San Juan River: muddy water or watery mud?

I have lots and LOTS of show and tell for you from our trip out west. But I thought I'd begin with the centerpiece of the excursion, our paddling trip on the San Juan River.

And, because the river itself presented some unique challenges—some expected, some unexpected—I thought it best to begin with a riff on the River's water itself.

As I showed you in one of my teaser photos, the visual aspect of this river really is like café au lait, or, perhaps, just plain old chocolate milk. But rather than being a Willy Wonka dream-come-true, the river is full of silt, not chocolate.

This attribute was not unexpected. Most of the folks in our merry band had been on this section of the river two years before and had tried to prepare us newbs for this watery mud. However, seeing it first-hand, in the river channel, was still something of a shocker.

Not to mention seeing its residue splattered over all of your gear, after a day of ploughing through standing waves of the stuff. On the right is Henry's camelbackpack, which had spent the day sitting on top of a pile of stuff in our canoe, but still managing to get practically covered in silt. Here are a couple more examples of what splashes of river water do to people and things in a boat (these pictures were, admittedly, taken after our biggest water day):

my sunglasses, which had stayed mostly 3-4 feet
above the level of the river during the day

small and large water containers, which had spent the day lower in the boat

Although we all had a lot of fun, as you can imagine, after four days of this kind of dousing, we were pretty happy to reach the take-out and head to our various shower facilities!

take-out at Mexican Hat, Utah

The un-expected aspect of the river was its rate of flow. Due to heavy rains upstream, we caught a "bubble" of high water that made our journey much more exciting than I had been led to believe it would be.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from inside the boat during any of our encounters with the large standing waves we had to contend with. During these stretches, I was busy paddling (and straining my shoulder!). So this photo, taken in a relatively calm area, can only give you a slight idea of the challenges we faced:

(To get a better idea of how fast this river moves, even at slightly lower levels, you can watch this video I took the day after we took out, from our motel in Mexican Hat. The flow here is approximately 1500 cfs. I love watching the spontaneous generation and extinction of little whirlpools and wavelets; fascinating from a scientific viewpoint, but a little treacherous when you're paddling, since it's hard to tell which waves are of this transitory variety and which are hiding rocks or other obstacles.)

This shot will give you a little better idea of our waves; it shows Henry and Katie scouting 8-Foot-Rapid, the largest we encountered. Click on the photo to enlarge if you want to see the big waves in the background. Although the flow of the river is somewhat dangerous at this level, it actually makes running rapids like these (and there were only a few named rapids on our stretch) a little easier than usual because it washes over rocks that usually need to be avoided. But we still scouted this baby pretty closely. (Henry got a great video of Mike going through this rapid.)

It was the large standing waves between the actual rapids that gave us the most trouble. Henry and I had to stop to bail water out of our canoe several times on this big water day. It would just take one or two mis-timed interactions with waves to put enough water into our boat that it wasn't steerable. Much more adrenaline than I usually like with my paddling!

Here is a graphic I made from the USGS chart (your tax dollars at work!) that shows the river flows near our put-in (at Sand Island near Bluff, Utah) during our trip:

From it you can see that we lucked out (in my wimpy opinion, at least) and weren't on the River at its peaks. Our first night of camping, though, we had a little excitement, as we thought the river noise in the background of our post-dinner wine-drinking was sounding a little louder than it had before. Sure enough, the river had risen noticeably: the buckets we'd set at riverside to do our washing up were now in the river channel a bit (we didn't lose them). We decided it would be prudent to pull our boats further out of the water, just in case!

The next day we had only a 2-mile paddle to our next campsite, but it was eventful. Just before reaching the campsite landing Mike overturned in the swift current and it took some work to get him and (most of) his gear ashore. But the river gods were kind and he only lost a couple of non-essential items.

This campsite (at Chinle Creek) was where we'd planned to spend two nights anyway. And, as it turned out, this was a great bit of serendipity for us...the next day the river rose again, and we might have had more trouble than we did with the big waves.

As the flow recedes, of course, the newly exposed banks are very muddy. Fortunately no shoes were lost in the quicksandy flats when we had to get out to eat, bail, scout, etc. But as you can see in the photo above on the left, the footing was somewhat treacherous (as well as rather attractive, artistically!). This picture was taken at 4-Foot-Rapid, where we had lunch on Wednesday.

You might be wondering about the water and air temperatures. When you're getting splashed so much, it would be unpleasant if these were too low. But, for the most part, our paddling weather was perfect. The water was chilly, as you can see below in this morning picture (note the mist over the water) and our nights were cold enough that we used all of our warm bedding. But the days were sunny and bright and dried you off quickly.

Thanks to Michael for taking this picture of us at Chinle campground

So, to sum up the paddling aspects of the trip:

• it was more exciting than I had bargained for, but
• I did learn some new paddling skills, primarily in dealing with standing waves
• the scenery was FABULOUS (as you can get a taste of in the photos above, and which I'll show you lots more of in upcoming posts)
• although I'd prefer sticking to my previously-stated limit of 3 nights on the river, I can survive a four-night outing with no shower
• it's possible that in our lifetime the silt-load of the San Juan will be so great that it will be silted up to Sand Island from Lake Powell and future generations just might not be able to paddle this stretch at all 

Not only was our car filled with sand and fine silt dust when we got home, to remind us of the waters and banks of the San Juan, but I also got a tasty reminder on our final long day's drive. 

We stopped at Classics Frozen Custard in Roswell, New Mexico, for a late lunch on Sunday. BTW, this place is fabulous and well worth planning your travel day around (we had to be sure we didn't leave Albuquerque too early; didn't want to get to Roswell before they opened). We've never visited the UFO Museum, but would not go within 100 miles of Roswell without stopping for frozen treats.

Here is what was left of my chocolate custard when I realized how much it looked like San Juan River water and I stopped eating—briefly—to snap this photo:

heavenly Classics Frozen Custard!

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Next up: rocks, rocks, and more gorgeous rocks! As seen from the river and on our various hikes.