The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (9 page)

Over the next fortnight, one mishap followed another. Just after lunch on June 8, while attempting to wallow through a rapid the men later coined Disaster Falls, the
No Name
struck a boulder hard enough to throw out her three-man crew, then blundered broadside into another rock, broke in half, and sank. In addition to the loss of the boat, the wreck cost them a third of their rations.

During the following week, they managed to drive the remaining three boats into rocks hard enough to cause all of them to leak. Then,
late on the afternoon of June 17, Billy Hawkins, the cook, built his fire too close to some dead willows and sparked a blaze that swiftly turned their entire camp into a conflagration, forcing them to grab whatever they could and make a mad dash for the water. As the men tumbled into the boats, they were literally aflame, frantically attempting to douse their beards while tearing away their burning
clothing. Meanwhile, Hawkins leaped into his boat, his arms filled with the mess kit, lost his footing on the gunwale, and tossed almost every piece of cookware—plates, cups, knives, and forks—directly into the river.

As they struggled with these disasters, the river established what would become a familiar pattern. It wheeled sinuously through broad valleys and unpopulated parklands until it ran up against a range of mountains, then cut through the barricade to form a canyon. Inside these declivities, the walls would rise, the world would narrow, and the current would contort into rapids that could last for miles. Eventually, the ramparts would fall back, and as the river flowed into another valley, the land would open up again, affording another dramatic view of banded buttes in the foreground and, shimmering in the distance, the snowcapped subranges of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. As they made their way downstream, they christened every major feature the crew encountered—the buttes, the promontories, the side streams—like Adam naming the animals.

The days swiftly became weeks, and as May gave way to June, the portages grew ever more frequent, one following upon the back of the next, sometimes by as little as a hundred yards. The labor was brutal and exhausting and the men worked like stevedores, unloading thousands of pounds of cargo and hauling everything downstream by hand, then shuffling back upstream to carry the boats or to lower them along the shore with ropes. But they were making progress. By the middle of June, they had reached an idyllic stretch of calm water in southeastern Utah that they named Echo Park, and just a few miles downstream from this point, they conducted a twenty-mile hike to the last outpost of civilization, the trading post on the Uinta reservation. There, Goodman, the adventure-seeking Englishman, announced that he had endured enough and resigned. Then it was back to the river and through Desolation, Gray, Labyrinth, and Stillwater Canyons until,
at 4:45 p.m. on the afternoon of July 16, they looked to the left and saw that the Green was about to be joined by another river with an equally strong current, which they immediately identified as the Grand.

They had reached the Confluence and were, finally, riding the back of the old man himself, the Colorado proper.

By now their skin was cracked and sunburned, their hands were blistered and chafed, and their bodies had been battered by being dragged over the rocks when they lined the Whitehalls through the rapids. Miraculously, no one had suffered a debilitating injury such as a torn ligament or a broken leg. But they were in poor shape, and the boats were faring even worse. The hulls required constant patching, while any oars that were lost or shattered meant that new ones had to be laboriously sawed from driftwood. As for their commissary,
much of the flour was now congealed with river water, the apples and the coffee beans were coated in silt, and the bacon was slowly turning green. Thanks to the loss of the
No Name
and the damage inflicted by the fire, none of the crew had an entire suit of clothes left, and several were all but naked. “
I had a pair of buckskin breeches [and] they were so wet all the time that they kept stretching and stretching,” Hawkins wrote in his journal. “I kept cutting off the lower ends till I had nothing left but the waist band.”

Under such strain, tempers frayed and arguments flared, and by late July, as they were nearing the end of Utah’s Cataract Canyon, the crew were approaching mutiny. Much of their frustration was directed at Powell, who was so cautious about white water that he rarely risked running a rapid when it was possible to order yet another hated portage. While the men set about unloading the boats for the third or fourth time that day, the Major would wander off to “geologize”—collecting rocks, taking barometric readings, and making meticulous notes on the weather, the terrain, and the stars. None of that would have been a problem with a different type of leader, but Powell was prickly, aloof, and in practical matters, often rather incompetent. His flair for choosing the worst possible place to camp was especially galling. “
If I had a dog that would lie where my bed is made tonight, I would kill him and burn his collar and swear I never owned him,” George Bradley seethed in the pages of his diary. Later he added, “If we succeed, it will be
dumb luck
, not good judgment that will do it.”

And so, amid increasing psychological disarray—divided by anger, racked by anxiety, undermined by a distrust of their leader that seemed to deepen with each passing mile—the crew crossed another key threshold on August 5 when, at the downstream end of a placid and beautiful canyon they had named Glen, they reached an open pocket where the cliffs came down to river level. The spot, which would later be known as Lee’s Ferry, marked the entrance to the landmark that was not only the very first great feature in the territory of the United States to have been discovered but, perhaps fittingly, the very last to be explored.

F
rom the moment they entered the Grand Canyon, the walls rose higher, the space between them narrowed, and the scale of everything shifted. By the end of that first day, several new layers of limestone and sandstone had pushed out of the shoreline next to the river and shouldered the rimrock a quarter of a mile into the sky. As each stratum stepped back from the next in a stairlike progression, the entire ensemble began to take on the contours of a giant wedding cake of rock. By the third day, the walls displayed a horizontally banded palette of some half a dozen colors that ranged from tawny gold to deep maroon and, later,
a rose-petal pastel that seemed to smolder with an inner fire, as if it bore the reflected glare of a furnace deep inside the earth. As the boats penetrated farther into this labyrinth, the cliffs were sculpted into dimensions that were both breathtaking and sublime.

Unfortunately, the little band of boatmen had neither the time nor the inclination to appreciate most of this display. Tributary gorges were now spearing in from both the left and the right, and at the mouth of each tributary, a fan-shaped deposit of rocky debris bottlenecked the river, creating sharp hydraulics whose size and viciousness surpassed all but the biggest white water they had so far encountered. They quickly learned to tune their ears to the deep-throated, express-engine roar that signaled the approach of yet another rapid. Echoed and intensified by the rising walls, the thunder of the water quickened their pulses and deafened their ears. Their voices were all but lost as they shouted warnings and directions to one another.

The deeper they went, the more remote and lost they felt until, on August 10,
they arrived at a turquoise-colored stream known as the Little Colorado, which entered from the left. Here, at this isolated confluence surrounded by slabs and pillars that would dwarf all the cathedrals of Europe, Powell inserted his most famous passage into the journal that he later published:

We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.

Powell wasn’t overstating their ignorance. At this point, they had no clear idea how far they had come or how much canyon lay ahead of them. They did not know how many turns the river would make, how many rapids there might be, or whether their supplies would sustain them through the time it would take to negotiate these obstacles. And they had no way of knowing that their most serious challenges lay ahead.

Just downstream from the Little Colorado, the river cut into a layer of metamorphic rock, the Vishnu schist, whose polished black surface framed what would later come to be called the Granite Gorge, a place that was dark and gloomy and so deep that the rims were no longer visible. Here, where the river narrowed to one-third its width, the water increased in both depth and power. The schist’s ferocious resistance to erosion gave rise to rapids unlike any they
had yet seen—a gauntlet of truly colossal hellbenders. They lined or portaged whenever possible, but often the walls were so sheer that they were forced to work their way along the sides of the rapids by clawing at the sides of the canyon with their fingers. When the fingerholds gave out, they had to run rapids far beyond their skill. “
The boats are entirely unmanageable,” Powell later wrote. “No order in their running can be preserved; now one, now another, is ahead, each crew laboring for its own preservation.”

By now, the battered Whitehalls demanded constant attention and ceaseless repair to stay afloat. Each day, the boats had to be recaulked with pine pitch, which the men collected by climbing the walls to the tree line. But the chief concern was their commissary. They had been forced to discard the last of their bacon—too spoiled even for famished men to choke down—and now they were subsisting on a diet of biscuits, soggy apples, and coffee. They had less than three weeks of rations left, and thanks to the hapless Billy Hawkins, their larder was about to get even less appealing.

On August 15, Hawkins broke one of his oars and nearly capsized, resoaking the supplies they had just dried out and forcing them to pull over for repairs and redrying. While they searched for a suitable piece of driftwood from which to saw a new oar, one of the boats swung around in the current, and its anchor line swept the baking soda, which Hawkins had left sitting on a rick, into the river. For the rest of the trip their nightly meal would consist of unleavened biscuits made from “rotten flour mixed with Colorado river water.”

To add to their problems, the summer monsoons arrived—the time when cloudbursts empty into the canyon with shocking violence. As the rain sheeted down the canyon walls, the water coalesced to form hundreds of brownish-red waterfalls that exploded over the ledges and slurried into the river, dropping trainloads of gravel and rendering the river so gritty that they were forced to quench their thirst by lapping like dogs at puddles in the rocks.

With the barometers out of commission, their location and their proximity to the end of the canyon had now become a matter of guesswork, and the river disoriented them further by constantly changing course, looping back on itself in a series of twisted bowknots. From the Little Colorado, it jogged south before swinging west, then northwest before doglegging south again. “
If it keeps on this way,” Bradley scribbled in his journal, “we shall be back where we started from.”

Their days were reduced to the torturous sessions of lining and portaging, punctuated by terrifying, watery battles that must have felt something like war. At night, the rain ensured that they had little relief. Crouched beneath their rotted canvas among the rocks, two or three men to a blanket, they twitched and jerked with dreams of white water and famished men’s visions of food.
“
Starvation stared us in the face,” Jack Sumner later wrote. “I felt like Job: it would be a good scheme to curse God and die.”

By now, all pretense that this was a scientific expedition had been dropped. Their survival hinged on which would arrive first: the end of their food supply or the end of the canyon. After taking stock of their remaining flour and apples, Powell summed up their predicament with a single phrase:

“It has come to be
a race for a dinner.”