The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (62 page)

J
ust below Crystal lay an eleven-mile stretch of moderate rapids known collectively as the Jewels. Like the semiprecious stones for which they had been named, each was unique, and although none qualified as whoppers, every one of them could harbor nasty surprises at differing water levels.

With Petschek at the oars, the
Emerald Mile
cleared them all in just under an hour and fifteen minutes.

As they shot past Bass, the camp at Mile 108 that had served as a makeshift helipad for the air evacuations during the previous two days, they began seeing evidence of the havoc Crystal had wrought. On both sides of the river, the eddies were awash with gear of all sorts—life jackets and plastic coolers, fuel tanks and ammo cans, plastic sleeping pads and rotting fruit. Then they started seeing the wreckage of the abandoned motor rigs, moored among the rocks, limp and sagging like punctured balloons. At Mile 110 they passed Chuck
Mills’s overturned boat. Canted at an angle and smashed almost beyond recognition, it looked as if a torpedo had hit it. Georgie White’s upside-down logo was no longer readable. Farther downstream they passed two other rigs, equally destroyed. They surveyed each wreck in silence,
shaking their heads in disbelief. Later, they would remember this as one of the most disturbing segments of the entire journey.

Adding to their disquiet was a burgeoning concern that the clock was now against them. By Petschek’s reckoning, almost an hour had been lost during the flip and the recovery. The most effective way to make up that time would be through a series of hard sprints in which each man banged out furious, twenty-minute rowing intervals. But like the stricken baloney boats, the air had been let out of Wren. He did his best to spell his companions at the oars, but his chief assets—his focus and his fury—were gone. Wordlessly, Grua and Petschek began timing their switches to ensure that Wren’s rowing stints coincided with the relatively calm and flat stretches. He would not row a big rapid again for the rest of the trip.

At half past noon, they whipped past Elves Chasm, a tributary just below Mile 116 that marked the end of the Upper Granite Gorge and the entrance to Stephen Aisle, a two-mile stretch of flat water. Under normal circumstances, Stephen’s arrival provoked a sigh of relief. Guides who had just weathered the trials of the upper gorge could briefly relax as the river slowed down, winding sinuously from left to right and back again. But here the three boatmen once again detected the distinctive sound of rotors and looked up to spot the orange-and-white form of Helo 210. It was clattering toward them, flying low and keeping directly over the middle of the current.

They watched in dismay as the chopper passed overhead. Whoever was aboard would have to have been wearing blinders not to spot them.

As the helicopter reached the end of the aisle, it seemed to be descending even lower. The conclusion was obvious: the pilot was looking for a suitable sand beach on which to land. When the dory rounded the bend, a ranger would order them to shore and place them under arrest.

With no place to hide, they were busted.

H
ere, then, was the encounter they had been dreading, and its arrival made each man groan inwardly. The trials they had already endured had been difficult and demoralizing, but paled in comparison with what would happen if they were taken into custody, shuttled up to the South Rim, and hauled in front of the superintendent.

The possible repercussions of this confrontation extended far beyond Richard Marks’s power to slap them with the kind of fine that could wipe out their earnings for an entire season. Their worst fears had nothing whatsoever to do with money, and everything to do with the small plastic card each man carried in his ammo can: his river-guide license. Because the Park Service controlled those licenses, the superintendent effectively held the car keys to the Grand Canyon. If he was angry enough, he could take the river away from them forever.

For men such as Grua, Petschek, and Wren, the stakes didn’t get any higher. If there was ever a moment to take stock of whether the rewards of what they were trying to do justified the price they might be forced to pay, this was surely that moment—and its calculus was brutally stark.

Although they had not set out with the specific aim of humiliating the Park Service, theirs was undeniably a gesture of defiance. But having committed themselves so fully to this venture, what would it now mean if they permitted themselves to be stopped not by the forces of the river itself, but by a government agency that sought to control and regulate it?

When they thought about this—and each man did, separately, as the
Emerald Mile
cut through the flat water—they realized that submission was not an option. There could be no surrender, no moment of chastened humility in which they meekly pulled in to shore, hoping that the men with the badges would be gracious enough to consider cutting them a break and not ride them too hard.

If the rangers pulled out their weapons, maybe they’d have to reconsider. But short of gunplay, this train wasn’t stopping. They didn’t intend to be nasty about that—there would be no upraised fists, no curse words hurled across the water.
They were even prepared to try to politely explain, in the few seconds the current would allow them, that they weren’t
able
to stop because they answered to a higher authority than the federal government, which was the flaming righteousness of the Colorado and the memory of the crew that had come down the river with John Wesley Powell—men who had wagered more than they could afford to lose in order to master the game.

Whatever punishment the rangers might have in mind would have to wait until they were finished with the task at hand.

Through some mysterious alchemy,
all three boatmen now caught a kind of second wind, a renewal of purpose. What the river had taken away from them at Crystal was now replaced and doubled down. And as they approached Blacktail Canyon, a hushed tributary at Mile 120 that was known for its profound acoustics, a place of holiness and silence, this made all the difference. Their fear of being banned from the river had been supplanted by something that had less heat and fire than bravado or defiance. Call it a skewed sort of curiosity. Whatever
happened with that helicopter downstream would be interesting. But like detached witnesses watching a train wreck, it wasn’t going to touch them, not where it truly mattered.

G
rua was at the oars, pulling with his back facing downstream, and as they approached the final bend in the aisle, Petschek and Wren swept their gaze to the right, then to the left, scanning the shoreline. This stretch of the river usually featured wide sand beaches on both sides. But now the water was up to the cliffs. A few stretches of flat ground were still left, however, and if a pilot wanted to set a chopper down in this part of the canyon, it would be here.

As they rounded the bend, Helo 210 was nowhere to be seen.

Both sets of eyes now swung downstream to the next shelf. And the next. With the same result.

This they repeated for four miles—past the end of Stephen Aisle, then along the length of the even longer Conquistador Aisle, which followed.

The helicopter never showed.

By Mile 124, which marks the conclusion of Conquistador Aisle, they knew that whatever Helo 210 was pursuing, it didn’t involve them. And for the first time, they began to consider the possibility that, despite the flagrancy of their transgression, perhaps the Park Service had more important things to worry about.

Once more, their thoughts returned to the business of making up lost time.

B
y midafternoon, the Vishnu schist had reappeared, rising vertically along both sides of the river as the
Emerald Mile
raced through the Middle Granite Gorge. Not only was the clock against them, but also the heat. The mercury had climbed well past one hundred degrees as the sun’s rays, now directly overhead, essentially turned the corridor at the bottom of the canyon into an oversize convection oven. All three boatmen were sweating profusely and continuously refilling their water bottles from the river as they sought to replace the fluids that were being drained not only by the oppressive temperatures but also by the tremendous demands of pulling the dory downstream at top speed.

When done correctly, rowing looks elegant and effortless, but the toll it takes is enormous—in part because, unlike many other sports, the mechanics of moving a boat with a pair of oars recruits virtually every part of the upper and lower body, as well as its core. All four phases of a stroke—the catch, the drive, the finish, and the recovery—require explosive contributions from some
combination of almost every major muscle group: the quadriceps, glutes, and hamstrings as the blade bites into the water and the legs drive forward; the rhomboids, trapeziums, biceps, deltoids, and latissimus dorsi as the arms and shoulders send the blades forward through the water toward the conclusion of one stroke, then planing backward for the next. And throughout this entire motion, the erector spinae, the back extensors, and the abdominals must all engage as the torso whips through its arc. Each separate stroke is formidable, but when multiplied over a period of just a few minutes during an intensive burst of speed, the cumulative toll is savagely depleting.

A single two-thousand-meter rowing race, which typically lasts between five and eight minutes, demands virtually everything the human body can deliver in terms of both aerobic and anaerobic performance. (This is the primary reason why rowing ranks at the very top of endurance sports, rivaled only by cross-country skiing and long-distance swimming and skating.) Although Grua and his crew weren’t operating anywhere close to the cardiovascular level of Olympic-class rowers, the challenge they had laid before themselves was forcing each man to complete the equivalent of five back-to-back two-thousand-meter sprints each time he returned to the oars. As brutal as it may be to imagine one or two of these sequences, it is almost impossible to gauge the effect over many hours. Perhaps the most revealing metric is simply this: to reach the Grand Wash Cliffs within forty-eight hours and claim the record, all three oarsmen would need to execute, at top speed, a combined total of roughly fifty-four thousand individual oar strokes.

At 2:05 p.m., they rounded Bedrock, a nasty impasse at Mile 132 where the river is split into two channels by a garage-size chunk of granite. A mile farther downstream, they shot through Dubendorff, a long, sickle-shaped rapid that normally demands two precision moves to avoid a shallow table-rock in midstream. Now it was little more than a long train of fast water and huge standing waves.

Less than twenty minutes after clearing Dubie, they found themselves approaching Granite Narrows, a notorious bottleneck at Mile 135 where the river is forced through a gap that is only seventy-six feet wide, the narrowest point in the entire canyon. Here, as at Crystal, the hydraulics had created something for which they were unprepared.

As the river funneled through the constriction, the water rose almost forty feet above its normal levels, climbing the polished walls. Inside the chute, it was absolute chaos—as near as anyone could determine (and there would be much debate about this during the years that followed), the current actually corkscrewed, braiding back on itself in a kind of liquid helix. The surface of the river was undulating wildly, like a line of laundry snapping in a fierce wind, and
the main body of current was slamming directly into the right-hand wall. Any boatman who wasn’t fighting to keep off that wall would find himself scraped along the side of it for fifty yards. Evidence of this was already visible—dozens of boats had left banded stripes of white, blue, and orange paint that would remain there for the next a decade.