Daily Dirt and Dogs

Photos by Greg

No particular drama here. Just some of the springtime and riding pics that have been stacking up in the pile. Enjoy. Then go ride!

Dirty and Devilish

Words and Photos by Greg

A couple weekends ago I headed into Utah with Mike. Target: the Dirty Devil River.

At dusk we parked Mike's van and met up with three other guys. We loaded up bikes, then started pedaling pavement up a nearly empty highway through a dark canyon. Stars outlined canyon walls. Frogs trilled from hidden water. Our tires buzzed softly on the road. We followed bright planets to the west, chatting as we rode, as twenty five miles passed beneath us and hours slipped by. Down a dirt road in the dark we camped, sleeping bags in the sand, bikes beside us.

Morning, up with the sun, breakfasts cooked, bikes packed. We rode into the morning light along a sandy road. A dry wash. A dry year. The wash deepened into a small canyon. We rode when it was rocky and pushed when the sand was too deep. Spring water appeared then vanished again. The canyon narrowed to a towered corridor then opened up to wide views filled with mesas and empty spaces.































At midday we arrived at the river. The Dirty Devil. As dirty as advertised. Silty. And shallow. But just deep enough for our small rafts. We transformed. Rafts unbuckled from bikes and inflated. Bikes broken down and buckled onto rafts. One more rider/floater joined us, as planned, and soon six of us were floating in dirty water under hot blue skies.

The challenge of the afternoon was to find the flow. Wide sandbars crossed the sluggish river, but somewhere under the opaque water there was almost always a channel deep enough to float. One paddler might ground out, but others behind, alerted, would try a different path and float past. Often we could scoot and lurch and paddle-pole over the bar to the deeper water. Sometimes we'd merely step out into ankle-deep water and drag the raft a short way. But most of the time we floated.

Afternoon winds kicked up, tracing in and out of the curving canyon. At times we were blown backward as fast a we could paddle. At other times we paddled in the calm shelter of sandstone walls. Sometimes quiet calm would fill with the sound of an approaching gust, and in a moment we'd be propelled forward by a frenzied tailwind, or punished backward or into one of the narrow walls. Once, the wind caught under a raft and flipped it over. Our companion tipped under, head down, then swam out. Wet but safe, he dumped water from his raft, righted it, and we paddled onward, more wary of the gusts.

The wind added another moment of drama to my day. We stopped on the riverside for a rest and a stretch. I dragged my boat out of the water onto a sandy bank and fiddled with some of my gear. I started to walk away. A gust of wind flipped the end of my raft toward the water. A black shape flew through the air from the end of the raft and landed in the river with a kerplop. In an instant I realized two things. One, I'd foolishly left my camera on top of my raft and it was now in the river. Two, the camera was dead, but the memory card was worth saving. I immediately threw the raft back onshore and jumped to where the camera had splashed, hands grasping. The dirty water was only a foot deep, but surprisingly, my fingers closed on nothing. Where? The current! I turned and leapt downriver into deeper water, arms in to my armpits, feeling in a frenzy along the smooth sand bottom. Nothing. Nothing. Then my left pinkie brushed against something that wasn't sand and I grasped, grasped, then grabbed on to the familiar shape of my camera, hauling it out of the river with a splash, then high above my head as it dripped silty water back into the river and down my arm.

The whole event may have lasted eight seconds. But a very long eight seconds. I pried open the soggy camera's battery door which was nearly locked shut with grit and pulled out the battery. Then pulled out the memory card, cleaned it, dried it and filed it away. While I did, I wondered at the strange mix of thoughts going on in my head. A sense of loss and disappointment over the demise of a very enjoyable and useful tool. A sense of disgust at being foolish enough to leave my camera unprotected on a small raft next to a dirty river on a windy day. And a surprisingly satisfying sense of victory and triumph for having been able to pull it back out of the river.

I find that I want to draw some kind a parallel to a wider view of my life. Where small things that I can accomplish in a moment or a day give me a sense that I'm doing well. While the larger parts of my life are more suspect, and I'm less able to discern a sense that I'm moving in a positive direction. Perhaps, even, that I am not. I want to draw this parallel, but I'm not sure it really exists.

We paddled our way on down the river as the afternoon slipped toward evening, then pulled out at a sandstone bank. We camped on a low sandy step at the bottom of a staircase of colorful, textured cliffs. I scrambled up the lowest, a rough crumbling rock that was darkly purple. Above was a hard white stone, the top of it strewn here and there with nearly black chunks of petrified wood. From the top of the white stone I could look down to where the river turned back upon itself, a thin, low wall of stone only a few dozen feet thick after a mile of curving loop. Above, more cliffs, golden, slopes of crumbling rock, and the high red cliffs of the rim. Above those, blue sky.

Sand blew into our dinners, into sleeping bags, into bodily orifices, but no one was really clean enough to care. The night was warm and filled with stars before a late moon rose. I slept well, with the padded black hulk of my camera as a pillow.

We were paddling again when the sun came over the canyon rim and hit the river. We'd somehow camped at a dividing line between two moods of the river. They day before we'd struggled to find the deeper channel in the slow flow. But this second day, the river had narrowed and was a little faster and we had to put our attention to not bouncing off the walls. Turn after turn, the flow would ram straight into the solid rock of the canyon and a narrow channel of current would slide along the wall. The current was usually just slightly more narrow than a packraft with a dipping paddle on that side. But if we didn't hug the wall and keep to the current, an eddy would suck the raft out of the flow and stop our progress.

Wind dove into the winding canyon again, spraying sand over the water and either stopping our progress, pushing us along, shoving us into walls, or laying in wait around the next bend. But we were now warned, hunkered tightly, and no one blew over.

I'm used to traveling with a camera in my hand. I like the way I look at things when I can photograph them, the attention I pay to light, texture, composition, beauty. I like to think that a camera is a tool that I use to sharpen my perception of things that go on around me that I might not notice otherwise. But I had been set free of the need to try to capture the sense of this place. I was free to turn my eye the un-photographable sense of the canyon, the river, the float. Free to turn my mind to other thoughts.

I drifted happily with the flow of the river. Thoughts came. Thoughts went. The immediacy of paddling into a sand-filled gust of wind. The lazy wanderings and questions of eye and mind. Could that high cliff be seen from the Island In The Sky on a clear day? What would this canyon look like during a flash flood? Are we traveling in the same water we were in yesterday? How much river slipped past us as we slept? The questions were happy being questions with no real need to have answers.

Near the middle of the day we came upon the river's one and only rapid. The water entered a narrow sluice, picked up some speed, then smashed straight into a wall where it gushed and boiled and turned left. We watched from the top of a low cliff as the de facto leader of our group, a man known as Doom, paddled in. He slipped down the tongue of the sluice, paddled a hard left and cut the corner, missing the roiling boil, and came into the clear below. Seemed easy enough.

I ran back and got in my boat and began to paddle. The guy ahead of me didn't do as well as Doom. He smashed right into the wall, but then floated free and beyond. I was a little nervous, jumpy, and ready to take the clear line like Doom had. But first I stopped to wait as a tumbleweed almost as big as my boat floated through the rapid, tumbling against the wall, then floating on. I followed, paddled what I thought was a hard left, but I too smashed up against the wall. I floated free, too, but not until I'd flipped over, swum out of the boat, and was kicking hard for the edge of the little river.

I dragged the raft out. Gear bags and bike were still happily attached. I dumped out the water and righted my boat. Then watched everyone else smash into the wall, too. But luckily no one else flipped. I was getting back in and starting to float onward when I realized that I'd forgotten to strap down one piece of equipment: my glasses. They were missing.

We paddled on through what looked like a slightly fuzzier canyon. As we went, walls of dry silt began to seal off the river from the greater canyon. They rose higher and higher as we splashed through a trough that cut through silt that had been deposited when this portion of the river had been lost under Glenn Canyon Reservoir. Often the river was walled on one side by a steep or undercut stone cliff and on the other by a stack of silt. And where silt met water, there was a "transitional zone" that wasn't wet enough to paddle, but wasn't solid enough to stand on. A quivering quicksand muck that sucked down feet and stuck to the bottoms of boats.

When we passed under a high arcing steel bridge it was already evening. The river's twists and turns spilled into wide plain of mud/water, the current fringe-zone of the silted reservoir. The river had cut a channel deep enough to paddle and we floated on as the day dimmed. Then a quick turn and a mucky paddle to a crevice of rock where we dragged muddy boats, gear and bikes up some slickrock to the place where we'd left our cars two nights before. Rafts were folded and loaded. Paddles stowed. Muddy clothes changed for clean. Goodbyes were said. Promises made. Then we drove off, into the night toward home.

My glasses are still there somewhere. Probably drifting along under the water. Two prescriptionized eyes, looking around, free of the constraints of my turning head. Perhaps looking at decades-worth of silt that has sifted to the bottom of a "lake". Perhaps wondering why we thought it was a good idea to stop a river's flow. Perhaps wondering if there is a clear way into the future. If there is a way to lose something and be set free.

Baja Inesperada: Entre del Mer y Orilla

Unexpected Baja: Between Sea and Shore

Words by Greg
Photos by Greg and Trina



In the cracked shell of what could almost be called a town we soaked in magma heated water that steamed on the rocky edge of the sea, backdropped by the silence of empty homes. But while the town felt as if its life was seeping away, the shore and sea were filled with vibrant and noisy life. Seagulls and pelicans patrolled, splashing and diving, squabbling over bits of fish. We heard the sharp exhalations and saw the blowhole puffs of whales, the black domes of their sleek bodies rising from the blue water.







We drove further southward along the coast. Hard, ragged mountains shoved their way toward the shore crowding out the beaches and beach homes. The paved highway ended abruptly, still pointing onward toward fast-track future plans, while a dirt road angled off at its own slow speed. This rougher coast, the rough road took us closer to where we wanted to be.









We wandered on slow feet along the clear waters of the gulf. Details of stones and bones and shells drew us closer to the ground. While mountains spilled into the sea, skipping onward as islands, luring our eyes toward further horizons and possibilities.

We loaded our yellow boat with dogs and lunch and paddled into the chilly blue water and along the broken coast. Carved headlands sheltered secret cobble beaches and shallow caves. We paddled and we stopped, exploring the shifting line between land and sea where life and death mingled. Fish and bones. Birds and bones. Porpoises and bones. Stocky trees blown twisted and bony by persistent wind.

















At times the shore was very much alive. Crawling, even, with armored isopods, roly-poly like creatures as big as a thumb, antennae twitching, that dashed into crevices as we approached. The dogs were entertained for hours hunting them -- with very little success, and seemingly very little satisfaction with the taste when one was caught.











Three times in as many days we witnessed a frenzied battle between armies of feeders and food. Offshore but within the reach of our binoculars, a shoal of small fish were herded along by a line of porpoises whose dark, shiny bodies arced out of the water and splashed back in, creating a line of froth. Pelicans and gulls were drawn toward the turmoil and were soon diving and splashing, as more and more birds poured in from all directions. The line of porpoises and fish and diving birds moved steadily across our view, water creatures leaping into the air, birds of the air leaping into the water, blurring the distinction between either in a splashing and chaotic boil. Scores of porpoises, hundreds of birds, untold numbers of fish, all leaping, diving, splashing, the whole line of action moving steadily along until it was lost from our view.



As we wandered the shore at calmer times, pelicans, gulls and vultures would frequently cruise past. At some point Zeek, the JRT, decided that our piece of beach belonged to us and to us alone. He began to protect and defend us against all invaders. When a bird would fly by he would leap to action, barking and chasing over the cobbles and rocks to ensure that no bird flew into restricted airspace. Many were fooled by his ferocity, but a few gulls would hover on the wind, close but out of reach, teasing him into a froth.





Nights were calmer, quieter, though sometimes coyotes visited and roused the dogs. On two nights, under starlight I walked the edge of the shore where lapping waves stirred tiny creatures and set them to shine dimly. Pale green stars, constellations and galaxies stirred the water in phosphorescent glow as I cast stones that excited them.



There was a small town a dozen miles away from where we spent most of three days camped on the beach. Fishing boats from the town would cut the water, hulls slapping, heading out, or returning slower, deeper in the water. We visited the town, ate fish tacos, bought food, filled water. A town that had a happy and tough vitality. Tied to the tourist "industry" surely, but seeming to have a life of its own where people worked and lived and played.

We stood on a rough stone-and-cement pier that jutted into blue-green water. Perhaps the same pier where I stood once when I was eleven years old. My father had driven south with me, my sister and grandmother. We'd camped on beaches then, too. And had visited a small pier of a smaller town in this same place. Dark eyed sunburned boys in torn t-shirts had gigged for baitfish with treble hooks, line, and coke bottles. Someone caught an octopus and held it close for us to see, writhing sucker arms churning as it died. I remembered brown sand dollars leaving tracks on golden sand under clear water. I remembered pelicans. I remembered the mountains and islands stacked against the horizon.







The town and I have changed as years have passed. It was almost as if I were another person visiting a new place. Still, though -- or so I like to think -- there remains something wide-eyed and curious, something not unlike being eleven years old that still looks out from behind my older eyes.

Seeing new things, or seeing things in new ways is likely the largest part of what drives us to travel. We don't set out seeking, nor do we come back with a list of accomplishments. Trina and I prefer to travel somewhat slowly with time to let a small place seep into us, to observe and remark on new or previously unnoticed phenomenon. Distances between are, admittedly, often made in leaps that blur past the truck windows. And our time traveling doesn't allow for seasons to change, nor for time to observe plants and animals to grow and change. But often we will find evidence, a captured moment of change. A nest. A bit of eggshell. A feather. A bird. A bone. A story of life and decay. Of something remembered. Something unexpected.