We continued on. At the base of one drop, the river diverted left and then back right. Where the river turned right, there was a drop with a hole and large curling wave at its base. Just when it looked like were lining up perfectly for the drop, the nose of the raft swung sharply to the right. I didn’t understand how Tres could lose the line; there was plenty of time between the two drops.

My thoughts switched to hanging on. We were going over sideways and I was sitting on the leading edge. As we went over the drop, the raft tilted sharply to almost 45 degrees. I no longer had someone in front of me to block the wave; this was going to be a wet one.

The leading pontoon slammed hard into the base of the wave. To my surprise, instead of pushing through the wave, the pontoon rose sharply up and over the main body of the wave. As we were coming off the backside of the wave, I heard Tres gun the motors. The raft moved to river right and peeled sharply up into the eddy behind a large boulder.

The moment we peeled into that eddy, I knew the whole process had been no mistake. Maybe Tres was just making up for an otherwise ‘quiet’ day of rapids. In any case Tres earned my respect for handling the raft. From the vantage point of the eddy we were now facing upstream and had a front row seat for watching the other raft come through the drop. Tyler took a more conservative approach and faced the drop strait on.

Mile 40 marked the original proposed Marble Canyon Dam Site. Had this site been chosen, everything up to now would have been lost behind the dam’s backwaters. Fortunately the rock proved too porous and the site was abandon in favor of the current Glen Canyon Site.

At mile 62 we took a long stop at the Little Colorado River. Many trips skip this stop during monsoon season, because of its tendency to flash without a lot of warning. We were lucky this was a dry monsoon.

A ranger had hiked down some distance from the South Rim. He was stationed there and participating in a use impact study of the river. He had a radio and updated us with weather reports.