The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (49 page)

White was both wildly entertaining and gloriously disreputable. She survived mainly on canned tomatoes, wore a leopard-print bathing suit that featured its own tail, and spent her days roaring downstream with one hand on the tiller and the other clutching a can of Coors. Unlike her competitors, she declined to hire professional river guides, relying instead on a band of Los Angeles County firefighters who devoted their vacations to serving as her entourage and staff. They had nicknames like Rags and Smokey, Bing and Mule, and they spent much of their time on the river engaged in raucous practical jokes and pelting one another with fruit. Each night, White pulled into a camp, whipped up a batch of Kool-Aid laced with grain alcohol (a potent concoction known as Stupid), and spent the evening drinking and wrestling with her firemen, who called her Mother and did their best to keep these revels from getting too out of hand. (Once, White almost succeeded in biting someone’s ear off.) But among her many distinctions, perhaps the most noteworthy was that she piloted the
biggest raft in the entire canyon—an inflatable monstrosity consisting of three giant bridge pontoons whose dimensions exceeded the footprint of a double-wide mobile home and boasted
an estimated gross displacement of thirty-nine tons.

Known as the
Queen Mary
, the barge was so enormous that when it was initially launched, there was some question in White’s mind as to whether it would actually fit through the canyon’s narrowest points. But the boat’s genius—if that was the right word—resided in its sheer acreage, which smothered itself over the rapids like a wet neoprene blanket, thereby enabling White to take a unique approach to white water.

Aboard the
Queen Mary
, there was no need for White to cultivate or hone the subtler arts of reading water. She scorned the practice of scouting and she never cheated a single rapid, preferring to center-punch the biggest holes on the river while assuring her passengers that whatever went wrong would get sorted out in the tail waves.

Having relied on this technique for many years, White had no intention of modifying anything as she bore down on Crystal at the helm of her mammoth boat on the morning of June 23 and set herself up for a maneuver that Brian and his squad of river rangers could see was patently insane.

As the rangers watched, stupefied, White shut off her motor, levered the propeller out of the water, and allowed the current to carry her across the top of the rapid, a gambit known as dead-sticking. Without power, steerage, or any other form of control, the
Queen Mary
now boasted all the agility and responsiveness of a dead manatee. While her passengers—who had no idea what was about to occur—threw their arms into the air and screamed in excitement, White crouched in the bottom of her motor well and braced her feet against the rubber. Then the boat was seized by the accelerating current and hurled into the hole.

By dint of its prodigious mass, the
Queen Mary
was too large even for Crystal to flip upside-down. Instead, the boat danced indecisively inside the hole, first feinting downstream, then retreating upstream. In this violent game of cat and mouse, the pontoons were wrenched from side to side, pulsating like the bellows of an accordion as the current probed for a weak point.

In light of this punishment, the boat was faring remarkably well—the fact that it was still upright and intact probably qualified as some sort of milestone in the history of maritime design. Unfortunately, White’s cargo and passengers were not so successful. Each time the raft buckled and sprang back, the rangers could see bodies and pieces of gear being ejected.
“Not only were they catapulted
out
,” Brian later told a friend named Scott Thybony, “they were also catapulted
through
the pontoons. It was just crazy.”

The rangers onshore sprang into action. Realizing that more than thirty people were being flung into the middle of the meanest rapid in the canyon, they raced toward their boats, untied their bowlines, and hurled themselves downstream.

Unlike White, they speared through the lateral and rode the pocket of quiet water along the right shore. Once past the explosion wave, they started hauling swimmers from the water while visually assessing the people who had paddled into the shallows and were now clinging to the rocks. Some were suffering from shock or hypothermia.
Others had swallowed water and were vomiting. One man was sitting in a position that made it look as if both of his legs had been broken.
^I

To the astonishment of the rangers, all of White’s passengers had survived. After gathering everyone up and reuniting two young boys with their distraught fathers, both of whom were convinced that their sons had drowned, Brian walked down along the shoreline to check on White, who was now standing in her motor well holding a can of Coors and surveying the damage.

Every item of gear and equipment on the
Queen Mary
had been stripped from the boat. Brian saw nothing left on board except for the motor, which was still strapped to its mount, and, remarkably, White herself.

“Georgie, what happened?” asked Brian.

She looked at him and winked. “I told ’em to hang on.” She shrugged.
“They don’t make passengers like they used to.”

White might have been a bit less smug if she had known that Crystal wasn’t quite finished with her.

A
s it turned out, White had two other boats on the river, both of which were more than twenty miles upstream. They were piloted by two of her most trusted firefighters, one of whom, Chuck Mills,
was running a thirty-five-foot raft with twenty-three passengers. Mills and his partner did not arrive at Mile 98 until many hours later, long after both White and the river rangers had departed. Instead of running Crystal at dusk, they opted to camp for the night.

When they set out to tackle the rapid the following morning, several other outfitters were poised to attempt the same run. Like those other boatmen, Mills had no interest in center-punching the main hole the way his boss had done the previous day. Nevertheless, his skills were no match for Crystal’s hydraulics.

Mills’s rig was flipped upside down in a heartbeat. Everyone on board was dumped into the river and flailed toward the surface—except for Mills himself
and a passenger named Alice Couts, both of whom became entangled in the rigging underneath the raft. Couts was trapped and unable to breathe. Mills was able to fight his way clear, swim to the surface, and catch a breath, but was immediately pulled back under by a rope that had wrapped around one of his ankles.

In the struggle to disentangle himself, a ligament gave way inside his knee. Somehow he managed to free himself, return to the surface, and pull his body onto the slippery bottom of the raft—at which point he caught sight of Couts’s hand sticking out from underneath the boat. He grabbed hold and hauled her out.

As the upside-down boat raced downstream, Mills scanned the river for the rest of his passengers. Some were clinging to the sides of the raft. Others were in the water and struggling to keep their heads above water,
catching a breath in the waves. Scurrying crabwise across the bottom of the boat, he raced to pull everyone in reach aboard.

While Mills scrambled to rescue as many people as possible,
yet
another
accident was unfolding in the middle of Crystal, this one involving a cluster of motorized rafts from Cross Tours and Expeditions. The first Cross rig skated past the explosion wave without a hitch, but the second boat was trapped inside the hole when the third boat came flying through and was speared directly on top of it. The collision knocked both rafts out of the hole and through the main wave, but when they emerged at the bottom of the rapid, they looked as if they had been caught on the losing end of a vicious naval engagement. Their frames were mangled, their aluminum storage boxes had been blown to pieces, and the front and rear tubes of one of the rafts were deflated.

A total of
thirty-three passengers had been dumped into the river, and as they were pulled from the water or retrieved from the rocks along the shore, they bore the shell-shocked look of refugees. The children were shivering and terrified. Several adults were grimacing in pain, and in the bow of the half-deflated boat was a woman whose head was covered with lacerations. One of her eyes was turning black, she had lost her glasses, and she was sobbing.

This accident was witnessed by several other expeditions, one of which was able to send out a Mayday by radio to the Park Service dispatch center on the South Rim. Within minutes, a helicopter was clattering over the river assessing the carnage. On board was a ranger named Kim Crumbo, a former SEAL, who was clutching a megaphone. While the pilot hovered above the stricken boats, Crumbo, who was perched on the skids, shouted orders.

An evacuation will be staged from Bass Camp, ten miles downstream
, he announced repeatedly.
Proceed downriver and we will fly you out from there.

By 10:00 a.m., Crumbo’s chopper was airlifting people to the South Rim.
The injured went first, then the women and children. Chuck Mills and the people aboard his raft, which had been washed ashore two miles farther downstream, were evacuated by 1:00 p.m.

It was hard to believe that so much havoc had been wrought by a single rapid, but the destructiveness unfolding at Mile 98 was undeniable. Later that afternoon,
a reporter walked into the Kiva Lounge at the Thunderbird Lodge, a motel on the South Rim where most of the passengers were spending the night. When the reporter asked what had happened, the reply was elegantly simple:

“We got bit by Crystal.”

A
mid the scramble to manage this crisis, no one on the superintendent’s staff, including Richard Marks himself, had given much thought to anything that wasn’t directly connected with the matter at hand—including several phone calls from Martin Litton. Here, the final noteworthy event of the day unfolded, although the precise details of what transpired are obscured by the haze that often separates stories that are objectively true from stories that are told on the river.

Many years later, long after Marks was dead and Grua was no longer on the river and Litton had forgotten exactly who said what to whom, it was impossible to tease out the hard facts. But the legend goes something like this:

While Crystal was busy devouring those three motor rigs,
Litton placed several phone calls to the office of the superintendent. He never managed to get through. Then, late in the evening, Litton dialed the superintendent’s home number and got him on the line.

According to the story,
Marks was in the middle of hosting a cocktail party—a scene that stretches credulity in light of the many problems the superintendent was dealing with. But what is eminently believable is that, borrowing a page from Grua’s own handbook, Litton kept Marks on the phone forever with one of his speeches, rambling on about the transcendent importance of a speed run and the notion that what was now taking place inside the canyon called for the sort of grand and lyrical gesture that spoke to the iconic majesty of the river.

On and on Litton droned until, finally, the exasperated superintendent supposedly struck a dubious bargain by declaring that, although he was unwilling to change his mind about a speed-run permit,
if
—after reviewing the matter with his river rangers the following morning—the answer was
still
no, he would telephone Litton back and explain the reasons why.

There’s probably a mixture of truth and exaggeration in all of that. But no one disputes what happened after the call was made.

Later that evening, Litton telephoned Grua at the boathouse in Hurricane and told him about his conversation with the superintendent.

“He says if the answer is no, he’ll phone tomorrow,” Litton explained.
“Now if he
doesn’t
call me, what do you suppose that will mean?”

Grua didn’t need to answer the question.

Litton had done exactly what had been asked of him, which was to crack open the door of opportunity. All that Grua needed to do now was sit back for one more day and pray the phone didn’t ring.