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The bulk of the group paddled the Racecourse section again, then headed from their takeout up to Buena Vista, CO. Dick Swomley did us the huge favor of riding to the put-in with us, then driving my van back to camp, which was immediately across the river from the takeout, before he headed off on a side expedition of his own.
The Lower Box is 14 miles long, but thanks to Swomley we got off to an early start, with both of our vehicles at the takeout. Lee had paddled it 20 years earlier at a higher level, but otherwise it was an absolutely unknown trip for us. I carried my bailer, a red one-gallon Tide bottle, for the first time since I last ran the Upper Gauley years earlier, because I really didn't know what I would be getting into; whether I might find myself swamped someplace I couldn't get out to dump water, as in Lost Paddle.
We reached the put-in by following a dirt road down Arroyo Hondo, a side canyon on river left, and crossing a low bridge to put in on the west bank. The road then follows a steep series of switchbacks up the right wall of the gorge. Fourteen miles downstream the takeout is at the east end of the Taos Junction low bridge and our campground is at the west end. Between those two low bridges there is no getting out of the canyon except at a hiking trail up from a hot spring about two miles in.
By the time we passed under the High Bridge, six miles from the put-in, we had already seen two herds of Bighorn Sheep (and we would see more, later in the trip), mule deer, a coyote, and what we think was a Golden Eagle (but might be some type of vulture we don't know in the East -- see the picture).
The trip was quite mellow to start; nothing more than Class II or III- rapids in an utterly gorgeous gorge, until after we passed under the High Bridge. A couple hundred yards downstream of the bridge, Mick said "that was a body back there!" Lee attained back and confirmed it, so I got out of my boat, tried to think of something disposable to mark the spot with, and remembered that for the first time in years I was carrying my bright red bailer. I hiked up and planted my bailer atop a stick I lodged in the rocks opposite the body, which was mostly submerged in classic foot-entrapment posture about eight feet off the west bank.
We were all quiet and reflective for a while, but as the river picked up in difficulty, we soon had to think about what we were doing, rather than about what we had seen. Altogether, at this extreme low flow, there were six or eight solid Class III rapids, two Class IVs that we all ran and one that only Lee ran, and a hideous portage around the Powerline rapid, which had no channel wide enough to fit a boat. I slipped on a rock and raised a bruise that would bother me for the duration of the trip; imagine if I had broken my leg in such an isolated place!
We decided that after we took out and loaded up we would drive to the BLM Ranger Station to report our grisly find, agreeing that we might be subjected to less red tape there than at the sheriff's office. But from the takeout, as I walked across the bridge to retrieve my van from the campground, up drove the very ranger we had been talking to the previous afternoon. He told us that fatalities were the province of the state police rather than the sheriff, and he called the state boys for us. He also told us that there had been no reports of a missing angler, boater, or hiker, but that there were typically several jumpers each year from the high bridge. A very nice Hispanic-American state trooper showed up a few minutes after we pulled in to camp with our boats. He radioed in our preliminary report and had us fill out contact forms that were not too onerous. By the time we were finished with the forms he had word from his sergeant on the bridge that they had been able to spot my marker with binoculars. We learned after we got home that the body of a 21-year-old college man was recovered the next day.
Lee took off for Buena Vista and the other three of us cooked in camp and stayed a third night at the Taos Junction campground. |
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