Down the Great Unknown (16 page)

Bradley was often surly, even without Powell's religious laxity to provoke him. On most topics, his grumbling was worth heeding. Now, without fanfare, the cantankerous ex-soldier set down a crucial observation. “Our rations are getting very sour from constant wetting and exposure to a hot sun,” he noted in the same day's journal. “I imagine we shall be sorry before the trip is up that we took no better care of them.”

Three men used the day off to go hunting. They returned, wrote Bradley, “as ever without game.” The problem, as Bradley diagnosed it, was that the would-be hunters made so much noise they scared off every animal for miles around. “They seem more like school-boys on a holiday than like men accustomed to live by the chase,” he groused, “but as I am no hunter myself I must not criticize others. Still as usual I have my opinion.” Sumner had an opinion, too, but his was more forgiving. “There is nothing in this part of the country but a few mountain sheep, and they stay where a squirrel could hardly climb.”

From the start of the trip, the men had complained about how maddeningly elusive these desert bighorn were. The men could see them from the river, standing in a line on a cliff ledge two or three hundred feet above the water, fat and tempting and as still as statues. But, as Walter Powell had noted a week or two before, whenever the boats pulled to shore the sheep “suddenly wheel[ed] around like a platoon of well-drilled soldiers,” and leaped, in unison, to an even more remote perch.

The next day, June 14, began slowly. The sun beat down, and the men took refuge in the shade of some box elders and sewed up their torn clothes or made themselves moccasins or played cards or read or napped. Powell and Oramel Howland climbed a two-thousand-foot cliff and scanned the view; then, as they had the day before, they did their best to reconstruct the maps that had been lost with the
No Name
. Bradley worked on his journal and then caulked his boat's bulkhead. Sumner repaired a broken barometer. Walter Powell, proud of his deep, rich voice, amused himself, and perhaps the others, with his favorite songs.

They had camped just above still another roaring and seemingly impassable rapid. “The prospects of success are not bright,” Bradley had written two days before, when he contemplated it from above, but when they finally got under way, they managed to run it uneventfully. Their reward was a new rapid “five times as bad as the last.”

Powell was too taken with the scenery to be much perturbed. “On the east side of the cañon, a vast amphitheater has been cut, with massive buttresses, and deep, dark alcoves, in which grow beautiful mosses and delicate ferns, while springs burst out from the further recesses, and wind, in silver threads, over floors of sand rock.” In the meantime, the men had gear to haul. Struggling over the rocks with the cargo was backbreaking work, as always, but it went better than the lining. “My boat was sunk while being lowered over the rapid this morning,” Bradley noted that evening, though it was not wrecked but only swamped. Bradley lost some books and photographs but managed to save his notes. He dried them and decided that from here on, for safety's sake, he would carry them in his hat.

The river grew steadily worse. “Here we have three falls in close succession,” Powell wrote blandly, as if this were nothing out of the ordinary. “At the first, the water is compressed into a very narrow channel, against the right-hand cliff, and falls fifteen feet in ten yards; at the second, we have a broad sheet of water, tumbling down twenty feet over a group of rocks that thrust their dark heads through the foaming waters. The third is a broken fall, or short, abrupt rapid, where the water makes a descent of more than twenty feet among huge, fallen fragments of the cliff.”

Bad as it looked, Triplet Falls, as Powell named it, was only a kind of appetizer for the diabolical main course to come. Today, professional boatmen regard both Triplet and Disaster Falls, upstream of it, as almost routine. That judgment is more a measure of how formidably skilled these men and women are than it is a statement about the rapids themselves. An amateur scouting the river from shore can hardly identify a path through Triplet, let alone imagine how he would coax a boat to follow it if he did find one. Pick up a stick and toss it into the river hoping for clues, and it bobs and twists until, suddenly and mysteriously, it dives toward the river bottom as if pulled by an unseen hand. The prospects for a boat seem just as bleak. “The main current is into the cliff,” one modern-day writer observes, “and a boat pushed into this wall . . . flips in a second. The main push of the current bounces off the wall and shoots between it and a rock, forming a gateway that is just wide
enough to wedge a boat but not let it through.”

And that is only the first part of the first rapid, a mere warm-up. Powell never even thought of running Triplet Falls. “We make a portage around the first; past the second and third we let down with lines.”

It would be hard to devise a sentence that described more work in fewer words. “Lining a boat is horrible, horrible work,” says Michael Ghiglieri, a commercial boatman with decades of experience in the Grand Canyon and on rivers around the world. “You always think, ‘Gee, that wouldn't be so bad, you'd just sort of push the boat out into the current and hang on to the ropes, and every once in a while if it didn't go where you wanted, you'd give it another push.' But it never works that nicely.”

Ghiglieri pauses for a moment to recall exactly how things go wrong. “The boat's always getting wedged between boulders, or it does a kind of slingshot thing where it drifts out and then slams back against the rocks.” His voice picks up speed, as if running a rapid itself. “Or it takes off downstream and there's somebody running along the shore holding on to a rope but they can't keep up and they're already holding the
end
of the rope so there's no slack to let out, and they trip and fall on their face on a boulder.”

The thought of falling sets Ghiglieri off on a related tack. Having studied the Powell expedition and rowed the Grand Canyon more than a hundred times, he talks about Powell's boatmen as if he and they are old pals who have shared many a beer at the end of a long day on the river. “The thing to remember,” he says, “is the sheer pain involved. People hear ‘portaging' and ‘lining' and they think of drudgery, but it's worse than drudgery. These guys were getting beat up and falling down and wrecking their feet—they were either barefoot or wearing really bad, worn-out shoes, with the soles flopping and the stitches coming out, because the leather couldn't take being wet all the time.

“So they're walking around boulders, it's muddy and slippery, they can't see the bottom, every step is difficult because who knows what's underneath that water, and they're yanking ropes and getting knocked over. All these guys got hurt—somebody
always
gets hurt. Maybe they didn't get crippled for life, but they got hurt.
And
, on top of all that, it's a tremendous amount of work.”

One of the earliest accounts of a white-water trip, from an 1872 diary, describes river runners on the Colorado discovering precisely those hardships. “The boat at times will be wedged in between the rocks while we are tugging and pulling away; suddenly away she will go, dragging us after her, holding on for dear life. . . . ‘Tis a wonder that some of us have not had a leg or two broken. All of us wear horrible scars from our knees downward to remind us of the days when we made portages.”

Ghiglieri neglected mentioning still another hazard. One of the great dangers in white water is “foot entrapment.” Someone falls out of a boat and, instinctively, tries to stand up and scramble to shore. If his foot gets wedged under a rock or caught between rocks, he can be trapped and, in moments, forced underwater by the current, held there helpless, and drowned. It can happen fast, and not only in fierce rapids or mighty rivers. On a canoe trip in 1972 on a fairly calm stretch of the Green, the future writer Anne Fadiman (then an eighteen-year-old) saw a companion fall from his boat into waist-deep water. The young man stood up, near a wave just downstream from a large rock, but one foot was caught between two rocks. Fadiman and her fellow novices tried to reach him but failed. “Thirty seconds passed, maybe a minute. Then we saw the standing wave bend Gary's body forward at the waist, push his face underwater, stretch his arms in front of him, and slip his orange life jacket off his
shoulders. The life jacket lingered for a moment before it floated downstream, its long white straps twisting in the current. His shirtless torso was pale and undulating, and it changed shape as hills and valleys of water flowed over him, altering the curve of the liquid lens through which we watched him.”

If they could not pull Gary to safety, his companions hoped, at least they could hold him upright in the river until help arrived. “But the Green River was flowing at nearly three thousand cubic feet—about ninety tons—per second. At that rate, water can wrap a canoe around a boulder like tinfoil. Water can uproot a tree. Water can squeeze the air out of a boy's lungs, undo knots, drag off a life jacket, lever a boot so tightly into the riverbed that even if we had had ropes—the ropes that were in the packs that were in the trucks—we could never have budged him.” Gary drowned.

On the Colorado, a flow of a mere three thousand cubic feet per second would count as barely a trickle. A flow ten times that rate, thirty thousand cubic feet per second, is only middling. Before the dams, the spring floods routinely reached one hundred thousand cubic feet per second. The highest flow on record on the Colorado, in 1884, was three hundred thousand cubic feet per second. (The rising water submerged the official flood gauges, but a cat trapped in an apple tree served as a stand-in gauge.)

At most spots on the Green and Colorado, the river is so deep that a swimmer in midstream could not trap his foot if he wanted to. But for Powell's men, lining the boats often meant getting into the water along the shoreline and slipping and sliding over the rocks while wrestling with the boats and the current. Entrapment would have been a lurking hazard, although the men may never have known it, as if they were proceeding down an African river never having heard of crocodiles.

Powell's crew struggled through the three-part ordeal of Triplet Falls. Then came a brief break, a lull just long enough to permit a glimmer of hope that the worst was past. “We run down, three-quarters of a mile, on quiet water,” Powell wrote, “and land at the head of another fall.” This one dwarfed everything that had come before. “On examination, we find that there is an abrupt plunge of a few feet, and then the river tumbles, for half a mile, with a descent of a hundred feet, in a channel beset with great numbers of huge bowlders. This stretch of the river is named
Hell's Half-Mile
.”

The boulder-strewn rapid is still considered one of the most difficult in America, in part because it is so long that plotting a route seems impossible. Powell and the others had occasionally talked about mile-long rapids, but they had been speaking loosely. Here was the real thing—not a series of rapids in close succession but a seemingly endless stretch of white foam. When river runners swap stories about particular rapids, they tend to focus on a handful of landmarks—stay out of the eddy at the bottom right of Granite Rapid, say. No such tip sheet will do at Hell's Half Mile. One acclaimed river runner compared the task of memorizing the half-mile rapid to committing the entire score and all the singing roles of
Parsifal
to memory.

The challenge for Powell and his men was less intellectually demanding. They began by carrying the cargo to the foot of the falls. That was the easy part. “Then we commence letting down the boats,” Powell wrote. “We take two of them down in safety, but not without great difficulty; for, where such a vast body of water, rolling down an inclined plane, is broken into eddies and cross currents by rocks projecting from the cliffs and piles of boulders in the channel, it requires excessive labor and much care to prevent their being dashed against the rocks or breaking away.”

Then came the third boat. “We are letting down the last boat,” Powell wrote, “and, as she is set free, a wave turns her broadside down the stream . . . They haul on the line to bring the boat in, but the power of the current, striking obliquely against her, shoots her out into the middle of the river. The men have their hands burned with the friction of the passing line; the boat breaks away, and speeds, with great velocity, down the stream.”

The
Maid of the Cañon
vanished out of sight.

 

CHAPTER TEN

FIRE

 

“While letting the
Maid
down with ropes,” Sumner wrote that evening, “she got crossways with the waves and broke loose from the five men holding the line, and was off like a frightened horse. In drifting down she struck a rock that knocked her stern part to pieces.” The men, trying to coax the
Maid
around some rocks, had made the mistake of paying out too much line. The current had instantly snatched the boat for itself—a tug-of-war between five strong men and one angry river was not a fair fight—and flung it downstream.

The expedition had begun with four boats and had already lost one. If the loss of that first boat qualified as a disaster, it would be hard to find a word too strong for a second such loss. Sumner and Hawkins jumped into the
Emma Dean
and took off after the speeding runaway. The men were not hopeful, Powell least of all. “We gave up the
Maid of the Cañon
as lost,” he wrote.

But this time the always unpredictable river seemed content merely to tease the upstarts who had presumed to challenge it, like a boxer who sees a chance for a knockout blow but passes it up in order to emphasize his dominance of his flummoxed rival. After half a mile's frantic chase, Sumner and Hawkins found the
Maid of the Cañon
caught in an eddy, beaten up but still afloat and spinning placidly.