Greetings from the Green River!



After saying goodbye to Drew and hello to Mountain Classroom favorites Shanda and Andrew, we left Moab for the small town of Green River, Utah. Figuring that no study of the Colorado River Watershed could be complete without at least one long lazy river trip, we loaded up canoes and headed out for a ten day float along the Green River. A long winding Northern branch of the Colorado, the Green originates up in Wyoming's Wind River Range, twists through Dinasaur National Monument, and eventually carves through the red rock sandstone of the Colorado Plateau before meeting up with the Colorado River in Canyonlands National Park. Our itinerary had us floating the 120-mile Southern section from Green River to the confluence. The landscape was textbook Southwest: canyons, spires, mesas, brick red sandstone, arches, Anasazi ruins, and hot dry days.



We spent the first few weeks learning the ways of river life—signals, commands, paddling, new systems for packing up and setting up camp. Highlights include a sweet sixteen birthday party for Ariana complete with the eruption of an eighty-foot geyser, sightings of flock after flock of beautiful white-faced ibises, and a slow but steady descend into steeper and steeper canyons.



As we got used to the mellow rhythms of river life, we tried out new things: rafting all our boats together for "floating lunches," sinking up to our waists in river bank mud, and full tilt water battles that resembled WWF title bouts full of clotheslines, pile drivers, and pile ons. The highlight of the trip, however, may have been the student-intitiated full moon paddle. Shoving off at 3:30 a.m. we floated in silence through thousand-foot moonlite sandstone walls to the occasional sound of chats echoing off the canyon. At sunrise we rafted up and tried our best to give our own renditions of an experience that was quiet literally, beyond words.



By the trip's end, what became apparent was that the days had begun to blend—one into the other until—it seemed like there were no days, just a slow steady rhythm filled with a number of punctuation marks of laughter, awe, joy, and silence. At the confluence we continued down a few miles to our take out at Spanish Bottom. Before leaving Canyonlands, however, we climbed up to the rim and spent the night learning the constellations and the morning watching the sunrise. As we have all along we, up on the mesa rim we broke out the books and had class on the slickrock overlooking the Colorado. Afterall, Mountain Classroom is without a dout an academic program; but an academic program asking a very fundamental question: Can you learn about the world sequestered from the world? Or is it better to learn from experience? The choice is simple it seems: Classroom? Or Mountain Classroom? What'll it be?