In Utah, rafting through prehistory
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SOUTHEASTERN Utah, with its crimson canyons and flat-as-a-dinner-plate desert, would seem to be an improbable place to find wild water. But there, one morning early this spring, the San Juan River, as wide as a football field and as fast as a galloping horse, surged amid the dusty buttes of Bluff, Utah.
But that wasn't the only surprising sight. Nathan Sosa, a Bluff native and self-described hydrologic navigation specialist, stood on the bow of an 18-foot-long baby-blue raft and described the protocols of the river and the boat. He wore a nylon American-flag jacket, button-down shirt and tie, flimsy prom-queen tiara and rubber boots — you know, traditional outdoorsman wear.
"The river is a special occasion!" he said by way of explanation.
Though he is on the "20-year program" in earning his bachelor's degree, Sosa is a de facto professor of San Juan River history, having cruised its rapids and riffles for 10 years as a guide for Wild Rivers Expeditions, a rafting outfitter in Bluff.
The San Juan doesn't gush miraculously from the sagebrush and scrub-oak desert. It trickles out of the 14,000-foot San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado, gains muscle when it meets the Animas River, then snakes along the Utah-Arizona border before dumping into Lake Powell.
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On its 125-mile journey through Utah, the river follows the northern border of the Navajo reservation, skirting just north of Monument Valley and sharing much of the same John Wayne-worthy red-rock scenery and American Indian history. But since only a few dozen rafters float the river each day between April and October, compared with the hundreds of thousands of camera-clicking tourists who cram into Monument Valley annually, it is one of the most intimate ways to see the region. That was why a friend, Lori Moore, and I signed on for a three-day float on a 26-mile stretch of river between Bluff and Mexican Hat, Utah.
In April, the river was clocking along at 4,600 cubic feet per second; traveling faster than usual, we had plenty of extra time for hikes between our overnight camps. Good thing: Rolling past a host of almost alien-looking geological formations, cliff-top Anasazi dwellings and pristine wildlife habitat, the river is something of a greatest hits album of southern Utah's attractions.
Our first stop was Butler Wash, where a series of petroglyphs 100 yards from the river's northern bank stretched so far along an overhanging hunk of sandstone they resembled an elaborate frieze. About 10 feet off the ground, bighorn sheep, ducks, spirals, zigzags and human figures scratched in white and dating from 5000 BC covered the terra-cotta-colored rock.
Though Sosa has floated the river some 500 times, he still prefers to let first-timers conjure their own solutions to the riddles of the San Juan — such as the meanings of the petroglyphs.
"There's a river guide without his life jacket," Sosa said, pointing to a human figure as if it were a Rorschach test. "He forgot his morning coffee."
"That one reminds me of a fish spine," Lori said, pointing to a rainbow-shaped image with a line through it.
AND when it comes to the river, which flows through a layered, time-carved landscape that reeks of prehistory, there are even deeper mysteries.
"Around 1250 all the people left the region," Sosa said as we walked along the rocky path beneath the cliff. "There are lots of different theories. There was a 20-year drought. There was evidence of violence and warfare, cannibalism. But nobody really knows why." Alone in River House Ruin, an ancient 14-room cliff dwelling tucked in an amphitheater of rock about a mile and a half downriver from the petroglyphs, it felt as if they could have left yesterday.
Evening nightshade, a hallucinogenic plant thought to have been cultivated by the ancestral Pueblos for ritual use, still grows near the ancient mud-and-stone walls, which archaeologists estimate were built in layers between about AD 700 and 1150. On rocky hillsides nearby, potsherds and arrowheads still lie hidden in the sage and Mormon tea. Climbing through a window and standing in the darkness of an ancient stone room, it was easy to fancy yourself the site's first discoverer. That, however, is far from the case.
Some of the river's first Western visitors were trappers in the early 19th century and Mormon missionaries in the 1870s. A procession of fortune seekers followed: As many as 200 gold miners a day swooped in during the 1890s, but the river's fine-grain gold was too hard to collect. Oil prospectors arrived as early as 1907. A few years later, geological expeditions scouted the river for a good spot to dam. (They decided on Glen Canyon, about 90 miles southwest on the Colorado River.) Like the river's first explorers, we camped in tents by the river, but roughing it? Hardly.
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