This was a particularly disheartening trip at the end of a rough quarter. Keith had managed to get a Salt River permit that coincided with spring break. Heather managed to make childcare arrangements. Then four days before departure Keith managed to injure himself, dropping our group down to just Heather and I. Still wanting to make it work, we made arrangements to go ourselves. The short term forecast said rain, cold, and 1100 cfs for the flow, notably higher than the 400 cfs that we had seen the river at two years prior. Heather was sick and feeling rundown. Despite all these factors working against us we still endeavored to use the permit and get in 53 miles of river. Heather arranged for a pricy car shuttle. I tried to get excited about running this river and mostly succeeded in finding a few interesting canyons we could check out after our trip instead. We packed. More disturbance as our departure was delayed pushing us to a late start. Eventually we drove across Arizona with a late night detour past the put-in to the Sinclair gas station that sold the White Mountain Apache permits we would need. We drove to the put-in campsite, set up a tent, and waited to see how cold and wet it would be when we awoke. At some point in the middle of the night was probably the loudest crack of thunder I have ever heard in my life. It was the talk of the bustling parking lot of a campground in the morning.
We got a reasonably early start to the day but packing with the occasional squalls passing overhead slowed us down considerably and it was 10:45am by the time we finally got on the water. The first small riffle of Kiss and Tell T-ed into a cliff and we were both caught a little off guard by the force of the hydraulics and eddy lines at 1100 cfs. That said there were still plenty of rocks to avoid and boulder bars that had too thin coverage as we would find out. We both remembered Maytag (III) from our previous 400 cfs trip where the left boulder bar channel became much too thin to be boatable and so thankfully avoided any mayhem by taking the unassuming narrow right channel with a smooth wave train. Grumman (III) and Mother Rock (III) had some nice waves but were easy read-and-run.
A short distance further was Overboard (III) which had some chaos in store for us. Unfortunately we did not know this rapid had nearly the same setup as Maytag and took the larger left channel. I spotted the spot on the boulder bar with the best coverage and bumped my way over its falls which then fed abruptly into a couple waves and a ledge hole. Once clear I eddied out and saw that Heather was maybe only off my line by a foot which was enough to stall out on a boulder such that she took on enough flow to stably pin her boat in place. I beached my boat and ran up the thorny and scrambling riverbank opposite her. There was little I could do to help from this position and the rapid was too loud to effectively communicate. With a really lucky throw I could maybe get a throw rope to her but I would not be able to pull her across before the waves downstream and so if anything this would be more dangerous and still not solve the pinned boat. I noticed immediately to her side there were some high and mostly dry boulders sticking out of the rapid and a small patch of calm water just below. I tried to communicate for her to try to get herself out of the boat but we made no progress. The best option seemed to be to get to her. I carried my fully loaded boat over the uneven rocks doing my best to avoid the thorns until I was well upstream. I then ferried across and paddled hard to hit the small patch of calm water, hop out on the midriver boulders, and pull my boat up. I helped her out of the boat and over to the rocks. The boat was still pinned but without her the inflated seat freed itself and began floating down the rapid and out of sight. Great- now we had a time limit imposed! Paddling another 50 miles without a seat would be one heck of a disadvantage. The pinned boat was very easy to free with a little pulling force. We tried to chat over the situation as efficiently as we could, eventually deciding I would go first and take her seatless boat down the rapid, wait just long enough to make sure she cleared the rest of the rapid, and then paddle furiously downstream to hope to find her seat. Then just as I was about to jump into her boat three rafting boats appeared in the channel with the double bummer of delaying us by another minute until they were clear and also the embarrassment of having an audience. Finally I awkwardly paddled the seatless boat through the rapid. Thankfully Heather cleared the rest of the rapid without issue. We then paddled quick about a quarter-mile to where I thankfully spotted the seat pinned against a willow on the riverbank. We pulled over, collected the seat, and collected ourselves. This Overboard epic felt like forever but probably played out over 30 minutes. It was fairly disheartening. At this point it had been about 1.5 hours since we left the put-in, going about 3 miles on the river, and only 1400ft as-the-crow-flies from our put-in because of the enormous horseshoe bend in the river!
We reinstalled the seat and continued on but both of our confidence seemed to be shaken by the mishap so close to the start of our trip. We paddled on past Second Campground. About halfway through Exhibition (III) Heather had a flip and swam the second half of the rapid which further zapped her confidence and energy. We paddled through Cibeque (II), Three Way (II), and Rafter Ripper (II) to a bend in the river where a stop was requested. Downstream a bit was Mescal Falls (III), perhaps the biggest rapid to this point that some people scout. Heather was feeling cold, tired, and out of it and after a little deliberation we ended up setting up camp at this point at a measly Mile 7.5 for the day. We set up a rain tarp to hide from the rain and drank canned margaritas as we waved to other groups passing on further downstream. We discussed our options. It would be hard to finish the river in three days at this point but we had time and food for a fourth if needed. We could try loosely joining another group for some of the bigger rapid sections. We were also about 1.5 miles from the end of the daily run, the last opportunity to bail and return back along the road to the start. We left the decision of what to do up to tomorrow. We continued to have much more cold rain than forecast beat down on us the rest of the evening and night.
The next morning we woke early for a decision. Heather still was not feeling it and was certain she wanted to bail on the river. I pretty quickly realized we needed to make sure the car didn't get shuttled to the takeout and so sent out a couple messages via InReach to call it off. With that done there was not much else to rally for so back to sleep to the sound of rain. Eventually we packed up, pushed off onto the water, and paddled a whole 2200 ft to our Mile 8 takeout at Salt River Draw. One by one we carried our boats delicately through the thorny desert plants to the road and stashed gear in the bushes. After some deliberation we decided to carry a bare minimum of warm clothes, jacket, water, and some food to walk the 6.5 miles on the road back to the car.
The road provided a quite different vantage of the river below with some of the rapids like Exhibition seeming a bit more petite. The road had some slimy mud in places but overall it seemed like it would be suitable for a Subaru Forester. We had wet feet at the mid-thigh crossing of Cibeque Creek hopefully also no issue for our car. There were a bunch of people at Second Campground but no one that seemed to be headed upriver and so we continued on the road. Approaching Mule Hoof Bend we could see a group approaching Overboard the same wrong way as us. The kayaks slipped over the boulder bar but we watch as their heaviest loaded raft beached themself in virtually the same place Heather did. We continued on past the put-in, retrieved the car (about 2 hours hiking), and worked our way back to collect our stuff down the road. It took about 25 minutes to get to our stuff then another 20 minutes or so to get back out. On the last passing we could see a group stopping to camp at our same Mile 7.5 camp and the raft at Overboard had just managed to free itself from the rapid; low bar but reassuring that we were not the only mishaps around.
We passed back through Globe and checked the weather forecast- not great but should be marginal to get up to some hikes the following day so we headed out to Cherry Creek Valley Road. To add insult to injury this involved passing right past what should have been our Salt River takeout. We worked our way slowly along 20 miles of the Cherry Creek Valley Road which we found to be recently graded overall but with some rutted slippery mud patches that could be much worse with more rain. The further we went the consistently worse the road got and the more threatening the sky, which formed an unnerving combination. Every mile seemed a mile more isolated and committing. We crossed the engineered crossing for Cherry Creek which seemed like it could take a lot more water. The road continued to worsen as we past Water Slides Canyon, the furthest I had been here before. We drove to just before Ellison Ranch where the accounts said the road would get even worse and we would need to recross Cherry Creek, this time an unengineered crossing deeper than my knee in places. It began to rain and we decided to backtrack a bit and see if the storm would pass over. After a while it did, I attempted the crossing, thankfully successfully and we crawled onward. The road soon got considerably worse to the point that we had to move and stack rocks and progress was quite slow as we nearly lost daylight. From the creek we made it a full 1.2 miles to a nasty rock crawling stretch of road. We hiked a little down it and the road showed no signs of improvement. With guidance I did a 10ish point turn and we retreated back to a muddy pullout with the idea of camping. Hiking from this spot would mean an extra 8 miles of road hiking round trip to get to the further canyon which would significantly complicate things. I pulled a local weather forecast from my InReach...and it was grim! Much worse than previously forecast, basically on the cusp on getting much worse and clearing for days. Despite exhaustion and disappointment I was quite sure our best call was to get the hell out of here before we ended up getting stuck. The rain came down and I drove out mostly in the dark. The road had already deteriorated considerably in the last hour and I had to drive with care to keep on track through some looser patches of mud. This was fairly high stress as driver and so I was more than a little relieved to finally regain the pavement. We weighed our options but we were both tired and so drove to camp at the Schoolhouse Campground near Roosevelt Lake.
More rain overnight, a cold rainy morning to pack up in. We detoured for breakfast in Globe and then drove west for home. As it happened right about when we were looking for gas and a driver switch we ended up in Tonopah and decided to take a chance on El Dorado Hot Springs. Despite the slightly off-putting nudist nature of this curious place, we found it low key, unbusy, and easily set in to soak off some of the stresses of the trip. After this hour detour we were back on the road, eventually arriving with a small mountain of gear to clean. It was hard to shake this trip off with the considerable investment and hopes for a nice spring break trip. Overall I cannot think of another time I put so much effort in to have so little to show in return. We tried. Life lesson learned I guess. Hopefully the adventure drought ends soon.
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