The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  The chastened Major called the other boats off—and they began the exhausting business of lining and portaging the entire Big Drop. The boats displayed worrisome signs of wear, causing Powell and four others to climb the riverside cliffs in search of pine tar with which to caulk leaky seams. The attempt proved long and hot, all but the Major turning back. Powell eventually reached a patch of pine trees high above the river, where he scraped up two pounds of pitch, stuffing them into his empty shirt sleeve. On the way down, a storm broke from the south, releasing a torrential rain so violent as to nearly wash him off the cliff face. He clung to the rocks one-handed for half an hour until the rain lifted and the sun came out. His relief soured almost immediately at the sight of “a thousand streams rolling down the cliffs on every side, carrying with them red sand; and these all unite in the canyon below in one great stream of red mud.”

  He skidded down the wet slickrock to warn the others, all the time watching the newly created river break into waves, “several feet high and fifteen or twenty feet in width.” The sand soaked some of it up, but another wave came, and another after that. Powell streaked into camp, yelling at the others to strip the camp before the flash flood burst over them. From higher ground, the shaken party watched the cliff-borne river “roll on to join the Colorado.” The lesson for Powell, as it is for anyone who witnesses such a flash flood, is that canyon desert, no matter how arid it appears, is most fundamentally shaped by water.

  Somewhere near the end of Cataract Canyon, the mission hit its nadir. It began when Bill Dunn, who had been standing near the river’s edge making a barometric measurement, fell into the water when a line caught his foot as the current shifted the moored boats. Even he—the strongest swimmer of the bunch—barely escaped the river. The dunking ruined Powell’s gold Elgin watch, which Dunn had in his pocket to make time notations for the barometric readings. Powell observed that among all his other chronometers, this was “the only instrument on which I could rely.”

  The crush of errors brought by carelessness and exhaustion had mounted steadily over the past two months—Howland’s missed cue costing them No Name and a third of the supplies, the maps drenched and ruined, and the steady attrition of rations. And now, Powell’s favorite watch, which doubled as the expedition’s most accurate chronometer, had also gone, imperiling their ability to collect mapmaking data.

  To date, the largely self-controlled Major had mostly kept his irritation at these mishaps to himself. But now he snapped. Even as the overwhelming challenges had forced more and more of their energies toward plain survival, Powell had clung tenaciously to maintaining the expedition’s scientific work—their barometric readings, mapping, their calculations of latitude and longitude, the observations about the landscape. Any semblance of this being a scientific expedition had now vanished. The endeavor had degenerated into a madcap dash down a terrifying river, its sole object now getting its members through alive. Powell had come so far, only to watch his grandest dreams wash away as the shaken party raced through some of the most remarkable geological features on Earth.

  Powell lashed out at Dunn, demanding irrationally that he pay $30 on the spot for the ruined watch or leave the party forthwith. On the river the men had overheard their leader bicker repeatedly with the elder Howland over his often-sloppy mapmaking and difficulty in keeping the maps dry, but they were aghast at this merciless ultimatum. Powell knew that Dunn did not have that kind of money on him—so he was in essence telling him to leave, a virtual death sentence. Yet the Major spoke in deadly earnest. Powell gave Dunn such a tongue lashing, wrote Sumner, “that I think only the fact that the Major had but one arm saved him from a broken head, if nothing worse.” When Dunn sputtered that he had almost drowned, Walter Powell unhelpfully quipped that it would have been better if he had.

  Hawkins would claim in his dotage that Walter and Dunn had fallen upon each other, and that he had saved the day by furiously yanking Powell’s brother off the trapper by his hair, then throwing him in the water and holding his head down. But the musings of a then old man, as so often happens, fill with memories that inflate his own importance in an unfolding drama. In their daily journals, Sumner, Bradley, and Powell make no mention of such a tussle. Four decades after the expedition, Hawkins held that Walter stormed off to get his gun, only to be blocked by Andy Hall hitting him in the side of the head. A scuffle of some sort had probably taken place, but these animosities broke as quickly as a wave dashing against the bow of a Whitehall, under bigger concerns than brawling. Their survival now clearly lay on the line. Most of them probably felt relief that tensions had finally boiled to the surface and discharged. Sumner wrote that afterward “everything was as smooth as with two lovers after their first quarrel and make-up.” Even so, some resentments would not go away so readily.

  Dunn and the elder Howland now firmly believed that the Major did not give a whit about the men he led. The truth on that riverbank that day, while a ragged band of frightened, desperate men eyed one another, was certainly far more complex. Their hard-as-granite leader, who had never before lost control, clearly had that day—and this, more than anything else, had scared the spirits out of everyone. The men might not always like their sometimes autocratic leader, but they knew that he was the key to their survival.

  * * *

  A few days later, they finally emerged from Cataract Canyon. “Now that it is past,” recalled Powell, “it seems a very simple thing indeed to run through such a place, but the fear of what might be ahead made a deep impression on us.” Soon they entered the serene waters of Glen Canyon, “a curious ensemble of wonderful features—carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments,” all now lying beneath the waters of Lake Powell. The few riffles they encountered required no portaging or lining. They came across a four-roomed Anasazi house, the ground about it littered with pottery shards. “How they contrived to live is a mystery to me,” wrote Sumner, “as the country around is as destitute of vegetation as a street.”

  On August 5—the expedition’s 74th day—3,100 feet above sea level, the expedition finally pushed off into the Grand Canyon, just downriver from today’s Lees Ferry, nine miles south of the present Utah-Arizona border. They had half the vertical distance left to descend, but only one-third of the mileage in which to do it. Several days earlier, Bradley noted that only fifteen pounds of bacon remained. About that time, Sumner had shot a mountain sheep, the last of the game they would find. Although unaware that they had entered the Grand Canyon they certainly understood that something was up. “With some feeling of anxiety we enter a new canyon this morning,” recalled Powell. “Below us are the limestones and hard sandstones which we found in Cataract Canyon. This bodes toil and danger.” Powell could now read the canyon walls with increasing sophistication. Horizontal rock layering, he noted, often meant an absence of rapids. When those same layers tilted downstream, they generally signaled that the river would flow faster, although probably not arousing any serious whitewater. But when the layers inclined upstream, the river often turned violent.

  At Lees Ferry, the whitish-gray Kaibab limestone at the water level would provide a benchmark of sorts for the next three hundred miles. The Canyon would altogether cut downward through nineteen distinct rock formations, some of them many hundreds of feet deep. Each new layer pushed the Kaibab higher until it gleamed a mile above their heads. No geologist—or non-geologist for that matter—had been able to experience the unfolding of Earth’s history in such a fashion. From the merely 270-million-year-old Kaibab they would push deeper and deeper into the past, until they encountered the so-called basement rocks, hard granites and schists that had lain there for 1.7 billion years—among the oldest exposed rocks in the Southwest and nearly half the age of the Earth. Their descent left them feeling that they were penetrating the very bowels of the Earth.

  Powell turned to literary metaphor: the Grand Canyon as the “library of the Gods . . . The shelves are
not for books, but form the stony leaves of one great book. He who would read the language of the universe may dig out letters here and there, and with them spell the words, and read, in a slow and imperfect way, but still so as to understand a little, the story of creation.” This book was replacing the narrative in Genesis. The stories of Adam and Eve, and the great flood, were yielding to visions of dinosaurs roaming the Earth, of great inland seas, volcanic disruptions, mountains thrust up and worn away. Powell could read it all in the rock. Even to a man of Powell’s formidable imagination and ability to confront the unknown, the experience proved overwhelming. Powell would not be the first to feel the cold realization of humanity’s relative new-coming, yet few would experience it so viscerally as did Powell that summer of 1869. It would force him to reflect in powerful new ways about the relationship of humans and the natural world.

  * * *

  In the Canyon, the Colorado River Exploring Expedition would encounter 360 rapids and the worst whitewater of their journey. The men entered the Canyon a ragged mess, not one of them owning a complete set of clothes. Nor were their boats in any better shape. Now, at most every stop, they caulked leaky seams. On August 7, after running ten bad rapids and portaging three times in Marble Canyon alone, they replaced the ribs of one boat. Never had they worked so hard, and now they had to cut rations even more. Portaging admittedly became easier with fewer supplies to haul, but their steadily weakening bodies now made more mistakes. Two days earlier, the exhausted men had dropped Emma Dean while portaging, busting a hole in its side that required major repair.

  The lightened boats did appear to ride the waves better. On August 10, Powell seemed to brush away some degree of caution; and so they ran thirty-five rapids—some of them bad ones—in fourteen miles, emerging from Marble Canyon where the Little Colorado River comes in from the left. Here they took a two-day break, Powell taking the latitude by fixing on the North Star, which indicated that they were as far south as their destination, Callville—“so that what we run now,” noted Bradley, “must be west from this point.”

  They now prepared to enter the Inner Gorge, the core of the Grand Canyon. Years later, in the sanctuary of his government office, Powell would mark that pivotal moment with the words for which he is best known: “We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things.” Grand sentiments indeed. He noted that the men joked before setting off, “but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.” In that day’s journal, Bradley reported that the men were “uneasy and discontented and anxious.”

  After running fifteen miles in two hours of near-continuous whitewater, they heard a roar unlike anything they had encountered before and quickly pulled ashore. Powell climbed the cliffs to scout what others would later call Hance Rapid, returning with somber news. A mile downriver, the Colorado passed over hard granite—a situation the men would come to dread, for it often equated with hellish whitewater. The river’s course through softer sedimentary rock, which they had run and labored through since Green River City, now yielded to metamorphic rock, forged by continental-scale pressure and heat from within the Earth’s interior to come out as hard, sharp, and unforgiving. The jet-black Vishnu Schist seemed to suck the light from anything near it, except when occasionally—and surprisingly—veins of raspberry sherbet–colored Zoroaster granite shot through it. Unable to erode this unyielding rock as easily as the sedimentary formations, the river becomes a caricature of a whitewater passage, cutting through vertical walls now thousands of feet high. “No rocks ever made can make much worse rapids than we now have,” noted Bradley gloomily. The jagged rock gnawed on their ever-weakening boats.

  The next morning, “emphatically the wildest day of the trip so far,” wrote Bradley, they lined and portaged Hance, then ran a bad rapid at its foot. Two miles later they heard the throaty rumble of yet another menacing rapid, so thunderous that they had to shout to be heard—“a long, broken fall, with ledges and pinnacles of rock obstructing the river,” wrote Powell, the torrent breaking “into great waves on the rocks” and lashing itself “into a mad, white foam” for a third of a mile before the river turned sharply to the left and out of view. Sumner, never one to show fear, noted that a line of fifteen-foot standing waves made his hair curl. The steep walls offered no point of purchase to line the boats or any places to portage. “We must run the rapid,” wrote Powell, “or abandon the river.”

  “Who follows?” Sumner shouted. The young men, Andy Hall and Billy Hawkins, yelled back, “Pull out! We’ll follow you to tidewater or hell.” Sumner, Powell, and Dunn shoved out into the turbulence, riding one wave to its top like a roller coaster, then dropping precipitously into the trough. Again and again they bounced and thrashed through these mad waves until they struck the crest of one as it broke. The boat plunged underwater, its center compartment filling completely, Sumner and Dunn desperately trying to avoid the rocks. Powell frantically bailed as best he could. A whirlpool spun them, but the boat did not sink, and somehow came through.

  “I have been in a cavalry charge, charged the batteries, and stood by the guns to repel a charge,” wrote Sumner. “But never before did my sand run so low. In fact, it all ran out, but as I had to have some more grit, I borrowed it from the other boys . . .” They named the rapid Sockdolager, a nineteenth-century term for a bare-knuckled knockout punch. They had just entered what later boaters call Adrenaline Alley—forty miles of chaotic whitewater. That night, denied any place to lie down, the men wedged themselves painfully into niches in the wall.

  Mistakes and mishaps piled up. The day after Sockdolager, Oramel Howland lost his notes and river map; then Emma Dean broke her bow rib on a rock. The following day, the cook knocked the baking soda tin into the river, so their musty bread would now also be unleavened.

  Near constant rain, which often turned torrential at night, served as its own plague, extinguishing their driftwood fires almost immediately. For several nights, they huddled two to a blanket, shivering against the cliff until dawn. Powell wrote that they were more exhausted by the night’s discomfort than by the day’s toil. No matter what they did, they could not keep their food dry. The constant alternation of soaking and heating had ruined their bacon, leaving them with a thin ten days’ rations of flour, some dried apples, but plenty of coffee at least.

  * * *

  On August 18, after three portages in four miles, the men pulled bankside to weather a furious rainstorm that continued all night. “The little canvas we have is rotten and useless,” observed Powell. “[T]he rubber ponchos with which we started from Green River City have all been lost; more than half the party is without hats, and not one of us has an entire suit of clothes, and we have not a blanket a piece.” The river had become so muddy they could no longer drink from it, so they relied instead on rainwater pooled on rocks. For the first time, Powell contemplated leaving the river and hiking to a Mormon settlement. Misfortune had emphatically put an end to the scientific documentation of their expedition. No barometers worked, leaving them unable to tell how much farther they needed to descend. When Powell scouted downstream, all he saw was a “labyrinth of deep gorges.” They had ten days of rations, with no clear idea about how many miles remained. A few days later, Powell noted with gallows humor that it had “come to be a race for a dinner.” On that they all could agree.

  * * *

  Heavy rain continued to hammer them the following day. When another furious rapid appeared, its absence of rocks encouraged Powell to run it. But almost immediately, a standing wave flipped Emma Dean like a toy, pitching Dunn, Sumner, and Powell overboard, although they managed to hang on. The gasping men righted the boat below the rapid.

  On August 21, after a thrilling run of ten miles in the morning, they encountered yet another massive rapid, requiring a long, grinding portage. But on
ce below it, they could see the dark granite giving way to limestone walls. “Good cheer returns,” wrote Powell. “We forget the storms and the gloom and the cloud-covered canyons, and the black granite and the raging river, and push our boats from shore in great glee.”

  To these exhausted, bruised, and hungry men, all anticipating the Canyon’s end around every turn, the sky and river then combined to deal a series of cruel blows: Not only did the heavy rain resume but the river cut back through the sandstone, completely reversing direction, and thus sending them into the granite again. One of their last working tools—a compass—now indicated that they headed northeast, directly away from their destination. On that day water soaked their little remaining flour.

  But the following afternoon, the river resumed its westward course, and they returned to the limestone, which enabled them to run a dozen rapids in a similar number of miles. At midday they passed an odd rock in the middle of the river, like nothing they had seen before: a fifty-foot plug of dark volcanic basalt standing as a silent marker to a world that would transform itself just a mile downstream. They pulled up shortly thereafter at the head of a massive rapid, today known as Lava Falls.