The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (26 page)

C
rystal spent the next several years merrily clobbering every kind of boat at every conceivable level of water. But unlike another major hellbender about eighty miles downstream that was also giving everybody fits, Crystal had riddles with answers. Untangling its lines and solving its many problems required ugly trial and error, but by the early seventies, almost every outfitter in the canyon had managed to more or less figure out what needed to be done. The one glaring exception to this trend was Litton’s platoon of dorymen.

For anyone in a tiny wooden boat, Crystal seemed utterly insoluble. When the water was low, there was no surefire way to avoid the rocks. When the river ran high, the giant haystacks flipped the boats over like hot tortillas on a griddle. The dorymen were still trying to find an answer to these challenges when Litton found himself standing on the scouting terrace at Mile 98 on a blistering June afternoon in the summer of 1970 with a group of five dories and a
baggage raft. Scratching his head, he considered the backbreaking prospect of a portage—the only guaranteed method of preventing Crystal from chewing through the boats and ejecting them like the spent cartridges on a machine gun—and decided he wanted no part of it.
“We’re not going to carry these boats around,” he declared, “even if I have to row this thing myself.”

The first dory he took through was sucked straight into the Big Hole, dragged upside down along the side of the Rock Garden, and spit through the tail waves while Litton trailed behind in the water, clinging to the stern line, which he managed to fling around a rock at the very bottom of Thank God Eddy. He anchored the shattered boat in the shallows, hiked up the right shoreline, seized hold of the second craft, and put her through a similar sequence of shocking crashes that sheared off her hatch lids and shattered her oars. This time he wound up on the left bank, which meant that after tying up the boat he now had to jump back into the water and swim across the river. Fifteen minutes later he emerged, soaking wet and out of breath, staggered past his crew, and clambered aboard the third boat with a young guide named Ned Andrews, who said he wanted to help—an impulse that left Litton wondering about Andrews’s sanity. The results were the same.

After this third pounding, Litton was steeling himself to head back upstream to deal with the fourth boat when a guide named Ron Hayes, who couldn’t bear to watch Litton being sent through Crystal’s wash cycle a fourth time, took off with two passengers. When Hayes crested the rapid’s main wave, his dory stood vertically on end, and Hayes was sent careening backward, out of the cockpit and toward the stern. The two passengers in the bow saved him from being dumped into the river by grabbing his ankles and hauling him back into his oar station. The shift in weight propelled them over the top, and Hayes slammed his oars back into their locks just in time to steer them clear of the Rock Garden.

That left only two guides, Curt Chang and John Blaustein, standing at the top of the rapid next to the
Music Temple
, along with a baggage boatman named Charlie Stern.

“So, do you want to hike down, or do you want to ride through with me?” Chang asked Blaustein.

“What are the chances of another flip?” quipped Blaustein as he climbed aboard the
Music Temple
.

Chang pulled into the current, followed closely by Stern in the baggage raft. Both boats promptly turned upside down, and Stern was washed all the way to Tuna Rapid, almost a mile downstream, before he finally made it to shore. Hayes’s boat was the only one that made it through intact on what would henceforth be referred to as “that miserable dog-day at Crystal.”

The damage was so extensive that the dorymen were forced to spend the next two days patching the boats back together using every spare piece of plywood in their repair kits and several lengths of driftwood that they cadged from the shoreline. On the second morning of repair work, Litton was patching a hole using a scrap of plywood and a batch of homemade glue he’d somehow concocted with a box of Bisquick, the instant baking mix. To speed up the drying, he decided to place a hot frying pan on the chine and wound up compounding their problems by setting the dory on fire.

So it went. By the end of that summer, every doryman in the company was convinced that Crystal was an implacable adversary with whom they were at war. That fall, Litton grumbled that it might not be a bad idea for the Park Service to send in a demolition team with a couple of boxes of dynamite and blast a fish ladder down the right side of the rapid so the boats could be gently lowered through.

“We really could do without it,” he would bark whenever the subject of Crystal came up. “I don’t think it’s a necessary rapid.”

I
ronically, though, Crystal
was
a necessary rapid. Because it was this stretch of white water more than any other that was responsible for transforming the dorymen from a band of beleaguered yahoos into a squadron of crack oarsmen who came to regard rowing wooden boats through the canyon as a form of art, an enterprise imbued—at least in their own minds—with all the drama and emotional intensity of a Beethoven symphony or a dance by Balanchine.

Litton had by now assembled a corps of about twenty guides, a dozen of whom were regulars, and each of them loved everything about their job except for the execrable pay and that the boss still insisted on policing the garbage cans. They were now divided into two main crews, each of which had a permanent leader who called all the shots about how far they ran each day, where they camped at night, and the order in which they tackled the rapids. The first team was led by
Regan Dale, who had signed on with a motor company
in the spring of 1971, then two years later took a pay cut to go work for Litton when he realized that rowing a dory was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. The second crew was led by Wally Rist, a high school teacher from St. Louis who lived in Phoenix and was something of a whiz at math.

Under Crystal’s harsh tutorials, both of these trip leaders—or TLs, as they were called on the river—achieved levels of finesse and competency that Litton himself couldn’t be bothered to cultivate. Dale, a laconic skipper who never said a word more than he needed to, would build a reputation as a chilly minimalist
whose brevity with language was eloquently mirrored in his rowing style. He came to understand current so well—where it was heading (often tricky and sometimes invisible), where it actually
wanted
to go (not always the same thing), and where he himself needed to be (a separate trajectory that could waft imperiously above the first two calculations)—that he was reputed to take the fewest number of oar strokes of any boatman on the river.

Rist, on the other hand, would become perhaps the premier scholar of dam fluctuations—the daily ebb and flow of Glen’s discharges that were dictated by the electricity demands in places such as Phoenix and Las Vegas—which played havoc with the river by boosting the flow from 3,000 to 30,000 cfs, then ratcheting it back down again in the space of twelve hours. As an added complication, those discharges proceeded downstream at speeds that could vary between four and six miles per hour. The deeper you were in the canyon, the harder it became to calculate how long the ebbs and the surges would take to reach you. This turned the river corridor into a bizarre version of a marine ecosystem whose tides varied according to how many miles downstream from the dam you were.
Rist set out to master these nuances, and he succeeded magnificently.

Applying themselves to their respective specialties, Dale and Rist became absurdly good at what they did, and they added value to their achievements by passing knowledge and skills along to their subordinates. During the scouts, they permitted everyone to take in the contours of whatever rapid they were surveying, then conducted impromptu lectures that usually began with one of them declaring,
Okay, all you new guys, listen up.
After an exhaustive review of the hydraulics feature and a graphic description of what would happen if each doryman failed to read the current correctly, these tutorials would conclude with an announcement of the running order: who would lead, who would chase the leader, who would run sweep, and who would be placed in the safety slots in the middle. Under this instruction, the crews gradually began to get a handle on their runs—memorizing the lines, codifying the marker rocks that would prevent them from getting lost in the chaos, rehearsing the sequence of moves that would see them through. As their understanding deepened, they noticed a commensurate improvement in performance. Their skills sharpened, the mistakes they committed became less frequent, the quality of their oarsmanship grew ever more refined.

Around this point, everyone realized that the holiest grail they could pursue would be for one of them to pull off an entire run—not merely skating through Crystal but threading through the entire canyon from top to bottom—without suffering a single crash, flip, or ding. There is some confusion about who
first achieved this feat, but when the moment finally arrived, it was deemed so miraculous that it was commemorated by the scrawling of the words
Golden Trip!
on the inside cover of the boatman’s right cross-hatch in Magic Marker. Within a few seasons, the best of the dorymen were nailing one or two of these runs every summer. By the midseventies, the hatch lids of almost every boat in the fleet were filled with golden-trip markers.

With Dale and Rist running the show, and the rest of Litton’s guide corps gradually getting the hang of the river, the boss no longer felt he needed to lead every trip himself. Instead, he kept tabs on things with his airplane. He’d load up the passenger seats of his Cessna with blocks of ice and cases of Schaefer beer, and then in a maneuver borrowed from his World War II days, he’d barnstorm through the canyon at two hundred miles an hour, buzzing the tops of the tamarisk trees and looking for his camps.
“We’d hear his approach and it’d be like—
here he comes, everybody run
!” recalls Andre Potochnik, a veteran of this era. “Pedal-to-the-metal Martin. He’d swoop in, strafe us with supplies, then roar off to Washington to lobby for the redwoods or whatever other wilderness issue he was fighting at the time.”

Although this meant that Litton was no longer as much of a direct presence inside the canyon, some things didn’t change, especially when it came to his view of the baloney boats. He continued to disparage them at every opportunity—and thanks to his behavior, most of the motor and raft companies continued to regard the dorymen as insufferable elitists. But now a new twist began to emerge, one that changed the dynamic in an unexpected manner. Whenever Litton returned to the canyon to participate in a river trip, guides who worked for other outfitters were pulling alongside him in the eddies, or strolling over to his camp at night, and beseeching him for a job.
“They’d come up to me with these big cow-eyes and ask if there was any chance they could get on with us,” he would later recall. “I can’t imagine why, but I guess they admired what we were doing.” Perhaps that was part of their motivation. But the driving force behind those entreaties was that scarcely a boatman in the canyon didn’t dream of one day strapping himself into the driver’s seat of a dory.

By the middle of the 1970s, Litton’s crew perceived themselves to be perched like catbirds on the pinnacle of the unique and hidden world of white water at the bottom of the canyon. Even those who were convinced that the dorymen were a detestable pack of prima donnas almost always felt a stab of jealousy. The dorymen had their own valets—an entourage of earnest baggage boatmen who attended to the niggling details of setting up camp each night and then breaking it down the following morning, paying their dues in the hopes of one day piloting a dory of their own. The dorymen also had their own cooks—all women, each harboring a fantasy that one day Litton might be persuaded
to set aside his chauvinism and allow her to row.
^I
In short, the dorymen had forged themselves into one of the most rarefied fraternities in all of the outdoors: a society of tanned swashbucklers who were paid to live and work aboard the world’s sweetest fleet of rowboats in the heart of America’s most famous national park. And although they were by no means universally loved by their rivals, they were the envy of the canyon.