I keep hoping for a glimpse of bighorn sheep—no show. But there’s one little brown cricket in the boat with me, chirping now and then. Last of a dying breed this time of year. I’m glad the cricket’s aboard: means good luck. Everybody knows that.

Close to noon the sky clears a bit and I catch a look at the sun drifting across a tiny patch of blue. We make a halt below the mouth of Salt Creek Canyon, tie up to a willow and climb out on a limestone ledge. Groping for a better hold I see a cluster of fossil crinoids beneath my hand: the span of ages between my fingertips.

I walk for several miles up Salt Creek, following the clear stream as it pours through slick grooves and chutes in the polished limestone of the creekbed. My boots clash through layers of fallen gold leaves when I pass beneath the cottonwood trees. I climb around a fifty-foot waterfall, scrambling up from ledge to ledge, and walk for another mile before my way is blocked by a high dropoff that I lack either motivation or skill to climb.

By midafternoon, in my boat again, I approach the confluence of the two great desert rivers. As always, I feel a strange excitement in my heart. I row through a blast of headwinds coming upstream, work around a final bend and there it is—greenish Colorado merging with the golden-hued Green. My friend Sanders will be coming down that latter river. Just for the hell of it, I row up the Green River as far as I can, hugging the bank, and slipping from eddy to eddy. Half a mile and I give it up, ferry across the stream and drift downriver with the main current.

The wind grows rapidly stronger. Three miles to Spanish Bottom. I row against the wind, against the alarming waves topped with whitecaps, and have to strain at the oars before I finally reach the little silty beach at the upper end of the Bottom. I make camp at evening among the boulders, fix my supper of beef soup and crackers washed down with spring water and a slug of Jim Beam’s Choice.

Clouding up again. Reluctantly, but glad I’ve brought it, I erect the old Springbar tent in a grove of sheltering hackberry trees above the beach, then go for a walk through intermittent moonlight across the broad fields, half a mile wide and close to a mile long, of Spanish Bottom. Cottonwoods shiver in the wind and a herd of mule deer—I count seventeen—bound across my path, fifty yards ahead. Canyon walls a thousand feet high rise on all sides but there is one trail up out of here, leading to a maze of pinnacles known as the Doll’s House, and beyond that to the Maze, Lizard Rock, the Golden Stairs, Flint Trail and the high plateau country of Land’s End.

At the southern corner of Spanish Bottom I hear the roar of the first big rapid, the entrance to Cataract Canyon. STOP, says a signboard on the right bank, facing the river; HAZARDOUS RAPIDS 200 YARDS AHEAD. Quite so; that’s the way we’ll go when Sanders gets here, down the river through twenty miles of white water until we reach the stagnant waters of Lake Powell and the end of our journey.