Location

Grand Outdoor Adventures

Then there’s Jordy Margid, who leads Campus Recreation and Unions’ Outdoor Adventures and is head organizer for this trip. If we are safe, well-fed, have a way to use the bathroom, and are all present and accounted for, that’s thanks largely to Jordy’s direction. He’s run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon 14 times, six of which were while guiding this class trip. He’s one of two kayakers who run with the rafts at all times, just in case quick and nimble action is required on the river. He looks most at home when paddling his kayak against a rapid and doesn’t seem to feel temperature like the rest of us.

“Jordy could walk barefoot in the snow and not notice that it’s cold,” Cathryn Lawrence, assistant director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, tells me before the trip.

He goes shirtless and wears flip-flops while the rest of us are geared to the hilt in wet suits or dry suits and neoprene socks. We slowly watch his skin go from white to roasted lobster over the coming days.

First major rapid: House Rock

Nevertheless, for all this expert guidance, I’m nervous as we approach our first major rapid around mile 17, House Rock.

Before we can see it, we hear it. A soft dragon’s roar of water that gets louder and louder as we inch forward. I’m pretty sure my palms are sweating, but they’re wet, so who knows? Some in the group are giddy at the idea of some wet, stupid fun. But I’m new to this whitewater stuff and not a thrill-seeker by nature.

I think about death — and hitting my head on rocks — and flipping our boat and being stuck underneath it — and being sucked underwater and… you get the idea.

So as we slip down the V-shaped tongue of the river and into the first choppy waves, I grip the boat’s rope handle in front of me. My heart pounds as we drop into our first wave. Then I can’t help but smile and whoop like a kid on a roller coaster just like everyone else going over this rapid. It’s a blast.

Time travel on the Colorado River

To explore the canyon by river is to be in a constant state of awe — not just of the Grand Canyon’s beauty, but also of the unrelenting, overwhelming sense of time these rocks expose to us, mile after mile. Like a living natural history museum, each section tells a new chapter of Earth’s life story. 

My boat mate as we head to North Canyon for our first big hike of the trip is geology graduate student Michael Kenney. He explains that we’re going deeper into time as we continue our trip down the river.  

The cliffs around us are made up of distinct sections, like layers of a cake stacked on top of each other, each with its own name. With the geology students, it’s almost a game — “Name that Strata” — to see who can identify the next rock layer first.

Michael points out the reddish Hermit Shale, formed about 280 million years ago in what was then a sandy river floodplain. Topping it is yellowish-white Coconino sandstone, made in a Sahara-like environment. The Toroweap and Kaibab layers preserve marine fossils born when this was a sea. And topping it off is the Moenkopi layer, formed when the earth here was a riverbank where dinosaurs roamed.

We’re looking at a time span of about 40 million years, and these are the “young” rocks. By the end of our trip at Bright Angel Trail, we’ll have traveled through nearly 2 billion years of geologic time.

Riverside view of the history of the world

It’s all rather mind-boggling. How can anyone truly absorb the magnitude and weight of time in the Grand Canyon? Here we are in a raft, looking at the history of the world. Beneath our feet and above our heads, dinosaurs lived and died; tropical sea creatures thrived; mass extinctions took place; desert replaced ocean; the Earth quaked; volcanoes erupted; ancient civilizations hunted, made baskets, stored grain and ate breakfast. And we traveled in a boat.

“You get an aspect of deep time here that you don’t get in other places,” Michael tells me. “A lot of times, you can put your hands between two rock layers and know a lot of time has passed. But here you can see an entire era of geologic time.”

North Canyon hike

Somewhere, a canyon wren sings its falling song, as if Pac-Man was just eaten by a ghost. Feet crunch on trail. A student nods at a rock and says, “Nice conglomerate.”

As we hike to North Canyon, necks arch upward and around to see mocha brown walls with swirling patterns. They look as if someone placed their palm on once-wet mud and waved it back and forth.  Except these patterns weren’t formed by anyone’s hand, or even wind or water.

“Plumose structures!” exclaims Veronica Prush, a bright and passionate geology student. She stops for a minute and explains that these featherlike patterns record the direction a rock broke when it was forcibly snapped apart under pressure.

Veronica’s impromptu mini lecture is a great example of what environmental policy graduate student Mateo Robbins says later on the boat about this group: “It’s like being immersed in an interpretive exhibit — you just point at something interesting and say ‘What?’ or ‘Why?’ and somebody knows.”