Down the Great Unknown (37 page)

In truth, most white-water historians believe, White was simply lost. He had told the truth as best he knew, and the wild claims about the Grand Canyon represented neither lies nor a hoax on White's part but overexcitement on the part of his rescuers. White's descriptions did not fit the Grand Canyon—but
did
fit a stretch of river below the Grand Canyon—because White was already beyond the Grand Canyon before his raft ever touched the water. He had traveled a total of 60 miles, not 550.

True or not, White's story may have inspired Powell's Grand Canyon expedition. What a single, unprepared man clutching a log raft could blunder through, an organized expedition in newly made boats might pull off in style. Powell claimed that the idea of exploring the Colorado in boats was his. (Sumner made the same claim.) But, as a result of White's strange adventure, such talk was in the air in 1868 and 1869, before Powell set out. The
Rocky Mountain News
, for example, not only reported White's story but even reprinted White's letter to his brother. Oramel Howland worked at the
News
and Sumner's brother-in-law was the editor.

White's story also appeared in General William Palmer's railroad survey of 1869 and in a paper presented to the Academy of Science of St. Louis. The effect was not only to publicize the tale but also to imbue it with authority. The key passage in the railroad report drew on White's experience. “The absence of any distinct cataracts or perpendicular falls would seem to warrant the conclusion that in times of high water, by proper appliances in the form of boats, good resolute men, and provisions secured in water-proof bags, the same passage may be safely made, and the actual course of the river mapped out, and its peculiar geographical features properly examined.” For John Wesley Powell, such prose would have seemed an invitation and a challenge.

Whether or not Powell had been lured to the Colorado by White's story, he and the crew concluded as soon as they saw Hance Rapid that no one had come this way on a log raft. In any case, they had more urgent problems to deal with. “At the lower end of the rapid the granite rises for the first time,” Sumner wrote. “There is no granite whatever (except boulders) from Green River City to the head of this rapid.” Powell took a moment to explain why that news was so ominous. “Heretofore, hard rocks have given us bad river; soft rocks, smooth water; and a series of rocks harder than any we have experienced sets in. The river enters the granite!”

Powell was right to be afraid of hard rocks, but his reasoning was wrong. In the Grand Canyon, hard rock
does
mean bad rapids but not because the river bottom forms a sharp ledge, as it does in a waterfall. Instead, hard rock makes for steep side canyons that fling enormous boulders into the river and block the channel. But Powell did have the big picture right—this was trouble to dwarf anything they had yet encountered.

Bradley was worried, too. “Major has just come in and says the granite is coming up less than a mile down the river,” he wrote. This was bad news, and the news had seemed bad enough already. “One thing is pretty certain,” Bradley noted somberly. “No rocks ever made can make much worse rapids than we now have.”

They were entering a dark, frightening canyon-within-a-canyon now called the Upper Granite Gorge. To a geologist, this gorge marks the onset of metamorphic rocks—ones transformed by heat and pressure deep within the earth—as opposed to the sedimentary formations, born of wind and water, that had grown so familiar. At two billion years old, these are the oldest rocks in the canyon and among the oldest exposed rocks on earth. To the layman, the transition is more basic. The “granite,” which is in fact mostly Vishnu schist,
looks
hostile and dangerous, with sharp, swooping curves and nasty, jagged edges. If Edward Gorey had designed the Bat Cave, it might look something like the Upper Granite Gorge.

It gleams coal black in the sun, though the dark, tortured rock is crossed by scars of red and pink and cream formed of Zoroaster granite or quartz. The gorge squeezes the river against its will, and the sound of roaring, protesting rapids carries upstream. Powell and his men strained to make out what lay ahead. “We can see but a little way into the granite gorge,” wrote Powell, “but it looks threatening.” Emery and Ellsworth Kolb, seeking to duplicate Powell's trip in 1911, echoed that judgment, but comforted themselves with the knowledge that others had come this way. “The granite gorge seemed to us to be the one place of all others that we had seen on this trip that would cause one to hesitate a long time before entering,” Ellsworth Kolb wrote.

For Powell and his men, there could be no hesitating. After breakfast on August 14, they set out into the gorge. “At the very introduction,” Powell wrote, “it inspires awe. The cañon is narrower than we have ever before seen it; the water is swifter; there are but few broken rocks in the channel; but the walls are set, on either side, with pinnacles and crags; and sharp, angular buttresses, bristling with wind- and wave-polished spires, extend far out into the river. Ledges of rocks jut into the stream, their tops sometimes just below the surface, sometimes rising few or many feet above; and island ledges, and island pinnacles, and island towers break the swift course of the stream into chutes, and eddies, and whirlpools.”

They portaged one rapid and ran the next two. The walls of their stone cage rose steadily higher. At about eleven o'clock, they heard the familiar roar of ground-level thunder. “The sound grows louder and louder as we run,” Powell wrote, “and at last we find ourselves above a long, broken fall, with ledges and pinnacles of rock obstructing the river. There is a descent of, perhaps, seventy-five or eighty feet in a third of a mile, and the rushing waters break into great waves on the rocks, and lash themselves into a mad, white foam.” The seventy-five-foot descent was an exaggeration for dramatic effect—in his river diary Powell wrote, “Fall 30 ft. probably, huge waves”—but the danger was real.

The men stopped to consider their options. It didn't take long. With cliffs that extended to the water's edge, portaging and lining were impossible. The men could perhaps climb to the summit a thousand feet above them and then descend on the far side of the rapid, but it was inconceivable to do so while carrying the boats. “We must run the rapid,” Powell concluded grimly, “or abandon the river.”

This was Sockdolager, nineteenth-century slang for a knockout punch (pronounced Sock-DOLL-a-jur).
*
The early river runners who described it sounded as intimidated as if they had encountered a one-eyed, man-eating Cyclops or snake-haired Medusa herself. “Just as the dinner hour was near and the threatening black granite had risen to one thousand feet above the water,” one of these early explorers wrote, “we heard a deep, sullen roar ahead and from the boats the whole river seemed to vanish instantly from earth. At once we ran in on the right to a small area of great broken rocks that protruded above the water at the foot of the wall, and stepping out on these we could look down on one of the most fearful places I ever saw or ever hope to see under like circumstances—a place that might have been the Gate to Hell.”

At the same vantage point, even Sumner, as proud and feisty a man as ever lived, conceded that he had met his match. “We finally encountered a stretch of water and canyon that made my hair curl,” he wrote. “I don't know how it affected the other boys. The walls were close on both sides, with a fall of probably thirty feet in six hundred yards, a white foam as far down as we could see, with a line of waves in the middle, fifteen feet high.” Beyond that, the canyon veered left, cutting off the view.

The rapid, as bad in fact as in appearance, had the power to reduce grown men to cowering wrecks. In 1903, a prospector and skilled boatman named Hum Woolley decided to take a boat through the Grand Canyon. He recruited two cousins, John King and Arthur Sanger, as crew. Neither cousin had any idea what he was in for. They quickly learned. Not far below Lee's Ferry, Sanger already sounded desperate. “Thank God we are still alive, it is impossible to describe what we went through today. Only the wonderful river knowledge and oarsmanship of Hum Woolley saved us from the vortex . . . I am scared.”

In Sockdolager, the two cousins pressed themselves flat against the floor of the boat while Woolley battled the waves. “I thought this was the end as we rushed up a great wave, then another until I was almost sick and dizzy with fear,” Sanger wrote. “Wolly would yank the boat this way and that, until one of the great waves or whirlpools suddenly swung us broad-side to a great wave coming up the river and towering at least 20 ft high, curling right over us . . . it came down and almost filled the boat again, the next one did fill it John and myself was clear under water Wolly shouted to lie still and paddled the boat over to the shore.”

Woolley's boat was well designed for white water, and he ran the Colorado facing forward, as today's boatmen do. Powell's men had no such advantages. By this time, they had gained a degree of river-running skill, but it was nothing compared to what they needed. Crueler still, the caution that had helped them get this far now threatened to undo them. By portaging and lining every rapid that looked dangerous, the men had avoided calamity. But they had also missed the chance to hone their skills in more or less manageable rapids. Now, with virtually no experience in big rapids, they had come to “a perfect hell of waves.” This time there was no avoiding it. They were troops on the eve of a great battle.

From here on, the Colorado's ferocity would far outdo anything Powell and his crew had seen. With their fledgling skills made irrelevant by the river's power, the men were no longer navigating but simply hoping to survive. Once they had tried to plot the best course downstream. Now they were in the position of a hapless pedestrian who has slammed his jacket in a car door and is being dragged down the street.

“I decided to run it,” wrote Sumner, “though there was a queer feeling in my craw, as I could see plainly enough a certain swamping for all the boats. But what was around the curve below out of our sight?” If there was a waterfall lurking just out of range, everyone understood, they were about to speed to their deaths. But, with no options, Sumner announced that he was ready to start. “Who follows?” he cried. Hawkins and Hall, the two youngest members of the expedition, one the none-too-expert cook and the other the ex-mule driver who had once complained that his boat would neither gee nor haw, answered first. “Pull out!” they yelled. “We'll follow you to tidewater or hell.”

“We step into our boats, push off, and away we go,” wrote Powell, “first on smooth but swift water, then we strike a glassy wave, and ride to its top, down again into the trough, up again on a higher wave, and down and up on waves higher and still higher, until we strike one just as it curls back, and a breaker rolls over our little boat.”

It nearly did them in. “The
Emma Dean
had not made a hundred yards,” wrote Sumner, “before an especially heavy wave struck her and drove her completely under water. Though it did not capsize her or knock any one out, the wave rendered her completely unmanageable. Dunn and I laid out all our surplus strength to keep her off the rocks, while Major Powell worked like a Trojan to bail her out a little.”

Powell picked up the story. “
Still, on we speed
, shooting past projected rocks, till the little boat is caught in a whirlpool, and spun around several times. At last we pull out again into the stream, and now the other boats have passed us. The open compartment of the
Emma Dean
is filled with water, and every breaker rolls over us. Hurled back from a rock, now on this side, now on that, we are carried into an eddy, in which we struggle for a few minutes, and are then out again, the breakers still rolling over us. Our boat is unmanageable”—Sumner and Bradley chose the identical word—“but she cannot sink, and we drift down another hundred yards, through breakers; how, we scarcely know.”

Finally, the
Emma Dean
caught up with the freight boats, safely tucked into a quiet cove. The rest of the crew sent up a cheer as Powell, Sumner, and Dunn came into view. For Andy Hall, who viewed the most terrifying misadventures with the glee of a small boy at a Fourth of July parade, it was all great fun. He only regretted that he didn't have a photograph of the floundering
Emma Dean
.

Sumner was not as quick to recover his nerve. “I have been in a cavalry charge, charged the batteries, and stood by the guns to repel a charge,” he wrote. “But never before did my sand run so low. In fact, it all ran out, but as I had to have some more grit, I borrowed it from the other boys.”

•      •      •

If the Colorado is indeed a monster—a “liquid predator,” in the words of one modern-day river runner—it is a monster with decidedly odd habits. For one thing, since virtually all its rapids are formed by side canyons, the Colorado, unlike some smaller rivers, is
not
a continuous string of rapids. Instead, the Colorado is a “pool and drop” river, with long, placid stretches punctuated by bursts of danger, like a restful sleep broken by nightmares. Rapids form only 10 percent of the Colorado's length through the Grand Canyon, yet they account for 50 percent of the river's drop.

On Grand Canyon trips today, the calm interludes provide an opportunity for tourists to sprawl out and work on their tans, and for boatmen weary of rowing to play the good host and let someone else take a turn at the oars, and for restless teenagers to ask, “How long till the next one?” For Powell and his men, the frequent breaks were a cruel tease, the river behaving like a taunting bully who lets his victim up, pretends to leave, and then returns to the attack.

On average, because its pools are so long, the Colorado drops only eight feet a mile through the Grand Canyon. But averages can obscure useful information. On average, snakes and centipedes each have fifty legs. If we consider only its twenty-odd miles of rapids, the Colorado falls a far more daunting forty feet per mile. The overall drop seems steeper than it really is, partly because the rapids are so dramatic and partly because the Colorado Plateau, as it rose into the air, rose unevenly. Lee's Ferry is three thousand feet above sea level, for example, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, ninety miles downstream, is at eight thousand feet. In that stretch, the river drops six hundred feet, and the canyon rim
rises
a mile. The effect is to exaggerate the river's fall, which seems hardly necessary. This is like outfitting Shaquille O'Neal with elevator shoes, dressing Dolly Parton in a Wonderbra.