Paddle boarding the Colorado River through Horseshoe Bend: An overnight touring trip from Glen Canyon Dam to Lees Ferry

My entire upper body is SORE but bucket list trip: complete!

I just got back from a weekend excursion paddle boarding (and camping) along a segment of the Colorado River that passes through Horseshoe Bend: From the Glen Canyon Dam to Lees Ferry outside of Page in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

I complain talk about it a lot, but summers are usually pretty brutal due to my day job. I spend a lot of time working and not a lot of time playing.

But, once monsoonal rains hit us here in northern Arizona, that’s usually my sign that it’s OK to step away from monitoring my work phone 24/7, and take some time to venture away from cell service. Of course, since it’s monsoon season, that usually means that a lot of my plans get rained out.

But, not this time! After a few years of waiting, I was finally able to paddle the Colorado River!

When Jane and I first visited Horseshoe Bend a few years ago, we talked about cool it would be to take a river trip through Horseshoe Bend, so I’m really excited I finally got to do that.

My friend Jim pitched the idea a few months ago and I was 100% in.

I mean, when you get a new touring board, you obviously have to take it touring — right?

We booked our back haul service through Kayak the Colorado (KTC). Taxes and tip included, I paid about $100 for the 15-mile long shuttle from Lees Ferry up to the dam.

We arrived at Lees Ferry about an hour before our back haul was scheduled to go. It was recommended that we arrive 30 minutes early, but it took us a lot longer than I thought it would to organize and load everything for two vehicles/ six people, so I’d definitely suggest getting there an hour early.

KTC was super, super chill and our guide Tim was fantastic. The six of us had our own back haul boat, so Tim was really flexible on time. He loaded all our stuff up for us and used the outfitter’s dockside generator to inflate our paddle boards for us before we all hopped on our boat to head out.

Tim pointed out some landmarks (including spots to stop and spot petroglyphs or hike, how to identify camping sites and where to locate vault toilets) and gave us some fun facts about the river history and geography.

After we made it up to see the Glen Canyon Dam, we unloaded on a small shore, strapped our gear to our paddle boards, and set out.

We paddled for a bit until we reached Ropes Camp, where we pulled over a bit. Some of us hiked up the ropes to see the view from above, and some of us (including me) stayed on our boards on the river to eat lunch.

After our stop at Ropes Camp, the headwinds seriously picked up. We were fighting to get downstream, and we watched a few other paddlers flip their boards and lose their belongings.

We fought the winds and kept paddling! There were a few natural springs along the river that we stopped at, and we paddled until we got to Ferry Swale, which is where we decided to camp for the night.

We thought about paddling a little further downriver to camp, but we were a little anxious about getting to a spot and finding out there was no room for us since paddling back upstream for a few miles at night didn’t sound ideal. So, we checked out Ferry Swale and when we found a perfect campsite for us, we decided to stay.

We hauled our boards out of the river, up to shore and unpacked.

We had dinner, hung out and talked and went to bed.

While I’d planned on setting up my and Ryan’s backpacking tent, I didn’t check the tent’s stuff sack when Ryan handed it to me… and he’d forgotten to include the tent poles in it.

Which was swell.

I ended up just cowboy camping on the tent’s footprint with my sleeping pad shoved in my sleeping bag so I didn’t roll off of it/ watch it fly away.

Right before we went to bed, we had several massive and unexpected gusts of wind blow into our campsite. I’m glad I didn’t set up my sleeping pad and bag because those winds blew several camp chairs down to the river and anything that wasn’t staked down ended up in nearby bushes.

After we got everything set up, I crawled into my sleeping bag and it started raining.

Luckily, it was a light sprinkle on-and-off for only about 10 minutes, but since I didn’t have a tent, it was the longest 10 minutes of my life.

Surprisingly, I didn’t sleep horribly, although I did wake up covered in sand.

We woke up to a stunning sunrise over the canyon walls, the glass-like surface of the Colorado River and complete silence.

I’m a morning person, so I was up at about 5:30, but by the time everyone got up, ate breakfast, packed up and loaded boards, it was 9 a.m. before we hopped back out on the river.

After Saturday’s brutal winds, we were excited for a calmer morning.

We leisurely floated down the river to our next stop: Descending Sheep Petroglyph Panel.

We pulled our boards to shore and ventured to the panels, which were a fairly short five-minute walk away from the river.

We hopped back on our boards to continue our journey downstream into Horseshoe Bend and…

…the WIND.

It was BRUTAL.

At one point, the wind blew every single kayaker/ rafter/ paddle boarder through Horseshoe Bend and into a river bank across from the 8 Mile Camps, where we were all stuck.

The outfitters later told us when we got back to shore that we had been experiencing 40-50 mile-per-hour gusts all day Sunday.

We had to portage our boards around a slight bend in the river, and then paddle like mad to get back into the current.

We paddled on for a bit… and then got stranded again when the headwinds picked up so forcefully that we found ourselves being blown upstream.

We paddled over to shore at the 6 Mile Camps to wait for the winds to die down, and at this point, the “rescues” started.

Over the course of our Sunday, we watched five boats of paddlers get pulled off the river and ferried back to Lees Ferry.

And that’s just boats of paddlers that were upstream from us — we didn’t even see the downstream evacuations.

However, we were persistent as shit, so we refused to get shuttled off the river and we combatted the headwinds the entire way back to Lees Ferry — for about 9 miles.

I didn’t take too many photos because (and I am not kidding) you could not break from paddling for a second, or the headwinds would flip your board around and blow you to shore.

I think we all lost something due to the wind — hats, sunglasses, earrings and even a pair of Chacos. One of us (not me, luckily) had to finish the excursion without shoes.

We took our final break of the day at the Waterholes Canyon Trailhead, which we’d planned on stopping to hike until we realized how slow we were going due to the headwinds.

After our final break, we pushed on to finish the last four miles to get back to Lees Ferry.

Our entire venture from our campsite back to Lees Ferry Sunday took us about seven hours — 4.5 of those hours were active paddling hours and the remainder of the time was spent either waiting out winds, taking short breaks or portaging around bends.

(Once we got back to Lees Ferry, Tim let us know this was not normal weather, and we’re experienced the worst winds he’d seen in his three years working for KTC.)

But, we did it!

After we collapsed onto shore, Tim told us that out of the 90 campers he’d dropped off Saturday, they ended up shuttling about 60 of them off the river, so our group was 6 of the 30 that pressed on to complete the venture despite the wind.

Several back hauls were also canceled entirely due to the wind speeds.

I will say that — despite the chaos and sore shoulders — it was kind of nice to have the whole river to ourselves?

I highly recommend this trip — and I already can’t wait to come back and do it again next summer… hopefully with lighter winds!

A few more notes:

I really recommend Kayak the Colorado as an outfitter if you choose to take this trip. They were fantastic. Tim pointed out all the sites to us on our boat ride up the river Saturday, and during Sunday’s high wind event, KTC had its boats going up and down the river the entire day to check in with all the paddlers and make sure we were doing OK. We watched KTC boats bring several groups of paddlers back to Lees Ferry, and I saw the guides keeping track of specific groups of people to make sure they were safe. It was incredibly reassuring. One of the KTC guides let me know the outfitter doesn’t really weigh your gear (we were all really concerned about KTC’s gear weight limits) and won’t make you unpack/ leave things behind unless it looks like you’re really going to struggle to manage your gear load, in which case they’ll ask you to leave some things behind. Also, if you don’t have your own watercraft, you can rent from KTC.

If you want to make this a shorter trip, KTC also does back hauls up to the petroglyphs instead of the dam.

See ya on the river!

SHOP PADDLING GEAR

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