SOONER THAN YOU THINK
Getting on the river! Taking you to the water!
HEY! We’re less than a week out! By this time next week we’ll be floating down the mighty and wild Green River. Fun facts:
Last I looked, there was no fire ban on the Green. That’s great for so many reasons, from the lack of smoke in the air, to the lack of fire around us, to having a campfire.
There’s a lot of water being released from the Flaming Gorge reservoir, so we should have a nice ride. The reason that it’s being released isn’t great—Lakes Powell and Mead are at historic lows, almost at ‘deadpool’ where the levels drop underneath the outflows at the damns, which means no hydropower and no water. Eep.
It’s 81° in Green River, getting to a high of 96° today, temperatures in the 100°s all week. Definitely sunscreen, hat, and sunglasses weather.
We’re meeting up at Ray’s on the 12th — you all have my mb#, so text me as needed. Look for an email this week with specifics and logistics.
ON THE RIVER
I don’t get to do my Historical Photos on the Green River slideshow and story1 before we head out, so I wanted to drop a key location on you guys today.
On our first day of float, we’ll be swinging past Sumner’s Amphitheater, a large natural amphitheater on a river bend, photographed by one Elias Olcott Beaman, chief photographer (at the start anyway) of John Wesley Powell’s second expedition (1871) down the Green and Colorado rivers (he sorta didn’t bring one the first time). The same place was also photographed the same year by William Henry Jackson, for the Hayden Geographic Survey, and later by Raymond Cogswell in 1909, in a party of the first ‘recreational’ boaters.
However there’s disagreement as to which bend: there are two in close proximity. We launch at river mile 96. At mile 89 we have a bend across from Duchess Hole with a candidate at river left2, and at mile 84, another feature near Maverick Canyon, river right.
A spot named in 1869 by John Wesley Powell’s first expedition, but possibly placed incorrectly on maps by entirely different personnel during the second expedition in 1871. […]
…in Powell’s 1875 account, he describes sweeping “around curve after curve with almost continuous walls for several miles.” In the previous sentence, he writes, “One of these we find very symmetrical and name it Sumner’s Amphitheater.” A few years later, the second expedition came down the river, using notes from the first expedition to help create a detailed map. In his 1925 book, A Canyon Voyage, crew member Frederick Dellenbaugh describes standing on a ridge where the river seemed just a stone’s throw to either side. What he calls Sumner’s Amphitheater “was perhaps one thousand feet high, beautifully carved by the rains and winds.”
— from Mike Bezemek’s story in Men’s Journal
Frederick Dellenbaugh, artist of the 1871 Powell expedition, writes:
We helped Beaman get his dark box and other paraphernalia up to the summit of the ridge back of camp, which was easy so far as climbing was concerned, the rocks rising by a series of shelves or steps. I made several pencil sketches there, which I have never seen since the close of the expedition. The crest of the promontory was about forty yards wide at its maximum and three yards at the minimum, with a length of three-fourths of a mile. From the middle ridge one could look down into the river on both sides, and it seemed as if a stone could almost be thrown into each from one standpoint. The opposite amphitheatre was perhaps one thousand feet high, beautifully carved by the rains and winds. It was named Sumner's Amphitheatre after Jack Sumner of the first expedition.
WET COLLODION
As we all do our final packing, where we try to fit it all into our cases and bags, decide exactly what to keep and what to leave behind, hoping that we have enough battery power and solar panels, it’s good to have some perspective.
“With equipment he obtained from E. & H.T. Anthony, the young photographer [E. O. Beaman] outfitted his portable darkroom with several cameras, tripods, glass plates, and other specialty equipment which had a combined weight of more than 2,000 lbs.”
That’s a literal ton of equipment—including chemistry—that needed to go down river.
An itemized statement in the archives of the Office of the Secretary in the Smithsonian Institution lists the sum of […] $1,173.70 for equipment and supplies
In 1871 the US Currency was still backed by gold, so by current rates for gold that’s equivalent to $111,966.52.
The wet collodion process required a heavy wooden large format camera, a ‘dark box’, a crate of chemistry, and glass blanks — all of which needed to be carried up to any viewpoints, and then back down. In the dark box, the glass plates were coated evenly with the silver solution and placed in a specialized holder. They were immediately put into the camera, exposed (with an ISO speed of maybe 2?), and returned to the dark box to be developed, washed, fixed, and varnished.
And all of these glass plates—fragile, delicate photographic negatives—needed to be carefully packed and stowed so that they would survive battering in the rapids that regularly put holes in the boats.
This reveals our use of a digital camera, with a zoom lens, and ISOs that look amazingly clean at ISO 1600—all packed into a rugged waterproof plastic case—to be a comparative cakewalk.
That will happen on night one, along with some informal discussion on photography, what we are all doing out there, hopes and dreams kinda stuff.
We can’t land, or get out on river left. That’s Ute Reservation land. They closed their permit system in 2015, but there’s hope that in 2023 it might re-open.