The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (35 page)

His graduate thesis, for which he put rats in refrigerators to analyze the way their brain functions responded to the cold, bored him so profoundly that he typed out the entire thesis by hand, with the margins of each paragraph justified on both the right and the left sides, in an effort to keep himself engaged. That rather pointless exercise said a lot about the way Petschek’s mind worked. He was thorough, patient, even-tempered, and delighted in applying himself to tiny details—traits that served him well when he tossed his career as a scientist out the window, found his way to the Grand Canyon, and devoted himself to the life of a dory guide. On the river, he was renowned for his meticulousness and his precision. (He was so obsessed with maintaining perfect trim on the
Ticaboo
, the dory he captained, that he glued a carpenter’s level to the bowpost so he could monitor her lateral balance while he rowed.) For all of those reasons, he was also a superb oarsman.

Petschek’s love of analysis, experimentation, and problem solving were all qualities he shared with Grua, and by the spring of 1980 the two men had become close friends. So Petschek was easily the best choice when Grua and Rist realized they needed to fill out their crew with a boatman who, among other things, was capable of working through the calculations for how the trip should be paced. This issue was complicated by the need to optimize their daylight hours in order to minimize the challenges of rowing at night. They knew they wanted to be inside the Granite Gorge, where they would encounter some of the biggest white water, while there was still plenty of light. But they also knew that they didn’t want to tackle Lava Falls, which lay far below the gorge,
in darkness. The problem boiled down to one question: Given how fast the current would carry them and the additional speed they would generate with their oars, when should they launch?

When Petschek sat down with his notebook and ran the numbers, he calculated that the trip would have to begin sometime in the late afternoon, and the launch should take place as close to the full moon as possible. To help them get through the darkness, he also realized that they would need to equip themselves with a set of large waterproof flashlights. Meanwhile, Rist and Grua set about getting sanction from their boss and wrangling permission from the Park Service. Litton didn’t present a problem—although a speed run certainly cut against his philosophy of how the canyon should be run, he wasn’t in the business of telling his employees how to do things, especially on their own time. The rangers, however, were another matter.

The river was now under tight government control, and it was no longer possible to simply barnstorm downstream without proper authorization. They would need a special permit, and Grua and Rist both suspected that telling the Park Service that they were seeking to break the speed record probably wouldn’t pass muster. In the end, Rist’s solution had a familiar ring, a theme that echoed all the way back to the Rigg brothers. They would submit an application to
“test evacuation procedures” in order to update the data on how long it would take to row a severely injured passenger out of the canyon.

Surprisingly, the Park Service actually bought this logic, and by the time Aspinall was posing for his picture next to the reservoir’s water-level gauge, they had their paperwork in hand and were ready to go.

T
hey
launched at just after 4:00 p.m. on the afternoon of Monday, June 30, one day after the full moon, and things began going off the rails from the start. A massive weather system was lumbering across northern Arizona, and when they arrived at the ferry, it was already raining so hard that they had to meet with Tom Workman, the ranger who reviewed their paperwork, inside the cab of Petschek’s truck. While Workman completed their checkout procedures, the rain pounded down on the roof like ball-peen hammers.

When a storm of this magnitude strikes the canyon, it is nothing short of biblical. As the water runs over the rimrock, it funnels into hundreds of waterfalls that stream over the lowest band of cliffs and splatter into the river. The effect is breathtakingly gorgeous and spectacularly violent, a line of miniature Niagaras discharging to the left and the right, extending as far downriver as the eye can see. To avoid being shotgunned by those waterfalls, Grua and his crew had to hew as close to the center of the river as possible.

By the time they tackled the first several miles along the upper stretch of the canyon, the rain had tapered off, but the sky remained an angry shade of eggplant. By the time they reached Redwall Cavern, at Mile 33, night was upon them and the storm clouds had thoroughly obscured the moon. This was where Grua took over the oars, and during the next several hours he truly came into his own as the captain of the
Emerald Mile.

As Rist and Petschek peered into the darkness from their posts in the bow and the stern, they marveled at his mastery of the river’s dynamics. He ordered them to direct the beams of their flashlights at the walls—Rist to the right and Petschek to the left—and although neither man could fathom where they were, Grua calmly called off the rapids and the mileage numbers. His ability to navigate without any visual cues seemed remarkable, until they realized how extensively he had done his homework and prepared for this part of the trip, memorizing each twist and turn of the canyon so thoroughly that he was steering by the blueprint inside his head.

In this way, he took them past 37 Mile Rapid, where the current heads straight toward the wall, and past Kwagunt at Mile 54, which features a huge, haystacking hole in the center of the main current that he skirted by cambering smoothly to the right. Grua had never rowed or even seen the river at 37,000 cfs, but it made no difference. He knew exactly where he was and precisely where he wanted to be, and he tackled the entire night completely on his own, rowing for seven hours in total darkness until they reached Unkar at Mile 71, the gateway to the big water, where he finally pulled in at the top of the rapid so they could brew up a pot of coffee and wait for first light.

Forty-five minutes later they were off again, and with the arrival of daylight they picked up the pace, each man rowing hard for an hour or so before rotating to the bow or the stern as they began smashing through the hellbenders: first Hance, then Sockdolager, followed in swift succession by Horn Creek and Granite and Hermit, until they finally reached Mile 98, where, to no one’s surprise, Crystal threw them for a loop. They didn’t flip, but the hole in front of Big Red, at the top of the Rock Garden, struck them hard enough to catapult both Grua and Petschek into the river. Fortunately, they slid past Big Red without mishap, and Rist was able to pull his comrades back aboard a few seconds later.

They had barely missed a beat and were on their way through the Jewels, past Waltenberg, and across the long straight stretches at Stephen Aisle and Conquistador Aisle. They were really moving now—through Specter and Bedrock and Dubendorff—when, just above Tapeats Creek at Mile 133, the weather returned and hammered them once again.

The fury of the storm was unbelievable. Hail came down hard and dense, and an upstream wind flung it straight into their faces like buckshot. It was
impossible to see anything downstream, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, and a few minutes after the storm struck, the waterfalls returned—big and brown and menacing. The combined effect was enough to cut their pace in half while draining the energy they had been hoping to hold in reserve for their second night.

When the storm finally passed, they picked up the pace again, and by 5:00 p.m. they had reached Lava Falls, which, they were pleased to discover, was entirely runnable. Grua was once again at the oars and they whooshed through without a hitch. From there, they continued cranking hard, racing through the first stage of the lower canyon in the remaining hours before darkness returned. Night caught them just above Pumpkin Spring at Mile 213, and there their fuel tanks ran dry.

They had now been rowing for more than twenty-four hours virtually without pause, and they were hungry and wet and utterly drained. When they saw the lights of a commercial trip winking through the darkness on the left side of the river, they pulled into the camp, curled up on the decks, and went to sleep. When the rain returned later that night, they slept on, too tired to care.

They were back on the water before dawn, and the final segment was miserable. They didn’t reach Separation, the side canyon where three members of Powell’s crew had lost all hope and abandoned the expedition, until lunchtime, and when they reached the Grand Wash Cliffs and laid down their oars, it was well into the afternoon.

By this point Rist and Grua were too tired to do the math, but when Petschek told them the news, their spirits rose. Even with the waterfalls and the hail and the night spent sleeping in the rain, they had maintained a superb pace. So remarkable that their total elapsed time was forty-six hours and fifty-six minutes. They had beaten the Rigg brothers by almost six hours, and the record was theirs.

T
hat should have been enough—and for anyone other than Grua, it surely would have been. They had achieved something remarkable, snatching the record while upholding the marvelous and immensely satisfying principle that when it came to speed in the Grand Canyon, oars were still superior to motors. What’s more, they had pulled it off in a little wooden boat that less than three years earlier had almost been condemned to a Viking funeral, which was almost as miraculous as the run itself.

When they returned to Hurricane, their coworkers were thrilled by what they had accomplished, and even Litton seemed pleased. He was still unconvinced of the merits of racing down the river, but he couldn’t conceal the pleasure
he took in the knowledge that the record now rested in the hands of one of his dories, although he did his best to hide his satisfaction. (
“Well, did you do it?” he demanded, and when they said they had, he nodded crisply and walked away.) By almost any yardstick, the task was finished and they were entitled to congratulate themselves on a job well done. Grua, however, didn’t quite see it like that.

In the same way that Colin Fletcher’s shortcut through-hike had rankled Grua’s sense of correctness, he was nagged by some troubling thoughts that refused to go away. The three men may have smashed the record, but they hadn’t pushed the outer limits of what was truly possible, certainly not in Grua’s mind. What’s more, they had made no secret of the obstacles that had slowed them down—the weather delays and their extended nap at Pumpkin Springs—and since this was now known within the river community, it was only a matter of time before someone got it into his head to run the damn thing even faster than they had, claiming the record and reducing the
Emerald Mile
to a minor footnote tacked onto another person’s achievement.

Those thoughts slowly ate away at Grua for the next two years, until the winter of 1983, when the weather started to do something strange. By now, Rist had left the company to pursue a real estate career in St. Louis and was no longer connected to events in the canyon. But from the house that Petschek shared with his wife in the foothills of the California Sierra, he took note of how one storm seemed to follow another and the snow refused to stop. Meanwhile, Grua listened to the radio from his Airstream trailer in Hurricane and was intrigued to hear that flooding was popping up all along the lower elevations of the Great Basin.

At first, Grua wasn’t sure what to make of this odd turn. But as the winter deepened and the snowpack in the Sierras and the Rockies built into something epic and laden with cold promise, the Factor began turning a provocative question over in his mind. Was it possible, he asked himself, that the universe was aligning itself in a manner that might allow his resurrected boat, the Lazarus of the river, to seize hold of the bar and set it so unreachably high that no one could ever even think about contesting her achievement again? Could it be time for the
Emerald Mile
to carve out an abiding place for herself in the history books—not a provisional and temporary perch to be shoved aside at the next big event, but, like the canyon itself, permanent and lasting, something for the ages?