Parker was basically running the boat today. Although pretty experienced on the river -- this was her 30th trip down the Canyon -- she's now in serious training to be a boatman, and has qualifying trips to get in. She's scheduled to get her first trip with a raft of her own on August 17, but needed the experience handling the raft, and today she was to show us that it's not as simple as it looks. The rafts have no keel, and are about as happy going sideways as they are going straight ahead, and overcontrol easily. River currents will shove them about, so it takes being on your toes, even on flat water.

Joe had planned on stopping at North Canyon Rapid (20 Mile) for a side canyon hike, but we discovered that the Grand Canyon Expeditions group just down river got under way sooner and had already stopped there, so he decided to give it a pass, and we headed on into several miles of serious rapids -- the "Roaring Twenties" as they're known. For several miles there's a serious rapid every half mile to mile, and the worst of them is probably 24 Mile, which Parker ran clean. But at the next one, 24 1/2 mile, she got the nose of the rapid into an eddy line, didn't correct in time, and we wound up running part of the rapid backwards. Oh, well, you have to make mistakes to learn, I guess.

As we progressed downriver, we went deeper into time. At Lee's Ferry, we were looking at Kaibab Limestone, the topmost layer of the sedimentary rock that the river cut through when that dome was rising, but not far downstream we ran into Toroweap Limestone, the next layer, somewhat older. Joe gave us a pretty good lecture about the geology -- he'd just come off a seminar trip for Canyon guides that included a geologist, and was pretty good at the geology of the Canyon anyway after five years of running the place. I'm not going to try to explain the ins and outs of it here; there are plenty of good texts about it, but here and there I will touch on it.

All the rocks of the Canyon, at least here and until far downstream are sedimentary, laid down by oceans and sometimes lakes and rivers long ago. As you look up the canyon walls, you can see the various layers and striations in the limestone, one of the ongoing universalities of the place. The topmost layers, like Toroweap and Kaibab Limestones, are about 250 million years old, but about 23 Mile, an older layer appears, the Redwall Limestones, which are around 350 million years old. These tend to form the more vertical layers of the Canyon, and aren't red at all, but naturally a buff color, about like what used to be the common color of computer equipment. It gets its red, and sometime black color, through an aging process called "desert varnish", in which iron oxide leaches down from higher rocks to older ones. Down near the river, and where there have been recent rockfalls, it's possible to see the true buff color of the rock.

We ran on through the rest of the Roaring Twenties -- a little muted after 25 Mile. Around 31 Mile, we pulled up at Stanton's Cave. The second major group of expeditions to survey the canyon came in the late 1800s, when the canyon was being explored for the possibility of using it as a railroad route -- which seems like madness today. It was organized by a railroad magnate from Denver, who was something of a cheapskate. He skimped on gear, including life jackets. It would have helped him; he got swept out of the boat in a rapid early in the Roaring Twenties and drowned, and two more men from the expedition drowned not much further on. At 30 Mile, Edwin Stanton, the expedition's surveyor, who was actually leading the expedition, figured they'd had enough, and stashed their gear in a cave now called "Stanton's Cave". They came back later, did the rest of the Canyon, and produced pictures and surveys still of use today; not long ago a group took copies of Stanton's pictures and tried to reproduce them from the same spots where they had to have been taken, to note how much the Canyon had changed in a century. Often, the answer is "not a lot".

Only a short distance below Stanton's Cave is "Vasey's Paradise", named on the Powell Expedition. Here, a waterfall slides down the rock, making for a small spot of lush, verdant vegetation. However, we didn't stop and explore it, even though the spot is right next to the river, since the vegetation includes poison ivy and the place is lousy with it. Joe is especially sensitive to it, and decided that the place is best seen from a distance, although we got close for photos.

We did run on another couple miles to Redwall Cavern, one of the famous spots of the Canyon. Powell said that he thought fifty thousand people could be seated there, and while it is pretty large he probably overestimated the seating capacity by a factor of ten. The cavern, just a large undercut in the redwall, is largely filled with sand, and we pulled up on the shore to check it out. It is pretty big, and a popular stop; a private party was there, and a single-boat group from Diamond River, run by a big, happy gal who Joe was friendly with; he spent some time gamming with her while several other people threw Frisbees around, and Jason took a bunch of photos.

We stayed at Redwall for about an hour, I guess -- no watch -- and then ran on for a short distance, only a couple hundred yards below Redwall, and stopped for lunch, more cold cuts. By now, we were ahead of the Grand Canyon Expeditions Group, and wanted to stay that way to get a good campsite, so we just ran on, only making one short stop below President Harding Rapid (44 Mile) for more IPIX photos. "President Harding isn't much of a rapid," Joe quoted someone wryly, "But then, Harding supposedly wasn't much of a president."

Really, when you get right down to it, the Colorado isn't much of a river, either. It's not a big river, in this area rarely not much over a hundred yards wide, although the continual fall makes for lots of rapids, they're mostly pool and drop rapids, and mostly not complex drops like are often seen on eastern whitewater. I can think of a number of other rivers that I've been on that are lots wider, and at times flow just as fast with just as much water. But, for the arid west, it's a big river. At least in Marble Canyon, which we were still in, it's much more enclosed than I imagined, but with continual interesting, beautiful, spectacular views. There are tons of photo opportunities; I was already rationing film, and Kathy and Jason's huge capacities seemed to make some sense.

I hunted around above the sand bar for a good place away from the group to put a camp, but didn't find a place that I liked that wasn't too far from the group -- or that would be easily accessible to the main camp when the tide came up, so chose a place down near the end of the sandbar, pretty well away from everything. Although there was some virga hanging from a few clouds, and we did get sprinkled on a few drops, it looked that they'd collapse when the heating of the day went away, so I decided to sleep out that night, although the spot was rather soft sand. While I very much enjoy sleeping out under the stars, in the east I rarely get a chance to do it, due to mosquitoes, and, more importantly, dew -- but here there are no mosquitoes, although occasional sand flies and gnats, and it's so dry that dew is unheard of, so I proposed to make the best of the opportunity. I spread out the ground cloth from the overnight bag, lay my gear down on it to keep it from blowing away in the occasionally gusty breeze, and started organizing things for overnight. The big problem in camping down in the Canyon on the sand bars is that the sand gets into everything, no matter what you try to do to keep it under control. You try to do what you can but you still live in it -- no wonder that the boatmen take the prerogative of sleeping on the boats, the situation is a little better.