The Rio Grande
Exploring the Gritty Wastelands of the Great Unknown
It’s the boat that sparked my interest. Plywood and utilitarian—not a dory or a skiff, but more like a flat pram. A jon-boat, really. The oarlocks said it could be rowed, but it looked like it could also be poled or paddled. At fifteen-and-a-half-feet, with inwales ready-made for tying-in bags, and stowage lockers fore and aft, I imagined it could carry a ton of gear. While it was hard to tell what it was built for, it smelled like adventure.
“So what do you do with this?” I asked my buddy Chuck Leinweber.
“That’s our river boat,” he said.
Being Jim Michalak’s “River Runner” design, the boat’s purpose was to float “mild rivers” with a guide in the stern, steering by paddle, and a passenger or two up front fishing. Chuck hadn’t used it for fishing, but with two people paddling, he’d done long stretches of the San Juan and Rio Grande rivers in Texas.
I asked about Chuck’s Rio Grande trip, and he told me about the river’s remote beauty—natural hot springs, camping on sand bars, paddling through towering canyons. I asked him to keep me in mind the next time he planned to float the Rio Grande, and a couple years later, the call came. We were on.
“Then, reading downstream, came the fantastic country of the Big Bend, where only Indian wanderers penetrated.” —Paul Horgan, Great River
We were four days in and fifty miles down the Rio Grande—in a section they call The Great Unknown—when Meridith decided to tell us the story of her last trip on the Rio. Her kayaking party had come upon two men armed with military-style rifles, standing on the Mexican side of the river. As Meridith and her family paddled past, the men were overheard talking in Spanish about how nice the boats and equipment looked and how all of it would soon be theirs. Fortunately, she says, nothing came of the threats, but now I had one more thing to worry about—banditos.
Our group of nine included my 10-year-old daughter, Winnie. Besides keeping us from drowning, I was also trying to keep us from freezing. We came prepared for a variety of weather conditions, but hadn’t anticipated the 28 degrees and sleet we encountered on day one. The first few nights in our tent we slept in all the clothing we had—including knit caps—and I would’ve worn my PFD if I wasn’t using it as a makeshift pillow.
Early on I began rationing our food, as we were working a lot harder than expected, burning more calories and making fewer river miles. I’d fooled myself, and Winnie, into believing we might spend some time relaxing in the sun, warming our Pacific Northwest bones in the Texas sunshine. As we were loading the boat I’d even suggested to Chuck I might put the dry-bag holding our sleeping bags near me so that I’d have something soft to lie against. Chuck just laughed. Maybe I was missing something.
The reality was we didn’t simply “float along” or “drift” much at all. The Rio Grande moves very slowly, with miles-long pools that need to be paddled if you want to get anywhere, or more precisely, to get to some other nowhere. And in a development I could have predicted, two days into the trip Chuck announced to the group that not only were we not on pace to enjoy the promised “layover day in the canyon,” we might not reach our final camp at Rio Grande Village on schedule—even without the layover day. We’d need to wake up earlier and paddle longer, he said. Having sailed two strenuous Texas 200 events in Chuck’s company, I’ve now decided he only really knows one way to vacation—the hard way.
At 1896 miles, the Rio Grande is the second-longest river in the United States, but it doesn’t flow naturally anymore. The river springs from just east of the Continental Divide, where several streams meet at the base of Canby Mountain in Colorado. From there it turns southward across the length of New Mexico through the desert cities of Albuquerque and Las Cruces to El Paso, Texas and Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, before making one crazy detour—a Big Bend—where it’s also the boundary between Texas and Mexico, before finally spilling into the Gulf of Mexico.
Because of dams and diversions upstream, the river is nearly sucked dry by the time it reaches El Paso, but it gets replenished by the Rio Conchos, which pours in from the Mexican state of Chihuahua just upstream from Big Bend National Park. In fact a reservoir on the Rio Conchos dictates the flow encountered here in the Big Bend, which varies wildly from a recorded maximum daily flow of 65,332 cubic feet per second, down to going completely dry. The flow during our trip was about 120 cfs, which meant we encountered mostly slow-moving water a few-feet-deep, in between frequent rapid sections, which raced around or over rocks and whose rushing sound could be heard at a good distance.
We had five boats in our fleet. Chuck, me and Winnie were aboard the River Runner (which I’d taken to calling the “The Barge” because of its relative lack of mobility and impressive stability—more on that later). Bill Moffitt and Ed Einhorn were in one canoe; John and Rosa Goodman were in another; Sandra Leinweber paddled a Michalak-designed plywood Rio Grande kayak, and Meridith Wright was aboard her production Old Town kayak.
Generally speaking, the kayaks and canoes were a good match in terms of speed, as the kayaks flitted along under double-paddle and the sleek canoes—even fully laden—cut through and carried well with each paddle stroke. The Barge, on the other hand—with three crewmembers and loads of supplies including as many 20 gallons of drinking water—required almost constant hard paddling to keep pace.
Boats took turns in the vanguard, with each pausing before rapids to scout the best route. We’d stand to survey the situation, then decide whether to head for the “pillow,” the funnel-shaped section of calm water before the rocks; to hug the shore for deeper water, or, if the drop was too sketchy or water clearly too shallow, to get out and walk the boat down.
Our first day was relatively uneventful, with the kayaks and canoes finding just enough water to run most rapids, and our river boat scraping and banging its way downstream behind them. After successfully negotiating many consecutive rapids that first day, I started to think the whole pausing to “scout the route” business was a silly, time-wasting convention, and I encouraged Chuck that we should just go for it.
Of course it wasn’t long after that we were swept down along the bank and under a particularly nasty strainer of low branches and debris, sending us all ducking, hats and glasses flying, and leaving Winnie with scratches across her forehead. Close calls like this would raise blood pressure momentarily. After we’d made it out of harm’s way Chuck offered me a paddle-technique suggestion, which I promptly rejected. (Never mind his years of river trips; I’d been paddling for almost two days now so I was pretty sure I knew just about everything.)
These more exciting rapids became the new norm on day two, so I was more likely to stand-up and survey the scene, or even better, to let one of the other boats break trail. Meridith was an expert paddler, and her little kayak was so nimble that we frequently waited for her to run the ugliest sections and report back, usually by pointing her arm toward the deepest or smoothest water. Sandra often did the same.
The four causes of rapids are said to be steepness, roughness, constriction of the riverbed, and sheer water volume. We encountered the first three. The steepest drops were the most fun, but often rough and rocky, so we were often forced to walk. Constriction rapids were fast, but also the most challenging as they typically ran along the riverbank where the strainers loomed.
While the worst of the strainers were tough on us in The Barge—sometimes trapping us under brush with racing water pinning us to a rock wall or muddy bank—they were downright nasty to the canoes. The kayaks could mostly traverse quickly above obstacles, but the canoes took longer to turn, didn’t have much freeboard, and they lacked The Barge’s glorious stability. It was early on the morning of the second day when John and Rosa were swept down and slammed against a tangle of branches, their canoe dipped its rail, and they capsized.
“… The desert closes against the river, and the gritty wastelands crumble into its very banks, and nothing lives but creatures of the dry and hot; and nothing grows but desert plants of thirsty pod, or wooden stem, or spiny defense.” —Paul Horgan, Great River
They call this part of the river the Great Unknown because almost nobody ever paddles it. There are no roads, no distinctive landmarks, and no visible inhabited settlements—you need to pack-in whatever you might need. Early explorers called it despoblado (open country) and that certainly hasn’t changed.
The scenery here is like something from an Old West painting—Agave, Sotol, Yucca and desert scrub grow between the low mesas and the leathery river—with the occasional herd of horses and a protective donkey spotted near the banks.
“It’s amazing how alone we are out here,” I yelled over to Ed, a sailor from Maryland, as he and Bill paddled along in the midday sun.
“No kidding,” he agreed. “And it’s not just the lack of people—where is the wildlife?”
He was right. Other than the horses, we’d seen only a few birds and a couple of turtles. The Great Unknown is remarkably uninhabited. In our first several days we encountered not a single boat, and only two other humans—a couple of Vaqueros mending a barbed-wire fence above the riverbank. “Ten Cuidado,” they said, “es poco profundo.”
“Be careful, it gets shallow,” Bill Moffitt translated for us as we paddled past.
This being the first capsize of the trip, I wasn’t sure exactly how much peril John and Rosa were in. Their canoe was upturned in a deep pool, and while one of them washed clear of the boat, for a few seconds I couldn’t see the other. But as we paddled quickly toward shore upstream of the rapid, they managed to drag the flooded boat to the rocky shore. Exhausted, they took inventory and started the wringing-out process while the rest of us helped bail the canoe.
So long as you didn’t get pinned under something, capsizing wasn’t apparently all that dangerous, but in addition to potentially losing gear, there was the consequence of the time and energy expended righting and emptying the boat. Maybe the most serious potential concern in this weather was hypothermia. There’s a reason the Spanish name for the river is Rio Bravo Del Norte (Great River of the North)—it’s because the water is cold. Early missionaries speculated the river originated at the North Pole.
John and Rosa had wisely anticipated the potential for extreme cold and brought—and were wearing—bib-style snow suits to keep warm. Now their snow suits were soaked through. Fortunately, being seasoned adventurers they’d tied their gear in securely and had dry clothing stowed in waterproof bags.
Watching my expert canoeist friends dump their boats had me looking at The Barge in a different light. Over the course of the trip both of the canoes would capsize again, always in similar situations—constriction rapids and strainers, or hairpin turns with “wall shots,” where the river flowed directly at the bank. We had the same turning-radius problems on The Barge, one time slamming into the rock wall so hard we cracked the gunwale and split the top plank…but our boat was so ridiculously stable we never shipped water. Well, at least not from above.
The Barge had a 3-foot-long, 3-inch-deep skeg made from UHMW, through-bolted to the bottom. About midway through the trip, after countless collisions with rocks, John Goodman held up a piece of our skeg he’d found floating in the river. We continued undaunted until we had only bare bolts sticking down, naturally catching on every rock we encountered. Soon the bolts had worked-open larger holes and Chuck’s feet were awash in the back of the boat. Fortunately, we were able to effect repairs that evening using wood plugs and John’s quick-dry epoxy. Hanging out with guys like Chuck and John, I’ve learned there are very few things that can’t be fixed.
After four days of Chihuahuan Desert the scenery begins to change. We are heading into the canyons. Native Americans described this place where the river entered the mountains and into deep shadow as “a place no man could enter”—at least not on foot.
Mariscol Canyon was everything we’d been promised—cool air and watery echoes bouncing off 1400-foot-high limestone cliffs, and amusement-park-like waterways wending beneath Hollywood-sound-stage-looking rock ledges and around giant boulders.
Eventually we made camp on a rocky bank near the end of Mariscol Canyon, pitching our tents on any flat spots we could find. Winnie and I cooked chili over the butane stove as darkness fell. We could hear Bill blowing his harp on the evening breeze. Later we joined everyone at the group campfire, a nightly ritual, where stories, snacks, and spirits were swapped, and stars were gazed.
Winnie, it turned out, is made for this stuff. On our drive down to Big Bend from El Paso I’d ended up in the exact situation I wanted to avoid—driving through desolate West Texas—lost, late at night, out of cell service, with my 10-year-old daughter. But Winnie quickly transitioned from someone I had to take care of, to an adventure partner and co-pilot. From dead-reckoning with phone and paper maps that first night driving, to making and breaking camp, paddling all day, and using a bucket for a bathroom—she managed it all like a seasoned explorer.
The final day’s mileage to our finish at Rio Grande Village was modest, but the capricious river wasn’t done with us yet. The wind came up, producing the first whitecaps and wind-waves we’d seen all trip, and somehow, regardless of the river’s tortuous route, the wind was almost always on the nose. We just paddled harder.
We finally started to see civilization. First a couple of hikers, then a campground, then tourists lounging in a riverside hot-spring tub. They eyed us curiously as we paddled past, our fleet of small boats bumping rocks, our crews dreaming of hot showers and ice cream and smelling like adventure. —Joshua Colvin •SCA
Article originally appeared in issue #117.
I'm lucky enough to have made this trip half a dozen times but this one was my favorite. Really great to relive it through your eyes, Josh. Thanks.
It was nearly as good as being there. Thanks so much for sharing!