The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (5 page)

By the time Cárdenas arrived, much of the terrain inside that abyss had not only been traversed and explored but also inhabited, first by three successive waves of Anasazi, the ancestors of the modern Hopi, then later by the Hualapai, the Paiute, the Havasupai, and half a dozen other tribes. The ruins of entire villages were down there, where the granaries had been stocked with corn and canals had channeled water across fields for hundreds of years until, sometime during the twelfth century, the bottom of the canyon was mysteriously abandoned. There were secrets and legends too—places where shamans had worshipped, where young men had conducted vision quests, and where the spirits of the dead were said to cross over into the afterlife. Nevertheless, Cárdenas’s arrival marked a crucial point in the history of this landscape.

At that moment, the continent from which these explorers hailed was at a peculiar crossroads, with one foot testing the waters of the Renaissance and the other still firmly planted in the Middle Ages. The printing press, one of several technologies that would do the most to shape and transform the future, had barely begun shouldering aside the impossibly laborious business of copying illustrated manuscripts by hand. Johannes Kepler, Sir Francis Bacon, and Galileo had not yet been born. Mercator projection maps had not yet been invented; complex numbers were still awaiting discovery. The words
geography
and
geology
had not even been added to the English language. And yet, the first tremors of the seismic shifts that would rock the face of the world were already being felt.

From a three-story tower within the walls of the city of Frauenburg, the great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was preparing to publish
On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres
, his treatise positing the radical notion that Earth was not the center of the universe, which would herald the arrival of the scientific revolution. In Rome, Bologna, and Venice, the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci had teased out the conceptual principles behind single-span bridges, comparative anatomy, plate tectonics, aeronautics, and the science of fluid mechanics. And oddly, although Spain was still
a stronghold of religious orthodoxy—and thus fiercely resistant to these new ideas—the
country that had given birth to Coronado and Cárdenas stood at the forefront of these developments in one crucial respect, because no country had a greater command of water. It was on the Iberian Peninsula that the Romans had done some of their most impressive work on arched dams. Here was where the Muslims had laid down the foundations of reservoir-driven irrigation, and where Christian engineers were now refining the concept of hydraulic power. In short,
Spain was the seedbed of the technologies that would eventually converge to harness one of the most unbridled but potentially useful forces in all of nature, a wild river.

Thus the era of Cárdenas’s arrival at the edge of the canyon offered the first promise of a world that was not only ruled but also controlled by man. And now, here where the piñons and the junipers gave way to the buff-colored caprock, that vision was colliding against one of the most implacable expressions of nature’s indifference to grand schemes—a landscape whose essence suggested that such a conceit was perhaps no less arrogant, and no less rife with the potential for unintended consequences, than a horseman’s thinking that it was a simple matter to run his lance through a dog that was pestering his sheep.

Y
ears later when Pedro de Castañeda, one of the chroniclers of the Coronado expedition, set down the story of this first encounter, he offered not a single detail of Cárdenas’s reaction as he and his men peered into the abyss for the first time. But if those men had anything at all in common with the tens of millions of visitors who would later follow in their footsteps, it’s a reasonable guess that not one of them said a word—that they simply stood, rooted in silence, their breath snatched away by the vision that had been laid at their feet.

Although
no one now knows precisely where this incident took place, it’s almost certain that it occurred along a section of the South Rim that is known today as Desert View. This promontory offers one of the most dramatic of all vantage points into the canyon—a place where it completes a great arc, bending from the east to the north in a sweep whose view is so arresting that the National Park Service would later erect a tall stone watchtower for public enjoyment.

Somewhere close to this spot, Cárdenas and his men found themselves looking out at a formation called the Palisades of the Desert, a dramatic set of banded cliff faces that form the canyon’s southeastern rampart. From the base of the Palisades, a series of benches and precipices descends like a crudely hewn set of stairs toward a glittering ribbon of silver and green that winds through the bottom far below. On the opposite side of that stream, a matching set of cliffs and ledges ascends to the North Rim. And yawning between those
two rims stretches a void as wide and deep as a landlocked sea, an impression strengthened not only by the shimmering blueness of the air itself but also by the armada of clouds that scud past at eye level, casting shadows beneath their bellies that ripple and dance amid the shattered stones that lie shipwrecked below.

Gazing down toward that thin trickle of water winding sinuously between the buttes and mesas rising from the center of the gorge, Cárdenas scoffed at the claims of his Hopi guides, who assured him that this was no mere stream, but a mighty desert river whose width measured half a league across—several hundred yards. Certain they were exaggerating, the Spanish captain dismissed their pronouncements as absurd, judged its true breadth to be no more than eight feet, and ordered his party to begin moving west along the rim in search of a promising place to descend to this creek.

Three days later, they arrived at a break in the escarpment where Cárdenas directed Captain Pablos de Melgosa and two of the nimblest foot soldiers to scramble down to have a look. Many hours later, they returned with news that this giant arroyo was far more treacherous than the view from the top had led them to believe. In fact, Melgosa reported, they had penetrated only a fraction of the way down before further descent became impossible—although they had gone far enough to confirm that the Hopi had not overstated the size of the river. But what sobered the reconnaissance party even more were the monstrous dimensions of the interior—a landscape so huge that even its minor features had made them feel hopelessly diminished. To illustrate the point, Melgosa pointed to a single stone column. From the rim, it appeared to be roughly the height of a man, did it not? But no. In fact, it had proved taller than the great tower of Seville, the belfry that rose 344 feet from the Catedral de Santa María de la Sede, the largest cathedral in the world and, tellingly, a crowning point of reference for a Spaniard of that era. They must have felt that they had lost their bearings entirely.

In both a literal and a symbolic sense, this was entirely true. Without a single familiar object to impart some sense of scale—a man sitting beneath the shade of a tree; an ox pulling a plow through a field—it was impossible for the Spaniards to gauge the immensity of this declivity. They had no conception that they were staring into an abyss whose volume exceeded a thousand cubic miles, a distance and depth that dwarfed anything they or any other European had ever encountered. They had no notion that, for much of its length, the top and the bottom of this canyon were separated by more than a vertical mile of rock, which meant that if it had somehow been possible to lift up every peak in the Pyrenees and drop them neatly into that expanse, each mountain would easily fit inside the bottom and not a single summit would peer above the rim.
They also had no way of fathoming that, from its eastern reaches to its western terminus, the abyss ran for 277 miles, arguably the longest canyon on earth. Nor did they comprehend that the span between the South Rim and the North Rim averaged roughly ten miles, or that the canyon’s six hundred bays and tributary arroyos could push that width back to fifteen, twenty, even thirty miles. Finally, they were unable to grasp or appreciate that the river of which the Hopi spoke served as the premier drainage channel for the entire Southwest, a waterway that gathered together all the runoff of a region larger than Spain and Portugal combined.

Their inability to frame themselves in relation to this stupendous tableau, however, was not simply spatial but also extended into a fourth dimension, the realm of time. And here, they were truly out of their depth. They had no idea, for example, that the very rock beneath their feet, a honey-colored limestone known as the Kaibab, was older than the oldest things they knew of. Older than the basilica that was built upon the slope of Vatican Hill in Rome or the shrine in Jerusalem where the Prophet Muhammad had initiated his ascent to heaven. Older than the temples of ancient Greece or the walled cities of Sumeria—older than any city in the world, in fact, or even the land itself. So old that
the Kaibab actually predated not only the continent on which they stood but also the ocean they had spent nearly three months sailing across to get there, as well as all the rest of the continents and all of the oceans between them. And as astonishing as all of that may have seemed, what would have brought them to their knees in awe was that this topmost layer of rock wasn’t really very old at all in comparison with the age of what was lost in the tremulous shadows below.

They could see that the walls of the canyon formed a crumbling staircase, but they had no way of knowing that each riser on those stairs was composed of rocks that had been deposited
before
the step above and
after
the step below—a vertical concatenation of time that had been laid down in horizontal strata.
^I
This meant, among other things, that if Cárdenas and his men had elected at that moment to force a descent, they would have confronted not only a formidable physical challenge but also a profoundly temporal one. In effect, the canyon served as a kind of self-propelled time machine, a terrestrial chronometer in which each step they took would have hurled them into a deeper and more distant precinct of the past.

Their progression into this well of time would not have been uniform. Depending on where they were, they might have passed through fifteen million
years in a single stride, while the next dozen paces may only have taken them through a few millennia. But regardless, every step of their journey would have catapulted them backward through entire ages and epochs as they dropped deeper and deeper into a world whose buttresses had been laid down long before anything human had ever taken place. And as they penetrated each stratum—through the hardened deltas of dead rivers, the floors of vanished oceans, the petrified dunes of antediluvian deserts—they could have calibrated their progress by noting each successive benchmark in the fossil record that they passed.

Past the conifers, the reptiles, and the amphibians. Past the first seed plants, the first beetles, the first sharks. Past the spiders, the scorpions, and the centipedes, then past the first creatures ever to have left the ocean and ventured forth upon the land. Not long after that, they would pass the point where the first terrestrial plants—the mosses and worts and ferns—had begun to colonize the land. By this point, they’d be inside a realm that had been framed when the land was so empty and barren that all of its rivers ran over bare rock, unadorned by so much as a single green leaf.

When you get down that deep, the rock record has big gaps, so without even realizing it, the Spaniards would have found themselves skipping over some important opening movements in the pageant of biology: the first armor-plated fishes, the first vertebrates, the first coral reefs. At around this point, too, things would begin to grow quiet as orders and classes and, eventually, entire phyla in the taxonomic regnum of life successively winked out.

First to go would be the gastropods, followed swiftly by the sponges and the echinoderms. And by the time Cárdenas and his men had reached the layer of smooth, tan-colored sandstone now known as the Tapeats, the sea lilies and the brachiopods would also be gone, followed soon thereafter by trilobites—the horseshoe-crab-shaped creatures that had peered through the shallows of lost Paleozoic oceans with eyes made of calcite, the earliest vision systems on earth and a lyrical merger of biology and geology, a living form of rock.

Somewhere below the last of the trilobites, Cárdenas’s company would have stepped across a final threshold and entered into the stillest and most silent epoch of all—the time of everything that preceded visible, multicelled life. This was a world that had been populated by whorled chains of the earliest cyanobacteria, anaerobic creatures whose chemistry had coalesced shortly after the crust of the planet had begun to cool and life’s initial moments of respiration unfolded amid an atmosphere devoid of a single molecule of oxygen.

Eventually, they would have been able to go no farther. By this point, they’d be standing at the edge of the river itself, a kingdom walled off by elegant foliations
of Vishnu schist, rock that had been compressed and deformed by heat and pressure so intense that the minerals inside the stone had recrystallized and metamorphosed into something surreal and otherworldly. This was stone whose bloodlines extended further back than the human mind could possibly conceive—seventeen million centuries into the past, nearly half the life span of the planet and one-tenth the age of the universe itself. A stone so dense and so black that a man felt, upon seeing it for the first time, that its polished surface must surely mark some kind of nadir. Certainly no other rock on the surface of the earth seemed to glitter so darkly with the dawn light of creation.