Tales from America's Grand Canyon (3)

Now, a tale of alcohol.

Lava Falls is the fastest navigable whitewater rapid in Northern America. It's at around about River Mile 180 (ie 180 miles from Lee's Ferry) and would be our last major rapid of the trip. I think it's a grade 10 rapid (equivalent to grade 5 on the scale used everywhere else in the world) - photos don't quite give the full impression of how powerful the river can be:



After scouting the rapid from the rocks above, we reboarded the boat and made our way through. The guides didn't mention it to us at the time but a couple of people have died in Lava Falls over the years, both on commercial trips like ours (though the most recent was around 20 years ago). Thankfully, none of us died or even fell in and our 35 ft rigs sailed gloriously, if bumpily, through. The first of our boats headed downriver towards camp and we in the second boat followed behind.

A few miles downstream we came across a party of rowboat rafters on the shore. They were shouting something at us. It sounded like they wanted... ice. Did we have any spare ice that we could give them? Hell yes! We only had one night to go, and our boat was the one with majority of the coolboxes, so we could just about spare a few bags of ice. We pulled into shore, satisfied that we were helping out some rafters in need.

It turned out that this other party had run out of ice a few days previously. Whether they needed the ice to keep food cool or just to use to make cocktails, they didn't make clear. However, they were clearly grateful to receive this bounty because one bearded old gent bounded over to us with a bottle of Tequila and urged us all to "have a shot". Excellent! But it got better - he then decided that they clearly had far too much booze and that we could just take the whole bottle (it had about 0.75 to 1.0 litres left in it). Result!

We thanked the man and sailed off. The first boat was now out of site in the distance and had probably just assumed that we'd stopped to clear out our water pump, or possibly for a riverside toilet break. They had no idea that we had just made a genius alcohol haul.

We didn't have any shot glasses with us, though I wouldn't have been surprised if there had been some tucked away in the boat somewhere - they seemed to have everything else. But such a small thing as that would not hold us back from Tequila. Since it was a big bottle, it had a big bottle cap. Perfect for drinking from! We began to pass the bottle round those of us on the boat who wanted some (which was most of us).

After the first round it occurred to our boat drivers that we had some salt and limes knocking around on the boat, easily to hand. So our superb assistant boatsman searched them out, cut up some limes for us, passed the salt and we were then on to proper Tequila Slammers all the way to camp:



We got through around four or five rounds by the time we pulled in and were all fairly happy. We had maybe 0.25 litres of the bottle left and that mostly got drank later on in camp.

Good times.