The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (79 page)

“Mailbags were coming in by the hundreds”
: Ibid., 288.

was heralded by
Life
as “his country’s number-one working conservationist”
: Martin,
Story That Stands Like a Dam
, 291.

“Some people get the kudos and others, out of inequity, don’t”
: Litton,
Sierra Club Director
; see introduction, written by Brower.

Part III The Sweet Lines of Desire

“If rightly made, a boat would be”
:
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
(1849), in
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 1:13.

6: Dories

“The glory of the dories is their lightness”
: P. T. Reilly, cited by Welch, “In Praise of Port Orford Cedar.”

had emerged as the classic American wilderness experience
: Nash,
Big Drops
, 168–69.

part of a tradition that reached back to medieval Europe
: Gardner,
Dory Book
, 1–39.

“There must be something about dories that intrigues people”
: Ibid., vii–viii.

“to remind us of places we’ve destroyed without any necessity”
: Author interviews with Litton.

the Sierra Club had lost a bitter battle in 1968
: Cohen,
History of the Sierra Club
, 403–4.

one of the many gemlike features inside Glen Canyon that now lay
: Inskip,
Colorado River Through Glen Canyon Before Lake Powell.

scratching makeshift blueprints in the sand next to Briggs’s driveway
: Author interviews with Litton.

He also straightened out the chine
: Fletcher,
Drift Boats and River Dories
, 272.

What he wanted now were copies
: Ibid.

an entire mountainside mantled in some of the tallest virgin trees
: Litton,
Sierra Club Director
, 39–41.

those first twenty-seven dories that emerged from Briggs’s shop
: There is some discrepancy over how many dories Briggs produced. According to Roger Fletcher, Briggs built thirty-three, including the
Emerald Mile.
However, Brad Dimock, a respected Grand Canyon boating historian, puts the number at thirty-six. I have elected to stick with the twenty-seven dories whose names can be verified, all of which are listed in an article published in the 1994 edition of the
Hibernacle News
, “The Dories—Whence and Whither?,” 14–15.

he was charging the same for a no-frills trip
:
Grand Canyon Dories Catalogue
, 1972.

Diane Sawyer, James Taylor, Bruce Babbitt, Richard Holbrooke, and Bill Moyers
: Author interviews with Litton and John Blaustein.

a vintage tail-dragger with a radial engine and a propeller
: John Litton,
The Life and Times of Martin Litton
, an unfinished film by Bill Briggs, available on Vimeo. Also, author interviews with Litton.

In river hydrology, a phenomenon known as headwater capture
: This idea has been explained by many writers, perhaps the most eloquent of whom is Gretel Ehrlich. See
http://test.ourhomeground.com/entries/definition/river_capture
.

7: The Golden Age of Guiding

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing”
: Grahame,
Wind in the Willows
, 8.

no one had the faintest clue how to run
: Norm Nevills, the founder of Mexican Hat Expeditions, had used hard-hulled boats inside the canyon during the thirties and forties, but Nevills completed only seven trips through the canyon in his entire career. By the early seventies, some members of Litton’s crew were running that many trips in a single season.

looking for a dry space to stow his cigar
: Jerry Ledbetter,
The Life and Times of Martin Litton
, an unfinished film by Bill Briggs, available on Vimeo.

a whirlpool laid on its side with its axis of rotation perpendicular
: Quammen,
Wild Thoughts from Wild Places
, 48–49.

“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book”
: Powers,
Mark Twain
, 76.

composed of Arabic numerals ranging from 1 to 10 and spread across four different levels
: See
Belknap’s Waterproof Grand Canyon River Guide.

an awful lot of luck was involved
: Many boatmen speak about this quality of luck. For a good example, see Mitch Dion’s untitled article on pages 6 and 7 of the 1996
Hibernacle News.

“Lord knows what can happen aboard those contraptions”
: Author interview with Litton.

8: Crystal Genesis

“In the rock record, the tranquillity of time”
: McPhee,
Annals of the Former World
, 171–72.

the rain fell steadily for twenty hours on Saturday, paused briefly
: Cooley et al., “Effects of the Catastrophic Flood,” 4. Note: the rain did stop for a three-hour break between Sunday and Wednesday.

adding to the magnitude of what unfolded
: Carothers and Brown,
Colorado River Through Grand Canyon
, 41.

is commensurate with the kind of rainfall that the jungles
: See McCullough,
The Path Between the Seas.

unconsolidated silt, fine sand, and a heterogeneous blend of chert
: Cooley et al., “Effects of the Catastrophic Food,” 34.

clays and minerals that can act as crude lubricants
: Childs,
Secret Knowledge of Water
, 190.

This type of flash flood is known inside the Grand Canyon
: Zwinger,
Downcanyon
, 143.

“As the rain increased, I heard some rock tumbling down”
: This quote comes from Dolnick (
Down the Great Unknown
, 231), who is apparently quoting from Stanton (
Down the Colorado
). The wording, however, is different from a similar quote cited by Webb (
Grand Canyon
, 125–26), who is apparently citing Dwight L. Smith’s
The Colorado River Survey: Robert B. Stanton and the Denver, Colorado Canyon & Pacific Railroad
, 88. Moreover, wording of both quotes are different from a similar quote that Lavender uses on pages 6 and 25 of
River Runners of the Grand Canyon
, for which Lavender provides no citation.

“he was running as wildly as any human being could”
: Ghiglieri and Myers,
Over the Edge
, 100. All details of the Clubb tragedy come from Ghiglieri and Myers.

the gradualists had not only won this long-running debate
: There are many excellent accounts of this debate. The texts from which I have drawn include McPhee,
Annals of the Former World
, 171–72; Bjornerud,
Reading the Rocks
, 26–29; and Bryson,
Short History of Nearly Everything
, 69–75.

assumed that this landscape was shaped slowly
: I am indebted to Ghiglieri and Myers, who lay out this notion quite nicely in chapter 3 of
Over the Edge.

objects that none but the largest floods could ever dislodge
: Webb,
Grand Canyon
, 143.

nearly a hundred separate debris flows were touched off
: Cooley et al., “Effects of the Catastrophic Food,” 42.

The amphitheater consists of two main drainage streams
: Steck,
Hiking Grand Canyon Loops
, 53.

a group of six scientists with the US Geological Survey
: See Cooley et al., “Effects of the Catastrophic Flood”; Webb et al., “Debris Flows from Tributaries”; and Webb,
Grand Canyon.

it generated so much centrifugal force that the surface actually tilted
: For several details in this section, I am indebted to Jeremy Schmidt’s clear and eloquent treatment in
A Natural History Guide
, 55–56.

The debris flow obliterated it
: Cooley et al., “Effects of the Catastrophic Flood,” 16.

it was now sixty feet wide
: Carothers and Brown,
Colorado River Through Grand Canyon
, 42. Also see Zwinger,
Downcanyon
, 141.

almost thirty dump-truck loads of material
: Author calculation. There are 18 cubic yards, or 486 cubic feet, in a dump-truck load.

rushing past each second
: Webb et al., “Debris Flows from Tributaries,” 1–39.

When the debris flow burst from the mouth of the Crystal Creek
: Quite a bit of hyperbole surrounds the details of what took place. According to one account, the debris flow was moving at fifty miles per hour and at nearly 30,000 cfs—triple the flow of the river itself. Another version claimed that giant boulders skipped across the surface of the river and bounced off the cliffs on the opposite side of the canyon. A third account claims that the event went on for several hours and the entire river was temporarily blocked. In recent years, those assertions have been tempered by the patient research of Robert H. Webb and several other scientists with the USGS. Thanks to their work, we now know that some of the most colorful elements of the story are simply not true. The peak discharge lasted for minutes, not hours. The boulders that were dumped into the Colorado probably did not dam up the entire river, even temporarily. Nevertheless, what actually happened was impressive enough. By the time the debris flow reached the bottom of the drainage, it had reached about 10,000 cfs, roughly the same flow levels as the river itself.

the heaviest of them being nearly fifty tons
: Carothers and Brown,
Colorado River Through Grand Canyon
, 42.

Seconds later, it was constricted to a channel of about 55 feet
: Webb and Magirl, “The Changing Rapids of Grand Canyon,” 42–44.

it has since been contested by at least one scientist
: See Webb,
Grand Canyon
; and Cooley et al., “Effects of the Catastrophic Flood.”

On February 24, 1967, Ken Sleight
: Sleight, “Letter to members of the Western River Guides Association, Inc., February 24, 1967.”

Cross had spoken to the same helicopter pilot
: Sleight, “Letter to members of the Western River Guides Association, Inc., March 23, 1967.”

“that a boat trying to break out of the current and get around the right side”
: Ibid.

“Any way you look at it, Crystal has become one of the worst rapids”
: Ibid.

the rapid’s topographic and hydraulic contours would remain firmly in place
: A handful of floods, the most noteworthy of which occurred on the Little Colorado in 1972, created brief pulses of higher water that shifted things around but failed to expand the bottleneck or reestablish the constriction ratio.

The river no longer had the muscle to move them aside
: According to Susan Kieffer’s findings, almost all of the work to establish the constriction ratio took place during floods, when the runoff burgeoned to 100,000 cfs and the river had the power to perform this kind of work.

9: The Death of the
Emerald Mile

“And the river was there”
: Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
, 5.

“We’re not going to carry these boats around”
: Donald Litton,
The Life and Times of Martin Litton
, an unfinished film by Bill Briggs, available on Vimeo.

“We really could do without it”
: Author interview with Martin Litton.

Regan Dale, who had signed on with a motor company
: Dale,
Oral History
, NAU.

Rist set out to master these nuances
: Author interview with Wally Rist.

Golden Trip!
on the inside cover
: Author interview with John Blaustein.

“We’d hear his approach and it’d be like”
: Author interview with Andre Potochnik.

“They’d come up to me with these big cow-eyes”
: Author interview with Litton.

In the years to come, a number of these women would demolish
: See Teal,
Breaking into the Current.

“Oh, if we get ten trips out of her, I’d be happy”
: Author interviews with Litton and Petschek.

Wren hailed from a logging burg
: Author interview with Steve Reynolds.

Late in the summer of 1977
: Author interviews with Regan Dale and O. C. Dale.

one afternoon in the summer of 1971, Wally Rist
: Author interview with Rist.

In the spring of 1995, another flood would race down Prospect Canyon
: March 6, 1995.
http://wwwpaztcn.wr.usgs.gov/fscc/stanton-repeat-photography/repeat-photos.php?mode=stake&StakeID=431
(accessed 12/16/2012).

Dalton was just a few feet to the right of where he needed to be
: Details of Dalton’s accident at Lava come from author interviews with Regan Dale and Rudi Petschek, both of whom were eyewitnesses.

to haul her off to the town garbage dump and give her a “Viking funeral”
: Author interviews with Regan Dale, Petschek, and Tuck Weills, manager of Grand Canyon Dories in 1983.

Part IV The Master of the
Emerald Mile

“If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat”
: White,
E. B. White Reader
, 188.

10: The Factor

“And you really live by the river?”
: Grahame,
Wind in the Willows
, 10.

an eccentric and contrarian boatman
: Details of Grua’s childhood and his early years on the river come from his four oral-history interviews that are cataloged at NAU’s Cline Library, plus author interviews with Petschek, Litton, Blaustein, Tom Myers, Regan Dale, Kenly Weil, and Rist, among others.

“Let’s wait for the little man”
: Author interview with Rist.

“an instant flash picture”
: Author interview with Petschek.