The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (34 page)

The book that Moitessier later wrote about this experience,
The Long Way
, chronicles an odyssey that was as much spiritual as it was physical. He wrote that leaving from Plymouth and returning there seemed “like leaving from nowhere to go nowhere.” He also declared that he was “a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth—a nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present.” But perhaps his most provocative discovery was the realization that winning a race had no connection with his true goal, which was to reach a point in space and consciousness that would enable him to bear witness to the beauty and the complexity of the natural world—and to glimpse, however briefly, the sort of person he might become if he permitted himself to cross a kind of international date line of the soul and merge with those things. In the end, he realized, the journey itself was the destination.

Intriguingly, Moitessier’s words echoed a comment made almost three decades earlier by one of the most legendary boatmen in the Grand Canyon. In the autumn of 1937,
an Oregon gas-station attendant named Buzz Holmstrom took a handmade wooden boat all the way from the upper reaches of the Green and down the Colorado to Lake Mead, becoming the first person to row every rapid on both rivers, as well as the entire Grand Canyon, alone and without aid.
Toward the tail end of his trip but still twenty-eight river miles upstream from the Grand Wash Cliffs, Holmstrom made his final camp inside the canyon and noted that this would be the last night he would sleep next to the moving river and look up at the stars through the narrow canyon walls. He knew that when he rowed across Lake Mead and allowed the bow of his boat to tap the concrete surface of the newly completed Hoover Dam, his achievement would make headlines across the country. But now that the journey was coming to an end, he wasn’t sure the fame and the opportunities that awaited him had any value.
“I had once thought—once past here—my reward will begin,” he wrote in the pages of his journal that night. “But now—everything seems kind of empty & I find I have already had my reward—in the doing of the thing.”

When viewed from the perspective of these two boatmen, the idea of racing through the Grand Canyon might not only begin to seem rather absurd and pointless but could also appear to violate, at some fundamental level, the very essence of the place. In light of what Moitessier and Holmstrom and the members of the Hundred Days Trip underwent, a speed run can seem just plain wrong. But there is another perspective, a way of looking at the same issue from an entirely different angle, and when one considers this point of view, the conclusion one reaches is something else entirely.

Of all the writers who have attempted to explain the obsessions that fire extreme mountaineers, one of the most eloquent is the novelist James Salter. In 1979, Salter published a novel called
Solo Faces
, which is loosely based on the life of Gary Hemming, a remarkable American climber who, in 1962, put up the first ascent of a route called the American Direct on the Aiguille du Dru, a spire in the French Alps whose profile is so sheer that for many years it was deemed impossible to scale.
At the center of the book is a scene in which Hemming (who is given the name Rand) finds himself staring up at the Dru while he contemplates the challenge before him. The ascent he has selected is so dangerous it verges on suicide, but it is also intoxicating—and Salter’s explanation of why that line holds such irresistible appeal bears on the matter at hand.
“There are routes the boldness and logic of which are overwhelming,” Salter writes. “The purely vertical is, of course, the ideal. If one could ascend, or nearly, the path that a pebble takes falling from the top and climb scarcely deviating to the right or left, impossible as it may seem, one would leave behind something inextirpable, a line that led past a mere summit. The name of that line is the direct.”

As it turns out, the appeal of the American Direct and the appeal of a Grand Canyon speed run have much in common. The allure of both lies in the notion that both lines possess such shining simplicity that the path they inscribe on the imagination is a statement of daring and beauty—a thing whose boldness
and clarity are too overwhelming to be ignored. An added part of its power also resides in the subversive fact that such a line has no reverse gear, because if you have thought of it once, you simply cannot dismiss it. Once the genie has been let out of the bottle, there is no way to coax it back in. You cannot blink it away or run the film loop backward until it is expunged from your brain. If you have conceived such a line, even for a second, it is there forever, beckoning and urgent, a standard and a goal to test yourself against. It is so compelling that it cannot be turned away from—compelling enough that it may even be worth risking the possibility that the course you have charted might contradict or transgress the spirit of the place itself.

This is precisely why the notion of
another speed run formed a major topic of discussion among Grua and the other dorymen during the golden age of guiding in the midseventies. They returned to the topic again and again because, among other things, the practical questions it raised were so endlessly intriguing. How could the Rigg brothers’ record ever be broken? The massive river level that had borne Jim and Bob on its crest—more than 60,000 cfs!—hadn’t been seen in almost twenty years. That flow must have boosted their velocity by at least three miles an hour, which meant that you’d have to be rowing almost twice as hard as they were. The only way to even have a chance, everyone agreed, would be to row through some of the biggest rapids at night, something that had never before been tried. But even if you were willing to tackle all that white water in the dark, how would you cope with the engineers at the dam, who were constantly ramping the river up and then throttling it back down again every twenty-four hours? If you set out on the surge, you would row yourself smack into the ebb, and how would you get past that? And what
else
would you need to pull it off? What kind of boat? How
many
boats? How many boatmen? What would you take and what would you leave behind? And how would you get around the Park Service, whose ever-expanding litany of regulations was another thing Ed Hudson and the Rigg brothers had never had to worry about?

Inherent within those questions lay the recognition of an intriguing paradox. Bernard Moitessier’s epiphany seemed to suggest that a race was fundamentally anathema to obliterating the barriers between oneself and the natural world. But when you thought about it, that wasn’t entirely true—or, to frame the idea with slightly more nuance, it
could
be true but it didn’t
have
to be true, because the line that separated those two things boiled down to nothing more (and nothing less) than intention: the spirit with which you embarked on the enterprise. If you were gunning for fame or fortune, it was pretty much a given that you would never arrive at the place Moitessier and Holmstrom had. But what if the idea of setting a record was ancillary, maybe even irrelevant, to the true
goal? What if the summit on which you had set your crosshairs had absolutely nothing to do with trying to elevate yourself above another man’s achievements, and everything to do with forging a connection inside
yourself
—in this case a connection with the river and the canyon that might deepen the intimacy that bound you to both? What if the reward that you were chasing lay not in the result to which you were ostensibly striving, but in the simple doing of the thing?

That may well sound like a twisted rationalization, but there was some hard truth at the core of it. Because when you have fully given yourself over to a landscape, without condition or reservation, and when you have come to love that place deeply and with all of your heart, you will do almost anything to celebrate and extend your connection to it. Going slow was a good way of doing that, perhaps the best way of all. But going fast was another way—and if you did it right, if you went fast enough—it might take you to the same destination.

If you looked at the matter from this angle, sooner or later you were forced to concede that there was really no difference at all between slow and fast; that the Hundred Days Trip and a speed run were simply different facets of the same quest. The essence of both actually had nothing to do with velocity and everything to do with depth—and thus what appeared to be a paradox was, in fact, not a paradox at all. At the heart of both approaches lay the dream of forcing open a doorway to a dimension that would enable you to fully explore what it meant to transcend your limits—to arrive at a destination in time and mind where the dichotomy that separated you from the natural world collapsed, where you and the thing became one.

For Grua, that last element must have seemed especially seductive.

Later, the idea of a speed run—its meaning and purpose—would come to acquire new layers of understanding, both in Grua’s mind as well as in the minds of those who witnessed what he set out to do. But this was where Grua’s fascination with speed in the Grand Canyon began. And it was the reason why, when a group of his friends and coworkers finally saw an opportunity to try to break the Rigg brothers’ record, he had no hesitation about declaring himself fully on board with the program.

I.
In June 1960, a New Zealand inventor named Bill Hamilton led a squadron of three jet boats equipped with propulsion-driven engines from Lake Mead to Lee’s Ferry, the first and only time the canyon has ever been run in reverse. When it was over, the Park Service declared it illegal to drive motorboats upstream inside the canyon, a policy that remains in effect to this day.

Once it was a boat, quite wooden

and with no business, no salt water under it

and in need of some paint. It was no more

than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.

She’s been elected.

—A
NNE
S
EXTON

A
S
the 1970s came to a close, the Glen Canyon Dam was approaching an important milestone. Ever since the headgates to the dam’s diversion tunnels had been slammed shut in the autumn of 1963, Glen’s discharges had been calibrated with one paramount goal: filling Lake Powell. Minimal amounts of water had to be released to generate electricity and to meet the water rights of the states located downstream, but the bulk of the Colorado’s flow was held back in an effort to fill the enormous bathtub directly behind the dam to the brim. This process had continued for more than sixteen years until, early in the spring of 1980, the numeric gauge in Glen’s Control Room, the instrument that measured the depth of the reservoir, indicated that Powell was just a tick or two shy of “full pool.”

To commemorate this event, many of the major politicians who had pushed for the dam’s construction, including Colorado’s
Wayne Aspinall, traveled to Page, Arizona, for a special ceremony on June 22. Aspinall, who had fought
so fiercely to authorize the construction of the two additional dams inside the Grand Canyon, had his picture taken next to the gauge at the exact moment the fill was complete. A host of local and regional dignitaries was also on hand to take part in the event and tip their hats to the reservoir that bore the name of John Wesley Powell. And as an added bonus, the engineers decided that this would be
a good time to conduct a partial test-drive of the spillways by sending a bunch of water down the intakes, through the tunnels, and into the canyon.

The release was relatively small. Each spillway tunnel was designed to handle more than 100,000 cfs, but the test run would generate a maximum combined flow of less than 46,000, which would last for only three hours and fifty-three minutes. Then they planned to
lower the gates and crimp the flow to a steady 37,600 and let that run for about a week—just long enough to create a buffer that would enable the reservoir to absorb additional spring runoff. This wasn’t remotely close to the amount of water that Glen’s spillways would be required to handle under full flood conditions, but it would nevertheless bring the river to a level that hadn’t been seen inside the canyon in almost twenty-five years. The window of opportunity was narrow, but when it opened up, Litton’s dorymen were ready.

By this point, they had already worked through most of the details of another speed run,
driven primarily by Wally Rist, who had first conceived the idea of breaking the Rigg brothers’ record. Grua, however, was an equal collaborator because the features he had incorporated into the
Emerald Mile
meant that she was, by far, the best tool for the task. Her self-bailing footwells would save her high-siders from having to worry about bailing and enable them to concentrate exclusively on keeping the boat upright. Meanwhile, her double-ended bow and stern would enable her to punch into the hydraulics backward or forward, which would give whoever was at the oars a wider range of options in maneuvering.

After some lengthy discussion, Rist and Grua had decided that the trip would have to be a private venture conducted on their own time that did not endanger the lives of commercial clients. Only three expert boatmen could take part, and each member of the crew would have to row. The participants would rotate—one man at the oars, pulling as hard as he could, while the other two served as spotters. When it came to filling out the third slot on the crew, both men agreed that there was really just one choice. Rudi Petschek had not only taken part in the
Emerald Mile
’s maiden voyage back in the summer of 1971 but had also rowed her remains out of the canyon six years later, after Steve Dalton had all but destroyed her in Lava Falls. In addition to his special connection to the boat, Petschek’s unusual background had imbued him with a special set of skills that would prove crucial to the venture.

Petschek had been born into a family of elite Jewish industrialists and bankers who had established their fortune in Bohemia at the end of the Hapsburg Empire, then later moved to Prague. There Otto Petschek, the family’s patriarch, had built an elaborate mansion for his residence and another building, known as the Petschek Palace, that served as the headquarters of the bank. In 1938, just as the Nazis were coming to power in Central Europe, the Petscheks had liquidated their holdings and fled to London, where different branches of the family then scattered to various capitals around the world.
^I
Rudi’s parents had opted for Argentina, and there, in the Highland Lakes region to the southwest of Buenos Aires, he developed his passion for rowing small wooden boats, an interest that stayed with him when he headed off to the University of California at Berkeley, where he obtained a PhD in physiology.