The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (75 page)

© KURT MARKUS

Kevin Fedarko
was a staff writer at
Time
magazine from 1991 to 1998, where his work helped garner an Overseas Press Club Award. His freelance writing has appeared in
Esquire
,
Outside
, and other publications and has been anthologized in
The Best American Travel Writing
. He attended Columbia and Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and works as a part-time river guide in Grand Canyon National Park. This is his first book.

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T
HIS
is a work of nonfiction. Anything between quotation marks was said directly to the author, is part of the transcript of an oral-history interview, or was expressed to another source whose attribution is included in the notes section of this book. Similarly, any notation of a time and a date derives from primary documents—most of which were obtained through either the Bureau of Reclamation or the National Park Service—or were notations taken by eyewitnesses to the event in question.

Much of the initial work to assemble this story required piecing together a complex “time puzzle” that involved braiding together three separate narratives: events unfolding at the Glen Canyon Dam; actions being taken by National Park Service search-and-rescue personnel both inside the Grand Canyon and along the South Rim; and events affecting the lives of several dozen people who were at various locations along the Colorado River, all of whom were traveling downstream on a fast-moving river according to different schedules.

The pieces of that puzzle were assembled from a variety of sources, the most important being the accounts of eyewitnesses and participants who were either at the dam or inside the canyon during the final weeks of June 1983. Whenever possible, those accounts were corroborated with memos, transcripts, telephone logs, faxograms, Case Incident Records, and handwritten notes stored within the archives of the Bureau of Reclamation and the National Park Service. These materials were obtained by filing multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The FOIA staff at Grand Canyon National Park was unflinchingly helpful in this respect, making every effort to track down obscure documents that had never before been requested or accessed. The employees at the Bureau
of Reclamation’s headquarters in Denver were also enormously kind in providing information from Reclamation’s Denver archives.

T
he subjects of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River are enriched by many colorful layers of scholarship and writing. In the process of mining this information, I benefited enormously from the tremendous work done by other authors. I have listed these, as well as other important sources, in the bibliography while also doing my best to cite specific instances where I am indebted to their work in the notes and in the main text. There are, however, a number of works that merit particular mention.

Any understanding of John Wesley Powell begins with Wallace Stegner’s classic work
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
, which includes one of the finest treatments of the Major’s pioneering voyage through the canyon in the summer of 1869. The companion pieces to that work are
A River Running West
by Powell’s other great biographer, Donald Worster, and Edward Dolnick’s
Down the Great Unknown
, which is a delightful piece of writing and research, as well as an excellent primer on the mechanics of white water. Powell is a contentious subject, however, and discussions of his character and behavior are rife with differing interpretations. While parsing through those nuances lay far beyond the scope of this book, a useful place to turn for a differing point of view is
First Through the Grand Canyon
by Michael Ghiglieri, a writer who, among other services, has painstakingly compiled the diaries and journals of Powell’s crew and laid them out chronologically in a single volume. All of these works were indispensable to the narrative herein.

Anyone who attempts to tackle the subject of the Grand Canyon swiftly discovers and comes to rely upon Earle Spamer’s thorough and exhaustive
Bibliography of the Grand Canyon and the Lower Colorado River, 1540–1980
, which remains the definitive source for almost everything that has ever been written about the canyon and the river (and which is available, for free, in an updated and searchable version on the Internet, at
www.grandcanyonbiblio.org
). For a clear and helpful treatment of the canyon’s geology, Wayne Ranney’s
Carving Grand Canyon
is excellent. It is bookended by two provocative works whose scope includes geology but also embraces the complex history of human interaction within the chasm:
Grand Canyon: Solving the Earth’s Grandest Puzzle
by James Lawrence Powell and Stephen Pyne’s magnificent
How the Canyon Became Grand.
Perhaps the loveliest treatment of all, however, is John Blaustein’s
Hidden Canyon
, a book that is noteworthy not only for its beautiful dory photographs but also because the main text was written by Edward Abbey, while Martin Litton penned the introduction.

The history of white-water boating within the Grand Canyon has received one of its most comprehensive treatments in David Lavender’s
River Runners of the Grand Canyon
, whose historical photographs are especially revealing. For specific history on dories, the two most important contributions are John Gardner’s classic,
The Dory Book
, and Roger Fletcher’s
Drift Boats and River Dories.
For white-water boating, one of the most eloquent of all treatments can be found in David Quammen’s
Wild Thoughts from Wild Places
, although this is supplemented admirably by William Nealy’s
Kayak: The New Frontier.
Within the Grand Canyon, the two standard guidebooks for the river corridor are the classic
Belknap’s Waterproof Grand Canyon River Guide
and Larry Stevens’s
The Colorado River in Grand Canyon: A Comprehensive Guide to Its Natural and Human History.
Most river guides carry both inside their ammo cans; on the river, they are as indispensable as duct tape.

To hear the stories that are told on the Colorado River, the best thing one can do is to take a river trip through the canyon and listen to the boatmen at night around the campfire. Short of that, Christa Sadler’s anthology,
There’s This River
, is the place to start. Many of the anecdotes in this narrative, however, have been assembled from Northern Arizona University’s massive river runners’ oral-history database. The histories are cataloged in the Special Collections at NAU’s Cline Library, and most are available, both in recorded form and in transcript, online. Here you will be able to find the three long interviews that Lew Steiger conducted with Kenton Grua, which include many details of Grua’s early life, as well as of the first speed run and his pioneering through-hike of the canyon.