Escalante Calling

The Escalante was a complete mystery to river-runners until May 1948, when famed Grand Canyon river guides Harry Aleson and Georgie White Clark, using a small Navy surplus raft, made the first recorded trip down the river. It took them seven days to drag, portage, and float down to the Colorado, then two more to get to Lees Ferry.

By contrast, our trip, though strenuous at times, seems more like a float in the park. Our second mandatory portage, where the river funnels through another impenetrable boulder blockade, takes about two hours. Then it's more fast water, rock dodging, and constant attention to stay in the deepest part of the channel. Pulling over to shore to wait for stragglers, Laba, the instigator of our trip, is one happy man. "We are so damned lucky to have this good water!" he crows.

ANOTHER SPELL OF GORGEOUS weather - sunny and warm, but not too hot - ushers in the following morning. We're on the water by nine, and from the outset there is a lively current and steady technical rapids to negotiate. It's tough, demanding work, more so for our only tandem team, Bob Donner and Bonnie Wolf. Horsing their hefty 16-footer through the obstacle course, Bob quips, "I love whitewater, but about now I could do with a little less of it."

Finally, we get a breather when the river temporarily slows to a modest current. Leaning back in our boats, we drift lazily in circles and quietly, reverently, suck in the slickrock scenery. Jeff, out in front in his kayak, breaks the stillness with an excited holler and points high at Stevens Arch, vividly outlined near the rim of the sheer, thousand-foot-high canyon wall. Through the arch's window-measured in 1954 by the National Geographic Society at 225 feet across-is a dazzling patch of brilliantly sunlit blue sky.

Coyote Gulch is right around the next curve. We pull out at the mouth, where an ankle-deep spring-fed stream flows into the murky river. The gulch is the most commonly used take-out point for paddlers unable or unwilling to make it down to Powell.

To see for ourselves what this alternative exit route entails, Jeff and I set out on an exploratory midday hike. Carrying just water bottles, we aim to reach the canyon rim, which is accessible by a four-wheel-drive road high atop the plateau. We immediately learn that the barely discernible trail is in a class by itself. Not only do we have to scramble over exposed narrow ledges and trudge up a large shifting sand hill with an elevation gain of about 1,000 feet, but we also have to surmount the notorious Crack-in-the-Wall, a hairpin slit in a sheer rock cliff just below the rim where even my gangly frame has difficulty slithering through.

"Hey, think we made the right call to get a motorboat pickup on the lake?" Jeff huffs when we finally escape the Crack and emerge onto the open, windswept mesa. "Duh!" I reply without hesitation, painfully aware that if this were the real deal, our vehicle would still lie two agonizing miles away. "Can you imagine hauling all our junk out this way? It'd take at least three, maybe four carries. We'd be shriveled or dead by the time we were done."

The plan for May 18, our final day of paddling, is to embark early, before the sun blasts our sandbar camp near Cow Canyon, and head six miles down to flooded Willow Gulch, currently the approximate limit of Powell's long reach up the Escalante arm. There, the following morning, we will be picked up by a concessionaire motorboat and whisked back to Bullfrog Marina, where our vehicles are waiting. The three-and-a-half-hour, two-boat shuttle is costing our group $836, but split six ways, the price tag seems a bargain compared to tackling the portage out of Coyote Gulch.

The trip is nearly done, but the Escalante, not your everyday river to run, isn't done with us. "We've entered Bizarroland," Larry's wife, Barb, says as we plunge into a surreal, almost ominous, weirdly eroded mini-canyon incised within the much larger canyon. Avalanching walls of sodden gravel and sand kerplunk into the river way too close to our swerving boats. "If one of these slides hits us, we're going down!" the normally unruffled Laba shouts as a dump-truck load misses his canoe by just a few feet.

And that's not the only bizarre phenomenon on this final day. Prior to five consecutive years of extreme drought, which began in October 1999, the Escalante Canyon, as far upstream as Coyote Gulch, was a deepwater fjord of the Powell Reservoir. Now that the lake has receded to historically low levels, evidence of this previous inundation is obvious wherever we look. A white, crusty bathtub ring lines the canyon walls 150 feet above our heads. As the Escalante cuts itself a new course to the shrunken reservoir, carving out decades of accumulated silt, it has created a narrow, sheer-walled channel that is unstable to the extreme.

Suddenly, sand waves begin to surface out of nowhere, startling all of us. Relatively rare, these waves are caused by the water's movement against the silted river bottom. They appear without notice, often in mid-river, and disappear just as quickly. The ones we're bouncing over are a few feet high, and add to the exciting ride.

Our otherworldly run continues for nearly three hours, then abruptly the current sputters and dies. Without fanfare, we are deposited in a very shallow, braided mudflat littered with floating sticks and scummy debris. The river is no more, replaced by the dull backwaters of the stagnant reservoir. Accustomed to a swift, dynamic flow the past eight days, we now feel like we're paddling in sticky brown molasses.

Charting our way through the sluggish shallows and flotsam, we inch farther down the arm to where the water eventually deepens and clears to a pellucid bluish-green. The peaceful sounds of trilling canyon wrens, the rustle of wind, and the dipping of paddles are suddenly shattered by engine noise amplified off the unnaturally bleached sandstone walls. We have re-entered the realm of motorized boats-from RV-sized houseboats and powerful runabouts to whining, pesky Jet Skis.

I could let this loud, gas-spewing intrusion get to me. I could lose the harmony I've found, the profound sense of awe. Instead, my eyes follow a pair of prairie falcons soaring and barrel-rolling against the blue sky, riding the thermals up and over the Escalante in the direction we have come. The birds are free and spirited and bursting with ecstasy, just as we have been while traveling through this raw, unfinished, beautiful canyon world.