Down the Great Unknown (38 page)

Even a forty-foot-per-mile drop is only middling by white-water standards. Many rivers are far steeper and more rock-studded, which means that they demand quicker, more precise moves from the boatman. The steepest section of North Carolina's Green River, a mile-long run that is one of the most difficult in North America, drops over 350 feet.

What sets the Colorado apart from many other rivers is its volume and the sheer difficulty of coping with so many tons of angry, surging water. The flow in the North Carolina Green's most dangerous stretch is usually less than 250 cubic feet a second. On the Colorado, that would be barely a trickle. A flow of less than ten thousand cubic feet per second is low. Thirty thousand is a good flow but hardly remarkable. As recently as 1983, when spring floods filled Lake Powell so high that Glen Canyon Dam was in danger, the Colorado's flow reached
one hundred thousand cubic feet per second
.

“This is
big
water,” says Zeke Lauck, a professional boatman with decades of experience on some eighty rivers around the world. “In some rivers, you see a line of current running left to right and you can just cross it. On the Colorado, if
it's
moving right,
you're
moving right.” Running rapids in the Grand Canyon, Lauck says, is like wrestling an overwhelmingly strong but not especially subtle giant. The challenge is not in responding to tricky spins and reverses and feints, as in a kung fu contest, but in coping with an opponent who is unrelenting, overpowering, and unforgiving.

Roughly speaking, the danger in most rivers is dodging the rocks, whereas the danger in the Colorado is coping with the force of tons of water forming towering waves and holes ten feet deep and whirlpools like light-devouring black holes. Whirlpools form at the junction of strong currents moving in different directions, and Powell and his men marveled at their power. “In high water there are a lot of very dangerous whirlpools that will catch a boat and whirl it round till it makes the occupants dizzy,” Sumner wrote. “If the boat is drawn under the vortex of the whirlpool,” he added, with forgivable exaggeration, “there is not one chance in a hundred of its ever rising again.”

A swimmer who falls into a whirlpool can be in deadly trouble even if she is wearing a life jacket. Just above a black rock at the bottom-right-hand side of Lava Falls in the Grand Canyon, for instance, sits a small, fast whirlpool that boatmen call the side pocket. Its terrifying feature is that much of the water that forms it makes its escape by racing toward the river bottom and then squeezing between the black rock and the shore. The deep-diving current glues any swimmer to that underwater sieve.

Whirlpools can make trouble even without dragging their victims underwater. “The
Emma Dean
was caught in so severe a whirlpool that Dunn and I could not pull out of it to save our lives,” Sumner recalled. “It spun us round like a roulette wheel. I thought I saw a chance to get out as the boat spun round past a rock about thirty feet away. Seizing the rope in my teeth, I made a desperate plunge. Good lively swimming, combined with the momentum of my jump, enabled me to make the rock by a scratch. Seizing it with a death grip, I was able to pull the bow of the boat out of the swirl, whereupon it shot ahead like a scared rabbit.”

Eddy lines mark the boundary between the main downstream current and water moving upstream in an eddy. The colliding currents make for whirlpools and what boatmen call squirrelly water. In smaller rivers, the eddy line truly is a line, or perhaps a narrow band. In the Colorado, the “line” can be a zone eight or ten feet across. If the water in the eddy is moving fast, the eddy sits
lower
than the main river—picture water in a glass that someone is stirring furiously—and a boatman can be trapped by an unclimbable “eddy fence.” Even a low fence can block a boat as effectively as a curb stymies a wheelchair. On smaller rivers, eddy fences six inches high have trapped boats for hours. In the 1983 flood in the Grand Canyon, the eddy fence at Mile 24 1/2 Rapid was
four feet
tall.

Boils form when powerful currents deflect off the river bottom and head back to the surface. They can come out of nowhere, as if a fountain has suddenly been turned on, and can rise several feet above the river surface. In the Grand Canyon, they range from three feet across to forty feet. Boils can swamp a boat, if they happen to come up under one side and push the opposite side underwater, or they can lift it up and fling it aside.

Holes are even more formidable in a river as big as the Colorado. “At thirty-two thousand cubic feet per second,” the veteran boatman Larry Stevens calculates, “one thousand tons of water are moving through the river channel every second. If an average elephant weighs about five tons, this means that the flow of the river is equal to two hundred elephants skipping by every second. A hole in the river may take up about a third of the channel, so the hydraulic dynamics in that hole are about the same as sixty-seven elephants jumping up and down on your boat.”

Such hazards make river running a high-stakes game of pinball, with the caveat that the boatman is both the player and the ball.
*
The pros make it look easy. Clair Quist, one of the best, takes a wry delight in pretending to think there's nothing to it. “Just remember,” he tells a novice about to run his first Grand Canyon rapid, “take the waves head-on.” As advice, this is essential but gravely inadequate, akin to telling a first-time tightrope walker to remember to keep his balance.

The art in river running consists not in trying to outmuscle the river—no human stands a chance in that test of strength—but in identifying a path that leads smoothly downstream. Quist and his fellow veterans would have you believe there's nothing to it. All you have to do, says the boatman John Running, is find a stretch of river that's going where you want to go and then hop aboard. Easy does it. “The important thing to remember is that you're dancing with the river”—Running pauses for a theatrical beat—“and
you're
not leading.”

With the current running upstream here, downstream there, diagonally or even downward in still other places, and all at different speeds—imagine a crisscrossing series of airport-style moving sidewalks designed by a sadist whose aim was to knock passengers off their feet—it's
not
easy. The trickiest zones are at the junctions where two “moving sidewalks” merge or collide or interact in some still stranger way. The catch is that often the boatman must seek out these junctions, intentionally moving into harm's way, in order to maneuver downstream. Rocks mean trouble, for example, but a boatman might need to slow down and spin the boat around in preparation for a move farther downstream. Often the best way is to duck partway behind a rock so that one end of the boat is in water pushing upstream while the other end is still in water moving downstream.

In small, steep, fast, rock-strewn rivers, such moves have to be just so. In the Grand Canyon, the margin of error is generally bigger. “You can say, ‘Oh, I really wanted to be three or four feet farther right,' and most times you'll get away with it,” says the boatman Zeke Lauck. “On the other hand, because of the force that's hammering on you, skills that work other places don't work here. Boatmen think, ‘Gee, I've got my boat sideways, what I would usually do is put this oar in the water and—‘ Well, in the Grand Canyon, if you've got your oar in the wrong place, you're in trouble.”

By now, Powell and his men were perpetually in trouble. “Down in these grand, gloomy depths we glide,” Powell wrote, “ever listening, for the mad waters keep up their roar; ever watching, ever peering ahead, for the narrow cañon is winding, and the river is closed in so that we can see but a few hundred yards, and what there may be below we know not.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

FIGHT

 

Sockdolager marked the first in a forty-mile-long series of rapids now nicknamed Adrenaline Alley. The waters churn and roil, and huge waves collide with one another as the river crashes in fury against the black walls that would presume to hem it in. The options of portaging or lining, which Powell had embraced so many times, often did not exist in this devil's gorge.

“The walls now, are more than a mile in height—a vertical distance difficult to appreciate . . .” Powell wrote. “A thousand feet of this is up through granite crags, then steep slopes and perpendicular cliffs rise, one above another, to the summit. The gorge is black and narrow below, red and gray and flaring above, with crags and angular projections on the walls.”

Even a single day in the Granite Gorge had left everyone keyed up (with the possible exception of the unshakable Andy Hall), and no one had any idea how long the granite continued. “This is emphatically the wildest day of the trip so far . . . ,” Bradley wrote on the evening of August 14, after losing an oar in Sockdolager but otherwise escaping intact. “The waves were frightful beyond anything we have yet met and it seemed for a time that our chance to save the boats was very slim but we are a lusty set and our good luck did not go back on us then.” Then, just below Sockdolager, came “a rapid that cannot be run by any boat, half a mile long, 75 yds. wide, fall of 50 ft. and full of rocks.”

They struggled through this horror as best they could, clinging to the cliff face and inching their way downstream by snubbing ropes around protrusions in the rocks. From two o'clock until sundown, the men labored, and still they had made it only halfway down what is now called Grapevine Rapid. Like a boy trying to crack open nuts by hurling them to the ground, the river repeatedly flung the boats against the granite. Bradley yearned to take a chance and run the rapid, but he kept his thoughts to himself. Exhausted and discouraged, Powell and the men knocked off early. They sat down to a meager dinner of bread and coffee and ate to the accompaniment of the rapid's roar.

The bare rock offered few places to sleep. Sumner and Powell found a spot big enough for their bedrolls, though Bradley half-expected to hear one of them fall into the river in the night. Bradley wedged himself into a seam in the rocks, and Hall found a tiny perch at the water's edge. The rest of the men were “tucked around [the cliff] like eve-swallows.”

The next day was August 15, another Sunday without rest. The first order of business was getting through the tumultuous rapid they had begun battling the day before. After a near disaster with the
Emma Dean—
it looked for a moment as if the rocks had bashed a hole in her side—Bradley volunteered to run the rapid in the
Maid
. Powell granted his wish, and Bradley swept his way downstream. He was shoved this way and that “with terrible force” and “whirled round and round” in whirlpools, but the run was a success. Then, momentarily safe, Bradley relaxed a bit. Like every boatman delighted to find himself upright and intact at the bottom of a fearsome rapid, he settled in to watch the others try. “Rowed into the eddy and laid on our oars to have the fun of seeing [Hawkins] run it,” Bradley wrote. Hawkins provided some entertainment by nearly swamping and breaking an oar, but he, too, made it downstream.

Somewhere in the chaos, Oramel Howland lost his notes and his map of the canyon from the Little Colorado on. This was not life-threatening—whether or not they had compass directions, there was no choice but to go where the river dictated—but it was a severe blow. Powell saw himself as head of a scientific expedition charting unknown territory. He had no interest in leading a pack of adventurers.

•      •      •

It was hard to know which was worse, the slow agony of lowering the boats with ropes or the sudden danger of running the rapids. Even Powell acknowledged that it was “not easy to describe the labor” involved in lining the boats through the Granite Gorge. The men clambered along the sharp, steep cliffs while holding a rope attached to a bucking boat, struggling to find a place to secure the rope. Where the river dropped off too quickly, they had to let go of the boat for a moment and hope to haul it in below before it sank or split open on the rocks. Sometimes there seemed no route downstream, and someone would throw bits of driftwood into the maelstrom to see which path they took, to get some idea of where to try to coax the boat. “And so we hold, and let go, and pull, and lift, and ward, among rocks, around rocks, and over rocks.”

Running the boats through these angry, twisting rapids was usually just as hard. (Once or twice, the fickle river smiled on the men. In one rapid with an eight-foot drop spanning the full width of the river, Sumner gulped hard and braced for trouble “and jumped it like jumping a hurdle with a bucking horse—and didn't ship enough water to moisten a postage stamp.”)

Far more often, the river showed its angry side. “The river is very deep, the cañon very narrow, and still obstructed, so that there is no steady flow of the stream,” Powell wrote, “but the waters wheel, and roll, and boil, and we are scarcely able to determine where we can go. Now, the boat is carried to the right, perhaps close to the wall; again, she is shot into the stream, and perhaps is dragged over to the other side, where, caught in a whirlpool, she spins about. We can neither land nor run as we please. The boats are entirely unmanageable; no order in their running can be preserved; now one, now another, is ahead, each crew laboring for its own preservation.”

Only one shaft of light cut through the gloom. On the afternoon of August 15 the men came to a swift, beautiful creek coming in from the north. It was “clear as crystal,” Bradley exclaimed, and he could see fish swimming in it. Powell named it Silver Creek (but later changed the name to Bright Angel, to contrast with the stinking, muddy Dirty Devil they had encountered two weeks before
*
). A large willow tree growing from a sandbar just above the creek provided welcome shelter and an ideal spot to camp. “Stretched our weary bodies on the sand under the willow and rested the remainder of the day,” wrote Sumner.