At the last minute, Bev calls me from the AZRA warehouse and says they need an assistant on a lower half trip she was doing. I almost declined, because it meant I would need to drive straight from Flag to Moab at the end of the trip for my next Cataract trip with the guys, but I decided it would be worth it to do both trips back to back. I scrambled to get a reservation at a Phantom Ranch dorm, then drove to Flag, left my truck at the Radisson, caught a shuttle to the South Rim, then hiked down to Phantom in the dark, where come to find out they gave away my bunk. The Phantom people were nice, and they found a generous guy from Colorado who had a cabin all to himself, and he let me and a guy from Germany bunk with him. The next morning the AZRA group came by, picked me up, and I was in the paddle boat for Horn, Granite, and Hermit. We had a great group of guides and clients, most who really enjoyed paddling, so for the rest of the week I rotated around oar boats and rowed for the guides, giving them a break. I think I rowed over 100 miles, which was great.
The highlight of the trip was several days of extreme rain, which caused hundreds of waterfalls, flash floods in side canyons, rainbows, and an epic hike up Tapeats, over Surprise, and down Deer Creek--all of which were flashing and flooding. Luckily we got the group across and the creek and around the patio with ropes, and made it back to camp just before dark. The next day clear waterfalls continued to pour thousands of feet off the top of the redwall in the Muav Gorge, even with sunny skies, so the Esplanade must have been a river. I tested a new Sony waterproof camera, which has some neat panorama stitching, as can be seen by many of the photos below. For some reason the larger panorama photos mess up photo labeling. Most of them are obvious, such as South Rim, Granite Rapids lunch, Shinumo Creek waterfall, heavy rain rowing, Blacktail flashing, rainbow at camp below Blacktail, then the Deer Creek patio flooding and hand line use, and the bottom photo is at Spring Canyon (mile 204).
Muav Gorge waterfalls
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