Where rafters are worth their salt - Salt River, Arizona

Sunset, March, 1997 by Jeff Phillips

March marks the height of river-running season on Arizona's incomparable Salt River

Day two paddling the Salt River has barely begun, and we are already pros. Well, sort of. Our raft of paddlers - an eclectic collection of urban escapees that includes a restaurateur, an attorney, a biologist, and a Japanese poet - exudes the quiet confidence of a team that has already survived rapids with names like Rat Trap and White Rock. If whitewater isn't pumping in our veins, it's at least dripping from our chins.

This morning's wake-up is a wicked little plunge through a narrow slot between two boulders. A frantic paddle at the bottom keeps us from flipping. Our urgent maneuvering is rewarded with a deluge of icy water as the raft bucks big waves at the bottom of the run. Wet and exhilarated, we float into the sun at the top of a long stretch of smooth water.

Loosening our life jackets, we soggy paddlers stretch out on the raft's inflated tubes to enjoy the sudden warmth and soak up the scenery. The left bank is a solid wall of granite: tall, smooth, darkly shadowed. On the right, large rounded boulders stack up a steep hillside forested with graceful, multiarmed saguaro, spindly ocotillo, and tangled clumps of cholla. A canyon wren dodges among the boulders, then graces the river with its mournful, declining-note song. As we drift by an ocotillo tipped with heavy clusters of crimson blossoms, we watch a black-chinned hummingbird sip nectar from each flower. The biologist, Peter Warshall, speaks softly.

"For years," he says, "I wondered why ocotillo bloom in a wave that starts in the south and moves north."

"Did you ever figure it out?" someone asks.

"Yep - it was hummingbirds." It turns out that ocotillo are hummingbirds' main food supply during their spring migration. If the cactus all bloomed at the same time, the birds wouldn't have a continuous supply of food throughout the migration. And ocotillo, for their part, depend equally on the migrating hummingbirds. "Look at the shape of each blossom," Warshall says. "Hummingbirds are about the only creatures that can pollinate these flowers."

Warshall leans back in the sun. The raft drifts quietly on down the river.

A RIVER OF SURPRISES

That's the way it is on the Salt. Surprises around every bend, and not all of them on the water.

Plunging from Arizona's White Mountains until it backs up behind Roosevelt Dam northwest of Globe (a town about 90 miles east of Phoenix), the Salt is the West's whitewater season opener. Though it's runnable most years as early as late February, the best months are March through May.

Our guide had introduced us to the Salt at the Mule Hoof Bend put-in just below the Salt River Canyon Trading Post on U.S. Highway 60, explaining that it is the only raftable wilderness river flowing through the Sonoran Desert. As we headed downstream, she described the canyon's geology (its granite and basalt mark where the North American and Pacific plates collide at the edge of the Mogollon Rim), pointed out distinctive Sonoran cactus and wildflowers, and noted birds (including the bald eagle) and other wildlife that we were likely to see once we entered the canyon proper.

Day one covered a stretch of the Salt well known to the many Arizonans who take family day trips through the friendly riffles along the first 9 miles of river. This stretch is crowded on weekends, but beyond the day trip take-out there are fewer boats. Once the river drops into the wilderness canyon, there's only one other access point along the Salt's next 43 miles - all the way to our take-out at placid Theodore Roosevelt Lake.

Our contingent had signed up with Far Flung Adventures for a four-day trip, which gave us barely enough time to hike up a few of the river's many side canyons. Exploring Canyon Creek the next day, we discovered flower gardens above a string of deep, nearly transparent pools cupped in gray and pink granite bowls. We made camp early on the third day, giving us time for a sunset hike up a steep trail leading to the top of a volcanic plug littered with red bits of broken pottery left by the Apaches who used this site for centuries.

Sandy beaches backed by long gravel benches above the river are rafters' campsites of choice; there, outfitters set up kitchens and tents at the end of a day of hiking and paddling. After dinner it's tempting to spread a sleeping bag under a glittering canopy of stars, as several of us did one evening.

Big mistake this time of year. Sometime after midnight it began to rain. Grabbing my bag and clothes, I ran for the nearest tent: the Japanese poet's. As the rain spattered down on the tent and we sorted my soggy gear, white-haired Nanao Sakaki laughed and produced a flask of very good scotch. "Never say no to the rain," he counseled as the liquor warmed my stomach.

On the shuttle bus back to Globe, our crew rehashed the surprises of the trip. Most of us came expecting whitewater thrills and hot desert weather; side-canyon hikes revealing the subtle delights of the Sonoran Desert were a bonus. Even now I ponder the implications of hummingbird migrations and the meaning of the poet's admonition. That's the way it is on the Salt.