To offset the weight of an extra man for each boat, our supplies were cut to the minimum, arrangements having been made with W.W.  Bass—­the proprietor of the Bass Camps and of the Mystic Springs Trail—­to have some provisions packed in over his trail.  What provisions we took ourselves were packed down on two mules, and anything we could spare from our boats was packed out on the same animals.  As we were about ready to leave a friendly miner said:  “You can’t hook fish in the Colorado in the winter, they won’t bite nohow.  You’d better take a couple of sticks of my giant-powder along.  That will help you get ’em, and it may keep you from starving.”  Under the circumstances it seemed like a wise precaution and we took his giant-powder, as he had suggested.

The river had fallen two feet below the stage on which we quit a month before.  A scale of foot-marks on a rock wall rising from the river showed that the water twenty-seven feet deep at that spot.  No measurement was made in the middle of the river channel.  The current here between two small rapids flows at five and three-fourths miles per hour.  The width of the stream is close to 250 feet.  The high-water mark here is forty-five feet above the low-water stage, then the river spreads to five hundred feet in width, running with a swiftness and strength of current and whirlpool that is tremendous.  The highest authentic measurement in a narrow channel, of which we know, is one made by Julius F. Stone in Marble Canyon.  He recorded one spot where the high-water mark was 115 feet above the low-water mark.  These figures might look large at first, but if they are compared with some of the floods on the Ohio River, for instance, and that stream were boxed in a two hundred foot channel the difference would not be great, we imagine.

One of the young men who greeted us when we landed came down with a companion to see us embark.  On the plateau 1300 feet above, looking like small insects against the sky-line, was a trail party, equally interested.  They did not stand on the point usually visited by such parties but had gone to a point about a mile to the west, where they had a good view of a short, rough rapid, the little rapid below the trail, while it was no place that one would care to swim in, had no comparison with this other rapid in violence.  We had promised the party that we would run this rapid that afternoon, so we spent little time in packing systematically, but hurriedly threw the stuff in and embarked.  Less than an hour later we had made the two-mile run and the dash through the short rapid, to the entire satisfaction of all concerned.