Grand Canyon - Preface

This blog is an attempt to capture pictures and notes from a two week trip down the Colorado during the second half of June. I'm using the blog format since it lends itself to this kind of online journal - but that means that in order to follow us downstream, you must begin at the bottom and work back. Sorry. The alternative was to fake the dates, but I wanted to keep the dates, and the approximate times, true to the actual itinerary. The best way to read the entire blog is to click on the 'June" label to the right and scroll up from the bottom.

The blog is in some way an appendix to my long-running hshipman blog. For a variety of reasons, I felt it better to create a separate record of this trip and keep the number of Grand Canyon posts in hshipman to just a few. Similarly, and not surprisingly, there will soon be a number of canyon posts in my gravel beach blog as well.

The Canyoneers trip that Devon and I were part of left Lee's Ferry around 11am on June 17th and arrived at South Cove on Lake Mead around 2pm on June 30th. There were six boats and seven guides. There were a total of seventeen paying customers above Bright Angel; eleven below. You can probably sort out more of the details as you read through the blog.

I apologize in advance for the mixed tense - sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes I will speak in the past - it is an artifact of post-hoc journaling. I've tried to maintain accuracy, or at least to provide qualification where my memory was weak. The photos tell few lies, but my notes were sparse and my recollection poor. And as fascinating and diverse as the canyon is, it is easy to let one day or one reach blend into another.

There are links to online photo albums on the right margin, including an album of all the photos used in the blog itself and two albums containing a much larger collection (one for the upper river and one for the lower river). The photos are tagged with the trip day (1 to 14) and are also geolocated, so you can view them on a map or even on Google Earth. The locations are approximate - do not use for navigation!

I wish there were more pictures in the rapids, but one concession to a mortal camera was that it made somewhere around 160 trips to the dry bag over the course of the 14 days.

I hope the blog proves fun, whether you were on our trip, whether you just wish you had been, or whether you are just as glad you were not!