The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (8 page)

When white explorers advanced into the American wilderness for the first
time, they were almost never pioneering a new route. Men like Lewis and Clark, Jedediah Smith, and John Charles Frémont were, with rare exceptions, following the immemorially ancient trails used by Native Americans for trade, hunting, and war. Not so with Powell. Although parts of the Grand Canyon were known intimately, many sections had never been touched. The shoreline of the river itself was so riven by impassable cliffs that the first traverse on foot would not take place until 1977. In Powell’s day, Indians and mountain men alike traded in the widespread belief that no one who ventured upon the Colorado would emerge from the canyon alive. The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop.

The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi.
The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (
The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.)

Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the engine that drives almost all of this activity is snow. This means that the bulk of the Colorado’s discharge tends to come down in one headlong rush. Throughout the autumn and the winter, the river might trickle through the canyonlands of southern Utah at a mere three thousand cubic feet per second. With the melt-out in late May and early June, however, the river’s flow can undergo
spectacular bursts of change.
In the space of a week, the level can easily surge to 30,000 cfs, and a few days after that it can once again rocket up, surpassing 100,000 cfs. Few rivers on earth can match such manic swings from benign trickle to insane torrent. But the story doesn’t end there, because these savage transitions are exacerbated by yet another unusual phenomenon, one that is a direct outgrowth of the region’s unusual climate and terrain.

On most sections of the Colorado Plateau, rainfall is sparse and infrequent. Many areas receive less than six inches a year, roughly equivalent to what falls on Africa’s Kalahari Desert. It is not unusual, however, for almost the entire
annual quota to fall during a single storm or two—brief but exceptionally violent and highly localized cloudbursts that hammer into the dry dirt like a power washer. With so little vegetation to hold that dirt in place, the loose soil is swept into the canyons in muddy torrents, creating flash floods that transfer colossal loads of sediment directly into the river, turning it the color of chocolate. Rolling with a muscular, heavy viscosity that makes it seem more solid than liquid,
the river annually removes nearly sixty dump trucks of sediment for each square mile within its watershed, dismantling the landscape grain by grain, pebble by pebble, and freighting the entire mass toward the Sea of Cortés.

As a result, the Colorado is one of the siltiest rivers in the world. It’s probably safe to say that no other river anywhere can match
the compulsive intensity with which it cuts away the topography and bulldozes those materials downstream. Prior to 1963, the year that the Glen Canyon Dam was finished, the Colorado hauled
an average of nearly half a million tons of sand and silt past Yuma, Arizona, sixty miles upstream from the river’s mouth, every twenty-four hours. (Its record, set in 1927, was more than twenty-seven million tons of sand and silt in
a single day.
) The Nile and the Mississippi are both renowned for their alluvial deltas, but the Colorado’s silt-to-water ratio leaves them in the dust. A single cubic foot of the semisolid Colorado is
seventeen times more silt-laden than the so-called muddy Mississippi, a river that carries twenty-four times more volume and drains an area five times the size of the Colorado’s basin. And for every acre-foot of water—defined as a unit of water equal to one acre covered one foot deep—the Colorado freights eleven
tons
of silt. One way of putting this into perspective is to consider that France and the United States together excavated 357 million tons of dirt while digging the Panama Canal, during roughly fifteen years of total labor. In Powell’s day, the ancestral Colorado was capable of transporting the same amount of soil, by weight, in less than a fortnight.

The virgin Colorado was so saturated with silt that, during certain times of the year, only about 48 percent of the cocoa-colored slurry sluicing past Lee’s Ferry was actually composed of water. Among the handful of settlers who first lived within the canyon country during the nineteenth century, it was said that the river was “too thick to drink and too thin to plow.” Others joked that on windy days
dust could be seen blowing off the water’s surface. This was no laughing matter, however, to the Mormon sheepherders who attempted to ford their flocks at Lee’s Ferry and stood helplessly as the animals sank beneath the surface, pinned down by the weight of the sediment trapped in their wool.

This unusual combination of gradient, volatility, and sediment distinguishes the Colorado as the most tempestuous river on the continent—savage and unpredictable, often dangerous, and almost
psychotic in its surges. No river in
Europe, no river in South America, no river in Russia, compares to it. Pakistan’s Indus and the Tsangpo in Tibet exceed its drop. The Nile and the Mississippi deliver a larger gross tonnage of silt. A number of rivers in Canada match or exceed the savagery of its rapids. But none of them combine these elements like the Colorado. And those qualities, put together, account for its greatest claim to fame. No other river on earth has ever cut canyons to rival those of the Colorado.

All of this meant that Powell was about to take on an almost impossibly daunting set of challenges in the spring of 1869. In the thousand miles that lay between the head of the Green in Wyoming and the Grand Wash Cliffs, the river and its tributaries had excavated
seventeen major canyons. When the expedition launched in the shadow of the railway trestle at Green River Station, a dozen of those canyons had not even been named, and three of them featured bigger white water than anyone in North America had ever boated—a gauntlet of almost five hundred separate rapids.

The Major and his companions had no knowledge of any of these obstacles. Nevertheless, they intended to tackle them all.

Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges, where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles; and then a thousand strangely carved forms in every direction; and beyond them, mountains blending with clouds.

—J
OHN
W
ESLEY
P
OWELL

F
OR
such a momentous undertaking, the crew of nine that Powell had corralled together was
a remarkably ragged bunch, a band of mavericks, fugitives, and Civil War veterans, most of whom had been drawn to the expedition in the hope of finding adventure or a quick way to get rich. Bill Dunn was a classic mountain man: a ferociously competent hunter who dressed in a filthy pair of buckskin pants and wore his hair so long it fell the length of his back. Billy Hawkins was rumored to have committed some sort of mysterious crime in Missouri and was now running from the law while
earning his keep as a trapper. John Sumner, who would emerge as
the acknowledged leader of the group in Powell’s absence, was a combative, sharp-tongued scout who enjoyed bragging about how he had once thwarted a war party of Utes by planting himself on a keg of gunpowder with a cocked revolver and offering to blow them all to hell. And George Bradley was
a hazel-eyed sergeant from New England who had been raised in the Maine cod fishery and was later
wounded at Fredericksburg. Fearless in a crisis and tough as a badger, Bradley was the only member of the crew, aside from Powell,
who knew anything about boats.

The others included Oramel Howland, an ex-Vermonter who had transplanted himself to the West and preferred gunning for elk and bear to practicing
his established trade as a printer and editor. At thirty-six, he was the oldest member of the group. Oramel’s younger brother, Seneca, was
a quiet and pensive young man with deep-set gray eyes
who had fought at Gettysburg. Andy Hall, the youngest member of the expedition, was
the cheerful eighteen-year-old son of Scottish immigrants who worked as a bull whacker, a teamster who drove oxen. And Frank Goodman was a florid-faced Englishman who was rattling around the West in search of gold or excitement—and so keen to find either that he offered to pay Powell for the privilege of signing on.

Rounding out the company was the Major’s younger brother, Walter, who had spent ten months at Camp Sorghum, a notorious prisoner-of-war camp in South Carolina, where inmates were confined in an open-air stockade, with almost no food, amid their own excrement. Walter had emerged from this ordeal a bitter wreck of a man whose impenetrable depressions could be broken only through volcanic outbursts of rage or by singing war ballads. (He had a baritone that an angel would envy.)

These men knew almost nothing about the details of their route except that it would bring them within walking distance of only a single settlement, a trading post on the Uinta Indian Reservation in northeastern Utah. Beyond that point, they would be irrevocably committed, with no chance of turning back. Inside the deepest canyons, it was taken as a given that entire stretches of river would offer no way of climbing out—and if they did somehow reach the rims, they would probably confront hundreds of miles of open desert. As daunting as all that was, what loomed most disturbingly in the back of everyone’s mind was a question that arose from one of the few hard facts available to them.

Their point of departure sat at 6,115 feet above sea level, and the elevation at the mouth of the Virgin River, about thirty miles east of present-day Las Vegas, was at roughly 800 feet, so they knew that the river would be descending slightly more than one vertical mile. The question was how that drop was apportioned, and whether any of it might involve waterfalls. Wyoming’s Yellowstone River featured two enormous cascades, the second of which, at three hundred feet, was
almost twice as high as Niagara. If Powell and his men encountered a drop of even a fraction of that height in a section where the canyon walls were too sheer to beach their boats and the current was too swift to resist, the entire party could easily be swept to its death.

Exacerbating all of these issues was the fact that none of them had ever run a rapid or
knew the first thing about white water. Perhaps the most graphic evidence of their ignorance about the kind of savagery that a river such as the Colorado could unleash was that only one member of the entire crew, the man
who was missing an arm, was equipped with a life jacket. The other compelling testament to how little they knew about what they were getting into was their four boats.

Custom-made in Chicago to Powell’s specifications, three of the craft were Whitehalls,
a sleek design that had originated in New York City around 1820 and was so efficient in the water that the boats were favored by the
gangs of thieves who plundered the ships in the city’s harbor, as well as by the police who pursued them. They were also spectacularly unsuited to a wild desert river. The
Maid of the Canyon
, the
Kitty Clyde’s Sister
, and the
No Name
were twenty-one feet long with double stems and sternposts, and they were heavily planked with oak for added strength. Each weighed close to half a ton and would carry an additional two thousand pounds in cargo. In consequence, they were backbreaking on a portage. But the Whitehalls’ biggest liability lay in their rounded bottoms and their keels, features that made them
all but impossible to pivot, a key ability on a river where maneuverability was essential.

The fourth craft, which was shorter and lighter but scarcely more maneuverable than its sisters, was named in honor of Powell’s wife. The
Emma Dean
would serve as the pilot boat and lead the way, with Powell issuing orders to
the trio of “freight boats” in his wake by waving signal flags with his one good arm.

W
hen the crew spun out into the swift and glossy current on May 24, the heavy loads forced the freight boats to ride so low in the water that the oarsmen kept
running up against sandbars. That night, they decided to pull five hundred pounds of bacon from the storage compartments and dump all of it overboard, a move that would later haunt them.