The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (63 page)

Here, perhaps more than at any other place, the river took the measure of Grua’s skills as a boatman. Assessing the situation and setting up the sequence of moves, he pivoted, entered the bottleneck and, pulling for all he was worth, inched the
Emerald Mile
along the cliff until she was finally free of the current’s tractorlike pull. They were so close to the wall that Wren, who was in the bow, could have reached out and let his fingertips brush the rock.

After they passed through the Narrows, the walls opened up again and the turbulence subsided, and now Grua decided to start making some serious time. As he laid into his strokes, he dipped into his well of reserve energy, and they once again started flying.

At Mile 136, he shot them past Deer Creek Falls, a tributary canyon where a long waterfall dropped more than a hundred feet into the river. At Mile 139, he blazed through a rapid called Fishtail, which was so washed-out that they barely even registered passing through it. Then just before 3:30 p.m., as they were approaching Kanab, a huge tributary canyon that enters the river on the right at Mile 143, Grua turned the oars over to Wren and caught sight of something he’d been watching for.

Directly up ahead, dories were on the water.

T
here were five of them, tightly spaced and strung out in a line. Each boat carried a guide and four passengers, and the oarsmen were all facing forward, pushing downstream. At the tail end of the running order was a heavily loaded baggage raft, and all the way up at the front, leading his squadron in the
Dark Canyon
, was Grua’s great friend and rival, Regan Dale.

Dale’s crew were now into their eleventh day on the water, and even from behind, Grua could read the toll that those days had exacted. The strain of the relentless rowing and the constant vigilance was written in the corded sinews in the dorymen’s forearms and the hunched tightness of their shoulders. Yet as the
Emerald Mile
flew past each boat, the worry and the weariness vanished as the crew turned in surprise, then called out greetings and encouragement to their comrades.

When Dale looked back to discover the cause of the commotion, he spotted the
Emerald Mile
bearing down on him like a bat out of hell. It was a memorable moment: the man who had almost consigned the dory to the flames of a
Viking funeral all those years ago, watching her sweep past the blade of his left oar as she gunned for a place in the history books.

They shot past so fast that there was no time for a colloquy. But Dale, who had taken in the most essential details in a single glance—the duct tape on the gunwales and stern, and Wren’s blood-soaked bandages—knew exactly what to ask.

“How was Crystal?” he yelled.

“Flipped!” cried Petschek. “See you guys in a coupla days.”

As Wren grunted past, sweat dripping from his bandages, unwilling to concede the loss of even a single oar-stroke, the ribbon of river between Dale’s boat and the
Emerald Mile
rapidly unfurled.

In light of the history between them,
Dale wasn’t entirely sure whether he should be shaking his head in exasperation or pumping his fist and cheering. His only certainty was that this encounter deserved to be commemorated.

In the fleeting seconds before they were gone, he had just enough time to fumble with the latches of his hatch, whip out his camera, and snap off three shots, the last of which captured the dory’s bow as she disappeared downstream, backlit against the glistening light of late afternoon and graced by a final salute from Petschek.

They would be the only photographs taken of the speed run.

D
uring the next two hours they raced through the Muav Gorge, the limestone corridor where, six years earlier, Grua had completed the crux of his canyon through-hike by following the path shown to him by the bighorn sheep. Evening wasn’t far now; the light off the water was beginning to take on a warm, pinkish haze as they passed some of the most gorgeous tributaries in the middle of the canyon—narrow and diminutive Matkatamiba at Mile 148, then Havasu, with its turquoise side stream and its travertine waterfalls, at Mile 156.

Thanks to the high water, the big commercial expeditions now had fewer and fewer places to camp along this stretch. National, a hulking side canyon on the left side of the river at Mile 166, was almost completely underwater. Ditto with Fern Glen, another popular pull-in spot about a mile and a half farther downstream. But a little after 6:30 p.m., as they approached the mouth of Mohawk, another big tributary that punched into the left side of the river just below Mile 171, they spotted a motor-rig camp consisting of two huge rafts and a party of about thirty people.

A guide named Jon Stoner was standing behind a metal table in the kitchen, facing the river and sipping on a beer while he prepared to get dinner started. Like Regan Dale,
Stoner had spent the past two days monitoring a constant
stream of detritus from the wrecks that had taken place at Crystal. That very afternoon he had discovered one of the side tubes of the Tour West rig on which Bill Wert had died, floating forlornly in an eddy all by itself. Now, here came something even stranger: a lone dory, patched with duct tape, sprinting downriver as if something were chasing it.

Stoner wasn’t quite sure what to make of this, except to note that the dory had red gunwales and that it looked exquisite and fair, as all dories do, silhouetted against the peach-colored shallups of sunlight that were dappling the main current.

The boatman at the oars didn’t even bother to look across the water and nod, but the figure in the bow snapped off a quick wave.

Stoner returned the greeting by raising his beer can—the universal boatman’s salute. Then they were gone, lost in the early evening light.

S
eventy-three miles upstream from the
Emerald Mile
’s position, that same low-angled light was telling John Thomas that it was time to start wrapping up his day at Crystal.

During the past nine hours, nearly two dozen commercial and private expeditions had navigated past the explosion wave, and although a few of the smaller oar boats had flipped, not a single one of the motor rigs had overturned. With the exception of Grua’s crazy stunt, the operation had been a success. Now all that remained was for Thomas to summon Helo 210 and catch a ride up to the South Rim, where he was scheduled to attend a rangers’ briefing with Richard Marks and discuss, among other matters, what should be done about the speed run. Before that briefing, however, Thomas decided that he needed to complete one last task.

All afternoon, Thomas had been worrying about Grua and his battered crew. In addition to Crystal, there was one other place on the river where the speed runners might get into serious trouble, and as his shuttle touched down, Thomas realized that several days had passed since anyone had provided any hard information on this spot.

“Let’s go downriver,” he said to the pilot as he clambered aboard the helicopter and put on his headphones.
“We need to find out where that dory is, and then we need to take a look at Lava Falls.”

First, they had to climb out of the canyon and stop at the fuel station on Hualapai Hilltop, a depot located along a remote stretch of the South Rim. By the time they had finished topping off their tanks, it was nearing 7:00 p.m. The light was beginning to soften across the uppermost bands of cliffs, and as they flew north, descending past the buttes and temples along the Great Thumb
Mesa, Thomas could see that the shadows were already creeping down the walls and flooding the bottom. Dusk wasn’t far behind.

To conserve fuel, the pilot kept the ship high, so Thomas was forced to scan the river corridor from a thousand feet above. They flew over National, Fern Glen, and Mohawk, but no boats were on the water. Then at Mile 174, where a small tributary called Cove Canyon enters the river from the left, he caught sight of his quarry.

In the evening, this stretch of the river turns gold and auburn, and as they flew down the corridor Thomas could see the little dory with its crew, far below, backlit against the river. They were about five miles above Lava Falls, and they must have been trying to make the most of the remaining daylight, because they were rowing for all they were worth.

As the helicopter rotored downstream, the pilot gradually descended so that by the time they reached Vulcan’s Anvil, the tower of black basalt jutting straight up out of the middle of the river that signals the entrance to the lake above Lava, they were no more than five hundred feet off the deck.

They were moving fast, roaring straight toward the lip of the falls, and by Thomas’s reckoning they had just enough time to find out how bad things looked and, if necessary, roar back upstream to warn the crew of the
Emerald Mile.

As the chopper passed the point where the river ran over the ledge and exploded, Thomas leaned over and caught a good look at what Grua and his companions were racing into.

N
obody in his right mind plows straight into Lava Falls on water flowing at 70,000 cfs without stopping to scout. But this run was different. Far too much time had been lost at Crystal, the light would soon be gone, and as they tore past Vulcan’s Anvil each man understood that, whatever Lava was about to dish out, they would have to absorb on the fly.

Years later, what Petschek would recall most clearly was Grua’s confidence as he pulled them toward the top of the rapid. Unlike at Crystal, he didn’t debate his options or ask what anyone thought. He was convinced that he had figured out what the river was doing and, by extension, knew exactly what he needed to do. And unlike at Crystal, he was absolutely right.

All the rocks were covered over and even the ledge hole was almost washed-out. There was no need to thread the Slot. The biggest worry was an enormous lateral that was coming off Black Rock on the right, where the
Emerald Mile
had been taken to pieces six years earlier. The aim would be to stay to the left, keep the bow square to the waves, and ride out whatever the river threw at them.

The standing waves were enormous, the biggest any of them had ever seen. But far from Crystal’s savage hydraulics, these waves were rounded and smooth, and in the end, those haystacks would be what they remembered best about that run—the great dome-shaped mountains of water, green as emerald and smooth as glass, and the deep, curving valleys between them.