Up early once again -- one of the bad things about being close to the kitchen, and I was only a few feet away, is that the roar of the propane burners wakes you up early, but it's conducive to getting around. This camp and my spot proved to the be best yet, with the whisper of Shinumo Rapids a few hundred yards downstream. I got around in good order, got some coffee, and was packed by the time the crew called "Breakfast", which was French toast, strawberries and bacon -- very good, although I hit the bacon a little hard.

The day was promising for warmth, and there are few big rapids coming today, and then toward the end of the day, so I decided to stuff the rain gear in the day bag and just run in my regular clothes. As always, there's a bit of waiting around to get going, as some stragglers don't get around well in the morning, and the crew is still cleaning up from breakfast and loading the rafts -- most of the kitchen stuff has to be down in the gear boxes in places only they know, and bigger items, like tables, have specific spots as well -- some have to be gotten to during the day for lunch. Eventually, it's time to get started loading for real, and the call of "duffle line" goes up. Most of the passengers -- except for those up at the groover or still getting their acts together, form a line to pass up the gear.

Tent bags and night bags go in first. The tent bags are heavy, and there's always a little grunting and groaning when one of them comes along. The crew places these big bags, with a row along each sideboard, the rolls facing down to provide something of a fence for the rest of the bags, and something of a seat for people to sit on, although it isn't much of a seat. Once all these are packed, the night bags are called for, and they are packed in between the big bags, and wherever else they can be stashed. Once the night bags are aboard, the load it covered with a tarp, and tied down with straps.

Now, people can start getting aboard the raft. This is always confusing, as people are pulling on life jackets and raingear, and hooking the strap at the bottom of their day bags onto the tarp straps anywhere they can. People settle into place, and a couple of the crew head up and get the groover, heavier now than it was the night before. It's handed aboard, and tied down back in the boatmen's well. There are in fact several, one for each day except the first and the last; those have to do double duty.

By now we were in Middle Granite Gorge, and again the walls rise steeply above the Canyon, although much more open than the upper one. Here, there are frequently talus slopes halfway up the canyon, at least the parts that we can see. Unlike the upper river, now these slopes, and most surfaces sufficiently non-vertical to hold something resembling soil, are covered with the dull olive drab color of Sonoran desert vegetation, barrel cactus, sagebrush, prickly pear and the like, some whose names I don't know. We were coming to the end of the Utah agave country, an interesting plant we've seen frequently upriver, although rarely close by. At its base, it has a small ball-like pack of sharp leaves, but a single thick stalk extends high above, sometimes several feet. It's always interesting to see where these grow -- more than once I'd noticed them high on the rim of a cliff, the distinctive stalk silhouetted noticeably against the sky.

Several miles below, we came to Specter Rapid, one of the two big ones we'd meet today, the other being Deubendorff, a few miles farther on. Only now did I pull on the rain suit, while Joe readied us for the rapids, which we could now see ahead, a white froth laying behind an obvious dropoff. "Gonna get wet in this one," Joe said, always a warning of a big rapid. "I'm going to need you down and in." Down means off the load, down on the sideboard, and in means that people can't ride the side tubes, which people do occasionally on the quiet stretches. Then, he gives the word that this rapid is really serious -- "Pull in the drag bags!" This means that there's a good chance of hitting something, or at least scraping it hard enough to make the MGD hunt in the evenings even worse.

We drift down on the rapid, Joe (or whoever is driving -- often it's Parker, and occasionally, one of the helpers) twists the raft this way and that to set up the entry. "Hang on," he yells. Then, the lip of the rapid is there, and we're lunging down the tongue at an rapid pace, then bouncing up over the first of the backrollers. The first backroller usually isn't bad, and the boat climbs up over it, but the length of the raft and the spacing of the backrollers means that sooner or later we're going to stick the nose into one. Rarely are they big enough to actually take water over the nose, but they're often big enough to send up a huge mound of spray. I wear a wide-brimmed hat, and after several days of practice, have learned to tip my head forward to take the worst of the spray heading for my head on my hat -- it keeps my glasses a little cleaner, although I still have to clean off the water droplet marks each evening.

Finally, sometimes only seconds, sometimes longer, we're out into the calm water below the rapid. We look back upstream, to see Josh and his raft plunge through behind us, and it always seems like his passengers get a drier ride than we have managed, although it's mostly for the sake of perspective, I guess. Once we were below Deubendorf (Mile 132) I peeled out of the rain gear -- it was awful warm out in the sun. We faced one more moderate rapid, Tapeats, but I figured if I got wet, I got wet -- it would feel good in the warmth of the sun. A couple miles later, we did run through Tapeats, and sure enough I did get a little wet, and sure enough, it felt good. We ran through a couple more small rapids, and about Mile 135 came to the narrowest point of the Canyon, where the river is compressed down to only about 75 yards -- but it's very deep and calm; Josh brought his raft alongside, and both motors were shut off as we drifted, held together by the strap ends that hold the side tubes on, being held by some of the passengers, while Joe talked a little more about the natural history of the place and where we were heading.

Where we were heading was Deer Creek, another of the famous places of the Canyon -- and one of the more frequented. It was hard to find a place to tie up on the small sand beach, and Joe had to scramble far up the rock to find a place to tie off the rope from the bow. There was a Hatch party of three rafts there, the gal with the Diamond River single boat trip was there, another party was tied up across the river at a campground, and while we were there a private trip, in oar boats and kayaks for a total of seven boats, joined us. I noticed that one of the kayaks was a Godzilla, which must be fun in the rapids but a real bear to paddle through all the flats.

The waterfall at Deer Creek is very spectacular, gushing forth from a narrow crack in a tall cliff in a stream that can't be more than a foot wide, plunging down in a shower of spray. Again, there's the verdant vegetation living in the moisture from the falls. Many of the party took a steep, tough hike to the top of the falls, where there's an interesting little pool, but I only went part way up the trail, mostly to get some pictures of some barrel cactus and prickly pear, and a tremendous view upriver. The trail was rough going, and was about all the rock scrambling I wanted, so I came back down, found a shady spot in behind a rock, where the afternoon breeze could get at me to cool off, and worked on my notebook for a bit.

We hung around long enough for the hiking party to get back -- and found that yes, it was a tough hike -- then got back on the river. We didn't go far, less than a mile, to a spot on the other side of the river, where a huge vertical wall loomed high overhead, with a nice eddy and sand beach. Once again I hunted around for a good spot, found one, and discovered that was where the groover was going, so had to look elsewhere. The beach was a little sloped, and the only other possibilities seemed to be back out in a rock field, far from the beach, where here and there were patches of sand. Without much hope, I headed in that general direction, until I noticed a small, flat spot of sand, shielded from the irritating afternoon breeze coming up the canyon by a stand of tamarisks and a large, sloping rock. It seemed a touch on the small side, but was otherwise perfect, and so proved to be. The only thing it lacked was a view of the river -- it was on the back side of the rock, and the main view was that huge, vertical wall, but that wasn't all bad. Once again, home for the night. I dropped my PFD and day bag there, and went back down to help with the duffle line, unloading the boats of big bags and night bags and kitchen gear.