On the Colorado
November 29, 2018

Intentions and actions . . .

What to do with our time away from home?  Acknowledging that we are blessed with so many options for how to spend our time, we settle on something to start with, and don't worry about what may come after.  When activities are to be outside, weather conditions play a big part of our decision-making.

Castle Rock . . .

A previous windy day had been more suited for dry land than kayaking, but still we were anxious to get on the water.  Happily, perfect weather came along for just that and we set off from a launch point at Castle Rock into a reed-lined bay.  It took quite a bit of scouting to find an opening through the reeds that let us get out into the river.

I took this shot back at the fancifully-named landmark before exploring the bay.  Personally, I don't think it bears much resemblance to any castle I've ever seen, but perhaps in the desert, it has to suffice.

Those are the Chemehuevi Mountains beyond the bay and across the river on the California side, a prominent range from most vantage points around Havasu.

Once we were out of the bay, I stashed the camera and other valuables in the dry bag.  I am very cautious about having it out while I am on the water in the kayak.  I haven't dumped yet (well, there was that one time on the Verde River, but that was to be expected), but prefer not to take chances.  The result is that I get few photos whilst putting around in the boat.

We were nominally fishing while paddling our way upriver, no destination in mind, just enjoying the perfection of the day and marveling at the beauty all around us.  The channel in which we found ourselves had no lake traffic at all; in fact, we had it entirely to ourselves.

Our search for a place to beach and get out for lunch was to no avail; we found no shoreline other than straight-up cliffs and a wilderness of reeds.

The view in this photo made me decide to pull out the camera, and then was inspired to also get out the phone and send a shot to Trinity, thinking she might get a kick out of seeing where Grandma was hanging out.  And truthfully, Grandma kind of got a kick out of being able to send a picture to her granddaughter while kayaking on the Colorado - I'm plenty old enough to still be in awe of such technology.

There's the señor unsuccessfully angling . . .

 . . . and there we are managing a selfie (barely) without falling out of our boats and without dropping any electronics into the drink.

While the camera was out, I entrusted it briefly to the señor, who snapped a couple of shots.  When he spotted a black-crowned night heron perched, oddly enough, on a cliff face, we took turns snapping away, but never did come up with a decent shot: it's really difficult to take a photograph with a zoom while in a moving kayak.  This was the best we could come up with.  Almost immediately afterward, another heron flew into the streamside vegetation.  That bird is a rare sighting for us, strange to see another right afterward.

After paddling away all the livelong day, my shoulders commiserated with my feet from the previous day.  At that, it would have been only a bit of soreness, but when we went to carry the boats back to the truck, I lifted badly and injured my back.  It happens that Castle Rock is a nice place to launch, but a pretty long distance to carry the kayaks - it felt even longer after that, even though we took them one at a time after my goof-up.

Three Canadians, two criminals and a ranger . . . 

Lake Havasu has some nice fishing piers, which we opted to try out.  For a long while, the only folks out there were us and a gentleman from Saskatchewan.  Quite a talker he was; we learned a good bit about his likes and dislikes and so much more.

At any rate, as the afternoon turned toward evening, a few more people began to wander in, mostly filtering toward the other end of the pier.  One youngish couple set up in the middle and another couple was at the far end.  As we were being regaled with tales and comparisons between the U.S. and Canada, we didn't pay too much attention to the newcomers, although I did notice something that set me to questioning in my mind.

One of the men was placidly resting his forearms on the deck railing and jiggling his hands very slightly.  Eventually, my curiosity would have gotten the best of me and I would have gone down to ask what he was doing.  As it turned out, I found out without asking.

Before that, though, our Saskatchawanite glanced back toward the fairly distant parking lot and lightly told the group at large that they'd better have their fishing licenses handy because the Game & Fish ranger had pulled in.  A little chuckling ensued except for one couple who suddenly got the deer-in-the-headlights look and began to pack their gear.

Quicker than you could register it, they were gone back along the twisted path to the parking lot.  At that point, we realized they had an issue, and as we watched, it looked like they were headed off the trail and into the brushy hillside.  But no, there they were again walking toward the parking lot and about to meet the ranger who was advancing toward them.  They uneventfully crossed paths, but then the ranger went off into those same bushes, emerging with the couple's fishing gear in hand. They had ditched it for later retrieval, hoping to make a clean getaway.

The ranger yelled over to ask if they had been fishing.  When our group acknowledged that, he turned and ran after them.  By that time, they had a good head start and we thought they would escape his clutches and it looked as if they might be successful.  Alas, it was not to be; the ranger nabbed the miscreants, ticketed them and confiscated their gear.

The female half of the remaining couple had approached us to be filled in on the drama.  I struck up a conversation with her and discovered they were from Alberta.  Donna and I hit it off and determined to stay in touch.  Somewhere in there, I found out what her husband, Jack, had been doing.  He was jigging, as he called it.  His style of fishing was to bait a hook at the end of a length of fishing line, drop it straight down and gently bob it up and down.  His endeavor was far more successful than the more traditional method employed by the rest of us.  He casually pulled up a 15-inch largemouth bass, which he awarded to his fellow Canadian.  Not taking any chances with John Law present, we measured it to determine its legality.

 

With nefarious doin's afoot, the ranger was taking no chances: he returned to make sure that none of us were fishing without a license, drinking alcohol, possessing illegal fish or otherwise creating havoc.  After our shakedown, we all went our separate ways while admiring beautiful skies and sunsets.

One of the few things I like about winter (hmmm . . . maybe the only one) are the colorful sundogs that adorn the sky.  I shot this photo of one from the truck during an afternoon drive; I never cease to be delighted by their appearance.

Wikipedia offers a drier but accurate explanation of sundogs: they are "formally called a parhelion, an atmospheric optical phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to one or both sides of the Sun. Two sun dogs often flank the Sun within a 22° halo.  The sun dog is a member of the family of halos, caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere. Sun dogs typically appear as a pair of subtly colored patches of light, around 22° to the left and right of the Sun, and at the same altitude above the horizon as the Sun.  Sun dogs are best seen and most conspicuous when the Sun is near the horizon"
 

SARA's Crack . . .

On another dry-land day, the señor was anxious to explore a slot canyon he had read about, known locally as SARA's Crack, the "SARA" being an acronym for a certain recreation area.  It was odd that when Chris described the proposed hike as moderately difficult, I somehow heard instead "easy-peasy", even though he would never use that term.  And that was the way it began as we started down into a gravel- and sand-bottomed wide canyon.

The swirled and twisted rock cliffs towered high above us as the canyon width lessened until we came to the slot itself.

Far back in there, we encountered a couple who were retreating toward the entrance.  They informed us that the way was impassable up ahead because of a pool of stagnant water of indeterminate depth.  Even better, to get that far, one would have to traverse a seven-foot dropoff via a rope. 

That looked pretty darned sketchy to me as I hemmed and hawed, so the gentleman kindly demonstrated just how it was done, a feat I thought briefly about taking on.  The fly in the ointment was that now I knew I still would not be able to continue past the pool, and therefore would be required to climb back up that waterfall. 

Additional hemming and hawing, so he even showed me how to climb the seven feet back up by going hand over hand on the rope.  I remained mostly dubious; after all, he was a 30-something male and I am a 72-year-old woman. 

Chris chimed in with agreement that we might want to forego that particular feat.  Certainly he could manage the maneuver, but I suspect he was envisioning dropping cheese sandwiches to me at the bottom until he figured out a way to extract me from the hole.

An impasse: we now had two options.  One was to retrace our steps back to the truck and drive away like sensible folks.  The other possibility was favored by the señor: hike back to the canyon's opening and find a route that we could use to climb up and out, bypassing the slot and its watery roadblock.

What was it about that second option that didn't give me enough pause to know that once I had climbed out of the canyon and skirted along above it that I would then be required to climb back into it at another place, requiring yet another climb out???

As I gazed up in terror at the route he proposed to take, I distinctly said something along the lines of "No way am I going up there", except that I am fairly certain I was far more adamant in my statement.  The next thing I knew, I had been coerced, cajoled and coaxed into the climb.  Out of the canyon and along above the slot we went, me teetering and not looking down until we arrived at the far end of the crack.

Well, there would be no point to all of that unless we were going to slip, slide and slither down a very steep trail to get back to the bottom and so we did.  The following photo does not begin to convey how scary that scrabble was.

The bottom end of the slot canyon was even more beautiful, narrow and precipitous than the top end: it was less of a walk and more of a climb to squeeze through.

We continued on until we came to the pool that was indeed as nasty and smelly as we had been told.  And once more, we were required to backtrack our way out of SARA's Crack.

By the time we worked our way back out into the relative open, I was bushed from our previous day of kayaking combined with the morning's shenanigans.  Any sane person would then climb back out of the canyon, skirt the slot once again and climb back down to return to the truck (notice how I keep coming back to that), but oh no: in for a penny, in for a pound, I think.  We've come this far; we might as well continue to the river.

Distant vistas of rugged mountainous expanses relieved the fatigue to some extent or at least distracted me . . .

. . . until finally we sighted the lake far up ahead.  That's when I tried not to think about the helicopter that was not coming to lift me back out of there.

Passing so-called "balanced rock", we found a nominally level spot to enjoy our lunch ensconced between two mammoth twin pillars while we watched the birds in the bay - it was awash with American coots and American wigeons.  Not another species was to be seen.

As they say, what goes up must come down.  In like fashion, I'd gotten myself in there, now I had to get myself out, and I did, but it was not the easiest thing I ever did.  We took a higher route out, ridge-running for much of the way, and me continuing to do my best not to look down.

I did notice that with all our extensive hill climbing, I never got out of breath and realized that I am unaccustomed to doing that type of exercise at lower elevations.  It seems to be our norm that we do those kinds of things in our home-area mile-high elevation or in other even higher mountains.  Despite the relative ease for heart and lungs, my muscles and feet kicked up quite the fuss afterward.

Homeward . . .

No dilly-dallying on the way home:  a commitment in Prescott meant we got an early start, getting us out and about before the sun made its appearance; we were rewarded with a beautiful island send-off.

A plan
November 25, 2018

Whew!  We got there, and even more importantly, we returned!  The "there" was the wilderness area/wildlife refuge along the lake where Blankenship Valley meets the river.

As weariness dissipated (thankfully, it always does), we made plans for a full day.  We would rise early to take the boats out for some fishing.  Presuming we would tire of that at some juncture, we intended to take a trek into a wilderness area in Blankenship Valley.  That walk would take us to the national wildlife refuge that brackets much of Havasu’s shoreline.

As plans sometimes do, that one went awry pretty quickly after we discerned our weather situation.  Wind was whipping along at a good enough clip that the lake had whitecaps and the birds even grounded themselves.

We would have been blown to who-knows-where in our little kayaks, so the planned afternoon activity rose to the head of the line.

Equipment and clothing rearranged, we set off to that desert region north of the city.  The requisite road was a bit unclear; the map and the zig-zags made by off-roaders don’t necessarily match.  We tried one gravel road because the mountains in that direction looked interesting.  Not too far along, we felt a little bit of a sinking sensation, and I don't mean in our psyches; the Toter was perhaps not up to the task of navigation in sand-bottomed drainages.  After several attempts, a few turn-arounds and a good bit of discussion, we  decided that where we were was just right, despite the rooster-tails of dust were emanating from passing ATVs.

After all, we were heading into the Havasu Wilderness Area where they could not follow.  The designated motorized-free space encompasses 18,000 acres and is within the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge, which borders a good bit of the river.

Our walk downstream through the wide Blankenship Valley was hemmed on one side by one of the most gnarly rugged ranges ever, with beckoning twisted rocky canyons.

At times, our route was through water-cut narrows . . .

. . . and sand washes . . .

. . . but often just wandering through creosote-dotted gravelly flats and slopes, criss-crossed with burro tracks.

The occasional palo verde tree found a place amidst the creosote as in the photo below.  That picture shows the other side of the valley: an impressive line of sand dune mountains.

As we neared the valley's terminus, we could not see water, but knew it was near by the line of vegetation up ahead.  Skirting around high dunes, we headed for what looked like the nearest waterline,  Alas, we were met by an impenetrable jungle.

It was a heck of a long trek to get there and not get to water . . .

. . . so we followed a burro track up onto a high dune, presuming that if the animals went that way to get to water, so could we.  So much for that idea.  Our higher perspective did allow us to see a backwater marshy area (the lake along the river's course was still far distant), but it would have taken a machete, a chainsaw and waders to get us through that morass.

A bit more regrouping and wandering did allow us to locate a very nice lunch site with a view of the water that we were clearly never going to stand beside - darn good thing we hadn't planned to fish out there.

We caught sight of a beautiful northern harrier while we lunched and were surrounded by hordes of violet-green swallows.  We heard a phainopepla, which also got added to the list.

I am grateful that my wonky feet continue to do what I ask of them, but they and I pay a price for those demands.  By the time I reach the terminus of a long trek, I am feeling the pain, but obviously, there is no choice but to return, and so I do, and they continue to get me there despite it all.  

On the north side of the valley in front of that range of twisted leaning rock was a continuous high miles-long dune.  I really wanted to see what was at the foot of the mountains on the other side of it and I really didn't want to climb it; however, curiosity won out.  Up we went on the steep slope, only to discover that there was another line just like it, so our curiosity would have to remain unsatisfied.

Our higher vantage point did allow looks back at whence we came.  From down below, we were unable to see water anywhere at our approach, but this view was entirely different.  As we walked that high ridge, we often followed a burro track that made the way easier on the steep side slopes.  Even then, there were times when I balked at a traverse that was slippery enough to give my stomach flip-flops.  My modus operandi at those times is to refuse, balk, whine, whimper, refuse again, and then to give in to doing something I really don't want to do, but with the señor holding my hand for moral support, we get 'er done.  In that case, he cajoled that if the burros could do it, it must be perfectly safe.  I saw no bleached bones below; perhaps he was right.

As much sign as we saw that indicated the presence of burros, we were surprised not to encounter any.  That changed when we were up on the high ridge; I spotted a small herd of five burros across on the slope of the rocky range.  They were far too distant to get a photo, especially since the wind was blowing gale force.  It was work to remain upright - holding the camera still enough for that kind of shot was impossible.

We inspected what must have been a remnant from the granddaddy of all floods.  It appeared that water built up a large mud dike across a section of the wash and then washed most of it away.

When all was said and done, we were wind-blasted and tired and I was foot-sore, but we had had another adventure and seen a piece of country that was new to us.  Our eight-mile trek was done and we were grateful for our place in the world.