The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (66 page)

While Gamble readied his team, the news was passed along to the Park Service. By the time the
Emerald Mile
was being towed back toward Hurricane—where Grua and his crew would crawl
into their beds and sleep for two solid days—
Helo 210 was making a beeline for Lee’s Ferry to conduct another sweep of the canyon. Late that afternoon, every expedition between the ferry and Lake Mead received a plastic baggie that contained the following message:

DAM RELEASE UPDATE

BuRec will release 90,000 cfs from

Glen Canyon on June 27 after 5 p.m.

Flows will remain at 90K or above

for approximately two weeks.

CAMP HIGH—BE CAUTIOUS

National Park Service

6-27-83

Meanwhile, Burgi and Moyes caught a flight from Denver to Page to help Gamble boost the discharge in stages.
At 7:00 p.m., all three men watched as the mechanics hoisted the cables on the spillway gates and sent more water crashing into the tunnels. At 9:00 the next morning, they raised the gates again. Then an hour later, they did so for a third time.

As the final phase of the operation unfolded,
Burgi, who had walked out on the service deck above the east gates to peer into the top of the tunnel, leaned too far out over the railing and accidentally sent the white hard hat that he was wearing spinning into the spillway. The moment the hat struck the current of water rushing underneath the gate, it was snapped into the vortex and disappeared.

“Well, we’re not gonna see that again,” said one of the dam workers who stood next to him.

The amount of water now passing through or around the dam was stupendous. All eight penstocks were fully open and sending their streams into the turbines in the power plant. Ditto for the four river-outlet tubes, whose discharge was thundering through the jet valves at the base of the dam at 120 miles per hour. When combined with the two powerful plumes of water arcing over the flip buckets at the mouth of both spillway tunnels, the dam was feeding more water into the river
than it had ever done: 92,000 cfs.

Reclamation had now cashed in its final insurance policy. Until the discharges were dialed back, the west spillway would be subjected to the same fury that had already ravaged its counterpart on the east side of the canyon,
a situation that was fundamentally unsustainable. Everything now hinged on how much more snowmelt was still heading downstream and when that surge would reach its crest.

M
ean while, the pulse of newly released water bored downstream from the toe of the dam at just under eight miles an hour, the pace of a trotting horse. A few minutes before noon, the head of the surge reached Lee’s Ferry and started its journey through the canyon. It reached the bottom of the Roaring Twenties by 4:00 p.m., hit Nankoweap just before 7:00, passed through the entrance to the Upper Granite Gorge a few minutes before 10:00, and reached Phantom by 11:00. Then, at twenty-five minutes past midnight, it slammed into the explosion wave at Crystal, taking the rapid to the highest level ever witnessed—and triggering a series of changes that surprised everyone.

During the next thirty-six hours, as the engineers maintained their massive release through the spillway tunnels, the river got to work on the rocks that obstructed Crystal’s thirty-five-foot-wide choke point, muscling aside boulders that the current had not been able to budge at the lower flows. Gradually, the channel widened—first by five, then ten, and finally fifteen feet—and as the gap opened up,
the hydraulics dramatically weakened.
As the height of the explosion wave decreased from thirty feet to ten, the ferocity began to subside, and a unique moment in the history of the river slammed shut. The white demon that had raged in the center of Crystal for six days—destroying four motorboats, killing Bill Wert, and nearly ending the speed run—retreated back into its lair, taking with it the wall of water, the keeper hole, and the perfect pipeline curl.

They would never be seen again.

Just as this process was completed, Gamble and his team at the dam finally caught a long-anticipated break.
At 9:15 a.m. on Thursday,
word arrived from far upstream at an earth-fill dam and reservoir on Big Sandy Creek, a tributary of the Green River in southwestern Wyoming. Big Sandy was one of the highest tributaries in the Upper Colorado Basin, which meant that it offered a telling barometer for the entire runoff. Early that morning, the engineers there had observed that the surface of the reservoir had dropped by almost a foot, which would enable them to cut back on the discharges they were releasing through the dam. A few minutes later,
the engineers at Blue Mesa Reservoir, in Colorado, telephoned with news that their inflows were dropping as well.
Soon, similar reports were trickling in from the reservoirs at Flaming Gorge and Morrow Point. In engineering parlance, they were now
“on the back side of the hydrograph.” The runoff had reached its peak.

At 1:30 p.m., Gamble ordered the gates on the left spillway to be lowered by
two inches, the first in a series of reductions that would play out over the next several days. As this operation unfolded, the crest of Glen’s highest discharge completed its surge through the Grand Canyon. It would take almost two more days before the tail end of this pulse finally reached the Grand Wash Cliffs and flattened itself out on the swollen surface of Lake Mead.

This meant that the handful of expeditions that were still on the river were able to witness and participate in something historic. For the rest of their careers, a few dozen river guides would be able to brag about having boated through the canyon at the apogee of a flood that had not been matched in two generations. Many of those guides would claim that they had rowed through Crystal or Lava during this unique and fleeting window. But as the speed run had already demonstrated, it didn’t make a whit of difference who was where at the absolute peak. Everyone who was on the river during that magnificent and terrible time was changed by what he or she had seen and done. And in this sense, whether they liked it or not, the river folk and the engineers at the dam shared a bond that would tie them together for the rest of their lives.

The Grand Canyon had not seen a remotely comparable injection of high water in at least a quarter century, but this was only part of the picture. For the first time in history, virtually every reservoir and flood-containment structure along the Colorado and its tributaries—an elaborate water-management system stretching from Wyoming to Mexico that had taken seven decades to build at a cost of many
billions of dollars—was filled to the brim. In less than twenty weeks, a single load of snowmelt had pumped
just under fourteen million acre-feet of water into that system, almost half the capacity of Lake Powell, a reservoir that had taken nearly two decades to fill. And it had created the highest
sustained
surges on the Colorado since 1917, the year that Martin Litton was born,
making it easily the biggest flood in sixty-six years.

If the Bureau of Reclamation had any say-so in the matter, nothing like this would ever happen again. But first they had to see the crisis through to its conclusion.

F
or the better part of the following fortnight, the surface of Lake Powell continued rising as the balance of the runoff worked its way toward Glen. During that time, a team of sixteen specialized welders arrived at the dam, climbed onto the tops of the gates—which were still partially raised—and began replacing the plywood flashboards with a set of steel bulwarks that doubled the height of the barrier. When the job was through,
everyone stood back and waited, until, around 1:00 p.m. on the afternoon of July 15, the surface of the reservoir finally crested at 3,708.34 feet above sea level. There it hovered,
quivering,
for almost twenty-four hours. Then, slowly and grudgingly,
the waters began to recede. If the gates had been fully closed, the lake would have been almost four inches above the tops of the new flashboards.

A week later, the surface of the reservoir had ebbed to the point where Gamble was able to order the spillways closed.
When the steel plates slammed shut at 8 a.m. on July 23, a platoon of about a dozen engineers and construction
workers prepared to go into the tunnels. For the first time since Phil Burgi’s descent aboard the “I Challenge U 2” cart back in early June, they were going to get a look at the carnage that had been wrought.

This time, instead of descending from above, they climbed over the flip buckets and walked into the mouths of the tunnels from the bottom. They started with the east spillway, which was partially filled with a column of cold, standing water, and they pulled behind them
a rubber raft loaded with battery-powered floodlights, which illuminated the dark chamber.

They encountered massive destruction from the first step. The section of tunnel immediately beyond the flip bucket contained more than three hundred cubic yards of debris, mostly concrete rubble and broken chunks of sandstone, which they were forced to scramble through. Then a hush fell over them as they
encountered their first surprise: a sandstone boulder, eighteen hundred cubic feet and easily the size of a delivery truck,
sat directly in the middle of the tunnel.
They christened it House Rock, unwittingly borrowing the name of the first major rapid in the Grand Canyon, seventeen miles downstream from Lee’s Ferry. To remove the boulder, they realized, they would have to blast it to pieces with dynamite.

As they continued fumbling forward in the wet darkness, the spotlights revealed a scene that would not have been out of place in a building destroyed by an earthquake or a bomb. Along the walls, the three-foot-thick concrete lining was gone, stripped to the sandstone. Only the upper section of the roof was intact, and everywhere there were signs of rockfall. The most eerie elements of all, however,
were the skeins of rebar, whose ends were still half embedded in the remaining concrete
like the bones of a poached fish. The tangle of steel offered graphic testimony to the fury that had been unleashed inside the tunnel.

Now they reached the elbow joint, the most critical section, and even those who were braced for the worst were shocked by what awaited them.

The base of the elbow was submerged beneath a dark pool of water. The depth was impossible to gauge, so they decided to continue no further, but from this vantage they could see plenty. A column of light spilled down the steeply inclined tunnel section from the gate openings, more than five hundred feet above, illuminating the same series of cavitation holes that Burgi had observed during his descent almost two months earlier. The “Christmas tree,” however,
had been expanded so deeply that the tunnel was now bisected by a jagged gash, ten feet deep and twenty-five feet wide. Through this linked series of small ledges and basins, the discharge from the tunnel’s weep holes cascaded merrily through the gash and into the plunge pool at the bottom, filling the chamber with the sound of falling water.

After recording the damage with their cameras and video equipment, they turned around and
retraced their steps back toward the flip bucket. Then they crossed to the other side of the river to inspect the west spillway, where a similar scene awaited them.

The first order of business was to pump both spillways dry, which enabled them to address the biggest question on everyone’s mind—how deep were the caverns that had been excavated at the base of the two elbows? The answer, when it was revealed, took their breath away.

Both holes were enormous, but the declivity in the east spillway, which had sustained the greatest damage, was slightly larger,
so they called it the Big Hole.
It was 134 feet long, 15 feet wide, and more than three stories deep. They would have to bring in a series of ladders just to get to the bottom. Even more astonishing than the extent of the damage, however, was that all of that destruction had been unleashed by a nodule of calcite no bigger than a walnut.

Later, while mapping out the contours of the Big Hole, a construction worker discovered a battered piece of white plastic that had gotten wedged into the rocks at the base.

It was
Phil Burgi’s missing hard hat.