The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (53 page)

Thanks to the chilly water and the adrenaline in her system, the blood vessels in her leg had contracted and her bleeding was not extensive. But both Stratton and Gallaher knew that this was about to change. If they didn’t get McNammee bandaged immediately, she could bleed out right there on the deck. Unfortunately, the expedition’s primary medical kit had been riding on Parmenter’s boat and was stripped away with the rest of the gear during the wreck.

What the hell were they supposed to do?

It was then, in one of those bizarre coincidences that seemed in retrospect to stretch credulity, that Paparelli’s eye was caught by a bright red object in the river, and he realized that the med kit was floating past them in the current, just a yard or two away. Gallaher and Paparelli were both about to leap into the river to retrieve the kit, but opted instead for a reach-and-grab. With Paparelli clinging to his ankles, Gallaher lunged all the way out of the boat, seized hold of the kit, and was pulled back in. Snatching a roll of tape, a wad of gauze, and an inflatable splint, they got to work on McNammee’s leg.

Meanwhile, Stratton glanced up and spotted Curt Sauer’s helicopter, directly overhead and flying downstream.

Assuming—correctly—that the rangers would be staging their evacuation at the first available spot with enough room to accommodate both the boats and the extra helicopters that were undoubtedly on their way, Stratton started motoring in earnest for Bass Camp, now less than five miles downstream.

W
hen Stratton rammed his boat through the eddy fence at Bass and tied off, Sauer and his helicopter were waiting, and the cove was rapidly filling up as rafts of all sorts began to arrive, laden with the Tour West passengers who had been stranded upstream, as well as sundry pieces of gear that had been retrieved from the river.

All of this made for a bewildering scene, especially for the people who had been flung into the river. Most of them had lost all of their belongings—their extra clothing, their wallets, their personal gear, everything but the bathing suits they were wearing. Amid the confusion, Stratton found himself confronted by a disoriented and visibly anxious Ellen Wert, who had been retrieved from the side of the river and shuttled down to Bass in an oar raft.

The accident had taken place so quickly that she could not recall any details of what had happened, aside from, at some point, Bill’s having called out to her. Now he appeared to be missing.

“I don’t know where my husband’s at!” she exclaimed.

“We don’t have everybody accounted for right now,” replied Stratton, who perhaps couldn’t bring himself to break the awful news. “We still have people upriver.”

Ellen Wert did not find this statement at all reassuring.
“I know something’s wrong,” Stratton heard her say as she walked off in search of her husband.

Next, Stratton turned to confer with Sauer, who was demanding an update on whether everyone was accounted for and how many injuries there were. When Stratton informed the ranger that he had a body on board, Sauer radioed his dispatcher and asked them to notify the Coconino County sheriff’s office.

When Helo 210A touched down, it deposited two of Sauer’s colleagues, who began taking vital signs and preparing the injured for evacuation to the medical clinic on the South Rim. The third chopper, Helo 210B, was on its way, and when it arrived, the priority would be to get the most serious injuries into the air as quickly as possible. Mary Ann McNammee would be on the first flight out.
^II

For the next hour, the helicopters clattered back and forth between the
makeshift helipad at Bass Camp and the South Rim, shuttling all of the Tour West passengers out of the canyon. One of the return flights also brought down Deputy Sheriff Steve Luckeson and a ranger named Darrell Cook, who would supervise the removal of Bill Wert’s body.
It was Cook who took Ellen Wert aside and informed her that her husband was dead.

By 1:00 p.m., the Gallahers, the Butte Ladies, Ellen Wert, and the rest of the passengers had all been lifted to the South Rim. After Luckeson and Cook collected Wert’s personal effects—his ring and his wristwatch—he was placed in a body bag and Luckeson accompanied the deceased man on the final leg of his river trip.

One of the last helicopter shuttles that afternoon included Roberson and Parmenter, whose wrecked boat had slid past the camp during the evacuation, disappeared downstream, and was now drifting into the depths of the canyon on its own.

TIME: EARLY EVENING

LOCATION: UPPER OWL CAMP,

38 MILES BELOW CRYSTAL RAPID

O
n the left side of the Colorado at Mile 136, along a scallop-shaped inlet that marked almost the exact midpoint of the Grand Canyon, Regan Dale stood staring out at the flood tide running past his camp and struggling to make sense of what was out there in the river.

Dale had been leading a squadron of Litton’s dories down this torrent for the better part of a week—closer to two weeks, actually, now that he thought of it. Two days earlier, he and his crew had barely made it through Crystal, and the following morning they had stood by helplessly and watched in horror as one of Georgie White’s upside-down rafts had rocketed past them with a group of terrified passengers clinging to the bottom and pleading for help.

But as disturbing as those events had been, nothing that he’d encountered so far was as surreal as the scene now unfolding before his eyes.

Dinner had just been served and everyone was sitting in canvas chairs with their plates in their laps when one of Dale’s dorymen glanced upriver and exclaimed,
“Hey—
lookit.
”

Something strange and sinister had emerged from the gloaming upstream and was now spectering past.

At the head of the procession was a string of soggy paper plates, dozens of them, floating out in the middle of the main current. Behind the plates came a cluster of torn life vests. These were followed by a collection of battered steel
ammo cans, the watertight army-surplus boxes that the canyon folk used for storing their personal items.

Each piece of gear floated neatly behind the next, and together they formed a bobbing conga line that ran down the center of the river, offering up a mute testament to some terrible event that had taken place somewhere upriver—a disaster whose detritus was now bearing its news down-canyon.

As this trail of flotsam snaked past the boulder-lined beach, Dale ordered one of his guides to position a dory directly along the outside edge of the eddy and keep his eyes peeled for any swimmers.

Several tense minutes passed. When the wreckage finally petered out and disappeared, the dory returned to its mooring and the passengers got back to the business of trying to finish their dinner.

While the crew traded whispers about what might have happened,
Dale kept his thoughts to himself and continued staring out at the river. He was fairly certain that the show wasn’t over yet.

S
ure enough, half an hour or so later, just on the far side of dusk, another object appeared.

It was the center section of a large motor rig, drifting upside down with its belly in the air. With shredded lines trailing in the water behind its bulbous, bloated body, the boat bore the look of an animal—some kind of river beast—that had died violently. Empty and silent. There wasn’t a soul on board.

A ghost boat.

Dale shook his head and wondered whether anyone might be trapped underneath that wreck—perhaps the body of a passenger or a boatman who had become entangled in the rigging and run out of air before he could fight his way out.

The boat glided past without giving up an answer.

As it slipped into the gathering shadows, Dale tilted his head to read the upside-down logo, barely discernible in the last glimmer of twilight:

TOUR WEST

I.
Sultzer has kept her promise to this day.

II.
McNammee’s injuries were so severe that the doctors at the clinic on the South Rim refused to allow her to be sent to Las Vegas aboard a life flight, fearing her lower leg was likely to be amputated. Instead, they bundled her into an ambulance and rushed her eighty miles south to the Flagstaff Medical Center, where a team of surgeons saved her limb.

We are now ready to start

on our way down the Great Unknown. . . .

We have an unknown distance yet to run;

an unknown river yet to explore.

—J
OHN
W
ESLEY
P
OWELL

A
S
Regan Dale pondered the mysteries of the ghost boat from the subbasement of the canyon, more than five thousand vertical feet above him on the South Rim, Richard Marks found himself adding up the kind of numbers that every superintendent dreads. During the past thirty-six hours, a single pocket of white water had managed to destroy four motor rigs, flip as many as a dozen oar boats, and inflict serious injuries on fifteen passengers and guides. In the process,
ninety-one people had been evacuated from the canyon using a trio of helicopters whose collective flight time of twenty-five hours and thirty minutes
had cost $9,778. And in addition to all of that, now they had a fatality.

This last fact was especially noteworthy because, for all the havoc that white water had wrought over the years inside the canyon, death was actually quite rare. In more than a century of river running,
the Colorado had managed to drown only nineteen boaters. Moreover, although the bulk of those tragedies had unfolded inside the fiercest rapids—House Rock and Sockdolager, Horn Creek and Upset and, of course, Lava Falls—
not one of those accidents had
taken place anywhere near Mile 98. Despite its savage hydraulics and notorious reputation, Crystal had never managed to kill a single person, until now.

In addition to setting a gruesome precedent, Bill Wert’s death had significantly raised the profile of the Grand Canyon flood. Up at the Glen Canyon Dam, the spillway crisis was already
drawing serious media attention from the
CBS Evening News
, and thanks to the wire services, newspapers from Los Angeles to Miami were covering the story. Now, calls were also pouring into the South Rim—from local television stations, from newspapers across Arizona, and one from a woman who worked for National Public Radio in Washington, DC. As the news spread, it was sure to provoke sharp queries about what was being done to prevent other fatalities inside the canyon.

The wheels in that process had already been set in motion. Even as Wert’s body was being retrieved from the heliport and transported sixty miles south to the town of Williams for an autopsy, Marks had called together
his river rangers, pilots, and communications team for a briefing to address the question that was uppermost in everyone’s mind—what did they need to do to keep this situation from coming totally unglued?

Three options lay before them, the first simply being to shut down the river by prohibiting any more launches from Lee’s Ferry until the crisis at the dam was brought under control and the flooding subsided. As everyone in the room understood, however, this would do nothing to solve the most pressing problem, which was the boats that were already on the water. Scattered along the river between Lee’s Ferry and Mile 98 were fourteen separate river expeditions—twelve commercial trips and two groups of private boaters—all of which were headed straight for Crystal.