The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (4 page)

A
lthough the dam operators’ myopia was neither malicious nor willful, their ignorance underscored one of the strangest and most confusing aspects of the drama about to unfold. For although the reservoir and the canyon were bound
together by geology, by government oversight, and most important by the thread of the Colorado itself, they were actually two separate worlds. Indeed, Glen’s hulking edifice represented one of the starkest divisions on the American landscape,
a borderline that seemed to delineate the frontier between two different republics. And to say that the citizens of those rival domains did not always see eye to eye was a bit of an understatement, because each represented the antithesis of the other’s deepest values.

To the engineers and the technicians who belonged to the world of the dam, Glen was no dead monolith but, rather,
a living and breathing thing, a creature that pulsed with energy and dynamism. Perhaps even more important, the dam was also a triumphant capstone of human ingenuity, the culmination of a civil-engineering lineage that had seen its first florescence in the irrigation canals of ancient Mesopotamia and China, then shot like a bold arrow through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution to reach its zenith here in the sun-scorched wastelands of the American Southwest. Glen embodied the glittering inspiration and the tenacious drive of the American century—a spirit that in other contexts had been responsible for harnessing the atom and putting men on the moon. As impressive as those other accomplishments may have been, nothing excelled the nobility of transforming one of the harshest deserts on earth into a vibrant garden. In the minds of its engineers and its managers, Glen affirmed everything that was right about America.

To Kenton Grua and the river folk who inhabited the world of the canyon, however,
the dam was an offense against nature. Thanks to Glen and a host of similar Reclamation projects along the Colorado, one of the greatest rivers in the West, had been reduced to little more than a giant plumbing system, a network of pipes and faucets and catchment tubs whose chief purpose lay in the dubious goal of bringing golf courses to Phoenix, swimming pools to Tucson, and air-conditioned shopping malls to Vegas. A magnificent waterway had been sacrificed on the altar of a technology that enabled people to prosper without limits, without balance, without any connection to the environment in which they lived—and in the process, fostered the delusion that the desert had been conquered. But in the eyes of the river folk, even that wasn’t the real cost.

To the boatmen and the guides, the untamed Colorado embodied a current of values that ran far deeper than the celebration of economic progress. Chief among them being the idea that nothing offers a more compelling distillation of nature’s beauty than a free-flowing river. In their eyes, Glen was a testament not to everything that was right with America but everything that was wrong with it. And it was here that the illicit adventure upon which the
Emerald Mile
had just embarked raised the possibility of something more provocative than simply setting a speed record.

On its surface, staging a clandestine race through the Grand Canyon was little more than a bold act of mischief. But to conduct such a race atop a runaway flood tide, and to do so at a moment when a hated hydroelectric dam was in peril—those things elevated the endeavor, at least in Grua’s mind, to something more than just a stunt. To him, it offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to participate, in the most visceral way imaginable, with the ancestral majesty of the Colorado. An act that was insane and reckless, to be sure, but that also stood as an expression of defiance against not only the ideals for which the dam stood but the arrogance of having built the thing in the first place.

Had Glen’s engineers and technicians known of the speed run, they would have surely felt themselves justified in dismissing this notion as idiotic, thereby reinforcing the extent to which these two dominions, the world of the river and the world of the dam, were so fundamentally opposed. In fact, it was probably fair to say that no one on either side of this divide shared anything at all in common. But on the evening of June 25, members of both camps were inextricably united by at least one truth.

In its own way, each group was confronting the unsettling fact that on this night, at this hour, despite all the engineering and the technology, despite the colossus of the dam itself, the Colorado and the canyon that contained it were as wild, as ungovernable, and as mysterious as on the day they were first discovered.

I.
Floods are measured in cubic feet per second, also known as cfs, a dynamic calibration of both volume and force that is obtained by multiplying the average speed of the current by the river’s cross section.

The World Beneath the Rims

By far the most sublime

of all earthly spectacles . . .

the sublimest thing on Earth.

—C
LARENCE
D
UTTON

The Grand Canyon at the Toroweap Overlook, by William Henry Holmes, 1882.

It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such a wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed . . . and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

—W
ALLACE
S
TEGNER

I
N
the winter of 1540, just nineteen years after Hernán Cortés had marched into the heart of Mexico and looted the riches of the Aztecs, a young Spanish nobleman named Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was given supreme command of the largest expedition of conquest in the brief but magnificently profitable history of the New World. When Coronado’s company mustered in the central square of the town of Compostela on a Sunday morning in late February, the column behind him included 230 horsemen recruited from the nobility of New Spain, sixty-two heavily armed foot soldiers, and five friars. Although the leaders of this glittering assembly were all Spaniards, the ranks were also enlivened by a smattering of other nationalities—five Portuguese, two Italians, a Frenchman, a Scot, and a bugler from Germany, plus more than a thousand Tlaxcalan Indians, whose primary duties involved tending to the fifteen hundred horses, mules, and cattle that shuffled inside the vast cloud of dust that rose in their wake. One witness in Compostela described them as
“the most brilliant company ever collected in the Indies to go in search of new lands.”

Coronado’s military escort was led by Melchior Díaz, an intrepid horseman and scout who was destined within a few months to become the first European to cross the mouth of the Colorado River where it entered the Gulf of California—and who was fated, just a short time thereafter, to suffer a cruel and freakish death. (While attempting on horseback to run his lance through a dog that was attacking his sheep, he skewered his groin and bladder on the back of his own weapon.)

The vision that had drawn these men out of Mexico was Cíbola, a complex of seven cities that was rumored to lie far to the north and whose treasures were said to defy belief. If the stories that had been peddled to Coronado were true, the walls of Cíbola’s palaces
were encrusted with emeralds,
the doors were studded with sapphires, and the handles of those doors were wrought from the purest turquoise. The rulers of Cíbola were said to sup on golden plates and quench their thirst from golden goblets, and on warm nights they lay beneath trees whose branches were festooned with
tiny bells of hammered silver. But most tantalizing of all were the palace storerooms. Richer than the vaults of the Incas or the Aztecs, they were rumored to be stuffed with gold and silver, emeralds and pearls, and fine cotton shawls to a depth of nine feet.

Aside from their horses, the most valuable assets of Coronado’s company were their arms, which were unlike anything seen before in that part of the world. In addition to the usual assortment of swords and maces and pikes and halberds, their weaponry included
nineteen crossbows, seventeen harquebuses, and a handful of small brass cannons on wheels. Along with these implements of warfare, every soldier in Coronado’s column carried a mental image of himself seizing some portion of Cíbola’s fabled treasure for his own. Even a tiny piece of that hoard would be the making of a man’s fortune, the thing that would change the direction of his life no less dramatically than the
acequias
—the irrigation canals that had been brought from Arabia to Spain by the Moors—can alter the shape and flow of a river by pouring it onto a man’s fields.

That prospect was sufficient to pull Coronado’s men through the arid plains of Sonora and across the border into what is now Arizona, past the silver-studded hills surrounding the future town of Tombstone, then up onto the highlands of the Mogollon Rim, through what would later become the Apache National Forest. By the middle of that first summer, however, the fantasy that spurred them had begun to break apart on the hardened surface of the baked desert that lines the western edge of New Mexico. It was there, less than fifty miles southwest of the present-day city of Gallup, that the explorers stumbled upon Háwikuh, a pueblo of the Zuñis, whose adobe abutments Coronado immediately prepared to storm in the belief that he was about to pillage the first of Cíbola’s great cities.

Despite finding themselves hopelessly outmatched by the Spaniards’ horses and guns, the Zuñis launched a ferocious counterattack with clubs and arrows that brought them almost to the hooves of the Spanish mounts, where they were able to knock the supreme commander senseless with a well-aimed rock. When he regained consciousness, Coronado was given the news that God had granted them a glorious victory in this battle, the first formal military encounter between Europeans and natives within the future territory of the United States. He was also informed that the Zuñi storehouses held no precious metals or gemstones. Háwikuh’s stockpile of wealth, most of which was kept in simple clay pots, consisted primarily of dried corn and pinto beans.

This moment marked the start of an unpleasant awakening in which Coronado was forced to grapple with the disheartening possibility that Cíbola might be nothing more than a beautiful illusion, a chimera of the desert. Before succumbing to this truth, however, he persisted in watering the fading flowers of hope by ordering several small reconnaissance parties to break off from the main column and conduct exploratory forays on the chance that one of them might stumble upon something of value.

One of these teams, a squadron of twelve men led by an intrepid young captain named Don García López de Cárdenas, was dispatched from Háwikuh and ordered to ride deep into what are now the Navajo and Hopi reservations to chase down rumors of a “great river” that was said to lie somewhere off to the northwest and which might connect with the same river whose mouth the luckless Melchior Díaz had earlier crossed.

As September spilled into October, Cárdenas and his companions made their way to the Hopi village of Tusayan, then headed through a forest of piñon and juniper trees until, to their surprise, the ground abruptly gave way, and they found themselves gazing across what appeared to be an inland ocean of air. Here they confronted a vision that future visitors to this remarkable corner of the world would one day deem more wondrous than the mythical riches of Cíbola.

P
erhaps it’s worth pausing for a moment to acknowledge, from the standpoint of Europe’s exploration and conquest of the New World, just how early in the morning it still was. In the autumn of 1540, there was not a single European settlement—not one—along any coastline or anywhere within the interior of what would eventually become the United States. It would be sixty-seven years before the first group of English settlers began battling starvation at Jamestown, and another thirteen years after that before the Pilgrims sighted the cliffs
of Cape Cod from the decks of the
Mayflower.
George Washington would not be born for almost two more centuries, and the better part of a third would slip past before Lewis and Clark even started their great journey up the Missouri River system. Yet there stood Cárdenas and his men, on the brink of a prodigious chasm that was destined to emerge as perhaps the most iconic landscape feature of a nation that did not yet exist. Of all the natural wonders in America—the waterfalls of Yosemite, the geysers of Yellowstone, the great trees of Northern California—this was the very first to be discovered, although
discovery
was hardly the right word.