Tempting fate on the Owyhee River
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I (fourth from left) and the other dauntless members of a five-day rafting expedition do calisthenics on the riverbank to keep hypothermia at bay. We ran sixty-nine miles of the Wild and Scenic Owyhee River (in Oregon’s remote southeast corner) in winter. It snowed every day. None of us had brought a wet suit.
I unintentionally swam the entire length of the Class IV Montgomery Rapid, in winter and without a wetsuit, after falling out of the raft I was captaining at the head of the rapids. This shot was taken with a telephoto lens just as I resurfaced from the bottom of a whirlpool.
My buddies put me (bottom-center, wearing blue and gray balaclavas) in a four-person body sandwich to treat my severe hypothermia after swimming Montgomery Rapid in winter. After an hour and a half—and drinking two quarts of hot water—my body temperature was still only 94.6 degrees Fahrenheit. This was one of over a half dozen times I nearly lost my life in the wild.
Me in the Grand Canyon, three weeks into the expedition. I and fifteen fellow river rats ran 280 miles of the Colorado River—over a hundred rapids—through Grand Canyon National Park. Our ill-fated expedition was plagued by venomous critters, across-the-board injuries and life-threatening illness.
An expedition member is evacuated by helicopter from a very remote stretch of the river to a medical facility on the canyon’s South Rim. A couple hours earlier, team member Jim Gurly and I had climbed the south wall 700 vertical feet in order to get a mayday distresss call out of the mile-deep canyon (via ground-to-air transceiver) to a commercial aircraft.
Expedition members (far-left side of photo) are nearly completely swallowed by Granite Rapid. The Colorado River’s torrent—up to 20,000 cubic feet per second—created waves up to ten feet high (far-right side of photo), totally submerging raft and occupants at times.
The view upriver of Lava Falls Rapid. So terrifying were the rapids here that, after scouting them from the river bank, all but one of us had to urgently run into the bushes to empty our bowels before manning our rafts through the roiling whitewater.