The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (23 page)

There was nothing else quite like it, the way this river could braid terror and rapture so tightly together. And although it wasn’t always possible for Litton’s crew to fear and love the rapids in the same instant, sometimes those feelings toggled back and forth with such fury that they generated a charge not unlike the voltaic current that was running through the power cables at the base of the Glen Canyon Dam. Once you had felt that energy coursing through your synapses, you simply had to return to it again and again, chasing the elusive electric butterfly into the vortex.

In this way, white water became the dorymen’s elixir and their narcotic. Because they literally lived on the river—riding its back by day, bobbing asleep in their boats upon the eddies at night—they became part of the water itself. It ran down their veins and bored into the chambers of their heart. It framed their world, it greased their engines, it shaped the subtext of the dialogue they conducted with themselves, with one another, with the gods they worshipped. And out of all of this emerged a connection that bound the dorymen to the water, the rocks, and the boats they rowed more intimately than any of the generations of river runners that had preceded them. As far as they were concerned, anyone in a motor rig or a rubber raft had only run his or her fingers along the surface of those truths. Even John Wesley Powell himself, they were half convinced, had barely touched the magic.

T
he other companies didn’t necessarily see it this way. Massive rubber rafts had their own quirks and challenges, and when you threw motors into the mix—their habit of pulling tricks such as breaking down in the middle of a rapid—things could become complicated indeed. All of which meant that rival outfitters often took a rather dim view of the dories—not necessarily of the boats, which they coveted, but of the boatmen and what they thought of themselves. To many of these outfitters, Litton and his crew seemed little more than a gang of snooty purists who subscribed to the delusion that they were better than everybody else, an impression that was convincingly underscored by Litton’s insistence on referring to the rubber rafts as “baloney boats” and his penchant for warning his passengers that, in addition to being ugly, the boats were dirty and unsafe. “God, no!” he would declare whenever one of his clients asked if he had ever ridden on a motor rig.
“Lord knows what can happen aboard those contraptions—not to mention the diseases you’re liable to contract.”

Unfortunately, this gave rise to some intense rancor and ill will, which in turn created lasting divisions within the guiding community, pushing the river-running industry in the direction of a loose confederacy of tribes whose members considered everyone else a bunch of knuckleheads who had no business being on the river. However, on one thing everyone was united.

During this period, a remarkable geomorphic event took place deep inside the canyon that changed the face of the river. They all agreed that it was more or less the biggest thing that had happened to the bottom of the canyon in the 426 years since Cárdenas had stumbled onto the place. Among other consequences, it created, in the space of a single winter’s night, the meanest and ugliest stretch of white water that anyone had ever seen.

I.
The interior of a hydraulic jump within a major rapid inside the Grand Canyon is subjected to some shocking forces, and the ordeal of being trapped in one of these underwater tornadoes is called “getting maytagged.” As a further illustration of how dangerous they can be, consider that sometimes the only option for a person trapped inside a keeper hole is to dive toward the bottom of the river in the hope of becoming caught in the downstream current, thereby funneling
under
the breaking wave.

In the rock record, the tranquillity of time is not well represented. Instead, you have catastrophes. In the Southwest, they live from one catastrophe to another, from one flash flood to the next. The evolution of the world does not happen a grain at a time. It happens in the hundred-year storm, the hundred-year flood. Those things do it all.

—J
OHN
M
C
P
HEE
,
Annals of the Former World

O
NCE
every thirty-three years, the comet Tempel-Tuttle returns to the inner solar system, casting off a dense stream of frozen gas particles that generates one of the loveliest and most prolific displays of shooting stars in the heavens. The Leonid meteor shower is often spectacular, but the storm of 1966 was truly singular—especially in the western United States, where, on the night of November 17, the stars rained down at an uncountable rate, etching the sky with a tracery of silver so dense and so luminous that witnesses later said they felt as if the planet were hurtling into a celestial blizzard, like a car driving through a snowstorm. On the highways of Nevada and the interstates of eastern California, drivers pulled to the side of the road, got out of their vehicles, and stared upward, transfixed. In small towns from New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin to the Texas Panhandle, parents plucked sleeping children from their beds, padded into their backyards, and slowly turned in circles. For three hours, people stood spellbound by a silent explosion that yielded more than forty falling stars a second. Many
witnesses later said it was the most remarkable natural phenomenon they had witnessed in their entire lives. Yet, just two weeks later, an equally bizarre storm took place in the highland deserts just north of the Grand Canyon—something far more violent and, in its own way, even stranger than a meteor shower.

Unlike with the Leonids, however, not a single human being was there to see it.

During the winter months, the country along the canyon’s North Rim, more than six thousand feet above the river, is essentially deserted. Once the first snowfall has closed off the forty-seven-mile road that connects the park’s entrance station to the rim, all vehicular traffic comes to a halt and the place is cut off from the outside world. During this lockdown, the alpine meadows and the dense glades of aspen trees are suspended in stasis. The only full-time resident is the winter caretaker at the Grand Canyon Lodge, which sits at the top of the North Kaibab Trail, leading down to Phantom Ranch. The lodge has almost no visitors, and almost none of them bother to venture into the backcountry, where dozens of side canyons and pocket drainages notch into the rim like the bays and inlets along the coastline of British Columbia. From late October through mid-April these areas, which may not see a single human being until spring, are some of the most isolated places in the entire Southwest—which is why no one was there when, shortly after 1:00 a.m. on the night of December 3, it started raining on the North Rim.

This was hardly an unusual event. Winter storms are common from November through March all across the highlands of northern Arizona. But this rainfall was different. At the park’s entrance station, which sits at eighty-eight hundred feet,
the rain fell steadily for twenty hours on Saturday, paused briefly, then started back up and didn’t stop until 4:00 a.m. on Wednesday. Much of this deluge splattered atop approximately six inches of snow, which swiftly melted and joined the runoff,
adding to the magnitude of what unfolded over the next three days. But the sheer intensity of the rain was what was most remarkable. Within a small pocket of roughly a dozen square miles, a series of storm cells dumped fourteen inches in just thirty-six hours. Precipitation that heavy
is commensurate with the kind of rainfall that the jungles of Panama receive at the height of the rainy season. In the desert uplands of the Kaibab Plateau, such precipitation is breathtakingly extravagant—nearly twice as much as the area normally receives during an entire year.

Unlike the tropics, the desert has little soil and scant vegetation to cushion and absorb this kind of impact. Instead, the rain simply lollops off the bedrock and forms rivulets that race indiscriminately through the beds of the dry arroyos. (Hence the name for these storms: gully washers.) As smaller gullies
enter from the sides, the speed and mass of the runoff builds and intensifies with each passing minute. This can have blunt consequences—especially along the North Rim, where the south-tilting slopes of the Kaibab direct the entire discharge toward the limestone caprock that defines the edge of the rim and dump virtually all of this water directly into the canyon.

A
t the lip of the rim, the ground drops through a sequence of cliffs and slopes whose angles vary according to the stability of the rock in each layer. The harder rocks—the limestones and some of the sandstones—which are relatively stable and resistant to erosion, tend to form vertical cliff faces. By contrast, the mudstones and the shales are crumbly and weak and are thus more vulnerable to the pull of water and gravity, which results in steeply angled slopes. This progression from hard rock to crumbly shale, from cliff face to slope, accounts for the distinctive terracelike appearance of the canyon’s walls. Under the right conditions—the appropriate combination of slope angle and intensity of rainfall—entire sections of this colossal staircase can catastrophically fail.

One of the weakest links in the entire chain of rock, the brittle, maroon-colored Hermit shale, sits directly beneath the cliffs of Kaibab limestone and Coconino sandstone that form the rim of the canyon. When subjected to the fire-hose effect of high-intensity, storm-induced runoff, these slopes become so saturated they simply give way, slumping into the flood and contributing to the formation of a highly viscous sedimentary slurry.

This slurry has some intriguing properties. Only about 40 percent of its volume is actually composed of water; the rest is made up of
unconsolidated silt, fine sand, and a heterogeneous blend of chert and limestone fragments. But there is also a third ingredient, the thing that gives the slurry its rather freakish potential for violence.

As the author Craig Childs explains in
The Secret Knowledge of Water
, marine mudstones and shales often contain
clays and minerals that can act as crude lubricants when they are combined with relatively small concentrations of water. The Hermit shale, for example, has heavy concentrations of the minerals illite (a component of soap and lip gloss) and kaolinite (which is used in the manufacture of glossy paper). The result is a glutinous, oily-looking goulash that has the consistency of cake dough or, perhaps more accurately, wet cement. Like cement, it is dense and rather grabby, and as the liquid avalanche roars downhill, it begins snatching up rocks and boulders, which are rapidly entrained into the mix. At this point, materials that are normally solid and fixed undergo a startling change into something fluid.

This type of flash flood is known inside the Grand Canyon as a debris flow,
and because most of the 529 tributary drainages within the canyon that are capable of yielding debris flows are remote and inaccessible, few of these incidents have been witnessed firsthand. One of the most vivid accounts we have was provided by Robert Brewster Stanton, a gifted engineer who took part in a disastrous expedition to conduct a river-level railway survey along the bottom of the canyon during the summer of 1889.

On the morning of July 18, having watched helplessly as three of their comrades were drowned in the Colorado, Stanton and his exhausted party of surveyors were attempting to make their escape to the rim by clawing their way up a steep tributary when a heavy thunderstorm broke directly above them. Stanton described what happened next:

As the rain increased, I heard some rock tumbling down behind us, and, looking up, I saw one of the grandest and most exciting scenes of the crumbling and falling of what we so falsely call the everlasting hills. As the water began to pour over from the plateau above, it seemed as if the whole upper edge of the Canyon had begun to move. Little streams, rapidly growing into torrents, came over the hard top stratum from every crevice and fell on the softer slopes below. In a moment they changed into streams of mud, and, as they came farther down, again changed into streams of water, mud and rock, undermining huge loose blocks of the harder strata, and starting them they plunged ahead. In a few moments, it seemed as though the slopes . . . were moving down upon us, first with a rumbling noise, then an awful roar. As the larger blocks of rock plunged ahead of the streams, they crashed against other blocks, lodged on the slopes, and, bursting with an explosion like dynamite, broke into pieces, while the fragments flew into the air in every direction, hundreds of feet above our heads, and as the whole conglomerate mass of water, mud, and flying rocks came down the slopes nearer to where we were, it looked as if nothing could prevent us from being buried in an avalanche of rock and mud. It was a scene of the wildest fury of elements!