Muddy Creek

Our trip began in Salt Lake City on Friday 6 June 1997.  We (Steve “Guido” Corsi, Mike Giddings, Tom O’Keefe, Elise Peterson) had arrived in town the evening before after a 24 hour drive from Madison.  Two others (Guy Babbitt and Harry House) arrived by plane.  Although we had plans for a short little run on the Sixth Water and a soak in a nearby hotspring we ended up spending a good part of the day repairing our raft.  The raft belonged to Mike’s family and was last used a few years ago.  It had a few leaks and missing pieces.  We took the valves out and cleaned them which fixed the leak problem.  Then we found a hardware store to replace a few steel bars on the rowing frame that had long since been misplaced.

We finally pulled out of Salt Lake just as the Bulls-Jazz game was about to start downtown.  Needless to say, it was too late to think about even a short kayak run.  Our plan was to head south towards the Muddy River in central Utah, and find a place to catch the basketball game on the way.  We found a club where we could watch the ball game.  Utah does not have real bars, but private clubs where you must have someone sponsor you.

After the game it was still a long way to the put-in across roads that cut through the lonely desert.  Our gas tank was low and the gas stations were few and far between.  We finally made it to the put-in sometime after midnight.  Although it was only 5 miles south of I-70 it took a considerable amount of meandering along jeep trails to find the put-in at the Lone Tree Crossing Bridge.  The bridge is actually just an old flatbed railroad car.

Most of us slept out on the desert sand.  A light rain and cool winds kept us snuggled up in our various bivy sacks.  Harry was the only one with the luxury of Goretex.  The rest of us wrapped ourselves up in plastic--effective at keeping the rain out but the sweat in.

We had come to the Muddy in search of one of Utah’s most incredible but little known desert floats.  The river runs east through the San Rafael Swell and cuts a deep and narrow canyon through centuries of geology.  The river was running around 310 cfs.  When it gets much lower you are hiking down, but this level was just enough to float our boats.  Our plan had been to boat the nearby San Rafael just north of I-70 which floats through two canyons called the Black Boxes.  In 1996 Mike and I had boated the first Black Box with two others, but this year it was raging at an incredible 850 cfs which would make it an intense whitewater run.  It could be possible to boat the San Rafael at that level but I was a little bit nervous about the river-wide landslides that blocked the channel in a few places.  At these spots, the entire river funnels through a sieve of boulders.  No problem if you could stop in time but instant death if you could not.

Our new plan was to do an overnight trip on the Muddy River, get off the river by Sunday afternoon, and meet the others Sunday evening for the start of our week-long trip on the Dolores in Colorado.  We awoke on Saturday morning loaded down our boats with as much food and gear as we could stuff in.  Mike and Guido began the shuttle and the search for gas, leaving us alone in the desert around 10:30 am.  The hours passed slowly in the hot desert sun.  Guy had thought to grab the mountain bikes off the car.  Guy, Elise, and I kept ourselves entertained by making short excursions out into the desert.  As the morning passed into afternoon, we looked for other activities.  Harry challenged Guy to ride across the river on his mountain bike.  We went down to the river to watch Guy go, in his own words, “stupidly fast” down the road to the river.  After three attempts he made it across.  Guy needed a new challenge so Harry suggested an approach from the other side of the river.  The far bank was about 3 feet from the surface of the water.  Guy decided to come charging down the road.  He had a beautiful liftoff and flew through the air about 1/3 of the way across the river displaying form fit for a Mountain Dew commercial.  The landing was not as graceful, however, for as soon as the front wheel touched the silty river bottom the bike came to a violent and sudden stop.  Guy flew over the handlebars in a tucked position as violently and quickly as I have ever seen.  Although I was not in the mood for an identical stunt, one thing led to another, and soon Guy and I were biking our way down the river together.  We discovered that the river bottom was a great surface for biking on.  Sitting on the bike in most places the water was up to my shoulders.  We biked for maybe a mile down the river in this manner--a nice way to retreat from the desert sun.

Finally the shuttle vehicle returned around 5:00 pm.  It had taken nearly 7 hours and I was beginning to question the wisdom of even bothering to run the river at all.  It would be a race to get off at a reasonable hour on Sunday.  By 5:30, however, we were on the river heading down to our first campsite, a really great sandbar with canyon walls on either side.  Mike had brought some old freeze-dried meals for dinner.  We listened to a lonely frog call for a mate as we drifted off to sleep.  I snuggled up in a fleece outfit, space blanket, and sheet of plastic.  Unlike the others, I had not been able to successfully jam a sleeping bag into the rather flat tail of my boat.

We hit the meat of the run the next morning and an alternative put-in further downstream with a bit more activity and a more reasonable shuttle on the north side of the river.  It was a weekend and a few people were taking advantage of this rare opportunity to get on the river.  Most years the river does not have enough water.  One local told me he had been waiting 8 years to get a chance to boat the river.  People were running a section through a narrow canyon called the Chute.  A few rapids rate Class II but nothing is particularly challenging.  There is a put-in above and below the Chute which is really the most beautiful part of the run.  The narrow canyon walls squeeze the river to a width of only about 7’ at one point.  The Chute does have some small side canyons and a few sandbars where you can stop for lunch.  We passed one woman out doing a bit of nude sunbathing on a big rock deep in the box canyon.

After the Chute the run was beginning to get a bit long.  We had been running hard to make the takeout which did not leave much time for exploring or sunbathing.  Finally we arrived and with several hours of daylight to spare.  It took us a while to load up the van and a long time to run the shuttle.  It was dark by the time we got back to Guido’s truck parked at the put-in.  It was clear that we would not make it to meet the others anytime Sunday night as we had planned.  Harry stepped in and made a wise suggestion that we head to Moab, spend the night, pick up the raft first thing in the morning, and continue on to meet the others around noon on Monday.  It was really our only option.  It was a long and lonely trip through the night back to Moab.  Sitting in the passenger seat I slipped in and out of consciousness as triple tractor trailer rigs flew past us at unreasonably high speeds.

Sometime after midnight we made it to Moab and camped on the north bank of the Colorado river near town.  My tent was buried deep inside the back of the truck somewhere and I did not have energy remaining to set it up.  The mosquitoes were voracious, however, and then a light rain began to fall--just enough to be annoying but not enough to drive the bugs into hiding.  I could not take it anymore so I made myself a little nest in the cab of the truck, killed all the mosquitoes inside the cab, and finally found some peace.  Guido made a run for the truck sometime later only to find that I had beat him to it.  Needless to say, we did not get a lot of great sleep in.