Tuesday, May 31

It’s back to reality again, no more floating along the quiet peaceful waters of the San Juan River. As the rains were pounding Salt Lake City last week, we seemed to be missing it all in the four corners area. The only thing we noticed were a few cloudy days as the fridge of the storm passed north of us. I don’t think we had a single drop of rain.

We did experience a tornado, or what looked like a very large dust devil. Generally I think of a dust devil being mild enough to walk into the center of it without anything happening……not this one.

Wednesday afternoon we pulled into our camp at a site they call False John’s canyon, we unloaded the raft and canoe and set the chairs out to dry after being wet from the last rapid. Within half an hour the wind picked up and we noticed some turbulence over the water, in seconds a large dust devil formed and was sucking up water as it moved towards us. It then blasted right into our camp and picked up the canoe, which was tied up to a large bush and the sixteen foot canoe was blown up nine feet in the air and spun around like a toy three times. Okay, you might be saying well a canoe doesn’t weight that much, but this one still had the water jugs in it. Front and aft we had two full, seven gallon water containers strapped onto the thwarts; a combined weight of over 250 pounds flying around in the air. We threw ourselves to the ground as it blasted over the top of us and watched river bags, chairs and what ever else was on the beach all flying up into the dust devil. Thirty seconds later it vanished leaving a mess in the camp, bag were up in the trees and the water jugs in the canoe smashed wide open.

That was one hell of a dust devil!

We had to watch our water supply after that experience.

Last night we had five relatives flying in from Sweden, they didn’t arrive until 11:00 at night. Saying they were tired would be an understatement. Sunday was spent clearing out rooms in the basement to fit beds in and get everything ready for Karin’s mother, Sister and three kids. It will be a full house for the next few weeks.

I worked on this Amsterdam piece today, there were a few things I changed around. The foreground boats were added and I lightened up the water.

The sun has finally arrived in Salt Lake City and it’s supposed to be close to 80 today. Yesterday we had a dusting of snow on the ground. The newspaper thought it was funny to show a picture of some guy enjoying ten inches of fresh powder up at Snowbird Ski resort !!!

Richard Boyer