Random Photos from Road Trips

[Rick Quinn]

This rock sticking out of a river is known as Vulcan's Anvil; a solidified plug of hard, black lava rising up from the riverbed. Of itself, the Anvil isn't all that impressive, and my photo isn't beautiful, or particularly interesting. Not, that is, until you put it in context!

The trip on which I encountered this thing started out as a road trip: a drive from Phoenix to Las Vegas with one of my friends. After a night in Vegas, we boarded a chartered bus for the five hour ride to Lee's Ferry, where we boarded a big pontoon raft for the eight day journey down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. At the end of the rafting trip, another bus back to Vegas, and a flight back home to Phoenix.

The Anvil showed up on Day 6 of the rafting trip. It's a signpost, a marker indicating the imminent approach of an infamous rapid. Lava Falls isn’t the biggest rapid in the Grand Canyon, because it has a relatively short run, but it’s widely considered to be among the baddest stretches of whitewater in North America. Vulcan's Anvil announced our impending arrival at this rapid, which is sometimes referred to as Vulcan, after the Roman god of fire. It’s the lava deposits beneath the surface of the river that created this rapid, but the anvil was the only piece of it that showed.Once we passed the Anvil, there was no turning back.

“Two Hander!” John called out rather gleefully (meaning: hang on with BOTH HANDS!), and we all clung to the ropes for dear life as the raft picked up speed. We were headed straight for the boil of the rapid, which was roaring like a freight train, bearing down. John hadn’t bothered to scout this one first. He knew what he was doing, and his confidence really showed. We entered the churning whitewater pretty much dead center, then moved hard to the right to avoid the standing waves and the big holes in the middle of the channel. We got good and drenched at least three times, almost like running under a series of waterfalls, bucking and lurching like crazy, but the whole thing was over in less than a minute. Once we got to calmer water, John swung the nose of the raft around, pointing it back upriver toward the rapid, and held it stationary in mid-channel, gunning the outboard just enough to nullify the current, waiting and watching while Mikenna piloted our second raft, and the other half of our party, through the dangerous rapid. She may not have been as experienced as John, but she handled it like a pro, and in no time at all, our whole group was safe and sound on the other side.

A group of smallish three-passenger oar boats was pulled over to the bank at the top of the rapid when we first entered it. Once Mikenna’s raft was clear, she turned around nose first as well, and both boats stayed in place to act as spotters for the little guys, who had deliberately waited for us to pass, for that very reason. No matter how experienced the boatman, small rafts are in serious danger of flipping in these big rapids. If that happened, and if those rafters turned into swimmers, we’d be there to help fish them out of the water once they passed through the worst of it.

The first of the small rafts entered Lava Falls, two dudes, one of them on his feet at the oars, and quite dashing, wearing a helmet with horns and a pair of skin tight pants with a garish flame pattern.

They sailed through it like it was nothing, shouting gleefully, a couple of well-seasoned river runners. The second boat carried two women, and when they hit the biggest wave the one handling the oars was very nearly thrown out, but she somehow managed to hang on, and she stayed with the raft, a very close call. The third and final raft was a guy and a gal, and the same thing happened to them—the raft bucked high in the air, but this time, the young woman crouching in the prow was thrown completely clear of the raft, tossed into the middle of the rapid headfirst. We were horrified, imagining the worst, but she was a trooper, and she’d obviously done this sort of thing before. She bobbed up to the surface almost immediately and swam for it, with powerful strokes, not rattled in the least, and her friends picked her up maybe a minute later, all of them laughing uproariously.

John and Mikenna turned the rafts around then and headed for shore, a wide rocky ledge, the perfect spot to have our lunch.


My rafting trip through the Grand Canyon was one of the most amazing things I've ever done. I highly recommend the experience!

Rick