Down the Great Unknown (31 page)

Glen Canyon's splendors continued unabated. “Past these towering monuments,” Powell wrote, “past these mounded billows of orange sandstone, past these oak set glens, past these fern decked alcoves, past these mural curves, we glide hour after hour, stopping now and then, as our attention is arrested by some new wonder.” (The descriptions in Powell's river diary, written that day rather than years later, were more spartan. “Many huge Mts. seen near river and back some distance, low walls giving a view.” Bradley dispensed with the scenery even more quickly than that, and Sumner found nothing noteworthy “excepting daily duckings and continuous fasting.”)

Late in the day on August 3, the men reached the Crossing of the Fathers, near the present-day Utah-Arizona border. Here, in 1776, a fourteen-man team of explorers led by Father Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Father Francisco Domínguez had forded the Colorado on their return to Santa Fe, having failed to find a new overland route from New Mexico to California. (The Powell expedition had crossed the Escalante party's path once before, hundreds of miles upstream in the Uinta Valley, where the Spanish explorers had forded the Green on the outbound leg of their journey.) The two missionaries became the first white men to describe great stretches of Colorado and Utah, but the experience almost cost them their lives. At one point in their six months' trek, they lost their way in the desert and nearly died of thirst; at another, they grew so hungry that they killed their mules for food; still later, they barely survived a blizzard.

The glories of Glen Canyon that Powell celebrated are vanished now, drowned under the lake formed by the immense Glen Canyon Dam. Like the dam, the lake is colossal—at 186 miles long and with a twisting shoreline longer than that between Seattle and San Diego, it is the second biggest man-made lake in the United States. (The biggest, Lake Mead, sits at the downstream end of the Grand Canyon, behind Hoover Dam.)

The dam took what had been a muddy, seasonal river that flooded in the spring snowmelt and trickled in the fall and transformed it into a dazzling blue lake shimmering in a red desert. Where once only a handful of rowboats and rafts ventured down a broad and winding river, today three and a half million visitors a year bring jet skis and motorboats and canoes and houseboats to a mirror-still lake.

Construction of the dam, a 710-foot-tall plug of white concrete, began in 1960. It is what is known as a “cash register dam,” because one of its several roles is to bring in revenue by selling electricity to Phoenix and other Southwestern cities. Glen Canyon is a curious setting for a massive dam—the Bureau of Reclamation had originally opposed the site because a dam would be anchored in Navajo sandstone, which is porous and crumbly. “The dark red rock,” one dam historian notes, “is actually solidified sand dunes.”

In the end, Glen Canyon Dam was built as a kind of massive afterthought. The great dam-building battles of the 1950s were fought farther north, in Dinosaur National Monument, which stretches across the Utah-Colorado border. The Bureau of Reclamation had proposed two dams for Dinosaur. In one of the major environmental clashes of the modern era, conservationists desperately fought the proposal. They opposed the dams in their own right, and they vehemently opposed putting dams in national parks or monuments.

After a tumultuous battle, the plans for Dinosaur's dams were shelved in 1956.
The two sides agreed
to a compromise that was seen at the time as a triumph for environmentalists—in return for not building dams in Dinosaur, the Bureau of Reclamation could continue unopposed with its plans for a dam at a remote and almost unexplored spot in the desert called Glen Canyon.

The lake behind Glen Canyon Dam began to fill in 1963. Eventually the rising waters drowned the last thirty-five miles of Cataract Canyon, hundreds of Anasazi ruins, and countless grottoes, stone bridges, and natural auditoriums like Marble Temple, where Walter Powell sang “Old Shady” for Powell's crew. The few environmentalists who had seen Glen Canyon cursed the dam. “To grasp the nature of the crime that was committed,” wrote Edward Abbey, “imagine the Taj Mahal or Chartres Cathedral buried in mud until only the spires remain visible.”

It happened, perhaps, because Glen Canyon had no constituency. Only a tiny number of people ever saw what Powell and his men had seen. Eliot Porter was one of the last. The Sierra Club published a book of his photographs as a kind of canyon epitaph; the book bore the apt title
The Place No One Knew
.

The much-praised, much-reviled lake formed by the dam is named Lake Powell. It is perhaps a tribute to Powell's tangled character that his admirers cannot agree on whether this is an honor or a desecration. Those admirers, moreover, have nothing but Powell in common; though they share a hero, they can barely refer to one another without spitting in contempt. Edward Abbey, for instance, placed Powell high in his pantheon and advocated the
bombing
of Glen Canyon Dam. “Probably no man-made artifact in all of human history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long as Glen Canyon Dam,” Abbey wrote.
But the Bureau of Reclamation
, which built the dam, bestowed Powell's name on the lake as the highest tribute it could offer.

Easy as the river seemed as their boats passed through Glen Canyon, the men were jumpy about the rapids still to come. Bradley suspected trouble ahead, although he tried to convince himself that his fears were unfounded. For seventy-five miles upstream of Cataract Canyon, he noted, the river had wandered “through a dark calm cañon which a child might sail in perfect safety.” Then had come the madness of Cataract, but that had been followed by the long, gentle stretch of river through Glen Canyon. Perhaps Cataract had been a malevolent fluke?

The expedition continued on its way, hoping for the best and fearing the worst. “Today the walls grow higher, and the cañon much narrower,” Powell noted on August 4. (This narrow spot would become the site of Glen Canyon Dam.) On they went, through “a perfect tornado with lightning and rain,” past canyon walls of creamy orange and bright vermilion and purple and chocolate brown and green and yellow. They advanced thirty-eight miles, a fine total for a single day, and made camp near the mouth of the Paria River.

The Paria marked the end of one canyon and the beginning of another.

No one knew it, but the expedition was poised on the brink of the Grand Canyon. “With some feeling of anxiety, we enter a new cañon this morning,” Powell wrote on August 5. “We have learned to closely observe the texture of the rock. In softer strata, we have a quiet river; in harder, we find rapids and falls. Below us are the limestones and hard sandstones, which we found in Cataract Cañon. This bodes toil and danger.”

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

GRAND CANYON

 

They had camped just upstream of the Paria River, at a spot where the Mormons maintained a ferry. Indians had long crossed the river here as well, and Powell's men were dismayed to see fresh moccasin prints. “We were in no condition for a fight or a foot race,” Sumner admitted.

The crossing is known today as Lee's Ferry, for John D. Lee, who was banished to this remote spot by Brigham Young in 1872. In his heyday a well-regarded member of the Mormon community—Lee was prosperous, handsome, a husband to nineteen wives, and an adopted son of Brigham Young himself—Lee ended up an outcast who met his death before a firing squad. In September 1857, Mormons and Indians had attacked a wagon train of “Gentiles” crossing southern Utah on their way to California. In what became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, some 120 men, women, and children were slaughtered. (The exact number of victims is unknown.) Only children too young to talk were spared. The Mormon leadership did its best to pin all the blame on the Indians, but when the truth began to seep out, Brigham Young assigned the role of scapegoat to his adopted son.
*
Lee, one of many who had participated in the massacre, was excommunicated from the church, assigned sole blame for the killings, and sent off
to the barren hideaway that his wife named Lonely Dell.

Lee's Ferry is now the put-in spot for every river trip through the Grand Canyon. Rapids and other landmarks along the Colorado are labeled by their mileage below Lee's Ferry, which itself is designated as Mile 0. “It is desolate enough to suit a lovesick poet,” Sumner remarked, and when the governor of Arizona Territory saw Lonely Dell, he remarked that he, too, would take up polygamy if banished to such a place. It is still desolate, but no one in search of solitude nowadays would venture to Lee's Ferry on an August morning. Easy access to the Colorado is a rare and valuable thing, and on summer days the boat landing at Lee's Ferry looks like a parking lot.

The boats—most of them inflatable rafts with an outfitter's name or logo brandished across a huge pontoon—sit at the water's edge, jostling one another like hippos. The boatmen, who will have worked through a blistering day and late into the night rigging their boats and checking their gear, do their best to deflect questions (“Are we gonna flip?”) and concentrate on last-minute chores. Vans shuttling back and forth from nearby motels unload groups of eager, nervous passengers. They step out of the air-conditioning and into the sunlight, blinking, and take a first, wary look at the river they will be living on for the next week or two. When all the passengers have arrived and packed their clothes and sleeping bags away into waterproof rubber bags, the boatmen introduce themselves and give a lesson on adjusting a life jacket. It must be cinched
tight
, so that surging, whirling currents cannot yank it over a helpless swimmer's head. The trip leaders inject a small joke or
two into their mandatory safety talks, and everyone laughs a little too loudly.

At nearly the same spot a century and a third ago, Powell's men were jumpy, too. “Just below our camp a fine rapid commences that is roaring pretty loud and I can see the white foam for quite half a mile,” Bradley wrote on August 4, 1869. “We have all learned to like mild rapids better than we do still water,” he went on. “But some of the party want them very mild.”

Bradley had fretted about the river and the weather almost from the day the trip began, and he had grown increasingly disdainful of Powell. But, until now, except for some muttering directed toward the hunters, he had never directed any criticism toward his fellow crewmen. Even here, he named no names. But Bradley's charge was clear enough—after seven hundred miles and uncounted rapids, some of the men were losing their nerve.

The next day he recanted a bit. “I said yesterday that we had learned to like rapids, but we came to two of them today that
suit us too well
. They are furious cataracts.” The men had risen early and run one long rapid and then a dozen more in the next eight miles. Forced to portage around a rapid with a fifteen-foot drop, they lost their grip on the
Emma Dean
and stove a hole in her side while trying to carry her over the rocks. They made emergency repairs, then another brief run, and then another portage that even Powell acknowledged to be “long and difficult.” By day's end, they had advanced twelve hard-won miles.

The men were beat. “Very hard work,” Sumner scribbled in his journal that evening, and night brought no relief. Rain poured down and the wind howled. “Am very tired tonight,” Bradley wrote. “Hope a good sleep will do me good but this constant wetting in fresh water and exposure to a parching sun begins to tell on all of us.” Bradley's discouragement was especially noteworthy because he had become the expedition's most enthusiastic white-water boatman.

August 6 was a short day but a grueling one. The day's first task was repairing the
Emma Dean
properly. Then came what seemed like endless rapids and endless portaging. By day's end, Sumner, who often enlivened his journal with sharp observations and wry asides, had only enough strength for a bare-bones summary. “Made 3 portages and ran 10 bad rapids in 10 1/2 miles. Walls of cañon 2000 ft. and increasing as we go. River about 50 yds. wide, rapids and whirlpools all the way.” Bradley expressed his by-now-customary hope. “Three times today we have had to carry everything around rapids,” he wrote, “but the last few miles we came tonight we found the rapids less furious and I hope we are out of the worst of this series.”

In one stretch where the river ran between vertical cliffs, the expedition found itself forced to repeat the difficult and dangerous “leapfrog” maneuver they had devised a few weeks earlier. The three boats formed a precarious line, the first anchored to a rock, the second farther downstream and hanging on a line attached to the first, and the third still farther downstream and hanging on a line attached to the second. Then the last boat found a spot where it could anchor itself, and the upstream boats cast themselves free. Like the “catcher” in a trapeze act, whose job is to grab the daring young men somersaulting through the air to him, the downstream boat had to reel in its runaway companions and pull them to safety. It was a maneuver whose only merit was that the alternatives were worse, but it worked. Powell described the procedure at length, but Bradley, as if eager to put the whole desperate episode behind him, cut more quickly to the bottom line. “We succeeded in landing all
our boats safely,” he noted, and left it at that.

For decades to come, the rapids that had provided Powell and his men such a hostile welcome to the Grand Canyon would prove dangerous, even deadly. The next man after Powell to lead an expedition down the Green and the Colorado was one Frank M. Brown, a large, cheery, impatient, and recklessly optimistic Denver businessman. In 1889, Brown organized the grandly named Denver, Colorado Canyon, and Pacific Railroad Company and named himself president. Brown had looked at Colorado's coal, and at southern California's growing population, and seen a fortune beckoning. He planned to build a railroad line to carry that coal to market; the tracks would follow the course of the Colorado (thus, efficiently, running downhill all the way) as it cut its way through Cataract Canyon, Glen Canyon, and Grand Canyon on its way from the Rockies to the Gulf of California. A final section of track would cut across southern California toward San Diego.