The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (54 page)

The second option, a mass evacuation of everyone on the river, raised a different set of concerns. Setting aside the daunting logistics and the obvious safety issues, scooping up every single passenger and chauffeuring them all out by helicopter would not only be expensive but would also trigger an uproar among the commercial outfitters—many of whom had the ear of their congressmen and senators, and all of whom would be outraged by the loss this would inflict on their businesses. No, something a bit more surgical was required. What Marks needed was a way to mitigate the risks where the danger was greatest, and the most effective way to do that was to figure out how to put up some kind of mandatory stop sign at Crystal.

If every expedition was required to pull over at the top of the rapid and discharge its clients, several things could happen at once. While the passengers clomped downstream along the shoreline, a ranger could deliver a pointed lecture to the boatmen about the critical importance of skirting along the tamarisk trees and staying out of the main wave train. Once the passengers had picked
their way through the rounded boulders and reached the little beach at the bottom of the rapid, the boats could run the rapid empty except for the guides and the swampers, then pull into Thank God Eddy to pick everyone up before proceeding downriver. There was no guarantee that this would prevent another terrible accident, but it would virtually eliminate the potential for collateral damage. If Crystal did flip and dismember another motor rig, the only people who would be injured, maimed, or killed were the boatmen.

Such a thing had never before been tried inside the canyon, but once the decision was made, the process of applying the brakes started immediately. A few minutes after the meeting adjourned, Tom Workman, the ranger on duty at Lee’s Ferry, was ordered to get down to the water and place a temporary halt on all launches. Until further notice, none of the expeditions that were poised on the boat ramp would be permitted to cast off. Meanwhile,
Dave Buccello, Workman’s counterpart at Phantom Ranch, eighty-eight miles below Lee’s Ferry and ten miles upstream from Crystal, was told to position himself on the beach and start hailing boats and informing everyone on board that the river was closed until the following morning.

While Workman and Buccello shut down the river, Helo 210 was mobilized for its final mission of the day. Clattering upstream, the helicopter dropped another round of plastic baggies filled with sand and a mimeographed note. By sunset, every expedition on the river had received a message that read, in part:

The superintendent has closed Crystal Rapid to all passengers of both private and commercial trips. Passengers MUST walk around Crystal, with only boatmen and swampers to run Crystal. This closure is due to the extreme hazard of Crystal Rapid. . . . This closure is in effect until further notice.

The final phase of the superintendent’s plan, which would have to wait until the following morning, would be to get a ranger into a helicopter and drop him directly onto the scouting terrace at Crystal. There, he would organize the mandatory walk-around and do his best to prepare the boatmen for the ordeal of getting past the explosion wave.

Amid the scramble to put everything in motion, the furthest thing from the mind of anyone on the South Rim was a piece of unfinished business left hanging in the air—Martin Litton’s phone conversation from the night before, and the superintendent’s alleged promise that if he had not changed his mind about a speed run permit, he would call Litton back and explain the reasons why.

The records indicate that this subject was never discussed in any of the
briefings that took place on the afternoon of June 25. Moreover, in light of the events that had already transpired, it’s difficult to imagine that Marks considered himself under any obligation to telephone Litton and state the obvious. As anyone with half a brain could plainly see, approving a speed run to “test evacuation procedures” was patently ludicrous.

But that wasn’t how Kenton Grua chose to interpret the matter.

A
t the Grand Canyon Dories boathouse in Hurricane, no one had the faintest idea what had been unfolding at Crystal. Throughout the long morning and afternoon, while the helicopters clattered up and down the river and the passengers swam for their lives, Grua and his two-man crew had piddled around, sweeping and polishing and performing whatever other odd jobs they could think of to pass the time—all the while keeping an ear peeled for the phone and hoping, fervently, that it would not ring. As the end of the day drew near without a single call coming through,
they decided to start gearing up.

They began by hoisting the
Emerald Mile
onto Petschek’s flatbed, a green metal trailer with hydraulic brakes and a floor fashioned from battered two-by-sixes. Once the boat was in position, it was time to begin loading. By now, Petschek had purchased a pair of Q-Beams, high-intensity halogen strobe lights encased in yellow plastic, which would be powered by a twelve-volt battery that they pulled from Grua’s Scout. They connected the spotlights to the battery using some wire and alligator clips, tested the strobes to make sure they worked, then placed these items in the center footwell. Next they began gathering up miscellaneous pieces of gear—several sets of nylon cam straps, plenty of rope, a handful of pulleys, an extra set of oarlocks, and a metal anchor—and tossed all of that into the side hatches, the compartments that ran beneath the dory’s port and starboard decking. Then it was time to prepare the rocket boxes.

These were narrow steel canisters originally designed to store antitank-grenade rockets for the US Army’s M1A1 bazooka. Because the boxes were watertight and virtually indestructible, they were used on the river as storage containers for everything from food and charcoal to trash. On a normal trip a dory might carry half a dozen of these, but Grua had decreed that for this run they would need only three.

The first was stuffed with their heavy-duty repair kit: fifty pounds of hand tools, including saws, hammers, screwdrivers, wire cutters, screws, and drills, plus caulking, glue, and duct tape sufficient to patch a damaged boat just enough to float her out of the canyon. The second box held the medical supplies that
would enable them to perform the same services for an injured boatman. The third container, which was double-lined with heavy plastic garbage bags and included a roll of toilet paper and a toilet seat, would serve as their Porta Potti.
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When the trio of rocket boxes was placed in the cross-hatch, the locker located directly behind the boatman’s seat, plenty of room was left for several jugs of drinking water, a bag stuffed with extra clothing for each member of the crew, and a small blue-and-white cooler that would hold their food. Two sets of oars, ten-foot-long Smokers made from straight-grained Oregon ash, were lashed to the starboard deck. Then a strip of nylon webbing was threaded underneath the hull and affixed to the gunwales directly beneath the oarlocks. This would serve as their “flip line”—a device invented by Grua that would enable them to right the boat in midstream if they went over.

Finally, they tossed in two thermoses filled with coffee and clipped their life jackets to the gunwales with carabiners. With that, the job was essentially complete and the dory was ready to go—which forced each member of the team to pause and take stock of how empty the boat was.

The
Emerald Mile
was, for all practical purposes, stripped to the bone. Almost every piece of baggage and equipment that was deemed essential for a conventional three-week commercial dory trip—the silverware, the plates, the skillets and pots and pans, the lanterns, the coolers filled with dairy products and fresh vegetables and frozen meat, the cans of baked beans and fruit cocktail and peas, the boxes of pasta, the crates of potatoes and onions and carrots, the rubber bags stuffed with tents, the six-burner stove and the aluminum propane canisters that fueled the stove, the folding chairs, the folding tables, the steel fire pan, the bags of charcoal, the cans of lighter fluid, the plastic buckets for hauling water, the rain tarp and its aluminum poles, the cast-iron Dutch ovens for frying bacon and baking pineapple upside-down cake, the huge coffee urn—almost every one of the hundred-odd items that normally went on board, the whole Grand Canyon kit and caboodle, was left behind. They were not even carrying a single bottle of gin or tequila—an omission that underscored the ruthless minimalism and extreme commitment of this enterprise.

With the preliminary loading complete, each man now headed into the pantry to build himself a couple of sandwiches and select a few pieces of fruit.
These items were duly deposited inside the cooler. Then, together, they rolled the trailer through the doors of the boathouse and into the parking lot, where they dropped the trailer’s hitch over the towing ball on the rear end of the little van that served as Petschek’s mobile home between river trips during the summer.

The vehicle’s boxlike appearance—brown, windowless, and drab—suggested that it was nothing more than a retired delivery truck. But with the same care and patience that he lavished on everything else, Petschek had tricked out the interior with carpeting, a tiny sink and stove, a narrow bed with a Navajo rug for a quilt, and a set of brown-and-orange curtains. He called it Franklin, a name that admirably captured the vehicle’s spirit of even-keeled sobriety and restraint.

R
ight around the time that they were locking down the ball hitch on the trailer and hooking up the brake lights, their driver and timekeeper showed up.

Cliff Taylor was a CPA from Las Vegas who moonlighted as a quasi-professional gambler and whose first encounter with the canyon had taken place years earlier when he and a friend attempted to conduct a misguided float through the lower portion of the river using truck-tire inner tubes. The main highlight of this distinctly unpleasant experience was being passed by a dory trip—at which point Taylor, like Grua before him, had instantly fallen in love with the wooden boats and eventually pestered his way into a job with Litton. Unlike Grua, however, he had proved himself to be resoundingly devoid of any rowing talent and was an unmitigated disaster as a boatman. After several seasons in which he set and then broke some impressive records by racking up more wrecks than any other oarsman, the damage Taylor inflicted became so extensive and costly that Litton had no choice but to fire him—which had only heightened Taylor’s ardor for the canyon. By the summer of 1983, he was willing to do almost anything that would allow him to retain his connection to the river, and when Grua had called to ask if Taylor would be willing to help out with the logistics of the speed run, he was only too happy to say yes.

Taylor’s assistant was a young woman named Anne Marie Nicholson, who was about to start her second summer working as one of Litton’s cooks. She hadn’t been down the river yet this season, but all spring she had watched the shell-shocked dory crews stagger back to the boathouse and seen how appalled and bewitched everyone was by the power of the river.

The plan was for Taylor and Nichols to ride along during the long drive up to Lee’s Ferry, where they would witness the launch and officially start the clock
by noting down the start time. While the
Emerald Mile
embarked on her race down-canyon, Taylor and Nicholson would then drive Franklin and the trailer west back to Hurricane, where they would wait for twenty-four hours before making their way to the takeout at Pierce Ferry, where, if all went according to plan, they would meet the
Emerald Mile
sometime on Monday.

With the loading complete and the participants assembled, there was nothing left for them to do but stand around and wait until the clock struck 5:00 p.m., when the phone finally rang. It was Litton, calling to confirm that he had definitely
not
received a call from Richard Marks. This was the imaginary green light that Grua had been waiting for.

Time to hit the road, he announced, shooing everyone out the door before the phone could ring again.

In their haste, they held nothing in the way of a departure ceremony to mark the significance of the moment. Like Buzz Holmstrom’s pioneering solo odyssey through the canyon forty-six years earlier, the reward of this venture, if there was one, would reside in the doing of the thing itself.