Editor’s note: Journal reporter Cameryn Cass spent four days and nights with 11 strangers and organizer Tim Hunter of Mancos this Easter weekend during an annual cleanup operation on the San Juan River.
For more than 20 years, Tim Hunter of Mancos has assembled a group to pick up trash along the San Juan River, the river he loves. He has floated it so many times that he lost track after 300 runs.
“That’s our backyard,” Hunter said. “That’s my solstice, where I find the most peace in life. Cleaning it makes it better for everyone who goes out there to see it, and makes it so everyone can enjoy it. That means a lot to me.”
He said it’s never the same river twice.
Rocks fall and create new rapids, the river swells and contracts and swells again, reshaping its banks. Sandbars come and go, Russian olives overtake the shorelines where tamarisk once stood.
“It’s a service to our backcountry,” he said. “And it’s what our public lands are all about.”
I had never been on a trip like this before and didn’t exactly know what to expect. But, I figured, I could do just about anything for four days.
I clocked out of The Journal office in Cortez at 5 p.m. and drove to Sand Island, a campground just west of Bluff, Utah, to join much of the crew before launching early Friday morning.
Dan and Mark were chatting at a picnic table in a pavilion.
I introduced myself and wandered off to set up camp, the single-person Big Agnus tent Tim lent me for the trip.
“The orange goes in the orange, gray in the gray,” he said, gesturing to the tips of the tent poles, and how they fit into the color-coded metal rings in the tent’s corners.
I nodded and thanked him, and said I could take it from there. Orange sand was blowing all around me, and I laughed as I struggled to secure the rain fly, trying to ease my growing frustration.
Eventually, I wrangled it into place and unrolled my sleeping bag. To secure everything in the relentless wind, I lined the inside of the tent with small boulders, not trusting the stakes that had so easily slid into the sand.
Satisfied, I joined Dan and Mark. Tim and Kim, whose fuchsia coat matched her pink plaid muck boots, had joined them around the table. Not long after, a couple named Jude and Jonathan, who had come from Portland, Oregon, wandered over, snacking on potato chips.
The sun was setting, and the wind reminded us of its presence.
Mark offered me Jameson Irish Whiskey and I gladly accepted it neat, pouring some into my coffee cup. I sat quietly as I sipped, listening to the talk, and retreated into myself.
I was reminded of something Edward Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire, a sentence that started what I feel is the prized passage of the book: “The wind will not stop.”
“Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring …”
In the morning, I blew orange dust from my nose.
The first day on the river.
People woke early, ate breakfast and filled their mugs with coffee Tim brewed first thing. He later told me about how he loved to “listen to the world wake up.”
The wind had died down from the night before. From my sleeping bag, I heard Tim say, “The weather will do what it will.”
I turned my phone on to see the time: 6:47 a.m. I groaned, stretched and rose slowly. By 11 a.m., all eight boats in our fleet – two inflatable kayaks and six bigger boats – were floating down the river.
For collecting trash, leapfrogging was the name of the game. One group would pull off and walk the banks, picking up trash. The next boat would pass them and stop at the next pull off, and so on.
I was wearing all the layers I had packed – five on top and two on bottom – and was still cold. The overcast sky threatened rain at any moment, but held off until we were off the river.
We floated and leapfrogged until late afternoon, leaving plenty of daylight to set up camp.
Unloading the gear from the boats – and reloading every morning – was a strenuous, “all-hands-on-deck” event. But with 26 helping hands, it progressed with ease.
I helped set up kitchen, carrying in a tote bag of pots and pans, as well as the metal table that doubled as my seat during the day.
Karen was “Groover Queen,” and went to work setting the toilet somewhere scenic. A quality view, I learned, was of utmost importance when choosing where to set up the groover. Accessibility and privacy considerations follow, and are decidedly less critical to a Positive Groover Experience than a good view.
The process of setting up camp made me warm, so I peeled off my long underwear and shed two more top layers. I sighed a sigh of relief, the fresh air welcome on my skin.
Everyone seemed to be doing something, so I sat in my camp chair and resumed reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
“The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one’s own existence of it. But it’s nothi–” my reading was interrupted by Jude and Jonathan, the couple from Portland.
“Want to hike to River House Ruin with us?”
Outside of Mesa Verde National Park, I had never seen a cliff dwelling so intact. River House, or Snake House, is an ancient Puebloan dwelling with multiple rooms, levels and a kiva. Petroglyphs decorate the walls above and around it, and one of the carvings looks like a huge snake.
The three of us marveled at its beauty. Traces of smoke on the roof took us to a time when people lived here.
Jude noticed rain clouds overhead and opted to head back to camp. My cotton clothes would only absorb the weather, so I decided to join her. Jonathan stayed, eager to hunt for more ruins, traces of lives long passed.
“He calls it kiva feva,” Jude said.
I laughed. I learned that Jude is a mountaineering guide, though that they don’t call it that where she works in Oregon. She’s a leader, a climbing leader.
Our small talk was cut short when the rain came in. We reached camp just in time and rushed to our tents to hunker down.
Dinner that night was hot soup, a hot meal my cold self accepted with gratitude. We huddled beneath a rain fly as rain poured from the sky. We ate quickly.
I think everyone was cold and eager to get to bed.
The rain kept on falling as I sat up in my tent, writing.
“Jonathan, ill with kiva feva, is caught in this storm,” I wrote. “Maybe he found shelter in a dwelling.”
My eyes grew heavy. The work of the day caught me, and I slept.
The river was shallower than I expected.
The murky, khaki-colored water was nearly opaque, and I had been tricked into believing it was deeper than it was.
Tim’s oars grazed the bottom. Three feet was the deepest it got, though it usually sat just above my ankle.
The leapfrogging cleanup continued. At one point, Tim jumped off the boat to help dig a tire out from the muck.
We floated into the canyon.
There was a swooshing sound overhead as a peregrine falcon flew by, a dove in its talons.
Faster than I could comprehend a raven swooped down and crashed into the peregrine with a loud thud, and caused it to drop its prey.
The dove, wings still moving, landed in the water not far from our boat.
I took the oars and pushed us closer to the dove. I was wondering if the peregrine or raven would dive for it, and nervously looked to the sky as Tim reached down and grabbed the dove with his hands.
He tossed it onto the red rock, its limp body making a thud I still can’t seem to get out of my head. To the peregrine’s dismay, the raven got to it first.
Around lunchtime – my only gauge of time being observational and seeing people on shore eating sandwiches – I jumped out to look at more petroglyphs.
I hurried up the hill as gracefully as I could in muck boots one size too big and was admiring the ancient art when a man with burned skin and sunglasses that took up most of his face playfully called me a “River Rat.”
The other 10 or so people in his group crowded the trail to see the petroglyphs. I got caught in the middle and was forced to make small talk, my escape routes limited.
They were very interested in what I was saying because I was a River Rat. I told them about our cleanup trip, and added that I was hardly a River Rat since this was something of a maiden voyage for me.
Plus, I’d be taking out at Mexican Hat in just two days’ time.
Aside from myself, Mary and Helen Mary, the rest of the crew would be on the river 10 days, taking out at Clay Hills in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
I ran back to the boat where Tim was waiting, and we pushed off to resume our cleanup.
When we were floating and nobody was around, the quiet was profound.
Tim said he goes onto the river to feel peace, and I nodded in agreement. Aside from the water rippling, it was still.
In those moments of stillness, I feel still, and stillness never felt so good.
Easter Sunday.
Before we pushed off that morning, everyone gathered on shore as Tim read a few passages from the Bible.
On the boat, Tim had a post-breakfast porter ale and I cracked a PBR.
Dan complimented my choice and called Pabst Blue Ribbon the “official beer of the river.” Tim said, “The best beer is the one in your hand.”
I sipped, and asked Tim, “Does your boat have a name?”
The question amused him, and he told me the story of why he named his aqua blue boat Achelous.
In Greek mythology, Achelous was something of a changeling, and changed forms in an attempt to win a fight against Hercules.
First, he turned himself first into a snake. Hercules defeated him, so Achelous morphed again, this time into a bull.
Hercules broke off one of his horns, and even though Achelous is defeated in the end, that horn became a cornucopia, “the horn of plenty.”
“It’s like this boat,” said Tim.
It may be large and clunky with its oversize tubes, but when it gets to camp, it’s got everything we need. “It’s the horn of plenty,” he said.
As we floated along, swarms of swallows danced around us. Tim sang.
Later in the day, we saw wild burros and bighorn sheep as they made their way to the river for a drink.
As we pulled into camp, Debbie jumped out of Kim’s boat, sand anchor in hand.
“Beat the snot out of it,” Kim yelled, encouraging Debbie as she hammered the anchor.
Hal and Judy made dinner.
Everyone got a baked potato – though some only took half one – and there were all kinds of toppings for them: bacon, sour cream, green onions, a chili sauce.
I listened to Judy talk excitedly about the Goosenecks, a windy part of the river that she had been trying to get a permit to go on for 12 years now. She also talked about her phobia of sand as I looked down at my bare feet covered in sand.
Unlike most places we’d camped at with red-orange sand, this sand was golden. Coupled with its beach grass, I was reminded of growing up in Michigan and the Sleeping Bear Dunes.
As Judy shuddered at the sight of my bare feet, I shuddered at the thought of leaving the river the next day and going back to the “real world.”
Hal said that “this,” gesturing to the canyons framing the San Juan River, “is more real than any of that other stuff.”
A shower never sounded so good.
As we neared Mexican Hat and the iconic rock came into view, Tim flipped his straw hat upside down, imitating the formation.
I took the oars. At the sight of me struggling, Tim said, “It’s a mileage game.”
The sun was shining and I smeared sunblock on my face and shoulders. I even convinced Tim to apply some.
“This is against my better judgment,” he laughed as he applied the lotion.
Dan-Mark, a play on “Denmark” the two had started calling themselves, teased Tim as they floated by.
We arrived at Mexican Hat a little after noon, 27 miles downriver from where we first dropped in at Sand Island.
Everyone unloaded their trash onto shore, piling the bags, stacking the tires. Someone even placed a jack-o'-lantern Tim had found on the very top of the pile.
After just four days of sweeping the San Juan shoreline, we filled a Dumpster to the brim.
River booty was limited – it was mostly all trash we found.
Tim found a few forgotten children’s toys, and presumably added them to his box of strange things he’s found on the river. Karen said she has one of those boxes, too.
I found a toy, a sun-bleached rubber penguin with a slit in its belly, and kept it. It lives on my microwave now.
Mostly we found bottles, Styrofoam, pieces of plastic, tires – trash was random and relatively plentiful, especially in brush piles.
One year, Tim said they collected 18 tires.
“Those loads are not atypical,” he said.
People thanked us for cleaning up when we got Mexican Hat and all along the river, too.
As of this year, there are just two rangers to patrol all 83 miles of the San Juan River. They can’t take the time to patrol too thoroughly – or pick up trash – since they have no per diem and a credit card limit of $9, which is new with the federal cuts.
“The river won’t get patrolled,” Tim said. “People will camp wherever, have fires wherever. A lot of the sites and the river itself is used every day.”
He joked about getting fired up as he spoke about the federal cuts and how those cuts threaten public lands he loves, like the San Juan River.
“These billionaires have never set foot on public land or a national park,” he said. “They have no idea what it means to have these kinds of experiences.”
I thought about that last part, about what it means to have these kinds of off-the-grid, wild experiences. I thought about the joy I felt, the connection to people and place, and the stunning scenery of the area.
I said goodbye to the crew who went on collecting trash for six more days, all the way to Clay Hills. I loaded my gear and stinky self into the truck with Mary and Helen Mary.
As we drove up the road away from the boat ramp, Mary pointed.
“I see trash down there,” she said.
