River Day 2 6 October 2014 : Caspar Institute

By sunrise of Day 2, we had left civilization far, far behind, and were operating entirely within River Reality. Cold nights reward snug tents and sleeping bags. Stars and moon illuminate the night, but the ground is never less than uneven. When one gets up to pee in the river – desert rules: it can take decades for rain to wash away human imprints – one carefully plans every step.

The catamanoe is a wonder. We only unload what we need, and the rest stays moored on its stable barge. Ungainly, but at three miles per hour, manageable.

We took our time breaking camp and repacking the canoes more sensibly. Every time we looked around, the light had changed. The scenic part of the river begins about here, and so our short float this day was revelatory.

The light! The rocks and plants play their parts, but the primary author of beauty is the ever-changing light ... sometimes blindingly direct and hot, sometimes warmly reflected, often sparkling with the ever-changing surface of the living river.

Water is the primary sculptor, but many broad strokes were laid down millennia ago, when this part of the planet was alternatively under a shallow sea, the sea's shore, or hundreds of miles of blowing dunes left behind when the sea shrank. Later, as the land rose and the river cut through to maintain its course, it cut fanciful shapes. Later still, torrential rains form runnels and waterfalls that cut the rock with its own washed-away sand.

Plant life establishes itself everywhere, in the narrowest cracks and unlikeliest shadows. Again, water is the author of life, because plants survive when they choose a niche with adequate water during the rare but violent rainstorms.

The Green River, rising in Wyoming and traversing the edge of the Rocky Mountains in northern Utah, carries a burden of silt. An early settler called it "too thick to drink, too thin to plow."

Animal life is not abundant. We saw lots of ants, busily maintaining their patches ... wasps, midges by the million ... one morning, a beaver, another, evidence of an otter's lair. Lots of Bighorn sheep and deer tracks and droppings, but never the animals themselves. Almost every day, a hawk or two. Lots of Scrub Jays and more than a few Flickers.

Things that live here are cautious to the point of invisibility. This lizard posed only because I got between him and safety with my camera.

We found a spot we eyed as prime camping on our first trip about lunchtime, and decided we liked it so much, we'd stay. The longer we stayed, the more we liked it. Good tent sites and a grand rocky kitchen, but best of all: a shady cave halfway up the cliff. We called the site Verandas.