🛶 Kayak Camping Down the Green River in Utah, 2006 🦟

Travel Tales – By Barbara Levine

Those Were the Days

🛶 Kayak Camping Down the Green River in Utah 🦟

June 2006

After returning from a three-week trip to France and Italy in June 2006, my husband Stan and I have only six days to prepare and pack for our next three-week adventure: a 10-day kayak/camping trip down the Green River in Utah through Canyonlands National Park – a beautiful 56-mile journey on mostly flat water. We did this same trip seven years earlier in eight days with the same couple, Gary and Ann – but it was in October then when the water was lower and the insects and heat were nonexistent.

Barbara and Stan on the Green River in Utah in June 2006

🛶 Prologue

Stan and I retired nearly 30 years ago in 1992. We bought a motorhome so we could travel with our dogs, and we took up whitewater kayaking in 1995.

June 2006: This is our third motorhome, a diesel pusher with four slide outs, towing our Jeep with our sea kayaks. We are driving through Utah on our way to the Green River.

Stan met Gary for the first time at an Advanced Ski Clinic at Mammoth Mountain in the late 1990s. Gary and his wife Ann were volunteering as Mountain Hosts, and were living in their RV at Mammoth for the winter.

We introduced Gary and Ann to whitewater kayaking, and we have had some wonderful and scary adventures with them in that sport. In return, they introduced us to sea kayaking.

We bought our sea kayaks so we could join them on our first kayak camping adventure down the Green River in Utah for eight days in October 1999 – a river that none of us had been on before.

After that first trip down the Green River with the Gary and Ann, the four of us also used our sea kayaks together on the ocean with orca killer whales in 2001 in the San Juan Islands (off of Vancouver, British Columbia), and kayak camping on Lake Santa Margarita in 2002 (near San Luis Obispo, California).

In 2006, seven years after our first Green River trip, the four of us decide to repeat the experience (but for 10 days instead of eight) and in May (rather than October).

🛶 Preliminaries

Stan & I drive to Indio in our Jeep with our sea kayaks on Monday, June 12, where we keep our motorhome on our lot at the Motorcoach Country Club. We spend two nights, hook up our Jeep to the motorhome, and drive to Moab, Utah, via Phoenix.

Map showing stops from our home (My Location) to Moab, Utah (3) via Indio (1) and Phoenix (2). Mineral Bottom (4) (where we launch our kayaks) and Spanish Bottom (6) where we finish our 56-mile paddle are also shown.

🛶 Starting Point in Moab, Utah

We meet Gary & Ann in Moab on Thursday, June 15, and enjoy a celebratory birthday dinner for Stan at a fancy ranch several miles out of town on the Colorado River.

Ann & Gary with Stan & Barbara celebrating Stan's 69th birthday the night before we put in on the Green River (we never looked so good over the next 10 days)

Early Friday morning, June 16, we load up our gear and kayaks at Tag-a-Long Expeditions in Moab, where we leave our RVs for the duration.

Barbara, Stan, Ann & Gary in Moab – loaded up and ready to set out

🛶 Drive to Mineral Bottom on the Green

Tag-a-Long drives us to the put-in spot at Mineral Bottom on the Green River (a 35-mile drive).

Stan, Gary, Ann and our driver on the 35-mile drive

from Moab to our put-in at Mineral Bottom on the Green River

Looking down from the rim at Mineral Bottom on the Green River in the far distance –

it is a really hairy trip down all of the switchbacks!

Tag-a-Long is scheduled to pick us up in a large boat at Spanish Bottom on the Colorado River 10 days later.

🛶 Paddle Route

We paddle for 52 miles on the Green River to the Confluence with the Colorado River, and then paddle for four miles down the Colorado to Spanish Bottom – just above where the rapids start in Cataract Canyon.

Map of our paddle route on the Green and Colorado Rivers through Canyonlands National Park in Utah.

•. Our starting point and final take-out points are in Moab (upper right).

• We launch our kayaks at Mineral Bottom (middle top) and paddle six days (21 miles) to Anderson Bottom (middle) where we spend three nights for a much needed respite and lots of hiking.

• We continue on for 31 more miles to the Confluence of the Green & Colorado Rivers (middle bottom).

• We then paddle four miles down the Colorado River to our destination at Spanish Bottom (middle bottom) where we are picked up in a large boat and taken back to Moab.

🛶 Put-In at Mineral Bottom

Tag-a-Long drops us off at Mineral Bottom with our kayaks and and all of our gear at mid-day on Friday morning, June 16 .

Stan, Barbara, Gary & Ann at the put-in spot at Mineral Bottom.

How can we ever get all of that gear in those four little kayaks?

And they are already mostly loaded!

Our sea kayaks are over twice as long as our whitewater kayaks (17+ feet vs. 8 feet). Stan and I bought ours specifically so they would be capable of carrying 250 pounds (including the passenger). Our two kayaks are on the far left in the photo above – Stan's is purple and mine is red.

The portion of the Green River that we will paddle is through Canyonlands National Park – the word National means that we have to carry our own chemical porta potty as well as all of our food and gear (including a tent, sleeping bags and clothing) for 10 days of camping.

Ann, Stan & Gary are ahead of me as we start out on our 10 day, 56 mile journey – somehow, we got everything into or on top of the kayaks, but we are sitting pretty low in the water.

🛶 Paddling On the Green ⛺️

Gary & Stan riding low on Day 1 of our paddle. The scenery is gorgeous!

There is no room to carry all of the water we will need to drink for 10 days, and there is only one place along the river where we can hike up to a fresh water creek and pool.

The Green River is always fairly thick with silt, but it is especially so in June after the rains have washed down all of the clay from the canyon sides. If you leave a pail of water sitting all night, the silt never even settles to the bottom.

So to get drinking water, we carry a portable, hand-operated, water filter, which requires someone to hand-pump it for at least an hour each evening to get enough drinkable water for the next day.

Ann & Stan, clowning it up during a stop for lunch on a muddy island

Stan, VERY low in the water, on the first day.

🥵 The Heat and the Insects 🦟

Did I say why we decided to do a 10-day trip in June this time, rather than an 8-day trip in October like we did before? It is my fault (with some of the blame shared by Gary).

We thought that June would be a nicer time of year to go (warmer than October, and with higher water so we don’t have to carry our gear so far) – and 10 days will give us more time to hike, plus we can spend more than one night at a camp without having to pack up each and every day.

Sounds very rational, right? WRONG!

🥵 We happen to hit a year with temperatures at least 10 degrees higher temperatures than normal throughout the southwestern U. S. We will have highs of between 110 and 120 degrees each day.

🦟 We never counted on the insects! – the gnats* rule during the daylight hours and the mosquitos rule the rest of the time, plus they overlap for at least an hour on each end!

* A gnat is a small two-winged fly that resembles a mosquito. Gnats include both biting and nonbiting forms, and they typically form large swarms. Unfortunately, we encountered the biting form.

The HEAT is horrific and the MUD on the banks is omnipresent. We rarely have landings without mud where we can unload/load our kayaks more than one at a time.

Ann is about to disembark at a very MUDDY landing. Stan has just exited his kayak.

In order to escape the insects, we soon learn to look for campsites on ledges where there aren't many tamarack trees (where mosquitos love to hover). But that means toting all of our gear up steep cliff sides.

Ann helping Barbara scale the cliff (note the kayaks way down below). And then we have to lug all of our gear up the cliffside also.

Aren't we having fun??? Stan and Gary have found some shade.

We rarely have much shade at our campsites.

Are we still having fun? At least, we are camped on a ledge high above the Green River where the skeeters are more bearable. Stan, Ann and Gary are relaxing at dusk in the chairs we carry on the back of our kayaks.

We are so weary with unpacking, lugging gear up cliff sides, setting up camp, cooking dinner, and pumping to purify water that we want to crawl in our tents and sleep for 10-12 hours. That way, we can escape most of the annoyance of the skeeters and the gnats.

Then we get to make breakfast, break camp, lug the gear down the cliffside, and load the kayaks to start another day of paddling.

🛶 The Wonderfulness of the Trip

BUT – I have failed to give you a full picture of the wonderfulness of the trip. When we are in our kayaks on the river, the scenery is drop-dead gorgeous!!!

The river keeps making sharp bends. Every view looks like it will dead-end. This photo is wide angle, and doesn't give the feeling of the closeness of the cliffs around us.

The river, being higher, is running from 2.5 - 4.5 knots. We don’t have to paddle much (except to beat some canoeists to the next campground), so we just float and totally enjoy the surroundings.

Also, there are no insects on the water, and we can always cool off by splashing some on us.

The high cliffs offer some shade.

BUT – in case I have lulled you in to thinking it was all a picnic in the park, the good and bad news is that I lost about 10 pounds in those 10 days.

Stan says that I became high maintenance on the trip. True, he did all of the cooking and washed the dishes. He did tote most of the gear. But I must have done something to lose that weight.

John Wesley Powell & party were the first white men to explore the Green River. They drew a picture of this formation that they labeled The Cross. In reality, the two formations are miles apart, but appear to be joined in this view.

We do a lot of hiking most days. That is the reason Gary and I wanted to do a longer trip so we would have more time to see things we missed on our last paddle down the Green.

Ann is standing in front of an old rancher's cabin from the early 1900s, on a hike above the river.

🛶 The Anasazi Indian Ruins

There are many Anasazi Indian ruins all along the river. The Anasazis* disappeared around 1200 A. D., but they left many ruins in the form of granaries, living quarters and forts high up on the cliffs.

* The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado.

In the mid-1100s, the Anasazi began building large villages within the high cliffs in the southwestern U.S. These villages often had two, three, or even four stories and as many as a thousand rooms. Explorers, who later found the remains of these homes, called the Anasazi "the cliff dwellers."

The Anasazis had no mortar, but just piled up rocks. It's amazing that so many of their structures still exist today.

Behind Stan and Barbara, at the top of that mesa in the far distance, is an Anasazi fort that we climbed up to.

There are also many pictographs (petroglyphs) that the Anasazis left behind. Although we saw many of them on our last trip, it is fun trying to relocate them and to discover new ones.

⛺️ Anderson Bottom 🥾

I named this rock "The Ship's Prow." It is across the water from Anderson Bottom where we finally found a wonderful campsite where we stayed for three nights for a much needed rest.

Our wonderful campsite in the shade at Anderson Bottom!

Ann, Gary & Stan climbing up the steep dunes to the Anasazi pictographs at Anderson Bottom

Stan with some Anasazi pictographs on the cliffs above the sand dunes

More Anasazi pictographs on the cliffs above the sand dunes

Stan & I lucked out while looking at an Anasazi granary.

Barbara below a perfectly preserved Anasazi granary

Actually, Stan was examining a metal stamp in a rock below the granary when he bent over and stuck his rear end into a cactus. As I was trying to remove the spikes from his buttocks, he heard a noise above and looked up to see a bighorn sheep looking down at us. I missed seeing the sheep, but when we moved further down the cliff, I was able to snap several photos.

The bighorn sheep looking down at Stan and myself from a ledge above

We paddle on down the river after Anderson Bottom to Turk's Head where we climb up near the top.

🏞 Turk's Head

The formation in the background is called Turk's Head. We camped below it and hiked up and around it. There are fields of jasper and flint stones, many of which were carved by the Anasazi over 800 years ago.

Stan & Gary created a large cairn so we can find our way back to where we scaled the cliffs.

Close-up of jasper stones below Turk's Head

View of the river from the top of the cliffs below Turk's Head

If you are still reading this saga, I am amazed that you have stuck it out this long. In spite of the difficulties that we experienced on this trip, the beauty of the scenery outshines everything else. This is the only river that I am aware of that flows through so much beautiful scenery for such a long distance without rapids.

You have heard most of the details now. We are out of touch with the world for most of these 10 days. There is some risk involved in case of medical problems or accidents. Cell phones don’t work, but our GPS does. After the first three days, the only way out is down the river. Fortunately, we have no accidents or medical problems.

🛶 The Confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers

On the eighth day, we reach the Confluence, and first set our eyes on the Colorado River.

At the Confluence with the Colorado River, Ann watches as Stan & Gary play 'dead man' by falling face-first into the river.

We continue down the Colorado River for four miles to Spanish Bottom where we spend the night and await the boat from Tag-a-Long Expeditions to pick us up the next day.

Warning sign for Cataract Canyon on the Colorado River – reputed to have the largest rapids in the North American Continent.

Approaching Spanish Bottom on the Colorado River, the last stop before the big rapids. The formation above is called "The Doll House." Stan & Gary climbed up to it in the heat of the next day.

Stan at the top of the rim by The Doll House. The Colorado River can be seen way below in the distance.

This saga is truly nearing its end, but I have so many beautiful photos to choose from, that I have a hard time stopping.

The jet boat that hauled our kayaks and our gear back from Spanish Bottom to Moab (46 miles upriver on the Colorado River) is being loaded on a boat trailer for the ride back to the outfitter's in Moab.

And there you have it, folks. A small snapshot of our trip. I have a thousand more photos that you haven't seen.

🛶 Epilogue 🦟

Looking back on it at the end of the trip, the four of us agree that had we known what we were in for, we would not have made the trip. But now that it is over, we are not sorry to have experienced it.

Will we do it again seven years from now? Who knows?

🎸A Song Called The Green 🎶

And now it is time for a song to go along with my missive. Although the section of the Green River that we paddled through Canyonlands has only one stretch of easy rapids, it is a different story in northern Utah.

This song titled The Green was composed and sung by C. W. McCall and was released in 1997 on his album The Best of C. W. McCall – not long before our first paddle down the Green in 1999.

The song reminds me very much of our many years of whitewater kayaking and rafting adventures. [BTW, Stan & I met on a whitewater rafting trip through the Grand Canyon in 1972 – but that is a story for another missive.]

Double-click on the album cover to hear the song on your browser.

Starting Lyrics for The Green

Way out in the canyons of the West, there's a wild river.

The Spanish named it San Buenaventura; but we knew it as The Green.

It was daylight on the river but we couldn't see the sun

And we couldn't hear our voices through the roar

But we felt the boilin' current and our blood was runnin' cold

As we headed down the canyon of Lodore

And the gods were runnin' with us

On the day we ran the rapids of The Green…

🛶 The End of Another Great Adventure 🦟