After completing all the rigging of our boats, we pushed them off the shore and into the river’s current. Flow levels had just started to rise, owing to precipitation in portions of the San Juan’s watershed the day prior to our launch. Although the five of us had come to the launch site from three of the four different cardinal compass points, we had all encountered rain, hail, sleet and/or snow on our drives. Over the course of our four-day trip, the temperature would increase comfortably each and every day, as would the flows. I had heard from one of the BLM River Rangers that, between the time of our launch and the time of our take-out, the San Juan flows had increased from 300 to 900 cubic feet per second (cfs). Supposedly, 900 cfs translates into a four-mile-an-hour current for that section of the river.

Lin and I had our own much used Aire brand inflatable kayaks (IKs) for the trip; Randy had used the trip to justify buying an REI brand IK; Dan had rented an Aire IK in nearby Bluff, Utah; and Dave had borrowed my Old Town river canoe for the trip (the only canoe we would see on the entire trip, amid a flotilla of other boats, including oar-powered rafts and many, many IKs). Each of us in our crew had filled our boats with a comfortable amount of gear, including full-sized coolers, which contained much of our food and all of the water (in frozen form, to start off the trip) we would need for four days. Nobody planned to deprive themselves of any creature comforts on this trip, and we could afford to pack our boats heavy given the relatively easy maneuvers we might need to make downstream.

That first day of our float, the river was crowded with other boaters, as was our first night’s camp. But, by the second day, everyone seemed to spread themselves out, and our little crew of five spent most of the days and all of the nights with no one else in sight. Likewise, the river itself changed not only in terms of flows, but also in that it became more turbid as the trip went on, starting off fairly green from phytoplankton, but later turning brownish from the sand and silt that was brought in from the storm’s runoff higher up on the basin. The shores and surrounding terrain varied over time, too, and ranged from steep-walled, canyon-bound stretches with little to no streamside vegetation to broader portions of river, where the banks were choked with native plants such as willow and cottonwood, to other areas where the nonnative Russian olive and salt cedars dominated.

Half-way through the trip, the olive trees began to flower and their fruity scent perfumed the entire river corridor for the remainder of the float. Of all the river trips I’ve done, I have never once been on a river that smelled so sweet. The precipitation that perhaps triggered the olive’s bloom also initiated flowering by many other plants as well, including assorted species of cacti. In turn, the pollinating insects responded to the fresh floral display, and subsequently, birds, bats, reptiles and amphibians became noticeably more active and numerous. The cycles of Nature are myriad, but not all are complete mysteries.

Speaking of mysteries, by far and away the most stunning and remarkable observation of the entire trip occurred one evening when only Randy and I remained up and talking long after the other three had retired for the night. We had been sitting on our camp chairs when Randy decided to stand up to stretch his back muscles – long hours in a kayak can put a strain on anyone’s lower back, especially when that person has spent a lifetime engaged in the hard physical labor of home construction. As Randy swiveled at the waist and looked up to the sky, he said in a circumspect tone, “Now, what in the world do you think that is?” I turned to see where he was looking and tilted my head to take in the northern half of the sky. To the west and to the east of us were high canyon walls, but in the portion of the heavens that we could see, there was a steady procession of what appeared to be silent airplanes, except that they had only white lights (not the red and green lights typically required of all aircraft) and the lights were sustained, not blinking.

It didn’t take long for us to become apprehensive at what we were witnessing: a steady parade of lights, each of which resembled in brightness, say, the planet Venus during its “evening star” phase, equidistant from each other, moving slowly and steadily from the southwest to the northeast. Since we were not prepared to say what the objects were, we began the process of elimination by suggesting what they were not.

“Okay, we’ve ruled out normal aircraft, eh?” I offered. “And we’ve dismissed planets or stars, as obviously that is NOT what they are,” replied Randy. “So,” we said in unison, “they are UFOs!” But, of course, that was an entirely inadequate explanation, and so, while Randy ran back to his pack to find his camera, I continued to count the objects as they traversed the sky. By the time Randy returned, my count was up to fifty, and only another few more lights would breach the western cliffs before the last light would appear and follow its predecessors in their inscrutable trajectory across the night sky.

Given my general mistrust of our modern civilization, I started making the case that it was either covert U.S. military maneuvers or possibly an invasion by a hostile nation’s air force. Randy didn’t laugh at me; after all, I hadn’t suggested that the UFOs carried “little green men from Mars,” but he did ratchet things back by suggesting that there must be a more low-key explanation than either the domestic or foreign air force hypothesis. He did not, however, have a plausible theory of his own to offer, and so, after about fifteen minutes of animated conversation, we slipped into a period of meditative silence. Eventually, still bewildered but very tired, we called it a night and retreated to our respective sleeping spots.

The next morning, Dave and Dan had no theories for what Randy and I described, but Lin thought that he possibly recognized the event, as he had seen something very similar in Mexico not too many months before. When Lin and his friends had returned from their Mexico camping trip, they did a little digging and eventually came to the most plausible explanation of what they had witnessed as being a satellite launch, possibly by the private company Space X.

With the phenomenon made clear, I immediately turned to grousing about our entering a new era of industrial pollution (space junk), and fortified my resolve to do without a “smart phone” or any other modern telecommunication gadgetry. My friends, all of whom were already quite familiar with my frequent anti-technology rants, headed to their respective coolers to begin rustling up some grub for breakfast. Soon, we were all back on the water and peacefully paddling downstream.

In contrast to the 21st century satellite intrusion into our wild lands experience, we were also able to move backward in time, as the San Juan River is home to impressive cliff dwellings and petroglyph displays, several of which are so well known that we were able to beach our boats and follow well-trodden trails to these marvelous artifacts of ancient, indigenous habitation. I was happy that I had bought Polaroid sunglasses prior to the trip, for, as Lin pointed out when we were studying one particularly extensive panel of rock art, polarized lenses greatly enhance the level of detail that one can see in the glyphs against the otherwise overly bright and shiny cliff walls into which the art was made.

We continued to enjoy the deep relaxation that comes from leaning back in one’s kayak, as we silently drifted by the occasional family of desert bighorn and mule deer. Occasionally, we had to run a rapid, but in no case did anyone take on any appreciable amount of water. Besides, all of our IKs were self-bailers, and Dave, the lone canoeist, always managed to deftly paddle in precisely the right line to avoid broadside waves or other potentially swamping river hazards. In fact, all in all, when it comes to the technical aspects of river running, our trip was quite uneventful. Well, wait now, there was one slight mishap: I managed to lose a baseball cap that was knocked into deep water as I obliviously passed under some low hanging branches, and by the time I regained my composure, the cap had sunk out of sight. The River Gods Giveth, and the River Gods Taketh Away…

When we reached Mexican Hat, we unpacked our boats and loaded up the vehicles we had shuttled to the take-out. Soon, we were back to where we had started at Sand Island, and we shuffled gear into the appropriate vehicles. I had driven with Dave, so we checked again to make sure the canoe was well secured atop Dave’s truck and said good-bye to our fellow paddlers. It had not only been a perfect river trip and an idyllic nature experience, but it had also been very gratifying to me to see friends from different periods of my life all get along so well, and so effortlessly. Next year, if one of us is lucky enough to get drawn for a permit, hopefully the five of us will have the chance to paddle the lower reach of the San Juan, the stretch that puts in at Mexican Hat and takes out at Clay Hills.