Wolincircus.com

Wednesday June 9th 2004

6:00am
The CAVE

Everyday is the best day so far out here. Although I woke up with a churning stomach yesterday, a lost paddle, and many cuts and bruises, those all seemed to vanish when the sun came out. It wasn’t long after we started yesterday that the canyon got narrower and narrower. On the map it shows a pencil line for the river, and I can see why now. In some places it is only 20 feet across in a canyon whose walls are anywhere from 500-800 feet high.

The new paddle I fashioned out of wood and rope and duct tape worked fairly decently, and it helped me get through a few of the tougher rapids. It was a bit heavy, slightly awkward, but I would have paid $100 for it if I had to with four days to go without a paddle. By now we are a little more familiar with rafting and are going over some smaller waterfalls, that is 3-5ft high. But, unfortunately confidence can sometimes be your downfall. On the last rapid of the day, my kayak went straight into the water, filled up, and instantly flipped over. Once again everything flew out of the raft and was scattered around the river. I was drug down through some rapids, bouncing over rocks. Jason had gone first and his boat was hung up on a rock in the middle of the river and he was standing there in the middle, on top of a little boulder wondering what to do. I came floating down, and the current pushed me right under his boat, which swept both the boat and I further downstream. Once again everything was scattered for both of us; and both kayaks were stuck on the rocks. By the time we collected everything, YES BELIEVE IT OR NOT, my paddle was gone AGAIN– the one I had just made. Jason then pulled his paddle apart into 2 halves, and now we are reduced to each having a half a paddle and using it like a canoe paddle.
Three spots stand out in my mind from yesterday. The first was an incredibly narrow section of the river. The walls were sheer for hundreds of feet, and the water had completely slowed down. Way up on top the trees were growing out of the walls at 90 degrees, and it was so incredibly quiet. There wasn’t a single bird, or anything to make noise. The canyon walls were dug out at certain places so it looked like it was pocketed with small caves.

A second place where the canyon narrowed was also fed by a side stream from far above, and the water poured over the side in constant sheets like rain. As we rounded the bend, the walls were so overhung that it looked like we had to go through a small window just to get to the other side. The rain falling through the opening made it so you had to pass under the water. It was beautiful, truly beautiful.

The third spot is no doubt the most impressive spot of the trip. This spot well deserves to be called the pen-ultimate event. We ended up camping right next it so we could visit it again in the morning. At this spot the river actually goes underground. It narrows, and narrows, and slowly the walls begin to engulf you, and the sliver of the sky itself gets smaller and smaller until suddenly you are completely inside.

It reminded me of some of the greatest tombs in Egypt because of the grandeur – but this time it was all-natural. The rooftop was so incredibly high up, which made it very light, and hundreds of screaming parakeets flew through the cavern over and over. The acoustics were incredible and the noise of the parakeets was just deafening. At this point, the river actually cuts through a portion of the mountain. The water had slowed down almost to a lake and it was amazing to simply sit through it and let the boats float through it for over a half an hour.

We camped on the outside of the cave, on a nice little sandbar. Inside the cave, I was looking at something and came across a coiled up snake, the type of which I had never seen before. It definitely looked poisonous if you go with the old adage that the more beautiful a snake, the more deadly it is. For dinner we were so hungry since neither of us had eaten any lunch, so we cooked up some potato soup that supposedly fed 8 people, and ate it all.

We had been wet all day, and it was so nice to dry out and get some warm soup in our bodies. This is the most amazing spot on the river.

Unfortunately the canyon is too narrow to get a GPS reading, so we don’t know exactly where we are. I’m looking outside my tent now, and all I see is thick overgrown trees protruding off the canyon. Even though there is one spot where the walls are low and I might possibly want to climb out, the thickness of the undergrowth is actually impenetrable. Birds are flying all over and making many weird sounds.