Red Rocks, Blue Skies and White Water

We rendezvoused the night before in Moab, the mountain biking mecca in southern Utah, and in the morning climbed aboard a bus at World Wide River Expeditions. At the river, our group settled into the rafts, while two families traveling together climbed onto the S-rig, a big, stable rubber vessel with a 35 hp outboard and a sunning area between the pontoons that's dubbed the piazza.

"It's pretty mellow for two and a half days," Marcus said.

And it is. There are few more luxurious sensations than moving on water through scenic beauty, in summer. The rock formations visible above the rim suggest life beyond the canyon -- like the skyscraper tops of modern Istanbul glimpsed from a Bosporus cruise -- but your world is here: Bake on the fat yellow tube. Sip something cold. Slip into the stream.

The brown water is bracing, in delicious counterpoint to the desert air. Find the current and there's a pleasing sense of acceleration (so pleasing it appears in my notes as "excelleration"). You glide along at the pace of the boat, where Pedro, as everyone calls Pete, reads aloud from "Cadillac Desert," Marc Reisner's masterpiece on water and the West: "until they made a Mesopotamia in America between the valleys of the Green River and the middle Snake."

After lunch we tie on to the S-rig, less idyllic but faster, and there's the piazza. The man at the outboard is huge: Lorenzo is 6-foot-7, 340 pounds. Without announcement, he launches into "A Boy Named Sue," declaiming it, with very little tune involved.

Camp is a rare break in the cliffs, extending back into a grove. While the lasagna cooks, the Aspen boys discuss the best way to field-dress an elk in bow season. Then one of them faces the river and lifts a leg straight out, doing yoga. The New West.

* * *

Day Two unfolds like the first, after a night as cinematic: moonlight like a lens filter, clouds moving across a day-for-night sky neither blue nor black. Cinerama.

The whole 100 miles between Moab and Lake Powell can be covered in a day if you take a speedboat to the rapids. Stretching it to five leaves time for hikes: Lorenzo leads us to drawings left by Native Americans 1,600 years ago. We climb 500 feet to see the famous "oxbow" where the river nearly doubles over on itself. At Indian River, we hike a mile to a natural water park, a grotto of sandstone and falling water that is at once haven and playground. We sit in the bowl formed by the pounding water of the topmost waterfall and take a stab at staying upright beneath the pounding torrent. The Great Lorenzo shows the way, raised fist emerging from the mist.

A few miles down, the Green River joins the Colorado, lighter water curling in from a bend on the right. And a bit beyond that, a sobering sound: water rushing over rocks. We drift toward the rising racket as Lorenzo makes a loud, hurried briefing on whitewater safety. "Rule number one: Don't panic. Rule number two: Hold on."

The light is failing. The rumble draws closer, like thunder. The rafts cut loose from the S-rig, and we coast around a bend and burble over just a few hundred yards of low curls, hang a right and beach ourselves on a gorgeous strand of sand.

Two nights on this beach, outlasting two other expeditions already set up when we arrived like Marines, fire-lining cots and kitchenware and smartly snapping out three parallel lines of recreation: Frisbee, football, horseshoes.