Not My Grandpa's Cataract Canyon

My grandpa was a professor of Engineering at Brigham Young University, and though he loved camping, and fishing and the outdoors, I never really thought of him as a real "rafting" guy...He was so soft spoken, very gentle, not a big or burley man...so imagine my surprise when we were chatting one day and he started telling me about taking his boy scouts down through Cataract Canyon and Glen Canyon! He told me stories about the canyon before Lake Powell began to fill, and how beautiful it was, and about the rapids and how fun it was for him and his scouts.

My experiences with Glen Canyon growing up were all on Lake Powell. We used to go to Hite each summer and spend a week on the lake, camping, water skiing and playing with our family. We would motor up the lake past the bridge at HIte and into the canyon to go swimming.

Things have definitely changed! The lake levels have dropped! The lagoon where I used to swim with my family is now more than a mile away from the water. The Colorado River is carving its way through the lake sediment down to its natural bed.

As the River cuts its way through the sediment, it is finding it's old channels and carving new ones, finding old rocks and new ones. The Cataract Canyon experience of today is very different from the one that my grandpa had with his boy scouts. The Glen Canyon experience of today is very different from the one I had growing up, too. And it is Awesome!

If you have already been through Cataract Canyon, but it has been a while, you need to do it again!