White River Rafting

Anticipation is always part of a whitewater trip, thus the calm. The actual running of the rapids is the unknown, the adventure or the fury. Rivers change almost daily, guides will attest. Holes will appear where none were the day before. Rocks will surface, making rollers and backwater flushes where the river ran smooth the day before.

Rivers are designed around flows, and this year flows were excitingly high and prolonged. This would, of course, include water flowing through Cataract Canyon, which is one of the premier whitewater sections in the country and said to hold some of the biggest and most challenging rapids in the U.S.

In a more normal summer, said Myke Hughes, owner of Adrift Adventures, one of the veteran river companies in Moab, "Flows through Cataract Canyon are between 40,000 and 50,000 (cubic feet per second). This year they were over 70,000. It made for some very exciting runs ... and people responded. Our business, for the shorter one- and two-day trips, is up 20 percent over last year. On the longer four- and five-day trips we are even with last year."

Vacationers, he explained, are pinched for time, "and while they want, very much, to take a river trip, they don't want the longer trips. They want to run a river, then go biking or visit one of the parks or go on a Hummer ride."

A standard rowing trip through Cataract, roughly 120 miles of calm and whitewater, takes five days. Jet boats and motors have made it possible to cut the time to one or two days.

A day on the Colorado River begins early with a bus ride to put in near the potash plant on the banks of the river. After a talk by guides on safety and procedures, boats are launched ... calm water first, then the rapids — 29 in all. A number of rapids were class 3s and 4s at this time of the year. Many were 5s, the highest number possible to still be open to rafts during high water.

The river meanders, flat and calm, for about 50 miles to where it joins with the Green River at the confluence. At the meeting place there is a distinct line where the greenish hue of the Green blends with the silt-laden waters of the Colorado.

This is where boxes are tied down, life vests are tightened, cameras and glasses are put away and more instructions follow ... "If you fall out of the boat, either hold on or swim back to the boat or face down river, feet forward and hold onto the vest — you'll be fine," said Brian Martinez, an eight-year guide with Navtec.

The first of the rapids is "Brown Betty," named after a black cook who drowned in the rapid during the Stanton party river run in 1889. Then comes rapid No. 2 ... then rapids with numbers and names like Little Upset, Seven Seas and the six rapids in Mile Long. The most famous of the big rapids are the Big Drops 1, 2 and 3, with 1 and 2 being good 4-plus rides and 3 being an easy 5, with a hole appropriately called Satan's Gut off to the left.

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