The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (36 page)

I.
While the Petschek family mansion was initially seized by the Nazis, who used it for housing high-ranking officers, the palace later became the headquarters of the local Gestapo. The interrogation, torture, and execution of Czech resistance members took place in its vaults. The building was later purchased by the US government and today serves as the residence of the American ambassador in Prague.

And farther off, where darkness met it,

the light was broken into scallop-shells of gold,

it swam and shimmered in a billion winks of fire

like a school of herrings on the water,

and beyond all that there was just the dark.

—T
HOMAS
W
OLFE

Clouds gathering over Maricopa Point on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

Even this may be the eventful year,

which will drown out all our muskrats.

—H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU

T
HE
massive storms that drew Grua’s and Petschek’s attention during the winter of 1983 were the handiwork of something enormously complex and fantastically remote—a meteorological anomaly that had been triggered seven months earlier on the far edge of the Pacific Ocean, more than eight thousand miles to the west of the Grand Canyon. The ripple effects of that event would spend the better part of a year cutting almost halfway across the globe, playing havoc with weather systems from the jungles of South America to the Canadian Arctic. But nowhere would the repercussions be greater than in the western United States—especially within the Colorado River basin.

The prevailing weather in the southern reaches of the Pacific is typically governed by an immense barometric gradient in which areas of low pressure are concentrated off the coast of Australia, while zones of high pressure are restricted to the Pacific coastline of the Americas. Normally, the trade winds of the tropics ride this vast gradient, blowing from the Galápagos toward Australia, and as these gusts drive west they tend, like an immense plow, to push the warm water that lies on the surface of the ocean before them. The effect is
so pronounced that the sea levels around Indonesia and Australia are generally about a foot and a half higher than those off the coast of Peru.

Roughly every five years, for reasons that are still not clearly understood, this pressure gradient weakens or disappears, touching off a shift in what is known as a southern oscillation. Within weeks, the trade winds taper off or even reverse direction, in which case they drive toward the Americas, pushing the ridge of warm surface water east instead of west, and generating a sequence of dramatic weather disruptions. When the weather stations in Darwin, Australia, registered this type of pressure shift in April of 1982, it provided the first indication that another swing in the southern oscillation was about to unfold. Although no one realized it at the time, the most massive El Niño event on record had just been set in motion.
^I

After weakening considerably in April, the trade winds collapsed and died in early May. Then they started blowing in the reverse direction, pushing an immense pool of warm water eastward along the equator and pulling a series of storm systems in their wake. This ushered in a period of almost unprecedented drought across the western end of the southern Pacific. During the next several months, the city of Melbourne would suffer its worst wildfires in two hundred years, while sea levels around the Great Barrier Reef would drop by fifteen inches, exposing large parts of the reef to direct sunlight and killing off vast sections of coral.

In June, thermal readings on the surface of the ocean were starting to rise across the middle of the Pacific. By July, atmospheric temperatures along the international date line had also spiked and isolated tropical islands such as Fanning and Jarvis, which normally bake beneath cloudless skies, found themselves blanketed in deep banks of fog. On Christmas Island in the Republic of Kiribati, the rain started pouring down and refused to stop. More than seventeen million terns, petrels, and shearwaters that used the island as their primary breeding site were forced to abandon their young and disappear in a desperate search for food. Several of these species would never return.

As the warm water continued sluicing east, storms started battering islands that are renowned for the stability and mildness of their climate. By November, Tahiti had been clobbered by five of the biggest cyclones it had experienced in decades, while Hawaii suffered its first significant hurricane since gaining statehood in 1959, with winds that reached 120 miles per hour. A tornado was reported on Oahu, and the waves on Kauai surpassed thirty feet in height, sinking forty-four of the forty-five boats moored in the harbor of Port Allen
and knocking out power across the island. That Thanksgiving, thousands of Hawaiians without electricity were forced to cook their turkeys on barbecues or outdoor grills.

By early December, the mass of warm water was slamming into the continental shelf off the coast of South America and splitting into two vast plumes. The southern plume raised sea levels by more than a foot and devastated marine ecosystems off the coast of Peru that depend upon a rich supply of deepwater nutrients, primarily nitrates and phosphates, which are normally conveyed to the surface by a rising column of cold water. Within weeks, the commercial anchovy and sardine fisheries, key components of the economies of both Peru and Ecuador, had collapsed.

Meanwhile, the northern spool of warm water was sliding up the Pacific coastline toward California and British Columbia. As temperatures rose, fish began migrating north in vast numbers. As Christmas approached, tropical species such as barracuda and red crabs appeared off the shoreline of Monterey, while marlins and sea horses, creatures normally found at the latitude of Mexico,
were showing up outside the entrance to San Francisco Bay. The most dramatic impact of these changes, however, was on the engine that drives the winter weather across the western part of the United States.

S
imply put, the Pacific jet stream is a celestial river of air that flows through the troposphere, the lowest layer of the earth’s atmosphere, from Japan to California at an altitude of roughly forty thousand feet. Like the lower reaches of the ancestral Colorado, the jet stream refuses to be confined to a single channel; instead, it swishes back and forth like a loose fuel hose on the deck of an aircraft carrier, banging off the high-pressure zones and convulsing toward the lows. In the late autumn, when the surface water off the western coast of the United States began to heat up, this roiling current of cold air began gathering energy as it inhaled immense drafts of warm, moist air. This, in turn, sent a series of gales catapulting directly toward the coast of California.

The first of the ’83 El Niño superstorms made landfall on Saturday, January 22, striking the entire coastline with torrential rains and gale-force winds. A man-made offshore island dotted with 120 oil wells was demolished by a towering train of sixteen-foot-high waves, which went on to tear apart the Santa Monica Pier and wreck at least sixteen thousand homes. San Diego received nine straight days of rain, and in the coastal mountains directly to the east, cross-sections of saturated soil on the hillsides lost their cohesion and began disintegrating,
sending semiliquid avalanches slumping into the lowlands, which killed sixteen people and left more than ten thousand homeless. Those
storms also disrupted the travel schedule of perhaps the last person in the world one might imagine being put off by lousy weather. In late February,
the queen of England was forced to scuttle her plans to sail from Los Angeles up to Santa Barbara, where she was hoping to celebrate President and Mrs. Reagan’s thirty-first anniversary.
The eighteen-foot seas and the fifty-mile-an-hour winds were deemed too much even for
Britannia
, the royal yacht.

By the end of that month, the storm systems were relentlessly bludgeoning the Sierra Nevada. In Yosemite Valley, the Merced River overflowed, and the campgrounds and parking lots at Tuolumne Meadows went underwater. Echo Summit, ten miles south of Lake Tahoe, was buried beneath sixty-two feet of snow, the largest accumulation since record-keeping had started in 1906. Several weeks later, when an enormous mudslide triggered by that melting snow cut off six remote mountain towns, the US Postal Service would be forced to take the unprecedented step of actually
restarting
the Pony Express. For six weeks, thirteen riders carried more than twenty thousand pieces of mail to and from the stranded communities by horseback along the 115-mile relief route, parts of which paralleled the original Pony Express route, in an effort to ensure, among other imperatives, that residents’ April 15 tax returns reached the IRS on time.

The High Sierra, the loftiest range in the Lower 48, is often able to wring dry most of the storm cells that pass over it, but the winter of 1983 broke all the rules. By March,
much of the Great Basin, an arid hardpan that typically receives scant precipitation, found itself awash in torrential downpours. In western Nevada, a forty-acre section of rain-saturated dirt gave way and slid into a mountain lake, a mudslide that one witness described as “a huge wave of chocolate pudding.” Farther east across the state line in Utah, bone-dry depressions began filling up with water. The Great Salt Lake rose by four and a half feet, nearly doubling its surface area and sending brackish currents sluicing across Interstate 80, twenty miles from its shoreline, and forcing work gangs to elevate the Union
Pacific’s railroad bed to keep the train tracks from being submerged.

Meanwhile, the frontal systems that had created this mess continued lumbering eastward. When the storms reached Colorado and smashed against the southern Rockies, the snow started falling in earnest, and it didn’t stop until the summits were entombed beneath a thick and frozen blanket. At
Crested Butte in the Elk Mountains, it snowed for forty-five days straight, forcing the lift operators to get to their posts by 4:00 a.m. to start shoveling so that the lifts would be ready for skiers at 9:00.

On March 10, a huge storm took
the snowpack in portions of the southern Rockies past seventeen feet. Two days later,
an even bigger storm dumped another two feet on top of that. In this case, it wasn’t the levels of snowfall that
were so exceptional, but the fact that the storms tamped the temperatures down well below freezing and thereby delayed the start of the spring runoff. As April approached, resorts from Salt Lake City to Denver were preparing to continue hosting skiers past Memorial Day, and their snowfall gauges were registering as much as 825 inches, three times more than normal for that time of year.

As delightful as this may have been for the managers of those resorts and their clients, these weather developments elicited a radically different response from officials at a host of federal agencies who would be responsible for dealing with all of that snow when the runoff finally arrived.
“All that we can hope and pray for,” announced Robert Vickers, a regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “is that we have a normal melt.”

If God took note of Vickers’s prayers in the spring of 1983, he apparently decided to ignore them.