The raft was lined up perfectly for the massive rapid.
The Colorado-based team — eight accomplished paddlers on sliding seats atop a 48-foot custom raft designed to fly down the Grand Canyon — was on pace for a record.
Suddenly the boat was vertical. Then it was broken.
“It sounded like a gunshot,” said Ian Anderson.
“Followed by the sound of a jet engine,” said Seth Mason.
In the pitch black of night on the Colorado River’s burly Lava Falls rapid, an aluminum bar had snapped and punctured a 4-inch hole in the inflatable beam of the custom-built craft. The air hissing from the punctured tube wasn’t just the sound of trouble. It signaled the dissipation of a dream to paddle the 277-mile length of the Colorado River’s Grand Canyon in record time.
“It was an exciting couple moments. There was this elation that we had made it through and we had such a clean line and then coming face-to-face with the reality that our boat was sinking,” said Mason, one of seven whitewater athletes who had spent the last year training and designing the speediest raft with a goal of breaking a record set by a kayaker. “It was an emotional roller coaster.”
In the roiling eddy below Lava, the sleep-deprived paddlers — they had been rowing non-stop for more than 20 hours — boiled water to heat a patch. It was dark and raining. The patches weren’t sticking. The tube wouldn’t inflate to the hard pressure needed for speed.
“We really limped out of there,” Mason said of the last nine hours of dejected flatwater paddling below Lava. “We had abandoned the plan and recognized that any dream for a record was gone. At that point, we were aiming to get out alive.”
The six members of the U.S. Whitewater Rafting Team — the Eagle River Valley’s Jeremiah Williams, John Mark Seelig, Robbie Prechtl and Kurt Kincel, Seth Mason of Carbondale and Matt Norfleet of Breckenridge — spent more than a year building this mission. The team before them — the world champion Behind the 8-Ball rafting team — had set a 24-hour record in a similar vessel in 2006, paddling from the Upper Colorado below Gore Canyon to Moab.
The new team talked about a record attempt for years. But it was chatter. When Chaco — a water-friendly sandal company started by a Colorado river guide — asked the team for an idea beyond sponsorship of the team’s rafting races, the talk quickly became action.
“As soon as they came on board, the project went from being an abstract notion to much more of a reality,” Mason said.
It was an audacious goal. During a historic flood event in 1983 that saw the Colorado River’s flow below the Glen Canyon Dam reach 72,000 cubic-feet-per-second, a trio of paddlers — Kenton Grua, Rudi Petschek and Steve Reynolds — pushed their wooden dory, the “Emerald Mile,” down the 277-mile stretch of the Grand Canyon in 36 hours and 38 minutes. That record stood untouched until January 2016, when the record fell twice in one week. Aurora CPA Ben Orkin, paddling solo in a fiberglass and carbon fiber race kayak, set the Grand Canyon speed record on Jan. 24, 2016, at 34 hours and two minutes — a speed made more remarkable by the fact that he swam from his boat in Lava. He shaved less than an hour off the time of a team that had set a new speed record two days earlier.
After securing January permits from the National Park Service, the team set about designing a boat that could hold eight paddlers, which included the six-man rafting team, Carbondale endurance athlete Ian Anderson and Grand Canyon veteran Marty Borges, who served as a sort of coxswain, manning a tiller oar on the rear of the boat.
They ripped the sliding mechanisms off of rowing machines and mounted them with lightweight river seats, with the rowers each on an oar and their backs facing downstream. They built an aluminum frame that weighed more than 400 pounds, and tried a carbon-fiber frame on the Colorado River above the Grand Canyon that flexed too much. The design ended up a hybrid of carbon and aluminum.
They mounted the frame on two 48-foot tubes made by Jack Kloepfer, whose Jack’s Plastic Welding in Aztec, New Mexico makes virtually indestructible river tools. Kloepfer went out to see the team off from Lees Ferry.
“I was really impressed with the thought they put into that boat. It was a valiant effort,” said Kloepfer. “For me, the record is interesting but the real cool part is that the story is a whole hell of a lot better right now. Nothing bland about that story.”
Last week, they scraped record snowfall off the raft in Carbondale and hit the road for Arizona.
The plan was to average at least 8.3 mph. That means no stopping. No bathroom breaks. No sleeping. A rest spot on the raft allowed for a few minutes off the oar, but taking that spot included manning the spotlight to watch for rocks while pounding water and food.
Anderson said the team’s food supply was like a “traveling aid station,” with a buffet of high-calorie foods: self-heating OMeals, sausage-wrapped hard-boiled eggs made by Mason’s mom, date balls, bacon, M&Ms and chocolate bars. They carried all the necessities of a Grand Canyon river trip — including a portable toilet and a firepan — even though they never planned to leave the boat.
“We congratulated ourselves on how low impact we were,” Mason. “Besides a little carbon-fiber paint on the rock in Crystal, we left no trace we were there.”
The team put on the river at Lees Ferry at 11 p.m. Jan. 13. It was raining, but not windy. The river was rolling at around 20,000 cfs. The plan was to race through the inner gorge’s meatier rapids in daylight and then the easier, yet still daunting rapids, at night. They had an LED light bar mounted on the raft and speakers for tunes.
They greased the first big rapid, Hance, the first true rapid for both the vessel and the team. Spirits were high. Maybe they could make it to Lava before nightfall.
At House Rock rapid, the boat spun sideways through a towering wave train. But it didn’t come close to flipping. Still, the scare prompted a seating switch, where the two paddlers nearest Borges on the tiller oar were facing downstream. Still, the four paddlers at the front of the boat were facing backwards.
“That was pretty significant experience, dropping into whitewater backwards at night,” Anderson said. “It required putting a lot of trust and faith in everyone in the boat.”
The team was skirting the huge rapids of Crystal on the right side when the raft straddled a rock. It smashed all four carbon-fiber bars across the bottom of the frame. They improvised and, while still paddling, strapped back-up oar shafts across the bashed bars.
“It made some really creaky noises but it held for another 150 miles,” Mason said.
They were still on record pace when they arrived at Lava. It was 8:45 p.m. Dark. And really loud. Their line was clean, straight down the middle and well away from the infamous Cheese Grater rock. But the surge in the middle of the rapid — a mountain of water that erupts in unpredictable, boat-flipping bursts — caught them. A union of aluminum to carbon-fiber failed, puncturing a tube.
“I was basically underwater,” said Anderson. “John Mark, next to me, he was nipple deep. We were sinking.”
The 40 miles of flatwater beyond Lava were “absolutely brutal,” Mason said.
One of the tubes was barely inflated and dragged through the water. A strong headwind didn’t help. They had lost a lot of motivation, knowing the record was impossible. Mason fell asleep standing at the tiller and nearly tumbled off the boat. The team rotated through 15-minute catnaps on the rest perch.
They finished in 39 hours and 24 minutes, which includes three hours of repairs below Lava and who knows how much lost time on the final push out. After de-rigging the raft and loading it on a trailer, the team had been awake for more than 60 hours.
“Sleep deprivation was the big enemy,” Mason said.
Still, the team was in a celebratory mood on Sunday. They knew everything had to go perfect for them to beat the time of a racing kayak. The record is reachable, Anderson and Mason said.
And even though they raced down the most beautiful canyon on earth mostly in the dark, there were more than a few memorable moments.
“It was my first run down the canyon and two-thirds of it were at night; most of it facing backward,” Mason said. “It was a unique way to experience a place you hear so much about. But that first morning, with the blue and grays and the sunlight in the rain, that was an amazing way to start a day.”
