The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (47 page)

In the absence of a reliable radio network or satellite phones—which would not arrive for another two decades—there was only one way to do this.
^II
And so, late on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 22, a Park Service chopper lifted off from the heliport on the South Rim, made a beeline for Lee’s Ferry, then headed down the canyon corridor on an unusual mission. On board were rangers, one of whom crouched in the cargo bay filling small plastic baggies with sand from a cardboard box at his feet and tying off each bag with a long red streamer. The second ranger sat in the cockpit next to the pilot, peering through the curved glass and scanning the water and the shoreline for boats. The pilot was moving fast—they had more than 250 miles of river to cover before dusk. But whenever the ranger in the cockpit spotted a cluster of boats, the pilot banked toward the nearest sand beach. The ranger in the cargo bay then passed a plastic baggie to his colleague in front, who opened the window and dropped it out.

The presence of a Park Service chopper skimming through the canyon corridor was always noteworthy, but when the mysterious bags with their red streamers were released, a new ritual was added to the river pageant. In addition to its deposit of sand, each plastic bag contained a note that had been run through a mimeograph machine earlier that afternoon. Upon pulling to shore and retrieving the Ziploc, the guides huddled tightly while the trip leader
opened the bag for the message:

DAM RELEASE UPDATE

BuRec releasing up to 70,000 cfs tonight.

CAMP HIGH—BE CAUTIOUS

National Park Service

This elicited low whistles and murmurs—not only from the guides on the river but from everyone who heard the news as word swiftly spread out of the canyon and through the boatyards of Flagstaff and Page, Hurricane and Marble Canyon.

In no one’s mind, however, did this information register more keenly than in that of the diminutive doryman who was the captain of the
Emerald Mile.

A
ll spring, Kenton Grua had watched with growing fascination and excitement as the runoff raced out of the mountains and the reservoir rose behind the dam. With each successive boost of the discharge through the spillway tunnels, his thoughts were once again drawn to the unsolved problem that had been percolating in the back of his mind for three years. Was this the moment he had been waiting for? Was it finally time to think about another speed run?

In May, when an early-season commercial dory trip had given Grua his first glimpse of the burgeoning power of the Colorado, he was shocked by the water’s fury—its violence, its complexity, and most of all its ruthlessness. As the face of the river changed and then changed again, his skills seemed increasingly inadequate to the task of simply keeping the
Emerald Mile
upright and intact. By June, with the force of the hydraulics seeming to expand with each passing day, the prospect of a nonstop sprint down the entire length of the canyon inched closer toward madness.

And yet, Grua could also see that something epic was unfolding. For years, every boatman in the Grand Canyon had heard the stories of what the unchained Colorado was capable of unleashing. Now, thanks to a freakish runoff and some rather appalling miscalculations by the bureaucrats, he and his colleagues were at last being given a chance to be part of it, and that prospect was absolutely intoxicating. Because no one who loved the river could fail to grasp the central truth that
this
water,
this
runoff, was the greatest display of the old Colorado in more than a generation, an event that would surely not come around again during their lifetimes, if ever. Anyone who was cursed and lucky enough to be on the river during the final week of June would not be witnessing history firsthand, he would actually be
running it.

For Grua, however, the prospect of simply being on the river was not enough. The challenge, as he perceived it, was not merely to bear witness to the majesty of this reawakened Colorado, but to touch and participate in that majesty in the most direct and visceral way imaginable. And what could be more direct or visceral than using an ungovernable flood tide as a hydraulic slingshot for an unbreakable speed record?

The Factor was by no means alone in this assessment. Not only did Rudi Petschek feel precisely the same way, but the sentiment was emphatically echoed by nearly every doryman in Litton’s operation. As the boatmen on those early-season trips had come staggering into the boathouse in Hurricane with ever more graphic tales of the river’s rising intensity, the whispers about the possibility of another speed run had grown feverish. Everyone wanted to know if the
Emerald Mile
would be allowed to take another crack at the record. And if so, when did Grua and Petschek plan to launch? And now that Wally Rist was no longer around, how would they fill out their crew?

The debate raged for more than a fortnight until, finally, someone stepped forward with a proposition that cemented Grua’s resolve.

A
side from Grua and Petschek, no one found the possibility of a high-water speed run more alluring than Steve Reynolds, the boatman known as Wren, who had wrecked and repaired the
Emerald Mile
seven years earlier up on the Snake River, then found himself forced to step back and watch in frustration as she was sent back to the Colorado. By now Wren himself had followed the path charted by the little dory, transferring down from Idaho and establishing a place for himself in Litton’s Grand Canyon operation. There, amid the hellbenders and the hydraulics in the deepest part of the canyon, he had come into his own as a devotee of giant white water.

To say that Wren was an unusual character was the kind of statement that touched upon but failed to fully illuminate his complexities. His face, which was ovular, was dominated by a hook-boned nose, at the top of which floated a pair of deeply skeptical brown eyeballs. Thanks to that aquiline nose and his sharp Vandyke beard, he bore the look of one of those Spanish foot soldiers who had followed Coronado from the deserts of the Southwest to the plains of central Kansas in the early 1540s—a comparison that was doubly apt because, like that wandering company of conquistadores, Wren had, over the years, gotten himself profoundly lost.

Somewhere between Idaho and the Grand Canyon, he had embarked on
a rather tempestuous affair with Jack Daniel’s, an association that merged with his affection for wild times, both on the river and off. In addition to generating some rather serious friction between himself and Litton, those habits had concealed a range of subtler and far more appealing aspects of Wren’s personality, chief among them the fact that he was a man who believed deeply in the practice of kindness—especially when it came to clients who found themselves intimidated by white water or immune to the harsh and brutal
magic of the canyon.
Whenever he spotted a passenger who was struggling or disoriented or crosswise with the world, Wren would take that person under his wing, speaking softly and gently, lavishing care and attention that seemed strangely at odds with his reputation as a reveler. And it was this compassion—his many quiet acts of empathy and tenderness—that had not only won him forgiveness and affection among his colleagues but also enabled them to celebrate his other great defining attribute: what he was capable of doing with a pair of oars.

Wren was the kind of boatman that the
river folk sometimes refer to as a looker—an oarsman who pays special attention to reading water, and who takes an almost preternatural joy in being able to row a complex stretch of current without hitting a single thing. Plenty of other oarsmen were bigger and stronger and more aggressive than Wren, but few could match the ferocity of his focus. At the top of a rapid, he seemed to flip some kind of internal switch that brought a beam of intense concentration to bear on the task ahead. It was not unusual for him to rack up ten or fifteen golden trips in a row, acing every rapid, never so much as flirting with a rock, skating through the white water with a seamless perfection that made those who rowed with him shake their heads in admiration and envy.

He derived great pride from that ability, perhaps because it affirmed a level of command that had no cognate in any other part of his life. Among other consequences, his skills rendered him utterly reliable, a man on whom one could always depend. He was truly a great boatman—and a measure of that greatness achieved one of its purest expressions when, sometime in early June, he pulled Grua aside and said that if Grua and Petschek were considering another bid at a speed run, he wanted to throw his hat into the ring.

“If anything happens,” he declared, “I’d love to be a part of it.”

Wren’s intensity and his rowing prowess would be obvious assets, but there may have been another element that carried even greater weight, and this was Grua’s awareness—conscious or otherwise—that Wren’s participation would complete a kind of circle in the story of the
Emerald Mile
.

These three boatmen spanned the whole of that little boat, all the way from the tip of her bowpost to the brass cleat on her stern—and their own stories were intimately entwined with her own. Could there be anything more fitting, more right, than the notion that they would set out to write her final chapter?

All right, Grua told Wren,
they would do this thing together. But before that could happen, he added, they would first need to figure out a way to convince the Park Service to give them a permit.

A few days later, Grua found himself making the long drive from Hurricane to the South Rim, walking into the office of a ranger named Curt Sauer, who
was the river boss of the Grand Canyon, and explaining that he wanted to apply for yet another permit—his second one in three years—to test evacuation procedures by taking a dory down the river in the shortest time possible.

Sauer, a reasonable man, replied that he would consider the request and that Grua should give him a call when he got off the river from his next commercial trip. With that assurance, Grua left for Lee’s Ferry with high hopes of receiving a green light for a June 25 departure that, like the first speed run, would be timed to coincide with the full moon.

While he was gone, however, Sauer found himself questioning the wisdom of approving the application. Not only was Grua’s proposal beginning to look patently unsafe amid the cascade of emergencies created by the ever-rising discharges, but Sauer had also received three separate complaints from other outfitters who had heard rumors that someone was planning to try to break the speed record under the guise of a “training trip”—a prospect that struck the outfitters as inappropriate and highly dangerous.

On June 17, Sauer telephoned Tuck Weills, Litton’s operations manager in Hurricane, and informed him that Grua’s request was denied. Five days later, after getting off the river and receiving the unwelcome news, Grua called Sauer to express his dismay.

When this had no effect, Grua declared that he would be forced to seek approval through other channels. Sauer told Grua that he was welcome to try, but the answer was still no.

With that, Grua hung up and dialed the number of the only person he knew who was even more stubborn and recalcitrant than himself.