The healing power of nature

By Rebecca Lawton

The longer the trip, the more healing occurs,’ says the geologist Peter Winn, who has been leading expeditions down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon since the 1960s. ‘Healing happens for people almost without exception.’

The most dramatic transformations that he’s observed have been in disabled military veterans on 16-day kayaking trips organised by a group called Team River Runner. ‘One army communications expert came home from Iraq so full of shrapnel, he’d lost his ability to do even simple math, and would only say “ !@#$%^&* you.”’ By the end of the trip, he spoke eloquently and at length, in appreciation of both the Canyon and his fellow boaters. ‘Later his wife wrote to thank the crew and the river for getting her husband back.’

Another Team River Runner veteran, a helicopter mechanic and co-pilot in Iraq with shrapnel in her brain that couldn’t be removed, came to the river with suicidal tendencies. ‘She’d been in and out of hospitals and therapy for three years,’ Winn says. ‘She didn’t want to kayak, so I taught her to row my raft. She ran all the rapids without flipping, then went home and got into competitive road bicycling. She just won a major women’s race in Europe.’

I too was a Grand Canyon river guide in the 1970s and ’80s; I saw the universal changes on the 14-day trips we led. Passengers made the trek to our rafts at Lees Ferry in Arizona, escaping deadlines, responsibilities and overflowing voice- and (back then) paper-filled inboxes at home. In a matter of days, they forgot about life above the rim while they plunged through legendary whitewater and hiked to hidden grottoes and waterfalls.

‘After three days, the passengers and the crew could really be on the river,’ recalls Louise Teal, an author and Colorado River guide. ‘People not only heal physically down there, they sometimes change their lives. They get or quit jobs, marry or divorce, become river guides themselves.’

Teal and I were both passengers before we took up guiding – as she says, because we found the river ‘beautiful and intense, a completely fulfilling place to be’. With its soul-stirring sunsets, hypnotic rock walls, and endlessly flowing river, the Canyon provides the backdrop for restoration. Guides know that they only have to get passengers to the river, earn their trust, and take them deep into what Teal calls the ‘zillion-year-old rocks’ where, as she says, ‘the rest is cake’.       More