Lava Falls can be heard from two kilometres away, long before it comes into view. At first there is only a deep, booming rumble that grows with every stroke of the paddle until it fills the whole cleft of the canyon. It is one of the most dangerous rapids in North America, at the place where, at mile one hundred and seventy-nine, the Colorado squeezes through a rockfall that slid down from a side ravine. The kayakers from the Kraków club Bystrze did what people have done here for generations: they climbed onto the bank and looked at the water for a long time, learning it by heart, before getting back into their kayaks. The run itself, which had taken almost twenty years to reach, lasted thirteen seconds.
The queue and the lottery
You cannot simply paddle onto the main stretch of the Grand Canyon. The American national park has rationed non-commercial trips there for decades, because the river and the narrow beaches, where crews camp between the rapids, could not bear unlimited traffic. There is also a principle taken seriously in the canyon: carry out everything you carried in, and leave no trace behind.
In the past there was a waiting list. More than eight thousand people signed up for it, and the wait ran to over twenty years. In 2006 the list was deemed absurd and abolished, replaced by a weighted lottery in which the odds rise with every year that passes without a win. For someone who dreamed of one particular river, it meant something simple: you had to sign up and wait, sometimes half of your adult life.
The 1994 application
The people from Kraków entered this system early. They filed their application for the main stretch back in 1994, during an expedition called Colorado 94. At that time they were let in only above and below the canyon proper; for the hardest part they were told to wait. Over the following years Krzysztof Potaczek kept their place in the queue. In that time some of the members started families and others raised children, and still the permit did not come. When it finally arrived, standing side by side at the start were people who had filed their applications as students and people for whom this was the first great expedition of their lives.
Bystrze at the canyon
The Colorado was not an unknown river to the club. The CanoAndes expedition had already run stretches of it at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, but outside the park's boundaries and without any permit, the way people paddled all over the Americas back then: wild, without maps, without approvals. It was the same school that had produced the first descent of the Colca canyon in Peru in 1981. The 2013 descent was the first non-commercial, self-supported passage by Poles through the main stretch of the canyon, in line with the park's rules, which had meant waiting almost two decades.
Fourteen Poles, two Americans
They left Poland in early August 2013. Ahead of them lay eighteen days and more than four hundred and fifty kilometres, from Lees Ferry below the Glen Canyon Dam to Pierce Ferry on Lake Mead. The group was made up of fourteen Poles and two Americans, Mike Connoly and Chris Witt, who steered the rafts loaded with gear.
An expedition in the canyon has to be self-sufficient. Eight kayaks and four rafts carried close to a tonne of equipment, because inside there are no shops, no access roads and no way to buy more food. Everything had to be brought in at the start and carried out at the finish. About a hundred rapids waited along the way, and the river here carries more water than most European rivers, and cold water at that, released from the bottom of the reservoir above the dam.
Granite: a test of a lifetime
The first truly serious rapid was Granite. One of the members wrote that it was the biggest water he had been on in twenty-four years of paddling. In the canyon the waves do not break the way they do on a mountain river in Europe; they pile up and explode on the spot, and the distance between them is so great that a kayak can disappear into the valley between two walls of water. Anyone who gets through Granite knows the worst is still ahead.
Lava Falls
The park classifies Lava Falls at the top, difficulty grade ten. The rapid formed where a side ravine dumped so much debris into the river that it narrowed the channel by half. In the nineteenth century the first explorers of the canyon, John Wesley Powell and Robert Brewster Stanton, chose to portage the place overland, fearing for their lives. The Poles stood over it exhausted after two weeks, staring at the water they had earlier watched in dozens of films showing capsizes and rafts vanishing under the wave.
They ran it one after another. One man's account reads dry, like a dictaphone note: the approach, punching through the first wave, sliding down the second, a jump to the left, one more punch and it was done. The whole fight, nineteen years in the reaching, was over in thirteen seconds. On the raft, once it reached calm water, the American at the oars leapt about with joy like a child.
A canyon that keeps changing
Eighteen days on the water is enough to see how the canyon changes from hour to hour, as the sun moves across its tiers and draws out one shade of rock after another. Between the rapids the river ran past side ravines and caves that are wonders in their own right on this route: the giant Redwall Cavern, which could hold a church, and the green, damp canyons of Havasu, Matkatamiba and Deer Creek. At its deepest the walls above the water rise more than two kilometres, and a person at the bottom is a speck against them.
One club, more rivers
The Colorado was one more entry on Bystrze's long list. The same Kraków club ran the Colca canyon in Peru in 1981, paddled the rivers of Australia in 1990, and reached the source of the Nile in Rwanda in 1993. Each time it was about the same thing: to paddle where the water is hard and little known. The difference was that the Colorado, alone among those rivers, first had to be waited out in a queue.