Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  Nash tells the story of one recent wrap, on a rock in Crystal Rapid, one of the Grand Canyon’s notorious danger spots. The boat was a thirty-foot-long rubber raft, motorized and carrying a dozen people. Many boatmen disdain such behemoths. They prefer small, oar-powered rafts, or elegant craftlike dories and kayaks that flit across the water like dragonflies. (The trade-off is that dories and kayaks are harder to patch after a wreck.) In comparison with its small, maneuverable rivals, a giant inner tube has all the grace of a brontosaurus. But though they are ungainly, these wallowing rubber beasts are as close to invulnerable as anything on the Colorado.

  Close to invulnerable, but not all the way there. The rubber raft at Crystal turned sideways against a boulder near the top of an obstacle course called the Rock Garden. The river, rushing downstream, wrapped the raft’s two ends tight to the rock. The raft sat glued in place, while passengers and crew scrambled up and out onto their new island home. They sat on the rock through the night, trapped in mid-rapid, listening to the water rise around them (the Colorado, dammed upstream of the Grand Canyon in the 1960s, rises and falls depending on electricity demand downstream). Dawn found the scared, chilled passengers still with a bit of rock to cling to, and the boat itself freed by the rising water and straining against the lines the boatmen had used to tie it in place. Boatmen and passengers climbed back into the boat, which was still tied down but now being yanked violently downstream. Three knives came out; on a signal, all three touched the mooring lines. A touch was all it took. With a crack like a whiplash, the taut ropes snapped, and the boat and its passengers shot free.

  The Green was not yet up to such malevolent tricks. May 27, the fourth day on the river, marked the end of the first and easiest leg of the journey. After a late, leisurely start and a quiet day on what Powell called a “placid stream,” the men reached the junction of the Green and Henry’s Fork, a beaver stream the mountain men knew well. Here they found the barometers, chronometers, and sextants Powell had stashed earlier in the spring, still safe beneath the overhanging rock where he had hidden them. Powell and his crew settled in for a few days, making scientific observations, Powell displaying more enthusiasm than the men.

  The rain continued (it had hardly let up since they set out), but the scenery had improved and spirits were high. The men had yearned for canyons. Now they had them. “The river winds like a serpent through between nearly perpendicular cliffs 1200 ft. high but instead of rapids it is deep and calm as a lake,” Bradley wrote. “It is the most safe of any part we have yet seen for navigation. Found some marine focils [fossils] in hard limestone—first yet found.”

  The exuberant tone was new. At camp on the first night, Powell had climbed a cliff and struggled manfully to admire the view. “Barren desolation is stretched before me,” he had noted, “and yet there is a beauty in the scene.” Still looking with eyes accustomed to the rolling terrain of the green midwest, he had found himself bewildered. “The fantastic carving . . . with the bright and varied colors of the rocks conspire to make a scene such as the dweller in verdure-clad hills can scarcely appreciate.”

  Even so, he had done his best to wax rhapsodic. “Dark shadows are settling in the valleys and gulches,” Powell wrote in an account of that first afternoon, “and the heights are made higher and the depths deeper by the glamour and witchery of light and shade.” Sumner was more succinct. “Country worthless,” he scrawled in his journal.

  Now things were picking up, and there was no need to manufacture enthusiasm. “It is the grandest scenery I have found in the mountains and I am delighted with it,” Bradley exulted. “I went out to see the country this morning and found it grand beyond conception.”

  Powell was just as excited. The Green at this point ran south, and the Uinta Mountains, running east-west, lay smack in its path, and “yet it glides on in a quiet way as if it thought a mountain range no formidable obstruction to its course. It enters the range by a flaring, brilliant, red gorge, that may be seen from the north a score of miles away.”

  That gorge would be their first canyon. “We name it Flaming Gorge,” Powell wrote proudly. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, where everything was new, Powell had the opportunity to bestow names as he chose.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ASHLEY FALLS

  For the next several days, life was easy. This was the trip as Powell had envisioned it, a scientific expedition rather than a mad dash. There were cliffs to explore and measure, repairs to make, fossils to find. Bradley and Powell climbed one day to a vantage point some one thousand feet above the river and surveyed the panorama—the long, sinuous curve of the Green, the valley of Henry’s Fork stretching to the west, desert and hills and buttes to the north, the Uinta Mountains to the south, the peaks of the Wasatch just barely visible in the distance to the west.

  Bradley went off exploring on his own early one morning, hoping for fossils, but came up empty. Worse still, he managed to spend the day lost in a driving rainstorm. After eleven hours, he finally made it back to camp, “tired and hungry and mad as a bear.” Powell was nearly immune from such frustration, in part because he had a gift for imbuing even the most mundane chore with drama. He and Sumner had spent most of a rainy day in camp repairing one of the barometers. The barometers were crucial—they were the tool used to determine altitude—but they were finicky and fragile. The repair was a matter of taking a long glass tube open at one end, adding mercury to it a few inches at a time, heating the tube (without cracking it) in order to create a vacuum, and then repeating the procedure again and again until the tube was filled to the proper volume. When the tedious repair was finally completed succesfully, Powell beamed with pleasure. “[We] are ready,” he cheered, “to measure mountains once more.”

  The men were harder to excite. “Tramped around most of the day in the mud and rain to get a few fossils,” Sumner wrote crabbily on May 27, and his journal entry the next day began with a weary “Still in camp.” But the crew was not being paid for their opinions (or for anything else), and Powell seemed unaware of the grumbling.

  By May 30, after a morning hike to survey the local geology, even Powell was prepared to move on. “We are ready to enter the mysterious cañon, and start with some anxiety,” he wrote. They entered Flaming Gorge on a fast current and emerged into a little park and then, when the river swung sharply left, headed toward another canyon cut into the mountain. “We enter the narrow passage,” Powell continued. “On either side, the walls rapidly increase in altitude. On the left are overhanging ledges and cliffs five hundred—a thousand—fifteen hundred feet high. On the right, the rocks are broken and ragged, and the water fills the channel from cliff to cliff.”

  Then, as if unsure of what to make of the mountains, the river made a sharp turn back to the right. In the lead boat, Powell strained to make sense of the chaos ahead of him. Bradley braced for trouble. “We took off boots and coats and prepared for a swim,” he wrote. Powell struggled to stay cool. “Here we have our first experience with cañon rapids,” he wrote. They had seen other rapids, in fact, but in comparison with what he now confronted, Powell seemed to consider them not worth mentioning. “I stand up on the deck of my boat to seek a way among the wave-beaten rocks. All untried as we are with such waters, the moments are filled with intense anxiety. Soon our boats reach the swift current; a stroke or two, now on this side, now on that, and we thread the narrow passage with exhilarating velocity, mounting the high waves, whose foaming crests dash over us, and plunging into the troughs, until we reach the quiet water below; and then comes a feeling of great relief. Our first rapid is run.”

  This was Horseshoe Canyon, the name chosen to indicate the U-shaped course of the river. Then came another valley and soon another canyon, this one fed by a beautiful creek. They named both creek and canyon Kingfisher, for a bird they saw on the branch of a dead willow. It stood on its perch above the river, Sumner wrote, “watching the finny tribe with the determination of purpose that we often see exhibited by politicians wh
ile watching for the spoils of office.”

  The river curved again, bending around a dome-shaped rock where hundreds of swallows had built their nests. The rock, a thousand feet of gray-white sandstone, looked like an enormous beehive, with swallows playing the role of bees. The men named it Beehive Point, and camped on the opposite bank. The hunters set out before dinner, returning with the usual lack of success. “Goodman saw one elk, but missed it,” Sumner noted with dismay, and no one else came even that close.

  Powell was in an expansive mood nonetheless. The first serious rapid lay behind them, the river had become “broad, deep, and quiet,” and the view from camp was inspiring. On the far shore, behind the beehive, rose a kind of natural amphitheater perhaps fifteen hundred feet high, formed of sandstone cliffs and terraces of pine and cedar. “The amphitheater seems banded red and green,” Powell wrote, “and the evening sun is playing with roseate flashes on the rocks, with shimmering green on the cedars’ spray, and iridescent gleams on the dancing waves. The landscape revels in the sunshine.”

  The next day brought everyone back down to earth. It began well enough. Powell, Bradley, and Dunn had set out “to examine some rocks,” in Sumner’s none too enthusiastic words, and Oramel Howland and Goodman had climbed high above the river to survey the landscape for Howland’s map. By ten o’clock, the men were on the river and into two miles of barely interrupted rapids. Then came half an hour of flat water and after that, in Sumner’s words, “a bad rapid through which no boat can run; full of sunken rocks, and having a fall of about ten feet in two hundred yards.” They lined it in two hard hours, one boat at a time, most of the men stumbling along the shore clutching ropes tied to bow and stern while two of the group grabbed oars and stationed themselves on the rocks along the riverbank to fend off the boats as needed.

  At five o’clock, Sumner continued, “we came to the worst place we had seen yet; a narrow gorge full of sunken rocks, for 300 yards, through which the water runs with a speed that threatened to smash everything to pieces that would get into it.” The men pulled to shore to make a plan and quickly saw that they had landed on the wrong side of the river. Now the problem was to get across the rushing river without being swept into the rapid. “Dunn and the trapper”—Sumner referred to himself in the third person—“finally decided to take the small boat across or smash her to pieces.” They made it across, emptied the boat, and crossed back to help their companions. In the meantime, the three heavy boats had each unloaded about half their cargo so that they would not be quite as clumsy as usual. Five crossings later, the Emma Dean had ferried the excess cargo to the far side. Now, one at a time, the big boats set out. They made it, barely, the men pulling desperately while the current rushed them toward the rapid. Tomorrow they would line their way past it. Now they were too exhausted to do more than collapse. “Had supper,” Sumner wrote, “turned in, and in two minutes all were in dreamland.”

  Not quite all. “As the twilight deepens,” Powell wrote, “the rocks grow dark and somber; the threatening roar of the water is loud and constant, and I lie awake with thoughts of the morrow and the cañons to come.”

  Away from its rivers, the desert at night can be eerily silent. “Was there ever such a stillness as that which rests upon the desert at night!” the writer John Van Dyke asked a century ago. “Was there ever such a hush as that which steals from star to star across the firmament!” We can be sure that Van Dyke was not camped by a rapid when he wrote those lines. Many people find the sound of running water soothing. They may have in mind a babbling brook or a gurgling fountain; they are not thinking of rapids, which do not murmur. They rumble. They roar. They crash. The sound evokes a thunderstorm just overhead, a jet skimming the ground, a runaway train. The noise echoes all the louder when it is amplified by stone cliffs that soar upwards of a thousand feet. And, in nerve-racking contrast with the other ground-shaking sounds it calls to mind, this river thunder never stops.

  The message is worse than the sound itself—the roar of a rapid is a proclamation of danger as clear as a giant’s bellowed curse in a fairy tale.

  Small wonder that Powell and his men all rose early the next morning. The first order of business was to make it past the rapid they had sneaked in front of the day before.

  It took three tense hours of lining, but then, as if to reward the men for their hard labors, the day took a sudden turn for the better. In the boats at last, they found the river fast and free of obstacles. The contrast between the misery of lining rapids and the delight of “shooting” them leaps off the journal pages. Even the dyspeptic Bradley seemed excited, writing happily that the boats raced along “like lightning for a very long distance.” Powell, characteristically, was the most high-spirited of all. “To-day we have an exciting ride,” he wrote. “The river rolls down the cañon at a wonderful rate, and, with no rocks in the way, we make almost railroad speed. Here and there the water rushes into a narrow gorge; the rocks on the side roll it into the center in great waves, and the boats go leaping and bounding over these like things of life.” The swooping, soaring motion of the boats over the waves reminded Powell of “herds of startled deer bounding through forests beset with fallen timber.” For the time being, the rapids were thrilling rather than threatening.

  Even on as fine a run as this, it was not all play. Occasionally a wave had the bad manners to jump uninvited into one of the boats. This “necessitates much bailing, and obliges us to stop occasionally for that purpose,” Powell complained. (Powell had made the wise decision to cover bulkheads in the bow and stern of each boat, but he had left the center section of each boat open. Had he known the size of the waves he would face, he might have chosen to cover this center section, too, except for open cockpits for the men at the oars.)

  The expedition’s introduction to the fine art of bailing was comparatively gentle. A boat that has swallowed a wave is instantly heavier and clumsier by more than a thousand pounds. For a boatman, already struggling to find a route that will take him safely through a rapid, it is as if some prankster god has dropped a piano into the boat at the worst possible time. The only good news is that a boat carrying an extra half ton of ballast is hard to flip. But passengers and pilot may end up swimming anyway, because the newly heavy boat may plow directly into the next giant wave rather than float over it, and the impact of that collision can overpower the most white-knuckled grip.

  About two decades ago designers devised “self-bailing” rafts with an inflated floor that rides considerably higher than the river surface. Water that spills into the boat drains out through strategically placed holes along the floor. Self-bailing boats have obvious advantages but disadvantages as well—they are harder to repair, slower in flat water, and, because they drain their watery ballast so quickly, comparatively easy to flip.

  So the old design is still widely used, and it is still common for white-water trips to be punctuated by shouted orders to bail. On commercial trips on the Colorado today, passengers quickly learn what is at stake. At the foot of every rapid, the boatman yells, “Bail!,” and three-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers and thirty-year-old millionaires grab their bailing buckets and start slinging water overboard.

  Despite the pauses for bailing, Powell and his men were making good time. In a single hour, they reckoned, they had covered twelve miles and run perhaps a dozen rapids. (The mileage figures were rough guesses, obtained by stringing together estimates of the “half a mile to that black rock” sort. The guesses tended to be high, especially early on.) Then came trouble. “As the roaring of the rapids dies away above us,” wrote Sumner, “a new cause of alarm breaks in upon us from below . . . when, turning an abrupt corner, we came in sight of the first fall, about three hundred yards below us.” Powell, in the lead boat, signaled the other boats to land. The Emma Dean approached the rapid within about twenty feet and pulled to shore to reconnoiter. No one liked what he saw. “[We] found a fall of about ten feet in twenty-five,” Sumner reported. “There is a nearly square rock in t
he middle of the stream about twenty-five by thirty feet, the top fifteen above the water. There are many smaller ones all the way across, placed in such a manner that the fall is broken into steps, two on the east side, three on the west.”

  They were in a chasm they had named Red Canyon, in honor of the red sandstone walls that soared anywhere from a thousand to two thousand feet above the river. Powell had been warned about these rapids; they were the ones he had been told about the previous spring by the Indian who had painted a word picture of roaring waves and bucking canoes and rocks that were “heap, heap high.” The rapid in front of them confirmed that description. As miserable as it would be to carry the supplies and line the boats here, where there was no decent land route, no one even suggested they try to run the rapid.

  The lining strategy was born of desperation, as if house movers who needed to transport a safe ended up tying ropes to it and pushing it down the stairs. (Today, lining is still dreaded, although techniques have improved.) First, the boats were unloaded. Then, one boat at a time, a long rope was attached to the boat’s stern. Five or six men on the shore grabbed that stern line. A second line was attached to the bow and tied off downstream, well below the fall. Next came the critical move—the half dozen men clutching the stern line with all their strength did their best to ease the boat over the fall, while others in the crew stood on the sharp rocks along the river’s edge, armed with oars, poised to ward off the boat if it careened into the rocks. When the river overpowered the men on the stern line and tore the rope from their hands, the boat shot over the fall. Now it was up to the men stationed downstream to reel in the runaway craft by taking up the slack in the bowline, as if our housemovers had to snag the safe tumbling down the stairs before it crashed through the front door.