The Colorado River traverses through the Grand Canyon, one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

Deep in the canyon are wild rapids, pristine waterfalls and ancient ruins.

6 million people visit the rim each year, but very few float down this wild river.

Come join our group of 15 strangers as we connect through the magic of the Colorado River.

The Living Peace Foundation is honored to provide funding support for Wild Rivers with Tillie supporting people and projects that creatively and courageously advance collaboration, compassion and living peace.

This series shares the passion that the Living Peace Foundation has for the health and connectedness of our planet and all who inhabit it.

I am Veteran River Guide and conservationist Tillie Walton.

Join me as I lead different groups down the great rivers of the American West.

As we can see that this great river has carved out this massive Grand Canyon.

It obviously doesn't need us.

But, we need it.

More than anything, We need it.

My name is Tillie Walton.

I fell in love and became obsessed by water as a teenager, and since then have become a river guide and hydrologist and have spent much of my life restoring and advocating for rivers.

Come join me.

Meeting fascinating people.

Seeing places very few have seen and learn about the power and magic of running water and the unique system known as a river.

We're getting ready to launch on our Grand Canyon River trip Instead of the 6 million people that visit the rim, we're part of the 20,000 that get to go along the river.

I was curious about the river█s ability to connect us to each other.

So I've invited 15 people who don't know each other to spend eight days together on this wild river.

To receive the medicine of nature is something that I didn't realize how much I needed.

Just a few miles downstream from where we have launched on our adventure, we come to the Navajo Bridge.

This will be the last signs of civilization.

The last cell phone service, the last Internet, the last electricity or cars that we will see as we float down 200 miles of wild river.

This is my first time really interacting with the river.

My first hint at the Grand Canyon.

And I keep wanting to cry because when humans we are when we're going through difficult things, we're so in our heads, so in our bubble that we forget that we are bigger and grander than just what we're going through.

Certainly my first time in Grand Canyon and the Colorado River, just majestic.

So beautiful.

Look at the history layer by layer.

And it just makes you wonder how tiny our lives are compared to how long this place has been here.

And as a composer and pianist, as I look at the scenery here, I can hear just beautiful, cinematic, melodious piano like piano playing.

Think of that.

I think of major keys.

A sound majestic, a sound full... rich... but still light.

It's a completely different kind of isolation.

And I already feel a sort of weight left behind.

I'm excited for some time with my feet in the sand.

This feels like a very timely and unique opportunity to disconnect in order to reconnect.

We are traveling down the river through the layers of geologic time and we'll get to visit side canyons and magical gems that are only accessible by boat.

This is an amazing canyon called North Canyon.

It's a bunch of rock.

It was laid down flat like this rock here where you can see the horizontal stripes.

And these great forces were at work.

There was so much pressure on it that it bent it and morphed into vertical layers.

This pool behind me is normally really fun to swim across and climb up the slide and water slide down like a big adult playground.

And right now, there is no way I want to swim across this pool.

This shows how little rain we've had in an area of the desert where it only gets four inches of rain a year.

Every drop counts and this is an extremely dry year.

And you can see it by the film that█s formed on top of the water.

So what I really love about this canyon is I feel like it illustrates what happens to people on the river.

You can almost see the different layers, like the layers of an onion and just like an onion, our layers peel off as we go down the river.

Then we relate to each other on a human level or a soul level and recognize that we're all the same and we're all one.

And so that's the beauty of the river is it's peeling back the layers.

I have a deep respect for the power of the river and just in general, the the power of the water.

I find it calms me.

Despite despite the chaos at times there's a calm in the chaos and extreme energy that it also evidences.

These side canyons are the birthplace of the rapids.

And so what happens is when it rains, all the rocks and the mud come down here.

And this acts as a funnel system carrying and funneling the rocks out into the river.

And when the rocks are deposited in the river, the water flows over them.

And that's what makes the rapids and the river will work and rework these rocks trying to get them downstream.

In the meantime, we have these creation of these really fun rapids that we get to run.

Day two on the river, and our day starts out with a series of rapids, one after the other called The Roaring Twenties.

The paddleboat hit a huge wave and Kyla was knocked overboard and sent swimming in the icy waters.

You watch the raft and like this massive wave was coming, and then all of a sudden it just knock you down and you don't have time to really think about it.

But I think it was important for me to continue going.

You have to conquer the fears, you know?

If not, I'm always going to be scared of the water.

Rivers are the lifeblood of our planet.

They're what connect us all, whether we know it or not, to each other.

They connect cities.

They provide transportation.

They provide drinking water.

They provide our food.

Rivers touch every aspect of our lives.

This place tends to open up and transform people.

So part of my reason for bringing people on this trip is to inspire them to recharge and bring more positive energy back out into their everyday lives.

Thanks to those conservationists who have come before us, such as David Brower and Martin Lenton, who had the foresight to fight to preserve the river, places like this still exist.

That's the area where they were drilling into the canyon walls to test for the stability of the walls, because this was a site where they thought it would be perfect to put a gigantic dam in between the canyon walls.

And so right about here, we would have been butting up into a big dam.

And instead of floating through all of these places, the entire canyon would have been underwater.

Everything that we've seen and experienced up until now would be completely gone.

We really are visitors passing through the homeland of the 11 Native American tribes whose roots are deeply connected to the canyon.

This is my favorite spot in the canyon.

I just get this incredible sense of immensity because we just spent all this time climbing up the hill, huffing and puffing, and we can look over at the wall across the river, and we've only made it up about a quarter of the way.

This place reminds me of how small we are in the whole scheme of things.

People don't know why the folks who lived here disappeared.

There's various theories.

One could be that the river dried up.

Another is famine or disease.

People really don't know.

But at one point there was a thriving community here and there is no longer.

This is a place that the Native Americans used to once inhabit, and we're very connected to the river and water.

There's a big, vast delta that stretches out before us.

They were able to use the river so the river would come up and flood and it would deposit a lot of silt and sediment.

And then as the water receded, they would plant their crops.

And so the crops would follow the groundwater.

And this was an area of great harvest with mesquite beans and corn and prickly pear.

There were homes out on the delta which are now ruins.

And this is a place where it was extremely evident of even man's long standing connection to water and nature.

We are so dependent on this resource.

The entire economy of the Southwest, seven basin states, two countries rely on this river.

The question is, are we going to let it run dry before it reaches the sea?

Or are we going to start thinking of this as as a friend that we get to take care of and respect and enjoy?

In several countries around the world, there's a new movement to grant personhood to rivers, to give rights to the river.

This river, which provides us a billion dollar industry, provides a trillion dollars in economic activity.

What right does it have in addition, the right to flow, the right to have water in the channel and gives the river a voice?

We're on day four of Colorado River and we're about to drop into a rapid called Kwagunt and start the day with some wet rapids.

And we're going to go downstream about 20 miles today.

And right now we're going to come to the first wave and Kwagunt here.

There is a proposal that's been defeated by the Navajo Tribal Council but can still rear its head again and it would bring a tramway down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and there would be hotels and restaurants and various walkways down here that would bring over 10,000 people a day down to the bottom of the river where we're experiencing this pristine stretch of a river where we've hardly seen anybody.

One of the last remaining places that this exists.

The Little Colorado River, holds incredible cultural and ecological significance.

The Hopi tribe believe that this is their emergence point into this world and it's a free flowing river.

So some of the last remaining native fish live there.

They're able to thrive in the warm, silty water.

It's almost surreal to see this turquoise blue green water that we have here in the Little Colorado River and a lot of it is because of a calcium carbonate that comes out of a rock formation called travertine.

And so when it inner mixes with the light reflects this beautiful blue color.

This is like mind blowing.

This is like something out of Lord of the Rings or some fantasy novel or something.

It█s beautiful.

I█m just in awe, constant awe.

I've traveled thousands of miles to try to find this what color of water?

And here it is at our own river.

It's awesome.

There's no imitation for what nature makes.

So even though the threat of the tram is, at least for now, on hold, the wilderness environment still faces a lot of other threats.

One of the latest proposals is to put a helicopter pad and make this a helicopter flight corridor to bring tourists for sightseeing over the canyon.

All of these things bring to mind the importance of possibly protecting a lot of these places in perpetuity.

Even with its protections as a national park system, it still is under threat.

As soon as we pass the little Colorado River, we enter into Grand Canyon proper and the soft Red Rock of Marble Canyon is giving way to older, more active rock.

If you could only imagine what must have gone on here with volcanoes and earthquakes.

And as we go down here, we'll see the canyon open up.

We're across a gigantic falls and you can see where the two plates slid together and one part was pushed way up.

And it's almost standing at a vertical angle.

It's the last of our open sky.

And until we go down into the middle of the earth, into some of the oldest rock on earth, the schist, which is 1.7 billion years old.

this rock is some of the oldest exposed rock on earth, and the water has carved at it and makes these intricate shapes.

This is really where you can feel the insignificance of our size compared to the power of the water and the immensity of the canyon.

Massive, massive whitewater today.

So we get to run some some really fun rapids.

First Zoroaster, Horn Creek and then we wake up to Granite Hermit Crystal and then a series of really fun rapids called the Gems, which are about every mile, one after the other.

We have no idea what to expect.

We're going to run the paddleboat through some of the biggest rapids.

I think I am going to get to paddle through some of the rapids.

It'll be a new experience for me, paddling without being the guide, listening to the guide telling me what to do.

It's never about conquering the river.

It's always about the river is allowing us through.

So paying our respects to this power of the water and asking for safe passage through... and always having respect.

There are many different kinds of crafts you can take down here, motorboats, which is what we're doing this week, or boats up there, and then a paddleboat which we also have with us.

I think they all have their benefits.

I think they allow different populations to be able to come down here accessibly, you know, different amounts of time and oar a trip, usually about 14 days.

We're doing an eight day motor trip here.

I'm going to go to the right of that.

Don't you think, Tillie?

I█ve they never done that.

Paddle boats are super interactive.

They're really fun team building craft.

There's a higher chance of being a member of the Colorado River swim team, but I think the reward of charging through your big rapid and the adrenaline and charging into something together and then making it out on top and doing the paddle high five and all that excitement and laughs and getting tossed around is, is pretty fun.

I think these trips can transform people.

The initial awe of this place.

We are mainly water.

Perhaps that's why we feel this deep connection to this flowing body of water that is the Colorado River.

And perhaps that's what allows us to flow and connect with each other.

I'm going to be back.

I think the river is magnificent and I'm not sure exactly how to explain.

It█s.

Oh, it has a way of getting to your soul and to your heart and digging deep and watching everyone kind of connect together is magnificent.

We are at Elves Chasm, which is this gorgeous secret waterfall that you can only access from the river and if there ever fairies in the canyon, this is this is probably where they would live.

At least if I was a fairy, this is where I would live.

And to be in a sacred place like this.

It's so generous of spirit.

It just.

It's something I want everybody to have.

My heart is so full.

And it's healing.

You know we talked about Black children not knowing how to swim...

If the child doesn█t know how to swim, they█re not going to have an experience like this.

Water always finds its way.

Water isn't deterred.

It always keeps going.

It finds that path of least resistance.

It's the lubricant of life, you know.

It is everything.

I love swimming in it.

I love it raining on me.

The river is the magic.

It's the thing that brings us out.

Draws us out.

Those are the boats I used to row.

So I kind of miss that.

This is great.

There are different ways of seeing the canyon and this is nice because we get to see the entire thing in the period of eight days, but there's nothing like really being on the water in a smaller boat and really feeling the water and being a part of the river and having it really be just a part of you.

Haven't thought about anything other than what the next what we're doing the next day... what rapids we're going to run.

If we█re gonna run with the in the boat or if we█re going to run in the kayak.

Took a few days to get in rhythm.

Third day I█d say.

It got into rhythm and everything was pretty much like clockwork.

I also kind of realize how attached we are to our identities and you know, the default world, you know, here, it allowed me to let go.

It█s our last day on the river.

Tomorrow everybody will leave, take away from their river family and go back into their own families.

River wise, we have some great rapids.

We go through a beautiful gorge and we have two big rapids today, Upset Rapid and then one of the largest on the river, Lava Falls.

This is really our last time together on the river.

So it's hard to believe that seven days have gone past and then you just want to hang on to it to preserve it for taking off the river.

In terms of the river and and people, I'm reminded how important it is to have these places where we can all come and be together and have these experiences of really dropping into nature, into our natural world, into time together.

And so my hope from this experience is that everybody, when they now hear this, they have a new a new understanding of water.

They have a new understanding of our connection to water, and they have a new understanding of how we're all connected through water to each other, whether it's via the veins and arteries of the river, whether it's that we're 70% water and somehow we vibrate the same when we're all on the water together, or whether it's just that we all drink water, whatever it is, we all have it in common.

And it's the great thread that pulls us all together.

Whenever I leave the river, I like to think of it as just a long side hike, knowing that I will return eventually.

Today we've take a small plane back to reality, a world far different than the Wild River of Sometimes when you really got to go and the bathroom is kind of far it█s a little challenging because you█re in the sand and you█re trying to concentrate.

But it█s nice.

You have a great view.

And there she is.

And look at the view!

I mean... What more could you ask for?

The Living Peace Foundation is honored to provide funding support for Wild Rivers with Tillie supporting people and projects that creatively and courageously advance collaboration, compassion and living peace.

This series shares the passion that the Living Peace Foundation has for the health and connectedness of our planet and all who inhabit it.

I invite you to us at wildriverswithtillie dot org Or wildriverswithtillie dot com