The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (30 page)

In any case, as Grua prepared to enter his third season with Litton’s company, the scattered forces whirling inside his heart—the moralism and the dogma, the testing and the sense of ownership—converged into a single beam of resolve that drove him to do something no one had ever before done.

O
ne odd aspect of the Grand Canyon was that, although dozens of trails led into and out of the abyss from the rims—many of which followed pathways originally developed by the Anasazi—there was not a single route on either side of the river that enabled a person to walk along the length of the canyon from Lee’s Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs. Much of the shoreline was too convoluted to permit efficient trekking, and significant reaches had no shoreline at all because the cliffs dropped directly into the river. Anyone hoping to forge such a path would thus confront the ordeal of repeatedly descending and ascending through many different layers of rock to link together a network of passable ledges. As a further problem, one could not simply cruise along the biggest and most convenient terraces because they were located many hundreds of feet above the river, and therefore offered almost no access to drinking water.

Despite the obstacles, by the 1960s a handful of hiking fanatics had slowly begun to piece this puzzle together and force a line that ran the entire distance. The foremost expert, who did more work than anyone else, was
Harvey Butchart, a mathematician from Flagstaff, who was also a friend of Grua’s. Butchart was closing in on this elusive goal in 1968 when, to everyone’s surprise, a popular book called
The Man Who Walked Through Time
was published by Colin Fletcher, an ex-British-marine commando who was also an avid backpacker. The jacket of Fletcher’s book identified him as
“the first man ever to have walked through the entire length of the Grand Canyon.”

When Grua picked up Fletcher’s book and read it during one of his first river trips, he scoffed with disbelief. Fletcher was a fine writer, but his claim was considerably less impressive than it seemed. When he conducted his transect, in 1963, Grand Canyon National Park stopped far short of encompassing the entire abyss. If you were floating down the river during those years, you would not actually enter the park until you reached a rapid called Nankoweap, nearly sixty miles downstream from Lee’s Ferry, and you would exit the park downstream at a spot known as Havasu, which was almost 120 miles above the Grand Wash Cliffs. The park’s boundaries thus bore no relationship to the true size and scope of the canyon.

Fletcher hadn’t lied about what he had done, which was to conduct a solo backpacking trip along the length of the river corridor that was contained within Grand Canyon National Park. But he didn’t exactly go out of his way to advertise that he had covered considerably less than half the length of the actual canyon. Moreover, seven years after the book’s publication, when the boundaries of the park were expanded by an act of Congress to include almost the entire canyon at river level, Fletcher’s claim was rendered moot. This was obvious to everyone on the river. But only Grua decided to do something about it.

“Somebody else needs to do it and do it right,” he announced to a friend. And to no one’s surprise, Grua had some rather strong ideas about the difference between doing it right and doing it wrong.

First, he declared, you had to start at the top and go to the bottom, walking
with
the river instead of against it; otherwise, you were doing the thing “backwards.” Second, you had to pick either the north or south shoreline, and then you had stick to that side of the river the entire way. (Tracking back and forth across the Colorado like an addled beaver was, in Grua’s view, “cheating.”) Also, it was essential to conduct the hike
lightly
, which meant traveling with a minimal amount of gear and carrying as little weight as possible. Grua wasn’t sure what the exact weight parameters were, but he had no doubt that Fletcher’s sixty-pound backpack violated this standard, and that he was therefore guilty of poor style.

All of those points were arbitrary, and one can all too easily imagine Grua changing his mind and passionately arguing the opposite point of view on any of these criteria. But everyone could recognize the truth of the final and most important element. To be the first person to truly walk the entire length of the Grand Canyon, you had to do the whole damn thing—all 277 miles—from Lee’s Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs.

This was considerably more difficult than what Fletcher had pulled off, and length was only a small part of the reason. The most vexing problem was figuring out how to piece together a chain of exceptionally narrow ledges that would
enable a person to traverse the high cliffs that lay downstream of Havasu, the point where Fletcher had started his hike.

The challenge essentially boiled down to geology. The hardest and most resistant rock strata—the limestones, sandstones, and schists—tended to form vertical cliff faces that were all but impassable. So the key lay in charting a route that would cut across the layers of shale that lay closest to the river, many of which were tilted and warped by fault lines. To solve this interlocked series of problems, you needed to be able to read the rock almost as well as the dorymen could read the water. In this respect, geology was a bit like hydraulics. It all came down to finding your line.

Grua started scoping out his route during his first season on the river, surveying the walls from the deck of his motor rig, plotting where he would go, and keeping careful notes on questionable spots that would require further study. In the areas where he was unable to conduct a proper evaluation of the terrain from his boat, he would make some excuse to pull over—announcing that it was time to eat lunch or for everyone to take a nap—then dash off on an inspection tour. In this manner, he was able to bring a large portion of the river corridor into alignment, although one segment had him completely stumped.

The stretch of river just downstream of Havasu featured a long line of cliffs that shot directly out of the river and soared upward at an eighty-five-degree angle for several hundred feet. Here, the rock—consisting of two separate layers of limestone known as the Muav and the Redwall—was so resistant to erosion that there wasn’t a single breach. After several seasons, Grua was still looking for a way past those escarpments. Then one autumn, he gazed up and spotted a family of bighorn sheep carefully picking its way across the face of the cliffs about 150 feet above the river. When he climbed up to confirm what he had seen, he spotted a ledge so narrow it was all but invisible, and he realized that the sheep had handed him the answer to his problem.

Convinced that he was now ready to embark, he was busy gathering together his gear in the fall of 1971 when he made a decision he would swiftly come to regret. At this point, Grua had taken a passionate dislike to modern footwear and was spending most of his days running around the bottom of the canyon in his bare feet. Although he didn’t necessarily think it would be a good idea to attempt a full traverse without any shoes whatsoever, he liked the notion of trying to pull it off wearing moccasins.

Having purchased three pairs, he started along the south side of the river at Lee’s Ferry that November. Within the first eight miles, he discovered that he had worn several holes in his first set of moccasins. By the time he reached Nautiloid Canyon, a tributary that enters the river at Mile 35, the holes had expanded, and when he accidentally stepped on a prickly pear cactus, the spikes
penetrated deep into the ball of his right foot. Loath to give up, he stubbornly continued hobbling downstream. But a few days later, when he reached Eminence Break, a fault line at Mile 44, infection had set in. Out of options, he had to limp down to the edge of the river, stick out his thumb, and hitch a ride downstream to Lake Mead with a passing motor rig.

So much for teaching a lesson to Colin Fletcher.

T
he following spring, Grua joined Litton’s company and entered a period of such intense learning and change that a full five years would pass before he was able to take another crack at the through-hike. But when the opportunity finally presented itself, he left nothing to chance. In the autumn of 1976, he began mixing up batches of homemade gorp and custom-blended dried soups in his kitchen, then funneling them into five-gallon honey jars. Later that winter, he selected six points along his intended hike route, climbed up to each of them from the river, and established a line of food caches.

He departed on the twenty-ninth of February, toting a small North Face rucksack with an interior frame and clad in a pair of sturdy, high-topped work boots with thick Vibram soles. The load on his back was astonishingly light—the weight of the pack would never exceed thirty pounds—and he hauled no more than a gallon of water at one time, even along those stretches where he was cut off from the river. (For drinking water, he would gamble on his ability to sniff out springs or to sip from potholes—cup-shaped indentations in nonporous layers of rock that often contain small pools of rainwater, as well as thriving colonies of tadpoles and copepods.) He carried little in the way of clothing and didn’t even bother to bring along an extra pair of socks.

His daily routine was spartan. He would awaken early, well before it was light, make a fire, and linger for a few minutes to enjoy the predawn gloaming while stoking a cup of instant coffee and a bowl of granola mixed with water or dehydrated milk. He was usually on the trail by 5:00 a.m., then hiked all day without stopping, ranging up and down the layers as he moved downriver. Just before darkness set in, he would find a place to camp, boil some more water to brew up a batch of soup, drift off to sleep, and then restart his engines first thing the following morning. This ritual remained largely unchanged, except that the deeper he penetrated into March, the longer the days got, which meant he could spend more hours hiking between dawn and sunset.

Every five or six days he reached a spot where he had stashed one of his honey jars, and replenished his food supply while exchanging the socks he was wearing for a fresh pair (which had been wedged in with the food). When he set off again, he would leave behind the empty jar and a pair of stinky socks. In
this manner, he covered between fifteen and twenty miles a day, a pace that is punishing to sustain even on terrain where there is a trail. On many days, he covered closer to twenty-five or even thirty miles.

It was 277
river
miles from Lee’s Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs, but the actual walking distance was far greater. Grua wasn’t sure of the precise length of the entire traverse, but with the constant detours—necessitated by the fact that the contour lines of a ledge often took him into deep recesses before looping outward and returning to the Colorado—the total distance was almost doubled. His food caches had been placed correctly in terms of distance, but the extra miles he was covering meant he was burning an enormous number of calories and was constantly famished. By the middle of March, he was boosting his energy intake by stirring almonds and cashews into his soup at night.

Some sections were more difficult than others. Not surprisingly, the most dangerous ones lay along the limestone cliffs below Havasu, where the sheep had shown him the route. The bighorn ledges were extremely thin and often obscured by a steep wedge of scree that was as loose as ball bearings. The tracks of the bighorns told him that they kept to the outermost edge, which was often terrifying and demanded intense focus. Where the pathway was blocked by a dihedral—an L-shaped corner in the cliff—a gap would have to be jumped. The drop in those spots exceeded 150 feet, and a miss would have splattered him across the rocks at the bottom.

What buoyed his spirits was that along much of the route he found signs that the Anasazi had been there before him. Although there was never any sign of a continuous trail, he could see they had moved through the area in much the same manner as him—lightly, quietly, and without an audience. It was also evident that they had lingered, often for long stretches. There were mescal pits where they had roasted their agaves. There were granaries where they had stored their corn in clay pots, and they had carefully placed those pots inside alcoves that had been sealed with rocks and hand-plastered mud. When he looked closely at those lines of plaster, he could see the whorled prints of the men and women whose fingers had shaped the mud and nudged the stones into place some eight hundred or a thousand years before—and the intervening centuries seemed to snap together into an electric moment of connective immediacy when he gently placed his clubbed thumbs over those ancient imprints and noted, with wonder, that his hands were almost as small as theirs. It was a heady sensation to realize that he was at times moving in their actual footsteps.