The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (57 page)

At 21 Mile Rapid, they had to dodge a series of whirlpools, huge and glistening in the dark. Then at 24.5, most of the current was flinging itself directly into the side of a limestone cliff on the right side of the river. Just to the left of that obstacle, the water formed not one but three separate eddies, each oval enclosed within the other like the eye of a cat.

The
Emerald Mile
didn’t cut through these features with her normal grace. Instead, she was batted about like a cork, slammed from all sides. Each time she rose and fell to meet another swell, her bottom slapped down and a vicious crack reverberated through her chines and gunwales. The blows rattled not only the boat but also her white-knuckled crew, who were now wrestling
in earnest with their biggest fear—the possibility that an exceptionally violent hit would fling one of them overboard and whisk him off in the dark.

The always-meticulous Petschek had foreseen this possibility and purchased Maglites for each of them to wear around his neck. But this would do little good in a stretch such as the Roaring Twenties, where the roar of the water would drown out a swimmer’s cries as he was swept into the night. That notion would haunt them later, when they had time to think about it.

Around 2:15 a.m., they punched through the last of the Twenties and entered the Redwall, a limestone corridor whose landmarks, lost in darkness, flashed past almost faster than they could register. On the right at Mile 32, was Vasey’s Paradise, where a waterfall burst from the side of a cliff and cascaded through a hanging garden of ferns and flowers. Two miles beyond that on the left lay Nautiloid Canyon, where the rocks were speckled with paleozoic fossils. And several miles farther downstream, at Mile 40, was the site where the Bureau of Reclamation had drilled the test bores for the first of the two Grand Canyon dams.

These were some of the most interesting and provocative spots along the upper canyon, places where no dory trip would ever fail to stop.

The
Emerald Mile
blazed past them all.

T
hey didn’t talk much. The demands of reading the water were too intense for banter, and what little communication passed between them unfolded in clipped code: a warning about the current around Cave Springs at Mile 36, where the water was racing beneath an overhanging rock; a quick word to keep an eye out for the President Harding Rapid at Mile 44, where the river was piling up against a midstream boulder. For the most part, each man kept silent and concentrated on his job until, once every fifteen or twenty minutes, whoever was in the cockpit would suddenly ship his oars
and call out, “Okay,
go
!”

This was a key element of the plan. To prevent themselves from burning out, each oarsman rowed furiously for fifteen or twenty minutes until he neared exhaustion. Then he would call for a switch, and leap toward the stern or the bow while his replacement scrambled into the cockpit. The order of rowing—first Grua, then Petschek, then Wren—remained more or less the same, with each boatman circling the decks from cockpit to stern to bow as the dory raced downstream in the dark.

As the night wore on, the flat-out rowing and the ceaseless high-siding began to take a toll. By 4:10 a.m. as they passed Saddle Canyon, a tributary at Mile 47, the fatigue had begun showing up in the place that starts to hurt first, their hands. Now when it came time for each oarsman to give up his place in the cockpit, his fingers would refuse to uncurl, forcing him to slide his fist off the end of the oar. As he settled himself in the stern and peered downstream, he would straighten his fingers one by one, gently massaging them back to life.

In their oarsmanship, all three men were evenly matched. But as they penetrated deeper into the canyon,
Petschek and Wren found themselves increasingly reliant on Grua to gauge what lay ahead. For years, he had been making
careful notes, anticipating what the high water would do along each bend and curve, and now that homework began to pay off. As they shot downstream, he called off the invisible mile markers and features one by one with uncanny accuracy. “Astonishing man,” Petschek would later remark, shaking his head at the memory.
“He’d never run that water before, but Kenton had done it in his mind.”

Around 4:45 a.m., Grua warned that they were nearing the top of Nankoweap, one of the longest rapids in the canyon, which now featured a series of heavy laterals—
angular, rolling waves that built on a cycle of roughly ten seconds and crashed together at the center of the river. As the crew powered through this crosshatched section of current, they all sensed a subtle change in the night. Although the bottom of the canyon was still bathed in darkness, the narrow ribbon of sky framed by the walls had begun to lighten, shifting from black to violet, and the rimrock was clearly visible.

For the next hour they raced through the false dawn as the river, wide and broad in this reach, swung sinuously from side to side. At Mile 60, they entered a new layer of rock, the brown and coarse-grained Tapeats sandstone, and passed the confluence point where the turquoise waters of the Little Colorado River entered from the left. Then, just before 6:15 a.m., as they were approaching a rapid called Chuar at Mile 65.5, the first rays of sunlight angled over the rim and lit the upper bands on the eastward-facing cliffs like the inside of a cantaloupe.

“Ah, thank God,” Wren said to himself.
“We made it through the night.”

Reaching into the bow hatch, Wren pulled out their green, stainless-steel thermos. Time for coffee. While unscrewing the cap, he failed to note that Chuar—normally no more than a riffle—was unusually active, filled with waves that were breaking from both the left and the right in an agitated herringbone pattern. One of these now slammed into the bow, almost flipping the boat and thoroughly drenching Wren. That wave was odd—it wielded a power, an alacrity, that Wren had never seen on this stretch before. It almost seemed as if the river had deliberately reached out and slapped him across the face,
as if to say,
Wake up, dammit!

Casting further thoughts of coffee aside, they shook off their fatigue and focused on the current with a renewed intensity, ignoring the dramatic vista that had just opened up as the walls widened to reveal one of the broadest views along the entire river corridor. If the crew of the
Emerald Mile
had bothered to look up at that moment, they would have spotted the section of the South Rim where García López de Cárdenas stood in the distant autumn of 1540, baffled and disoriented by his first encounter with the great chasm looming at his feet.

The Desert View Watchtower, a stone citadel now marking that location,
was
the only man-made structure that was visible from the bottom of the canyon. Under normal conditions, its slender silhouette seemed to underscore the remoteness of the world below the rims. At that moment, however, something was taking place up there that would, in just a few hours, bring these two realms colliding together.

A
few minutes after sunrise at the little heliport on the South Rim, an orange-and-white chopper lifted off the tarmac,
clattered above the main buildings at Grand Canyon Village, and passed over the corral for the Grand Canyon mule train. Seconds later, an ocean of air abruptly opened beneath the belly of the helicopter and the pilot initiated his descent into the night-chilled shadows below.

The ship angled along the steep, banded formations of rock until it reached the base of the first set of cliffs, then skimmed across the Esplanade, the flat, cactus-studded bench that extends north for nearly a mile. At the far edge of the bench, the pilot passed over another stomach-churning drop-off and plunged a thousand feet through another series of rock layers into the recesses of the Inner Gorge. There, more than a vertical mile into the earth, the helicopter caught the current of air suspended just above the river and raced downstream between the black walls of the Vishnu schist.

The flight took less than fifteen minutes, and by 6:30 a.m. the pilot had landed on the right side of the river at Mile 98 and deposited his passenger, a young man who zipped out of his flight suit to reveal the standard uniform of a river ranger—a short-sleeved khaki shirt and olive-green river shorts. His name was John Thomas, and on this particular morning his assignment was to prevent a repeat of the chaos that had unfolded the previous day by enforcing the “commercial closure” of Crystal.

When Thomas arrived, the bottom of the canyon seemed to be savoring the remaining minutes of coolness before the sun leered over the Powell Plateau, chasing away the shadows and turning the place into a furnace. For the moment, he had Crystal to himself and was thus able to take his time looking over the rapid.

Out in the main current, the immense standing wave was crashing upon itself and flinging spray high into the air. That wave looked as bad as ever, possibly even worse. But between the right shore and the shoulder of the big wave, Thomas could see that a lane of relatively smooth water was still sluicing through the tamarisk trees.

His orders were to stop every boat that came downstream, direct the passengers to walk around the rapid, and lecture the guides on the critical importance
of tucking into those trees and avoiding the explosion wave. There would be no exceptions. With no sign of the boats that he knew were headed his way, Thomas gathered up his binoculars, his radio, and his clipboard and parked himself in a patch of shade to await their arrival.

T
hirty-two miles above Crystal, the crew of the
Emerald Mile
were now able to spot things that had been invisible to them in the dark. As the early-morning light washed the bottom of the canyon, they could see that the eddies were full of flotsam, shattered tree branches and battered bits of driftwood. They also began to catch sight of other river expeditions, most still onshore with their boats tied up. The only people awake in those camps were the boatmen on kitchen duty, boiling water for coffee. As Grua and his team whipped past, the boatmen stared quizzically, wondering what a lone dory was doing on the river at this time of morning.

Around 7:20 a.m., the
Emerald Mile
reached Mile 76 and prepared to enter Hance, a jumbled stretch of standing waves studded with enormous boulders and ledges that offers one of the most complicated sections of white water in the canyon. Because the crew had no intention of stopping to scout, they had only a few seconds to take stock and register that the action ahead was violent enough to render a normal run down the center completely off-limits. Grua, who was at the oars, decided to go right and attempt to ride out a wave train that they normally sought to avoid. With flawlessly timed high-siding from Petschek and Wren, they flew over the rollers without a hitch, but the power of the waves left them stunned.

At the bottom of Hance, the walls on either side of the river closed up and the cheerful morning sunshine was abruptly cut off—a fitting marker for perhaps the most ominous of the canyon’s transition points. Here, the Colorado narrowed dramatically and the river entered the Upper Granite Gorge, the canyon’s subbasement. As the walls tilted toward dead vertical, it felt as if a set of massive stone gates had slammed shut behind them, a sensation that deepened as the river rose to a new level of fury.