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It's almost every paddler's dream to paddle down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.  There's just something special about being on a river for 3+ weeks, being gone from civilation, and seeing the amazing places that the Grand Canyon has to offer.  I first signed up on "The List" back in 2005.  At that point, there was a 10-20 year waiting list due to how the list was managed.  In 2006, they implemented a weighted lottery system.  This allowed those who had been on the list a long time to be weighted more than those who were relatively new.  When the list was implemented, I ended up with 8 "points" or tickets to use in the lottery.  Every year I would pick the dates I wanted, usually at the end of May or beginning of June, but I never won.  I wasn't that worried because every year I didn't win a spot, another point was added and I knew that eventually the probability would swing in my favor.

One of the reasons that the old list failed so miserably, was that over 50% of the permit winners cancelled their trips.  Those cancelled trips would be added to a recording that you could call into every Friday and then email or write a letter to the National Park Service (NPS) to add your name to a cancelled date.  People who knew this, because many didn't, and were willing to wait on the phone for 45 minutes a week, were able to get on the Grand almost every year.  With the new system, and its web based interface, everyone who has applied for the year gets an email notifying them of cancelled trips.

Most of the time I ignore these cancelled trip notifications, but for some reason, when I got one on October 19th, 2007, I decided to log on to their web site and apply for one of the cancelled trips.  Most of the trips were in December, January, and February.  I wasn't really interested in a winter trip, so I decided to apply for the latest date possible, March 5th, 2008.  I figured that Arizona probably has nice weather in March.

Now, I was excepting a "Sorry but you didn't win" email to come about a week later, but to my surprise, I actually won the permit.  That put me into a huge panic, because I had nothing setup.  I could have declined the permit, but I decided to see if I could put a trip together.  You only have a week to reserve the trip with a $400 deposit, so I had to work fast.  Afterwards, I looked to see how many "tickets" where in the system for the 3/5 cancellation permit.  As expected, of all the cancelled trips, that date, being the latest possible, had the most points towards it, 135.  Since I had 9 points at the time and there were two permits available for that date, my chances of winning were 13%.  I definitely sucked out with this one.

I started emailing all my kayaking friends, asking if they wanted to go.  I figured that most people couldn't take 3+ weeks of time off from work or school, so I wasn't expecting a lot of yeses.  I wasn't even sure that I could take that much time off from my job, but I was willing to buck the system to make this trip happen.  I also needed to find skilled rafters to row the rafts with the gear down river.  I didn't know any rafters, so I wasn't very optimistic.

We all know that kayakers will take a day off just because the water levels are right, so I should have known that if I dangled a big carrot like a Grand Canyon trip, people would make it happen.  Eight of my friends made the commitment, so I decided to fork up the cash for the deposit.

Over the next week or so, we found 7 more people to go.  Those who were my friends, had friends of their own who were interested.  In the end, we had 5 experienced rowers (well maybe 4 who were actually "experienced"), one rower who had rowed the Canyon before, an ER doctor, and an ER nurse.

Now that we had our crew, I just had to figure out how we were going to pull this off in such a short time span.