[Ed. Note: This is Brian Codde's first-person account of the flooding near Supai, Ariz. The words are his own; we have only edited for style and spelling.]

We were camped about .5 miles above Mooney Falls, one of the very last camp sites in the canyon, and we were on the opposite side of the river from the main trail.

We were warned of the flood, and [we] tied all our gear between trees and planned an escape route. Nothing really happened except for the water rising and dropping about 6 inches.

At 1 a.m. I woke up to eat something and noticed the water had risen a lot, I woke everyone up to grab our gear and get out of there and we within that time the other side of our camp (our escape route) completely flooded over and we had a huge raging river on both sides of us. Nowhere to run.

We all got on top of our two picnic benches and hoped the water would stop rising. It settled right below bench level on the tables. Probably rose about 6 feet total in a 5 minute period.

We spent all night on the tables, and had a few more events during the night with water rising and huge amounts of debris slamming into the trees around us holding all our gear and tables in place.

At day break [the water] had dropped maybe a foot, and luckily all the debris that piled up around us formed a dam and made our area more secure. We were still stranded, but we were not too scared. We were able to walk around the debris piles and look for escape routes to the shore but couldn't find any place safe enough to cross.

Around 8 a.m. another person that was stranded on the opposite of the river, but on high ground navigated debris piles and got fairly close to us. We were able to throw him a rope and we used a tension system to tighten the rope. We then sent everyone across the rope above the river.

Once on high ground we were rescued by a helicopter that lowered cargo nets to lift us out in. That helicopter merely dropped us off at a higher section, it took awhile to finally get back to our cars.

The helicopters that were transporting people from the village were highly unorganized and most of the people there didn't have the full information about what was going on. There was obviously a severe lack of communication between agencies. Probably because of FEMA.