h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I wonder if the bit about whitewater rafting was created to intentionally mislead. It mentions that there are no rapids, and that rafting the canyon is a mostly scenic experience. While there may be flat stretches on the river, any comment about there being no rapids couldn't be farther from the truth. The Grand Canyon and adjacent Marble Canyon, as well as the rest of the floatable Colorado River contain some of the biggest navigable rapids in the world. Rapids such as Crystal, Lava, Horn, and Hermit, known collectively as the "Big Drops," are rated a six on a scale of five when the water's high, and there are hundreds of other such aquatic rockfalls throughout the entire canyon. A rafting trip in this particular canyon is not something to be taken lightly, as the fastest trip takes more than a week on a motorized 30' long super raft, and the more leisurely can take as much as 18 days. If anyone's interested in undergoing such an adventure, I contend that it is, far and away, the best way to see the canyon, and recommend going if the oppurtunity ever presents itself. Two kinds of trips run frequently, commercially run, for which you pay a rather hefty fee to ride on a boat and get totally taken care of, and privately run, for which you have to know some rafters, and be enough in their good graces to score a spot on their permit. Private trips are probably more work for the average person, but are, in the end, a more accurate rafting experience than just going for a ride on the equivalent of an inflatable semi. And if you're lucky, you may get to paddle some of the flat stretches. If you're really lucky, you'll get to paddle the whole thing, but that is the stuff of dreams.

Constanttraveller, you are making a common error on the grading of the big GC rapids, by mixing the International Whitewater scale 1 - 6, with US extended scale for big water rivers, which runs on a 1 - 10 scale. The big GC rapids are around 6 to 7 on the US scale, 4 - 5 on the International. although there is no exact correspondence between the two. Sorry to be a pedant...