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The Quiet Neighbor

With the spotlight held on the Grand Canyon and Lake Powell, middle neighbor the Colorado River provides a corner of peace and solitude for anglers and paddlers

By Kate Siber

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Kayak Powell (888-854-7862; kayakpowell.com) rents canoes for $66, single touring kayaks for $49, and double sit-on-top kayaks for $44 per day, including life jackets, paddles, and dry bags. Camping equipment is also available for rental.

Colorado River Discovery (888-522-6644; raftthecanyon.com) offers shuttles for $23 per person and $20 per boat. Alternatively, Kayak Powell can help arrange a shuttle with local fishing guides, who usually have flexible schedules. The weather is optimal in spring and fall.

Onlookers gave us a few double takes as we drove through the desert in a mud-spattered diesel truck with three canoes strapped precariously to the roof. It was early November, and my friends Kate, Danielle, and Sam, my boyfriend Andrew, and I cruised through the desert from our home in Durango, Colo., to Lee's Ferry, the Colorado River's launch site, to canoe a section of the mighty waterway.
If our vehicle seemed a bit out of place, the river seems doubly out of place. My first glimpse of the gorge belied the brawn of the West's great plumbing system. Its valley is as flat as a basketball court, and, from afar, the river forms just the slightest of cracks, so crisp it looks as if it were sliced by a butcher's knife. The land looks parched dry, and stripes of dark red, dusty red, pink, and muted gray creep up the cliffs on the opposite side of the valley.
We caught our first glimpse of the river from Navajo Bridge. Though we were looking for the river, it still seemed like an awesome surprise. Everyone in the car oohed and aahed as we stared a couple of hundred feet down from the bridge at the torrent that had been hidden from view.
The Colorado River, of course, is hardly a secret. Its route through the Grand Canyon is arguably the country's premier river trip. But sandwiched between Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon is a relatively little-known 17-mile stretch of the Colorado River that, surprisingly, isn't all that well frequented. To get there, simply head upstream from Lee's Ferry (in a motorized shuttle, naturally) to the Glen Canyon Dam and paddle leisurely back down.
Last year, guide service Kayak Powell started outfitting do-it-yourself one- and two-day trips along this stretch of the river, making it easier for those without the proper gear to explore the river. Technically part of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, the Park Service maintains six campsites along the river with pit toilets - no reservations necessary - making logistics even more simple.
This stretch of river has long been known as an angler's heaven for its flat, glass-clear, dam-filtered waters and hybrid rainbow-cutthroat trout, which have striking coloring and a red dash across their throats. It's unclear to me exactly why kayakers and canoeists don't flock here. Perhaps the reason is simply that its neighbors, Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon, overshadow it.
As we unloaded our gear at Lee's Ferry that Saturday afternoon, one of the beautiful facts about river trips became imminently clear: There's room for all manner of luxuries. We unloaded boxes of firewood and kindling, bags full of food, a fold-out table, fold-out chairs, games, sleeping bags, pillows, and even yoga mats. Soon Colorado River Discovery's two mint-green pontoon rafts appeared and dispersed their sightseeing passengers for the day. We tossed our gear and canoes onto the boats and took off upstream toward the Glen Canyon Dam.
As we made our way up-river, the cliffs slowly grew, as if we were entering a kingdom of giants. The Chinle shale and Kayenta sandstone of Lee's Ferry gave way to hundreds of vertical feet of crimson Navajo sandstone cliffs, which, at their tallest, stretched over 1,000 feet into the blue desert sky. Hooker's primrose burst into yellow flowers by the side of the river and in nooks hundreds of feet up the cliffs. The tamarisk, though villainous toward other plants, transformed the side of the river into shades of gold.
As we cruised up the river, our driver, a chipper college student named Rory Glover, pointed out curiosities by the side of the river, like a 19th-century explorer's inscription, geological oddities, and a tiny waterfall that seeped from the rock - water that had traveled through the porous cliffs all the way from the lake. She told us that for centuries, Native Americans frequented the river valley to forage for juniper berries, hunt bighorn sheep, and plant corn. The petroglyphs they left behind still sit on the base of the cliffs, hidden in the brush and foliage of the shoreline. Prospectors came and went, railroad barons explored the area for a possible line, and Hollywood producers filmed movies here like "The Greatest Story Ever Told" and "Broken Arrow." Still, the area retains a sense of wildness, and there are only a few clues to its long history of human habitation, exploration, and exploitation. That sense of wildness was, of course, exactly why we were here for a weekend getaway.
"See that wave?" she asked, pointing across the river. "That's a boat that sank about a month ago." Sam and I stretched our gazes overboard and spotted a wave pouring over a capsized metal boat, barely visible under the navy water.
"Yeah, they were inexperienced and didn't know what they were doing," continued Rory. "They hit that riffle and got wrapped around a rock. The boat took on water and sank." Guides rescued the pair of anglers, who swam to shore. Still, the thought made me shudder. But then, it made me laugh. Sure, there was a current, but the river is so wide and lazy, you'd almost have to try to hit something. With no rapids whatsoever, it is perhaps one of the West's easier stretches of river to navigate.
Finally, we rounded a bend and the Glen Canyon Dam came into view. At 700-some feet tall, spanning from cliff to cliff, it looks as misplaced as a skyscraper in the Sahara. Though its existence is still plenty contentious, it does offer a few perks for river runners: consistent flows and water so clear of sediment one can see 15 feet to the bottom, where fish flit about their daily lives.
After dropping us off on the beach just downstream of the dam, Rory took off to park and her drone faded in the distance. We shoved off in our canoes and paddled downstream in the low light and silence of evening. We took a moment to listen to the drips off our paddles and gaze at the river's surface, so still that it perfectly mirrored the cliffs, the clouds turning salmon pink, and the darkening sky. Few creatures stirred to break the serenity, just the occasional duck or great blue heron, trolling delicately for fish in the shallows.
Sometimes the desert seems most beautiful in the evening, when the wind dies down and the darkness causes the scenery to take on a sense of magical otherworldliness. That night, we ate pesto pasta around a campfire as the stars appeared one by one like city lights and a wedge of a moon bathed the cliffs in a surreal silvery glow.
In the morning we discovered the evidence of a nocturnal metropolis with tracks of ringtails, centipedes and other creatures peppering our campsite. In November, the sun takes its time emerging from behind the tall cliffs and warming the canyon bottom, so we lounged, drank coffee, and yabbered on leisurely before picking up our tents, tossing our gear into the canoes and shoving off to see what we might find downriver.
We passed a few anglers but otherwise had the river to ourselves. Flanked by thousand-foot-tall cliffs, we couldn't help but conjecture on the origins of some of the features - pour-overs, great horizontal and vertical seams, and desert varnish that uncannily resembled visages like Abe Lincoln's. With some 175 million years of geological processes right in front of our faces, it was easy to feel peacefully speck-like.
At times the water was so still that the cliffs amplified our voices like a theater. We spotted a great blue heron so slim that his head almost disappeared when he turned toward us. A mere 30 feet away, he took flight, stretching his wings to about five feet, and skimming elegantly over the water.
Finally, we stopped on a wide sandy beach on the left bank, where Rory promised we'd find petroglyphs. After walking the short trail through the brush, we found the centuries-old gallery: lines of bighorn sheep and what looked like antelope or deer trailed across the rock. We couldn't help but theorize what these depictions might have meant.
"They think they're often telling stories of creation or important events that happened in their lives," said Danielle, who worked as an archaeologist at Mesa Verde National Park. "But no one really knows what they mean."
Perhaps that's exactly why we keep exploring areas like this in the West - because we still don't understand all of the secrets they harbor right under our noses. And though plenty of people have come before us, solitude affords a sense of discovery. These small things-a vestige of a past civilization, the flight of a heron, the improbable patterns on sandstone - never fail to leave us speechless at the quiet beauty of it all.

Contributing editor KATE SIBER launches an active lifestyle from Durango, Colo., where she writes for numerous publications.