Besides the usual stuff, there was only one piece major piece of advice that Ceiba gave us when they outfitted our rafts and got us ready to go down the Grand Canyon. Right at Bedrock they said. Go RIGHT at Bedrock. Well on our 11th day on the Canyon we would need to remember that advice, because we would be hitting Bedrock in the afternoon.
The day started with a stop at a little place called Elves Chasm. There is a little waterfall that you can hike up to and jump off of, in the midst of our excitement Taylor forgot to zip up his drysuit, Trevor broke the zipper on his drysuit, and Annika lost her sunglasses. Starting the day off 0/3 when you are about to run Bedrock is not ideal.
Our next stop was just above Blacktail Rapid in Blacktail Canyon where you can see Powell's Great Unconformity. An unconformity is when there is a gap in the geologic record. Imagine if you had a pile of National Geographic Magazines organized by year, with the oldest ones on the bottom. It would be easy to find the year that you wanted, because you could simply count down and figure out the year. Now imagine that a huge swath of the magazines are removed from the stack and you have the magazines from the 1990's sitting on top of the ones from the 1960's.
This is what an unconformity is, the only difference is that you have about 1 billion years of rock mission. Yes, 1,000,000,000 years!
To continue our trend of good luck we came to Specter Rapid, where you can see how I ran the rapid. I like to call this one. 'No no no...'
I promptly got into one of the boats after this ride. Next came Bedrock. I opted not to take the duckie down Bedrock. It's a place where you can easily have a boat flip if you go left. The waves weren't great for taking a duckie and the relative risk for minimal reward wasn't worth it. All three boats made it through, but only barely. Big Red, the boat with Trevor and Susan took a line that had them bump into the rock before being pushed right, which is lucky. If you want to see why they tell you not to go left, check out this...
The rest of our day was relaxing until the very end when we got to Deubendorff Rapid and I decided to hop back in the duckie. Our camp was on the beach right below Deubendorff, so I could bear the embarrassment of another flip, and then miraculously I made it through!