Desolation Canyon, reborn with an attitude

There's been a thread at the whitewater rafting internet forum Mountain Buzz for several weeks now, brimming with tales of rafters' first experiences with Joe Hutch Canyon Rapid, after a massive flash flood in Aug 2008 turned a splashy and straightforward Class II drop into a long, gnarly, technical, boat-flipping challenge, worthy of Class IV designation and, by at least one account, fully eligible for comparison to the keester-kicking Class IV's of the Grand Canyon.

Based on sheer guessing, there have probably been more flips (rafts, anyway) at this rapid in the last four weeks than the entire river has seen in years. It is now a full grade harder now, maybe more than a full grade, than anything else on the 84 mile run.

Deso, of course, was my old stomping ground with Karin - we ran the river together 11 or 12 times between 1992 and 2003, twice in 1999 alone. Neither of us were Class IV junkies, although we had done water at that level several times safely (Brown's Canyon, Main Salmon, Westwater), and my thoughts about the run now are tangled and unsettled.

I genuinely love the place - the vibe, the pace, the huge canyon expanse...and the whitewater, which for me was never more than I could really handle, and usually less than my rattle-prone sensibilities would stress over. We probably burned more worry calories over campsite competition and fretting about upstream winds than we ever did over the whitewater, and even now, a year and a half removed from my last trip down there, I can still describe the line at all the major rapids. It is unquestionably part of my history, a very significant vestige of my life with Karin, and a deep engraving upon my river-running DNA.

But this...wtf is this? The river is now essentially a III- run with a IV - IV+ rapid, just past dead-center of the trip.

Does it make me more excited to go back...or less? True enough, the stories I'm reading now are accounts of the rapid at 12-16K cfs, a level we never ran it at. What's it like at 2500 or 3000? Even 4000 - no rapid I could think of could flip my dunnaged boat by waves alone at 4000cfs.

And another piece of this is that fact that Sharon prefers (truly loves, in fact) the San Juan - a mellow, decidedly river-easier trip. And would be more than happy not to repeat our Sept 2007 Deso trip, which was troubled by weather issues and left her on the downhill side of ambivilent about the place.

We have no long river trips planned for the remainder of 2009, so at this point I'm just watching the thread, taking it in, accepting reluctantly the fact that the trip that Karin and I did so much is...changed, at least, and forever gone, at most.

Things change by degrees, this is changing by degrees. I cannot wrap my mind around the idea that I'll never go back there. But that may, in fact, be the case.

I just don't know.