Day 3 - July 6
Sunny, 18C

The morning dawns bright and sunny. Brendan (the keenest fisherman among us) lands a nice grayling that Deb decides would be a good addition to breakfast. Brendan's decided that he wants to learn to fillet on this trip, so he tackles the grayling. It takes him about two hours to prepare the fish, but it probably took that long because I'm helping him.

After packing up, we head downstream for a short paddle that takes us into the heart of the canyon where we stop to explore. The canyon walls overhang the river and we paddle underneath them listening to the constant chattering of Cliff Swallows nesting above. Leaving the canoes, we walk back to explore some of the caves carved into the sandstone by the river. When we hike up the bank on river right, there's a long section of flat rock that extends along the shore which makes walking easy. Among the interesting things we find there is a huge slab of sandstone that's almost balanced. The four of us climb on top and start jumping up and down to see if we can tip it. It starts to rock, but we can't quite overcome the weight.

Once we begin to paddle again, the temperature drops and the wind becomes very strong. Fortunately, it's a tail wind, but that's a mixed blessing. There are still lots of swifts and rapids to negotiate and the wind makes controlling the canoes very difficult. Rather than the nice clean lines we'd normally be paddling down rapids, the canoes are being forced out of control and are bumped against rocks by the strong and unpredictable gusts.

Around lunchtime, we find a location where we'd camped on our previous trip and take advantage of the bend in the river to get some shelter from the wind. After eating lunch, we hike up to the top of the ridge above us and become aware of the true strength of the wind. Its hard to even stand without considerable effort. The temperature has now dropped to 8 C and we've started to put on lots of layers to keep warm, which is hard because the wind seems to rip through all our gear and rob us of internal warmth.

Paddling downstream, we come to a turn in the river I remember distinctly from our previous trip. There's an obvious fault in the geology of the bank that hints at the possibility of interesting rocks. We didn't have enough time to stop last time, but there's ample time to explore this trip, so we stop. Scrambling among the rocks, we find some interesting geodes that reveal multicoloured crystals. There's quite a variety and most are fairly easy to pick out of the crumbling rocks.

By now, the weather has become quite miserable. We'd wanted to go a bit farther, but we've decided stop at the first opportunity. The shear canyon walls don't hold out much hope for finding a good site, but we're lucky in finding a fairly sheltered patch of flat tundra among the trees on a flat section around a sharp bend. It turns out to be a perfect location. There's room for four or five tents, but we only need space for two. Instead of pitching both, we decide to only set up one so that the body heat from the four of us will keep the interior warmer. But just before we begin to put the gear inside the tent, we decide to move it to another location as there's a large dead tree nearby that might be affected by the wind. The new location is surrounded by healthy trees that should withstand the force of the wind and we no longer need to be concerned about have a tree crash into the tent while we sleep.