The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (24 page)

Fortunately, Stanton and his men were able to dodge this cascade and it passed them by. “After a few minutes,” he wrote, “the rain soon ceased and the whole canyon resumed its deathlike stillness except for the noise of the little stream of muddy water running in the creek bed at our feet.”

Others have not been so lucky. Seventy-five years later, in August of 1963, Roger Clubb was hiking with his eight-year-old son, Roger Jr., along the Bright Angel Trail on the opposite side of the canyon from Stanton’s near miss. They had stopped for lunch under the cottonwood trees at Indian Gardens, an oasis
next to Garden Creek located about halfway between the South Rim and the river, when they were caught in a brief downpour. After the rain abated, Clubb was leading his son back toward the South Rim when he heard a deep rumble, looked up the trail, and spotted a ten-foot-high wall of water and mud surging downhill through the Garden Creek drainage.

Clubb had several seconds to scramble out of the way by clambering up the slope next to the trail. But when he turned to warn his son, he realized that Roger Jr. had lagged behind and was now a few dozen yards downstream, plodding along directly in the path of the debris flow. Instead of climbing to safety, Clubb turned and began sprinting through the streambed in the hope of snatching up his boy before the flow hit.

What happened next is described by Michael Ghiglieri and Tom Myers in
Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon
, a comprehensive analysis of more than six hundred fatalities that have taken place inside the canyon during the past 150 years. According to several hikers who witnessed Clubb’s desperate race, he never stood a chance, despite the fact that
“he was running as wildly as any human being could.” The slurry of mud and rocks engulfed the father first, then the boy. Both disappeared instantly. Searchers later found Clubb’s body about four hundred yards downstream and nearly buried by debris, but it took another five days to find Roger Jr. He was wedged beneath a deposit of mud and rocks less than a hundred yards from where his father lay.

T
hese two events—Stanton’s narrow escape and Roger Clubb’s mad dash to save his son—bracket a critical period in the understanding of what was taking place during the storm of 1966. In Stanton’s day, this kind of landslide didn’t even have a name, perhaps because the event was so at odds with the way everyone thought geology worked.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, there were two schools of thought on the mechanism of geomorphic change: “catastrophists,” who argued that the earth was shaped by abrupt, cataclysmic events like Noah’s flood; and “uniformitarians,” who believed that geological changes unfolded at a glacial pace over immense spans of time. For centuries, the catastrophists had enjoyed the upper hand, in part because religious scholars in Europe declared that the earth was less than seven thousand years old.
^I
During the scientific advances of the eighteenth century, however, researchers of all stripes began stumbling upon compelling evidence that the age of the planet was measured not in thousands
of years but rather in hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of years. By the end of the nineteenth century,
the gradualists had not only won this long-running debate, they had prevailed so decisively that the pendulum was pushed too far in the other direction.

Up through the first half of the twentieth century, most tourists who contemplated the walls of the Grand Canyon
assumed that this landscape was shaped slowly and gradually over tens of millions of years. This is true, but only in the broadest sense—which is to say, by stretching the process out on the scale of deep time. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, the geologic credo was further refined and scientists began to appreciate that the steady march of geomorphic change is punctuated by catastrophic bursts: brief moments of exceptionally brutal violence in which things happen very quickly indeed. In the canyon, these bursts take the form of debris flows.

In just a few minutes, a debris flow can achieve speeds that only the most extreme flash food can match, and it is capable of moving
objects that none but the largest floods could ever dislodge. Geologists who have studied debris flows in mountain ranges and canyon systems all over the world are now convinced that they constitute one of the signature events of the Grand Canyon. They are, in a sense, the canyon’s architects and civil engineers. The river may have carved the main corridor of the gorge, but the debris flows have expanded its width, scribed its profile, and molded the castellated formations that fill the canyon’s interior.

In addition, debris flows are responsible for one other thing. Among the 160 white-water rapids laced like beads on a necklace between Lee’s Ferry and Lake Mead, almost every one of them owes its existence to the kind of event that was triggered during the storm that took place in the first week of December 1966.

S
ometime between Saturday night and Wednesday morning,
nearly a hundred separate debris flows were touched off inside eleven creeks and drainages all along the North Rim. Some of these avalanches were fluid and fast; others were gelatinous and slow. Most lost their momentum quickly and petered to a halt less than half a mile from where they started. But at least nine of them went considerably farther, and two managed to punch all the way from the rim to the river at the bottom of the canyon.

The larger of this pair began at the head of a drainage located about a dozen miles southwest of the park’s entrance station, along a remote and little-used section of the North Rim known as Dragon Creek. Here, the ground drops off steeply, falling more than a thousand feet in a series of stairsteps that conclude
at the base of the Hindu Amphitheater, a hanging subcanyon cut into the north wall directly to the west of the Bright Angel Creek drainage.
The amphitheater consists of two main drainage streams—Crystal Creek and Dragon Creek—that are separated by a towering, razor-backed ridge known as the Dragon. Lacking eyewitness reports,
a group of six scientists with the US Geological Survey have analyzed debris within this area and pieced together a reasonably detailed scenario of what took place.

Once over the rim, the water cascaded into a number of side canyons and tributary gorges, each channel funneling its discharge into a larger gully, forming a network of rivulets that mirrored the way the twigs of a tree are connected to its trunk. As the deluge intensified, the flow expanded until the heads of both creeks pounding into the softer layers of shale directly below the rim. As these slopes gave way, tons of loose soil, greased with an infusion of micaceous minerals, formed a roiling brown tide that raced through Dragon Creek, picking up additional loads of debris and mud as tributaries poured in from both sides. As this half-solid, half-fluid torrent intensified, it started biting off clumps of sediment and snatching up boulders with each twist and turn. Soon the sides of the channels were giving way, dumping even larger clumps of dirt and even heavier boulders into the mix.

By now, the cascade looked like chocolate-colored cement, and as it tore downhill, this slithering mass began to come alive in a manner that was both surreal and grotesque. The surface was agitated and boiling, like the lava flow from a volcano, but on fast-forward. It also developed some impressive hydraulic features, albeit nothing like what one might encounter on a normal river. When the torrent rounded a bend, for example,
it generated so much centrifugal force that the surface actually tilted so that the height of the flow on the outside bend was twelve feet higher than on the inside bend, resembling the banked turn of a high-speed racetrack. Meanwhile, sections of cliffs were unbolting from the sides of the subcanyon, peeling away and shattering to pieces like icebergs calving off the terminal end of a glacier.

Deep inside the Hindu Amphitheater, Dragon Creek intersects with a smaller tributary named Milk Creek. About a mile and a half upstream from this confluence point, the roaring debris flow did something unusual.

Just above the juncture between the two creeks lay the ruins of a mescal pit, a shallow depression lined with stones used by prehistoric Anasazi Pueblo Indians, who inhabited the canyon prior to 1150, to roast the hearts of the agave plants that they harvested in these tributaries. The Anasazi were well aware of the danger posed by flash floods and debris flows, and they took pains to build their mescal pits in protected places—in this case, several dozen vertical feet above the streambed on the right side of Dragon Creek. This pit had been
left undisturbed since the Anasazi had abandoned the canyon.
The debris flow obliterated it.

By now, the body of this raging brown serpent was snapping back and forth between the walls, lashing at the terraces on either side and flinging spatters of mud dozens of feet into the air. As it thundered through Dragon Creek toward yet another confluence with Crystal Creek,
it was now sixty feet wide, forty-four feet deep, and flowing at somewhere between 9,200 and 14,000 cfs—
almost thirty dump-truck loads of material
rushing past each second. This was close to the average annual rate of the Colorado itself. In effect, a cataract of liquidized mud and rock comparable to the size of the Colorado was now hurtling down Crystal Creek on a collision course with the main-stem river.

W
hen
the debris flow burst from the mouth of the Crystal Creek drainage at the bottom of the canyon, it was probably traveling faster than a human being could run, but not in a smooth, continuous rush. Instead, it pulsed and throbbed in a series of ebbs and surges that resembled the peristaltic heaves that take place inside the gut.
^II
The sound it made was unearthly—a roar that can best be likened to the noise a diesel locomotive pulling a train of coal cars might make if it derailed and plunged over a bridge.

All of that would have appeared bizarre. But the feature that would have been most surreal, had anyone been there to witness it, was what was riding on the surface of the creature that crashed from the mouth of Crystal Canyon. Suspended on its dark and oily back were boulders the size of refrigerators and small automobiles. The largest of these objects was fourteen feet in diameter, and in apparent defiance of any law of physics, they all bobbed like corks, exhibiting a buoyancy and lightness totally at odds with their weight, with
the heaviest of them being nearly fifty tons.

The moment this avalanche emerged from the narrow confines of the Crystal Creek drainage, the edges spread out laterally and began to decelerate. Even so, the central mass of debris easily plowed straight over the boulder-studded delta at the mouth of the drainage and slammed into the Colorado at Mile 98 with tremendous force. The impact was explosive, generating enormous waves and sending spray high into the air while literally bulldozing the current toward the south wall of the canyon, thereby creating a sharp bottleneck. One moment,
the river was 280 feet wide, nearly the length of a football field.
Seconds later, it was constricted to a channel of about 55 feet, the width of a street in New York City.

This was hardly the first time something like this had happened. On average, a drainage such as Crystal Creek produces a debris flow once or twice a century. Nevertheless, the event was singular in several respects. It was the first major debris flow to be extensively documented in the scientific literature on hydrology and geomorphology. It created the largest geomorphic channel change in the recorded history of the canyon. But perhaps the most sobering element was that mescal pit.