Grand Canyon Packraft Self-Support

Background

For the past five years the two biggest driving forces in my life have been hiking Grand Canyon and whitewater packrafting. But I waited years before I felt ready to put them together properly, then waited another year for a permit. I actually drew my own permit for January, but my friend Laura got one for March. So when all my favorite local paddle pals began committing to the warmer trip, I knew I had to cut my losses and pivot. I desperately wanted to do this trip in a small boat self-support style, and luckily Laura's husband Tyler had already done a trip with just four packrafts, so the trip was being planned that way. We ended up having a group of 15 paddlers, 13 in packrafts and two in 12ft kayaks. I am not certain, but this could be the largest packraft self-support trip to date!

I brought multiple cameras on this trip and focused on video, so my best visual documentation is available in a 13-minute edit here. But I wanted to write something to cover some of the details of the trip, in hopes that more groups might decide to do a trip in this style. I love that packrafts allow travel through this landscape for many days, independently, maneuverably, playfully, and affordably. 

From what I've seen and heard, most self-support packraft trips in the Grand Canyon have been done by seasoned adventurers, excellent paddlers, and/or people in the "core" of packrafting (guides, Alpacka employees, etc). This can make doing a self-support Grand trip feel unattainable to average packrafters. But our group was different. We were a very large group of mostly class III boaters with modest packrafting experience. But many of us were Flagstaff locals, just familiar enough with the Canyon to know it was possible, even if we were scared. So we did our homework, focused on safety and healthy group dynamics, and had a fantastic time. You can, too!

FAQs

(Literally, I was asked each of these questions at least 15 times before and after the trip.)

“You’re not taking any big rafts?”

It's becoming very common on modern Grand Canyon river trips for packrafts to be brought along as accessory boats and used by a few participants for a few rapids. They serve more as toys than as vehicles. Rowboats are so integral to the culture of Grand Canyon river trips that it seems hard for people to think outside the box.

Of all my river friends, many of whom were on this trip, very few have rowing experience. Fewer still, perhaps even none, own their own rowboat. Grand Canyon river trips are traditionally very expensive because of the gear rentals and extravagant food. But all of my river friends own their own packrafting gear, and have experience eating, camping, and pooping on multi-day trips. Packrafts have been used for self-support Grand trips before, and knowing fully well that they are capable, they were the natural choice.

“So you’re running all the big rapids?”

An understandable concern. After all, smaller boat + bigger water = more difficult and more risky. Right?

I don't agree. I don't have rowing experience, but the few people on the trip who did commented that packrafting felt easier and less stressful. It seems like rowing a loaded 18ft raft through these rapids by yourself is actually pretty damn technical. It's difficult to nail lines, flips are possible, and difficult to recover from.

So, did we all run all the big rapids? No. Our group was made up mostly of solid class III paddlers, and even a couple of brave self-identified class II paddlers (I think they can now say that they’ve graduated!). We approached the whitewater accordingly, with a safety-first mindset. We scouted occasionally, and a handful of rapids had some participants wanting to opt-out. But we never portaged. The better options were either to take a sneak line through the shallows, or walk the rapid and have a more stoked boater walk back up for a second lap. With these methods, we ensured that opting-out had little effect on the flow of the day, making it easy for people to make a choice they felt safe with. I don't think it would be a good idea to plan on doing this for a large percentage of rapids, but for the roughly eight scariest drops it was a good strategy.

“Will you be able to carry enough stuff?”

Yes! I like to say that the name packraft is dual-purpose - in addition to being packable, they are also excellent at packing. This is one of their key advantages over most kayaks. Modern packrafts have airtight zippers so that equipment can be stored inside the tubes.

At the beginning of the trip, we decided it was easiest to each weigh everything we were bringing. Food, camping gear, packrafts, spares, drysuits, paddles, helmets - everything. 

Our heaviest load was Daniel with 127lbs. From there, I recall a variety of descending numbers - 117, 108, many near 100, 93, 88.

Sure, we left some things behind that traditional trips might have. Food with high water content? That was a sacrifice. Coolers? Only one. Canned beverages? Some made the cut, but not many. Cots? Paco pads? Yeah, no.

Aside from these obvious deductions, we weren't trying to pack light. Unladen packrafts are subject to getting slapped around and rejected by big waves, but with weight in the tubes they are more stable and carry momentum through features. Excessive weight reduces airtime and can feel sluggish trying to catch surf waves, so many of us strived for a balance. 

For fun’s sake, I was committed to bringing my V3 Valkyrie - the heaviest packraft, with the smallest cargo capacity. I brought many items that weren't strictly necessary - a chair, a big camera, copious battery power, a large backpack, a drytop, spare sleeping pad, 2 spare pillows, spare pogies, spare coaming, spare skirt,and, most notably, a spare packraft. My Refuge, along with most of this stuff, lived untouched inside my bow for most of the trip.

My total came out to 77lbs. I found it pretty inspiring to think that without some of these spare items I could've been at a total of about 67lbs - a weight that I could feasibly, if unhappily, carry in my backpack. A 14-day hike-in trip with full whitewater kit would be pretty significant, but doable.

Weather

Our trip coincided perfectly with “the most anomalous heatwave to ever hit the southwest, at any time of year”. 

Luckily it was only late-March, so the heatwave to us meant daily highs around 100°F. This was the weather of a typical May or September. Definitely hot, but when the water temperature is around 50°F and many side hikes are wet and shady, we coped just fine. 

As a result, much of my gear was excessive. I wore my puffy jacket twice near the beginning. Dry clothes were mostly unused - I stayed in the set I wore under my drysuit, unbothered if they were wet from paddling or a swim at camp. Being damp often helped me stay cool enough to fall asleep. I brought a 20°F sleeping bag and ended up inside of it every night, but usually very late. 

Those items were all part of what I’d want for typical March weather, and since long forecasts aren't always solid, I brought them anyway. The best forecast I got, pictured above, extended only to March 23rd, a few days before our trip ended. But I also knew that the end of the trip was in a significantly lower and warmer climate zone than the beginning, basically the Mojave desert. So I decided to skip a tent, and brought a 8oz tarp shelter instead, which I never used.

If this had been a winter trip, I would've brought more gear, but not much. Another jacket to layer under the drysuit. Down pants, socks, and hood. My 40°F synthetic quilt to layer over my sleeping bag. A tent. A firepan, for driftwood fires that are legal in winter. With only a few pounds more, I could easily have been overprepared for January, too.

Food

For the most part, we all brought the same types of food we would bring in a more human-powered trip. Commonly referred to (disapprovingly) as “backpacking-style” by conventional river runners, for me it's just standard adventure/camp food. It's nonperishable food with a high nutrient:weight ratio. That mostly means low water content.

I like this food! My breakfasts were cereal and powdered soymilk, oatmeal, or ramen with peanut butter and dried edamame. During the day I had Barbells protein bars, Honey Stinger waffles, more peanut butter, more dried edamame, sour gummy candy, cheese, pepperoni, and various chips. Most of my dinners were freeze dried Peak Refuel meals, and the rest were instant mashed potatoes with fried pepperoni, more cheese, Takis or more dried edamame, and hot sauce.

I find all this food pretty delicious on backcountry trips. But you don't have to - you can bring whatever food you like. I also find it very easy to get enough carbs, fat, protein, and salt using backcountry food like this. Micronutrients are admittedly more difficult, but no problem - they're waiting for us when we get home.

I love using a scale to help with food planning. I start with what I call vibes-based packing, aka just guessing how much of each item I'll want. Then I throw it all into a big bag and weigh it for a quick and easy "sanity check". I try to bring foods that are around 120 calories/ounce. Mashed potatoes are 100, chips are 150 - it all kinda works out. I've done this enough times to get to know myself and I find that on my hardest trips I crave 2.5lbs of food per day, and on short and easy trips I can get by with 1.5lbs and a few big meals upon return. 

Compared to other sports, paddling is not very metabolically depleting, but this trip was long, so I packed 2lbs per day for a total of 28lbs. This number includes packaging, so I don't know my exact calorie total for the trip, but I do know that it was about perfect. I ate as much or as little as I wanted to at any given time, and finished with 1lb of food left. I also don't divide my food up into daily portions, partly because it takes extra effort, but mostly because I like flexibility in my diet. I just pack it all however makes the most sense, and eat whatever I want whenever I want it.

At the end of the trip, I wasn't the only successful one. Everyone in our group seemed pretty satisfied with their food experience. For the most part, we had good variety and quantity. Some people expressed being tired of a certain repeat meal, and some had too much extra food (Daniel brought 42lbs and ate most of it! Others ate less than expected...). Nobody ran low. The group did express one biggest craving - chips. I thought this was hilarious! We could've easily brought so. many. chips.

Packrafts are very voluminous inside, so we didn't necessarily have to be careful about how we packed our food. We did, however, use a variety of methods for overnight/unattended food storage to prevent feeding the critters. Grand Canyon river camps have pesky mice, rats, ringtails, and ravens. So as a group we used a wide variety of plastic jars, bear cans, Ursaks, Ratsacks, Loksacks, and Luck-sacks (the kind that rely on good fortune to work!)

My favorite part about all this was the realization that I could've brought an additional 28lbs of food and still been at a total weight of only 110lbs with winter gear, which would allow me to do a 28-day self-support trip, the longest allowable trip length in Grand Canyon.

Water

The river in Grand Canyon emerges from Glen Canyon Dam perfectly clear, but not clean. Depending on the time of year, sediment can be re-added from tributaries, turning the river brown again. Brown water clogs filters, and the particles allow parasites to hide from chemical or UV treatment, so it must be clarified first. The best way to facilitate quick and complete sediment settling is with a chemical called Water Wizard. I have an older video about it here. There are many ways to implement it, but on big river trips the crowd-favorite seems to be collapsible buckets. 

Most people in my group planned to settle and filter about four liters each night, and they all stuck to their plan. Contrarily, I was suspicious that the river might remain clear for our entire trip, since this was a year without snowpack for the tributaries and we would have no rain. So in addition to my more complex system, I also brought a .6L Befreee squeeze filter, which I kept in my PFD. My dream was to be able to go the whole trip without carrying any water in my boat, and it came true!For most of the trip, the river stayed clear and my filter stayed fast enough to hydrate easily. Only around Lava Falls did the water seem a little dirtier and my filter start slowing down, but it was never brown, I usually carried only the Befree on hikes, too. Only on our Tabernacle and Whitmore hikes did I carry more than .6L.

Poop

Here is my favorite poop system:

1. Bring 3 dog poop bags per day

2. Lay out one dog bag flat (square-shaped) on the ground

3. Poop on the dog bag

4. Wipe with toilet paper. In other backcountry scenarios, I am a convert to the sticks, rocks, and backcountry bidet method. But at popular Grand Canyon river camps, scattering even small traces of poop felt inappropriate. Fortunately, the hygiene concerns of relying only on TP are mitigated by being near a river and having opportunities to bathe frequently.

5. Sprinkle crushed chlorine bleach tablets (creates gas that kill bacteria and halt decomposition) on the poop. Then, sprinkle some baking soda (moisture absorbent) on the poop. The combination of these two powders seemed to work well for Daniel, Tyler, and Greg on their previous June/July (very hot) trip through Grand Canyon. On this March trip, most of our group used two powders with reported great success. I did not use bleach powder, because of a misunderstanding (I thought it was being provided) and had slightly more odors than others.

6. Lift the flat dog bag by its four corners, centering the poop and placing the entire deposit into a second dog bag

7. Place used TP into the second dog bag also

8. Squeeze all the air out of the second dog bag and twist the top shut. Place into a third dog bag and repeat

9. Place the neatly wrapped final package inside a Nylofume bag lining your hard-sided container and twist the top to seal. These are like clear, strong, odorproof trash bags. They are cheap enough to be disposable, and are the best odor-proof bags I have found. I like a twist closure much better than a ziploc-style Loksak closure. It is more compressible, and the Loksaks on our trip seemed very difficult once they were dry and gritty. The Nylofume bag also serves as a divider within the hard-sided container, allowing you to keep poop accessories clean inside.

10. Place the screw-top, hard-sided container into the packrafts cargo fly.

Choosing a hard-sided container

One of our group members, Mike, is a veteran packrafter and was on the first full packraft self-support trip through the Canyon. At that time, the river rangers told the packrafters that they strongly recommended and would be most likely to approve a waste container called a Clean Mountain Can (CMC). From this point forward, a precedent was set that CMCs were the go-to waste container for Grand Canyon trips.

CMCs were designed in collaboration with the Park Service for mountaineers on Denali. I am sure they work well there, but for packrafting, I hate Clean Mountain Cans:

• They are expensive

• They are heavy

• They are made of very hard plastic, and have sharp edges and corners the are likely to damage packrafts

• They have a valve in the lid designed to vent gasses, which makes sense for changing altitude but not for containing odors inside a boat

• They are not even very watertight, partially due to the valve

• They are too big for most other river trips.

• They are borderline too small for Grand Canyon river trips. Tyler, our co-Leader originally wanted this trip to be 11 days in length because on his previous 11-day trip he and Daniel both filled their Clean Mountain Cans. I was adamant that this was a silly reason to not spend more time, and we should just bring additional hard-sided containers, even if we had to share them. But what would those containers be?

I emailed with a very helpful NPS ranger and explained all of these concerns. To my surprise, I was told that CMCs are not the only approved waste container for packrafting. Of course there are PVC-pipe options like the YakTube and DIY versions, but those seemed even worse than a CMC. Fortunately, the ranger also told me this:

"Have a truly honest self-evaluation of whether you feel your setup will be both sanitary for you and capable of meaningfully minimizing impact and protecting the Canyon that so many of us love so dearly. If it fits with all that, awesome!!

For reference, here are a few more examples of containers we have approved in the past for trips similar to yours that would be more flexible and lighter than PVC, with what at least appears to be more of a watertight capability than a standard old protein powder jar:

UniStore™ PP Wide Mouth Reagent Bottles for Chemical Storage | United Scientific

United Scientific® Unistore™ - Sample Container with Lid - Laboratory Grade

Polypropylene Wide Mouth Reagent Bottle - 135oz Container with Lid (4000ml), Plastic Bottles with Lids, Pack of 1: Amazon.com: Industrial & Scientific

Amazon.com: Nalgene HDPE Wide Mouth Round Container, 64 Oz, Opaque : Industrial & Scientific

Hope that's helpful in guiding your decision making.  Thanks for writing and for enjoying your public lands. We look forward to having you here at the Ferry!"

This was amazing news. I believe these are the best poop containers for packraft self-support trips. They are cheap, light, and made of flexible plastic with rounded edges. They are very watertight, small enough for use on other rivers, and two of them combined have much more capacity than a CMC, enough for anyone to get through 14 days or more. If they have one flaw, it is that the small mouth makes it impossible to dump your stuffed-full Nylofume bag into a dumpster all at once, but I can cope with that. I like that there are multiple Amazon links above, but in case those products all disappear, here is a photo of what we're talking about.

Timing

Is 14 days enough?

Daylight hours, weather, and group transition efficiency will vary between every trip. Our trip spanned the Spring Equinox, so we had a very average 12 hours between sunrise and sunset. We had warm weather, which makes getting up and getting wet in the morning feel a lot easier. We had only 4 hours of headwind on the whole trip, which could've been a lot worse. We had plenty of fussing about with gear, people who struggle to get up in the morning, and people who took a long time to pack. Our earliest launch left camp at 8:30am, but we were usually around 9 or 9:30.

Taking out at Diamond Creek makes for a 225-mile journey. The last day had to be short for the shuttle, so we needed an average of 17 miles per day. We had no issues meeting our mileage goals each day. We only scouted ten rapids which helped our efficiency. On flat sections, we easily moved faster than rowboat groups without exhausting ourselves. I would say we spent about 5-6 hours per day in our boats.

We had time for multi-hour side hikes each day. We distributed these evenly throughout the trip, so we never had a layover day and therefore never had time for any big objectives. Our biggest hikes were Kwagunt, the Tabernacle, Stone, Matkatamiba, Tuckup, National, Havasu, and Whitmore Trail, where a few of us had dinner at the top.

As I said at the beginning, hiking in Grand Canyon is one of the most important parts of my life, so I could happily spend a month on the river with many layover days to do bigger hikes, canyoneering descents, and summit climbs.

But was 14 days enough? Yes. It felt like a very appropriate length for a normal Grand Canyon packraft trip like this.

Shuttle

Even though we are local, we paid Ceiba Adventures for our shuttle service. They are great people, and they had a van with a trailer that easily fit all of us and all our gear.

Whitewater Skills

I have a 12-minute video about how to become a good whitewater packrafter, so I won't go into too much detail here. But I will highlight two skills that I think are uniquely helpful for Grand Canyon paddling:

1. Stay in your boat when you flip over. Immediately ejecting from your packraft (as if you're trying to keep your head above water) can result in annoying and scary separation from your boat. Luckily, thigh straps allow us to mitigate this. Practice going into the kayak roll position when you flip, then grabbing ahold of a boat component (thigh strap) while also holding onto your paddle. Grand Canyon water is deep, making this a very safe option. Having a big, bouyant packraft to float through the waves with is very comforting. It also makes self-rescue a lot faster when your reach calm water.

2. Everything is side surfing. Squaring up and hitting waves head-on is ideal, but it doesn't always happen that way. Side-surfing teaches you to lean downstream into frothy features, and hold a high brace with your paddle. This instinct is super helpful to have for the big, disorganized water of the Grand Canyon where lateral waves can unexpectedly hit you from the side.