The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (46 page)

I
n the midst of this drama, the question of what impact the endlessly rising discharges could be having just downstream wasn’t a priority for those who were grappling with the spillway crisis. There is no evidence to suggest that the water bosses in Salt Lake City, the engineers in Denver, or any member of Gamble’s team at the dam knew anything at all about what was unfolding inside the Grand Canyon. They had no information about how many expeditions were on the river or what kind of danger those people might be confronting. Nor did they have the faintest idea that as the crisis worsened, Kenton Grua was mulling over plans, weighing the odds, and waiting for his opportunity.

The black stream, catching on a sunken rock,

  Flung backward on itself in one white wave,

    And the white water rode the black forever.

—R
OBERT
F
ROST

A thirty-seven-foot motor rig is torn to pieces inside Crystal Rapid.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

—H
ELEN
K
ELLER

W
HEN
a giant lowland river system experiences spring flooding, the water typically spills over the banks and spreads across the landscape like an invading army, inundating thousands of square miles and often carving entirely new channels for itself.
In the spring of 1542, when an expedition led by the Spanish conquistador
Hernando de Soto stumbled upon the Mississippi in flood stage, they discovered that the river had washed over the land for more than twenty leagues, almost sixty miles. Nearly four hundred years later, when the Mississippi overran its levees during the most destructive flood in American history in the spring of 1927, the river’s width expanded to almost a hundred miles, forming
an inland sea that stretched from Yazoo City, Mississippi, to Monroe, Louisiana.

This sort of dispersal is not an option for the Colorado inside the Grand Canyon. Yoked and trussed within its impossibly high rock walls, the runoff is forced to throttle through a narrow space. And as the volume and the speed of the water increase, so too does its ferocity.

When the river rises, rapids that are especially vicious at low water begin to wash out, and many choke points within the canyon’s corridor are transformed into fast-water chutes that feature either smooth waves or none at all. As small- and medium-size rapids are eliminated, the Colorado achieves a kind
of
hydraulic sweet spot around 45,000 cfs—a level that P. T. Reilly, Martin Litton’s old mentor, once described as “pure pleasure.” But the moment the river rises beyond this point, the dynamics shift dramatically.

By June 19, Father’s Day, the river corridor between Lee’s Ferry and Lake Mead was all but overrun with boaters. There were eighteen big, motorized expeditions, each of which would complete its run through the canyon in as few as five days. There were also seventeen oar-powered rafting trips, which were moving quite a bit slower. Slowest of all were three pods of dories run by Litton’s company, plus another sixteen groups of private boaters who were piloting a colorful assortment of catamarans, paddleboats, kayaks, and small oar rafts. Finally, a special charter expedition was hauling a consignment of foreign ambassadors and diplomats from China, Peru, and other countries. As word of this venture spread downriver, it was swiftly dubbed the Dip Trip.

In all, roughly 213
boats were ferrying nearly thirteen hundred guides and passengers toward Lake Mead. Never before had the canyon been crowded with so many people on so many craft during such a high flow. And thanks to the additional water that Tom Gamble’s team was now sending through the dam, every boatman on the river was being treated to a crash tutorial in the havoc that a flood tide can wreak deep in the canyon.

W
hen the discharges shot past 60,000 cfs, the average velocity of the water
accelerated from three miles per hour to six, and the current began to weave erratically back and forth from one side of the river to the other, banging against eddies and ricocheting off the sides of the cliffs. At first, the guides were thrilled by these changes, and the passengers, feeding off the excitement, were titillated to partake in an adventure that even their veteran hosts found novel and bracing. But as the current grew more confused, the danger seemed to build geometrically, ushering in a seriousness that everyone found urgent and disturbing.

Around June 22, the river entered a new and alien phase. In some areas, the stationary haystacks—the huge standing waves that normally define the topography of a rapid—suddenly began milling back and forth at random. To meet those monsters squarely on the bow of their boats—an absolute necessity for a dory or a small oar raft—the boatman had to react explosively, pivoting instantly before confronting the shifting waves. In other areas, rapids arose within some of the larger eddies, which meant that
white water was actually moving
upstream
. Another oddity, for which no one had a name, was a foot-deep trough that would appear from out of nowhere and run swiftly across the
river, perpendicular to the main current. But the strangest features, by far, were the whirlpools—gaping wells that would open up in the surface of the river, twenty-five feet in diameter, like miniature spiral galaxies.

The whirlpools tended to materialize along the upstream ends of the eddies, but once they had formed they spun off at random across the face of the river. A boat caught in the grip of such a vortex could be pulled five or six feet lower than the surface of the rest of the river. First the gunwales would disappear, then the torsos and shoulders of the boatman and the passengers. Eventually, all one could see were the tops of people’s heads or their hats, spinning around like the second hand on a clockface. In those moments, no one on board said a word. Each person sat in rigid silence, eyes wide and white, like cattle on the brink of a stampede. Then, without warning, the whirlpool would mysteriously vanish and release the boat to the main current. The experience was eerie, and it left people deeply spooked.

Under such bizarre conditions, the key to safety lay in keeping together so that each expedition’s boats could instantly render aid if one of their sisters got into trouble. Maintaining a tight formation was a simple enough goal. But the current was running so fast and the hydraulics were so powerful that the smaller oar boats found this almost impossible. Simply breaking through an eddy fence
^I
and pulling to shore took Herculean effort, flawless timing, and a solid ration of luck. If six boats punched through the fence and the seventh was rebuffed, everyone had to pull back out, regroup, and make another attempt farther downriver.

The process was maddening, and with each boost in the discharge from the dam, the difficulties increased and the odds seemed to be stacked more heavily against the oarsmen. Every moment demanded absolute focus and ceaseless adjustments with their oars, and most of those adjustments required sharp, white-knuckle bursts of energy. This, they discovered, was perhaps the most brutal aspect of the flood tide—the manner in which it wiped them out physically. There were no respites, no intervals of tranquillity, none of the floating languor that typically forms some of the sweetest moments on the river. If they set their oars down for any reason—to snatch a gulp of water, to glance at their maps—and wound up missing a stroke, it might take fifteen or twenty desperate pulls to recover.

So it went, minute by minute, hour by hour, day after day. But even amid their exhaustion, they couldn’t help but marvel at the changes unfolding along
the bottom of the canyon. By now, most of their favorite beaches and their preferred pull-ins were underwater, and the banks of the river were lined with the tops of submerged tamarisk trees whose branches waved in unison with the current. One by one, familiar landmarks began to disappear. Ten-Mile Rock, a giant, midstream chunk of anvil-shaped sandstone that typically looms high above the surface of the river, slowly submerged. At Redwall Cavern, normally a huge expanse of sand that hosted games of volleyball and bocce, the boatmen drifted into the flooded chamber to permit the passengers to raise their arms and brush the tips of their fingers along the limestone ceiling of the cavern. As they approached House Rock, a big rapid at Mile 17, they listened for the roar, heard nothing, then shot through with their oar blades out of the water, looking left and right for the massive boat-eating hole. Nothing. Gone.

To the veterans, these things were extraordinary and wondrous, but the larger picture was deeply disturbing. As the speed and force of the current continued to build, with no end in sight, rumors began to fly up and down the river about what was happening upstream at the dam. Some guides informed their passengers that a catastrophic break was possible at any moment, and that
if they heard anyone yell “High ground!” they were expected to start climbing the walls of the canyon as fast as possible to get clear of the tsunami that would be created by the release of Lake Powell. Others speculated that the reservoir might already be sluicing over the top of the dam.

Years later, engineers such as Tom Gamble and Bruce Moyes—men who understood the workings of the dam far better than any river guide—would scoff at the absurdity of those fears. But the rumors offered a glimpse into the confusion and anxiety of a group of boatmen who were cut off from reliable information, held the lives of others in the palms of their hands, and were confronting the most ferocious white water that most of them had ever seen.

N
o responsible commercial outfitter could afford to ignore such conditions, and as the first of these expeditions slowly trickled off the river with reports of what was taking place inside the canyon, companies responded in a variety of ways. Several outfitters began contacting their upcoming clients and offering them the option of canceling. Others gave people the chance to back out right there on the boat ramp at Lee’s Ferry. The groups that were already on the river by mid-June, however, had no choice but to deal with the challenges as best they could, even as those events were beginning to undermine a quarter century of river-running wisdom.

For years, one of the guiding community’s most widely held beliefs was that the most stable craft on the river were the big motor rigs—behemoths whose
size and displacement enabled them to skate safely through the center of all but the worst stretches of white water. Toward the middle of June, to everyone’s astonishment, those rigs started flipping over.

The first accident took place at President Harding, a minor rapid at Mile 44 that had never caused anyone much trouble. The flip triggered a full-scale rescue in which all of the passengers were thrown into the river and had to be evacuated by helicopter, alerting the Park Service that some sort of invisible threshold had been crossed. By the second flip,
which took place on Saturday, June 18, the river rangers knew they had to find a way to broadcast the news each time the river rose.