On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Wow. I have never been on anything resembling a wilderness whitewater trip, so these pictures are like a trip to another world. ~WaterGirl
TheOtherHank
The other day lashonharangue had an OTR featuring the Green River in southern part of Utah. This inspired me to go into my photos and find some from a whitewater trip my family and I did on the Green River a bit further upstream in the Dinosaur National Monument. Put-in for the trip is in Colorado, but take-out is just outside Vernal, Utah.
On this particular trip my waterproof camera case let me down, so the pictures are all taken when there is no chance of a splash ruining a phone or SLR.
Pulling over for lunch on the first day.
We’ve pulled over to camp on Day 2 of the trip. It appears that one of the guides is getting the beer cooler out of his boat. One oddity of doing rafting trips with outfitters that are based in Utah is that they’re not allowed to provide alcohol to the passengers. Luckily, the bus ride to the put-in in Colorado passes through a small town whose economy appears to be entirely based on selling beer to people on their way to go rafting. The rafting company did provide a cooler with enough ice to keep beer cold.
Another shot from camp on Day 2
One of the attractions of going on wilderness whitewater trips is the opportunity to go relatively easy hikes that get you to places that would be grueling death marches if one were to try to get to the same spot as a backpacker.
Another shot from the hike on Day 2
A hike on Day 3
The view from the cliff edge
Yet another shot from the Day 3 hike. I really like the layering in the rocks.
Van Buren
Damn. Those are awesome. Gotta do the Green or Colorado some year.
raven
Great shots!
Dmbeaster
Luv Red Rock country
J R in WV
We spent several days in Vernal to visit the quarry at Dinosaur National Monument, which was actively being quarried by scientists when it was converted to a museum. There is a walkway up to a mezzanine from which you see a rock wall nearly a hundred feet high and a hundred meters long, with faces looming in the rock!
You can grab hold of individual femurs bigger than a large person, there are thousands of exposed bone fossils in the rock wall, they could tell from sand grains that the corpses were deposited in the curve of a big river.
They moved the digs into remote parts of the area which became available when helicopters became commonplace, and the original quarry was made into the most fabulous exhibit of how scientists work to pull the fossils from solid rock. Years later I visited again, and the actual quarry was closed for asbestos abatement in the indefinite future.
The views of the canyons and badlands from the clifftop are amazing, you can see why they couldn’t quarry deep inside the Monument without airlifts. The raft trip looks great!
ETA. Maybe we could do a B J get together in there and fuss over grammar face to face in the wilderness…
eclare
Beautiful photos!
Barbara
Stunning!
arrieve
One more item for the list. Beautiful photos.
MazeDancer
Outstanding photos!
frosty
Beautiful! Dinosaur NM was one of the places we didn’t get to this year.
monoglot
A million years ago (1972), I went on a river rafting trip through Dinosaur National Monument with the Sierra Club. The trip guides allowed me to come even though I was 14, and no one in my family accompanied me. It was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. I have no idea what happened to the pictures I took on the trip, so appreciate the pics here more than you can know.
Anonymous At Work
I see scenes like that, and my father’s training kicks in…”What’s the fishing like?”
TheOtherHank
Man, you really don’t see your typing errors until everything is on the internet for the whole world to see. I read and reread what I typed and a couple real howlers crept by. So it goes…
Way back in the day I used to be a guide for the company with which we did this trip. I used to think it must be the best kind of vacation (being a guide is a lot of work, but you get paid to go places like you see in the pictures). A few years ago the family unit started doing trips with my old company and it turns out I was right. It is the best kind of vacation. The trips are kind of pricey, but it’s more like an all-inclusive resort. Food (the guides prepare it all), lodging (you sleep next to the river), and entertainment (whitewater, hikes, hanging out in camp, etc) are all taken care of and you don’t have to worry about any of it.
As far as the fishing goes, the guides said it wasn’t that great, the local natives aren’t that exciting and they’re aren’t too many invasive species that are fun to catch.
WaterGirl
@TheOtherHank: make a list and I will make corrections. :-)
stinger
How cool!
TheOtherHank
@WaterGirl: Thank you! The only one that really bothers me is below.
“going on wilderness whitewater tripswilderness whitewater trips”
should read
“going on wilderness whitewater trips“
Laura
THere’s a one lane dirt road that leads down to the bottom of the canyon to a green grassy meadow like the place where you had lunch. My family camped down there fifty years ago. We were the only people. It was magical. Well, until the sleeping bags and other debris washed up. ANd then the rangers showed up.. They were looking for bodies. But all these years later I can still remember the hot dusty days and the cool shade and the deep strong scary river–and the rocks. The ancient rocks. Thank you for bringing back memories.
trollhattan
Lovely.
Cannot recommend “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian” by Stegner enough. It chronicles John Wesley Powell’s journey down the Green and Colorado rivers, an unprecedented and unfathomable expedition even without considering Powell lost an arm in the Civil War. Makes these pics all the more enjoyable knowing who went before.
TheOtherHank
@Laura: I remember that spot. It felt quite civilized because it had an outhouse and running water where we could fill up our water bottles. There’s a short hike there that takes you to this really odd cave where the temp in the cave is 20 or 30 degrees cooler than the outside air. You can also see some petroglyphs near there.
Spoiler: I submitted a second set of photos from this trip and I believe one of them features a petroglyph.
Interstadial
The color rendition somehow reminds me of film photos. Thanks for sharing!
currants
@Van Buren: OH, me too. I lived in the SW (ne AZ) for a year and did a lot of hiking/climbing, but no rafting. Have to remedy that. These pics make me — I don’t know if I could be homesick for someplace I only lived for a year, but homesick seems right.
currants
@TheOtherHank:
Thanks for the photos! Do you mind sharing the name of the outfit that you went with? Just in case….
TheOtherHank
@currants: Speaking as a no-doubt biased former guide, we went the best outfitter in the Western US: OARS (http://oars.com). They’ve been around since 1969 and run a huge number of rivers. You can do anywhere from an afternoon on the South Fork of the American River (where Sutter’s Mill was located) to 18 day hiker’s special trips down the Grand Canyon.
My personal favorite is the Rogue River in SW Oregon (you can do a 3, 4, or 5 day trip depending on budget and time constraints).
mvr
@Anonymous At Work: Ii had that fishing question too, but I think this is downstream from the trout fishing. But it is beautiful fishing or not.
Origuy
I used to go rafting with a group at work. We did all three forks of the American River, the Merced out of Yosemite, the Stanislaus, the Tuolomne, and the Klamath. Our last trip together we were going on a two day trip down the California Salmon. It was early in the season and the guides made sure to check the water flow gauge at the start of the run. I don’t remember the reading, but they interpreted it as a Class V, as expected. We were all experienced, wearing helmets and wetsuits. We put in three rafts and started to head down the river. At the first rapid, two of the three capsized and we went swimming. I managed to pull myself up onto a rock. When we all got to the side, we had two people missing. The guides put down a rope so we could haul ourselves up to the road that runs alongside the river. The bus driver took us back to our cabins while the guides went looking for the missing. They found one guy a half mile down the river, he was okay. They found the body of the other guy two miles down. He was in the same raft as his wife and I. A landscaper, he was probably in the best shape of any of us. It was a tough night and bus trip home the next day.
Later I was reading the newspaper and saw an article that the BLM had installed a new water gauge; it was running much lower than it should. Had it been correct, the guides would have read it as a Class VI and canceled the run.
We had been with the same rafting company for all of those events. When the funeral was held, they came down to Oakland to be there.
TheOtherHank
@Origuy: Thank you for sharing that. That must have been tough to deal with.
Even on trips that aren’t Class VI, one of the more difficult things to get across to people is that while it is fun, whitewater can be dangerous and you have to treat it with the respect that something that can kill you deserves.
Luckily, I was never on a trip where someone died. People I worked with were and they stayed shook up about it for a long time. The worst thing that happened on any of my trips was having to helicopter evacuate someone and that was bad enough.
For those who aren’t familiar with the whitewater rating system, it ranges from Class I to Class VI. Class I is basically a fast lake; Class VI is serious risk of bodily harm or death.
currants
@TheOtherHank: Thank you SO MUCH for this. I miss the desert Southwest, and love geology and this looks fantastic. There were a number of sites on the reservation where I lived with pictographs, and they are … goosebumps, for me, anyway.