Once a friend and I tried to canoe up a tiny waterfall, where one part of a lake drained into another. We overturned.
It was the very beginning of a weeklong trip, and we were wearing life vests. If we hadn’t been wearing those vests, as we didn’t for most of the rest of the journey, we might have drowned.
As it turned out, we lost a bit of waterlogged food but gained a story.
These stories — near-miss tales — are one of the rewards of spending time in the great outdoors. We city dwellers especially encounter unfamiliar challenges, then we return to the comfort of our homes and enjoy telling the stories.
My family had an experience like that last weekend, and I’m here to tell you the story, but now I can’t help but think how sometimes it turns out differently.
The deaths of TUSD science teacher Thomas Gillespie and his grandson Robby Miller on Wednesday reminded us all that not every story of outdoors adventure has a happy ending. Real risk is part of the formula, and basic precautions are an absolute must.
That brings me to my family’s story. Last weekend we traveled with several other families to a ranch north of Payson that belongs to my friend Tyler Pierce’s family. It’s in a narrow, green valley with that rarest of Arizona treats — a stream that flows through it.
A couple of years ago, some of us stopped camping near the small ranch house and set up our tents along the creek bottom, where there is short, soft grass and, most importantly, the sound of gurgling rapids nearby that helps you sleep. It’s maybe 100 yards through tall grass across the valley from the ranch house.
The tent site is only about 18 inches above the water. I knew there was some risk in being down between the banks like that, but it never rained hard enough to make me reconsider, and the sound of the water was so enticing.
This year, though, the rains started early. On Saturday, after we had spent a couple of nights down on the creek bottom, I asked the ranch caretakers, Jack and Amy Lloyd, what they thought of our sleeping down there. They said the stream only floods hard a couple of times a year, but when it does, it’s out of control. They wouldn’t do it.
Just a couple of hours later, Amy came over with news: The National Weather Service was warning of floods in Northern Arizona, and she didn’t like the look of the heavy rains she could see miles away in the east, upstream in the same drainage basin.
It was the Fourth of July. We were enjoying a lazy day. But we decided to move our four tents up out of the stream bottom.
About an hour later, as we started eating dinner, the heavens opened up. For 90 minutes, an insane deluge ensued. Then the rain lightened, we started a fire, lit some fireworks and told stories.
Then someone said, “What’s that sound?”
We quieted down and heard a roar coming from across the valley. The stream was charging with muddy water. Where our tents were, there was maybe a foot of water, in the eddies of the torrent.
We were lucky, though we deserve a tidbit of credit. We took precautions — eventually. But had the rain fallen further up the drainage in the middle of an earlier night, never hitting us where we were, had Amy not told us of the flood warnings, had we gone on with our lazy afternoon or had the flood hit after bedtime there’s a decent chance all 12 of us camped down there would have been killed.
I’m alive to tell this story, of course. But it doesn’t always turn out so well.
We were reminded of that Wednesday through the awful story of Gillespie and his grandson. Members of an LDS family, they had gone to hike a stretch of the Mormon Battalion Trail near Gila Bend. The grandfather was from Tucson; his grandson, from Prescott Valley.
The hike wasn’t a good idea — maybe even worse than camping on a stream bed during the monsoon. A flash flood happens occasionally, but on a July day in Gila Bend, excessive heat is the norm.
They hiked more than five miles down the trail and paid an unimaginable price. Gillespie either suffered from the heat or had some other medical emergency. Robby apparently walked toward the car for help — he was carrying his grandfather’s keys — but he died 1.5 miles from where they parked.
He got close. Had he survived, it would have been a heartbreaking story to tell, but at least he would have had a chance to tell it.
Instead, the story their deaths tell is that the risk is real. Sometimes, what could be a near miss turns into a direct hit.
But by taking ordinary precautions we raise the chances that the worst we’ll come home with is a good story.
