The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (27 page)

Unfortunately, however, the boat that was largely responsible for creating this state of affairs wasn’t faring nearly so well. In fact, she was about to be taken to the threshold of complete destruction.

O
n the morning that the
Emerald Mile
had first been launched into the river at Lee’s Ferry for her maiden run in the summer of 1971, one of the boatmen had turned to Litton and asked how long he expected her to last.
“Oh, if we get ten trips out of her, I’d be happy,” Litton casually replied. Five years later, she had surpassed those expectations many times over, racking up so many voyages through the canyon that her odometer—if she’d had one—would have registered more miles than almost any other dory. She had also borne a greater share of hardships. Trip after trip, season after season, the rocks and the riffles, the surging eddies and the punishing haystacks, the sun and the rain and the thousand-pound loads had all taken their toll, and by now the river had exacted a steep price from her frame and her hull. Having weathered five seasons of uninterrupted abuse, she was no longer the queen of the fleet.

As the oldest and most battered boat in Litton’s roster, she also suffered from the indignity of having been claimed by no one, which deprived her of the care and the attention that was lavished on her sisters and daughters. She was thus a logical choice when an extra boat was needed in Idaho, where Litton was expanding his guiding operations on the Snake and the Salmon—highly technical rivers that lacked the enormous hydraulics of the Colorado but were studded with the kinds of rocks that could peel open the bottom of a dory like a can opener. There, in the little river town of Lewiston, she met her next caretaker: an athletic young drifter with shoulder-length brown hair named Steve Reynolds, known to his friends as Wren, who was destined to play a leading role in the legend of the
Emerald Mile.

Wren hailed from a logging burg 175 miles north of San Francisco, a tiny place called Cummings, which boasted 127 residents, a redwood tree with a
tunnel carved in its trunk that you could drive a car through, and a little twelve-unit motel by the side of Highway 101 that his parents owned. After spending much of his boyhood hunting deer and fishing for trout in the forests behind his home, he had drifted east searching for work in the ski resorts around Lake Tahoe, then eventually hitchhiked his way into Lewiston, where Litton’s Idaho operations were based. After spending a summer season learning the ropes in the cockpit of a baggage raft, he was promoted to a full guide slot and permitted to take the oars of the battered little dory that had just arrived from the Grand Canyon, a decision whose wisdom was immediately questioned when Wren headed down the Snake and rammed her directly into a submerged rock in the middle of Wild Sheep, the first rapid in Hells Canyon.

The damage was bad—by the time the rapid finished clobbering the
Emerald Mile
, she had lost her gunwales and oarlocks, along with a few pieces of her bowpost and stern. When they finally got her back to the boathouse, Wren was given a pep talk familiar to many novice dorymen, a little homily stressing that a wreck such as this was simply an unpleasant rite of passage and that he had all the makings of a fine oarsman. At the end of the speech, he was informed of Litton’s you-break-it-you-fix-it policy.

When the rest of the Idaho crew realized that Wren knew absolutely nothing about repairing a wooden boat, the entire boathouse pitched in to help, and a month or two later the stricken dory looked ready to take another run at Wild Sheep. However, a phone call arrived from the boss ordering the Idaho operations manager to get the
Emerald Mile
loaded onto a trailer and sent south, where she was needed for yet another tour of duty in the Grand Canyon. Wren was livid. Having spent weeks restoring her to life, he had begun to think of the dory as his. He watched as she was wheeled out of the boatyard and disappeared down the highway with the assumption that he would never see her again.

Back in Hurricane, the
Emerald Mile
was promptly demoted to “guest boat,” the dory reserved for guides who worked on rivers in other parts of the country and were making their first trip through the canyon.
Late in the summer of 1977, she was handed over to one of Wren’s colleagues from Idaho, a wiry guide with dark, curly hair named Steve Dalton, whom everyone called Stevie Sperm because he was too energetic to sit in one place for long. The trip was led by Regan Dale, and for the first two weeks, Dalton did a yeoman’s job of piloting her safely through the gauntlet until, late in the afternoon of July 23, the crew arrived at a sinister column of black lava that soared sixty feet from the middle of the river, the cone of an extinct volcano that is known as Vulcan’s Anvil and that marks the entrance to the only rapid in the canyon more ferocious than Crystal. There, the
Emerald Mile
’s steadily diminishing stream of luck finally trickled to a halt.

O
ne hundred and seventy-nine miles downstream from Lee’s Ferry, directly below the Toroweap Overlook, the greatest river in the West runs up against a picket line of submerged boulders, roars over the edge, and detonates. This is Lava Falls, a quarter-mile stretch of white water that is considered by many to be the biggest navigable rapid in North America. Here the river drops almost thirty vertical feet, creating a marbled chaos of water and rock that has destroyed more boats and shattered the composure of more guides than any other rapid in the canyon.

Lava’s hydraulics are so vicious that in 1869 John Wesley Powell ordered his entire fleet to be lowered along the shore with ropes, and the first confirmed run wasn’t made for another twenty-seven years. Even today there is no guarantee that a boat will make it through Lava safely, and when things go wrong, the results can be shocking to watch. Motor rigs are folded in half like tacos. Boatmen are blown from their seats. Broken oar shafts cartwheel through the air as the welds on aluminum frames snap like dry twigs and passengers are forced to dog-paddle for their lives.

What makes Lava Falls so insidious is that there’s not a single good line, a fact that is painfully evident the moment you climb up the cliff of scorched basalt on the right bank of the river that serves as the scouting point. The entire left side of the river is studded with enormous rocks and pour-overs that cannot be negotiated in a hard-hulled boat at any water level below 6,000 cfs. In the center of the river, the current plummets into a recirculating keeper hole, while the right side of the river features a line of black rocks with scalloped surfaces that make them look like giant avocados. The sheer fury of this spectacle can be so intimidating that guides have been known to sit on the scout rock for hours as they screw up the courage to return to their boats. But for a period during the golden age of river guiding, a marvelous corridor through all of this chaos opened up.

Not long after the debris flow that formed Crystal, a flash flood roared down Prospect Canyon, a large tributary drainage on the south side of Lava, and rearranged the submerged boulders in the center of the river. The shift was minor and subtle, but the new alignment pried open a subsurface channel that allowed a narrow stream of current to proceed smoothly downstream without folding back on itself or colliding against a rock. That stream was breathtakingly thin, and because it threaded through the most violent section of white water in the center of the rapid, it was impossible to discern. In fact, the only evidence that suggested it was there was a line of tiny bubbles that would pulse up at irregular intervals, burbling to the surface every few minutes and remaining visible for no
more than fifteen seconds or so before disappearing again. The path that those bubbles delineated was so faint, so ill defined, so absurdly tenuous, that only the most careful and devoted observer would even take note of them and ponder their meaning. But
one afternoon in the summer of 1971, Wally Rist caught a glimpse of the bubbles, decided to follow their line, and demonstrated that a viable run was indeed there.

In the spring of 1995, another flood would race down Prospect Canyon and tweak the configuration once again—and the bubbles would vanish for good. But for twenty-three years, that ephemeral trail marked the most mysterious and confounding run in the entire canyon. They called it the Slot, and a large part of its allure lay in its evanescence. Sometimes you could search for the bubbles and never see them. Other times you would
think
you spotted them, only to discover in the midst of your run that you had seen something else. But when they were there and you lined up your bowpost on the path they laid out, the ride was pure delight—an effortless glide in which you barely even touched your oars as you slid through the heart of the rapid while water exploded around you in every direction. If you executed a flawless run through the Slot, you wouldn’t take on a single drop of water, which seemed so outrageously inconceivable that you would arrive at the bottom of the rapid half-convinced that the whole thing had been a dream. And therein lay the other part of the run’s fascination. Although the Slot was a manifestation of the laws of fluid mechanics, it seemed to partake in equal measure from the realm of metaphysics. In some ways, the run offered a hydraulic affirmation of that wiggy paradox to which Zen masters refer when they talk about journeys and destinations: the notion that only by steering himself unflinchingly into those places he most fervently wished to avoid—in this case, one of the vilest patches of white water in the entire canyon—could a man hope to arrive at the place he truly needed to be.

You would never want to try the Slot in a motor rig—the gap between the rocks was narrower than the width of a big baloney boat. You could certainly pull it off in an oar raft, but rubber wasn’t the best tool for the job because it lacked the precision and the maneuverability that the run demanded. So the Slot became something of a dory specialty—even as other boatmen initially wrestled with the question of whether the run existed at all. And therein lay perhaps the most bewitching aspect of the Slot: the possibility that executing the run correctly might have less to do with actually being able to see the bubbles and more to do with your willingness to
imagine
that they were there. For the first several years, a handful of skeptics even started peddling the heretical but exquisite theory that perhaps the bubbles weren’t anything other than just that—bubbles—and that the line the dorymen were surfing through the
maelstrom during those enchanted years was nothing more than the glittering suspension of their own self-righteousness. In other words, Litton’s boatmen had literally concocted the Slot for themselves out of thin air.

That was eventually disproved as the dories and later some intrepid rafters ran the Slot time after time. But if nothing else, the theory reflects what a special time this was on the river—an era of magical possibilities that briefly willed itself into existence and then, like most things of wonder and beauty, failed to sustain its own fire and winked out. Even when there was doubt it existed, however, the Slot offered the clearest possible window into the dorymen’s desperation to find a way through the madness of Lava Falls and avoid the kind of catastrophe that was visited upon the
Emerald Mile
in the summer of 1977.