27 - 5/8/2010 - Yampa River (Day 6)

Entering Split Mountain Canyon

In the morning, I learned that Paula had fallen and broken her finger the night before, not long after I had fallen asleep. She seemed in good spirits, and would be able to row her raft, but we would still need to take her to have it looked at. We got on the river early so we could get to the takeout as quickly as possible. This was the second time that my tent had frost on it, and I had to roll up the rainfly while it was still wet.

Below the Cove Camp there is 7 miles of relatively calm water. We still made 3mph without rowing, but it felt like we weren't moving. Part of the reason for that was that we could see the mouth of the canyon where we had camped the whole time. We were just meandering.

We stopped for a minute at a boat launch area and talked to the ranger about Paula's finger. The ranger took off with us and ran down into Split Mountain Canyon, which is where the other side of the mountain that was split can be found. It is almost the mirror image of where we camped the night before.

Split Mountain Canyon has more plentiful and exciting rapids than the rest of the trip. The scenery is also a bit different, with lots of light colored crumbly sandstone. It was a lot of fun, and was a great end to the trip.

We landed at the takeout a little before noon and started unloading boats and putting the gear into the trailer. We had a quick lunch, and then a couple of us had to deal with the groover. This took a little while, but at least there was running water.

Packed and ready to go, we headed into Vernal, Utah to have Paula's finger looked at. This took a couple of hours, which put us a bit behind schedule. We grabbed dinner to go and hit the road. We reserved hotel rooms in Ogden, Utah (good thing we had internet devices with us) and made it there around 10PM. We set up a plan to get up and leave at 5AM and get breakfast on the road.

The rest of the trip was all truck stops and non-stop travel (I was glad I didn't have to drive). We made it to the Seattle area at 6PM and I was home by 7. I was glad that I was taking another vacation day the next day to recover.

26 - 5/7/2010 - Yampa River (Day 5)

Ready to go

This would be our last day on the Yampa. A couple of miles below camp, we floated onto the Green River, which was running pretty low. It added a little water to the flow. Not far below this, we stopped to look at some petroglyphs.

The rocks on the Green were quite a bit different from the walls on the Yampa. The Green has more dark sedimentary layers of rock, which can be seen below:

Joan on the Green

We stopped for lunch, which was crackers and seafood dip (and candy), and worked our way through the end of the canyon. The canyon ends at one end of Split Mountain, where one mountain was split by another upthrusting mountain. The camp here is called Cove Camp, though we would probably call it Dead Sheep, because there was a dead sheep just upstream. Just past the camp the land opened up into a broad, flat valley.

I set up camp on the beach, next to my boat. Dinner was huge steaks, and just about everyone finished their entire steak, which was unexpected, but probably necessary. I went to bed early, and I apparently fell asleep quickly.

25 - 5/6/2010 - Yampa River (Day 4)

Randy runs Warm Springs

None of us knew what to expect this day. We knew we needed to kiss the Tiger Wall to make sure we would have a good run at Warm Springs, but we had no idea what this all meant. We got to Tiger Wall within an hour. Because of my helmet, I didn't make my first attempt, so I had to hurry and kiss the wall while it was flying by - I made it, but I came very close to losing an eyebrow...

We also ran into the research team who were finishing up their trench filling and sediment studies.

At Warm Springs, we all took a look and discussed the line. Joan, who was in an IK, was nervous, but we were all proud of her for going for it. I went down by the river to take pictures. The rapid was straightforward and runnable, but it would take some pushing. Joan followed another boat and was too far left. A wave stopped her and the next wave flipped her. She swam the big hole, and it spat her out. She took a swim, but still did a great job. I took the easy run - rather than starting center and working right, I ran the big waves on the right and stayed right until I passed the big hole.

Not long after regrouping, we came to our camp area - Box Elder. A couple of the guys walked down to make sure that the camp we wanted was available. In the meantime, a pair of bighorn sheep walked right by us and crossed the river. Box Elder 3 was available to us, so we landed at the big beach. We had a great lunch and set up camp in the trees. A few of us explored the shallow caves at the other camps and saw a small group of deer.

Before dinner, the ranger came by and looked at our permit and gear and gave us some information. He showed us a photo of the camp from a week before, when there was 6 inches of snow on the ground. A bit later, the research team and another group passed by and said hello.

The evening was cold, and it was really nice that a couple of people had brought heaters.

24 - 5/5/2010 - Yampa River (Day 3)

The Fords run the gnar at Big Joe

We got a later start this day, but it would turn out to be a very long day. Before I left, I took pictures of everyone running the big rapid next to camp. After a couple of hours, we came to Signature Cave and climbed up to it. As we were crossing the field, a trio of bighorn sheep got a little annoyed at us for disturbing their lunch. Here is a picture of me in the cave with the river in the distance:

The climb back down was a little scary at one point. There is a small ledge that had a mud puddle, and I was a little scare of slipping and falling, but I made it. I ran out of space and battery power as I was going back down to the boats, so I took advantage of being first down to change them.

As we continued down the river, it got twistier and the walls got steeper. We stopped for lunch near a rock formation called Cleopatra's Couch. Lunch was tabouli salad wraps, which was a little strange, but filling, which was important that day. This giant wall greeted us in the mid-afternoon:

The wind came up after a while, and it was slow going for a while. I took advantage of the situation to hone my oar-feathering techniques. Late in the day, we stopped and hiked up to Mantle Cave (named for some people named Mantle, not for a mantle-like formation). It was a hard hike in our drysuits, but it was an interesting place (other than the parts that had been vandalized - jerks).

Just downstream of Mantle Cave, we found our camp at Laddie Park. This camp also had a lot of willows on the bank, and wasn't easy to deal with, but the main camp section was a large grassy field, which made for nice camping.

Dinner was meatballs and rice, and because it was Paula's birthday, we had cake and ice cream! It rained a little bit, but it stopped after a while and the desert dried out the gear by morning.

On this day, I noticed that I was really getting dehydrated and it was making me uncomfortable. I had to really step up my water intake on this day. Another problem I was seeing was that my hands were getting really dry.

23 - 5/4/2010 - Yampa River (Day 2)

Rafts on the Yampa

Knowing that we had a long day ahead of us, we all got up and got going. The river moved quickly, so we didn't have to work too hard, but there was some wind to slow us down. We stopped for another great lunch, and then made it to Big Joe camp in the late afternoon.

Big Joe was our most difficult camp. The beach was small and covered with willows, and the upper bench had a lot of cactus. The river bed had really silty mud that would suck the shoes off of your feet if you didn't keep moving. I had to unload the entire boat from the front, which meant pulling a lot of my gear over the cooler.

It turns out that we were smart to have gotten going early. Not long after we got to camp, a commercial training group landed above our camp and began discussing what their next choice would be. Apparently, we had grabbed their preferred camp.

My umbrella tent made setting up camp easy, and soon I was relaxing and having a delicious dinner.

22 - 5/3/2010 - Yampa River (Day 1)

Boats in the upper Yampa canyon

The night was cold, and there was frost on the tents in the morning. After a slow start to the day, we were packed and ready to go at around 1PM. One of the great things about the Yampa is that within the first 15 minutes, you're in the canyon, and it lasts for days.

Just before the canyon, we ran into sandbars. One moment I was rowing through water, and the next my oar blades were down in the sand. A couple of people in our party got stuck for a few minutes, but once in the canyon, this was no longer a problem.

We soon stopped for lunch. Our excellent lunch chefs prepared a great meal for us to enjoy. During lunch, I put a small hole in my drysuit, which I patched at dinner and it never gave me any trouble.

After only 4 miles, we pulled over to camp at Anderson Hole. This was a long beach camp. I set up the groover and my tent, and I was done for the day. After dinner, a couple of us explored the area around an abandoned miner's cabin.

My one mistake on the trip was that I forgot to bring the hand soap. Luckily, I had a half bottle of soap for the groover and someone else had a full bottle for the kitchen.

Yampa River Trip

 Randy at the put-in

Over the past few years, a group of us have done a spring rafting trip together. We've run the John Day twice, the Owyhee, and now the Yampa. The Yampa River flows through Dinosaur National Monument in NW Colorado, not far from Utah. The river flows into the Green River, and is the only undammed major tributary of the Colorado River.

We were able to get a "low use" permit for a May 3 put-in. This permit meant that we were the only group of people allowed to launch that day, so we didn't need to have assigned campsites. We still had to follow some rules - no layovers, no lunch stops at campsites, and we could only stay in posted campsites - but we could go at our own pace.

As is customary, I took "groover duty" for the trip. This has its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, I don't have to help out in the kitchen. On the minus side, I have to set up first when we get to camp and I am the last packed when we leave. I've learned to pack so that it's easy to put the groover in at the last minute so I can pack everything else while I'm waiting. There is one more plus - since I'm going to be waiting for people anyway, I can sleep late and still get on the river with everyone else.

The drive to the Yampa took 2 days. The first day, we drove from the Seattle area to Twin Falls, Idaho, with a brief stop in Boise to buy spare lifejackets (we hadn't realized we needed a spare for each raft, and we had only brought 2 spares in total). On the second day, we stopped in Heber, Utah for lunch at an interesting restaurant run by a man who was born in Korea, adopted by a Dutch family, and then grew up in England. He was an investment banker in New York before moving to Utah to start a restaurant. After an excellent lunch, we headed to the put-in for the Yampa.

When we arrived at the put-in, we found another group preparing their boats. They told us that they were a research trip going down to a specific spot to gather results and clean up from an experiment started the year before. They were not allowed to camp where anyone else wanted, and most likely we would only see them for a few minutes.

We unloaded our gear, put our equipment together, set up camp, and had a nice dinner (burgers and hot dogs) before retiring for the night.

The flow was around 4000 cfs and slowly dropping, which turned out to be perfect for a first trip. People who started a week later would see increasing flows and flows since mid-May have been above 10,000 cfs. This can be great for people who know what to expect, but it could have been too high for us.