The front that brought the rain last night moved through. As typical of the passage of cold front, the day broke noticeably colder and windy. I made some long exposure (5-8 second) photos during the “blue hour” between 6 AM and when coffee would be ready somewhat after 6:30. In the photo to the right you can see tents above two dories and a raft…and the moon.

Below Lew emerges from his dory and a view along the very beautiful beach at Upper Chevron.

Below is an 8-shot composite of our camp at Upper Chevron taken at 7:13 AM, before breakfast was served. You can click this image to get to a site where you can zoom way in then pan around. When you get there, click the double arrow above the image on the right to see it full frame. Please wait for the resolution to download. You can use the + and – keys to zoom and the arrow keys to scroll. Or use the scroll wheel to zoom and the left mouse to drag.

You can see (L to R) Renee bending over to pick up something, very organized and together Jill neatly folding her tent, Frank and Sarge scurrying around, Nick waiting patiently for breakfast, the Martins getting their coffee, a jumble of boatmen trying to figure out how to assemble breakfast, and the entrance to the toilet path. 🙂

I thought the beach at Upper Chevron was beautiful. But I bet the lower part where many pitched their tents is underwater at times. Pat, Stephen, and I were not taking any chances of the river rising overnight — we pitched our tents high and dry in the upper brush.

The wall on the right side of the two photos below is composed of lava.

When we finally hit the river, we saw a Western Greebe and many more lava formations from the long-ago eruption.

It was a cool, sunny, and slightly breezy day with nice clouds.

And more and more fantastic lava walls.

It was a great morning for a peaceful cruise down the Colorado. Not many big rapids today.

Tony tried his hand at rowing, while Roger loafed, again.

I was developing some confidence that my battery supply would last until we got off the river and I got to a spot with electricity for recharging them. So I started to take more “people pictures”, something I very much like doing.

We stopped for lunch at Hualapai Acres. Got a tiny bit of rain mixed in with sun — fortunately mostly sun. The view included more lava walls and plugs.

Here is a brief slide show of our boatmen.

And some more people photos as we cruised to our camp at Parashant Wash, clockwise, Frank, Stephen, Pat, and Tony.

After we made camp at Parashant Wash I managed to get a shot of all four dorymen in their boats: Nick, Lew, Roger, and Duffy.

I made a few photos along the beach while waiting for a loosely organized group to hike the wash.

Then I wound up not walking with the group. Their pace was different than mine because I kept seeing things I wanted to photograph.

Below is a 400 degree panorama of the wash.

Here is a beautiful side canyon along the wash. Do your glasses need checking?

Dinner was pasta with a great sauce and garlic bread. Pirouette chocolate hazelnut “cigars” were our dessert. Sean entertained us with his guitar. There would be no star photography this night — it was cloudy.

Here are some more photos taken on Day 16 of our trip down the Colorado River.

As an irrelevant side note, today I took apart my Poldar timer/alarm clock that was taken out of commission by the sand storm at Love Nest Camp. It is amazing how long I worked to salvage a $13 item and even more amazing how many pieces this thing is made from. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t think to photograph them when it was apart.

Five tiny screws revealed the printed circuit board, but before I could get to the buttons below it, I had to remove 8 even smaller screws. Five of these were in a short row where certainly two would have been plenty. Then there were 15 buttons in 3 different shapes and sizes that I removed and cleaned of sand. And 15 holes/slots also to be cleaned. I removed the clear plastic cover over the digital readout and cleaned both pieces. There was a rubber piece with many contacts that needed washing in the sink — it was covered with fine sand. Then somehow I managed to get two of the parts back together with the white cord in a configuration that made further progress impossible without removing the cord.

All I had left over was a pile of very fine sand. And, a perfectly working timer.