# GC Sleeping situations



## benrad (Jun 29, 2015)

Good day.

I am going on a late January grand trip. Most trips I sleep in kitchen/hang out area under rain fly. Not a fan of tents. Sometimes on boat if it can be Sandy and windy. Figure becauss of night temps boat no good. I am worried when on windy nights the sand kicking up into my lungs. Silicosis. I have heard tents don't protect from this since they are just filtering down to fine particles. What do you guys think? I was thinking a cot plus Paco would get me 17 inches of ground. Wonder if dealing with a tarp could be better or an addition. Trying to keep it simple as possible. Thanks.


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## Electric-Mayhem (Jan 19, 2004)

If temps are right sleeping on the boat is great for sure. I agree that January probably isn't the greatest time for it though. I did a Lodore trip a month ago, and stuff on my raft (bow lines, water bottles, etc) froze but the stuff 10-30 feet up the shore didn't, so the temp difference is stark down on the water.

I did a late February trip in 2017 and did a tent about half the nights when it looked like possible rain or extra windy (or a bit of privacy on the big beach camps). The other nights I just slept on a roll a cot under the stars. Either way, I used one of the Cgear Sand Free Mats under it to combat the sand (mostly on the feet...but it did provide a nice area around the sleeping area to keep wind swept sand down too). 

On the nights I slept out I never felt like sand blowing around was an issue, but I also didn't get heavy wind on the no tent nights either. There were definitely a few camps where wind kicked sand up and deposited it into tents while we slept though. Two of the girls on our trip that shared a tent put their tent on the leeward side of a sand dude and woke up covered in a thick layer of sand.

I guess that is my rambling way of saying I think you'll be fine sleeping out. Just pick your camps and your spot at camp according to the weather and it shouldn't be problem. I like a bit of seclusion from the group so camping in the common area wouldn't work for me personally and if I wasn't gonna sleep on my boat or in a tent, I'd consider a small wing or a Megamid style single pole tent so I didn't have to sleep in the middle of camp.


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## dsrtrat (May 29, 2011)

On winter trips take a double wall tent with solid walls or one that has solid zip in panels. You will sleep warmer and if you get wind won't have the sand filtering in through the mesh. Not much need for extra ventilation that time of year. If sleeping out a good gore tex bivy sack will add warmth and keep the frost off your bag. 

Sent from my SM-T800 using Mountain Buzz mobile app


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## mattman (Jan 30, 2015)

Last winter I slept under the stars with the exception of two nights. I tend to sleep on my boat a couple nights, as well. 
Em and Dstrat are right, in that up the beach a ways is a lot warmer, and a tent will add a lot of warmth as well.

I have a silk liner for my 0 degree bag, then I like to toss my fleece blanket over the top. The blanket tends to just absorb whatever condensation happens, instead of letting it condense on my sleeping bag, and then melting and soaking through. Sacrificial blanky.

I just sleep on my Paco Pad, so sometimes I get mice running across my face, which kinda sucks. To cold for reptiles, and most bugs at least, I switch to my boat towards the end of the canyon sometimes, to keep the spiders off my face.

I just really like sleeping under the stars, and hate setting up a tent. Can't beat staring at Orion from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, so I give up a little comfort for this.


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## mattman (Jan 30, 2015)

Really, the colder it is, the more I like sleeping under the stars, pretty much everything is hiding under a rock, and not bothering you when it's real cold. A cot would be awesome, just would be a little colder, with the airflow underneath. Need a good pad if you go with a cot.


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## mattman (Jan 30, 2015)

Hey get your self a pair of rubber ditch boots to, if you don't have them. I go on a lot of winter time trips, and it's about the most valuable piece of gear in winter time. Makes loading/unloading your boat way better. No liners, cause eventually you will step in a deep spot, and fill them with water, and then the liners take forever to dry out by the fire, or blaster. 
Have a great trip down there! It is cold, but still a wonderful time to be down there!


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## FlyingDutchman (Mar 25, 2014)

I’ve been down in November and December. Slept under the stars on the ground. Wrapped my self in a tarp for the rain and blowing sand. I used two sleeping bags most nights, really toasty that way. 

A cot would have been nice, but I am too lazy to mess with that. A bucket of river water to dampen the sand around you might help.


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## jspoon14 (Aug 5, 2012)

Your NOT going to get Silicosis from sleeping in the Grand canyon during a rafting trip. The exposure levels are exponential higher than what you would get on a Grand trip. You have to work around it for long periods of time for extended duration's. OSHA has increased regulations for Silica but even they calculate exposure over and 8 hour period and the are permissible levels that you don't have to have a respirator.


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## benrad (Jun 29, 2015)

It's not that I am going to get silicosis I should have used my words wiser. It's just I want to sleep outside and not be breathing fine particles of sand on windy nights. There is no arguing that breathing fine particles of silica sand is bad.


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## benrad (Jun 29, 2015)

Thanks everyone for their input! Probably just take a cot and tarp for sleeping, along with obviously bag liner pillow.


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## GeoRon (Jun 24, 2015)

On cold winter nights I suggest not sleeping on your boat or near waters edge. My experience on calm nights has been that you will likely wake up with everything around you dripping wet, including yourself. As cold as the Colorado River is in the GC in winter it will be much warmer than the nighttime air temp. This generally makes for a dense saturating fog over the water. This is that fog you see over the water when driving along a river in the early morning in winter.


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## MT4Runner (Apr 6, 2012)

mattman said:


> A cot would be awesome, just would be a little colder, with the airflow underneath. Need a good pad if you go with a cot.





benrad said:


> Thanks everyone for their input! Probably just take a cot and tarp for sleeping, along with obviously bag liner pillow.



I like cots if it's warm outside and you need airflow.


If it's cold out, cots are super cold.


...unless you're in a hot tent...then it's nice to have the warm airflow under you and to sleep slightly higher up in the air layers.


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## wayne23 (Dec 30, 2014)

I use a mega mid an rig it on the boat, works great an all your stuff on your boat stays dry if it’s wet. I put about 12” of 1/4” shock cord on all tie downs with a small ****** to clip to D rings or the boat next to me. Good luck an have fun


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## newpc (Aug 3, 2009)

One night at tanner wash it was so windy and sandy, even in my tent I had to pull my fleece blanket over my head, and I was pitched behind a driftwood blockade. In the morning everything was silty, my eyes, ears, nose, throat. It was awful. That was a may trip. Ever since then I bring a couple dust masks just in case. Get the ones that have the one way valve so the mask doesn't get too humid.


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## GeoRon (Jun 24, 2015)

Wayne, we should start up a thread on "Grand Canyon Sleeping Situation on Boat" and followup on discussing your Megamid and other boat shelters.


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## Uncle Skwid (Oct 7, 2016)

*REPLY*

I had similar sleeping thoughts before a Jan 2, 2017 launch. I thought tarp because I had space and weight limits... open canoe, self-support, etc. Then my son brought his little mesh solo tent by the house and proclaimed his entire tent / fly / stakes were lighter than my tarp setup. And he was right. Technology these days! And then his tent has the whole one-pole system so it’s super easy to pop up. So I borrowed his tent and figured I’d use it for rain and sleep outside most of the time. I use the small 1” Paco under a zero degree, 900 fill in a Goretex shell so I dont have to worry about frost and ice, which is a serious consideration sleeping in the open over here on the east coast. We wet over her. And in Grand Canyon I didn’t zip the sleeping bag all the way up—keeping it unzipped about halfway to prevent overheating—but maybe three or four nights on a three week trip. 

I didn’t consider the mice and they were plentiful. (Sounds like they don’t bother some folks on here, or maybe some folks can get used to them and let them do their thing.) They began bothering me my first night laid out under the stars on a nice big boulder river left about mile 13.2... across from that nice overhanging slab of sandstone... They were curious and crawling under my pad and into my sleeping bag and around my head and it was a little much for me. I found myself concerned I might roll over and crush mice or they might start to find my earlobes tasty or crawl down into my clothes or something looking for more tasty treats. So I mostly used the mesh tent—I slept out in the rain one night and the mice left me alone—and got the quasi-feel of sleeping in the open. I hadn’t thought about the fact that some nights I wouldn’t want to be in the open... but would rather escape from the enormity of the Canyon for a few hours under the fly.

Neither did I consider that it would actually rain a considerable amount during my trip. Most people say, correctly: It’s the desert, it doesn’t rain. But that wasn’t my experience in January 2017. I got about 10 days of rain, half of which was the weird misty desert rain in which it rains but you don’t feel wet?? And about five days of steady, pouring down rain: the wet kind. I got the feel the entire year’s precipitation fell during my trip. My paddle out across the lake from Separation included two days of straight downpour. So I ended up being quite happy with the tent and I don’t consider it any more trouble than the tarp. I mean, in terms of escaping the mice (or, in the warmer months, escaping the really creepy crawlies), escaping the rain, and escaping the enormity of Grand Canyon, looming always like a weighted cloud, or some kind of presence, some kind of terrifying shadow standing over me with its mouth open breathing too loudly and drooling.

But I was also alone and scared of the dark.


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## mattman (Jan 30, 2015)

MICE!! So many Mice!!!
God, we had so many mice last December- January down there, it was like walking back into your house in Mississippi, after being gone for a week, and having all the starving flees jump you. After the first night or 5, I decreed that every last item of the kitchen get packed up every night, they would go crawling into the partner stove when it was closed, and shit everywhere, shit all over clean dishes in the drying rack, ate through the cover on my beer coozy, nibbled on the neck gasket of my dry suite, while it was right next to me. I think each camp down there has a couple hundred thousand mice, and they just get really hungry in the winter, with not having lots of people around to spill crumbs and feed the excess population.
Try to keep as tight a kitchen as possible while you're down there, it helps to control there numbers. 

DID i MENTION ALL THE MICE LAST WINTER?!?!


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## dsrtrat (May 29, 2011)

This is one of the reasons I sleep on a cot. Haven't had a mouse crawl on me since I started using one. There has been one river runner death from Hantavirus in Grand Canyon.


https://www.gcrg.org/bqr/11-4/hanta.html 


https://rrfw.org/riverwire/river-runner-dies-hantavirus


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