[Awclist] FW: Gila River - Humor, Intrigue and Humility article for your river tales

[R/C Southwick]

There is addition action plans in the works – so stay tuned. 

 

From: Allyson Siwik [mailto:allysonsiwik at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2014 7:32 AM
To: R/C Southwick
Cc: 
Subject: Re: Gila ISC Decision Campaign

 

You all may enjoy this from yesterday's Silver City Daily Press. Phil Connors, a fire lookout on Hillsboro Peak and exceptional writer, has a bi-weekly column in the local paper.  Here's his piece about running the Gila wilderness reach. 

 

Silver City Daily Press

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

 

by Philip Connors

 

A wilderness river, a lesson in humility

The wilderness stretch of the Gila is one of the secrets of river running in the American West. There exists no guidebook, no comprehensive website devoted to itemizing its dangers. Local intelligence can be had if you know the right people, but mostly you’re on your own, and anyway the river’s mood can change in a moment.

The entirety of my companion’s experience consisted of a tame 10-mile float on the Rio Grande — a Gila trip would more than quadruple that — and mine amounted to little more. We were as green as the country after the monsoon rains, and that felt right. The river would teach us what we needed to know. It was a true wilderness run after all: no hand-holding rangers, no knowing in advance where the hazards lurked.

I seemed to recall someone telling me that the 42 miles from Grapevine Campground to the takeout at Mogollon Creek could be run in one epic day, though the usual method was to camp multiple nights. I made a couple of calls, hoping to confirm this rumor lodged in some dark fissure of my cranium. Neither was answered. The fateful choice was made: we’d leave the camping gear behind.

Sunrise found us cruising Highway 15 under cloudy skies and light rain. The campground was empty; the morning and the river were ours. We’d hoped to be on the water by 8 a.m. We had no way of knowing the precise time, as neither of us wore a watch, but it seemed a safe bet that the target hour had come and gone by the time the kayak was inflated, the sandwiches made, the float bag packed. Then we were off, under the bridge and beyond sight of manmade infrastructure until the gauging station some 40 miles downstream.

For months the river had been a source of worry, and something of an abstraction in studies I’d read of its diversion potential by bureaucrats in Santa Fe and their hirelings in the engineering- consulting racket. In these jargon-laden reports the river is portrayed as little more than an underutilized ditch hauling water that, if diverted and dammed up and pumped and conveyed off site, could water the fields of irrigators and slake the thirst of the citizens of Deming. It was madness, every last word of it, and I hated having to sit through Orwellian public meetings in order to wrap my mind around the monomaniacal hubris that could propose such a dastardly crime with a straight face and call it ecologically beneficial.

These concerns dissolved upon our first encounter with whitewater, and not long after it a glimpse of a fallen tree across the river. To get the animal juices flowing you can hardly do better than to pull hard across the current to an eddy on the inside bank when the flow has every intention of slamming you into a half-submerged sycamore on the outside of the bend. Sometimes we floated on a surface as smooth as polished stone, only to round a corner and find a sweeper, a strainer, or a run of submerged rocks whipping the muddy water into a frothy meringue.

One time we failed to turn the boat parallel to a cliff on the outside of a dogleg bend; the bow T-boned the wall, the stern swung downstream, and all of a sudden we flipped. We came up spitting and gasping, literally in over our heads. My companion managed to grab the boat and a paddle. I lunged wildly for the other paddle and the float bag, then set off at a swim in chase of her hat. Nothing was lost, no one was hurt, but it was the sort of rude baptism that can bring a person face to face with the prospect of soggy death — an adrenaline jolt and an indelible memory if luck holds.

The beauty of the canyon was close to indescribable, even for someone in the business of wrangling words, but by nightfall we hadn’t made the takeout, as I suppose any sane person could have predicted. A mile beyond Turkey Creek we bivouacked. A campfire helped dry our clothes, and we tucked ourselves in the boat side-by-side for warmth. “You said this would be epic,” my companion reminded me, “but I’m not sure that word does it justice." We had come roughly 38 miles.

Her uncomplaining demeanor no longer surprised me, and my overconfidence went mercifully unmentioned. A down-canyon breeze rustled the leaves of the cottonwoods, and the rush of the water made music to sleep by, if only fitfully. Morning would bring several portages, thanks to more strainers and sweepers: a river doing its ancient thing, heedless of human designs.

Long may it remain, a siren song of adventure to the curious, and a lesson in humility for those who still care to be humbled.

Philip Connors is a Grant County writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Harper’s magazine, and many other periodicals.

“The beauty of the canyon was close to indescribable, even for someone in the business of wrangling words, but by nightfall we hadn’t made the takeout, as I suppose any sane person could have predicted.”

 

 

On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 12:21 AM, R/C Southwick <rsouthwick at shamanproducts.com> wrote:

In your planning this location has a social hall holding up to 200 people! 

I have posted some of this on the AWC website and sent out awclist w/ 3 events upcoming.

Thanks – celia Southwick

www.adobewhitewater.org 

Adobe Whitewater Club  - SPECIAL PRESENTATION by Michael Berman on the Gila Rising.

 THURSDAY, September 4, 2014

(instead of the normal 2nd Tuesday monthly meeting)

6:00 pm

North Domingo Baca Multigenerational Center

7521 Carmel NE

Albuquerque, NM  87113

(approximately off Wyoming  just north of Paseo Del Norte east of I25)

Each year I try and walk the Gila River as it passes through the Wilderness. Most years I hike from Grapevine where the west, east and middle forks come together above the 30-mile Gila River Canyon to Turkey Creek. I go just to get a sense of what the Gila looks like, how the river has changed, and how I have changed.

I’ve walked the Gila in the summer, when one always wonders if a little bit of rain up above might do more than send down a slew of mud that chokes up a water filter. And in the fall, after the rains have long since passed and the river comes up as the cottonwoods turn to yellow and the trees stop drawing water. And in the late spring, as the river slowly starts to dry after the snow runoff. And in June, when one starts to say little prayers for rain.  But it is those long winter walks that always surprise me. The days are warm enough, but the nights and the water are always cold. I find myself asking my wife what chilblains look like when I get home.

It might surprise all the folks who call me the photographer that most times when I walk the river, I do not make pictures. I want to look at things, and see what is there.  And what is there is a deeply complex and beautiful river. It seems important I spend the time to look.

I would like to say I’ve learned something of this river, but the truth is I barely know the Gila. Instead I have learned something of myself, and the culture we share.  And the culture we share is one that would put a dam on the last wild river, before we even know what a wild river is.  Somehow I got it in my head a few weeks ago, that maybe I should get out my camera and walk the whole river and make some photographs.

Landscape photographer Michael Berman, a resident of San Lorenzo, NM, has been exploring this region for over 30 years and is fascinated by the land and how people use and value it – an interest that grew out of his studies in biology at Colorado College. In 2008, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert. Michael is a 2012 recipient of the NM Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.  His work is included in collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum and the New Mexico Museum of Art, among others.  His installations, photographs and paintings have been exhibited throughout the country and his books include Sunshot: Peril and Wonder in the Gran Desierto, Inferno and Gila: Radical Visions/The Enduring Silence.  Michael is a founding board member of the Gila Resources Information Project and is on the board of the NM Wilderness Alliance. 

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