A tale worth telling

We returned home on Tuesday night from a fabulous 6 days at Lake Powell. Sometimes people ask me, "How is it having little kids at Lake Powell?" Or, "You mean, you always take all your kids??" to which I reply, "Wonderful!" and "But of course!" The dynamic is definitely different than it was back in the days of mostly teenagers (when I was a teenager) or mostly young adults, but different is just different, not worse by any means. We all had a great time and here are a few pictures: warning; this is pretty much the same as the email I sent to my family members yesterday; sorry for the repetition!

We had a little zipline action; masterminded by Hubs and executed by Hubs and Nate (Hubs' sister Emily's husband). I only got stills of Molly:

And Zoe:

Here are all the kids sitting on top of the houseboat watching Nate shoot the potato gun at some birds... well that was the idea but the birds were spooked by the first shot! Some pesky ravens got into our garbage while we were gone for our Sunday drive, and they scattered trash all over the beach & shallow water; yuck! The girls are plugging their ears because of the loud potato gun. Or as Gabe calls it, the guntato. Hubs' dad, Tom, is in the middle here; and Gabe, Emily & Nate's firstborn, is to Tom's left.
It rained on Sunday night, not too heavy but enough for us to all sleep inside. It continued to rain all night long so we were glad we'd gone in. Then it started back up, quite heavily, on Monday around 10am or so. We kept looking up at that V in the canyon wall ahead of us, just sure that there was potential for a great waterfall! There was this big mound of sand & rocks (and plants) between us and the waterfall, so we knew we were safe. When the waterfalls began they were coming in from all sides:
and at this point on our video commentary, we said, "Wow, those waterfalls are really crankin' now! Look at all that water!" As the center one got bigger, Aaron just HAD to go check it out. It was only about a 30-second hike over that hill to get to where the water was falling, and it got bigger and bigger. Aaron and Nate and Emily and I all went back there to look at it. Apparently when I was gone, Lucy was getting all freaked out because she thought we were going to fall down the waterfall. Here's Nate (who's no midget; this guy is well over 6' tall) and you can see how much water was coming down the center fall at this point:
Well, along with all that water there was also a lot of sand, rocks, branches, and all kinds of debris. It created a very big raging river that ran down around the right side of the hill, and into the water where the houseboat was parked. It was already a very shallow little cove, just deep enough for the houseboat to float. But we soon discovered that all the sediment being carried down was causing the water to become even MORE shallow and there was a serious risk of the houseboat becoming beached! When I came back from checking out this awesome waterfall, I noticed that the water that been up to my knees 5 minutes earlier was now only up to my ankles! So, mid-storm, we had to free the houseboat. Tom gave Nate, Aaron, & Ruth instructions on loosening the four ropes that were holding us in place, which was quite tricky since it was a really narrow spot too & took some expert manuevering on Tom's part...and some quick thinking on everyone's part... and me & Emily's job was to keep the kids quiet and out of the way. Luckily this storm was just rain, not too much wind, so it the water was very calm out in the main part of the canyon and it was a good place to hang out once we got out of there. After we were safely out into open water, the men went back with the ski boat to rescue the waverunners, which were anchored to the beach and catching the brunt of the raging river, getting beat up on the rocks and pretty beached themselves. The water around them was the consistency of "beef stew" as Aaron put it, so they had to tow them out to cleaner water before starting them up. They also had to get all the ropes untied from the rocks where we'd left them, and untangle them from all the debris that had washed down from the waterfall. There were a ton of pineneedles coming down with all that water too; apparently it had washed down from some piney mountain up above. It was really an amazing adventure! When the houseboat was backing away from the beach, I took one last shot of the waterfall at its full strengh. This was probably 3 times bigger than the shot before, when Nate was standing by it:
LOOK AT ALL THAT WATER COMING DOWN!

The pictures don't do it justice. But it was pretty amazing. Last night we were checking out the topography on GoogleEarth and noticed that there's a huge canyon above our camping spot, which funneled all that water from the hills above right down to where we were. (For any LP nuts out there, we were staying on the right-most fork of Long Canyon, which is just a couple of river bends up from the Escalante and just a little ways downriver from the Rincon.)

That last night we spent on the buoy and we had a lovely moonrise at dinner time. Here it is along with the houseboat slips at Bullfrog marina:

It was a nice peaceful end to a tumultuous but exciting day... and a really great trip. Sign me up for next year!