At 28, Arial isn’t yet a legendary Colorado matriarch, but she runs the trip like a practiced mother. She makes sure the boats are on the water each morning before the summer sun penetrates the canyon, and she finds time for hikes into eons-old rocky chasms as crooked and narrow as skeleton keyholes, and to side streams where we swim in pools that gleam milky blue with minerals. At cocktail hour, she instigates the nightly plier toss, a contest that sees the four guides chucking a rusty pair of pliers horseshoe-style at a bucket 10 meters away. Whoever sinks the tool first gets the night off from cooking, though the times I see Ariel win she just pours herself a drink and heads to the kitchen to help anyway. After dark, between swigs of Irish whiskey straight from the bottle, she cracks open dog-eared books and reads canyon stories and verses, such as the Ballad of the One-Armed Boatman. And halfway through the trip, she relieves Billy of his wake-up duties and takes to singing us awake herself.
“I was lucky enough to stumble into the Grand Canyon, and it has changed me. It’s made me stronger and more flexible,” she tells me one day as we’re gliding over a patch of placid water. “This place has a transformative power. I want to share that with everyone who comes here.”
As days pass and we meander toward Nevada, I start to think of Ariel as the modern-day Georgie White, a likeness she seems keen to play up when she shows up one morning in a pink snakeskin skirt.
“Nice outfit,” I say. “Echoes of Georgie?” With a wink and a campy drawl, she says simply, “do you know how many pink rattlesnakes I had to kill to make this?”
On most rivers, flat water can be as tedious as a midsummer drive through Iowa corn country. But on the Colorado I appreciate the long calm stretches almost as much as I do the rapids. None of the thousands of photos I’d seen of the canyon prepared me for its staggering beauty. Layers on layers of stone painted in shades of cream and ocher and burnt sienna stack up on both sides of me from the horizon to the sky, a palimpsest of eons of geological history. Sometimes, as at the broad unkar delta, copper sandstone and brick-hued limestone tumble down to grassy embankments thick with fragrant sage, yellow-flecked brittle brush, and scraggly mesquite trees. In other spots, tongues of sparkling black schist lick at the boat. On these flat passages, I like to stretch out and watch the desert panorama stream by like a silent movie reel.
But eventually Ariel cries, “To the battle stations,” and like everyone on the boat, I rouse myself from the dozy reverie and clamber to a secure spot for the rapids ahead. The battle stations are the outward-facing benches along the sides of the raft. The most prized spots—or the most deranged, depending on the size of the coming rapids—are the three seats at the raft’s nose, dubbed the Bathtub.
