by Craig Childs
I inched closer, creeping to a thin spine of rock, reaching my right arm until it touched water, until it recoiled and tugged at the muscles in my chest. Moving this fast, the water felt like a stinging flood of pea gravel. I dropped my foot and worked my way to the next ledge below, backing away from the spring.
Returning to the base of the falls, I stared at threads of mist trailing into the sky, feeling the shivering of the ground. I studied the dry cliff, the mentally agonizing anomaly of a spring out of a wall. And what is behind this? What is in the dark, inside of the rock where the water has no idea of daylight?
I waited a year. Came back in February. The man with me was a friend, Keith Knadler, a tile setter and river guide out of southwestern New Mexico. We had both traveled the backcountry together and had, at different times, approached this one spring, both of us climbing to the same rock spine, plunging our hands into the flow. He is the one who first told me of this place. Now we brought the equipment necessary to enter the cave: wet suits, webbing for climbing, and metal chocks that could be slid into cracks as anchors.
We entered the Grand Canyon midday with heavy packs, finding a way through a deepening gorge off one of the northern rims. The Grand Canyon is arranged so that down the center flows a single river, about three hundred miles in length, and feeding in from every side along the river's length are six hundred more canyons, some twenty or fifty or one hundred miles long, then thousands of canyons feeding into those. We were coming down one of the thousands across difficult terrain without trails. Boulders stared up from the floor of our canyon, looking back to where they had started, maybe one hundred feet higher. Many were freshly shattered, plugged into the sand, or broken across each other. Everything above was poised for falling, leaving the bottom clogged. It was the scent of a crime scene, blood trails still wet, the powder of boulders yet to blow away. Packs were slung over the wreckage, handholds taken as we lowered crack by crack, short, agonizing leaps made with the weight of full packs driving tendons and small bones into our ankles. Keith was tall, lithe. He moved cleanly. I followed his feet and his hands, trying to take after him, to move without doubt. We vanished into this interior web of canyons on each other's trail.
During these first days of a weeklong trek to the waterfall, our eyes adjusted to the dimness, pupils wide to screen out engulfing shadows. In the canyon's dusk, every color shifted one notch toward the darker blue end of the spectrum, an effect I have seen elsewhere only at the ground level of Wall Street in Manhattan, where buildings crop the light of the sky until the value of each color—people's skin, sidewalks, and granite facades—is forced to the blue. At each sharp turn, where cliff walls caved into the floor, the boulders rioted. They threw both sharp edges and smooth, slick faces. These we climbed silently, as we found small holds, sliding our gear down, hoisting it up the other side. I had my boot on a hold no thicker than a matchstick, my right hand groping around, Keith about four feet straight above me, when I felt the weight of my pack. It tugged and I shot a glance over my shoulder into a dark pool directly below. I teetered for a second, gritting my teeth, feeling the edge of a fingernail split against the solid limestone. Without looking down, Keith said, quietly, almost so that I did not hear him, “You've got to really want it.” He knew exactly where I was. He was talking about these handholds, and about climbing. I obeyed, taking the next hold as if there was no mistake, finding a strong grip above that one and pulling myself up, the pack heavy as a sack of iron. At the top we pushed away flood debris and slid down the opposite side into deep mud. Then, in a pen of boulders, we rested, sitting against the steel-cold limestone, backpacks slumped into one another to prop us up, our faces expressionless, arms poured limp into our laps.
The two sides of the Grand Canyon, the north and south divided by the Colorado River, have different spring water. Here on the north side, where the Kaibab Plateau flushes out large underground volumes, the taste of springs does not alter much from place to place. On the opposite side, below the South Rim, I have found that water tastes different at nearly every canyon. The earth there is tilted differently, changing the entire network of springs. Most South Rim water comes out slowly and tastes ancient, biting at the tongue like seawater. It is old water, having seeped twenty-five hundred feet into the ground to wait indefinitely in underground baths of minerals before leaking out. High calcium-magnesium bicarbonate concentrations are easily detected in the mouth, easy to spit out. The water on this side, beneath the North Rim, does not wait. The angle of rock formations sends it down rapidly, sometimes exploding it from the faces of cliffs.
One upshot of salty, laggard South Rim water is that it is not markedly radioactive. The water is old enough that it shows no sign of the decades of nuclear weapons testing. Unstable isotopes, embedded into the atomic structure of the water, cannot be filtered out as springs percolate through the ground. So the South Rim aquifer shows no trace of the nuclear age, having received its water long before people began tinkering with atomic bombs. Meanwhile, North Rim water is hot with tritium, as irradiated as most tap water and bottled water—not especially dangerous to human health, but notable on a Geiger counter.
This is not to say that all the springs on the sides of the Grand Canyon are rooted into only two distinct wells, one being salty and prehistoric, the other being fresh and radioactive. The underside of the Grand Canyon actually looks like a motherboard of circuitry with lines crossing from one region to the next, springs interlaced where they meet underground. Some springs will not alter their flows for a hundred years, while others nearby perk to each rainstorm and die with every drought. For the most part, though, springs on the north side carry young water, no more than forty years old. Springs to the south probably date back thousands or tens of thousands of years.
The main canyon below us took on its own springs as we hiked farther inside—North Rim springs that were clean, easy on the tongue. They welled out of bare rock, draining to the floor, eventually filling the canyon with a clear creek. This troubled our work. It sent us higher onto shelves. It filled our boots with water, causing us to skid and slosh.
If a hole is dug this deep anywhere on the planet, water will probably come out. The Grand Canyon is a hole over five thousand feet deep, nearly three hundred miles long, its side canyons severing aquifers left and right. This kind of hole opens underground floodgates in almost every canyon. No other desert in the world has such a blatant show of spring water.
The waterfall
Each day about 400 million gallons of water spill from rocks into the Grand Canyon—enough, statistically, to supply several hours of showers, irrigation, car washes, toilet-flushing, lawn-watering, and faucets left running to the entire population of California. But when engineers stand on the high rims with drilling rigs, even with so much water beneath them, their target is elusive. Caverns and subterranean hairline passages break and turn around one another, some of them filled with water, others abandoned and dry. So to find water, it is best to come all the way to the bottom, to the interior desert canyons where it appears. The cruel complexity of buried joints and faults reveals itself in sweet, graceful gestures, having evaded the poking of well drillers who go three thousand feet for water.
Most of the water used by humans in the Grand Canyon is indeed drawn from these desert sources. In the central Grand Canyon, a waterfall appears from a cave, a place called Roaring Springs, turned into the public water supply for both North Rim and South Rim developments. I traveled there ten months earlier, to where power lines slung down thousands of feet, sweeping over cliffs to a pump station and helicopter pad. The mouth of the cave was penetrated by a pipe that rerouted much of the water down to the pump station.
The station processing the spring water held an assortment of hex wrenches, hard hats hung from pegs, grease guns, and hand-turned valve wheels big as car tires. Display boards flickered with lights and commands. The pump housing, which now contained the spring, had been constructed by Bethlehem Steel.
As I walked through the pump house, I found myself staring at a sign. It read:
DO NOT LOOSEN TWO-BOLT CLAMP BEFORE CLOSING LINE SHUT-OFF VALVES AND DEFLATING CARTRIDGE
The sign seemed out of place because it said nothing of an underground river or the darkness within. I had arrived on a day when the pipeline broke open, so the pump had to be shut down. I hiked with the station operator, a man named Bruce Aiken, up the steep embankment to where Roaring Springs emerged from the cave and entered a series of pipes. He came to adjust the flow while the break was being repaired.
Surrounding the cave were stairs and platforms made of metal grates, sealed off with a locked gate and barbed wire. Straight into the mouth led a red, corroding pipe with a T-joint sending another pipe into an adjacent cave. A smaller pipe led a quarter-mile inside, used for water quality testing. My immediate thought was that, shoved into the cave, the pipes looked like some grotesque catheter.
I climbed the stairs behind Bruce as he unlocked the gate. With rigid grating, all cave entrances had been closed around the pipes to keep bats out. Their guano might contaminate the water supply. As Bruce spent half an hour adjusting the valve handle, restarting the water to both rims, I opened one of the bat grates and peered into the darkness. The water moved steadily, its surface silken. I reached in and touched it.
I know of a single spring on the east side of the Grand Canyon that shoves 100,000 gallons a minute out of one hole into the desert. The Hopi of northern Arizona call this spring the sipapu. It is symbolized by the hole dug into the center of each of their ceremonial kivas, the hole from which they climbed into this world from the drowning dark of the last. It is nothing like a water hole that sits waiting in a rainwater depression. It is literally bursting, throwing itself from the hole. The affiliation the Hopi have claimed with this spring is not happenstance. It is the sipapu, the place, and is not mistaken for any other spring nearby, and no other tribe has claimed ownership to it. It could be said that the Hopis' emergence from the sipapu is merely unsubstantiated myth, but in the area of the spring archaeologists have consistently found prehistoric pottery that can be traced only to the Hopi culture.
Fourteen miles, twenty-nine canyons, and innumerable springs to the west of the sipapu is another noted spring. The Zuni, who now reside primarily in New Mexico, claim this as their emergence point. Springs here are so unique, so individual, that there is never cultural confusion between one and the next. Hydrologists have found that the reservoirs beneath these two ceremonial springs originate in entirely separate parts of Arizona. Their waters differ in age, in fact, by thousands of years.
We came to a spring that flushed probably ten gallons a minute to the canyon floor from a heavy garden of willow, columbine flowers, horsetails, seepwillow, cattails, and maidenhair ferns. It was young water, fair tasting. Scrambling into the vegetation, we hunted its source, relieved to be free of our packs, finding any excuse for a break. We spent fifteen minutes getting poked and scraped until reaching a dense mat of monkeyflowers. Pushing away the covering revealed a single, fist-size hole. Water swelled from inside.
It is always like this finding the source of water—a second of silence, the clandestine enchantment of encountering something small and sacred, then down on knees to see where it actually appears, how far inside I can reach. Without discussion I rolled up my sleeve and stuck my hand in. I looked up at Keith, who was waiting to see if something would happen. Nothing did. He nodded, so I stuck my forearm farther into this tunnel of roots thin as dental floss, following a passage straight down. I drew my forearm out, rolled my sleeve farther, and slipped back in, finding small pebbles held in suspension by the water's force. Then I pulled off my shirt and moved my entire arm in until I was flush to the earth, my hand prodding into the underworld.
Keith took his turn at it. He got his elbow down the hole, then jumped back, yanking his arm out with a panic. He studied his hand for a moment, as if he had burned it, but could not find the injury. He flexed his fingers. “I have this distinct memory,” he said. “I was very young and I stuck my hand down a hole in my neighbor's backyard. I got down to my armpit and something grabbed me.”
“Something?” I asked.
“Something, someone, I don't know. I can't really explain it.”
“What kind of hole?”
“The kind of hole kids stick their hands into.”
“Why did you stick your hand in it?”
“Because it was a hole.”
I stood still, reviewing his words, looking for deeper meaning. There wasn't any. His logic was clear. The Hopis and the Zunis struggled to get out of the hole, climbing up to this world of light and air, while we struggle to get back in.
This spring was part of a larger network. A hundred yards downstream we found a massive deck of ferns out of which poured a shower. The ferns had gathered over time, collecting among their leaflets tons of blow sand, precipitated minerals, roots, rhizomes, twigs, leaves, and dead insects. The spring sank into this flying buttress and disseminated through it. Out the underside came streams of a spreading waterfall, pouring eight feet into the creek below. A forest of triangular leaves shivered against the droplets, hanging pillars of ferns sending streamers to the ground.
Keith and I stripped naked and stepped underneath, scratching at our flesh to clean off the sweat and mud, feeling the sting of wounds penetrated by fresh water. We scrubbed our scalps with fingernails and opened our mouths, letting them fill like bowls before swallowing.
The place sounded like a steady winter rain in western Washington, overflowing the roof gutters, slapping the garden stones all night long. But it had not rained in this part of Arizona for months. The desert could be seen beyond: ladders of prickly pear cactus hanging from rock ledges, and simple, dry daggers of agaves sending seed stalks to the air, blooming only once in a life that could last decades. There was blow sand out there that would slide like flour through fingers. The world beyond was slow and sere. Here it was sudden and quite alive. Our arms reached upward, into the rainstorm, brushing the luxurious undersides of maidenhair ferns, pulling rivulets down to our faces and chests and legs, turning our bodies into connection points, like spark plugs or lightning rods. We carried water.
The main canyon became ridiculously huge and dark. It led us through days of work, sometimes five straight hours of walking the pointed tips of boulders. We set camps under ledges and in gravel heaps left by floods.
On the fifth evening we had climbed from the main canyon and were now diving in and out of one canyon after the next, walking up one, down another along a washboard of chasms. We reached the narrowest slot so far and slept inside, on a lip where water spilled above and below us. I set my bag on a smooth back of sandstone, my left arm nearly in the water, feet pointed downstream. Water came around my right, too, leaving me on an island about four feet wide. We were only cutting across this particular side canyon, not needing to travel along it. Still, I kept looking down there, wanting to get inside, listening to the roaring siphon of water. Overhead was a view of the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters framed by the walls as if they had been cut out of the sky to be stuck onto a bulletin board.
I had studied the canyon closely during the last light of the day, while after dinner we walked its ledges without gear. Carved in a chocolate- and cranberry-colored sandstone, the canyon was darker than those of the blue-gray limestone. Sandstone resisted water differently, curving like child-bearing hips into a narrow abyss. My body wished to be inside. Not just my eyes with their cursory craving, but my flesh. Water ran into it, forming clamorous waterfalls that vanished around the next bend below.
Above were handprints. These made the canyon even more peculiar, more curious to me. They were left by the Anasazi, predecessors of the Hopi and Zuni, the pre-Columbian culture that first built kivas, and the hole to symbolize the emergence from the sipapu. Possibly the prints were eight hundred years old. Hidden among ledges, they had been painted on outcrops and within recesses hundr
eds of feet up from the floor. They were made of white paint sprayed against hands so that negative impressions remained, both of children and adults, all of the handprints with fingers spread as if holding up the rocks. They were probably sprayed when paint was blown from a person's mouth, a mist of white drifting away with the constant canyon breeze. I had seen many such paintings throughout the desert, but always they had been at functional locations, places where people could live, or at least hold an audience or build a granary. These prints were more geographic. In a place consisting of only rock and water, nowhere for a person to live, they seemed to be a recognition that this canyon is different from the rest.
I did not observe the prints one by one. Instead I stood back and looked across them, changing my vantage by sitting on a boulder or down by the water until I could see more of them. From numerous ledges they overlooked the canyon like spectators. More handprints appeared the farther I looked. It was not the sense of antiquity that was so striking, but the feeling of importance granted here. Of the thousands of canyons and side canyons within the Grand Canyon, this one became the focus of such attention.
Every other slot canyon I had seen, so carefully hewn to such depth and narrowness, had been dry, or held only the murky, stagnant water of past floods. This one cradled a clean stream, every drop of it spring-fed. It rounded inside as if it were a woman's voice singing down a stairway. Eight hundred years ago the Anasazi knew this was distinct and marked it so.
