PADDLING IS ONLY PART OF IT. SIDE CANYON HIKES REVEAL ROCK ART, REFRESHING WATERFALLS AND BREATHTAKING CANYON VIEWS.
• • • O
ur second day in Lodore is our big push— the day our guides have been waiting for.
We paddle Disaster Falls, Harp Falls, Triple Falls, building up to Hell’s Half Mile. Hell’s is the longest and most challenging rapid on the Green River. Dan and I scramble across the bouldery debris to set up cameras. I choose to eddy hop down the right side, ducking behind smooth red boulders that have rumbled down from the opposing ravines and landed conveniently above Lucifer’s, a left-of-center pour over. The more technical but drier open boat line, I figured, is right to left. The rafts run right for the big hit. Dan dances with the devil and boofs the corner of Lucifer’s. We make short work of Hell’s Half Mile that isn’t really a half-mile at all.
• • • S
kiers in Utah will remember the winter of 2011 for its record-breaking snowfall.
Snowbird had a whopping 775 inches. Just 47 miles upstream of the Lodore Canyon, the third largest dam in America struggled to hold back the spring melt. “The engineers were afraid that if we had a warm, wet spring, the Flaming Gorge Reservoir would spill over the top,” Russell tells us, pointing to historic water- lines stained on the canyon walls. The Green peaked at 8,500 CFS with another 26,700 pounding in from the undammed Yampa River at the confluence, known as Echo Park. “I have not seen the river that high and neither had most of the crew. All the big rapids were al- most unrecognizable.” The State Park Service had an astounding 162 permit cancellations.
44 RAPID SPRING 2012
In late August, the Green was still running at 2,400 CFS, more than double its normal flow. “It was a good summer to be a raft guide in Di- nosaur,” says Russell. “We may not see water like this for a very long time.”
• • • T
here is little play, short of catch-on-the-fly surfs. For the most part, the Green is wide and always moving. A swim would be a long one. We moved in a loose rolling cover, like a big game of leapfrog down the river. The big- gest hazards are the undercut canyon walls, which we don’t need to be anywhere near. On the Green, the paddling is secondary to the scenery and river life.
• • • O
n our final day, we stopped for lunch on the sand bar at the entrance to Split Mountain Canyon—the beginning of a seven- mile run of class II–III water and the end of our trip. “You guys are going to love this section,” Russell tells me while making a roast beef on rye sandwich. “You can play just about any- thing, just stay off the canyon walls.” And so, for the first time in four days, we put away the cameras, forgot where we were and we ripped down the last seven miles of the run, 2,000-foot canyon walls and tomorrow’s middle-age obligations be damned. —Scott MacGregor is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rapid. For more information on paddling Utah’s
Green River, visit
www.oars.com and
www.nps. gov/dino.
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