A Week on the Green

Stillwater Canyon is a serene stretch of the Green river that winds for sixty miles through Canyonlands National Park. The Green itself runs almost the whole length of the country, top to bottom, from the Windrivers of northern Wyoming to its confluence with the Colorado, in the Canyonlands--about 30 miles from Moab, Utah, and a lot further from anything else.

We first canoed this stretch of the Green thirteen years and several lifetimes ago. Kate and I were each 50 lbs thinner then, and neither of us had gone gray yet, but we were badly stressed--wound up to the breaking point with careers and child rearing. The river was a transforming experience for us--the raw beauty, the huge emptiness, the solitude. The quiet. It marked us and drew us back.

Now, older and weaker, gone gray, but calmer in some deep way--both quietly happy with our work, children grown, and generally at peace with life--we are returning. With us are our friend Anna and her 14-year old daughter Emma [photo], making the journey for the first time.

It's almost exactly 1,000 miles from Santa Cruz to Moab, a 2 or 3 day drive accross California--either south through Yosemite and Tioga Pass or north through Donner Pass and Truckee--accross all of Nevada--basin and range, basin and range--then halfway accross Utah--first the glaring white of the dry lakes desert, then the dark green of irrigated alfalfa fields, finally the riot of muted colors they call the Panoramalands (No Services, Next 113 Miles)--to the red rock country around Moab.

There's something about the deep red Permian sandstone. Iron in the rock makes it red when it's exposed to the air, but the atmosphere was different back in the Permian, and the rocks are redder and darker than rust should be. Ninety million years ago, the ancestral rocky mountains--higher than the Himalayas today--eroded away to sand and washed downriver to an inland sea, settled out as sediment, dried as the sea disappeared, and were uplifted to form the Colorado Plateau. Moab lies in a deep fault between upthrust layers of sandstone, hundreds of feet thick, deep red on the bottom, topped sometimes by pale pink sandstone or white caprock.

Moab has changed more than we have. The small town of marginal miners and proud, solitary desert rats, ekeing out a narrow living from rock and gem shops by the highway, is gone. The few old-timers remaining are almost invisible, some squeezed to the outside edges of town, most living in some niche of the new tourist economy, in a perpetual state of wry observation. Lots of new motels going up, crowding each other and the few remaining campgrounds. Many outfitters, rafting businesses, clothing and outdoor supply stores, art galleries full of Southwestern almost-chic, innumerable fast food restaurants, espresso and frozen yogurt stands, gift shops, and bars.

Still a surprisingly pleasant town for an evening walk, watching the surrounding cliffs catch the fire of the setting sun, the fire leaping from peak to peak, highlighting now one ridge, now another, as a few widely scattered clouds boil up into dramatic black and white thunderheads in the deep blue sky.

The road from Moab to Mineral Bottom is narrow and unpaved--18 miles of powdered red clay, marked with potholes, sand traps, and tooth-rattling washboard sections. It's better than I remember.

You can bring your own canoe or rent one in town. Either way, the drill is the same: you pay an outfitter to drop you, your canoe, and gear at Mineral Bottom, and to pick you up 56 miles downriver, at Spanish Bottom, some specified number of days later. In between there are no roads, no houses, no telephones, no drinkable water; you're on your own.

At the wheel of an old Suburban, towing a huge rattling trailer with our canoes and gear, is James, a desert rat with an enormous red walrus moustache. Thirty years ago he was a ski bum in little mountain town that somehow became Aspen, Colorado. When the cost of living squeezed him out, he moved to a little desert town: Moab. This time he's buying a small house, while a working man with a working girlfriend can still afford one. He's learned. He isn't dumb, just old-fashioned and mule stubborn--he likes working outdoors, being in his body, suurrounded by this kind of beauty. There's a price to pay for that, and he's willing to pay it.

The last two miles of road are wicked one-lane switchbacks, barely wider than the trailer, squeezed between cliff face and nothing at all. Impassable when rain turns red rock into slick rock, covered with a thin layer of liquid clay. A few spatters hit the windshield and James presses the accelerator a little harder. He needs to get us down--and get himself back up--before the clay gets wet.

We stop above the switchbacks to make sure no one is coming up. The women choose to walk down the first set of switchbacks, partly out of nervousness, partly for the exercise. I stay in the cab with James, partly to keep him company and demonstrate my savoir faire, partly out of simple laziness.

There are two canoes for the four of us, into which must go: two coolers, two large boxes of food and cooking supplies, a two-burner stove, a 3-gallon bottle of propane, four sacks of clothing, sunscreen, and personal items, twelve 2-1/2 gallon water jugs, a portable toilet with enough capacity for eight days of waste for four people, two tents, four pads and sleeping bags, four canoe seats, four life jackets, two bailing buckets, four working oars and a spare, tarps to cover everything in the rain, straps to secure everything if a canoe overturns, two long ropes to tie the canoes at night, and, in a fit of bourgoise luxury, a pair of canvas folding chairs, a large beach umbrella, four parasols, and a collapsible kitchen table.

James eyes the huge mound of gear skeptically. "I hate to leave you like this," he says. But with a worried look at the sky, he does just that. Somehow it all fits. Which is good, because we are genuinely on our own now.

Which is the whole point, really, apart from the incredible beauty of the place. Eight days in the wilderness--56 miles of river and canyons, cliffs and occasional wildlife, stillness and solitude. No works of man except a few Anasazi ruins, uninhabited for a thousand years.

The Green river gets its name from the green silt that colors it and makes it impractical to filter. It was never good to drink, even after letting it settle overnight and straining out the clay. Human habitation upriver has made it unsafe to drink as well.

It remains both safe and pleasant for swimming, with an average temperature of 70-75 degrees Farenheit. A welcome relief from the air temperature, which ranges from 90-105 degrees in the day, falling to a riverlike 70 degrees at night. We have sleeping bags, but we use them only as extra padding to lie on; all we need above us are sheets, and those more for comfort than warmth.

During the day we rely on sunscreen, hats, parasols, the shade of overhanging rock shelves, the occasional blessed cloud, and the river--dipping hats and shirts, filling spray bottles, splashing faces, and swimming every few hours.

I'm more of a mountain person, myself. I prefer being cold to being hot, snow to sand, glaciers to dunes, evergreen to cactus. So why take this trip? Well, my feeling is, if you're going to cross the desert, you should do it by boat.

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| Getting There | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 |