The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (73 page)

(5)
From the moment the headgates to the Glen Canyon Dam were closed in 1963, the river that flowed through the Grand Canyon may have seemed wild and dangerous and free, but every drop would now be metered and rationed by engineers and bureaucrats.

(6)
By the mid-1960s, the Bureau of Reclamation’s mission to bring the Colorado River under total control was almost complete. The only remaining untamed section lay deep inside the Grand Canyon, where the steep gradient and soaring walls afforded prime sites for two giant hydroelectric dams—until Litton and a host of other conservationists launched a campaign that roused the fury of the American public, provoking editorials and other protests, like this 1966 cartoon in the
Los Angeles Times.

(7)
Braced between the flanks of a narrow gorge at the head of the Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon Dam soars more than seven hundred feet from its foundation in the bedrock beneath the river. Pressing insistently against that ten-million-ton wall of concrete is one of the longest reservoirs on earth.

(8)
The schematics of the dam, as seen from above, capture key features of one of the largest machines on the planet. Here one can see the eight penstocks that direct water from the reservoir into the power plant at the base of the dam and the four river-outlet tubes, which bypass the power plant and hurl their discharge directly into the river. Along either side of the dam run the spillways, two massive tunnels bored through solid sandstone that are designed to serve as the dam’s safety valve during exceptionally large runoffs.

(9)
From the intakes of the dam’s penstocks, water plummets five hundred vertical feet and is funneled into Glen’s turbines, each of which is paired to one of eight generators (shown here) that convert the mechanical energy of the river into electricity, which is distributed across the desert and released to civilization: lighting homes, powering air conditioners, and zapping frozen microwave dinners in cities from Utah to southern Arizona.

(10)
Every aspect of the dam’s Control Room upholds and reinforces the principle that here, in Glen’s nerve center, human beings are the indisputable masters of a renegade river that was once the scourge of the Southwest. In the spring of 1983, thanks to the most massive El Niño event on record at that time, that principle would be turned on its head.

(11)
When the spillway tunnels at the Glen Canyon Dam were opened in June 1983 in response to a massive spring runoff, the dam’s operators stood by as rocks and jagged pieces of concrete were ejected at 120 miles per hour from the mouths of the tunnels. Realizing that something had gone terribly wrong, they were forced to lower a lone engineer into one of the spillways with the hope of diagnosing the problem. The photo on the left captures Phil Burgi on his harrowing inspection tour aboard a tiny, wheeled cart attached to a long steel cable. (Extending from one corner of the cart, like a parasol stuck in a cocktail glass, was a small umbrella to protect Burgi from the water cascading through the tunnel’s weep holes.) Deep inside the spillway, he discovered that the raging water had excavated a series of jagged holes along the surface of the tunnel.

(12)
With the spring runoff pouring into the head of Lake Powell faster than it could be discharged, and with the tunnels now crippled, Glen’s engineers confronted the prospect of an “uncontrolled release.” To prevent this, they hastily erected a bulwark of plywood flashboards atop the massive steel radial gates guarding the intakes to the spillways.

(13)
As a watertight barrier, the plywood was hopelessly inept; in the photo above left, powerful jets can be seen spurting through the gaps. Nevertheless, the flashboards bought the engineers some desperately needed time to troubleshoot their stricken dam—all the while sending enough water downstream to create the largest flood the Grand Canyon had witnessed in a quarter of a century.

(14)
Kenton Grua stood as an exemplar of the obsessions that can ignite the dry tinder of a man’s soul and then race like wildfire through the upper branches of his spirit when he decides to surrender the entirety of himself, unconditionally and without reservation, to the hidden and seductive world at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.