The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (25 page)

“The prehistoric Indians must have experienced flash floods,” concluded the first paper that was published on the event, “but the flood of December 1966 probably was greater than any since the general abandonment of eastern Grand Canyon by the Pueblo Indians about A.D. 1150.” If this assertion is true—and it is worth noting that
it has since been contested by at least one scientist—it was the biggest thing that happened inside that drainage since the twelfth century.

Finally, the debris flow of December 1966 also wound up creating a rapid that would eventually reign as the deadliest stretch of white water in the Grand Canyon—although several months would pass before anyone discovered it.

O
n
February 24, 1967, Ken Sleight, the president of the Western River Guides Association, sent out an emergency letter to every guide and outfitter in his organization. In the letter, Sleight explained that a ranger named Frank Betts had learned that the December storms along the North Rim had wrought tremendous changes to the Colorado River at Crystal Creek. According to a group of US Geological Survey scientists who were conducting research in the area, the debris flow at Mile 98 was so massive that the government’s topographic maps would need to be revised. Betts had also spoken to the helicopter pilot who had shuttled the researchers into the canyon. “He has flown the river many times over the past two years and knows a good rapid when he sees one,” wrote Betts. “He says Crystal rapids is now the most vicious he has seen.”

A month later, Sleight sent out another letter to his members. In March, a company called Cross Tours and Expeditions had undertaken its first river trip of the year, and the company’s owner, John Cross, had just submitted the first direct report on Mile 98. Prior to this trip,
Cross had spoken to the same helicopter pilot who had talked to Betts in February, and the pilot had told Cross that he did not think the rapid was navigable. Cross disagreed, but the
pilot’s warning was sobering, so Cross was braced for something big. When he reached Mile 97, a stretch of the river where the current had previously flowed at a moderate clip, he found himself motoring across a mile-long pool of calm, smooth-as-glass water that felt less like a river and more like a lake. As he made his way across the pool, Cross could hear the roar of something major over the sound of his motor.

Just ahead, an ugly fan-shaped delta of debris, still bespattered with a thick coating of mud, had forced the river against the south wall of the canyon. Several yards upstream of this constriction, the center of the current formed a narrow tongue of dense green water, hard and luminous as a shard of emerald. The water in that shaft was unbelievably fast and steep, and it hurtled directly into a vicious array of enormous standing waves backed by tremendous holes. Complicating matters further were rocks up to seven feet in diameter that had been strewn throughout the rapid, including a huge, jagged sleeper—a boulder positioned just beneath the surface of the water—at the narrowest part of the bottleneck.

The hole created by that sleeper, which would soon be known simply as the Big Hole, would become infamous in the years to come, and the water on its downstream side shot through a hundred yards of eight-to-ten-foot haystacks. These obstacles were formidable enough, but even worse, directly downstream from the jagged boulder the current was split by a large pile of exposed rocks that had been deposited midstream. While half the river continued to run through the series of huge holes next to cliffs on the left side, the rest of the current made a ninety-degree turn to the right before swinging downstream on the opposite side of the boulder pile.

As Cross correctly perceived, this new rapid offered a boatman two unpleasant alternatives—either a “wild ride” down the left that would send one directly through the holes or a risky cut to the safer channel on the right that would require enormous power to execute, and where the price of a mistake would be steep. “It is my opinion,” Cross wrote to Sleight,
“that a boat trying to break out of the current and get around the right side would probably hit the boulders at the center.”

Cross opted for the roller-coaster ride on the left and made it through without a hitch. But the ferocity of the rapid left him sobered. The flood and the debris fan had narrowed the river to one-quarter its former width, doubled the drop, and increased the speed by a factor impossible to quantify.
“Any way you look at it, Crystal has become one of the worst rapids in the Canyon,” Cross scribbled on a drawing of this new hellbender enclosed with his report. “I would rate Crystal at a 10. It looks like it might be worse at lower water.”

I
n the past, whenever a debris flow had created a new rapid like this, the river got to work on the bottleneck. Within a few years, a major spring flood would send enough water roaring through the canyon to sweep away the obstacles, rearrange the rock, and expand the breach. In this manner, the river has managed, over time, to erode its rapids with remarkable uniformity.

Unlike the other rapids on the river, however, Crystal would never have the opportunity to “mature” through seasonal flooding. Only three years prior to the 1966 debris flow, the headgates to the Glen Canyon Dam had been slammed shut, and annual spring floods were a thing of the past. The measured discharges now passing through the dam would make minor adjustments to the rocks, nudging them here and shifting them there, widening the channel slightly. But the giant boulders that had created
the rapid’s topographic and hydraulic contours would remain firmly in place.
The river no longer had the muscle to move them aside.

Literally overnight, Crystal had been transmogrified into one of the most dreadful stretches of white-water rapids in the West. Every young boatman gunning for a career as a river guide would now have to figure out how to unlock its secrets and navigate its dangers. And none of those boatmen would have a tougher time mastering those nuances than the band of oarsmen—Kenton Grua among them—that rowed Martin Litton’s little wooden dories.

I.
In 1650, the Church of Ireland’s archbishop, James Ussher, completed a careful study of the Bible and announced that the earth had been created at midday on October 23, 4004 BC.

II.
There are two theories about what may cause this: fresh loads of sediment contributed when a tributary hits the main stream, or boulders that jam up to create temporary dams. Probably both theories are true.

And the river was there

—fascinating—deadly—

like a snake.

—J
OSEPH
C
ONRAD

D
URING
the summers that immediately followed the 1966 debris flow, the entire Grand Canyon guiding corps flung itself into the task of mapping Crystal’s floor plan and piecing together the sequence of maneuvers that would enable them to thread through its jumbled mayhem. The challenge, they discovered, was to surmount not just one or two discrete obstacles, but to untangle a long, half-mile series of problems braided into a wicked hydraulic knot. It was not enough merely to avoid the Big Hole at the top, although that was certainly everyone’s biggest concern. Directly to the left of that hole lurked a turbulent vortex that came to be known as the Slate Creek Eddy, whose boils were so powerful that, once inside it, one had virtually no chance of breaking back into the main current without first flipping upside down. And that was just the top of the rapid.

About two hundred yards downstream from that eddy, the current slammed into a vertical wall of Vishnu schist. If your boat was raked along the side of that cliff, you would be treated to the horrific sound of a disintegrating propeller, or a neoprene tube being ripped open, or the shaft of an oar exploding into splinters. Among other complications, that kind of damage would rob you of
any chance to reach the only safe place to pull over—a tiny indentation on the
opposite
side of the river that was tucked all the way down at the tail end of the rapid and known as Thank God Eddy. Any boat that failed to make that haven would find itself hurtled straight into a small but vicious stretch of white water that featured a ninety-degree left-hand bend and a massive midstream boulder dubbed Nixon Rock because it was extremely difficult to “get to the right of it.”

Those were all formidable obstructions. But perhaps the nastiest aspect of Crystal was the Rock Garden, the island of half-submerged boulders that had been dumped directly into the center of the river about halfway through the rapid. The upstream end of that island featured a Buick-size chunk of sandstone known as Big Red, which boasted a unique geologic distinction. Of the trillions of rocks of all shapes and sizes that had fallen off the cliffs and crashed into the Colorado over the centuries, none was responsible for more carnage or despair than Big Red. It was probably the most hated rock in the entire canyon.

In essence, Big Red acted as a kind of oversize mousetrap that sought to bait and ensnare any boatman who was so busy congratulating himself on having skated past the obstacles at the top of the rapid—the Big Hole, the Slate Creek Eddy, the cliff on the left—that he forgot to pay attention to what was coming next. At this moment the current would catapult him straight into Big Red and smear his boat to the side of the rock like shrink-wrap. This vicious entrapment could truly ruin your day—but that was only if you were lucky enough to collide with Big Red at high water, when waiting a few hours for the river to subside might relieve the pressure and enable you to pry the boat free. For the luckless guide who got in trouble at low water, his nightmare was just getting started.

As the water rose, the river would claw its way up the sides of Big Red and the force of the current would dramatically increase. As the stricken boat slowly disappeared beneath the surface, the river would rummage through the gear that had diligently been tied down earlier that morning, tearing everything to pieces like a bear inside a station wagon. Every half hour or so, the water would strip away the lashings on yet another key item—somebody’s tent, a cooler stuffed with fresh vegetables, a watertight box housing the trip’s only radio and an unread love letter from the boatman’s girlfriend. The river would hoist each item to the surface and hold it there briefly, just beyond the reach of the hapless guide, as if taking stock of its value. Then it would contemptuously hurl the thing downstream, where it would sink and disappear.

This spectacle kept the boatman and his passengers occupied until someone on shore figured out a way to get out to the Rock Garden without becoming caught in the same predicament. If it was too late in the day to complete this
operation before sunset, the stranded party might find itself forced to spend the night out there in the middle of the Colorado. As darkness set in, the noise of the waves and the spray coming off the rising surface of the water could make the place feel like an atoll in the North Sea.

The following morning, the passengers would be gathered up and distributed among the rest of the boats, and the boatman responsible for this disaster would settle into his new duties as somebody’s swamper, or assistant, for the rest of the trip. Meanwhile, the Park Service would set in motion a plan to clean up what was left of the abandoned boat, which was now officially considered litter. A day or two later, a swift-water rescue team would show up with a set of pulleys and winches, and if Big Red
still
didn’t want to hand the boat back in one piece, the crew would go to work with their cutting tools. When they were finished, the pieces of slashed rubber and mangled aluminum would be placed in a net, slung out of the canyon beneath the belly of a chopper, and trucked off to a landfill on the South Rim.

Finally, a month or two later, the guide who had lost his boat might find himself called into the boss’s office and asked if he had any interest in taking a look at the bill the company had just received from the Park Service. If this was the boatman’s first major screwup, he’d stand there and listen as the boss launched into a long harangue about the duplicitous treachery of Crystal and the critical importance of never,
ever
, taking your eye off Big Red. If this was the boatman’s second or third encounter with that miserable chunk of sandstone, the boss would probably inform him that it was time for him to go look for work at another outfitter’s.