull left were not very successful. We tangled momentarily with another raft in the rapid and I was not able to straighten out fully for the holes at the bottom. I nearly washed out of the raft, but I hit the oar as I washed across the raft and it kept me in the boat, although I did knock the oar lock out of adjustment when I hit it.

After that, I learned a few tricks and the runs through the rapids got better for me. Specifically, I practiced between rapids at using both oars at once to turn the raft until it became automatic, and I learned that I could get a lot more power pulling by putting my feet on the bar rather than on the floor. We scouted and ran Horn, Granite, Hermit, and Crystal rapids all in one day, and they all went well for me, boosting my confidence. The narrower cat in our group flipped in Horn, but it was not a bad swim for the oarsman, and we flipped it back over without too much difficulty. That was our only flip (other than IKs) of the trip. We snuck Chrystal on the right except that one raft got sucked into the second hole and the oarsman almost washed out, but the raft stayed upright and it turned out ok. I almost did not make the pull to the right on Bedrock, but got it at the last minute. And I got pulled into the hole at Upset, but lined it up and punched through it just fine. Lava was very intimidating, and got the adrenaline going one last time, but we all ran the right side just fine.