Water

Way down below, you will find the hydrographs for this trip.  The flow was clearly well above 2,000 cfs during our Verde River trip.  This is a flow that's quite rare on the last weekend in March of any given year.  During the early 1980's, a flow like this would have been pretty normal.  Then along came the drought.  Flows like this vaporized during the drought.  It was a delight to have this much fluffy water during a nice, sunny warm time of the Arizona Spring. 

It was windy and rather cool Saturday but at least it was a tailwind.  The overnight low was 28.  However, on Sunday, the temps rallied into at least the upper 70's and probably the low 80's.  Sunday's overnight low was a mere 46.  All of this great weather made the cold water feel quite user-friendly.

The Verde River's famous rapids have undergone a lot of changes in recent years.  It's not the same river I remember.  Pre Falls and The Falls are truly knarly at these levels.  I wouldn't want to run either one of them.  We sneaked through the trees on river right to get into a position to scout a "must do" ferry over to a small eddy above the Falls.  Luckily, we all made the run.  If you miss that small eddy, you're going over The Falls and you're going to swim--guaranteed! 

After we got our boats into the little eddy, we then lined them on the far left side of The Falls.  The lining job was especially tricky but Dexter was in charge and his experience with this procedure made it look easy.  All of the many features of The Falls look MUCH different than I remember them.  The wave train has changed, the Ladders slot on the right is no longer feasible--there's at least two more keeper waves and the ledge hole looks far more frightening than I can ever recall.

Trust me, there's no way I'd want to run Pre Falls either!  Both of them looked very scary.  You couldn't pay me to take people through either of them in a commercial raft.  Nope.  No way.

Punk Rock is Punk Rock.  It's a hug the left shore and hope for the best.You really have to work at it.  Bushman has two really big, Grand-Canyonesque waves and you can't miss them.  If you're lucky, they won't flip you.  The vegetation has squeezed the river flow in a lot of places and rendered normally tame rapids into forces to be reckoned with.  There are a lot more potential "wrap rocks" sticking out here and there than there used to be.

Dex says it gets a lot easier at lower flows and becomes even more problematic at higher flows.  I guess that's to be expected.  It's not the same old casual Verde it was throughout the 1980's and 1990's.  It's definitely a formidable river now.  Buyer beware!