LONG STORY SHORT By Kristine McGowan  When Jason suggested that we go on a guided, multi-day rafting trip through Canyonlands National Park this summer, I thought he was flying a bit close to the sun. Not because I disliked the idea. We’d done a trip like this before—a nine-day journey through the lower half of the Grand Canyon—and it still holds the title of my favorite experience to date. It was our first time in the backcountry, where brushing the Milky Way with my fingertips felt more possible than locating a flushing toilet. I came away from that trip with a greater sense of what I wanted out of life: more experiences, fewer possessions. More adventure, less monotony. Those nine days reinforced my desire to eventually embark on our Big Trip. I was eager to exchange daily comforts for something more—the kind of more that leaves a mark. That said… we have a lot going on this year. We expect to drive ~50,000 miles between February and November, exploring two-thirds of the U.S. along the way. I doubted we would have time for a rafting trip, let alone the budget. Besides, even if Jason found some wiggle room in our schedule and our finances (spoiler: he did), I questioned whether the investment would be worth it. We’d already boated down half of the Grand Canyon, arguably our country’s most incredible landscape. How could any other river trip compare? And how could it leave a mark on me like the canyon did, especially when we’re already in the middle of the greatest adventure of our lives? Jason knows a good investment when he sees one, though. Fortunately, he also knows how to shove aside my doubts. So we booked it: a guided, five-day rafting trip along the Colorado River through Canyonlands National Park. And it turned out to be every bit as worthwhile—and transformative—as I didn’t expect.  The Quiet Power of RiversWe booked our trip with Holiday River Expeditions, a rafting company that prides itself on running rivers without motors, which was important to us.* Jason snagged us a spot on their late-June trip through Cataract Canyon, where some of the biggest rapids in the West churn between the red-wall avenues of Canyonlands National Park. Our first couple days, however, would be quiet ones. We wouldn’t reach Cataract Canyon until the third day, and before then, our river guides would row—and row and row and row—to keep us floating along the flat-water stretches of the Colorado. Originally, I wasn’t thrilled to hear this. I’m not against a scenic float, but we love whitewater, and I worried we might get bored during those slow days. So we packed a few items to keep us occupied: a book for each of us, a camera for me, and Jason’s phone so he could use GPS to track our position on the river. By the end of the trip, though, our books and Jason’s phone would hardly see daylight. (I think I read about 10 pages total.) Because we couldn’t tear our eyes away from the geological wonders of southeastern Utah. Millions of years ago, the Colorado and Green Rivers began carving through the layers of the Colorado Plateau to form the 500+ square miles that we know as Canyonlands National Park today. Floating along, we got to witness the Colorado’s work firsthand: cliffs soaring over us in one breath, dwarfing our boats, and falling away in the next. Enormous promontories lifting their heads from the horizon, indifferent to our trespassing. Reds, oranges, browns, and blacks coloring the landscape in all directions, made only more striking by the stark White Rim Sandstone that sometimes peeked out from between the rock layers and watched us float by. Jason and I had already seen the Colorado’s masterpiece, the Grand Canyon, but what we witnessed here still blew me away. To think that this silent, slow-moving water—in cahoots with the erosive forces of the Green River and rainwater—had shaped all this, in addition to the Grand? The Colorado, it dawned on me, is a humble artist. One that turns famously violent at times, with fearsome rapids that draw whitewater enthusiasts from all around the world. But most of this river is flat water. And even as visitors underestimate those quiet sections, it’s working away slowly, sculpting the American Southwest. Just hours into our first day on the river, I was glad we hadn’t arrived at the rapids yet. I didn’t want anything to distract me from this artist at work. Especially when it may not get to keep working for much longer.  Seven States, One RiverLater that night, at our first camp alongside the river, a theme that would wind itself throughout our trip began to emerge. We were camped on an embankment standing several feet above the water, its cliff edge lined with tamarisk and other vegetation that gradually gave way to dirt and rock as we moved inland. While three of the river guides prepared dinner, our trip leader, Nick, grabbed a stick and began drawing in the dirt. “Does anyone want to see where we are?” he called out to the guests, seventeen of us in all. Then he stepped aside to reveal a map of the western states: Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California. (A ways to the east, he’d also added his beloved home state of Mississippi.) We gathered around as Nick outlined the Colorado’s path through the Southwest: from its modest origins in the Rockies to Lake Powell in Arizona and Lake Mead in Nevada, and of course, through the landscapes it had sculpted over millions of years, including Dead Horse Point, Canyonlands, Glen Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. I don’t remember exactly how the question was phrased. But after Nick finished, a guest from Maine asked about water usage in the Southwest and whether the river plays a part in it. Nick’s answer: Yes. The Colorado is the Southwest’s water. The Colorado River Basin provides drinking water for nearly 40 million people across seven U.S. states and two states in Mexico. On top of that, it irrigates 5.5 million acres of agricultural land, and it “fuels hydropower resources in eight states and remains a crucial resource for 30 Tribal Nations and agriculture communities across the West.”** Those are just a few of the many reasons the Colorado plays such a vital role. The problem is, Nick said, the river’s not doing so well. For decades, the West has been drawing more water from the Colorado than the river can feasibly provide, and the combination of overuse and a prolonged drought driven by the effects of climate change has left the two largest reservoirs fed by the Colorado—Lake Powell and Lake Mead—at dangerously low levels, raising fears in recent years that Lake Mead could hit “dead pool” status. For years now, the seven U.S. states that rely on the river—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—have been trying and failing to negotiate a long-term plan for managing the Colorado to avoid that outcome.*** They reached an agreement last year to cut water usage through 2026, but it’s not enough to stabilize the river. Coming from California, I’d heard about those negotiations, so I knew a little of what Nick was talking about. But I didn’t ponder over his words much that night. As soon as the guides called for dinner, my hunger steered me toward the makeshift kitchen.  Submerged TreasuresOver the next few days, as our group meandered down the Colorado, Jason and I made a point of getting on a different boat each morning. Our caravan consisted of four rafts, each propelled by a river guide wielding a pair of oars. Our guides—Nick, Rachel, Ezra, and Connor—worked day and night to make our trip the best it could be, but frankly, we never felt as if they were “serving” us. It felt more like they were guests on the trip as well (albeit much more hard-working guests), and their company was part of the experience. So Jason and I wanted to ride along with each of them, to get to know them just like we were getting to know the other guests. By the end of the week, we’d ridden along with each of our guides, and I couldn’t help noticing a common thread throughout our conversations with them. As they rowed—and rowed and rowed and rowed, not even remotely out of breath—every guide pointed out how much the river was changing. “That rapid wasn’t here a few years ago,” Ezra said one day. “There used to be a beach there,” Connor said on another. As if to underscore their point, one morning after we’d clambered into the boats, a dumpster-sized chunk of sediment broke off river bank and plunged into the water, sending up a plume of dust that wafted across the gorge. “Erosion at work!” Connor whooped. It’s not just erosion though, Ezra had explained. It’s also the shrinking water level in Lake Powell—and the very forces threatening the water supply for nearly 40 million people—at work here. As outlined in an excellent piece from Rolling Stone, when Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963, the waters of the Colorado backed up behind it and created Lake Powell, a “water bank” that Western communities could draw from in the river’s leaner years. The water rose behind the dam for miles, and as it went, it submerged side canyons, buried some of Cataract’s famous rapids under a sediment plug, drowned plants and animals, and left “countless cultural, sacred, historical, and recreational resources” underwater. Over the last decade, however, as Lake Powell drops and the water recedes, those canyons, rapids, and resources have begun to reemerge. Scientists have found that birds and beavers are returning, and researchers, river runners, and journalists are now studying Cataract Canyon under the Returning Rapids Project to learn how this natural area is recovering from man-made impacts, all on its own. Thanks to our guides, we got to witness bits of that recovery throughout our trip—and, more importantly, we learned just how incredible this once-submerged landscape is. On the boats, we rafted down some of the biggest rapids in the West, 10 of which reemerged only in recent years (and one of which tried to slap Jason out of our boat). But on shore, our guides shepherded us away from the river at every reasonable opportunity, usually to embark on a hike in regions of Canyonlands that we might not have been able to access otherwise. On all of these hikes, we found not only stunning views and mind-boggling rock formations, but also evidence of ancient human life. In the rock alongside the Colorado, and probably throughout much of Canyonlands, are pictographs and granaries crafted thousands of years ago by the Ancestral Puebloans. Our guides would point them out from the boats—Rachel seemed particularly skilled at spotting them—but on our hikes, we got to inspect them up close, studying the ambiguous shapes of the pictographs and marveling at the remnants of crops still lying inside one granary. It seemed that evidence of human life was everywhere, if we only looked closely enough. And while I don’t believe the granaries and pictographs we saw were ever submerged by Glen Canyon Dam, their proliferation made me wonder—how many other granaries, pictographs, and archaeological sites were still underwater? And, like the rapids, would they ever get a chance to reemerge?  An Uncertain Future“It’s so big.” Nick breathed the words on one of our hikes, at the top of a rocky promontory overlooking a horseshoe bend in the Colorado. “From up here, you can really see how high the water is,” he said while gazing down at the river. He pointed to spots along the water’s edge. “Usually there’s a sandbar there. And one there, and one there. Right now, they’re all underwater.” Those sandbars will emerge later this summer, when snowmelt from the Rockies runs dry and the river’s level drops, as it does every year. Still, on that afternoon in late June, I couldn’t help but smile at how the Colorado had left our seasoned river guide in awe. That’s one of this river’s greatest powers, I think: the way it’s drawn people, across millennia and from afar—from California, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Montana, Texas, and Utah, if you’re counting just the guests on our trip—and how it beguiles us all into a humble silence resembling its own. That power had brought a group of twenty-one river rats together in the backcountry of Canyonlands for five days. That doesn’t seem like much compared to the drinking water, irrigation, and hydropower the river provides to millions of people, but it meant a lot to me. “We’ve always wanted to do something like this,” the couple from Texas said when we asked why they’d decided to join this trip. “I’m so excited to see the big country out here,” said a guest from Maine. “I’ve done a couple trips with Holiday,” said a Utahn, “and I wanted to do another one. I keep coming back.” To our group, the river was more than a water and power resource. It was something to study and revere, a natural force so alluring that we couldn’t keep ourselves away. The group we’d rafted with down the Grand Canyon had believed much the same. But beyond those beliefs, this group in Canyonlands seemed keen on acknowledging just how uncertain the Colorado’s future is. Because here, in ever-changing Cataract Canyon, you can’t ignore it. “Looking at the river,” Nick said on our last day together, “on the one hand, it’s like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of water.’ But on the other hand, it’s like, ‘This is it.’” This is it. As in, this slow-moving water carrying us toward the take-out, where we’d disembark from the boats for the final time, was all there was in the Colorado. All there was to support nearly 40 million people.  Something GreaterI don’t know whether the seven Colorado River states will ever come to a long-term agreement to stabilize the river. My stomach churns at the possibility that they won’t—but also that they will, and that Lake Powell will rise and flood Cataract Canyon and its treasures again. But as disheartening as this all may sound, the people on our trip and those behind the Returning Rapids Project give me hope. So many people care about this river and the land it’s shaped. They’re a mighty force of their own to be reckoned with. This was my second time spending multiple days on a river. And yet again, the experience changed something in me. The Grand Canyon left me wanting to seek more. Now, Cataract Canyon makes me want to seek greater. I devoted the last five and a half years of my career largely to one goal: building our savings for the Big Trip (and hopefully enjoying my job along the way). Now, the future of my career is a blank page. I’ve been thinking a lot more about that page as our Big Trip winds down, and what I want to fill it with. The idealist in me wants to fill it with a solution for the Colorado. The realist in me rolls her eyes at that—though maybe not as hard as she did before Cataract Canyon. I can’t put a solution on that page. But maybe I can still fill it with something greater than myself.  Note: The events and words quoted from individuals in this story are based solely on my memory. Any errors are my own. * Motor boats are a great option for anyone short on time and/or who wants a stable ride through whitewater. They’re faster and larger than their manpowered counterparts, and thanks to their size, they can plow through most rapids rather seamlessly. That said, they’re also loud, and we didn’t want to plow through the rapids anyway. We wanted to feel the ferocity of Cataract’s whitewater—a ferocity that can and does flip boats—and while riding a motor boat would have ensured we stayed upright, it also would have dulled the experience.
** Julia Jacobo, “Here’s what will happen if Colorado River system doesn't recover from ‘historic drought,’” ABC News, April 19, 2023. https://abcnews.go.com/US/happen-colorado-river-system-recover-historic-drought/story?id=98475953. *** Alex Hager, “Colorado River states have two different plans for managing water. Here's why they disagree,” KUNC Radio, NPR, March 6, 2024. https://www.kunc.org/news/2024-03-06/colorado-river-states-have-two-different-plans-for-managing-water-heres-why-they-disagree.
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