The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (48 page)

W
hen Martin Litton answered the telephone at his home in California, he and Grua were entering the eleventh year of a relationship that was, in ways both large and small, as turbulent and mercurial as the Colorado itself.

For Grua, Litton presented both a role model and a father figure. “He’s my hero,” Grua once told a friend.
“He basically raised me from a kid to where I am now, and I’ve got a lot of stuff to thank him for—he’s just like a dad to me.” In Grua’s eyes, Litton’s passion for the canyon, the river, and the dories were qualities to be admired and emulated. And in a more perfect story, those sentiments might well have laid a foundation for the type of bond that arises between fathers and sons. But in truth, Litton didn’t actively reciprocate Grua’s affections and often found his relentless young boatman rather annoying. Especially when it came to Grua’s habit of calling up Litton and keeping him on the phone for forty-five minutes while he rattled on about his latest pet project—endless monologues in which Grua explained how something had been
broken and then been fixed but hadn’t been fixed in exactly the right way and so he, Kenton, was now taking it upon himself to start the project over and make things even better than they were before. Eventually, Litton realized that Grua was using these calls as a pretext to talk, to share ideas, to solicit approval, and, worst of all, to
emote
—
which Litton found rather abhorrent.

One of Grua’s most remarkable attributes was his titanic obliviousness to how enervating these exchanges were for Litton, who had adopted a policy of immediately saying yes to whatever Grua was proposing, not only because it was so much easier than saying no but because it was also the most efficient way of getting Grua off his back. In this instance, however, the scheme that Grua had in mind was so bizarre that Litton found himself asking
why
—always a tactical mistake, because it opened the door for another of Grua’s relentless and impassioned arguments.

Kenton, you already
have
the record, Litton pointed out. Why in the world would you want to go and do the whole thing all over again?

With that,
Grua launched into a soliloquy about what a unique juncture in time this was, a grand confluence in which the capricious dynamics of the river and the incompetence of the engineers who had tried to harness it had merged to create an opportunity that would never again be seen. This was one of those moments that a man either recognized and seized or sat back, allowed to pass him by, and then spent the rest of his life wondering why he had failed to act—because the river would never again rise to this level. A level that no more than a dozen oarsmen in the history of Grand Canyon boating had witnessed and rowed. A level that not even John Wesley Powell had ever seen. Against all odds, the river had somehow gotten the upper hand—and now, with the help of the
Emerald Mile
, Grua had the chance not only to test himself against the ancestral power of that river but also to offer up a symbolic gesture of defiance against the dam that Litton hated so deeply and had fought so fiercely against. Surely his boss could see the value of that?

Litton sighed and agreed that he did.

Well, continued Grua, the river had soared to 70,000 cfs the night before and the full moon would arrive the following night, so what he needed,
right now
, was for Litton to summon his eloquence, phone up Richard Marks, the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, and somehow find a way of turning a
no
into a
maybe
.

According to the legend that is told on the river, Litton shook his head and grudgingly conceded to the weight of the logic that was being laid before him. That may have been the case. But it is equally plausible, especially in light of the history between those two men, that what Litton wanted most in that moment
was simply to get Grua off the damn phone.

In any event, the conversation ended when Litton said that he’d give the superintendent a ring and do his best to persuade him to sanction a speed run.

When Grua hung up, he knew he had done all he could and the matter now rested in Litton’s hands. What he did not know—nor, for that matter, did anyone else—was that deep inside the canyon, far downstream from the dam and along the worst stretch of white water on the entire river, a monster had awakened and was preparing to emerge from its lair.

I.
The seam of water that separates a river’s downstream current from the upstream flow of an eddy is known as an eddy fence. When the line of crosscurrent is especially powerful, the fence may be several feet high, a dynamic barrier that can easily flip a kayak or a dory.

II.
While most outfitters equipped their expeditions with VHF radios, the Park Service had not imposed a standard radio frequency; many river guides did not even know what channel to use to communicate with the helicopters.

Out there in the middle of the maelstrom the Eater awaits, heaving and gulping, its mouth like a giant clam’s . . . its mind a frenzy of beige-colored rapid foam. A horrifying uproar, all things considered. Imagine floating through that nonsense in a life jacket.

—E
DWARD
A
BBEY

A
SIDE
from the Grand Canyon helicopter squadron, perhaps the most effective tool in the Park Service’s disaster-prevention kit was the River Unit, an unusual little pod within the ranger subculture whose job was to patrol the bottom of the canyon in oar rafts to monitor the camps, render assistance to anyone in trouble, and, when necessary, summon evacuations. Unlike their starched-shirt, button-down counterparts who were stationed on the rim, the river rangers were a backcountry squadron. Their patrols could last up to a month, and those extended absences were reflected in the way they carried themselves. Many wore their hair long and declined to shave. All of them preferred baseball caps to Smokey the Bear hats. Most had a deep antipathy to paperwork.

One of the most experienced boatmen in this unit was Terry Brian, and
on the morning of Thursday, June 23, Brian pulled into an eddy just above Mile 98 with a small platoon of rangers piloting two rafts and a pair of kayaks. Their aim was to find out what was happening at Crystal Rapid.

After tying up their boats and ascending the one-hundred-foot cutbank
that had been created by the flood of 1966, the rangers began climbing to the scouting terrace, which would give them a comprehensive view. They fully expected the latest discharges from the dam to have muted Crystal’s savagery and essentially washed out the rapid. But when they reached the top, they discovered that something entirely different had taken place. Although none of the rangers was aware of it, they were witnessing a signature moment in white-water history—a unique hydraulic window that had opened less than two hours earlier.

During the seventeen years that had passed since the massive winter debris flow of 1966 had pinched off the river at the mouth of the Crystal Creek drainage, the Glen Canyon Dam had prevented a single spring flood from rushing through the canyon and expanding the rapid’s constriction ratio. Nearly two decades after its formation, Crystal was still an “immature” rapid, and the giant boulders that were responsible for its massive hydraulics remained firmly in place. But as the dam’s discharges increased throughout the middle part of June, the physics inside the choke point created by those obstacles
had grown progressively more vicious. When the flows were boosted to 49,500 cfs on June 7, the speed of the water in the center of the rapid had increased to almost twenty miles an hour, and Crystal’s standing wave rose from thirteen feet to twenty. Ten days later,
when the engineers took the discharge up to 59,000 cfs, the standing wave had risen by another three feet. Finally, at roughly 8:45 a.m. on the morning of June 23, just a few minutes before Brian and his squadron arrived, the surge of 70,000 cfs that had been released from the
spillway tunnels the previous night reached Mile 98, ushering in a new and unprecedented level of madness.

At the top of the terrace, the rangers were treated to a sweeping view of the river as it hurtled around the pink-and-orange boulders of the rapid’s fan-shaped debris field in a long and seething arc of white water. The basic configuration remained the same as ever—the river funneling through the bottleneck between the debris field on the right side of the river and the cliffs of granite on the left; the Rock Garden looming just downstream, now partially submerged; and far below on the right, Thank God Eddy, which offered the only safe harbor. But the magnitude and the violence of the flood had reshaped the hydraulics to create an astonishing new feature that had never before been seen in the canyon.

At the narrowest point, the river was squeezed into a glassy tongue that bore the silken smoothness of a piece of polished jade. The tongue knifed through the bottleneck in the shape of an elongated V, and as the compressed water shot through this chute its velocity accelerated to almost thirty miles an hour until it collided—abruptly—against an impenetrable white wall known as an
explosion wave. The trough-to-crest height of that wave approached thirty feet, and at the apex the water wrapped upstream and crashed back upon itself to form an unimaginably violent, endlessly recirculating keeper hole that spanned almost the entire width of the river channel, all the way from the right to the left bank.

The energy and the turbulence inside that hole, whose interior was invisible from shore, could be approximated by the sound emanating from its depths. Crystal’s thunder was always stupendous, but this was something altogether different—an audible fury that seemed to slap the rangers across the face the moment they hit the top of the terrace. They were enveloped by the roar of a sustained explosion whose concussion seemed to reverberate up from the depths of the river, through the rock, and
directly into the soles of the flip-flops on their feet.

One of Brian’s kayakers, a ranger named Stan Steck, who had studied engineering in college, immediately understood that
they were looking at an almost perfect hydraulic jump—and, intriguingly, part of the perfection resided in the fact that the jump had formed the sort of liquid pipeline that is normally visible only to big-wave surfers. By positioning himself in just the right spot on the terrace, Steck was able to peer through the pipeline’s aperture and gaze along the inside of the wave all the way to the opposite side of the river. There, a small section of the pink-and-black granite cliff was framed within a smooth, emerald-green oval.

To Steck and the other rangers, this was the most magnificent and fearsome thing any of them had ever seen. Never in all their collective years on the Colorado had they encountered anything quite so marvelous or terrifying. And beneath the deafening roar, they discerned something else—
a series of hollow, cannonlike booms that were detonating at irregular intervals every seven to ten seconds.

Deep below the surface,
the boulders at the bottom of the river were shifting and colliding, cracking into one another like immense billiard balls as the current labored to shove them from its path. With a muscular assist from the dam’s latest discharge, the Colorado was attempting to reestablish its proper constriction ratio, a process that had never before been witnessed. Exactly how long this would continue before the bottleneck expanded and the fury began to subside was anyone’s guess. But the moment was singular—and as the rangers readily understood, it also created spectacular complications for anyone who needed to get a boat downstream.

Brian immediately saw that the solution to the problem rested with a massive lateral wave emanating from the right-hand shore at an oblique angle and extending toward the center of the river. That wave formed a barrier that
blocked access to the only safe route past the chaos—a section of relatively calm and shallow water sluicing through a grove of submerged tamarisk trees along the edge of the debris field on the right shoreline. This was the safety zone, and any boatman who wanted to sneak past the rage in the center of Crystal would have to punch his bow or stern through the lateral with the perfect combination of angle, timing, and momentum. It would not be easy. But no one in his right mind would ever purposely try to take a boat into the face of that explosion wave.

As the rangers stood on the terrace, dumbstruck by the fury and reviewing the geometry of the rapid to confirm that there were no other options,
Brian’s attention was drawn upstream. An unusual contraption was rounding the corner—a convoluted arrangement of sausage-shaped bridge pontoons that he immediately recognized as the most infamous raft in the entire canyon.

Georgie White was about to make a run at Crystal, and she was heading straight for the center.

B
y
the spring of 1983, White was entering the fourth decade of what would eventually qualify as the longest and most storied guiding career in the Grand Canyon. She had arrived on the Colorado back in the late 1940s and had built her business during an era when women were permitted to venture down the river only as passengers—and, even then, only with reluctance. Through a combination of audacity, stubbornness, and an incorrigible passion for white water, she had emerged as the first and only woman to captain a river-running outfit, as well as perhaps the single most colorful—and controversial—personality between Lee’s Ferry and Lake Mead.