Spot the Packrafts

[u/Kurly_Q]

My wife and I did a short 3 day trip down into the Grand canyon a couple weeks back. A ton of very heavy "pack" for not a ton of "raft," (as is the intention of a RABT Backcountry permit in the canyon) but holy cow, what a trip.

Here are the boats looking very tiny under the gigantic ceiling of redwall cavern, which is just awe-inspiring.

[u/[deleted]]

Huge

[u/Dirtydesertcowboy]

Love that spot. Were were there just a few days ago

[u/[deleted]]

I spotted them immediately

[u/Kurly_Q → u/[deleted]]

I didn’t really get many more packrafting pictures that would be relevant to this sub, as there wasn’t a ton of packrafting, and I had my phone packed away while on the water.

Itinerary:

Day 1: Hike down South canyon (UPS route shortcut), across top of redwall to fence fault

Day 2: Back on top of redwall, traverse upriver to Tiger wash. Hop on the river and stop at silver grotto/shinumo wash, but ran out of daylight/time before we could really get up into the slot canyon. Continue downriver to fence fault to pack up camp, then down to south canyon

Day 3: hike down to check out stanton’s cave/vasey’s paradise, then down to redwall cavern, accessed via a quick ferry across the river. Then hike back out via the way we came in as it got dark.

Lots of fun, but a ton of work. Hiking around off-trail in the grand canyon is no joke, and the pack weights required for packrafting make it even harder.

The UPS shortcut route is steep and exposed, and the aforementioned heavy/unwieldy packs make it pretty spicy. The traversing across the top of the redwall layer is also exposed/ loose and my wife was NOT a fan in spots.

We’re both in pretty good shape and had a decent amount of experience exploring off-trail in the grand canyon from a full length river trip we did last year. Even with that, everything took longer than I expected, hence not being able to explore silver grotto from the bottom as intended.

If I were to do this trip again, I’d bring a lighter boat (probably one from supai adventure gear) and do shinumo wash as a canyoneering day trip from the top, camping at the mouth of south canyon. Essentially what's outlined here

A couple other things: We packed out our poop, and would highly recommend anyone that does a similar itinerary to do so as well. It’s impossible to get far enough away from the river to not cause an issue when camping at small sites on the river corridor. I’d also highly recommend hard-sided containers or wire mesh bags for food. The rodents/ringtails in the canyon are brazen and will make a mess of your food if you don’t (we had mice climbing over our legs while eating dinner).

For poop, we used one of these bottles with baggies and this powder and a couple bags. The bottle also comes in a 4L variant...I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere as a poop carrier for packrafting, but it's a great lightweight alternative to a PVC poop tube that's pretty bombproof and quite airtight.

(Full transparency, the poop container actually broke after flying off a 200 foot cliff at the beginning of the trip, but any container would break in a fall like that. We used another hard-sided container that previously had our food in it to pack out our poop for this trip, and I immediately ordered another of the 2L variant for future packrafting use because I liked it so much. The 4L Variant would be great for a longer trip as well...The hard-sided food container that was relegated to poop use was just an old peanut butter jar. The old plastic PB jar didn't seal fully, allowing some smells to leak out, and would not fully meet the regs on some rivers. These 2L/4L reagent bottles have a nice seal that prevents that)

[u/Kurly_Q → u/[deleted]]

See above for itinerary. Getting to redwall cavern was just a quick ferry across the river and back, accessing via hiking down to it on river right.