Paddling an Inflatable Kayak on the Grand Canyon

Audrey Crockett

Updated on:

River Beta

If you’re not planning to row, it might be a good idea to consider taking an inflatable kayak on your Grand Canyon trip. Bringing an IK can give you a break from being a raft passenger, and some of the rapids are extremely fun in an inflatable kayak. However, there are some things you should take into consideration before committing to doing the whole trip in an IK. We brought a tandem Tomcat on our recent Grand trip; we ended up paddling about a third of the way. Here are some tips we learned from our experience IK-ing on the Grand.

Paddling our tandem Tomcat on the Grand Canyon. Picture credit: Teresa Jenkins
  1. The water is cold. At the beginning of the trip, the water is extremely cold. Even if you have a lot of experience paddling and swimming, the cold water will likely take your breath away if you swim. The ability to avoid panicking and self-rescue is crucial: you don’t want to be in the water for any longer than necessary. Dressing appropriately is also important. I wouldn’t attempt to IK the Grand without a drysuit.
Successful in Badger Creek, one of the first major rapids—and it comes on the first day of paddling
  1. The river is wide. At one point a freakish windstorm came up and our IK was actually blown over. It was a calm stretch of water but the wind was so strong that we had chop, with whitecaps, to contend with as we attempted to flip our boat back over. We ended up swimming it over to shore to get it flipped, and it was kind of a long swim since the river was so wide. You need to be really comfortable flipping your boat mid-stream and getting back in, since swimming a boat to shore can be a long proposition.
  2. It’s a mental battle. Every eddyline has the potential to suck your tube under. We found that the tailwaves below the rapids were the biggest challenge, as long as we had scouted– we generally would miss the biggest hole or wave in the rapid, and then need to get back into the wave train to avoid having the waves push us sideways into the eddyline. In a tandem you have plenty of power to take on the the tailwaves, but you need a good sense of timing to get back in to the wave train before you’re in danger from the eddylines. Figuring out when to make our move and staying alert for laterals trying to push us around was mentally challenging–you don’t get any time to relax, as even in small riffles the hydraulics are much more powerful than you may be used to (depending on what rivers you normally paddle).
  3. Own your own trip. Make sure you’re communicating with your fellow boaters about what your plan is, but don’t let anyone pressure you into reading and running when you’d really prefer to scout, or into IKing when you’d rather be a raft passenger. On the flip side, if there are days where the rapids are going to be scary for you and the group is trying to cover a lot of mileage, that might be a good time to roll up the IK to reduce the likelihood of things going wrong. Our nastiest swim came in Soap Creek Rapid, which other members of our group had said was straightforward but which had flash-flooded since they had seen it. It’s easy to be pressured into just going for it, but you’ll have a lot more fun if you actually have a plan to attack the rapids. As you get more comfortable with the size of the waves in the Canyon, it’ll be easier to read-and-run, but especially early in the trip it’s important to make a plan to scout what you need to and portage when you don’t like the looks of a rapid.

Paddling an inflatable kayak on the Grand Canyon is extremely fun! As long as you plan ahead and gear up appropriately, it is a great way to paddle some giant waves and see the canyon.

Grand Canyon side creek
Grand Canyon side creek

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