The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (74 page)

(15)
There were different theories about why the dories of the Grand Canyon (seen here in Martin Litton’s boathouse in Hurricane, Utah) were so bewitching. But an unspoken consensus held that the boats’ appeal was rooted in the blending of three elements: simplicity, balance, and ruthless reductionism.

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For the little dory that was made for Litton in the summer of 1971 (whose schematics are seen here), he selected perhaps the most beautiful name of any boat in his fleet—a gesture of remembrance to honor a towering stand of old-growth redwoods tucked deep in the coastal forests of Northern California that had been clear-cut during the early 1960s. “Truly something to cry about,” Litton raged. And so she became the
Emerald Mile.

(17)
In 1977, when the
Emerald Mile
was extracted from the rocks at the edge of Lava Falls, the largest rapid in the Grand Canyon, following her brutal accident there, she barely resembled a boat. The damage was so terrible—her bow had been completely destroyed and several key pieces of her hull had disappeared down the river—that she was slated to be set on fire as her carcass was pushed off the back of a trailer into a municipal garbage dump.

(18)
After stepping in to put a stop to the
Emerald Mile
’s “Viking funeral,” Grua declared that he would claim the stricken dory as his own and bring her back to life. Here, he pauses for a sandwich break during the months of restoration work that followed.

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When Grua completed his rehabilitation project, the
Emerald Mile
was both a restoration of her former self and something new: a streamlined instrument of speed and grace, as well as the Lazarus of the river. The morning that Grua launched her into the shallows at the head of the canyon (19) and rechristened her with a bottle of champagne (20), she was poised for the final and most dramatic chapter of her story.

(21)
Steve Reynolds, known to his friends as Wren, was the kind of boatman that river folk sometimes refer to as a “looker”—an oarsman who took an almost preternatural joy at being able to row a complicated stretch of current without hitting a damn thing.

(22)
It was not unusual for Wren to rack up ten or fifteen flawless trips in his dory, the
Hidden Passage
(22), skating past rocks and through white water with a seamless perfection that made his colleagues shake their heads with envy. In the spring of 1983, Wren sensed that Grua was contemplating a speed run in the
Emerald Mile
and pulled him aside with a special request. “If anything happens,” he declared, “I’d love to be a part of it.”

(23)
Rudi Petschek was one of the most unusual boatmen ever to run the Colorado, a Jewish refugee whose path to the river had drawn him from Nazi-occupied Europe, through the lakes of Argentina, and then to the laboratories of Berkeley, where he abandoned a promising career as a scientist, went to the Grand Canyon, and found his true home on the decks of a seventeen-foot wooden dory. At age forty-nine, Petschek was by far the oldest member of the speed-run crew. Yet it was he who would see them through the darkest hour of their journey.

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Thanks to the damage inflicted on the spillway tunnels, the operators of the Glen Canyon Dam were forced to send excess water through the dam’s river-outlet tubes (24) in a nonstop torrent that lasted for months. The thunder of the discharge emerging at the mouths of those outlets could be heard from the dam’s parapet, more than five hundred feet above.