Tales from America's Grand Canyon (1)

Let's start with a tale of pain.

On the third day, we'd had an excellent morning in the Little Colorado river (more on that another time) and after lunch were heading downriver to our next stop. We were in the Unkar Creek area (and I think this is the exact point) near some large beach areas. I was in the second boat and we could see that the first boat ahead had stopped moving and had was just floating - this was not an uncommon event, and could just have indicated that the guide was pointing out some interesting geological features or history, or maybe that they were having a chocolate break.

However it turned out that one of the girls in the boat had managed to have a slight accident. Whilst in a non-rapids area she had been moving about the boat and had slipped, landed badly and dislocated her shoulder. Big Ouch. This had happened to her before (though not in the same circumstances) but this time it was apparently a bad one. It was a little on the rubbish side that she'd done this in a flat part of water rather than a violently bumpy one but that's girls for you: always contrary.

The trip leader got out his first aid book and looked up "dislocated shoulder" but was unable to find anything to help. And I'm not sure I'd like to have a shoulder put back in place by someone taking instructions from a book. It was looking like a bad situation that would require external help. Luckily we were near a big sandy area which would be able to take a helicopter landing. Then...

... we heard the sound of a helicopter. This was odd since we hadn't called for one. It was then even odder when it proceeded to land near us. We pulled up to the shore and our guide went to meet it to see if they could help. In the meantime we just sat around and chatted and drank stuff, except for the injured girl who I imagine was gritting her teeth and saying "ow" a lot.



It turned out that the helicopter hadn't come for us at all (which shouldn't have been a surprise given that we hadn't called for one) but had instead come to pull out a woman from another party who were parked around the corner from us. She was suffering from hyponatremia (resulting from drinking too much water and not enough food) and needed to be taken to hospital to recover. We asked if they could also take our girl too - sadly they couldn't as the helicopter was too small. However, they were happy to come back in 45 minutes if we could just do one thing for them: Build them a helicopter landing pad.

It occured to me last night when thinking about this that we could maybe have used the place the helicopter had landed on the first time. But that didn't seem to be an option - possibly because the boat (and the injured) were too far from the current landing location.

So we had to build a pad. This involved making an area of the sand very wet so that it would a) not blow around so much and b) be obvious from the air. This would not be so bad except that the proposed pad was around 50m from the river, it was very hot (maybe around 100F) and we didn't have a fire truck. So we had to form a line from the river and pass buckets of water up it, and empty buckets down it. For about half an hour plus. In this way the pain of the dislocation was passed to us all. The sympathy we had for the injured girl was evaporating along with our sweat.

But eventually we had done enough (or at least it was getting close to when the copter would return and we had to clear the landing site) and we were able to go and relax a little and wait for the landing.

The helicopter duly came and the medics did their thing with drips and drugs. Eventually the (now quite woozy and drugged up) girl was brought to the landing pad and taken away (though not before one of her friends had taken great delight in taking many photos of her in her time of crisis). The helicopter flew away. Big Brother had spoken and the first person had been evicted from our boats. Game over.



MedEvac over, we were able to continue downriver. Actually, we went back upriver to the place where thre helicopter had been the first time because we'd used up so much time that it was time to camp for the night. And it was going to be a stormy night...