The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (33 page)

The
Esmeralda II
, which Hudson had cobbled together in his garage, was unlike anything ever before seen in the canyon. Nineteen feet long and built of plywood, she was
modeled along the lines of a Higgins landing craft, a vessel that had been used extensively during World War II for amphibious landings in the invasion of Normandy and throughout the Pacific Islands. On the Colorado, the
Esmeralda II
represented an invasion of a different sort.
Propelled by a seventy-five-horsepower inboard engine, she was the canyon’s first-ever motorboat, and the roar of her four cylinders heralded the wave of internal-combustion-driven
rigs that would soon dominate the world at the bottom of the canyon.

Although Hudson and his crew stopped to camp each night along the shore and also suffered a daylong delay at Phantom Ranch because the mules that were hauling in their resupply of gasoline
had stampeded and strewn fuel cans all over the trail, they nevertheless made excellent time, clearing the entire stretch from Lee’s Ferry to Pierce Ferry in five days and ten minutes. This was the shortest trip in history from the head of the canyon to the Grand Wash Cliffs. Which meant that in addition to having pulled off the first successful motorized run down the river, Hudson had decisively established a Grand Canyon speed record.

That benchmark immediately caught the attention of two brothers who had already carved out places for themselves within the river-running community.
Jim Rigg, the older of the pair, was an ex-soldier and a talented aircraft mechanic from Grand Junction, Colorado, who had become a partner in a company that conducted commercial river trips on the Green, the San Juan, and the Colorado. Jim’s younger brother, Bob, joined the outfit in 1951. The two men were natural athletes who had a gift for rowing and a solid feel for white water. They were also fond of adventure. So that year they decided to see if they could smash Hudson’s motor-driven speed record using nothing more than the muscles in their arms and a pair of oars.

Actually, adventure was only part of the Rigg brothers’ motivation. As partners in a fledgling river company, one of the concerns that kept them awake at night was what they would do if one of their passengers suffered a traumatic injury and had to be evacuated from the canyon. At the time, there was virtually no means of summoning outside help, aside from hiking to the rim or attempting to flash a passing aircraft with a mirror, and helicopter extraction was still in its infancy. So if something truly awful happened to one of their clients—a broken femur, a fractured skull, a ruptured spleen—and they absolutely
had
to get that person to a hospital as fast as possible, how long, the brothers wondered, would it take to row out of the canyon?

Intent on finding an answer to that question while also inscribing a new entry in the record books, they pulled away from Lee’s Ferry at 7:20 on the morning of June 9, 1951, aboard a wooden boat called the
Norm
, carrying only their “emergency supplies”—a pair of sleeping bags, a screwdriver, a section of plywood patching, their water bottles, and two glass jars, one filled with peanut butter and the other with jelly. Their plan was to run almost every rapid “wide-open,” which meant they would not be stopping for a single scout, except at Lava Falls. They took turns at the oars, each brother rowing for about an hour at a time, and they moved with unbelievable speed, passing beneath the metal
footbridge at Phantom Ranch late on the first afternoon and anchoring to set up camp just above a tributary drainage called Bass Canyon, 108 miles from Lee’s Ferry, around 8:00 p.m. that night.

The following morning they were back on the water at dawn, and by early afternoon they were pulling over at the top of Lava Falls. After taking a quick look at the rapid, they agreed to tackle it by threading through a narrow chute on the left-hand side that featured a sharp drop-off. As they hurled down the tongue, Bob, who was at the oars, felt a series of harsh bangs reverberating up from his blades.
“Man, we got rocks on the oars!” he cried.

“You’re doing great,” declared Jim, who was riding “fish-eye,” splayed across the deck.
“We’re going the right way!” Indeed they were. A few seconds more and the little boat had been spit out of the bottom of the rapid and was rocketing through the tail waves without a scratch.

When darkness descended a few hours later, they kept right on rowing, dodging the rocks by sound until just before midnight, when they finally eddied out, wolfed down another ration of peanut butter and jelly, and snatched a few hours of sleep.

They peeled through the final stretch of river on the morning of the third day, reaching Pierce Ferry shortly before 11:00 a.m. and establishing three separate historic precedents. This was the first time that all but one of the rapids had been run wide-open in succession, a testament to the skill of two extraordinary young men who had a total of only three previous Grand Canyon trips between the pair of them. They had also set
a brand-new speed record of fifty-two hours and forty-one minutes. And they had proved that a hard-hulled, wooden oar boat could more than hold its own against motors.

The Rigg brothers’ run is justifiably remembered to this day as one of
the most impressive feats of boatmanship the canyon has ever seen. To run the whole 277 miles in just over two days seemed nothing short of miraculous, an accomplishment that evoked both admiration and envy within the guiding community. But it also raised some stark questions about whether racing down the Colorado might not cut directly against the grain of what was emerging, among those who knew the river world the best, as a consensus about the most fulfilling and exemplary way to experience the canyon.

O
f the many attractions that draw people to the bottom of the canyon, perhaps the most potent and beguiling is the realization that the experience is the
opposite
of a race—the antithesis of rushing from where you are toward someplace you think you would rather be, only to discover, once you arrive, that your true goal lies somewhere else. That is a defining characteristic of life in the world
above
the rim, and if there is a point to being in the canyon, it is not to rush but to linger, suspended in a blue-and-amber haze of in-between-ness, for as long as one possibly can. To float, to drift, savoring the pulse of the river on its odyssey through the canyon, and above all, to postpone the unwelcome and distinctly unpleasant moment when one is forced to reemerge and reenter the world beyond the rim—that is the paramount goal.

For the guides who worked in the canyon during the heyday of the 1970s, this was more than an abstract concept, the sort of beautiful ideal that people pay lip service to but never take seriously. Some of the most treasured moments in that era occurred when the trip leader announced that an expedition would be camping in the same spot for two nights, which meant an entire day could be spent hiking, reading, or simply staring up at the walls and watching the pageant of light play across the vertical amphitheater of rock. These “layover days” were coveted like gold coins because they enabled one to touch the best of what the canyon had to offer. The rapids were undeniably thrilling, but for boatmen privileged to return to the canyon again and again, the excitement of white water began to take a backseat to the hours of pure, unvarnished perfection that opened themselves to those who were not in a hurry.

Only during these interludes could one nap amid a bed of hellebore orchids and scarlet monkey flower, or listen to the hollow, head-knocking clonks of the bighorn rams as they battled along the cliff faces during their rut. Only in those moments could one peer into an Anasazi granary stuffed with dried cobs of corn that had been harvested when Saracens were battling Crusaders on the walls of Jerusalem, or hike to the base of Mooney Falls, a waterfall higher than Niagara, and watch it plunge into a pool whose color was deeper than that of a chunk of freshly mined lapis lazuli. Only in those intervals could one fathom the deepest wonders of the river world by disappearing into the aboriginal dreamtime, the
real
Stone Age, and truly comprehend how the canyon held in its fist a crazed and cracked beauty whose brutishness could strike with the force of a landscape from another planet.

This was the reason why, among all of the outfitters and boatmen, the oarsmen were considered the aristocrats of the canyon. Motor guides made considerably more money, moving swiftly downstream, racking up one six-day trip after another and merrily pocketing their tips at the end of each run. But the motor trips rarely had layover days; they moved too fast to linger, and the most you might get would be an extra morning or afternoon. The oar guides’ wealth was envied because their riches were calibrated not in dollars but in time. A trip in an oar raft lasted at least two weeks, sometimes as long as three—and it stood as a point of fierce pride among the dorymen that they could extend that schedule even further. Sometimes running twenty-three days, Litton’s were
the longest commercial expeditions in the canyon. Yet even that deliciously languorous pace was trumped by the luckiest people of all—the private boaters on noncommercial expeditions in which small parties, unconstrained by any timetable but the ticking of their internal clocks, could take as long as they liked.

Those private ventures were so appealing that during the 1970s several groups, many of them composed of river guides who were on vacation, launched a series of extended marathons
that stretched the principle of slow-boating to its outer limits. One of the first of these, which lasted for forty-two days, was eventually followed by an even longer trip, a seventy-seven-day whopper that would probably have set some sort of record, had it not been surpassed by yet another endurance run in which several members of Regan Dale’s extended family left from Lee’s Ferry and didn’t emerge from the bottom of the canyon for
a hundred and three days
—a hiatus that afforded them the space and the freedom to do things they had dreamed of doing for years and were finally taking the time to try.

They brought along sacks of flour to bake their own bread, just as Powell and his men had done. They hiked every side canyon they wanted to, those with names and those without, exploring some of the most exquisite and inaccessible springs and oases in the canyon. At their favorite camps, such as Eminence Break and Nankoweap and Granite Park, they planted themselves for a week or more and simply watched the water flow past, from vantages that enabled them to observe the river world unfurling not merely for a fortnight or even a month but across the arc of an entire season. They saw the desert primrose and the ocotillo and the Claret-cup cactus blossoms bloom and fade, and the leaves of the cottonwoods turn from acid green to dull gold. They bathed by the light of the moon as it waxed and waned and waxed again, three times over. They watched meteor showers rain down and the constellations wheel across the sky. They were serenaded first by the crickets and later by the locusts and eventually by peeping choruses of frogs. And at night on the beaches where they had camped, they planned their families and talked of the children they would conceive, when the time was right—and when those children arrived, they named them after the rapids and the flowers that they loved the most.

The trip would stay with them for the rest of their lives, and when it was finally over, it took its place in canyon lore. Years later when stories of legendary river expeditions were traded, none was more revered or more envied than the Hundred Days Trip—especially after the Park Service revised the canyon’s boating regulations to render another such excursion impossible, a thing that could never be repeated. It was also the polar opposite of what the Rigg brothers had achieved in 1951, and when you compared those two ventures—the
speed run and the Hundred Days Trip—there was really only one question you had to ask yourself: Why, in God’s name, would anyone who wasn’t hurt or starving or insane ever want to
race
through the Grand Canyon?

O
ne way of teasing out the shallowness of conducting such a sprint is by turning to
Bernard Moitessier, the great French yachtsman who took part in the Golden Globe, the legendary single-handed sailing race designed to reward the first sailor ever to circumnavigate the earth alone, without assistance and without stopping. Moitessier cast off from Plymouth, England, in August 1968 aboard
Joshua
, his thirty-nine-foot steel ketch. By the following February, having survived a series of gales and other trials, he was rounding Cape Horn at the tip of South America when he underwent a startling epiphany. Only another month or two separated him from Plymouth, and thanks to his position he stood an excellent chance of winning. Although victory would forever have inscribed his name in the annals of sailing, Moitessier decided that he neither needed nor wanted to finish the race. Instead, he turned south and kept sailing, rounding the Cape of Good Hope off the tip of Africa, then jacking far down into the Roaring Forties and eventually out into the reaches of the southern Pacific. When he finally stopped in Tahiti, he had been alone at sea for ten months and had never once touched land.