The Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is a place that is both heaven and hell. Heaven is in the small things, the red sandstone that seeps life-giving water, the ferns that cling to each tiny patch of moist rock, the bright red Monkey-flower that peeks out among the ferns. It is the humming bird that buzzes you because of the bright orange life jacket you wear. It is the cool mist below a 100' waterfall. Heaven is also in the larger things, the pinnacles, the spires, the cathedrals, which makes up the architecture of the canyon itself, the Great Unconformity with its wonder of a missing billion years.

I have over looked the canyon from the rim only once in my life. From the rim you see its architecture in full glory, but something of the canyon itself is missing with just this view. There is no intimacy with the canyon itself. Everything is at arms distance. Seeing it from the rim is like viewing the painting of a great master. Rafting it is like painting it yourself. It is not the grand views that define the canyon to me. It is the little things that make it live, a lizard doing pushups on a rock, swimming down the chalky blue water of the Little Colorado, climbing up a slick wash to a small grotto, seeing the tadpoles start to get their legs.

If you only view it from the rim, you get to miss hell. The temperatures inside the canyon can get well over 100 degrees in the summer. Hikes up dry washes can become torture as the heat radiates from every rock. At night the sweat drips off your body as you wait for it to cool down enough to get to sleep. Then there is the sand, sand in the food, sand in your clothing, fine sand that just never comes off your body. The sand is made worse when the strong winds kick up, sandblasting the grains into your skin and eyes. The creatures that live in this hell invariably have a nasty sting. The red harvester ants crawl over every beach. The scorpions love to inhabit your moist shoe or t-shirt. The rattlesnakes are less apparent, but no less nasty.

This website is about my third raft trip down the Grand Canyon. Both my husband, Joel, and I kept a journal for the duration of the trip. The pages that follow are a melding of both our journals. They will take you through our trip day by day as we experienced it.

Technical notes

Joel and I brought our Kodak DC260 digital camera with us on the trip and we took a total of 799 photographs. The pages of this journal only highlight a few pictures from each day; however, all 799 pictures are accessible from the Photo Index page.

The journal shows pictures in a convient size to view and to help tell the story written in the journal. If you click on any picture in the journal, you will be able to view a larger version of that picture, optimized for normal screen resolutions. The originals of each pictures are very large, and probably only useful if you want to edit or print an image. The originals are only accessible using the Photo Index.

The pages in this journal are each about 100k due to the photos. We had a constant battle trying to balance size versus speed of downloading and decided that you should all get a cable modem. If you can't get one, it only takes about 30 seconds or so to download each page and we feel our beautiful prose and artistic photos are worth it (HEY no giggling allowed).

Joel on creating these web pages

During the trip, we took 799 photos on our Kodak DC260 camera. We used nine flash RAM cards (45MB and 48MB sizes). When we got back to Winchester, we started by transfering the images to Daphne's computer. It takes approximately 2 hours per flash RAM card to transfer the images and you can not use the computer for anything else during that time. So, it took us a few days just to make the transfer.

The camera knows when a picture is taken but the jpg file on the computer does not contain any hints. Therefore, after the pictures were transfered, Daphne reviewed all the pictures on the camera and named the jpg files on the computer appropiately (including date, time and description).

Then came the journals. Daphne's journal was hand written. Mine was recorded on the Dragon NaturallyMobile recorder. (I used two 8MB flash RAM cards plus a portion of a third.) Daphne typed her journal into the computer by hand. I used Dragon NaturallySpeaking to transcribe mine, but then I had to correct all the misrecognitions.

Daphne did all the hard work for the journal pages. She combined sections from both her journal and my journal together. Then she selected a subset of photographs for each day. (Some days, the selection was hard. We wanted to limit the size of each page so lots of good photos did not make it into the journal.)

For the journal pages, each photo was cropped and reduced using Adobe ImageReady. Daphne wrote all the html for the journal pages by hand (using Notepad).

Meanwhile, I worked on the Photo Index. Using the Python programming language, I wrote a script which automatically generated thumbnails and large size versions of each original photograph. Then I wrote a second Python program which automatically created the thumbnail pages and Photo Index.

The contents of the Photo Index pages are described in a simple text file which lists the page names, section names and photographs for each section. The Python script then creates the html from that description. This allowed Daphne and I to play with both the layout of the Photo Index pages and the breakdown of the photographs.

The hard work was deciding how to divide the pictures up by subject. Some subjects were obvious (people, plants, rapids), but how do you break down hundreds of vista pictures?

Anyway, here are the results of our efforts. I hope you enjoy this site.

Update in 2022

We rehosted the pictures years ago, which resulted in broken links. I finally got around to fixing the brokewn links in 2022. I also removed the thumbnail pages. These pages were critical in 1999 when no one had great bandwidth, but are just a waste now. Instead, the photos thumbnails are handled by Smugmug, where we host them. Removing the top level thumbnail index means that I no longer have a list of the places we visited each day, so I have added that below:

• May 25-26, Mile 0-11 - In Delores, At the Put-in, Camp at Lees Ferry, Badger Creek Rapid, Soup Creek Hike, etc.
• May 27, Mile 11-27 - Camp at Soap Creek, House Rock Rapid, North Canyon Hike, 24 1/2 Mile Rapid, Shinumo Wash Hike, etc.
• May 28, Mile 32-47 - Camp at South Canyon, South Canyon Hike, Vasey's Paradise Stop, Redwall Cavern Stop, Nautiloid Canyon Hike, Camp at Saddle Canyon, etc.
• May 29, Mile 47-52 - Saddle Canyon Hike, Nankoweap Canyon Hike, Camp at Nankoweap Canyon, etc.
• May 30, Mile 61-65 - Little Colorado Stop, Lava Canyon Hike, Camp at Lava Canyon, etc.
• May 31, Mile 65-72 - Camp at Lava Canyon, Hike above Tanner Rapid, Hike near Cardenas Creek, Unkar Delta Hike, etc.
• June 1, Mile 76-87 - Camp below Nevills Rapid, Hance Rapid, Clear Creek Hike, Cremation Creek Camp, etc.
• June 2, Mile 87-98 - Phantom Ranch Stop, Horn Creek Rapid, Hermit Rapid, Camp at Crystal Creek, etc.
• June 3, Mile 98-109 - Camp at Crystal Creek, Crystal Creek Rapid, Stop below Bass Canyon, Shinumo Creek Hike, etc.
• June 4, Mile 110-125 - Elves Chasm Hike, Blacktail Canyon Hike, Camp at Fossil Canyon, etc.
• June 5, Mile 125-133 - Camp at Fossil Canyon, Stop at the Doll House, Stone Creek Hike, Waiting at Stone Creek, Camp above Tapeats Creek, etc.
• June 6, Mile 133-136 - Camp above Tapeats Creek, Tapeats Creek Stop, Stop at the Christmas Tree Cave, Deer Creek Hike, Waiting at Deer Creek, etc.
• June 7, Mile 137-150 - Camp below Deer Creek, Stop at 140 Mile Canyon, Kanab Creek Hike, Matkatamiba Canyon Hike, Camp below Upset Rapid, etc.
• June 8, Mile 150-173 - Camp below Upset Rapid, Havasu Canyon Hike, Fern Glen Hike, etc.
• June 9, Mile 174-194 - Camp at Cove Canyon, Lava Falls Rapid, Whitmore Wash Hike, Camp above 194 Mile Canyon, etc.
• June 10, Mile 194-209 - Camp above 194 Mile Canyon, Parashant Wash Hike, Spring Canyon Hike, Camp at Granite Park, etc.
• June 11, Mile 209-222 - Camp at Granite Park, Granite Park Canyon Hike, Pumpkin Springs Stop, Camp at 222 Mile Canyon, etc.
• June 12-13, Mile 222-226 - Camp at 222 Mile Canyon, At the Take-out, Back in Delores, etc.