We made it through the rest of the day without incident. When it was time to meet the bus, we left the river reluctantly.

It was a long, long bus ride back to the bridge, along an extremely narrow, winding, guardrail-bereft dirt trail. (That's the river, down the cliff, on the right.)

Our bus driver was a funny old guy full of wisecracks. He frightened a lot of the passengers when he backed up to the edge of the cliff while maneuvering to the left to let another bus pass by. "What -- did you want me to maneuver to the right?" he yelled.

Cibecue Creek is usually nothing but a trickle. But with the extra El Niño runoff, it was running deep & fast. I thought the driver was kidding when he said he intended to drive the bus across the creek.

He wasn't kidding. And just to make sure we knew he wasn't kidding, he opened the bus door. The water reached to the top step. But we had enough weight in the bus. Good thing, too -- it would have made a lousy raft.

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