The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (55 page)

T
he first stage of the three-hour trip took them south across the Utah state line, then east along the base of the Grand Staircase, a staggered line of cliffs and terraces that extend like an immense ziggurat across a remote section of the North Rim known as the Arizona Strip. The evening was warm and clear, and Petschek drove with the windows down.

On the far side of the little Mormon town of Fredonia, they turned south again, and now the road began to ascend the great dome of the Kaibab Plateau. Evening was drawing near, and the lengthening shadows began to soften the shaggy bark of the juniper trees lining the road and the cream-colored outcroppings of limestone.

Just east of Jacob Lake, they turned onto Highway 89A, and as they descended the switchbacks on the far side of the Kaibab monocline, they were greeted by a vision unlike anything else in the West.

Up ahead, the Jurassic sandstones and shales of the Vermillion Cliffs were flaring with the last rays of the setting sun. Far off to the south, forty miles away along the edge of the Navajo reservation, the stratified layers of Triassic rock on the face of the Echo Cliffs were melting into viscous pinks and liquescent corals. Between those two sets of cliffs stretched a rock-strewn plain, and across its surface tidal currents of lavender light ebbed away before a surge of purple shadows that had been assembled by the gathering of night.

Somewhere deep within those shadows lay the upper end of the great canyon
itself, running from the northeast to the southwest like an enormous serpent. Although none of them gave it much thought—for they had made this drive more times than they could remember—they were traversing the very same features that Cárdenas and his men had surveyed from Desert View, their vantage on the South Rim, in the distant autumn of 1540.

By the time they pulled into the lodge at the tiny outpost of Marble Canyon, a favorite watering hole for river guides on pre-departure evenings, the heavens were sliding from violet to black. They lingered over their supper, and after they had finished they stepped out to see a sky salted with stars. Directly above, a vast wash of silver, the plume of the Milky Way, arched over a flawless midsummer’s night in the high desert, a night polished by the soft shadows and the austere grace of the canyon country. And peeking over the cliffs like a Chinese lantern was a swollen, yellow globe that draped the folds of the surrounding plateau in moonbeams.

Then they started down the final leg of their drive, a six-mile stretch of gravel road that took them past the water tower, beyond the ranger station, across an arroyo, and down to the place where all Grand Canyon river journeys begin.

A
s the Colorado completes the final stretch of its winding, fifteen-mile run from the base of the Glen Canyon Dam toward the break in the cliffs that marks Lee’s Ferry, the river is normally gentle and calm. For these reasons, the boat ramp at the ferry is typically a place of repose for guides who gather there on the night before a trip to rig their boats and prepare for the buses and shuttles that will arrive with their passengers in the morning. Here the water seems to suspend its momentum and go languorous, as if pausing to inhale before embarking on the next and most tumultuous stage of its journey down from the distant Rockies to the no less distant Sea of Cortés.

At 10:30 p.m. on the night of June 25, however, the water was anything but peaceful. Out in the moonlight, the current seethed with dark energy, and the surface of the river was high enough that it had surged over the steel cable at the end of the ramp to which the boatmen typically tied off their bowlines. For this reason, the seven commercial oar rafts that had anchored for the night were all lashed to the frame of a large rig-truck parked at the water’s edge. The boats were strung neatly in a row, and huddled on their aluminum decks, fast asleep, was a crew of weary river guides.

The leader of that expedition was a veteran boatman named Bruce Helin, and the senior guide was Michael Ghiglieri, whom everyone called the Doctor because he was one of the few boatmen with a PhD (awarded, in Ghiglieri’s
case, for the study of chimpanzees in the Congo). That very morning, the two men had reached Lake Mead with a different crew after an arduous two-week trip. Upon de-rigging their boats at Pierce Ferry, Helin and Ghiglieri had completed the long six-hour drive back to Lee’s Ferry and re-rigged for their next trip, which was scheduled for the following morning. This kind of back-to-back schedule, which was known as a burn-around, did not allow the guides a single day off for rest or to do their laundry. When Helin’s crew had arrived at the ferry a few hours earlier, however, they’d learned that they would be getting an unexpected break. Just as they’d started to unload, Tom Workman, the ranger in charge, had walked down to the ramp and announced that the river was temporarily closed.

Closed? Helin was confused. Such a thing had never happened before. The very idea seemed bizarre.

After offering a brief recap of the carnage that had taken place at Crystal, Workman explained that the river might be reopened the following day, depending on what was decided up at the South Rim. But for the moment, all launches were suspended and no one was going anywhere.

A less exhausted crew might have received this news as an invitation to blow off some steam by heading up to the bar at the Marble Canyon Lodge or breaking out their guitars and treating the ferry’s full-time residents—a flock of wigeons and a family of beavers—to an impromptu boatmen’s concert. But Helin and Ghiglieri were interested in none of this. They were too drained to do anything more than unfurl their sleeping bags and bed down for the night. Thus, when Franklin finally rolled into the parking lot, the river’s thrumming was mingled with the steady rumble of their snores.

Ghiglieri, who was on the last boat in line, was so worn-out that he slept straight through the flurry of activity that erupted when the truck arrived. He was undisturbed by the beam of headlights sweeping the rafts, and failed to register the crunch of tires on gravel as the trailer was backed into the river until the wheels were submerged. He even remained oblivious of the furious scrambling as the crew and their timekeepers loosened the buckles on the cam straps and heaved the boat off the back of the trailer. But when the dory’s rockered bottom slapped the face of the river with a loud
ker-bloosh!
Ghiglieri’s eyes popped open.

Who, he wondered, would be crazy enough to be raising such a ruckus in the middle of the night?

The furious whispers that emanated from a collection of shadowy figures next to the trailer provided no answer. But when he caught sight of the
Emerald Mile
bobbing in the shallows just a few yards away, the mystery resolved itself.

L
ike every other guide on the river, Ghiglieri knew the story of the little green dory with the bright red gunwales—the horrific accident that had nearly consigned her to the flames several years earlier, her subsequent rescue and rehabilitation at the hands of the most fanatical boatman in the canyon, and the fact that if the speed record she had set in 1980 was ever to be broken, it would almost certainly have to take place during a runoff like the one they were witnessing now.

Ghiglieri shook his head with an amused and bleary-eyed indulgence. Although he did not appreciate being woken up, he harbored a grudging admiration for what was about to unfold. So along with Helin and the rest of the crew, who were by now also awake, he roused himself from his sleeping bag, grabbed his river sandals, and padded over to lend a hand.

Grua was determined to get on the water as quickly as possible before anyone who might have the power to stop them could arrive and put a halt to the venture. While the little crowd of onlookers stood in the shallows and steadied the dory, the three boatmen vaulted over the gunwales and scrambled into their places.

Grua, who was wearing a green life jacket and had a red bandana tied on his head, was the first aboard. After settling himself into the boatman’s seat, he began threading the shafts of his oars through their locks. Wren, who was clad in a blue life vest and a dark blue splash jacket with rubber gaskets around the neck and the wrists, sent the dory wobbling from side to side as he scrambled across the deck toward the front footwell and took his place in the bow. Petschek, who was wearing a bright yellow vest and had neoprene booties on his feet, was the last aboard and took the seat in the stern, which awkwardly faced backward.

Grua needed just a moment or two to complete a few last-minute tasks—knotting the cords to the leashes that would keep the oars tied to the boat if they tipped, shifting his weight sharply from side to side to confirm that the boat was properly trim, and extending his legs to place his feet against the two-inch dowel that served as a foot brace. Then, with tense deliberation, everyone sat and waited for Cliff Taylor to give them the signal that it was time to start.

When Taylor indicated that they were getting close, Grua took up the handles of his oars and gently swung the boat around so that the bow was facing the shore and the stern was pointed toward the river. Taylor counted down the seconds—and at precisely 11:00 p.m., Grua leaned back and hauled sharply on his oars.

The instant the hull penetrated the main current, the boat felt as if it had
been shunted onto a set of rails and coupled to a runaway freight train. They shot downstream with a whoosh whose rush was magnified by the darkness and deepened even further by the knowledge that they were alone in that darkness, hurtling through the gateway to the canyon and everything that lay beyond.

“Wow,” Wren murmured to himself. “This thing is
moving.
”

A
s the dory hurtled downstream, the guides and the timekeepers onshore found themselves lapped by successive waves of envy, resentment, and yearning. Amid these emotional undercurrents, none of them noticed that the dory’s departure was being observed in a very different spirit by another group of boaters, a pod of noncommercial river runners from New Mexico
led by Charles Zemach, a theoretical physicist who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Having anchored their rubber boats at the ferry earlier that afternoon, Zemach and his group had driven up to Marble Canyon to grab a late dinner and arrived back at the ferry just as Grua was spearing the stern of the
Emerald Mile
into the main current.
Zemach was neither amused by nor appreciative of what was taking place. In fact, he was rather offended.