A journey of 1,000 miles turned into 1,400 before ending on the night of Dec. 8-9, as Jennifer Sauer and Josh Mahan lay flat on their bellies on an island in the lower Colorado River.
Bullets - at least a couple hundred of them, Mahan estimated - whizzed over their heads. They were 100 miles from their adjusted goal of Yuma, Ariz., where the Colorado peters out.
Mahan and Sauer pulled off the river the next morning. They never learned who the shooters were. They'd been warned, they said, of potential hostilities as they neared Mexico, and figure the gunshots were scare tactics.
“They were shooting over us. They knew we were there,” Sauer said last week from her family's home in Denver. “It was a terrifying encounter, but it's interesting. We saw so much on this trip, and we saw everything change so much - the landscape changed, the river changed. But eventually it was the human element that changed so much it finally ended our trip.”
The 3 1/2-month journey was launched in late August in Green River, Wyo. It began with four people, waxed to as many as 15, and waned to just Mahan and Sauer for the final 400 miles below the Grand Canyon.
Their intent, as stated on a Web site that was periodically updated, was to retrace the 1,000-mile exploration of the Green and Colorado rivers of John Wesley Powell in 1869. Buzz Holmstrom led a subsequent running of the rivers in 1937.
Mahan is a professional guide and journalist who grew up south of Darby and graduated from the University of Montana. Sauer, a 2001 UM graduate and marathon runner, quit her job on the copy desk at the Missoulian to make the trip.
Their companion for most of the way was Mike Roselle, a writer and co-founder of Earth First! who once climbed Mount Rushmore to hang a gas mask on George Washington to protest acid rain. Roselle, Mahan and Sauer were recruited for the trip by former Missoula guide Bob Scholl, who left the expedition after 16 days and later rejoined the party with the permits to run the Grand Canyon.
The goal, Mahan wrote on Downtheriver.org, was “to chronicle the 1,000-mile journey, and sort through the host of environmental and social issues that have woven around the West's most prominent drainage along the way.”
They floated past six states and through four of America's permitted canyon sections, the fourth being the Grand Canyon.
Some of the obstacles mirrored those faced by the early expeditions. They lost a boat in rapids below Flaming Gorge Dam, and whitewater wreaked havoc in the Grand Canyon.
Others didn't, as Mahan pointed out.
“The 1,400 river miles were documented by word and photo and uploaded to the Internet,” Mahan said. “Historic parties burned large driftwood fires, and even released homing pigeons.”
Nineteenth-century river runners weren't nearly capsized on Lake Powell by a huge tourist boat, and they didn't have to dodge silt beds as the reservoirs retreated at record low water levels.
Unlike Powell and Holmstrom, the modern day expedition was tied to the dates of permits through four canyons and paddled through waters backed up by the Flaming Gorge and Glen Canyon dams - some 270 miles of often windy flat water.
Sauer and Mahan tacked on three more reservoirs, paddling the length of Lake Mead after setting out on their own. They'd reached South Cove in the Grand Canyon, which was once the mouth of the Virgin River.
That was where Powell left the river in 1869, where Roselle departed in mid-November, and the original designated take-out point for the Down the River expedition.
It was a week before Thanksgiving, but Mahan and Sauer weren't ready to call it quits.
“We started talking about continuing on, kicking the idea around, when we were in Cataract Canyon (in Utah),” Sauer said. “At first it started as kind of a joke, but then it got more and more serious. We obviously didn't want to be done yet.”
Among their companions for a stretch of the float had been noted historian Dr. Roderick Nash and John Weisheit, the Colorado Riverkeeper, who immersed the crew in the history of the river.
“We finally fell into the rhythm of life out there and got a sense of the history and just how special this river trip was,” said Mahan.
They spent a few days in Las Vegas, hauled around Boulder Dam and continued on the last leg, where the Colorado forms the border between Arizona and California. They shuttled around two more dams, at Lake Havasu and Parker; entered the Colorado River Indian Reservation on the Arizona side and - on what turned out to be their final day - passed through some sensational wildlife habitat.
“Birds everywhere,” Mahan said.
He and Sauer made camp on the evening of Dec. 8 on a small island, where the river was perhaps 50 yards across, roughly 30 miles north of Blythe, Calif. They noted with some unease that it was one of the rare stretches on the trip where roads lined both sides of the river.
“We had our little camp set up, had some healthy coals going, making some chili, talking about doing some writing on the laptops,” Mahan recalled. “The next thing you know there's a car screaming down the road, with rap music going.”
Mahan turned the lantern off as the car approached and passed, but it made a U-turn. Three men got out of the car atop a rock levee.
“We started to get kind of a bad feeling,” he said. “Right about then, gunfire starts ringing out over the camp.”
Mahan and Sauer dived behind their tent, which wasn't much of a shield but was the best they had.
“It was definitely one of the higher intensity points of my life,” Sauer said. “I got to practice my belly crawl.”
At one point, Mahan chanced a peek round the tent.
“You could see them milling around up there. They were lit up by their radio. It was kind of spooky,” he said.
Finally the shooters climbed into the car and drove off.
Sauer and Mahan quickly broke camp and floated away. But the night wasn't over. They proceeded a mile or so through the dark to a point just above the Lost Lake Resort.
They had settled into their second camp of the night, on a beach, when the river's water level began to rise, apparently from a drawdown of a dam upstream. They broke camp again, rowed a bit farther upstream, and settled down in their boats to camp. It began to rain.
“Somewhere along then, we decided the trip was over,” Mahan said. “We were done.”
“We wanted to push down to Yuma - it'd be a nice little tidy float trip from Green River to Yuma,” he added. “We got within 100 miles, but we still made it further than any river runner has in 100 years.”
The irony that humans ended a trip fraught with natural dangers isn't lost.
“We were hoping that wouldn't cloud our memory of the rest of the float, which was really incredible,” said Mahan, who leaves this week for a raft-guiding job in Panama.
Sauer will probably head back to Missoula after the holidays, but she isn't sure what her future holds. There's talk of a long float on the Salmon River, and she can keep busy putting together her notes from the trip into some kind of publishable form.
Their eyes were opened, as they knew they would be.
“It was a really interesting look at water use in the West,” Sauer said. “We went through five reservoirs, and you start to see how they're sucking out such tremendous amounts of water in the West.”
The mighty Colorado, fed by countless rivers and streams in its trek of more than 1,000 miles, doesn't even get to Mexico these days.
“It's sad to see such a powerful river drained like that. We have such a use-it-or-lose-it mentality,” said Sauer. “Water is going to become a finite resource sooner than we think. I don't think we're conscious of what a depletable resource it is.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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