The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon / Изумрудная миля (by Kevin Fedarko, 2014) - аудиокнига на английском

For my parents, Robert and Rita If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. —LOREN EISELEY LAUNCH June 25, 1983 ON any given evening in summer, but most notably in late June, there comes a moment just after the sun has disappeared behind the rimrock, and just before the darkness has tumbled down the walls, when the bottom of the Grand Canyon gives itself over to a moment of muted grace that feels something like an act of atonement for the sins of the world. This is the fleeting interregnum between the blast-furnace heat of the day and the star-draped immensity of the night, and when it arrives, the bedrock bathes in a special kind of light, the pink-and-orange blush of a freshly opened nectarine. This is also the canyon’s loveliest hour, when there is nothing sweeter, nothing more calming to the soul, than standing along the shallows at the edge of the Colorado River and breathing in the wonder of the place. The ramparts rising nakedly for more than a vertical mile above. The locomotive-size slabs that have peeled away from the terraced cliffs and shattered to pieces far below. And most bewitching of all, the muscular, sluicing, glimmer-gilded surface of the great river itself. But June 25, 1983, was not any given evening. Not by a long shot. And with twilight now fading, the face of the water turned menacing and unknowable as the biggest flood in a generation throttled downstream into the night. An hour or so later, the moon appeared, ascending with stately deliberation until it was suspended in all its fullness inside the thin ribbon of sky between the rims. There it hung, fat and heavy, casting the upper faces of the cliffs in a silver and faintly malignant glaze. Deep within the canyon’s corridor, the defile between the escarpments was too narrow to accept most of this illumination, and so the bottommost bands of rock, the ancient strata of Zoroaster granite and Vishnu schist that lined the edge of the river, were lost in shadow. But far upstream at a place called Lee’s Ferry, where a breach in the cliffs marks the spot where all river journeys through the canyon begin, the walls widened and the river was able to open itself to the sky. Here, the moonbeams streamed down the hunched shoulders of Shinarump shale and spilled across the water, etching each wave, every ripple and eddy, in a spectral radiance. Out there in the millrace, the rush of water was broad and powerful, and as the current pushed past, it did so with an eerie silence. But if you cocked your body at just the right angle, you could detect a faint thrum, a kind of basal tremor. The frequency of that vibration was impossible for the ear to pick up, but it registered unmistakably on the hairs of the forearms, the wall of the chest, and deep in the belly. This was the muffled resonance of a runaway river, the sub-audible bell-tone of water surging with ungovernable force into the throat of the canyon. Just beyond the riverbank, a road led away from the water, snaking off in the distance toward Highway 89, the only thruway in this remote outpost of northeastern Arizona. The surface of that road was strewn with loose gravel, and about an hour before midnight, it crunched softly with the approach of a vehicle whose driver was proceeding guardedly. Behind the headlights loomed the boxy silhouette of a small delivery truck, a contraption whose appearance, in this place and at this hour, was perplexing because it seemed to herald the sort of business that never unfolds at the ferry—an after-hours FedEx pickup, perhaps, or the arrival of a stack of tomorrow’s newspapers. The mystery was resolved only after the driver wheeled across the parking lot at the edge of the water and it became clear that the truck was towing a metal trailer. Cradled on the bed of that trailer was a small wooden dory. The boat’s profile was distinctive—an upturned prow that terminated in a sharp point, and a hull whose bottom was curved like the blade of a scimitar. Lashed to her decks were two sets of ten-foot oars hewn from straight-grained Oregon ash, and tucked into the footwell at the center of the boat lay a cable connecting a car battery to a pair of powerful searchlamps, the kind of devices that jacklighters use when hunting deer in the dark. There was just enough light to make out her colors—a beryl-green hull and bright red gunwales. And if you looked closely, you could discern the black-and-gold lettering emblazoned along the right side of her bow that spelled her name: Emerald Mile. As the truck completed the arc of its turn, three figures leaped out and began racing toward the river while the driver, who had now cast off all signs of hesitation, backed the trailer smartly alongside a line of rubber rafts that were moored at the shore. On the decks of those rafts lay a squadron of half a dozen slumbering river guides, who had arrived at the ferry’s boat ramp several hours earlier, only to be told by the National Park Service ranger that the Colorado was closed due to the flood. As the guides awoke to this burst of activity, they scratched their heads in confusion. Then, intuiting what was about to unfold, they roused themselves from their sleeping bags and hustled over to lend a hand by loosening the straps that anchored the dory to the trailer and heaving her into the water. She hit with a sharp slap and shot almost a quarter of the way across the eddy before coming to a stop, bobbing gently like a champagne cork. Meanwhile, the mysterious trio splashed through the shallows and hauled themselves on board. The first of those figures presented an image that seemed to cut in two directions at once. In some ways, his appearance perfectly embodied the demeanor of the unbound river. His hair was wild and out of control, while his limbs moved with a fluid grace as he scrambled across the decking and positioned himself at the oar station in the center of the boat. But in other respects, he appeared to have no connection at all with the water he was about to ride. His breathing was even and measured, and the expression on his face was composed as he threaded the oars into their locks, curled his fingers around the handles, and waited calmly for his two companions to stow the spotlights and the battery, then settle themselves into their seats in the bow and the stern. When everything was ready, all three men turned toward the shore, where their driver was now staring at his wristwatch while completing a silent countdown. When the second hand on his watch reached exactly 11:00 p.m., the driver cried, “Go!”—and with a sharp intake of breath, the wild-haired boatman thrust his torso forward with his arms outstretched, a move that sent the shafts of his oars planing sternward. At the top of this stroke, he snapped both wrists at the same time, a maneuver that squared up the oar blades just as they entered the water. Then he pulled back with his entire body while driving the balls of his feet directly into the front end of the footwell. His first stroke sent them skimming across the eddy, and the second speared them into the main current. There, the boatman paused for a half second to permit the stern to swing downstream. As the dory completed this clockwise turn, the river seized the hull and hurled them toward the swiftly rising walls of rock that marked the gateway to the Grand Canyon. And just like that, they were gone. Well, almost gone. In the final moments before the boat vanished, another vehicle pulled into the parking lot at the ferry and a second set of headlights swept the edge of the river. Inside that vehicle sat a family that had driven all the way from New Mexico in the hope of embarking on a rafting vacation, only to learn from the ranger that all launches were forbidden—disappointing news, given the hassles they had gone through to secure a highly coveted noncommercial permit to run the canyon. After motoring back to Highway 89 for a late supper at a roadside diner, they were now returning to their tent and arrived just in time to catch sight of the mysterious boat as she cast off and disappeared—an incident that they planned on reporting to the ranger first thing in the morning. In the meantime, they were left to ponder what had just taken place. What in the world were those clowns up to, they wondered, launching into the teeth of a flood on the near side of midnight with the assistance of a gaggle of guides who knew perfectly well that the Colorado was closed? Were they out of their minds? In a way, yes, they truly were—although the men aboard that boat were also engaged in an urgent mission. A gesture of poetry and defiance quite unlike anything the canyon had ever seen. A quest that was inspired and driven by the obsessions of the fanatical boatman who was now gunning his dory toward the maelstrom that awaited them downstream. Kenton Grua was a veteran of the river world as well as one of its most vivid and eccentric characters, a dreamer whose passions for the canyon ran deeper than almost anyone else’s, and whose prowess as a dory captain was unmatched by all but a handful of boatmen. The voyage upon which he and his companions had just embarked, however, would call upon all of his skills and more. Between Lee’s Ferry and the Grand Wash Cliffs, the sandstone portals at the edge of the Mojave Desert that marked the western terminus of the canyon, lay almost three hundred miles of river, the worst of which were studded with the most storied white water in all of North America. Threading that gauntlet in a rowboat was an odyssey that typically lasted at least two weeks and could take as long as twenty-three days. Yet Grua’s illegal pre-midnight launch on the crest of this flood tide was designed to smash that timetable to pieces. If he and his accomplices could steer through the darkness and keep their bow square to the biggest waves; if they could somehow avoid capsizing or drowning or being broken apart on the rocks; if they could stay awake and maintain their pace by spelling each other at the oars while dodging the brigade of irate rangers who would soon be alerted to their unauthorized presence on the river—if they could carry out all of those tasks without a single hitch, it was possible that the swollen Colorado might serve as a kind of hydraulic slingshot that would pitch them all the way from the ferry to the cliffs so swiftly that the duration of the trip would be calibrated not in weeks, or even days, but in hours. At which point, if everything unfolded according to plan, the little green dory with the bright red gunwales would be catapulted into legend as the fastest boat ever propelled—by oar, by motor, or by the grace of God—through the heart of the Grand Canyon. LEVIATHAN ROUGHLY thirty thousand yards upstream from the Emerald Mile’s point of launch on the evening of June 25, a distance of some fifteen miles, a rampart ascended into the night that bore no resemblance to the canyon and whose surface was burnished by a radiance that had no connection to the moon. Instead of running naturally along the edges of the Colorado, this wall stood directly athwart the river’s current, thrusting more than seven hundred feet into the air from its foundation in the bedrock deep beneath the surface. The shape of that wall was a complex parabolic arch whose camber and curves had no organic analogue, and its texture was equally synthetic. Unlike the corridors of the canyon, whose facades are broken by the endlessly striating cracks and blemishes of living rock, the face of this barricade was smooth and flawless. Something blunt and clean and undeniably impressive resided in the alabaster perfection of all that concrete. Nearly ten million tons of the stuff had been slung across the breadth of the river by an army of engineers and laborers who had started assembling its frame in 1960, pouring and shaping with such care and precision that, three years later, when they were finally through, it looked as if a highly skilled machinist had tooled the edges of a giant clamshell and dropped it neatly between the embrasure of stone. Aesthetics aside, however, the overwhelming impression that this monolith left on the mind, the element that overwhelmed the senses and blocked out everything else, was its sheer size. The wall was more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty and its length exceeded that of the Seawise Giant, the longest supertanker ever built. The dimensions were so implausible that, upon seeing this colossus for the first time, one was tempted to conclude that it could have been conceived only under conditions where the normal laws of gravity and physics did not apply. And this notion, that perhaps the structure did not belong fully to this world, was buttressed by an odd event now unfolding across its face. At 11:00 p.m. on one of the hottest nights of the year, the entire wall appeared to have been overtaken by a snowstorm. Only when the eyes had adjusted to the scale did this agitated cloud reveal itself as a nation of disoriented moths, tens of thousands of them fluttering like confetti around a line of sodium-vapor floodlights, each of which was sending a pilaster of blue-tinted light upward, like the columns on a Greek temple, toward the parapet of the Glen Canyon Dam. Those arc lights were mounted along the flat roof of a windowless structure that was anchored at the very bottom of the dam, a building whose profile boasted none of the grace and symmetry of the great white wall behind it. Nine stories high and shaped like an enormous shoe box kicked onto its side, Glen’s hydroelectric power plant was devoid of a single curve or bend that might have enabled it to harmonize with the face of the dam. Located on the far west side of the plant, eight stories above the surface of the river, was a chamber roughly thirty feet wide and fifty feet deep known as the Control Room. Staffed by a team of ten technicians who worked on three eight-hour shifts that rotated at 8:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m., and midnight, the room housed as many as five employees during the day. At night, however, there were usually no more than two: an assistant who roved around to inspect the many gauges and valves within the power plant as well as the extensive network of tunnels that ran through the interior of the dam itself; and an operator required to stay put behind a large steel desk equipped with three telephones and a two-way radio. The US Bureau of Reclamation, the arm of the federal government that had built the dam and was responsible for its operation, has long been particular about disclosing the names of its Control Room personnel, a security precaution that applies to all National Critical Infrastructure facilities deemed vulnerable to attack. Accordingly, the bureau has redacted from its logbooks the employee who was on duty on the night of June 25, and so we do not know his name. But the manager in charge of the Control Room during this period was Dick White. And according to White, if the normal pattern of behavior was being observed for the graveyard shift, his operator was sitting in a government-issued chair designed for air-traffic controllers, with his ankles crossed and his feet propped on the surface of the steel desk. From this vantage, White’s man was positioned at Glen’s nerve center and serving as the cerebral cortex for the entire facility. Arranged before him was a bank of panels studded with so many lights and switches and dials that it looked as if he were monitoring the public transit system of a large city. Thanks to that instrumentation, he had his finger on the pulse of not just the dam itself but also the power plant and the transmission lines snaking out of the canyon. Every aspect of the chamber in which he sat—its cool colors, its neat lines, the unwinking vigilance of the lights and the protective symmetry of the encircling walls—upheld the principle of control: the affirmation that here in this place, at this hour, human beings were indisputably in charge of a renegade river that had once been the scourge of the Southwest. For each member of the Control Room team, the gadgetry on those panels was as familiar as the knobs on his stereo at home. But according to White, every time you sat down at that desk, it was impossible not to feel a flitter of exhilaration and unease that flowed from the awareness of being in the driver’s seat of one of the largest machines on earth. A piece of technology so enormous that it made other things that are often invoked as reference points for jumbo-size industrial design—the bridge of an aircraft carrier, the cockpit of a C-130 cargo jet, the command module of an Apollo rocket—seem puny by comparison. But another factor was at work there too. Because, in addition to the dam’s size, you also understood that out there in the darkness on the opposite side of that wall loomed one of the longest reservoirs on the planet, a body of water that extended 186 miles up the ancient bed of the Colorado and touched 1,960 miles of shore—longer than the Pacific coastline from Seattle to San Diego—and whose ponderous volume, somewhere in excess of nine billion gallons, was incessantly pressing against the upstream flanks of the dam. That was an awful lot of water to be holding back. Water whose insistence on moving downhill harbored more power than one could imagine. As White well knew, the fury that water was capable of unleashing could be profoundly unsettling, especially if you dwelled on the idea too deeply. But this was also what made the dam truly awesome. There was no such thing as twilight inside the Control Room of the Glen Canyon Dam—no velvet hour when the floor and the walls were bathed in a peach-colored glow and the operator was able to heave a sigh of tranquillity. But on any given evening, whether it was the height of the summer solstice or the dead of winter, there was something almost as gratifying, perhaps even more so. Because whoever was sitting at the desk in front of the control panels at that moment got to play God. The ritual usually kicked off just before 6:00 p.m., when a call arrived from the Western Area Power Administration dispatcher, a man sitting 350 miles to the northeast in Montrose, Colorado. This signaled the start of the evening surge, the moment when most of the twenty million people in an area stretching from eastern New Mexico to Southern California were preparing to return home from work, turn on their lights, preheat their ovens, and sit down to watch the evening news. The dispatcher in Montrose was responsible for ensuring that the load on the power grid would meet this spiking demand, and he anticipated the evening rush by ordering White’s man to start calling up electricity. The operator responded by pushing a black button that activated a high-pressure lube pump that shot high-viscosity oil into the thrust bearings inside one of the dam’s eight generators. If you were standing on the floor of the power plant, this would register as a low whine. Five seconds later, the gates would open on the face of one of Glen’s penstocks—giant steel tubes that ran through the wall of the dam and whose intakes were positioned more than five hundred feet above the power plant on the reservoir side of the wall. At this point, the sound of the pump motor would give way to a roar of water. The drop was enormous, and at the base of the dam, the column of water inside was bent into a horizontal stream, channeled into the power plant, and blasted against a set of wicket gates attached to one of the plant’s 155,500-horsepower turbines. The rush rose another notch as the wicket gates threw torque into the battle-tank-size turbine, which spun faster and faster until it was whirling at two and a half revolutions per second. Extending vertically from the top of the turbine was a shaft connected to a generator that housed a six-hundred-ton rotor whose perimeter was lined with forty-eight steel poles that functioned as electromagnets. When the rotor was fully engaged, this spinning steel forest created a magnetic flux sufficient to generate 125,000 kilowatts, enough electricity to power roughly one hundred thousand homes and businesses. The current coursed from the top of the generator to a bank of transformers, which punched the electricity into a set of nine transmission cables that ran up to the switching yard on the rim. From there, the lines marched off across the desert toward the cities of the Southwest—to Phoenix and Tucson and dozens of smaller towns scattered around the Four Corners region, where, hundreds of miles away, the energy that had been locked inside the river was now released to civilization: zapping frozen microwave dinners, broadcasting Peter Jennings’s image on the television, lighting up the forty-foot-tall neon cowboy sign on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. Nothing about any of this was secret or unusual. Indeed, the process was so routine that most people had little appreciation that, perhaps more than anything else, this was the generative spark that separated the modern world from the Dark Ages. But for the man at the steel desk, there was nothing casual about cranking that dynamo into motion, hearing the roar, and watching the gauges and dials registering the amperage as the current shot from the bottom of the gorge and sped off to those distant cities and towns. Inside Glen’s penstocks and turbines and generators, the river was literally being reborn as something else—water quickening into electricity. The performance had a kind of magic, and for every member of the Control Room team, the charge was to be savored. Except that, on this particular night, the charge had been replaced by something else—an echo of the same chaos that was about to descend on Kenton Grua and his crew deep inside the Grand Canyon. Because on June 25, White and his colleagues were twenty-three days into a crisis that had no precedent in the history of hydroelectric dams. And by now, every single one of those men had forgotten what normal was. The emergency they were confronting had been set in motion almost a year earlier and some eight thousand miles to the west of the Arizona desert, on the far edge of the Pacific Ocean. There, in October of the previous year, a massive El Ni?o event had triggered a series of barometric anomalies that had given birth to the largest spring runoff within the Colorado River basin in twenty-five years. The last time anyone had witnessed a runoff of comparable size, the dam had not even been built yet—which helped to explain why the network of agencies responsible for controlling the largest river in the Southwest had been caught flat-footed. The details of how things had gone off the rails were still obscure, and the full picture of what had taken place would not emerge for months. But the upshot was that by early June, Glen was already holding back the runoff from 108,000 square miles, a region the size of Poland, and every additional acre-foot of floodwater that poured into the upper end of Lake Powell, the reservoir behind the dam, was arriving faster than it could be drained through the dam. Fortunately, Glen was equipped with an emergency bypass designed for just such an event. On each side of the dam, a massive spillway tunnel had been bored through 675 feet of Navajo sandstone and lined with thirty-six inches of concrete. In theory, those twin monsters were capable of inhaling a combined flow of more than 200,000 cfs,I neatly channeling that water around the dam before dumping it back into the river. This should have been enough to absorb whatever the Colorado might care to throw at Glen. There was just one hitch. The tunnels had never been put through a full-on test drive, and in early June, something had gone terribly wrong. Deep inside the spillways, a series of vicious shock waves had scoured away the concrete lining and exposed the soft sandstone walls to the full force of the river. As a result, water arcing out the mouths of both tunnels was laden with debris that included chunks of concrete, pieces of rebar, and boulders the size of refrigerators. In effect, the Colorado had begun to dismantle the spillways by tearing their guts to pieces. Throughout the month of June, the goal of every person who worked at the dam was to funnel as much of the water in the reservoir as possible downstream into the canyon. To that end, they had been running the power plant nonstop for weeks, maxing out the turbines and the generators and dumping the extra electricity onto the grid at bargain rates. They were also redlining river outlets, a set of four steel tubes running through the eastern portion of the dam, which bypassed the power plant and blasted water directly into the Colorado at 120 miles per hour. They were even harnessing the stricken spillways, sending as much water as they dared through the tunnels and keeping their fingers crossed. The scene was spectacular and chilling. You could hear the thunder of the discharge from the parapet, and if you walked out toward the hollow-jet valves on the east side of the power plant, you could actually feel the vibrations through the soles of your shoes. And yet, none of that was enough. As the runoff continued racing down from the tops of the southern Rockies, across the Colorado piedmont, through the badlands of Utah and into the upper tentacles of Lake Powell in one vast rush, the surface of the reservoir inched upward with each passing hour. Fifteen feet short of the parapet, the water would overwhelm the steel gates that guarded the spillways, then plummet back into the crippled tunnels and resume its excavation of the sandstone. At the very least, this would inflict dreadful damage on the gates and the tunnels while robbing the engineers of any ability to control the water they were releasing downstream. In effect, they would lose dominion over the river. Yet that was only the third-worst-case scenario. If luck was running against them, the hydraulic blast that had already ravaged the tunnels’ interiors might cut laterally through the sandstone walls and create a breach just downstream from the foot of the dam. Even then, the damage could probably be contained, albeit at tremendous cost to the Reclamation’s coffers and reputation. The last possibility, however, was nothing short of apocalyptic. If things truly went to hell, the river could, in theory, establish a connection between the damaged spillways and the bottom of the reservoir behind the dam, triggering an “uncontrolled release.” This would send the contents of Lake Powell down the length of the Grand Canyon, across Lake Mead, and over the lip of Hoover Dam. From there, the surge would bulldoze across western Arizona, where it would inundate the towns of Laughlin, Needles, Parker, and Yuma, along with almost every dam and river diversion structure along the lower Colorado. As a final grace note, much of that water would probably wind up taking out the infrastructure to California’s Imperial Valley, one of the richest agricultural breadbaskets in the country, before dispersing into the Sea of Cort?s. During the first week of June, the engineers had dismissed the terminal scenario as absurd. But by the end of the month, no one at Reclamation could say with certainty what the river would or would not do. Hence, the Control Room team’s primary concerns on the night of June 25 were the serious and far-reaching consequences of what was happening at the dam itself. Although they were aware that the torrent they were sending downstream had jacked the Colorado to a level that hadn’t been seen in a quarter century, they had no inkling of the commotion this was causing deep inside the Grand Canyon. At that very moment, more than two hundred boats and nearly thirteen hundred people who had left from Lee’s Ferry prior to the river’s closure were scattered up and down the 277-mile corridor within the canyon. The engineers had no idea that several of those boats had been destroyed, or that dozens of people had been dumped into the current, or that helicopters had been sent in to rescue the survivors, some of whom had been washed as far as ten miles downstream in fifty-degree water. And, understandably, the managers of the dam didn’t have the faintest clue that an hour before midnight, a trio of boatmen had staged an illegal launch of a little wooden dory out of Lee’s Ferry and were now racing straight toward the worst of the carnage. Although the dam operators’ myopia was neither malicious nor willful, their ignorance underscored one of the strangest and most confusing aspects of the drama about to unfold. For although the reservoir and the canyon were bound together by geology, by government oversight, and most important by the thread of the Colorado itself, they were actually two separate worlds. Indeed, Glen’s hulking edifice represented one of the starkest divisions on the American landscape, a borderline that seemed to delineate the frontier between two different republics. And to say that the citizens of those rival domains did not always see eye to eye was a bit of an understatement, because each represented the antithesis of the other’s deepest values. To the engineers and the technicians who belonged to the world of the dam, Glen was no dead monolith but, rather, a living and breathing thing, a creature that pulsed with energy and dynamism. Perhaps even more important, the dam was also a triumphant capstone of human ingenuity, the culmination of a civil-engineering lineage that had seen its first florescence in the irrigation canals of ancient Mesopotamia and China, then shot like a bold arrow through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution to reach its zenith here in the sun-scorched wastelands of the American Southwest. Glen embodied the glittering inspiration and the tenacious drive of the American century—a spirit that in other contexts had been responsible for harnessing the atom and putting men on the moon. As impressive as those other accomplishments may have been, nothing excelled the nobility of transforming one of the harshest deserts on earth into a vibrant garden. In the minds of its engineers and its managers, Glen affirmed everything that was right about America. To Kenton Grua and the river folk who inhabited the world of the canyon, however, the dam was an offense against nature. Thanks to Glen and a host of similar Reclamation projects along the Colorado, one of the greatest rivers in the West, had been reduced to little more than a giant plumbing system, a network of pipes and faucets and catchment tubs whose chief purpose lay in the dubious goal of bringing golf courses to Phoenix, swimming pools to Tucson, and air-conditioned shopping malls to Vegas. A magnificent waterway had been sacrificed on the altar of a technology that enabled people to prosper without limits, without balance, without any connection to the environment in which they lived—and in the process, fostered the delusion that the desert had been conquered. But in the eyes of the river folk, even that wasn’t the real cost. To the boatmen and the guides, the untamed Colorado embodied a current of values that ran far deeper than the celebration of economic progress. Chief among them being the idea that nothing offers a more compelling distillation of nature’s beauty than a free-flowing river. In their eyes, Glen was a testament not to everything that was right with America but everything that was wrong with it. And it was here that the illicit adventure upon which the Emerald Mile had just embarked raised the possibility of something more provocative than simply setting a speed record. On its surface, staging a clandestine race through the Grand Canyon was little more than a bold act of mischief. But to conduct such a race atop a runaway flood tide, and to do so at a moment when a hated hydroelectric dam was in peril—those things elevated the endeavor, at least in Grua’s mind, to something more than just a stunt. To him, it offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to participate, in the most visceral way imaginable, with the ancestral majesty of the Colorado. An act that was insane and reckless, to be sure, but that also stood as an expression of defiance against not only the ideals for which the dam stood but the arrogance of having built the thing in the first place. Had Glen’s engineers and technicians known of the speed run, they would have surely felt themselves justified in dismissing this notion as idiotic, thereby reinforcing the extent to which these two dominions, the world of the river and the world of the dam, were so fundamentally opposed. In fact, it was probably fair to say that no one on either side of this divide shared anything at all in common. But on the evening of June 25, members of both camps were inextricably united by at least one truth. In its own way, each group was confronting the unsettling fact that on this night, at this hour, despite all the engineering and the technology, despite the colossus of the dam itself, the Colorado and the canyon that contained it were as wild, as ungovernable, and as mysterious as on the day they were first discovered. I. Floods are measured in cubic feet per second, also known as cfs, a dynamic calibration of both volume and force that is obtained by multiplying the average speed of the current by the river’s cross section. PART I The World Beneath the Rims By far the most sublime of all earthly spectacles . . . the sublimest thing on Earth. —CLARENCE DUTTON The Grand Canyon at the Toroweap Overlook, by William Henry Holmes, 1882. 1 First Contact It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such a wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed . . . and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs. —WALLACE STEGNER IN the winter of 1540, just nineteen years after Hern?n Cort?s had marched into the heart of Mexico and looted the riches of the Aztecs, a young Spanish nobleman named Francisco V?squez de Coronado was given supreme command of the largest expedition of conquest in the brief but magnificently profitable history of the New World. When Coronado’s company mustered in the central square of the town of Compostela on a Sunday morning in late February, the column behind him included 230 horsemen recruited from the nobility of New Spain, sixty-two heavily armed foot soldiers, and five friars. Although the leaders of this glittering assembly were all Spaniards, the ranks were also enlivened by a smattering of other nationalities—five Portuguese, two Italians, a Frenchman, a Scot, and a bugler from Germany, plus more than a thousand Tlaxcalan Indians, whose primary duties involved tending to the fifteen hundred horses, mules, and cattle that shuffled inside the vast cloud of dust that rose in their wake. One witness in Compostela described them as “the most brilliant company ever collected in the Indies to go in search of new lands.” Coronado’s military escort was led by Melchior D?az, an intrepid horseman and scout who was destined within a few months to become the first European to cross the mouth of the Colorado River where it entered the Gulf of California—and who was fated, just a short time thereafter, to suffer a cruel and freakish death. (While attempting on horseback to run his lance through a dog that was attacking his sheep, he skewered his groin and bladder on the back of his own weapon.) The vision that had drawn these men out of Mexico was C?bola, a complex of seven cities that was rumored to lie far to the north and whose treasures were said to defy belief. If the stories that had been peddled to Coronado were true, the walls of C?bola’s palaces were encrusted with emeralds, the doors were studded with sapphires, and the handles of those doors were wrought from the purest turquoise. The rulers of C?bola were said to sup on golden plates and quench their thirst from golden goblets, and on warm nights they lay beneath trees whose branches were festooned with tiny bells of hammered silver. But most tantalizing of all were the palace storerooms. Richer than the vaults of the Incas or the Aztecs, they were rumored to be stuffed with gold and silver, emeralds and pearls, and fine cotton shawls to a depth of nine feet. Aside from their horses, the most valuable assets of Coronado’s company were their arms, which were unlike anything seen before in that part of the world. In addition to the usual assortment of swords and maces and pikes and halberds, their weaponry included nineteen crossbows, seventeen harquebuses, and a handful of small brass cannons on wheels. Along with these implements of warfare, every soldier in Coronado’s column carried a mental image of himself seizing some portion of C?bola’s fabled treasure for his own. Even a tiny piece of that hoard would be the making of a man’s fortune, the thing that would change the direction of his life no less dramatically than the acequias—the irrigation canals that had been brought from Arabia to Spain by the Moors—can alter the shape and flow of a river by pouring it onto a man’s fields. That prospect was sufficient to pull Coronado’s men through the arid plains of Sonora and across the border into what is now Arizona, past the silver-studded hills surrounding the future town of Tombstone, then up onto the highlands of the Mogollon Rim, through what would later become the Apache National Forest. By the middle of that first summer, however, the fantasy that spurred them had begun to break apart on the hardened surface of the baked desert that lines the western edge of New Mexico. It was there, less than fifty miles southwest of the present-day city of Gallup, that the explorers stumbled upon H?wikuh, a pueblo of the Zu?is, whose adobe abutments Coronado immediately prepared to storm in the belief that he was about to pillage the first of C?bola’s great cities. Despite finding themselves hopelessly outmatched by the Spaniards’ horses and guns, the Zu?is launched a ferocious counterattack with clubs and arrows that brought them almost to the hooves of the Spanish mounts, where they were able to knock the supreme commander senseless with a well-aimed rock. When he regained consciousness, Coronado was given the news that God had granted them a glorious victory in this battle, the first formal military encounter between Europeans and natives within the future territory of the United States. He was also informed that the Zu?i storehouses held no precious metals or gemstones. H?wikuh’s stockpile of wealth, most of which was kept in simple clay pots, consisted primarily of dried corn and pinto beans. This moment marked the start of an unpleasant awakening in which Coronado was forced to grapple with the disheartening possibility that C?bola might be nothing more than a beautiful illusion, a chimera of the desert. Before succumbing to this truth, however, he persisted in watering the fading flowers of hope by ordering several small reconnaissance parties to break off from the main column and conduct exploratory forays on the chance that one of them might stumble upon something of value. One of these teams, a squadron of twelve men led by an intrepid young captain named Don Garc?a L?pez de C?rdenas, was dispatched from H?wikuh and ordered to ride deep into what are now the Navajo and Hopi reservations to chase down rumors of a “great river” that was said to lie somewhere off to the northwest and which might connect with the same river whose mouth the luckless Melchior D?az had earlier crossed. As September spilled into October, C?rdenas and his companions made their way to the Hopi village of Tusayan, then headed through a forest of pi?on and juniper trees until, to their surprise, the ground abruptly gave way, and they found themselves gazing across what appeared to be an inland ocean of air. Here they confronted a vision that future visitors to this remarkable corner of the world would one day deem more wondrous than the mythical riches of C?bola. Perhaps it’s worth pausing for a moment to acknowledge, from the standpoint of Europe’s exploration and conquest of the New World, just how early in the morning it still was. In the autumn of 1540, there was not a single European settlement—not one—along any coastline or anywhere within the interior of what would eventually become the United States. It would be sixty-seven years before the first group of English settlers began battling starvation at Jamestown, and another thirteen years after that before the Pilgrims sighted the cliffs of Cape Cod from the decks of the Mayflower. George Washington would not be born for almost two more centuries, and the better part of a third would slip past before Lewis and Clark even started their great journey up the Missouri River system. Yet there stood C?rdenas and his men, on the brink of a prodigious chasm that was destined to emerge as perhaps the most iconic landscape feature of a nation that did not yet exist. Of all the natural wonders in America—the waterfalls of Yosemite, the geysers of Yellowstone, the great trees of Northern California—this was the very first to be discovered, although discovery was hardly the right word. By the time C?rdenas arrived, much of the terrain inside that abyss had not only been traversed and explored but also inhabited, first by three successive waves of Anasazi, the ancestors of the modern Hopi, then later by the Hualapai, the Paiute, the Havasupai, and half a dozen other tribes. The ruins of entire villages were down there, where the granaries had been stocked with corn and canals had channeled water across fields for hundreds of years until, sometime during the twelfth century, the bottom of the canyon was mysteriously abandoned. There were secrets and legends too—places where shamans had worshipped, where young men had conducted vision quests, and where the spirits of the dead were said to cross over into the afterlife. Nevertheless, C?rdenas’s arrival marked a crucial point in the history of this landscape. At that moment, the continent from which these explorers hailed was at a peculiar crossroads, with one foot testing the waters of the Renaissance and the other still firmly planted in the Middle Ages. The printing press, one of several technologies that would do the most to shape and transform the future, had barely begun shouldering aside the impossibly laborious business of copying illustrated manuscripts by hand. Johannes Kepler, Sir Francis Bacon, and Galileo had not yet been born. Mercator projection maps had not yet been invented; complex numbers were still awaiting discovery. The words geography and geology had not even been added to the English language. And yet, the first tremors of the seismic shifts that would rock the face of the world were already being felt. From a three-story tower within the walls of the city of Frauenburg, the great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was preparing to publish On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, his treatise positing the radical notion that Earth was not the center of the universe, which would herald the arrival of the scientific revolution. In Rome, Bologna, and Venice, the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci had teased out the conceptual principles behind single-span bridges, comparative anatomy, plate tectonics, aeronautics, and the science of fluid mechanics. And oddly, although Spain was still a stronghold of religious orthodoxy—and thus fiercely resistant to these new ideas—the country that had given birth to Coronado and C?rdenas stood at the forefront of these developments in one crucial respect, because no country had a greater command of water. It was on the Iberian Peninsula that the Romans had done some of their most impressive work on arched dams. Here was where the Muslims had laid down the foundations of reservoir-driven irrigation, and where Christian engineers were now refining the concept of hydraulic power. In short, Spain was the seedbed of the technologies that would eventually converge to harness one of the most unbridled but potentially useful forces in all of nature, a wild river. Thus the era of C?rdenas’s arrival at the edge of the canyon offered the first promise of a world that was not only ruled but also controlled by man. And now, here where the pi?ons and the junipers gave way to the buff-colored caprock, that vision was colliding against one of the most implacable expressions of nature’s indifference to grand schemes—a landscape whose essence suggested that such a conceit was perhaps no less arrogant, and no less rife with the potential for unintended consequences, than a horseman’s thinking that it was a simple matter to run his lance through a dog that was pestering his sheep. Years later when Pedro de Casta?eda, one of the chroniclers of the Coronado expedition, set down the story of this first encounter, he offered not a single detail of C?rdenas’s reaction as he and his men peered into the abyss for the first time. But if those men had anything at all in common with the tens of millions of visitors who would later follow in their footsteps, it’s a reasonable guess that not one of them said a word—that they simply stood, rooted in silence, their breath snatched away by the vision that had been laid at their feet. Although no one now knows precisely where this incident took place, it’s almost certain that it occurred along a section of the South Rim that is known today as Desert View. This promontory offers one of the most dramatic of all vantage points into the canyon—a place where it completes a great arc, bending from the east to the north in a sweep whose view is so arresting that the National Park Service would later erect a tall stone watchtower for public enjoyment. Somewhere close to this spot, C?rdenas and his men found themselves looking out at a formation called the Palisades of the Desert, a dramatic set of banded cliff faces that form the canyon’s southeastern rampart. From the base of the Palisades, a series of benches and precipices descends like a crudely hewn set of stairs toward a glittering ribbon of silver and green that winds through the bottom far below. On the opposite side of that stream, a matching set of cliffs and ledges ascends to the North Rim. And yawning between those two rims stretches a void as wide and deep as a landlocked sea, an impression strengthened not only by the shimmering blueness of the air itself but also by the armada of clouds that scud past at eye level, casting shadows beneath their bellies that ripple and dance amid the shattered stones that lie shipwrecked below. Gazing down toward that thin trickle of water winding sinuously between the buttes and mesas rising from the center of the gorge, C?rdenas scoffed at the claims of his Hopi guides, who assured him that this was no mere stream, but a mighty desert river whose width measured half a league across—several hundred yards. Certain they were exaggerating, the Spanish captain dismissed their pronouncements as absurd, judged its true breadth to be no more than eight feet, and ordered his party to begin moving west along the rim in search of a promising place to descend to this creek. Three days later, they arrived at a break in the escarpment where C?rdenas directed Captain Pablos de Melgosa and two of the nimblest foot soldiers to scramble down to have a look. Many hours later, they returned with news that this giant arroyo was far more treacherous than the view from the top had led them to believe. In fact, Melgosa reported, they had penetrated only a fraction of the way down before further descent became impossible—although they had gone far enough to confirm that the Hopi had not overstated the size of the river. But what sobered the reconnaissance party even more were the monstrous dimensions of the interior—a landscape so huge that even its minor features had made them feel hopelessly diminished. To illustrate the point, Melgosa pointed to a single stone column. From the rim, it appeared to be roughly the height of a man, did it not? But no. In fact, it had proved taller than the great tower of Seville, the belfry that rose 344 feet from the Catedral de Santa Mar?a de la Sede, the largest cathedral in the world and, tellingly, a crowning point of reference for a Spaniard of that era. They must have felt that they had lost their bearings entirely. In both a literal and a symbolic sense, this was entirely true. Without a single familiar object to impart some sense of scale—a man sitting beneath the shade of a tree; an ox pulling a plow through a field—it was impossible for the Spaniards to gauge the immensity of this declivity. They had no conception that they were staring into an abyss whose volume exceeded a thousand cubic miles, a distance and depth that dwarfed anything they or any other European had ever encountered. They had no notion that, for much of its length, the top and the bottom of this canyon were separated by more than a vertical mile of rock, which meant that if it had somehow been possible to lift up every peak in the Pyrenees and drop them neatly into that expanse, each mountain would easily fit inside the bottom and not a single summit would peer above the rim. They also had no way of fathoming that, from its eastern reaches to its western terminus, the abyss ran for 277 miles, arguably the longest canyon on earth. Nor did they comprehend that the span between the South Rim and the North Rim averaged roughly ten miles, or that the canyon’s six hundred bays and tributary arroyos could push that width back to fifteen, twenty, even thirty miles. Finally, they were unable to grasp or appreciate that the river of which the Hopi spoke served as the premier drainage channel for the entire Southwest, a waterway that gathered together all the runoff of a region larger than Spain and Portugal combined. Their inability to frame themselves in relation to this stupendous tableau, however, was not simply spatial but also extended into a fourth dimension, the realm of time. And here, they were truly out of their depth. They had no idea, for example, that the very rock beneath their feet, a honey-colored limestone known as the Kaibab, was older than the oldest things they knew of. Older than the basilica that was built upon the slope of Vatican Hill in Rome or the shrine in Jerusalem where the Prophet Muhammad had initiated his ascent to heaven. Older than the temples of ancient Greece or the walled cities of Sumeria—older than any city in the world, in fact, or even the land itself. So old that the Kaibab actually predated not only the continent on which they stood but also the ocean they had spent nearly three months sailing across to get there, as well as all the rest of the continents and all of the oceans between them. And as astonishing as all of that may have seemed, what would have brought them to their knees in awe was that this topmost layer of rock wasn’t really very old at all in comparison with the age of what was lost in the tremulous shadows below. They could see that the walls of the canyon formed a crumbling staircase, but they had no way of knowing that each riser on those stairs was composed of rocks that had been deposited before the step above and after the step below—a vertical concatenation of time that had been laid down in horizontal strata.I This meant, among other things, that if C?rdenas and his men had elected at that moment to force a descent, they would have confronted not only a formidable physical challenge but also a profoundly temporal one. In effect, the canyon served as a kind of self-propelled time machine, a terrestrial chronometer in which each step they took would have hurled them into a deeper and more distant precinct of the past. Their progression into this well of time would not have been uniform. Depending on where they were, they might have passed through fifteen million years in a single stride, while the next dozen paces may only have taken them through a few millennia. But regardless, every step of their journey would have catapulted them backward through entire ages and epochs as they dropped deeper and deeper into a world whose buttresses had been laid down long before anything human had ever taken place. And as they penetrated each stratum—through the hardened deltas of dead rivers, the floors of vanished oceans, the petrified dunes of antediluvian deserts—they could have calibrated their progress by noting each successive benchmark in the fossil record that they passed. Past the conifers, the reptiles, and the amphibians. Past the first seed plants, the first beetles, the first sharks. Past the spiders, the scorpions, and the centipedes, then past the first creatures ever to have left the ocean and ventured forth upon the land. Not long after that, they would pass the point where the first terrestrial plants—the mosses and worts and ferns—had begun to colonize the land. By this point, they’d be inside a realm that had been framed when the land was so empty and barren that all of its rivers ran over bare rock, unadorned by so much as a single green leaf. When you get down that deep, the rock record has big gaps, so without even realizing it, the Spaniards would have found themselves skipping over some important opening movements in the pageant of biology: the first armor-plated fishes, the first vertebrates, the first coral reefs. At around this point, too, things would begin to grow quiet as orders and classes and, eventually, entire phyla in the taxonomic regnum of life successively winked out. First to go would be the gastropods, followed swiftly by the sponges and the echinoderms. And by the time C?rdenas and his men had reached the layer of smooth, tan-colored sandstone now known as the Tapeats, the sea lilies and the brachiopods would also be gone, followed soon thereafter by trilobites—the horseshoe-crab-shaped creatures that had peered through the shallows of lost Paleozoic oceans with eyes made of calcite, the earliest vision systems on earth and a lyrical merger of biology and geology, a living form of rock. Somewhere below the last of the trilobites, C?rdenas’s company would have stepped across a final threshold and entered into the stillest and most silent epoch of all—the time of everything that preceded visible, multicelled life. This was a world that had been populated by whorled chains of the earliest cyanobacteria, anaerobic creatures whose chemistry had coalesced shortly after the crust of the planet had begun to cool and life’s initial moments of respiration unfolded amid an atmosphere devoid of a single molecule of oxygen. Eventually, they would have been able to go no farther. By this point, they’d be standing at the edge of the river itself, a kingdom walled off by elegant foliations of Vishnu schist, rock that had been compressed and deformed by heat and pressure so intense that the minerals inside the stone had recrystallized and metamorphosed into something surreal and otherworldly. This was stone whose bloodlines extended further back than the human mind could possibly conceive—seventeen million centuries into the past, nearly half the life span of the planet and one-tenth the age of the universe itself. A stone so dense and so black that a man felt, upon seeing it for the first time, that its polished surface must surely mark some kind of nadir. Certainly no other rock on the surface of the earth seemed to glitter so darkly with the dawn light of creation. Had C?rdenas and his men succeeded in completing this odyssey, they would have found themselves suspended so far down inside the pelagic nocturnes of deep time that their connection to everything that was familiar and comforting would have dropped away like a severed umbilical cord. This domain was older and deeper, by far, than anything they could even pretend to imagine—a dimension of time and space where God himself seemed to be a deluded and laughable idea and, in the same instant, closer and more ingrained than the teeth inside one’s own head. Electing to forgo the descent, C?rdenas and his men continued their sojourn along the South Rim, slowly making their way west. During the better part of the following week, they were afforded ample time to absorb the scene before them in all of its glory. There was color everywhere, and as each day unfolded, the leaning light of late autumn would have put the countenance of the canyon through a range of complex and alluring changes. The show began early each morning, as the company prepared to resume its journey. Just before dawn, the plateaus stretching beyond the rims took on a pale pink luster, while the upper band of cliffs appeared to be floating on a lake of darkness that slowly compressed as the light poured over the edges and squeezed night out of the abyss. Later in the afternoon, as the light turned flat, the chasm was engorged with a harsh glare that strained eyes and made temples throb. Then, at sunset, the upper strata were once again hammered into a molten gold that gradually cooled to lavender during the twilit minutes before the long shadows returned, the completion of a magnificent burning that spanned the entire visual spectrum, all the named and unnamed hues of candescence. If they were moved by such wonders, their response was never recorded, and in any case, aesthetics were irrelevant to the object of their quest. For C?rdenas was chasing after a harder grade of wealth, and the canyon seemed to contain none of it. There were no precious metals or gems to plunder in the name of his king, no farmlands or estates to seize, no inhabitants to enslave and convert. The impossibly distant river offered no great artery of transportation, and if the Hopi were to be believed, the only mineral worth excavating was salt. As for the gilded cities of C?bola, they were nowhere to be seen. And so, at the end of the week, C?rdenas did the only thing that made sense from his perspective. He pointed his squadron in the direction from which they had come and led them back toward the main body of the expedition—which went on to spend the next two years in a search that took them across the Texas Panhandle, through Oklahoma, and deep into the plains of central Kansas. It was the longest and most arduous march conducted by any group of conquistadores in the sixteenth century, and when they finally returned to Mexico in disgrace in the spring of 1542, they brought back, in the pages of their letters and reports, accounts of many singular encounters, including the first prairie dogs, the first jackrabbits, the first meetings with the tribes of the Great Plains, and the first buffalo. But they had failed to find anything that they deemed to be of value. “The villages of that province remained peaceful,” the expedition’s chronicler wrote of the country surrounding the great canyon, “since they were never visited again, nor any attempt made to find other peoples in that direction.” It was as if the defining element of the entire continent—the greatest testament on earth to the passage of time and to the power of water—had been rendered invisible. More than three hundred years would pass before the most important of Coronado’s successors returned, less than an eyeblink when measured by the scale of Grand Canyon time. But even so, the arrival of those first Spaniards marked a fundamental turning point, a rotation of the great wheel. Because it was the children of C?rdenas, not the Native Americans, who would eventually come back to codify the canyon’s boundaries and catalog its wonders, to map out its grid lines with transits and a surveyor’s chain, and to lay down the foundations that would eventually enable them to harness the power of the river itself. I. This is not a revolutionary idea to us, but it would have been to C?rdenas and his men. Another 129 years would pass before Nicholas Steno, the son of a Copenhagen goldsmith, framed this notion in the Principle of Superposition, one of the defining concepts of the emerging science of geology. 2 The Grand Old Man I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable . . . Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. —T. S. ELIOT JUST before two o’clock on a blustery Monday afternoon in May of 1869, a westbound Union Pacific train was clattering past a strip of ragged, tent-roofed shacks that clung like a piece of gristle to the pale gray badlands of southwestern Wyoming. Directly ahead, a trestle spanned a broad, shallow river whose olive-colored current was restless and kinetic, alive with the sluicing runoff of late spring. As the locomotive approached the lip of the bridge, the engineer throttled his speed back to five miles an hour, a shift that would have been manifest inside the walnut-paneled Pullman Palace saloon carriage, several cars behind the tender, by a faint tinkling of the chandelier and a subtle jolt to the small organ resting atop the richly brocaded Brussels carpeting. If, at this moment, any of the first-class passengers on the left side of the saloon car had been curious enough to push aside the heavily looped curtains framing the windows, they might have found themselves staring down on a diminutive navy of rowboats preparing to cast off on one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of American exploration. Those boats were manned by a squadron of bleary-eyed, rumple-haired men who had spent much of the previous forty-eight hours attempting to drain the entire liquor supply of Green River Station, a town whose population of several dozen roustabouts and blackleg gamblers had gathered along the shore to spit tobacco juice and call out farewells. The boatmen were not in the best of shape. Their faces were unshaven, their clothes were disheveled, and they subjected the spectators to “much blowing off of gas and the fumes of bad whiskey.” But despite these handicaps, they had somehow managed to complete the final steps in loading up their impressive array of gear and provisions. Inside the watertight compartments of the boats were enough bacon, flour, dried apples, sugar, and coffee beans to sustain a party of ten men for almost an entire year. An ample cache of ammunition accompanied a small arsenal of rifles and shotguns, plus the set of steel traps that they hoped would enable them to supplement their larder with fresh venison and beavertail soup. There was also a kit for surveying and mapmaking, including sextants, compasses, and four barometers—each featuring a thin tube of glass filled with a column of mercury and carefully packed in a protective layer of fresh straw. These would be used for determining their altitude as the river carried them on the better portion of its long journey from the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cort?s. By the time the train was rattling past on the trestle overhead, the stowing of this entire duffel—all seven thousand pounds of it—was finally complete, much to the satisfaction of a figure whose appearance gave little indication that he was destined for both greatness and notoriety. At thirty-five years old, Major John Wesley Powell stood barely five and a half feet tall, weighed less than 125 pounds, and scowled sternly at the world from behind the hedgerow of a beard that appeared to have been assembled from a box of steel wool—traits that made him look, in the words of one of his less deferential biographers, like “a stick of beef jerky adorned with whiskers.” His most notable feature, however, was that his right forearm, from the elbow down, was missing—a critical impediment, one might assume, for a man who was proposing to lead a flotilla of oar boats down one of the world’s most dangerous and least understood rivers. In truth, the missing forearm was merely one item in a long list of liabilities and shortcomings, none of which seemed to have had any effect whatsoever on the Major’s confidence. Unperturbed by the perils he was courting by launching downstream in the company of a ragged band of inebriates aboard an unwieldy set of heavily laden boats, he issued the order to embark, and off they went. As the boatmen put their backs into the oars and sent the bows of their boats shouldering into the current, it is impossible to know whether Powell or any member of his crew glanced up at the trestle and pondered how the labored chug of a steam engine passing over this highway of water represented the intersection of two epic subnarratives within the larger story of America, one of those semaphores in history that signaled the passing of one age and the arrival of another. Just two weeks earlier, and less than two hundred miles to the west, at a place called Promontory Summit, a California-based politician and industrialist named Leland Stanford had picked up a maul and hammered home a golden spike that completed the final link in the nation’s transcontinental railroad. Within a few years, coal-burning locomotives would be hurtling passengers and freight between the east coast and San Francisco—a journey that once took as long as six months in a Conestoga—in as little as eighty-three hours, consigning the wagon trails to obsolescence while flinging open the door to cross-continental commerce and trade on a scale that had never before been seen. The telegraph was already in operation, and the telephone was just around the corner, to be followed swiftly by the electronic stock ticker and the incandescent lightbulb. These and a thousand other changes were transforming the country from a pastoral agrarian republic into an industrialized powerhouse that would soon lead the world in mechanized production, agricultural output, capital formation, and real income. In just a dozen years, the frontier would be declared officially closed by the US Census Bureau and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner would compose a landmark essay on the significance of its passing. New York City was already planning its first subway lines. San Francisco, until just a few years earlier little more than a vast collection of tents sheltering mud-spattered miners and squatters, now boasted ostentatious Victorian mansions, one of the busiest ports in the world, and a population that was climbing toward 150,000. And like those burgeoning cities, the nation itself was feverish with expansion. In five months, Congress would take formal possession of Alaska, which had been purchased two years earlier from Russia, and augment the nation’s territory by more than 20 percent. Before the turn of the century, Hawaii would be annexed, Puerto Rico invaded, and the Midway Islands declared a US possession. And yet, despite the unstoppable growth, the ballooning wealth, the breathtaking speed with which the United States was expanding and ripening, parts of the country were ferociously resisting the pull of the modern age. All along the northern and southern Plains, the fiercest and most defiant Indian tribes were battling against the advancing waves of Anglo-European settlement using Stone Age technology, and in some cases they were actually winning. In seven years, the Lakota and the Northern Cheyenne would inflict a brutal defeat on George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry along the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana. A thousand miles to the south, the Comanche—a tribe that had risen to prominence for their unrivaled mastery of horses descended in part from the herd that was brought north during the Coronado expedition—had not only succeeded in stopping cold the advancement of white civilization on the prairies of central Texas, but had in some places actually managed to drive it back, forcing the line of settlement to retreat more than a hundred miles to the east. It was almost as if America was a kind of double nation composed of two parts: one surging forward relentlessly, even heedlessly, toward the rapidly looming approach of the twentieth century; the other digging in its heels and doing its utmost to remain anchored to the past. And nothing symbolized that resistance more eloquently than that an entire quadrant of the country’s backyard, a region bigger than all of Germany and roughly the size of France, remained as remote and obscure to its own citizens and government as the South Pole or the dark side of the moon. That region was called the Plateau Province, and almost nothing was known about its secrets, except that it received scant rainfall, possessed a surreal and almost otherworldly beauty, and was awesomely unreceptive to human beings. Stretching north toward Salt Lake City, south toward Phoenix, east toward Albuquerque, and west toward Las Vegas, its territory overlaid significant parts of what is now Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico—an expanse of 130,000 square miles that contained some of the most impassable terrain on the continent. The other thing that was known about the place was that somewhere through the middle of it ran the Colorado River—although, in the 329 years that had passed since C?rdenas had stumbled upon the great chasm that lay near its heart, almost no one had been back to explore that artery. A handful of expeditions had succeeded in circumnavigating much of the canyon’s periphery, but had barely ventured inside it. In 1776, a pair of Spanish friars had traversed a portion of the Plateau and forded the Colorado just east of the Grand Canyon at a point known thereafter as the Crossing of the Fathers. That same year, another Franciscan priest had poked along the South Rim of the canyon and worked his way into the hidden sanctuary of the Havasupai Indians in the western part of the canyon. This venture was followed by another two generations of silence until the 1820s and 1830s, when a handful of trappers ventured into the canyon country in search of beaver, but left little in the way of written records. The only hard data available on any portion of this terrain came from the US Army’s one organized expedition, which had been confined to the lower reaches of the Colorado, a relatively flat stretch of water that extended north from the river’s delta at the Sea of Cort?s. In 1853, a lieutenant with the army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers named Joseph Christmas Ives was ordered to examine the navigable portion of the river by taking a steamboat as far upstream as he could travel. After chugging nearly three hundred miles from Fort Yuma in an ironclad paddle wheeler with a crew of twenty-four men in the direction of present-day Las Vegas, his odyssey was brought to an abrupt halt when the little steamship slammed into a submerged rock in a crash so violent that the men near the bow were thrown overboard and the engineer was flung halfway into the firebox. Ives then struck out overland, heading east through the Grand Wash Cliffs and making his way onto the plateau that forms the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. After conducting two brief surveys down a pair of tributary canyons, he declared his exploration complete and returned home to announce, in his published report, that the region was so bereft that “the deer, antelope, the birds, even the smaller reptiles, all of which frequent the adjacent territory, have deserted this uninhabitable district.” He then offered one of the most infamous pronouncements that has ever been made about the Grand Canyon: Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed. . . . Excepting when the melting snows send their annual torrents through the avenues to the Colorado, conveying with them sound and motion, these dismal abysses, and the arid table-lands that enclose them, are left as they have been for ages, in unbroken solitude and silence. That was all anyone really knew about this giant expanse in the middle of the Southwest, which constituted the last truly uncharted territory in the country. The most authoritative map of the United States featured a single, provocative word emblazoned in the middle of its four-foot expanse: “unexplored.” The implications of that word struck the patriotic boosters of Manifest Destiny as intolerable. “Is any other nation so ignorant of itself?” railed Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, whose views were shared by many. The mission of uncovering this “great mocking mystery of our geography,” Bowles declared, was a task “more interesting and important than any other which lies before our men of science. The wonder is that they have neglected it for so long.” In fact, there was little wonder. Lieutenant Ives may have been wrong about the destiny of the canyon, but his assessment of its isolation and inaccessibility was accurate. In a landscape that was incised by countless arroyos that branched off from the main stem of the canyon, any form of overland travel was virtually impossible. The distance a raven could cover in a few minutes might take a week or more for a man to traverse on foot or on horseback. In the absence of wings, the only conceivable way to explore the place was by boat, and until the spring of 1869, no one was mad enough to give this a try. But now, here beneath an obscure railway trestle in a remote corner of the Wyoming Territory, as unlikely a figure as one could ever imagine—a one-armed Civil War veteran—was proposing to barnstorm his way into the center of this blank spot by rowing down the upper reaches of the Colorado to the point where published knowledge dried up, and from there to venture forth into what he rather poetically called “the Great Unknown.” John Wesley Powell was the eldest son of an immigrant Methodist circuit preacher and grew up on a frontier farm in Walworth County, Wisconsin, sixty miles south of the place where the distinguished naturalist John Muir was raised in almost identical circumstances. Like Muir, Powell had a deep interest in botany, geography, and geology. As teenagers, both men indulged their fascination with science and nature by capping off fifteen-hour days of backbreaking farm labor with bouts of nighttime reading in order to teach themselves the rudiments of natural history. And, like Muir, Powell seized the first chance he got to break loose from his family and set out on a series of long, solitary, rambling excursions that deepened his love of the land. But the two men differed in one key respect. While Muir eventually found his spiritual calling amid the craggy peaks and wind-raked mountaintops of the High Sierra, Powell’s passions revolved around rivers and boats. In the spring of 1856, at the age of twenty-two, he took a skiff down the navigable length of the Mississippi from the Falls of St. Anthony in Minneapolis all the way to New Orleans, an odyssey that the historian Donald Worster would later speculate may well have taken him past a steamship on which a young river pilot named Samuel Clemens was learning the rudiments of reading water. The following spring, Powell took a train to Pittsburgh and floated the Ohio to St. Louis, tracing the classic natural-history route into the West that had been followed by Lewis and Clark, Thomas Nuttall, and a dozen other of the West’s first scientists. Then, in 1857, Powell rowed down the Illinois River to its mouth, and from there up the Des Moines. On the way, he put together a collection of mollusk fossils, a diverse class of ancient marine invertebrates, that would later win several prizes from the Illinois State Agricultural Society. His rowing and mollusk-gathering days, along with the modest career in academia for which he seemed destined, ended abruptly in the spring of 1861, when he enlisted in the Union Army and went off to war. By April, he was a second lieutenant and serving on Ulysses S. Grant’s staff as a captain of artillery and an expert on fortifications. A year later, on the first afternoon of the Battle of Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee, as he raised his right hand to signal his gunners to stand clear of the recoil of one of the half-ton cannons that he commanded, a Confederate mini? ball entered his wrist and plowed toward the elbow, shattering his entire forearm. The following morning, in a makeshift military hospital set up in the town hall of Savannah, Tennessee, the arm was sawn off two inches below the elbow and tossed onto the pile of amputated limbs outside the building. He returned to command the men of Battery F in nine more battles during the next three years, eventually rising to the rank of major before resigning in January of 1865. Within two years of mustering out, he was appointed professor of geology and natural history at the Illinois State University at Normal. Around the same time, he was also named curator of the Illinois State Natural History Society. Both positions served as a springboard for trips to Colorado during the summers of 1867 and 1868 to gather museum specimens—and there he came up with the scheme of resolving the mysteries of the canyon country by launching a fleet of small wooden boats down the most pugnacious and defiant river in the entire West. The river that transected, knit together, and defined the last unexplored region in the United States had not one source but two. The first, the Green, was originally known to members of the Shoshone tribe, and later to the mountain men of the American fur-trade era, as the Seedskadee. Born amid the black and ice-studded tarns of Wyoming’s Wind River Range, just south of what is now Yellowstone National Park, the Green serenely gathered up the waters of a succession of small creeks cascading out of the Teton and Gros Ventre Ranges and meandered southward through a wide, shallow valley carpeted in sagebrush and lined with cottonwood trees, where, from roughly 1825 to 1840, several hundred trappers staged a rendezvous each summer to sell their peltries and replenish their supplies of salt, gunpowder, lead, and whiskey. At the southern end of this valley, the Green bent to the southeast and continued boring across the alkaline plains of western Wyoming until it reached the trestle bridge of the Union Pacific at Green River Station, where Powell and his bedraggled boatmen were launching their expedition. Fifty or more miles south, somewhere near the border separating the territories of Utah and Wyoming, the river ran smack up against the Uintas, the only major mountain range in the United States that runs from east to west, speared through a fault in the cliffs of flaming-red quartzite and shale that marked the portal to a massive gorge, and disappeared. Meanwhile the Green’s sister stream, known in Powell’s day by the now half-forgotten name of the Grand, was making a roundabout journey from its own point of origin in an idyllic Colorado meadow located in the heart of what would later become Rocky Mountain National Park. Tumbling out of a range called the Never Summers, the Grand cut a diagonal slant down the western slope of the Continental Divide, following a west-trending route that would eventually accommodate a long stretch of Interstate 70. Along the way, it collected the runoff from half a dozen or more tributaries, all of them cold, white-water streams cascading from the tops of the Rockies: the Fraser, the Blue, the Eagle, the Roaring Fork, the Fryingpan, and the Crystal. At the center of a crescent-shaped valley that would later become the farming town of Grand Junction, the Grand picked up the Gunnison River, then crossed into Utah, wheeled left, and began drilling south through the same badlands into which the Green had disappeared—an impenetrable landscape of bald mesas, wrinkled cliffs, and isolated pockets of mountains whose snowy peaks looked like icebergs marooned in an ocean of impossibly blue air. Somewhere out in that maze of wind-raked stone, the two rivers, which by now had covered a combined distance of nearly twelve hundred miles, arrived at a secret place deep inside what is now Canyonlands National Park, a spot known as the Confluence, and merged to form the Colorado. More than a thousand miles downstream from the Confluence, the Colorado emerged from the Grand Canyon and was joined by the Virgin, a tributary whose waters arrived just east of where Lieutenant Ives’s steamboat had come to a crashing halt. Almost everything that lay between those two distant points was a complete mystery. In fact, explorers had reached and forded this stretch of the Colorado at only a handful of places, and since the time of C?rdenas, no one had undertaken a systematic effort to navigate or chart the course of the river. On the Corps of Topographical Engineers 1855 map of the Southwest, the most definitive piece of cartography of the day, a dotted line of almost lyrical uncertainty traced across the empty space to represent the engineers’ best guess as to where the water ran. But the actual details of most of that journey—whether the Colorado doubled back on itself, whether it cascaded over waterfalls the size of Niagara, or bored through underground tunnels—was anybody’s guess. Herein lay yet another unique attribute of the challenge that Powell had laid before himself. 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 Fr?mont 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 Cort?s, 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 Cort?s. 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. 3 Into the Great Unknown 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. —JOHN WESLEY POWELL FOR 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. When 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. Over the next fortnight, one mishap followed another. Just after lunch on June 8, while attempting to wallow through a rapid the men later coined Disaster Falls, the No Name struck a boulder hard enough to throw out her three-man crew, then blundered broadside into another rock, broke in half, and sank. In addition to the loss of the boat, the wreck cost them a third of their rations. During the following week, they managed to drive the remaining three boats into rocks hard enough to cause all of them to leak. Then, late on the afternoon of June 17, Billy Hawkins, the cook, built his fire too close to some dead willows and sparked a blaze that swiftly turned their entire camp into a conflagration, forcing them to grab whatever they could and make a mad dash for the water. As the men tumbled into the boats, they were literally aflame, frantically attempting to douse their beards while tearing away their burning clothing. Meanwhile, Hawkins leaped into his boat, his arms filled with the mess kit, lost his footing on the gunwale, and tossed almost every piece of cookware—plates, cups, knives, and forks—directly into the river. As they struggled with these disasters, the river established what would become a familiar pattern. It wheeled sinuously through broad valleys and unpopulated parklands until it ran up against a range of mountains, then cut through the barricade to form a canyon. Inside these declivities, the walls would rise, the world would narrow, and the current would contort into rapids that could last for miles. Eventually, the ramparts would fall back, and as the river flowed into another valley, the land would open up again, affording another dramatic view of banded buttes in the foreground and, shimmering in the distance, the snowcapped subranges of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. As they made their way downstream, they christened every major feature the crew encountered—the buttes, the promontories, the side streams—like Adam naming the animals. The days swiftly became weeks, and as May gave way to June, the portages grew ever more frequent, one following upon the back of the next, sometimes by as little as a hundred yards. The labor was brutal and exhausting and the men worked like stevedores, unloading thousands of pounds of cargo and hauling everything downstream by hand, then shuffling back upstream to carry the boats or to lower them along the shore with ropes. But they were making progress. By the middle of June, they had reached an idyllic stretch of calm water in southeastern Utah that they named Echo Park, and just a few miles downstream from this point, they conducted a twenty-mile hike to the last outpost of civilization, the trading post on the Uinta reservation. There, Goodman, the adventure-seeking Englishman, announced that he had endured enough and resigned. Then it was back to the river and through Desolation, Gray, Labyrinth, and Stillwater Canyons until, at 4:45 p.m. on the afternoon of July 16, they looked to the left and saw that the Green was about to be joined by another river with an equally strong current, which they immediately identified as the Grand. They had reached the Confluence and were, finally, riding the back of the old man himself, the Colorado proper. By now their skin was cracked and sunburned, their hands were blistered and chafed, and their bodies had been battered by being dragged over the rocks when they lined the Whitehalls through the rapids. Miraculously, no one had suffered a debilitating injury such as a torn ligament or a broken leg. But they were in poor shape, and the boats were faring even worse. The hulls required constant patching, while any oars that were lost or shattered meant that new ones had to be laboriously sawed from driftwood. As for their commissary, much of the flour was now congealed with river water, the apples and the coffee beans were coated in silt, and the bacon was slowly turning green. Thanks to the loss of the No Name and the damage inflicted by the fire, none of the crew had an entire suit of clothes left, and several were all but naked. “I had a pair of buckskin breeches [and] they were so wet all the time that they kept stretching and stretching,” Hawkins wrote in his journal. “I kept cutting off the lower ends till I had nothing left but the waist band.” Under such strain, tempers frayed and arguments flared, and by late July, as they were nearing the end of Utah’s Cataract Canyon, the crew were approaching mutiny. Much of their frustration was directed at Powell, who was so cautious about white water that he rarely risked running a rapid when it was possible to order yet another hated portage. While the men set about unloading the boats for the third or fourth time that day, the Major would wander off to “geologize”—collecting rocks, taking barometric readings, and making meticulous notes on the weather, the terrain, and the stars. None of that would have been a problem with a different type of leader, but Powell was prickly, aloof, and in practical matters, often rather incompetent. His flair for choosing the worst possible place to camp was especially galling. “If I had a dog that would lie where my bed is made tonight, I would kill him and burn his collar and swear I never owned him,” George Bradley seethed in the pages of his diary. Later he added, “If we succeed, it will be dumb luck, not good judgment that will do it.” And so, amid increasing psychological disarray—divided by anger, racked by anxiety, undermined by a distrust of their leader that seemed to deepen with each passing mile—the crew crossed another key threshold on August 5 when, at the downstream end of a placid and beautiful canyon they had named Glen, they reached an open pocket where the cliffs came down to river level. The spot, which would later be known as Lee’s Ferry, marked the entrance to the landmark that was not only the very first great feature in the territory of the United States to have been discovered but, perhaps fittingly, the very last to be explored. From the moment they entered the Grand Canyon, the walls rose higher, the space between them narrowed, and the scale of everything shifted. By the end of that first day, several new layers of limestone and sandstone had pushed out of the shoreline next to the river and shouldered the rimrock a quarter of a mile into the sky. As each stratum stepped back from the next in a stairlike progression, the entire ensemble began to take on the contours of a giant wedding cake of rock. By the third day, the walls displayed a horizontally banded palette of some half a dozen colors that ranged from tawny gold to deep maroon and, later, a rose-petal pastel that seemed to smolder with an inner fire, as if it bore the reflected glare of a furnace deep inside the earth. As the boats penetrated farther into this labyrinth, the cliffs were sculpted into dimensions that were both breathtaking and sublime. Unfortunately, the little band of boatmen had neither the time nor the inclination to appreciate most of this display. Tributary gorges were now spearing in from both the left and the right, and at the mouth of each tributary, a fan-shaped deposit of rocky debris bottlenecked the river, creating sharp hydraulics whose size and viciousness surpassed all but the biggest white water they had so far encountered. They quickly learned to tune their ears to the deep-throated, express-engine roar that signaled the approach of yet another rapid. Echoed and intensified by the rising walls, the thunder of the water quickened their pulses and deafened their ears. Their voices were all but lost as they shouted warnings and directions to one another. The deeper they went, the more remote and lost they felt until, on August 10, they arrived at a turquoise-colored stream known as the Little Colorado, which entered from the left. Here, at this isolated confluence surrounded by slabs and pillars that would dwarf all the cathedrals of Europe, Powell inserted his most famous passage into the journal that he later published: We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Powell wasn’t overstating their ignorance. At this point, they had no clear idea how far they had come or how much canyon lay ahead of them. They did not know how many turns the river would make, how many rapids there might be, or whether their supplies would sustain them through the time it would take to negotiate these obstacles. And they had no way of knowing that their most serious challenges lay ahead. Just downstream from the Little Colorado, the river cut into a layer of metamorphic rock, the Vishnu schist, whose polished black surface framed what would later come to be called the Granite Gorge, a place that was dark and gloomy and so deep that the rims were no longer visible. Here, where the river narrowed to one-third its width, the water increased in both depth and power. The schist’s ferocious resistance to erosion gave rise to rapids unlike any they had yet seen—a gauntlet of truly colossal hellbenders. They lined or portaged whenever possible, but often the walls were so sheer that they were forced to work their way along the sides of the rapids by clawing at the sides of the canyon with their fingers. When the fingerholds gave out, they had to run rapids far beyond their skill. “The boats are entirely unmanageable,” Powell later wrote. “No order in their running can be preserved; now one, now another, is ahead, each crew laboring for its own preservation.” By now, the battered Whitehalls demanded constant attention and ceaseless repair to stay afloat. Each day, the boats had to be recaulked with pine pitch, which the men collected by climbing the walls to the tree line. But the chief concern was their commissary. They had been forced to discard the last of their bacon—too spoiled even for famished men to choke down—and now they were subsisting on a diet of biscuits, soggy apples, and coffee. They had less than three weeks of rations left, and thanks to the hapless Billy Hawkins, their larder was about to get even less appealing. On August 15, Hawkins broke one of his oars and nearly capsized, resoaking the supplies they had just dried out and forcing them to pull over for repairs and redrying. While they searched for a suitable piece of driftwood from which to saw a new oar, one of the boats swung around in the current, and its anchor line swept the baking soda, which Hawkins had left sitting on a rick, into the river. For the rest of the trip their nightly meal would consist of unleavened biscuits made from “rotten flour mixed with Colorado river water.” To add to their problems, the summer monsoons arrived—the time when cloudbursts empty into the canyon with shocking violence. As the rain sheeted down the canyon walls, the water coalesced to form hundreds of brownish-red waterfalls that exploded over the ledges and slurried into the river, dropping trainloads of gravel and rendering the river so gritty that they were forced to quench their thirst by lapping like dogs at puddles in the rocks. With the barometers out of commission, their location and their proximity to the end of the canyon had now become a matter of guesswork, and the river disoriented them further by constantly changing course, looping back on itself in a series of twisted bowknots. From the Little Colorado, it jogged south before swinging west, then northwest before doglegging south again. “If it keeps on this way,” Bradley scribbled in his journal, “we shall be back where we started from.” Their days were reduced to the torturous sessions of lining and portaging, punctuated by terrifying, watery battles that must have felt something like war. At night, the rain ensured that they had little relief. Crouched beneath their rotted canvas among the rocks, two or three men to a blanket, they twitched and jerked with dreams of white water and famished men’s visions of food. “Starvation stared us in the face,” Jack Sumner later wrote. “I felt like Job: it would be a good scheme to curse God and die.” By now, all pretense that this was a scientific expedition had been dropped. Their survival hinged on which would arrive first: the end of their food supply or the end of the canyon. After taking stock of their remaining flour and apples, Powell summed up their predicament with a single phrase: “It has come to be a race for a dinner.” On August 27, exactly 239 miles into the canyon and two days into their last sack of flour, they reached one of the worst rapids they had yet seen—a double set of falls created by a pair of tributary canyons that entered the Colorado on opposite sides of the river, squeezing the current into a fifty-yard-wide maelstrom that Sumner described as a “perfect hell of foam.” After hours of scouting, Powell declared that he could see no way through and concluded that their only option was to lower the boats through the upstream waterfall with ropes, then risk a run through the second falls—an announcement that was greeted with silence. That night, while the rest of the crew pondered this plan, Oramel Howland approached the Major and asked him to walk up the side canyon so that they could speak in private. He explained that after discussing matters with his brother Seneca and Bill Dunn, the three men had concluded that it was madness to go on. Instead, Howland proposed that the entire expedition abandon the river, climb out the side canyon to the north, and attempt to reach the Mormon settlements that lay somewhere along the Virgin River. If Powell refused, then the Howland brothers and Dunn intended to leave and take their chances alone. After Oramel had bedded down for the night, Powell spent the next several hours pacing back and forth along the riverbank. Then he began waking the other members of the crew to solicit their views. While none were pleased by their situation, they all said that they preferred to stay with the boats and the river. When morning arrived, everyone gathered together and begged the three deserters to reconsider. Dunn and Oramel Howland refused, and although Seneca was prepared to relent, he decided that his duty lay in sticking with his brother. The parting was solemn. In the absence of a full crew to man each of the boats, one would have to be left behind. The contents of the Emma Dean were transferred to the Whitehalls, and the little pilot craft was tied to shore, where it would be abandoned along with the barometers, a portion of the ammunition, and virtually the entire collection of rocks and fossils that Powell had painstakingly amassed over the past nine hundred miles. Dunn and the Howlands were presented with two rifles and a shotgun, plus a pan of biscuits that Hawkins had prepared. Powell handed Oramel Howland a letter addressed to his wife, and Sumner gave him a watch to mail to his sister. Then, with pained farewells, the two groups said good-bye. With Dunn and the Howland brothers watching from the cliff, Bradley wrote, the Maid of the Canyon and the Kitty Clyde’s Sister “dashed out into the boiling tide with all the courage we could muster.” The boats scraped against several rocks, plunged over the ledge, and were nearly swamped by the crashing waves. But in no more than a few seconds, they were safely through and bobbing in the tail waves. Delighted by their success, the six men pulled to shore and fired their guns into the air to encourage their friends to clamber along the cliffs and rejoin them. They waited for two hours, to no avail. “The last thing we saw of them,” Sumner later wrote, “they were standing on the reef, motioning us to go on, which we finally did.” The river still wasn’t finished with them. Six miles downstream they confronted an even worse rapid. Somehow they made it through, with Bradley performing his most heroic feat yet when the tether on the Kitty Clyde’s Sister broke free and he fought her through by himself. The following day was a Sunday, and Bradley, who had previously objected to Powell’s refusal to observe the Sabbath, noted that it was good they didn’t stop. “This is the first Sunday that I have felt justified running,” he wrote. “It has now become a race for life.” A few miles downstream, however, the river bent to the northwest and by nightfall the granite had receded into the earth for the last time. By noon of the following day, just over twenty-four hours after Dunn and the Howlands had parted company, they passed through the gates of the Grand Wash Cliffs and found themselves staring across the shallow hills studded with Joshua trees and creosote bushes where the canyon gives way to the Mojave Desert. On August 30, three white men and an Indian were drawing in a fishing net along the north bank of the river where the Virgin flows into the Colorado, a spot just twenty miles upstream from where the little ironclad steamship commanded by Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives had collided against a rock sixteen years earlier during his aborted attempt to explore the river from the opposite direction. The whites, who were Mormons, were under special orders from Brigham Young in Salt Lake City to monitor the current for any wreckage that might drift downstream from the Powell expedition, which had been reported lost several weeks earlier. Sometime around midafternoon, the fishermen spotted a pair of battered and badly leaking boats drifting in their direction, crewed by a company of half a dozen men. In the first of those boats, one of the crew members was standing up and staring at them through a spyglass while a second man seemed to be pulling a piece of cloth from a storage compartment and attaching it to the bow. As the boats drew near, the fishermen on the riverbank were astonished by what they saw. All six boatmen were unshaven, sunburned, and hollow-eyed. Most of them had no hat, several were in their bare feet, and none possessed more than a few scraps of clothing that hung from their exposed skin in ragged strips. They were also terribly thin—their bodies so emaciated that it was clear they were teetering on the threshold of starvation. But perhaps the most noteworthy detail—which offered a testament not only to the adversities they had endured but also to the purpose behind those trials—was the piece of fabric dangling from the bowpost of the lead boat. It was the Stars and Stripes. When the fishermen asked the boatmen if they needed something to eat, they said yes. All they had left was a day-and-a-half supply of flour and eighty pounds of coffee beans. Two days later, Powell bade farewell to his men, four of whom had elected to continue rowing downriver toward the Sea of Cort?s, and turned north with his brother for Salt Lake City. As they made their way up the edge of the Great Basin, they received word that Dunn and the Howland brothers were dead, apparently murdered by a party of Shivwits Indians after the three deserters had raped a squaw who had been gathering seeds—a tale that seemed preposterous, to say the least. Many years later, evidence would emerge to support a more plausible theory that the men had been taken into custody by Mormon fanatics and executed as federal agents. Neither tale would ever be proved. Despite this tragedy, the reception back East was jubilant. As Powell went off on the lecture circuit, trumpeting his accomplishments from one city to the next, he became a national hero, acclaim that he was able to parlay into a $12,000 appropriation from Congress so he could set out and do the whole trip all over again—which he did in May of 1871, producing the maps and the topographic data that had not been possible on the first venture. Several years after that, he conflated the events that had taken place on both expeditions into his official report, entitled Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries. Despite some rather wild inaccuracies that would later sow confusion and provoke fierce arguments among historians, Powell’s account stands as an expressive work of classic adventure-travel literature. To this day, Powell’s trips are celebrated by many as one of the greatest achievements in the history of American exploration, even as Powell is denounced by others for his distortions and exaggerations. But no one can dispute the essence of what was achieved. On May 24, 1869, ten men and four wooden boats plunged down an unknown river through the heart of the last blank spot on the map of the United States. Ninety-nine days later, and just shy of a thousand miles downriver, six men and two boats emerged. They had run through 414 rapids and portaged or lined another 63. In the process, they enabled America to take full possession of this last, hidden landscape feature, while simultaneously laying the foundation by which that same landscape would eventually turn the tables and take possession of Americans who would fall under its spell. But all of that lay, as it were, far downstream. For the moment, it is enough to acknowledge that although Don Garc?a L?pez de C?rdenas may have been the first European to lay eyes on the Grand Canyon from above, he had failed to take the measure of its depth and power. In part, that was because the mind of a sixteenth-century conquistador was incapable of calibrating its wonders, but mainly it was because C?rdenas had never touched the thing that had created the canyon and imbued it with its vitality. That task had been left to Powell, and his odyssey, not that of C?rdenas, would come to define the place. The Major went on to do great things. His river explorations eventually springboarded him into a distinguished career in government that included heading up the US Geological Survey, which was charged with mapping and surveying the West, while simultaneously leading the Bureau of Ethnology, which he founded. When he died in 1902, at the age of sixty-eight in his summer home in Maine, his obituary in the Washington Post ranked him with Columbus, Magellan, and Lewis and Clark. Powell’s presence is woven into the fabric of the canyon and haunts the river in ways that are impossible to ignore even today. His exploits are recounted and debated around each campfire, and a copy of his journal rides on almost every trip. On the maps that are used by the boatmen and guides, more than a hundred buttes, rapids, and plateaus bear the names that he and his men assigned to these features. He cut the line. He set the narrative. Everything that would subsequently unfold on the river—including the Emerald Mile’s deranged quest in June of 1983—would flow from the themes that were inscribed by the one-armed major and his fleet of little wooden boats in the summer of 1869. PART II America’s Pyramids I have climbed the Great Wall of China and crawled through the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. But these are dead monuments. Dams have to be the greatest structures made by man. They are not only gigantic, they also pulse with life. —HENRY FALVEY, US Bureau of Reclamation Hoover Dam, the colossus that tamed the Colorado. 4 The Kingdom of Water The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation. —NORMAN MAILER POWELL’S first trip down the river had an important postscript, a half-forgotten coda representing the last leg of the odyssey whose details were largely ignored amid the publicity and accolades. Within a few days of the Powell brothers’ departure for the East, George Bradley and Billy Hawkins anchored the Maid of the Canyon and left the river to strike out overland for California. But Andy Hall, the sweet-tempered Scottish bull whacker, and Jack Sumner, the combative frontiersman with the long black hair, kept on going in the Kitty Clyde’s Sister. The Colorado wasn’t yet finished, and neither were they. Upon emerging from its penultimate canyon at the Grand Wash Cliffs, the river uncoils and begins gliding south along the western edge of Arizona toward its final destination on the far side of the Mexican border, where the Sonoran Desert touches the top of the Sea of Cort?s. The antipodal segment of this journey, a stretch of about 565 miles, takes the Colorado through some of the hottest, driest, and most desolate terrain in North America, an area where the ash-colored wastes on the east and west sides of the river were once dotted for miles with shattered wagons and sand-encrusted skeletons of mules that had belonged to miners bound for the California gold rush. Through the angled light of late September, the two men permitted the current to carry them past the stark, bone-dry mesas and beneath the jagged escarpments of isolated desert mountain ranges such as the Blacks, the Spirits, and the Deads. Drifting through long shadows laid down by forests of giant saguaros, they penetrated into the northern end of the Sonoran Desert, where, more than 1,750 miles from its source in the icy mountain tarns of Wyoming, the river formed a giant, restless, ever-changing delta—a flat and sweltering region, twice the size of Rhode Island, that was so intricately interlaced with marshes and sloughs that its contours could neither be mapped nor surveyed because the land itself refused to stay in one place. Properly speaking, this maze of ephemeral creeks and endlessly shifting atolls belonged neither to Mexico nor to the United States because, in essence, it was a nation unto itself, a watery republic populated by a prolific confederation of wild creatures that fed upon its riches. The water teemed with schools of crayfish and shrimp. The rushes and sedges sheltered deer and bighorn sheep and small wild hogs, all of them hunted by coyote and cougar and even jaguar. Most impressive of all were the boundless flocks of waterfowl—entire weather systems composed of egrets and cormorants, bitterns and herons, ducks and pelicans, all migrating along the Pacific Flyway. Somewhere out there in that estuarine Eden at the tail end of September, the stern of the Kitty Clyde’s Sister touched salt water, and Hall and Sumner became the first men in recorded history to row from Wyoming to the Sea of Cort?s. This landmark achievement truly brought their journey to a close. But if the two men were moved by what they encountered down there in the lowest reaches of the river, or by their own act of completion, their diaries and letters failed to capture those feelings. Sumner, in particular, was unimpressed and downright grouchy. He described the low valleys on either side of the river as “burned to a cinder” and dismissed the delta as “nothing to brag of.” The whole place left him wallowing in a listless depression. “I find myself penniless and disgusted with the whole thing, sitting under a Mesquite bush in the sand,” he wrote in his journal at the end of it all. “I never want to see it again.” He had no idea that, within just a few years, the sun-scorched wasteland located just north of the delta would become a focal point of energy and ambition that would reverberate up the entire length of the river, transforming not only the Colorado, but also the great canyon whose passage they had unlocked, in ways that neither Sumner, Hall, nor even Powell himself would have conceived of in their wildest dreams. The section of the lower river where the landscape had been “burned to a cinder” belonged to one of the strangest parts of the entire Colorado—a place that, in its own way, was as alien and exotic as the Grand Canyon. Here, deep in southern Arizona and just above the Mexican border, the terrain flattened, the current slowed, and the vast loads of sediment suspended within the river began to drop through the water and settle along the riverbed. As this material built up in sheetlike layers, one upon the other, the streambed began to elevate, inch by inch and foot by foot, until the channel became so clogged that the current would periodically break free from the confinement of its banks and go tearing off across the desert in some new direction like a headless brown serpent. This bizarre trick of river geomorphology repeated at irregular intervals, usually once every few decades, and over the centuries the Colorado had developed the habit of returning to some half a dozen alternative channels. One of these channels embarked on one of the most perverse detours anywhere on earth—a wandering circuit that, like the route of a lost band of thirst-addled gold seekers, dipped into Mexico, then careened back into the United States at the California border before making a beeline for a bowl-shaped depression at the foot of a bone-dry set of ridges known as the Chocolate Mountains, about forty miles southeast of present-day Palm Springs. This treeless inferno was known as the California Desert, and its lowest point, which lay below sea level and endured heat rivaling that of Death Valley, was called the Salton Sink. Here the fugitive river would form a vast, evanescent lake that was known to the native Cocopah Indians—the only people who had lived in the area long enough to recognize this as a recurring pattern—as the Palm of the Hand of God, and that the whites would eventually call the Salton Sea. For years at a time, the Colorado would pour into this dead-end lake until the two main detour washes, later known as the New and the Alamo Channels, accumulated enough silt to force the prodigal river to return once again to its old bed and resume its route back through the delta to the Gulf of California. Meanwhile, the Salton Sea would slowly evaporate until a new laminate of fine sediment, particles that had been excavated from within the Grand Canyon, lay baking and exposed under the relentless desert sun. Neither Hall nor Sumner was aware of the existence of the Salton Sink. But it caught the eye of men who followed in their wake, and what drew their attention was the dirt. The entire valley was almost pure topsoil, packed with a rich conglomerate of minerals and other nutrients that had been finely abraded, thoroughly mixed, and drenched in sunshine for 360 days a year. The only drawback was the lack of rain in the Sink, which amounted to roughly 2.4 inches a year, less than half of what the Gobi Desert typically receives. But just a few miles away lay the greatest river in the Southwest. If someone could devise a way to funnel the water onto that rich matrix of soil, the California Desert would find itself transformed into an agricultural terrarium that would be the envy of the nation. The man who finally managed to put all of this together, a driven engineer from Michigan named Charles Rockwood, had a jaw set like a bulldog’s and hands so huge that it was said he could crush an apple in one palm. After helping to survey railway routes through the Rockies and across the Columbia River basin, Rockwood made his way to the Southwest around the turn of the twentieth century and focused his considerable energies on the task of turning the Colorado into an irrigation spigot and aiming it at the Salton Sink. The plan that he and his associates devised was audacious, elegant, and laden with the potential for disastrous mishap. By cutting a diversion channel into one of the river’s ancient detour routes, they reasoned—correctly—that they could employ this dry arroyo system as a conduit to transport a portion of the river’s flow to the flat, silt-enriched soils just south of the Salton Sea. There, a series of canals and irrigation ditches would distribute the water onto the fields of settlers who, upon learning of this new paradise—billed as America’s last great farming frontier—would stampede to get in on the ground floor. Rockwood didn’t waste any time. By the spring of 1901, he and his team had cut an opening in the west bank of the Colorado and prepared their diversion channel. They opened the headgates in May, then stood back and watched with satisfaction as a significant portion of the river started pouring into a network of freshly prepared canals. As word got out, settlers followed the water and poured into the valley too. Within a year, the population had jumped from exactly zero whites and Europeans to more than five thousand. Three years later, there were seven towns, nearly eight hundred miles of irrigation canals, and 120,000 acres under cultivation. All that was needed was a new name for the place. So they started calling it the Imperial Valley. Conditions were primitive—families lived in canvas tents or huts knocked together from rough lumber—and the heat was unspeakable, almost 125 degrees in the shade. But how the crops thrived! Cantaloupes and tomatoes, lettuce and broccoli, cauliflower and cotton, grapes and shoulder-high wheat and barley—all of it flourished, maturing weeks ahead of the harvest in other parts of the country and thus commanding premium market prices when it was shipped East by the Southern Pacific Railroad. Although no one thought to point it out, the residents of Memphis and St. Louis and New Orleans might have been intrigued to learn that, when these consignments of produce arrived at their tables and they bit into the winter vegetables and fruit of the Imperial Valley, they were literally eating the Grand Canyon. The entire venture was a smashing success, and the exuberance it unleashed was captured by the slogan adopted by the valley’s first newspaper. “Water Is King,” the Imperial Press proclaimed in a tagline across the top of its front page. “Here Is Its Kingdom.” The people who read those words had no idea how unerringly true this was. But the Colorado was about to teach them, in the harshest and most graphic terms one could care to imagine, the folly and hubris of trying to tame it. The first in what would prove to be a series of back-to-back flash floods hit the Imperial Valley and its surrounding region in the spring of 1905, when a massive surge made off with a control gate in one of the diversion channels just south of the Mexican border and opened a six-foot-wide breach. No one knew it at the time, but this marked the moment when the Colorado was once again about to skip out of its main channel and go off on another mad breakaway run to recharge the dead-end sea in the heart of the desert. With a newly reborn and rapidly expanding Salton Sea rising by seven inches a day at the lowest point of the Imperial Valley, Rockwood led the first three attempts to plug the breach. His initial effort to cut off the river in March of 1905, with a sixty-foot dam made of wooden pilings, brush, and sandbags, was a failure. A flood surge swept it aside as if it were made of dried leaves. Weeks later, a second dam, longer than the first, was carried away by yet another flood tide. By June, the gap had widened to 160 feet, and the water flowing toward the gulf had slowed to a trickle as most of the river hurtled toward the Sink. Rockwell’s third and final try, a six-hundred-foot barrier that took several weeks to assemble and cost $60,000, was wiped out by an overnight flash food on the thirtieth of November. Defeated and out of money, Rockwood had no choice but to turn the job over to the Southern Pacific, which had invested heavily in the valley and could not afford to see its interests destroyed. Responsibility then fell to Harry T. Cory, one of the railroad’s most competent construction engineers, who had started his career at the age of twenty-six as a full professor of engineering at the University of Missouri. His job was to stop the Colorado, using any means necessary. By this point, however, powerful and poorly understood forces were arrayed against Cory. As the breach expanded to a quarter of a mile, end to end, virtually the entire Colorado was now diverting north through the desert and roaring into the Salton Sea, which had already spread to cover four hundred square miles and was leaving farms and homes submerged in an inexorably rising tide of sediment-saturated water as thick and dark as a pot of gumbo. Even more alarming than the sheer size of this reservoir, however, was the “cutback,” a strange and rarely witnessed phenomenon in which a river equalizes the gradient of its streambed by creating a waterfall that actually migrates upstream. The mobile cascade, which started at the point where the water was pouring into the sparkling inland sea, was more than twenty feet high and spent most of that spring clawing its way south toward the main channel of the Colorado at about a mile a day, cutting deeper and deeper until the drop of the waterfall grew to eighty feet. To anyone standing along the banks, the river appeared to be eating its own entrails at the pace of a slow walk. As this rather grotesque and frightening process—which essentially created a brand-new canyon—marched upstream, the current gouged into the banks on either side, widening the channel to half a mile. For the settlers of the valley, it seemed as if the river had gone berserk. All along the banks of the channel, enormous chunks of soil were now cracking, giving way, and plummeting into the boiling current like walruses returning to the sea. When the cutback reached the border town of Mexicali, whose buildings had expanded to the channel’s edge, the brown serpent slowly began devouring the streets. Residents watched in disbelief as the walls of one adobe house after another trembled, teetered, and collapsed into the river, where they dissolved like lumps of sugar. On June 30, 1906, a brick hotel, the railroad station, and a dozen other buildings in the main business district all crumpled and slid into the current, sending geysers of water shooting forty feet into the air. Knowing that it would take a colossal effort to bring the runaway river under control, Cory asked his boss, the head of the Southern Pacific, how much money he was authorized to spend. “Damn the expense,” came the reply. “Just stop that river!” Orders in hand, Cory started battling the Colorado in toe-to-toe combat using every weapon he could think of. He stationed pile drivers on opposite ends of the breach and ordered his men to begin pounding a vertical row of ninety-foot logs into the riverbed to create a picket line across the now-submerged bank of the river. As the wall of pilings extended toward midstream, a pair of steamboats lumbered up and down the channel with loads of freshly cut arrowweed and willow bush, which a gang of laborers hired from the Cocopahs and half a dozen other indigenous tribes—the only men willing to work for standard wages in the crushing heat—wove into brush “mattresses” in front of the pilings. When this was done, a pair of railway trestles was constructed on top of the line of pilings. Meanwhile, Cory was putting together a fleet of special freight trains using three hundred flatbed dump cars, known as battleships, which he had requisitioned from the Union Pacific. When the trains were assembled, he ordered them to begin hauling huge granite boulders from quarries as far away as Los Angeles. As the trains arrived at the work site, they clattered onto the trestle and lined the battleships up directly over the breach. Then men with crowbars began upending the boulders into the current. The dumping proceeded until a makeshift dam began to rise above the brown surface of the river. Over the next few months, Cory and his crews built a series of several rock dams, each larger and more expensive than the last, then stood back and watched as a succession of floods methodically obliterated their work. After every defeat, he regrouped and redoubled his efforts, flinging more men, more money, and more material at the river. By the end of the year, his crew had grown to fifteen hundred laborers, recruited from all over the Southwest at top wages. He exhausted every rock quarry within four hundred miles and consumed every available piling in Southern California, forcing him to request that trains hauling lumber and piling from New Orleans be given special right-of-way. Six work trains were now lumbering across the trestles night and day. A battleship was being dumped every five minutes. Boulders that were too big to be rolled off quickly were dynamited inside the battleships and their pieces kicked into the current. Finally, on February 10, the largest dam was completed and, unlike the six that had preceded it, resisted the efforts of the river to wash it away. After an all-out campaign that had cost in excess of $3 million, the breach was finally plugged and the Colorado was forced to resume its course through the delta to the Sea of Cort?s. The flood was unlike anything that had been seen in the Southwest. When it was over, the northern portion of the valley was underwater. The Salton Sea, which stretched for more than five hundred square miles and was seventy-eight feet deep in the middle, was now the largest lake in California (a distinction it still holds, although it has shrunk by almost half). Most of the rest of the valley was marred by ruined fields, deep arroyos, washed-out railroad tracks, and partially destroyed towns. Four-fifths of Mexicali had simply disappeared. To those who participated in the events of 1906 in the Imperial Valley, perhaps the only thing more astonishing than the havoc wrought by the flood was that the river had managed to unleash all that chaos by exploiting a gap in the riverbank no wider than the door of a barn. That single detail underscored perhaps the most salient feature of the Colorado, the kernel of truth that transcended everything else, which was that it was totally out of control. The river that had carved the Grand Canyon was basically an outlaw, a renegade that moved according to its own rules. Which imbued it, in the eyes of everyone, with a unique status. True, the Colorado was decisively outranked and outgunned when it came to the mundane metrics by which rivers are conventionally measured—length and flow, volume and power, navigability and biological richness. By those yardsticks, the Colorado surely took a backseat to the Mississippi, the Columbia, the Missouri, the Hudson, and a dozen other waterways, each of which occupied a more important niche within the country’s economy and had woven itself more deeply—and with far more poetry—into the nation’s mythology. But when it came down to headstrong exuberance, the refusal to permit itself to be corralled into any scheme other than its own, and a willful insistence on asserting its autonomy, the Colorado was in a class by itself: the most American river on the continent. The canyons it had carved, the rapids it framed, the silt it carried, and the annual saturnalia of flooding in which it indulged rendered it the scourge of the Southwest. Thanks to those attributes, the Colorado simultaneously thwarted and held the key to the development not only of the Imperial Valley, but also of the entire region. Which meant that it was only a matter of time before the country whose spirit the river embodied with such savage eloquence would turn to the task of breaking it. And, as it happened, a brand-new agency was keen to handle the job, a branch of the federal government, established under the Department of the Interior, whose mission would include opening vast areas of the West to agriculture through the construction of massive water projects. Like everything else that happened on the Colorado, this organization was directly, albeit somewhat distantly, connected to the one-armed Major. In June of 1902, three months before Powell died at his summer home in Maine, Congress had created the Reclamation Service, and among the engineers who were transferred to this fledgling agency to help it get off the ground was Powell’s nephew, Arthur Powell Davis. Not surprisingly, he had been immersed in the lore of his uncle’s river since early childhood. When Davis first started out, the Reclamation Service was small potatoes among the federal bureaus, concentrating mainly on building irrigation canals. But Davis, who was appointed Reclamation’s chief engineer in 1903 and became the head of the organization in 1914, was determined to change all that—and the Colorado was the means by which he intended to realize his ambition. As his star rose within the service, Davis began to advocate for something considerably more far-reaching than a project that would merely buffer floods and aid irrigation in the Imperial Valley. He championed hydropower—using falling water to crank dynamos and produce clean, reliable kilowatts that could be wholesaled to factories and towns. The process had already been pioneered in 1882 at a diminutive plant in the tiny town of Appleton, Wisconsin, and was later scaled up at Niagara Falls during the early 1890s. Now, Davis proposed hydropower as the rationale behind a series of dams on the Colorado that would not merely control the river and prevent flooding, but actually harness the river’s energy and sell it. It would take another decade for the political forces to properly align themselves, including dividing up the water rights among the seven states through which the river flowed and surveying it from top to bottom. But when everything came together during the final weeks of 1928, the groundwork had been laid for what probably qualifies as the greatest dam ever built. To subdue a river such as the Colorado—not simply to whip it into submission for a season or two, but to break and yoke the thing by taming its rampages, vanquishing its moods, and converting its kinetics into energy that serves human beings—such a task is not only a colossal technical undertaking but, perhaps even more significant, a monumental act of audacity. The challenge requires more than merely superb competency and monstrous ambition; it also demands a level of hubris that was utterly unimaginable to the world of C?rdenas, an undertaking that lay far beyond even the boldest dreams of the Renaissance and the ages of exploration and discovery that followed. It required the kind of ruthless, steely certainty that humans only began to touch for the first time, perhaps, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the age of iron and steel—not only in terms of materials but also in the way the world was understood: a place whose laws were rigid and immutable, but also now capable of yielding to the even stronger forces of man’s intellect and will. The site where Davis proposed to build the structure that would aim to subdue the Colorado was located in a place so perfect, so ideally suited in every possible way, that it left dam experts half-convinced that God must have had a degree in civil engineering. At the point where the southern shard of Nevada stabs into the side of Arizona, many miles upstream from the diversion channels that lead to the Imperial Valley and roughly eighty miles downstream from the Grand Wash Cliffs, lay the last real gorge on the Colorado, a place called Black Canyon, where Lieutenant Joseph Ives had reached the “end of navigation.” The walls of Black Canyon were almost vertical and rose nearly fifteen hundred feet from the surface of the river, paltry by the standards of the great canyon that lay just upstream, but more than sufficient for the task at hand. The gap between those walls was relatively narrow—less than four hundred yards—and the bedrock that supported them lay less than forty feet beneath the bottom of the river. But the best feature of all was the stone itself. A mixture of micaceous schists and pre-Cambrian granites that formed the core of the craton, the backbone of the tectonic plate that was the foundation for most of the contiguous United States, it was as immutable as the continent itself. No one had ever before tried to stop a river this powerful, and the first challenge was to blast four massive tunnels through the sides of the canyon walls—which took eighteen months—and then force the river into them using the same trick that Harry Cory had employed during his fight to save the Imperial Valley twenty-six years earlier, except that dump trucks took the place of railway battleships. On the evening of November 12, 1932, a fleet of one hundred heavy trucks began jettisoning their loads at a rate of one every fifteen seconds. Fifteen hours later, the Colorado sluggishly turned into the smooth maws of the tunnels and began to snake around the section of bedrock where the dam could now be raised. For the next two years, an army of five thousand men swarmed the bottom and sides of Black Canyon, toiling in temperatures that reached as high as 140 degrees in the summer. While high-scalers armed with crowbars and jackhammers dangled from ropes prying fresh rock from the canyon walls,I laborers at the bottom of the chasm excavated the river channel until they reached the bedrock that would anchor the dam. Then they started pouring concrete, which arrived in giant steel buckets that were lowered into the chasm on suspension cables. The pouring continued virtually nonstop: sixteen tons per minute, 220 cubic yards an hour, twenty-four hours a day, for twenty-one months, until a titanic wedge whose base was the thickness of two football fields had risen up between the sides of the canyon. Finally, on February 1, 1935, the edifice was complete, and a set of massive steel gates was lowered over the entrances to the diversion tunnels so that the river, blocked from its downstream course, began lapping at the bottom of the newly completed Hoover Dam. Overstating the significance of Hoover is almost impossible, so thoroughly did the dam surpass—in the scale of its components, in the novelty of its construction, in the sheer audacity of its design—everything that had come before. It soared 726 feet and five inches above the bed of the river, double the height of any other dam on earth. Its spillways, intake towers, generators, and powerhouse were the largest of their kind. Lake Mead, the body of water behind the dam, would take years to fill and would become the largest man-made reservoir in the world, stretching 115 miles upriver and capable of holding more than twenty-six million acre-feet, enough water to flood the entire state of Connecticut to the eaves of a one-story house. As Michael Hiltzik points out in Colossus, one of the finest books on the dam, the weight of that impounded water would deform the surface of the earth along the reservoir and trigger a series of earthquakes that would topple chimneys and buckle roadbeds between Boulder City and Las Vegas well into the 1960s. Those superlatives were remarkable. But no less astonishing was the lack of any antecedent, model, or foundational paradigm for building such a thing as Hoover. Instead of tweaking or improving upon what came before, Reclamation’s engineers, who represented some of the sharpest technological minds in the country, were forced to surmount obstacles by making wholesale leaps into the unknown. They ventured into hitherto unknown subdistricts of complex geometry, and they pioneered new techniques such as trial-load analysis and crown-cantilever adjustments. Those forays were aided by the explosion in the disciplines of civil engineering, hydraulics, and fluid mechanics during the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. But resolving the problems on the ground, as opposed to on paper, also required a willingness to adopt bold and highly unorthodox ideas. The entire project was one giant experiment. Perhaps the best example involved the challenges posed by the fact that concrete gives off chemical heat as it cures and hardens. This had previously limited the size of such structures because, if they were made from a continuous pour, they would fracture. So instead of building a seamless slab, the engineers designed the dam as a matrix of blocks, each roughly the size of a house, interlocked like Legos. In between those blocks, they ran a network of pipes carrying chilled water. Having thus turned the dam into a giant concrete refrigerator, in effect, they essentially cut the cooling time from 125 years to three. As with everything else at Hoover, this was accomplished without anyone’s truly knowing that it would actually work. Three generations later, viewed from the standpoint of the digital age, a structure such as Hoover can appear to suffer from a kind of vulgarity of size—a thing so enormous and monolithic as to seem preindustrial, almost primitive. Like fascist architecture, that soaring wall of concrete, for all its Art Deco adornments, can strike the postmodern eye as embarrassingly elephantine and childishly simplistic. Yet one only need page through the dam’s elegant blueprints to realize that this is a machine that, in its own way, is as sophisticated as a Boeing 747—a marvel of engineering, of mathematics, of human thinking, of vision, and, yes, of art. For all these reasons, Hoover is regarded by many civil engineers as one of America’s most impressive achievements. It may not be much of an overstatement to say that, along with splitting the atom and sending the Voyager spacecraft beyond the solar system, Hoover is the most remarkable thing this country has ever pulled off. Unlike those other achievements, however, Hoover arose in the midst of an era of nationwide fear and collective self-doubt, the darkest period of the Great Depression, when factories were idle, corporations were going bankrupt, and millions of ordinary Americans had begun to doubt the future. The manner in which the dam rose up, like a cathedral of technology from the depths of Black Canyon during a moment when everything else was falling to pieces, did more than buoy the hopes of millions of the nation’s citizens. The dam also seemed to offer demonstrable, concrete proof that the key to human progress lay with scientific savoir faire and technological know-how. Perhaps no one captured this optimism better than J. B. Priestley, a prolific English novelist who traveled extensively throughout the Southwest during the 1930s (and who would later have some rather illuminating things to say about the Grand Canyon). “This is a first glimpse of what chemistry and mathematics and engineering and large-scale organization can accomplish,” Priestley declared in an article in Harper’s Magazine. “You might be tempted to call it a work of art; as if something that began with civil engineering ended somewhat in the neighborhood of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” Among its many other hallmarks, Hoover represented a watershed moment in the relationship between Americans and their landscape, especially their rivers. Inspired by the achievement at Black Canyon, the Bureau of Reclamation and its sister agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, didn’t wait for Hoover to be finished before setting off on an ambitious crusade to erect dams across every major US river, from the Rio Grande, the Snake, the Missouri, and the Arkansas to the Sacramento, the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Tennessee, and the Ohio. The aim of that crusade—embodied in the bureau’s motto: “Our Rivers: Total Use for Greater Wealth”—was to harness and exploit virtually every drop of free-flowing water in the country. If that sounds a bit far-fetched, one need only consider the superlatives that attached themselves to the dam-building projects on which the federal government embarked during this era. By 1936, five of the largest structures on the planet, all of them dams, were simultaneously under construction along the rivers of the western United States: Hoover on the Colorado, Shasta on the Sacramento, Bonneville and Grand Coulee on the Columbia, and Fort Peck on the Missouri. Moreover, each of these projects was surpassed in size and scope by its successor. As colossal as Hoover was, Shasta was quite a bit bigger, and both were dwarfed by Grand Coulee, whose mass outstripped that of Hoover and Shasta put together—the first man-made structure to exceed the volume of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. When Hoover was finished, it was the greatest single source of electricity in the world. But several months later, when Grand Coulee went online, its power plant was capable of generating half as much electricity as the rest of the entire country. By the 1940s, Coulee’s generators were powering factories that produced thousands of warplanes bound for the aircraft carriers that would turn the war in the Pacific in America’s favor while simultaneously powering the top-secret Hanford installation in eastern Washington that produced the plutonium-239 that fueled the atomic bomb. For the next thirty years, tens of thousands of dams—a few of them large and magnificent, but the vast majority unapologetically functional and devoid of any symphonic romance—were erected from one end of the country to the other. By 1980, when the National Park Service finally completed an inventory of all the rivers in the contiguous United States, more than seventy-five thousand dams had been erected on the country’s three-thousand-plus waterways—roughly one dam for every forty-eight hours that had passed since the summer of 1540, when C?rdenas had first stumbled upon the Grand Canyon. As the author Bruce Barcott has pointed out in his provocative treatise on a dam in Belize, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, every major river in the United States had been dammed except for one, the Yellowstone. There were twenty-nine dams on the Mississippi, thirty-six on the Columbia, forty-two on the Tennessee. In the end, however, nothing compares to what we did to the Colorado. From the moment the gates to Hoover’s diversion tunnels were slammed shut in the winter of 1935 and water began rising along the upstream face of the dam, the days of the lower Colorado’s uncontrolled rages were numbered. There would be no more mad dashes into the Salton Sink, no more jumping whimsically from one channel to the next across the desert. Nor would the power of the river—the energy contained inside its gradient—be permitted to go to waste. It would now be converted to electricity that would help drive the vast industrial expansion that was about to take place in the shipyards, aircraft factories, and light-metal refineries of Southern California. But if this marked the end of the Colorado’s unbounded freedom, as far as the government’s water engineers were concerned, it was only the first in a series of problems that had to be solved. The completion of Hoover was a monumental achievement, but it brought only the lower section of the Colorado under control. The work of harnessing the rest of the river had just begun. In March of 1946, the Interior Department published a massive report that contained a blueprint for the development of the entire Colorado. It was the fruit of decades of painstaking survey work, geologic mapmaking, sheer-strength analysis of rock samples, plus a dozen other forms of sniffing, testing, and prodding. Nicknamed the Blue Book, the tome contained 293 pages, weighed more than four pounds, and put forth a mission statement that was neatly encapsulated by the tagline on the title page: “A Natural Menace Becomes a Natural Resource.” Inside, what was perhaps most revealing was the manner in which it was written. In language exhibiting both a stridency and a frankness that no government document would display today, the Colorado was portrayed as a criminal and a deadbeat that was running amok and obstructing the creation of wealth. To correct these abuses, the Blue Book outlined 134 potential projects, one in virtually every major canyon and farming valley along the length of the river. The sheer numbers of dams, reservoirs, hydro plants, and irrigation projects slated for the river and its tributaries dwarfed anything planned for any other waterway of comparable size. The bureau was clear that not all of these schemes could be developed—doing so would exceed the Colorado’s flow by 25 percent and send the river into “deficit.” Instead, the purpose of the document was to provide its intended audience—the politicians who represented the interests of the mountain and desert states through which the Colorado coursed—with a menu of options, a kind of buffet table from which they could put together a plate of goodies for the constituents of every district the river touched. “Only a nation of free people have the vision to know that it can be done and that it must be done,” the report declared. “Tomorrow the Colorado River will be utilized to the very last drop.” That last sentence was no mere catchphrase. Over the next two decades, thanks to a series of massive congressional appropriations bills, Reclamation would construct nineteen large dams and reservoirs along the Colorado and its tributaries between the Rockies and the Mexican border. This epic sequence of projects would complete the river’s transformation from the wild and savage beast explored by Powell almost a century earlier into something that resembled a municipal waterworks system. It would make the Colorado the first major river in the world to come under almost total human control. Every cubic foot of its water was gauged and metered and accounted for. The timing and volume of each discharge through every set of penstocks and turbines was carefully calibrated to optimize the supply of electricity and maximize power revenue. Nothing happened on the river that had not been carefully planned, reviewed, and approved—and for good reason, because the Colorado was now the lifeblood of the entire Southwest, a resource on which a dozen cities and more than thirty million people were completely and totally dependent. By the 1970s, no river in the Western Hemisphere was more rigorously controlled, more stringently regulated, or more ruthlessly overused than the Colorado. No river in the world was the subject of fiercer litigation and dispute. And none was exploited so thoroughly and so ruthlessly that, according to calculations run by hydrologists at the bureau, every drop was used and reused seventeen times before reaching the sea—a claim that achieved a rather surreal dimension of impressiveness (or absurdity, depending on one’s point of view) since, in all but the wettest years, the final remnants of the river dried up in the desert south of the border before a single drop ever reached the Sea of Cort?s. In the exertion of human control over one of the wildest and most ungovernable forces in nature, no river had more seminal importance than the Colorado. As the author Marc Reisner explains in Cadillac Desert, his groundbreaking study of water policy in the West, civil engineers not only built the first great dam here but also learned the lessons that would enable them to control the greatest rivers in North America while giving others the tools to harness massive rivers all over the world, from the Volga, the Niger, and the Indus to the Zambezi, the Paran?, and the Yangtze. During the 1970s and 1980s, this dam-building boom spread to virtually every major river on the planet. By the year 2000, the amount of water that was stored behind the giant dams on earth was between three and six times more than existed in all the world’s rivers—a redistribution of the planet’s supply of freshwater significant enough, according to the water expert Peter Gleick, to account for “a small but measurable change in the wobble of the earth as it spins.” Yet this is only half the story of the Colorado’s significance. Because although the era of the great dams was inaugurated and later reached a kind of engineering apotheosis on this river, the Colorado is also where the flood tide finally smashed up against something that refused to yield and ultimately broke the wave. What no one realized at the time was that the demise of the greatest era of dam-building in human civilization had actually been seeded into the blueprint that was drawn up for the Colorado—and the stage upon which both acts would play out was nothing less than the Grand Canyon itself. What had begun at the bottom of the canyon with a stupendous dam that symbolized a future without limits was fated to conclude at the opposite end of the same chasm with yet another dam—one that would eventually come to stand, in the minds of many, as a kind of anti-symbol to everything that Hoover represented: a titanic monument to human overreach. The fight to preserve the cathedral of stone between those points was what turned the wheel. The people who waged that war would establish a direct line between the end of the dam-building era in the late 1960s, a full century after Powell’s voyage, and the great runoff of 1983, when a reckoning finally descended upon the canyon, and the river conclusively demonstrated that man wasn’t in charge to the extent he believed. And at the very center of that story—the narrative that brought the age of great dams to a close—stood a barnstorming World War II pilot and a devotee of the dance that unfolds between wooden boats and white water. His name was Martin Litton. I. High-scalers hold a special place in the history of American dams. They were regarded as almost mythic figures within the construction community, and newsreels captured their daring moves as they swung in giant, sweeping arcs across the faces of the cliffs, using ropes slung from the canyon rims, dislodging loose pieces of rock with jackhammers, and placing sticks of dynamite. They received the highest wages of anyone on the payroll, compensation for the dangers to which their duties exposed them. They also tended to die in spectacular ways—usually by plunging hundreds of feet to the canyon floor. In Black Canyon, ninety-eight of them perished in this manner—sacrifices that are memorialized in the bronze statue of a highscaler that now stands near the dam’s concession facility, the High Scaler Caf?. 5 Flooding the Cathedral Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed. . . . We need wilderness preserved—as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds—because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. —WALLACE STEGNER WHEN Martin Litton was born in February 1917, Pancho Villa was being pursued on horseback through northern Mexico, and the last grizzly bear in California would not be shot for another five years. That same month, the very first jazz record had just been produced, and patent offices were reviewing applications for a new-fangled clothing fastener with interlocking teeth known as the zipper. In keeping with the spirit of the times, the bucolic little town of Gardena, which lay on the outskirts of the soon-to-be expanding city of Los Angeles, seemed poised on an ambivalent threshold between a past that had yet to fully recede and a future that had not quite arrived. Litton’s father, a migrant from Tennessee who had moved West just after the turn of the century seeking work on the farms of the Imperial Valley, was now setting himself up as a veterinarian who specialized in doctoring farm animals but also found lucrative work treating the chimpanzees and lions that were serving as extras in a new series of Tarzan films. He purchased a small house on a slight rise overlooking the Santa Fe railroad tracks, and almost every night in the summer, he and his wife would gather their four children in the backyard to sit on apple crates and watch the sunset. This innocuous thing, staring into the darkening sky awaiting the arrival of night, left a powerful impression on their oldest boy, who marveled not only at the choreography of light but also that such beauty was freely available to anyone who took the trouble to step outdoors and plant his backside on an apple crate. The principle of nature’s accessibility and openness extended to embrace most of California, whose splendors rendered it one of the fairest places on the planet. In the 1920s, much of the state’s primal glory was still intact—and oddly enough, the impulse that drove Litton to go out and explore those wonders originated with John Wesley Powell, whom he first encountered at school, in his typing class. When Litton was instructed to transcribe several pages of the Major’s journal, he found himself pecking out sentences that, many decades later, he would effortlessly recite at the drop of a hat: We are now ready to start on our way down the great unknown. . . . . . . The great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above. . . . . . . We have but a month’s rations remaining. . . . . . . The sugar has all melted and gone on its way down the river. Those images fired Litton’s imagination and sent him out on a series of exploratory ventures to places such as the Pinnacles, a set of dramatic spires east of the Salinas Valley that would later become a national monument, and the Kern Plateau, a landscape that would one day form the heart of the Golden Trout Wilderness. When he and a friend rented a mule for seventy-five cents a day and headed off to climb Mount Whitney, they were gone for nearly two weeks. He returned from those adventures not only imbued with an abiding love of wilderness but also equipped with powerful arms and a massive chest that would enable him to join the eight-man varsity crew squadron at UCLA. There he rowed stroke until 1941, when he and the rest of his generation found themselves swept into the whirlwind of the Second World War. He enrolled in the Army Air Corps shortly before Pearl Harbor with hopes of becoming a fighter pilot, an ambition that was swiftly derailed when his vision tests revealed that he was color-blind. Booted out of flight school, he refused to accept the results and concocted a bold scheme to get himself assigned to the only other outfit where he might still be permitted to fly. The spearhead to virtually every major Allied airborne operation in Europe involved the US Glider Corps, a fleet of crude, motorless gliders that were crammed full of troops and equipment, everything from jeeps and small tanks to ammunition and medical supplies. Known as flying coffins, these fragile transport machines were strung behind an armada of tow planes, and their pilots were forced to make a low and fast descent directly into the combat zones. The gliders, which were fashioned from steel tubing and covered with strips of canvas, had no weaponry and no armor plating to protect against enemy fire—and the men who flew these machines were equally devoid of frills. Unable to take evasive action, they were consigned instead to playing the role of clay pigeons as they drifted through a withering hail of antiaircraft and 20mm machine-gun fire. Those who survived this ordeal then confronted the challenge of making their way through the German lines, back to the coast, and across the Channel to England, where they would be handed another mission and made to go through the exercise all over again. The pilots, who were either selected or volunteered for these barnstorming assignments, were highly unusual—“the most uninhibited individualists in the army,” in the words of one historian. Deciding that he fit the Glider Corps to a tee, Litton and a friend conspired to sneak into the hospital at his air base and steal a copy of the test booklet for the color-blindness exam. After petitioning to retake the test, he passed, was granted a special waiver, and before long was merrily practicing Cuban Eights, Immelmann turns, and the rest of the aerial combat maneuvers that were part of a glider pilot’s repertoire. He arrived in England in May of 1944, and a month later found himself delivering troopers into northern France during the invasion of Normandy. Three months after that, when the Allies put together an airborne mission known as Market Garden to free the port of Antwerp and set the British up to smash a hole through German defenses in the Netherlands, he led a formation of gliders into Holland, then made his way back to the Channel from sixty-five miles behind enemy lines, for which he was awarded an Air Medal. Later that winter, he volunteered, along with roughly a hundred other pilots, to fly ammunition, gasoline, medical supplies, and a team of nurses and combat surgeons into Belgium to relieve members of the 101st Airborne Division, which had borne the brunt of a German counterattack in the heavily forested Ardennes and was now completely surrounded in the village of Bastogne. To enable the defenders of Bastogne to hold out until General George S. Patton’s tanks could break through the German encirclement, the Allied high command flung several waves of gliders through a curtain of massed antiaircraft and small-arms fire on the day before Christmas. Casualties were extremely high, almost 35 percent in the first wave. Although Litton was not in that vanguard, his formation suffered heavy losses—the sky seemed to be filled with flaming transport planes as he made his approach, and he watched several tugs in front of him get blown to pieces. Nevertheless, he managed to land and deliver his supplies within the Bastogne perimeter. When Patton’s tanks broke through a few hours later, the 101st justifiably received front-page coverage from London to San Francisco, but the newspapers were largely silent about the glider pilots. To this day, their achievement remains one of the more obscure and unheralded feats of the war. Upon returning home, Litton took a position as a “roadman” in the circulation department of the Los Angeles Times, which required him to travel all over the state, managing sales accounts with the paper’s dealers. The job enabled him to return to many of the places he had visited as a boy, and what he saw left him dismayed by what was being done to California’s scenic wonders as the nation entered a period of postwar expansion and prosperity. All around the state, it seemed, remaining pockets of wilderness were under siege. In Tuolumne County, he saw that an entire forest of majestic sugar pines was being logged. From the Sierra foothills to the northern coast, he noticed new roads and highways being pushed into the last stretches of virgin sequoia and redwood trees. To Litton, it was evident that Californians were destroying their birthright without understanding the value of what they had been given or how, like the medieval cities of Germany that had been firebombed during the war, the original splendor could never be restored once it was gone. Incensed, he purchased a typewriter and began banging out articles for the Times on a long list of subjects that upset him. He criticized a plan to flood the Tehipite Valley, an enclave of unprotected land in the Sierras almost completely surrounded by Kings Canyon National Park. He put together an expos? about how overcrowded Yosemite had become. Another piece took Californians to task for flinging trash all over the state’s highways—a story that provoked snickers in the newsroom and earned him the nickname Mr. Litterbug. None of this may sound especially radical now, but at the time, almost no one was talking about such things. Conservation had yet to develop as a powerful political force, and the word environmentalism had not even been coined. But what made Litton’s ideas even stranger—and so at odds with prevailing sentiment—was the depth of his rage. Without quite realizing it, he was emerging as a ferocious and rather prescient expositor of a white-hot, no-surrender brand of environmental purism: the unyielding, unapologetic (and, his critics would later charge, unreasonable) defense of wilderness. “People often tell me not to be extreme,” he would repeatedly declare. “ ‘Be reasonable!’ they say. But I’ve never felt it did any good to be reasonable about anything in conservation, because what you give away will never come back—ever. When it comes to saving wilderness, we cannot be extreme enough.” In short, he had no compunction about being nasty, and he didn’t particularly care whom he might offend. No part of California was too small or too obscure to arouse his ire, and as his anger amplified, so too did the scope of his interests. The event that did more than anything else to trigger this expansion occurred in 1953, when his attention was pulled far beyond the borders of California to a remote corner of northeastern Utah. What was taking place there was about to connect Litton to the river of John Wesley Powell, eventually drawing him into the Grand Canyon itself. Shortly after emerging from Lodore Canyon, near the northeastern corner of Utah, the Green River enters a charmed little pocket where flooded meadows and thick groves of cottonwood and box elders are framed by smooth ramparts of white sandstone. In June 1869, this place had offered a much-needed respite to Powell and his battered crew after the hapless Billy Hawkins had set fire to their camp and pitched most of their mess kit into the river. Because the surrounding area, which was known as Echo Park, had been declared a national monument in 1938, the place was almost as pristine in Litton’s day as it had been in Powell’s. Unfortunately, however, Dinosaur National Monument lacked adequate funding for proper surveillance (the budget was so tiny that the handful of rangers didn’t even have money to purchase a raft to conduct river patrols). As a result, no one had taken much notice when a team from the Bureau of Reclamation showed up just before World War II with transits, drills, and maps, looking for dam sites that could be included in the Blue Book, the bureau’s catalog of prospective hydro projects along the Colorado and its major tributaries. After three years of survey work and geologic testing, the members of the team were pleased to report that they had located not one site, but two. The reservoirs of these dams would flood the heart of the monument to depths as great as five hundred feet, and it was of no concern to the Bureau of Reclamation or its allies in Congress that the law required this area to be preserved in a manner that would leave it “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” In 1949, when Reclamation formally unveiled a massive water-development package calling for the construction of six major dams and twelve irrigation projects in the upper Colorado River basin, the most prominent part of the package included the pair of dams in the center of Dinosaur. At the time, Litton knew almost nothing about the Colorado—its peculiar blend of violence and grace, or the otherworldly beauty that lay beneath the rims of the canyons that the river had carved. But having spent three years fighting the Nazis in Europe, he was viscerally offended by the possibility that a lawfully protected wilderness area could be trampled at will by politicians and developers. So he began plastering stories all over the pages of the L.A. Times, accusing Reclamation of “a dictatorial plan for a gigantic boondoggle.” Among the readers who took note of those diatribes was an amateur butterfly collector and former rock-climbing bum from Berkeley named David Brower, who had just been appointed executive director of a conservation group known as the Sierra Club. When Brower telephoned Litton to ask if he might be interested in joining the Sierra Club, Litton was amused. As far as he could see, the club was little more than a group of weekend hikers who were primarily interested in socializing and planning picnics. But at Brower’s urging Litton enrolled and started attending gatherings, where he distinguished himself by lighting up cigars and disdainfully blowing smoke at those sitting around the table. He was disputatious and irreverent, and his presence was often resented. But gradually he and Brower formed an odd partnership. In Litton, Brower found someone who possessed detailed knowledge about the wild places of California that needed protection, especially where the greatest stands of redwoods and sequoias and the most pristine pockets of coastline were located. Brower also valued Litton for his toughness, his refusal to compromise with corporate or government interests, and his willingness to needle Brower about the perils of compromise in matters of conservation. In turn, Litton saw that Brower commanded skills that he himself lacked—in organization, in leadership, in diplomacy. Litton also thought he saw a man who was beginning to show a willingness to take on powerful forces, an impression that was confirmed when Brower decided to take up the defense of Echo Park, a place he had never been, on a river he knew virtually nothing about, as a personal crusade. As it turned out, that crusade would change the trajectory of Litton’s life and reshape the destiny of the Grand Canyon. To battle against the Echo Park dams, the Sierra Club and a coalition of some seventeen other conservation groups pooled their resources and launched a publicity drive designed to build public opposition. The decisive part of the fight took place in Washington, DC, at a venue that was normally the last place one would expect to find high drama: an offshoot of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs known as the Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation. This was where the nuts and bolts of the project would be hammered out and debated, and a portion of the testimony would be duly allotted for the opposition, a group that Utah senator Arthur Watkins dubbed “the abominable nature-lovers.” Though Brower was a rookie lobbyist, having never before appeared in front of a congressional committee, he aggressively attacked the data that Reclamation had used to justify the Echo Park dams, arguing that there were several preferable alternative spots to build dams whose reservoirs would not invade Dinosaur. In particular, he pointed to a site on the Colorado River some 450 miles downstream from Echo Park, where the same volume of water could be stored with significantly less loss to evaporation. In driving this point home, Brower used a blackboard and a piece of chalk to demonstrate that the government’s engineers had committed a fundamental math error by neglecting to subtract the Echo Park reservoirs’ evaporative loss from that of the downstream alternative. He concluded his presentation by declaring that it would be folly for members of the subcommittee to rely on the claims of an organization whose employees “cannot add, subtract, multiply, and divide.” It is difficult to overstate just how extraordinary this kind of criticism was. Since the 1930s, Reclamation’s administrators and engineers had been lauded as heroes who had helped the country weather the Great Depression and win the war that followed. But when Brower’s assertions were proved more or less valid, they punctured the myth of Reclamation’s infallibility in matters of hydrology and the science of dams. The testimony had a devastating effect—especially when combined with the negative publicity generated by the conservationists’ media campaign—and by the autumn of 1955, several of the dams’ leading proponents were starting to reconsider their support for the Dinosaur dams. Among those who took particular note of the mounting negative publicity was Wayne Aspinall, a congressman from Colorado who wielded enormous power over the development of the country’s natural resources. When 4,731 letters flooded the subcommittee following the hearings, only 53 of which expressed anything remotely approaching support for the Dinosaur dams, Aspinall concluded that an all-out fight to defend those dams might result in the entire package going down in flames. Deciding to compromise—an art at which Aspinall excelled—he brokered a deal with Brower and his cohorts. In exchange for the conservationists’ assurance that they would not object to any other projects in the package, the Dinosaur dams were struck from the plan. For Brower and his colleagues, this victory marked a seminal moment in the politics of conservation. For the first time ever, a powerful coalition of federal bureaucrats and their allies had been bested by a band of “punks,” as one cabinet official had derisively dubbed the conservationists. But while all of this seemed to offer ample cause for celebration, the victory had come at a steep price. At the center of the compromise to which Brower agreed was a dam that was slated to be built on the Colorado River fifteen miles upstream from the Grand Canyon. This would be far larger than either of the two proposed structures inside Dinosaur—indeed, it would be the biggest and most important feature of the package, second on the Colorado only to Hoover itself. Even though Litton and a handful of others had urged Brower to reject Aspinall’s compromise, Brower’s reasoning was not without merit. The dam’s reservoir would inundate a little-known river corridor called Glen Canyon, which was not part of any park or monument. Whatever wonders that obscure canyon might contain, it had never received federal protection of any kind—and that, after everything was said and done, was what the Dinosaur fight had been about. Nevertheless, by agreeing to the compromise, Brower had, in effect, traded away something he had never seen on the assumption that it could not possibly match the value of what he was trying to save. This, as he was about to discover, was a terrible mistake. The Glen Canyon Dam was authorized almost immediately, and its construction kicked off in the fall of 1956 with an unusual piece of theater. During the second week of October, a pair of high-scalers were lowered on ropes from the rim of the canyon almost down to the level of the river. Dangling from bosun’s chairs, the men wedged a pigtailed string of dynamite into a crack that ran behind a house-size rock positioned directly above the place where the first of two diversion tunnels would be drilled. When the explosives were set in place, they were tied to a long line of primer cord that was run back up the face of the cliff and connected to a plunger on the rim. At precisely 11:30 on the morning of October 15, President Eisenhower tapped a telegraph key from his desk in the Oval Office, sending an electronic signal from Washington, DC, to Arizona, where the message was relayed first by radio, then by a flagman, to Arthur Watkins, the Utah senator who had made the remark about “the abominable nature-lovers” two years earlier. When Watkins rammed the plunger down, a massive explosion shook the bottom of the canyon. Boulders arced into the air, followed by a cloud of dust and grit that rose toward the rim. Within minutes, crews were drilling into the cliff at the portal to the diversion tunnel, which would route the river around the dam site during construction. The massive dam that began to rise from the dry section of riverbed at the bottom of the canyon the following spring was in many ways a mirror of and a companion piece to Hoover—but it was not a revolutionary structure. Unlike Hoover, Glen’s technology was already well established. Even its status as the third-highest dam in the world would last only a few months, until the Swiss finished a pair of even higher dams. Nevertheless, Glen possessed enormous symbolic significance because it signaled a remarkable act of transformation for the feature that lay at its feet, the Grand Canyon. The canyon of C?rdenas, a place that was defined by its capacity to dwarf human endeavor, to instill humility in those who gazed into its depths and found themselves staring eternity in the face, would now be hog-tied between two of the largest and most impressive machines that had ever been built by human beings. They would frame it like a matched set of immense concrete bookends, and the water that coursed through the canyon’s heart would be controlled by a spigot and a set of tap handles above, while the discharge was collected by an immense bathtub below. The river of John Wesley Powell might still feel wild and dangerous and free, but every ripple and wave of that river would now be metered and gauged and rationed by bureaucrats and engineers. At this point, however, Brower was far less concerned about the symbolic neutering of the canyon below the dam than about the real loss of the canyon above it. Because in the summer of 1962, while construction was still taking place but the river had not yet been dammed, Brower had set out on a series of river trips that granted him his first look at the mysterious place that had been traded away for Echo Park. He was shocked by what he found. If the Grand Canyon is geology’s G?tterd?mmerung, a thunderous “Twilight of the Gods” composed in stone, then Glen was a tectonic version of the Moonlight Sonata—a canyon that was neither imperious nor magisterial, but lyrically finessed, elegantly sculpted, and ethereal. Unlike the Grand, Glen was defined neither by the violence of its white water nor by the grandiosity of its rock formations, but instead by gentleness and tranquillity. Here, the river and its tributaries had carved a trellis of intimate side canyons, many of them so narrow that they were bathed in shadow-cooled twilight at noon. Deep inside this sinuous and hidden world were countless springs and vaulted grottoes, where thin cascades of clear water dropped into pools surrounded by maidenhair fern. This exquisite labyrinth was what Powell had discovered as his boats drifted languorously through Glen’s curves and goosenecks during the final days of July 1869, just prior to their grueling “race for a dinner” through the Grand Canyon. And those same qualities—the honey-colored light, the polished walls, the vivid green cottonwood leaves fluttering softly in the morning air—seduced and saddened Brower when he floated through this haunted landscape during its twilight months in the golden summer of 1962. As he recognized with a growing sense of remorse, Glen was much like Echo Park, only better in every way. The splendor of what had been sacrificed far surpassed the charms of what had been saved upstream. Within Glen’s side canyons alone, Brower would later declare, the place boasted “the equivalent of several Dinosaur National Monuments.” By the end of 1962, even as a team of workers prepared to start the process of filling Glen’s reservoir, Brower had resolved to make a last-ditch effort to stop the process that he had unwittingly sanctioned by petitioning the one person who had the power to apply the brakes. On the morning of January 21, 1963, he flew to Washington to see Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, the man whose job it was to reconcile and balance the competing interests of the National Park Service and the Bureau of Reclamation. Upon arriving at Interior’s headquarters on C Street, Brower was informed that Udall had a packed schedule and would be unable to meet with him personally. However, the secretary was about to conduct an important press conference in which he and the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation would make an important announcement regarding the Colorado River. If Brower wished, he was told, he was welcome to attend. And it was in this manner that he came to learn that the government was planning to flood yet another canyon and national park, perhaps the greatest of them all. That morning Udall unveiled a plan intended to complete and, in some ways, surpass the vision for the Colorado River that Reclamation’s engineers had been shaping and refining since the days of Arthur Powell Davis, more than sixty years earlier. Having already erected the cornerstone of their great scheme at Hoover, and having recently completed a whole smorgasbord of dams, power plants, and irrigation projects along the upper Colorado, the bureau had all but one remaining section of the river under its control. Among dozens of marvelous things, the plan that Udall outlined would create a whole new set of dams, tunnels, and canals in Northern California that would deliver water south, to the residents of Los Angeles and the farmers of the San Joaquin Valley, replacing water that was currently being supplied to those areas from the Colorado. In turn, that Colorado water would be shunted east, through yet another system of pumps and canals, to the rapidly growing cities of Phoenix and Tucson. The only catch was that delivering this water would require enormous amounts of energy. But this, Udall explained, was the most elegant part of the whole scheme, because that energy would come from electricity generated by the deepest canyons and the steepest gradient on the Colorado, thanks to a pair of giant new dams that would be built directly in the heart of the Grand Canyon. These two additional dams would not only produce enough electricity to pump water to Phoenix and Tucson but would create a surplus that could be sold to private utilities, thereby generating income that would eventually reimburse the government for its investment in the entire system. The project would essentially pay for itself, which is why the Grand Canyon dams—known as Bridge Canyon Dam and Marble Canyon Dam—were dubbed “cash registers.” As Udall sketched out these details, he could see Brower scowling in the back of the room. He knew that the conservationist was angry, but what he did not know was that this announcement was an epiphany for the executive director of the Sierra Club—a moment that neatly bridged the chasm that yawned between the hopes with which Brower had come to Udall’s office that morning and his sense of betrayal at what the secretary was revealing. The lesson that Brower decided he had been taught by Glen Canyon, something that Litton had repeatedly stressed, was that compromise was a vile and dangerous thing, an arrangement that destroyed a man’s principles while rendering him powerless. If further proof of that conceit was needed, it was unfolding at that very moment at the head of the Grand Canyon, where the job of closing off Glen’s diversion tunnels was already in full swing. Earlier that morning, a crew of laborers had finished chipping winter ice out of the vertical tracks on a pair of guillotine-shaped gates that were poised above the entrance to the tunnels. When they sent the steel gates slicing into the frigid, sugary-brown current coursing into the tunnels, the water purled and eddied as the river, robbed of any other path, made its way over an earthen barrier and slowly began to claw its way up the ten-million-ton edifice of the newly finished dam. The sound of a living river had been replaced by the silence of a reservoir. It would take almost twenty years for that reservoir to fill to capacity. But Lake Powell, named in honor of the one-armed Civil War major who had braved the once-unstoppable river, had been born. In that moment, perhaps the only thing that surpassed Brower’s sense of contrition was his resolve. Having had the perils of compromise drummed into him so painfully, he would take the lesson to heart. Now there would be another battle—one far bigger and with far greater stakes than had already been fought over Dinosaur. That struggle would be waged without negotiation or horse-trading, and the principle that would remain inviolable—subject neither to debate nor qualification—was that the Grand Canyon, the foremost of America’s natural wonders, should be left alone. Before Brower could embark on his campaign, however, he faced the intensely irritating task of having to persuade his colleagues at the Sierra Club to give him the green light. This would not be easy. The club’s old guard, the men who had helped nurture and sustain the organization through the first half of the twentieth century and now sat on the board of directors, valued decorum and dialogue. Many of those directors were on good terms with the government officials and bureaucrats who controlled the nation’s wild spaces, and they placed a premium on behaving honorably and refraining from personal attacks. The club’s purpose, as they saw it, was not to stand in the way of development but to argue, in a friendly and reasonable manner, for compromises that would enable progress to unfold while preserving places that were special. One of the most powerful proponents of this approach was Bestor Robinson, a prominent lawyer from Oakland who had extensive business and social connections at almost every level of government. Robinson specialized in crafting evenhanded deals that were advantageous to everyone, and he was convinced that it was unwise to declare war against Stewart Udall and the entire Interior Department. The rational course, therefore, was to negotiate. Brower knew that if he wanted to defeat the entire Grand Canyon dams project, he was first going to have to defeat Robinson at the club’s annual board meeting, which was scheduled to take place in May 1963. The outcome of that debate would determine whether Brower would be given license to deploy the club’s considerable resources in an all-out fight against both dams. And for assistance, Brower decided to turn to one of the few people who could be even more stubborn and irascible than he was. In some ways, this was a dangerous gambit. The board was well aware that Martin Litton embodied some of the very worst qualities of the Colorado River. He was willful and tempestuous, ungovernable and downright mean—a force of nature that recognized no one’s authority and tended to go tearing off in bizarre directions. Brower, however, understood that when Litton’s energy was properly channeled, the weight of his influence could be enormous. He was also aware that Litton held an important trump card—because, unlike anyone else in the Sierra Club, he not only knew the Grand Canyon firsthand but had also developed a philosophy about the place that hinged on the allure of wooden boats. During the fifteen years following his first encounter with John Wesley Powell’s journals in his high school typing class, Litton had made contact with the rim of the canyon on only three occasions. He saw the place briefly for the first time on a road trip in 1938, then got a slightly longer look three years later when he and his wife, Esther, had spent the first night of their honeymoon at the El Tovar, the main hotel on the South Rim. Between those two visits, Litton had also made a trip to Toroweap, a remote overlook on the North Rim, to write a story for the L.A. Times. But it wasn’t until 1955, the year that the Echo Park conflict was resolved, that he was given his first opportunity to actually run the river at the bottom of the canyon. He and Esther signed on with a boatman named P. T. Reilly, who had assembled a fleet of small wooden rowboats. Two had been hand-built by Reilly, while the third, an odd duck called the Gem, was a hybridized version of a white-water boat that had evolved on a river almost nine hundred miles to the north, in Oregon—a type of craft with which Litton would later develop a lasting connection. From the moment they pushed off, Litton found himself bewitched by the unique world of water and stone. Every mile or so, the walls opened and gave way to yet another side canyon filled with secret springs and waterfalls. The air was alive with pink-and-lavender dragonflies that paused, twitchingly, on the shafts of their suspended oars. In the mornings, the trilling notes of the canyon wren, the sweetest song of the river, dribbled down the walls. As they worked the boats beneath laced canopies of maidenhair fern that clung to the rock where the springs jutted out, they paused in secret, nameless grottoes where they marveled at the shades of the water and the textures of the surrounding cliffs. Like tiny particles of sediment, the impressions of this world worked their way into the bedrock of Litton’s sensibility: the color of the river when it was rinsed in morning light, the little tendrils of perfume that ascended from a brittlebush flower just before the rain arrived, the quiet music a boat hull made when moored inside an eddy at night. In many ways, this was very much not the canyon of John Wesley Powell. There were dangers and complications, to be sure, but Litton’s predominant impression was that this was not a place where nature was an implacable enemy to be battled, but instead something to be enjoyed and savored. Moreover, the beauty of the river world and the sense of wonder it evoked set up a powerful contrast with the prevailing message of the rocks. The place seemed to transmit a shattering reminder of the insignificance and irrelevancy of human affairs when set against the twin pools of deep time and geologic indifference. At the same time, Litton found himself undergoing a rebirth of the kind of delight that only children truly possess. The juxtaposition left him enlightened and enriched—a feeling he later summarized as a “major order of experience.” He was so impressed that he returned the very next summer and did the whole thing all over again, which only deepened the connection. He would probably have kept coming back had he not found himself beset by the pressures of making a living (by now he had left the Times and taken a demanding job as the travel editor at Sunset magazine). But then something unusual happened, because, in the summer of 1961, he found himself in Oregon, covering the McKenzie River White Water Boat Parade for Sunset—and there he encountered his first white-water dory. The dories on the McKenzie, which were locally known as drift boats, were reminiscent of the Gem, the unusual little craft that had taken part in Litton’s first run through the canyon. Unlike the Gem, however, these boats were the real thing: double-ended cockleshells with open decks and a sharp upward rake on their pointed bows and sterns. They had been specially engineered for the fast, shallow, highly technical white water of the McKenzie, and Litton was smitten by their beauty. But he also saw something intriguing: the possibility that, with some modification, they might stand up to the giant hydraulics of the Colorado. Upon returning to California, he telephoned Reilly and suggested that they each purchase one of these boats and take them on a test-drive through the canyon. When Reilly agreed, Litton placed an order with a boatwright named Keith Steele, who lived in the little town of Leaburg, Oregon. The following June, Litton and Reilly hauled the boats down to Lee’s Ferry and shoved them into the Colorado. When the trip was over, Reilly pronounced his dory the finest thing he’d ever rowed. Litton, however, went even further. Something about those boats—their elegance and symmetry and balance—seemed to dovetail exquisitely with the canyon itself. In Litton’s mind, the dories and the river fit together in a way that was difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore, perhaps because each seemed to frame and perfect the other. The river imbued the boats with context and purpose, while calling forth their dexterity and grace. In turn, the dories provided a visual metaphor that distilled the essence of the canyon: its seductiveness, its vulnerability, its aura of timelessness and classicism. The connection was no less real for being subtle, and it was sufficiently compelling that, as far as Litton was concerned, each was somehow incomplete without the other. By now, Litton’s response to the entire canyon—what he saw in the place, what he valued, what he knew of the truths that were embedded in its heart—had become inextricably entwined with the boats. And thanks to the manner in which the dories had crystallized those sensibilities, he found himself in a singular position when Brower telephoned him in the spring of 1963 and explained that the Sierra Club’s directors were preparing to grapple with the Grand Canyon dams question. Not only did Litton understand the river more intimately than anyone else in the organization, but he was also able to speak about the place with unique authority and persuasiveness. So when Brower asked if Litton would consider giving a presentation on why the club should fight against the dams with everything it had, he immediately said yes. The meeting convened at 10:14 a.m. on May 4, 1963, in the main conference room at the Jack London Hotel in downtown Oakland. Robinson opened the debate, and the case he presented was compelling. He pointed out, correctly, that the new dams would not actually “flood” the entire canyon by filling it up to the rims; they would merely inundate several hundred feet of an abyss that was more than a mile deep. In fact, neither reservoir would be visible from any of the hotels or the popular lookout points where most tourists gathered. The club’s smartest move, Robinson argued, was agreeing not to oppose the dams in exchange for extracting some concessions in how recreation would be handled on the reservoirs. His proposal was that the club insist—adamantly—that a set of elevators be built to enable anglers on the South Rim to access the blue-ribbon trout fisheries that would thrive in the cold, clear water pouring from the tailraces at the bases of the two dams. Brower had warned Litton that this might happen, but Robinson’s proposal nevertheless sent him into a fit of rage. Before the meeting, he had gathered together some Magic Markers and drawn a map of the canyon on the side of a grocery box. Clutching his cardboard sketch, he rose from his chair, climbed onto the dais, and began to quote from a speech that Theodore Roosevelt had delivered from the South Rim on May 6, 1903: In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. Then Litton started laying into Robinson’s arguments. Unfortunately, no one bothered to transcribe his words. But the gist of the stem-winder he uncorked is well remembered to this day. He began by declaring that it didn’t make a hoot of difference that the canyon might not look any different from the top if the dams were put in. The river was the essence of the place, its heart—the thing that had not only carved and shaped the rock but also sustained the unique and fragile ecosystem at the bottom. If the river were dammed, the spirit of that place would vanish, and what replaced it would be a poor substitute: a pair of stagnant reservoirs whose surfaces would endlessly and noisily be crisscrossed by powerboats and houseboats and water-skiers. What this amounted to, Litton continued, was the annulment of a space whose value resided not in the fact that it was accessible, but rather in that it was isolated and untrammeled. Indeed, access to the masses was the very thing that would destroy what made the place so precious by canceling out those elements that the canyon now possessed in abundance—the silence, the solitude, and the fact that it was so implacably cut off from the rest of the world. Those qualities were as fragile as a little wooden boat, and as Roosevelt’s words clearly implied, the willingness to nurture and protect such treasures amounted to a national test of character, as well as a covenant with future generations of Americans. A test that the Interior Department and the Bureau of Reclamation had demonstrably failed. Inside the canyon, Litton thundered, Interior and Reclamation are interlopers, and we don’t have to surrender to their scheme because the place doesn’t belong to them. It’s our canyon. It’s our national park. As for the idea that the government was too big and powerful to confront head-on, Litton’s contempt was scathing. Of course it will be an uphill battle, he said. Of course our resources are limited and our numbers are few. But in God’s name, how can anyone in this room look themselves in the mirror if we don’t resolve to go after this with everything we’ve got? Historians often minimize or discount the impact that any one individual can have on human destiny—and for good reason. Given the broad tides in the affairs of men, and the complexity of the forces that shape and change history, it is almost always a mistake to ascribe too much significance to the actions of a single person. But even the most jaded observer can concede that, every now and then, a man or woman steps up to the plate and takes a mighty swing that clears the bases and fundamentally changes the game. In the Jack London Hotel that morning, this is what Litton achieved. After an hour and a half of debate, it was moved that the club should oppose any further dams and diversions in the canyon. The motion carried. Many years later, when asked how he had primed Litton for his presentation, Brower chuckled. “Martin doesn’t have to prime for a speech,” he replied. “Martin poured it on—what a ridiculous thing this would be to do—and the audience applauded, and Bestor subsided, and we voted ‘no.’ ” Later that afternoon, when the meeting had wrapped up, Litton was sitting out in the hotel’s lobby having a drink with a friend when Robinson approached their table. “Well now, just because we don’t agree on everything doesn’t mean we’re not friends,” Robinson said, extending his hand agreeably to Litton. “Oh?” Litton retorted. “I wouldn’t say that.” Later that summer, Litton submitted a strongly worded essay to the Bulletin, the Sierra Club’s magazine, urging the organization’s twenty-two thousand members to write directly to their political representatives to voice their opposition to the dams. This kicked off a media campaign that would continue through the fall and winter of 1963. Meanwhile, at Brower’s urging, Litton commissioned another dory from Oregon, gathered his tiny fleet, and set off the following spring for the Grand Canyon with a writer and a pair of photographers on a special river mission. As they left Lee’s Ferry on April 26, they passed by a line of bright red fire hydrants that had just been installed for the marina that would service the boaters and water-skiers who would flock to the reservoir once Marble Canyon Dam, the first of the two new structures, was built. Thirty-nine miles downstream, they passed by a set of scaffolds that climbed several hundred feet up the cliffs on both sides of the canyon. Here, a series of test tunnels had been drilled to determine the quality of the rock where the dam would be anchored. Much farther downstream, the river took the boats beneath a steel cable that marked the spot where similar test bores had been drilled at the second site, for Bridge Canyon Dam. At each of these landmarks, and everywhere in between, the photographers shot rolls of film while the writer, a journalist named Fran?ois Leydet, took careful notes. When they reached the Grand Wash Cliffs, they had enough material to fill a coffee-table tome highlighting every feature inside the canyon that would be obliterated by the dams. It took six months to compile, with Brower writing the foreword and Litton doing most of the editing and contributing photos of his own. They called the book Time and the River Flowing, and it conveyed the same message that Litton had expressed in front of the board of directors eighteen months earlier. The Sierra Club fired off a copy to members of Congress and every news outlet they could think of. That was only one arrow in Brower’s quiver. While Litton pressed on with the media effort by helping to develop a traveling photo exhibit and a movie about the canyon, other members of Brower’s task force set about pressing news organizations to cover the controversy. By the following winter and spring, articles opposed to dams had begun to appear in Life, Newsweek, and Outdoor Life, precipitating an avalanche of mail to members of Congress, Stewart Udall’s office, and President Lyndon Johnson. Bowing to mounting pressure, an exasperated Wayne Aspinall scheduled a renewal of hearings before the Interior Committee, which gave Brower his next opening. In a reprise of the Dinosaur strategy, he recruited experts who could expose the government’s misuse of its own facts and brought those people to Washington. His trump card was a trio of young graduates from MIT—an economist, a nuclear engineer, and a mathematician named Jeff Ingram, who demonstrated how the payback plan that the bureau had devised for the new hydropower facilities was built around a numerical house of cards. Using the bureau’s own figures, Ingram proved that the construction of Bridge and Marble Canyon Dams—whose hydropower sales were supposed to pay for the network of new canals and river-diversion schemes in central Arizona—would actually reduce the amount of revenue that would accrue to the government until the year 2021. While testimony unfolded, Brower launched a third offensive. On the morning of June 9, 1966, he ran a set of expensive and highly inflammatory full-page advertisements in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. “Now Only You Can Save Grand Canyon from Being Flooded . . . For Profit,” the headlines screamed in oversize type. Emphasizing that the canyon belonged to all Americans, the text of the ad closed with an admonition that echoed what Litton had told the board of the Sierra Club: “There is only one simple incredible issue here. This time, it’s the Grand Canyon they want to flood. The Grand Canyon.” One of the people who took note of those ads with particular displeasure was a congenial lawyer and banker from Tucson named Morris Udall, who had taken over his older brother Stewart’s seat in the House of Representatives when Stewart was appointed Interior secretary. Morris was so outraged by what he read in the paper that morning—which he regarded as a wildly irresponsible misrepresentation of the truth—that he stood up on the floor of the House and denounced Brower’s entire ploy as “phony, irresponsible, utterly and completely false.” The following afternoon at 4:00 p.m., a messenger from the San Francisco district office of the IRS delivered a letter to the headquarters of the Sierra Club stating that it was now under investigation for violating IRS regulations concerning lobbying. In the opinion of the IRS, the letter stated, the club was engaged in substantial efforts to influence legislation, a direct violation of federal tax law, and its donors should be made aware that their contributions might no longer qualify as tax deductions. In short, the government had stripped the Sierra Club’s tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization. To this day, no one knows who initiated this investigation—Brower alleged that it was Morris Udall, who vehemently denied the charge, and his brother, Stewart, later suggested that someone in the White House was responsible. But whoever set the train in motion launched a graphic demonstration of the law of unintended consequences. Brower counterpunched by handing out copies of the letter to every reporter he knew. As word spread, it unleashed an absolute firestorm. If people were upset by the idea of the dams, they were positively apoplectic over the IRS’s attempting to strong-arm a group of conservationists who were trying to do nothing more than save the Grand Canyon. This triggered outrage, even in places where conservation was regarded with skepticism or disdain. The Wall Street Journal denounced the IRS’s move as “an extraordinary departure from its snail’s pace tradition.” The New York Times went a step further, calling it “an assault on the right of private citizens to protest effectively against wrong-headed public policies.” The most thunderous reaction of all, however, came from ordinary people. Congressional offices were immediately flooded with telegrams and phone calls from enraged citizens, and a few days later, the letters started pouring in. The secretary of the interior’s office alone received more than twenty thousand. Morris Udall described it as a “deluge.” “I never saw anything like it,” Dan Dreyfus, an official at the Bureau of Reclamation, later told the journalist riggr. “Letters were arriving in dump trucks. Ninety-five percent of them said we’d better keep our mitts off the Grand Canyon.” By late summer, My Weekly Reader, the newspaper for elementary-school children, had taken a vehement stand against the dams. “You’re in deep shit when you catch it from them,” remarked Dreyfus, ruefully recalling the incident. “Mailbags were coming in by the hundreds, stuffed with letters from schoolkids.” It took another eighteen months for the endgame to play out, during which Morris Udall explored a possible deal that would involve eliminating one of the dams if the Sierra Club would agree to withdraw its opposition to the other—a proposal to which Brower responded by declaring, “One bullet to the heart is just as deadly as two.” By the autumn of 1968, a final version of the bill—minus the hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon—was approved by both houses of Congress. When President Johnson signed the bill into law, the Sierra Club—captained by Brower and goaded by Litton, among many others—had been transformed from a group of alpine picnickers into the first truly powerful conservation lobby in America. Brower was heralded by Life as “his country’s number-one working conservationist,” and the environmental movement had scored one of its greatest victories, a platform upon which more sweeping successes, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Protection Act, would eventually be built. While many disagreed with the manner in which this victory had been achieved, no one could deny that the battle over the Grand Canyon dams marked the coming of age of American wilderness conservation. Something else was true too. By the time the fight was finally over, most Americans believed deeply in the principle that the Grand Canyon should not be messed with—not now, not ever, not for any reason. People from places as diverse as New Jersey and Alabama and North Dakota—people who might never set foot in the Southwest, much less see the canyon with their own eyes—now viewed it as a kind of national cathedral of geology and light: a wonder of nature that, foremost of all the country’s treasures, was sacrosanct. Although many conservationists had participated in the effort to bring this about, the lion’s share of the credit rightfully redounded to Brower—even though Brower himself was never entirely comfortable with this distinction. Whenever someone pointed out that he was the star of this play, its virtuoso performer, he would emphasize that the campaign had been waged by hundreds of people, men and women who would go on to make deep and lasting contributions to the way that Americans think about landscape, nature, and human responsibility to the world we all share. Among this group, Litton was by no means the most important. In many ways, his role was fairly minor. But in one crucial respect, he was absolutely vital—and many years later, Brower went to some effort to point this out: “Some people get the kudos and others, out of inequity, don’t,” he declared. “Martin Litton is due most of those addressed to me in error: more years than I will ever admit, he has been my conservation conscience.” If he wanted, Litton could easily have continued to follow Brower, who was forced out of the Sierra Club, but went on to found two new conservation groups. Instead, the irascible old glider pilot decided to follow an entirely different heading, a tack inspired by one of the men he admired most, and whose spirit he increasingly seemed to embody. Seduced by his fleet of wooden boats, Litton disappeared down the Colorado in the footsteps of John Wesley Powell, where his story was about to intersect with that of a dory called the Emerald Mile. PART III The Sweet Lines of Desire If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU Martin Litton’s fleet of dories, moored at Bright Angel beach in the heart of the Grand Canyon. 6 Dories The glory of the dories is their lightness and maneuverability; the way they go dancing over the waves, the way you can turn them like the knob on an outhouse door. If you sacrifice that . . . you’ve lost the whole goddamned ball of wax. —P. T. REILLY AMONG its many other consequences, the Grand Canyon dam fight wound up kicking the river-running industry into high gear. Drawn by the controversy, a number of celebrities and prominent politicians began booking excursions on the Colorado during the mid-1960s to see the place firsthand. Perhaps the most famous of these was Robert F. Kennedy, who took his entire family down the canyon, along with a group of friends that included the mountaineer Jim Whittaker, a member of the first American team to summit Mount Everest; the humorist Art Buchwald; and the singer Andy Williams. The publicity surrounding this and other trips proved to be a direct stimulant to river travel. By the time President Johnson signed the legislation that closed the door on the dams, a Grand Canyon white-water trip had emerged as the classic American wilderness experience, a pilgrimage at the top of the bucket list for anyone who loved the country’s natural wonders. Responding to this accelerating demand, new commercial outfitters began springing up almost overnight. Within a few years, twenty companies had obtained guiding permits from the National Park Service, and every one of those outfitters was experimenting with some form of rubberized raft, many with outboard motors attached to the back. Each company had its own theory about the best way to put together these contraptions—the size, the rigging, the style of frame—and the results were as varied as the layers of rock in the canyon walls. Some suspended their engines from wood frames that extended off the back of army-surplus bridge pontoons, oval-shaped tubes that had enabled George Patton’s armored tank divisions to race over the rivers of France and Germany in their drive toward Berlin. These were known as tail-draggers. Others preferred tying three or four pontoons together lengthwise, which were called J-rigs or snouts, depending on how they were lashed, and could fit up to thirty people. Another popular option was a smaller, sixteen-foot raft equipped with a single set of oars that was capable of carrying five passengers, plus several hundred pounds of supplies. Each outfitter was convinced that his setup was the best, and perhaps the only thing everyone could agree on was that the era of the small, hard-hulled boat was over. Rubber was the future, wood a thing of the past. Martin Litton stepped into this scene during the summer of 1969, shortly after deciding that he was fed up with writing stories on family-travel vacations for Sunset magazine. Having quit in a huff and then realizing, somewhat belatedly, that he now had to find another way to make a living, he concluded that the logical move—at least for now, he told his wife—was to use his trio of wooden dories to build his own commercial guiding company in the canyon. Characteristically, he made his entrance with a splash. That summer marked the centennial of Powell’s pioneering voyage, and Litton decided to commemorate it by re-creating the bulk of the Major’s trip, launching above Dinosaur National Monument and running all the way to the Grand Wash Cliffs. The dories were temporarily renamed after Powell’s boats, and at every stop, Litton disappeared into the bushes to paste a set of fake whiskers to his face and don a nineteenth-century black frock and hat. Tucking his right arm under the coat and pinning the empty sleeve to the lapel, he made his way down the river in stages, shuttling the boats around the dams and reservoirs, giving speeches, and happily hamming it up for the newspaper photographers and reporters who flocked to cover the spectacle. After leapfrogging down the Green and the upper Colorado, he spent most of August in the Grand Canyon. When the entourage reached the Grand Wash Cliffs on August 30, the date that Powell and his starving crew had completed their journey, Grand Canyon Dories was officially launched. To say that Litton’s boats offered a less than ideal platform for a commercial river company during this new era of white-water travel was something of an understatement. His dories were incapable of carrying more than four passengers, which put them at a disadvantage with the large, motorized rafts that could ferry five or six times as many people down the canyon at more than twice the speed. Even more problematic, Litton’s boats had a tendency to break if they got anywhere near a rock, often requiring extensive and time-consuming repairs. But something about their history and their shape had seduced him, and to fully appreciate the depth of his infatuation, one needed to know a little about where those boats came from and how they had evolved. When he’d first encountered the dories in Oregon seven years earlier, Litton had learned that their story was murky and the subject of some rather contentious debate. One version argued that they were part of a tradition that reached back to medieval Europe, where they were invented by Portuguese fishermen, then adapted by maritime communities throughout Britain and Scandinavia. Others argued that they had been developed in America by a Massachusetts boatwright named Simeon Lowell in the late 1700s, and were later adopted by New England cod fishermen for use in the North Atlantic, especially off the Grand Banks. The rivermen of the McKenzie rejected all of that history, however, and defiantly insisted that they had invented the things themselves, right there in Oregon, tailoring the boats to the unique conditions of their home waters to the point where, in the 1920s and 1930s, they became the favorite fishing vessel of celebrities such as Clark Gable, Babe Ruth, Winston Churchill, and Ginger Rogers. And perhaps that was the case—although it’s much more likely that all three versions of the story contained a kernel of truth. As with many designs of practical value, variations of the craft may well have arisen spontaneously in different places, with each group of inventors borrowing ideas and deriving inspiration from elsewhere. What no one could dispute, however, was that something about the boats was rather magical. Thanks to their toughness and durability, the dories of New England were famously capable of absorbing a ferocious beating. Cheap, unpretentious, and dependable, they were the Missouri mules and the Ford pickup trucks of their day. The McKenzies, by contrast, were fragile and demanded great dexterity to avoid being smashed to pieces. But regardless of where they came from, they all shared the same mysterious property, which was that their profile was deeply pleasing to the human eye. For reasons that no one could quite put his or her finger on, the little boats evoked passion and loyalty among everyone who built, rowed, or simply looked at them. Despite differing theories about why these craft added up to more than the sum of their parts, an unspoken consensus held that the dories’ charm was rooted in the blending of three elements: simplicity, balance, and ruthless reductionism. These qualities fused into an austere beauty not unlike the effect that the Shaker cabinetmakers strove to achieve—and maybe too the Shinto-temple builders of Japan. Like the very best products of human craftsmanship—indeed, like all small objects that have been fashioned with great care from humble materials—the boats were charged with the power of honesty, composure, and time. They embodied a peculiar kind of perfection that gave pleasure to anyone who admired that narrow strip of ground where utility and art converge—an allure that was captured best by John Gardner, a naval architect from Massachusetts, who was the foremost historian of this craft. “There must be something about dories that intrigues people,” Gardner wrote. “The sweet lines of some of them all but took my breath when I saw them for the first time, out of the water in all their naked elegance. I reveled in their good looks and desired them as much for their beauty as for their use.” This notion offers perhaps the finest encapsulation of why Litton was determined to stick with his wooden boats, despite their impracticalities. At the end of that first summer, Grand Canyon Dories was—and would remain—the only commercial outfitter to guide the Colorado exclusively in dories. Somewhat to Litton’s and everyone else’s surprise, the dories were an immediate hit with the passengers, and as word leaked out, more and more people began telephoning his house in California to ask about booking a trip for the following summer. They were partly drawn by the connections to the past—the notion that while every other outfitter was embracing new technology and design, Litton’s outfit harkened back to the earliest river runners. But an equal measure of the attraction stemmed from aesthetics. While rubber rafts were considerably more resilient and far easier to manage, they could be downright ugly. Fat, bulbous, and squishy, they lacked the dories’ elegance and grace, qualities that were further enhanced by Litton’s decision to paint each of the boats in the same colors—red, white, and turquoise—which supported the primary hues of the canyon, and they fit in beautifully. He also inaugurated a tradition of naming every craft after a natural wonder that, in his view, had heedlessly been ruined by the hand of man—“to remind us of places we’ve destroyed without any necessity,” he would bark to anyone who inquired, “so that maybe we’ll think twice before we do it again.” Litton’s original dory, the Portola, was thus renamed the Diablo Canyon in honor of a pristine stretch of California coastline where the Sierra Club had lost a bitter battle in 1968 to prevent the construction of a nuclear power plant atop an earthquake fault. P. T. Reilly’s old boat, the Suzie Too, was likewise rechristened. Her new name, the Music Temple, commemorated one of the many gemlike features inside Glen Canyon that now lay submerged beneath the waters of Lake Powell. They were followed by the Hetch Hetchy (Yosemite’s sister valley, drowned by a dam in 1914), the Diamondhead (the volcanic crater in Waikiki whose interior serves as a US military reserve), and the Malibu Canyon, a hidden pocket in the Santa Monica Mountains that had been Litton’s favorite spot in the world before it was marred by a commuter highway. The other outfitters had no idea what to make of all this. A man stubborn or foolish enough to reject improvements in order to wallow in the past was clearly out of his mind. But as the phone continued to ring, Litton found that each winter he had to expand the size of his fleet by making repeated dashes up to Oregon to order additional batches of boats. By now he had broken with his original boatbuilder, who was unable to keep up with production demands, and shifted over to a gifted boatwright named Jerry Briggs, who lived in the little town of Grants Pass along the banks of the Rogue River. With each new order, Litton and Briggs strove to improve their design, parsing which features didn’t seem to be working and often brainstorming their way through the solutions by scratching makeshift blueprints in the sand next to Briggs’s driveway with sticks. They tweaked the rocker back and forth. They made adjustments to the length and the beam. They tinkered with the height of the bow and the angle of the flare, juggling elements back and forth until finally, in the summer of 1971, Briggs nailed it. The boat he wheeled out of his shop was sixteen and a half feet long from bowpost to stern, with side panels fashioned from quarter-inch, marine-grade plywood and braces made of aromatic Port Orford cedar. Briggs had reduced the flare on the sides, and crucially, he had dampened the rocker amidships so that the middle of the bottom of the boat was virtually flat, and only the bow and the stern had an upward rake. He also straightened the chine, the corner along the length of the hull where the sides and the bottom come together, and he adjusted the freeboard amidships, so that the oar handles rested at the perfect ergonomic position—halfway between the boatman’s belly and his chest—for pulling a stroke. The changes were subtle, but their effect was noticeable the moment the boat was placed on the river. The chine now acted as a kind of keel, helping to keep the hull parallel to the direction of the river current. This enabled her to track, building the momentum she needed to catapult over the biggest hydraulics, while the upward kick on her stern and bow enabled her to pivot on a hot dime. The prow was high enough to split all but the largest standing waves, while the watertight decking easily shed the hundreds of gallons of water that came rushing over the sides. Most important, she achieved a balance of geometry—a blending of ballast, beam, and the angle of her oars—that simply felt right. Thanks to that equilibrium, she was capable of catching every nuance of the current and responding instantly to changing conditions inside a rapid. Unlike the rafts and the motor rigs or the generations of wooden boats that had preceded her, she didn’t plow piggishly through the waves, but instead seemed to dance over them. As she planed across the surface of the river, breaking the water into a series of interlocked, V-shaped ripples, she achieved a bewitching visual alchemy, almost if she were suspended partly on the surface of the river and—through some ineffable trick of her rocker, her rake, and her radiance—partly on the air itself. She was unlike anything else that had ever been seen on the Colorado. After her maiden run that July, Litton informed Briggs that their days of scratching with sticks in the dirt were over. What he wanted now were copies, fashioned to the boat’s exact specs. Briggs would spend the next few years cranking out more than two dozen reproductions that mirrored her lines. This meant that the 1971 boat served as the matriarch of Litton’s little armada, the de facto flagship of the fleet. As his roster of dories grew, Litton bestowed upon each new boat the name of yet another vanished wonder. The Music Temple was swiftly joined by half a dozen sisters christened after equally lovely features from the lost world of Glen Canyon: the Hidden Passage, the Tapestry Wall, the Dark Canyon, the Ticaboo, the Rainbow Bridge, and the Mille Crag Bend. The Flaming Gorge bore the name of the first of the canyons that Powell had confronted on the upper Colorado, now drowned beneath a giant dam. The Vale of Rhondda was a green valley in Wales destroyed by a coal-mining operation; the Skagit was a river in British Columbia stilled by a series of dams; the Mono Lake commemorated an ancient, landlocked tarn in the High Sierra whose waters were being drained into the aqueducts of Los Angeles. And for the special boat that spawned all the rest, the one whose lines had served as the blueprint for everything that followed, Litton selected perhaps the most beautiful name of all. It was a gesture of remembrance in honor of a dense and towering stand of continuous old-growth redwoods tucked deep in the coastal forests of Northern California—an entire mountainside mantled in some of the tallest virgin trees in the world, until a chunk of it was clear-cut during the early 1960s by a logging company that was hoping to disqualify the grove from inclusion in a national park. “Truly something to cry about,” Litton had declared at the time. And so she became the Emerald Mile. As each new boat completed the trip down from Oregon, it was wheeled into Litton’s boathouse in the tiny town of Hurricane, located just north of the Arizona state line along the North Rim country of the Grand Canyon, and painted with a different configuration of the distinctive company colors. Every boat was thus unique but also part of a matrix that was imbued with cohesion and meaning. In the years to come, a handful of other boatwrights from Oregon, Montana, and Idaho would attempt their own designs. But none would ever quite capture the sleekness of those first twenty-seven dories that emerged from Briggs’s shop next to the Rogue River. Bobbing through the canyon with their haunted names emblazoned on their bows, clad in their gay palette of colors, they resembled a collection of floating Easter eggs that provoked delight from everyone who spotted them. Nothing else on the water looked quite so gorgeous or compelling. And it was this, more than anything else, that enabled Litton to assemble his unique crew of boatmen, a band of river guides who would, with time, gradually mature into something as distinctive as the boats they rowed. Like most outfitters of the day, Litton recruited his early guides from an eclectic mix of young men in their late teens or early twenties. Several came from among the drifters, dropouts, and misfits of Northern California, many of whom worked as ski instructors during the winter and lived in tepees or tents or the backs of their pickups during the summer. Others were jaded hippies, betrayed by the broken promises of the counterculture, uncertain of anything other than that they didn’t fit into mainstream America. But most were simply confused young men who found themselves caught in that limbo following high school or college when they had not yet gotten a fix on the trajectory that their lives would take. Almost all of them were convinced they did not yet have a home, a place where they truly belonged, and although not a single one knew the first thing about white water or could tell the difference between a gunwale and a chine, they found themselves bewitched by the beauty of Litton’s boats and the hidden world at the bottom of the canyon. For all of these reasons, and because they were, to a man, young and free and looking for adventure, each was willing, indeed eager, to fling himself down the river armed with little more than his toothbrush, his tennis shoes, and, for the worst rapids, a hockey helmet. Those things drew them in initially. But with time, other elements began to emerge, powerful forces that none of them could have anticipated and that would later cement them together around a body of ideas and principles that ran deeper than mere adventure. This was partly because Litton was unlike anyone else they had ever met, perhaps the first leader many of them had encountered who truly seemed worth following—although this charisma was initially masked because Litton often displayed the demeanor of a cantankerous bear emerging from a troubled hibernation. Within his belligerent blue eyes, his gruffness, and the stream of profanities that seemed to fly off him like sparks from a grinding wheel, they found an intimidating taskmaster and leader. He could also be wildly mercurial, marveling at the colors of a Claret-cup cactus blossom in one moment, then in the next losing his temper over what a ridiculous knot someone had used to tie up his boat. But as one summer bled into another, they began to understand that both the man himself and the company he was building possessed an unusual spirit that seemed to set Grand Canyon Dories apart from every other outfitter on the river. His boats were certainly central to this emerging ethos. But they were only a part of the picture. This quality was not easily pinned down, in part because, although Litton was a fighter, he was never an evangelist. He had little interest in telling people what they should think or how they should behave, preferring instead to state what he thought and then permitting his listeners to draw their own conclusions. As a result, he issued no philosophical statements about what his company stood for or how his boatmen should conduct themselves. But with time, they began to realize that Litton was offering his clients much more than the wilderness equivalent of a trip to Disney World. One clue was his oratory. Regardless of where they might find themselves in the canyon, Litton seemed to treat every rock and bush as an excuse to launch into an impromptu conservation lecture, extolling the surrounding wonders while fulminating against the forces of greed, commercialism, and ignorance that conspired to neutralize nature’s power. In someone less eloquent or lacking his rough but endearing charm, this kind of behavior would have been boorish and impossible to tolerate. But the passengers who signed up for those early trips couldn’t get enough of it. They stared, rapt, when he ordered the boats to pull over at the Marble Canyon Dam site and pointed to the sides of the cliffs where the core samples had been drilled from the rock, then drank in his words as he uncorked a speech filled with graphic descriptions of what the reservoirs would have done to the bottom of the canyon. At night, they gathered around and pelted him with questions about David Brower, the Sierra Club, and the Eden that had been drowned upstream by the Glen Canyon Dam. In addressing those queries, Litton gave also himself license to range freely over interests of his that had nothing to do with the canyon or the Colorado. At any given moment, he was immersed in half a dozen conservation campaigns involving parts of the country that lay far beyond the river. There was an effort to expand several parks and monuments in Northern California that protected the remaining stands of redwoods and sequoias. There was a crazy scheme to set up a refuge for a surviving population of California condors and feed them with dogs and cats that had been euthanized in Santa Barbara’s animal shelters. There was his ongoing boycott of products manufactured in Japan to protest that nation’s whaling industry. (According to one of his boatmen, after rashly offering a free river vacation for anyone who could find a single Japanese item on any of his dory trips, Litton was forced to spend an entire day going through the gear and grinding off Made in Japan from every piece of cookware in the kitchen.) In talking about these matters, he peppered his passengers with his opinions, entertained them with his invective, and invited them to warm their hands at the fires of his rage. And what his guides began to notice was that many of the people who completed those trips seemed to emerge from the bottom of the canyon with deepened convictions about the importance of fighting to protect not only the river itself, but all wild places that were threatened by development. The guides also noticed that Litton offered few luxuries and charged his passengers almost nothing. In an era when the price of a one-week motorized run through the canyon was roughly $700, he was charging the same for a no-frills trip that could last up to twenty-three days. When the cost of his supplies and his payroll had been subtracted, his profit was almost nonexistent. Yet, on top of the already low prices, he also insisted on giving away many trips for free. Politicians, pundits, photographers, writers, and anyone else in a position to influence legislation or public opinion on matters concerning the environment were brought down the canyon at no charge. The reasons behind this, the guides eventually realized, had nothing to do with altruism. During the fight to block the Grand Canyon dams, Litton had become convinced that the best way, the only way, to protect the country’s remaining scenic treasures was to enable a wide range of citizens—schoolteachers, janitors, housewives, hairdressers, factory workers—to see these places firsthand and to experience their wonders for themselves. Only then could they fathom the magnitude of what was at stake. In Litton’s eyes, the rock-bottom prices for ordinary folks and the giveaways to people such as Diane Sawyer, James Taylor, Bruce Babbitt, Richard Holbrooke, and Bill Moyers were investments that might reap valuable dividends if people could simply be induced to step into his boats and be exposed to what the river, the canyon, and Litton himself had to say. In noticing these things, Litton’s guides also couldn’t help but notice the glaring and undeniable truth that their boss was an abominable entrepreneur who didn’t have the faintest clue about how to run a business. His fiscal largesse ate away at the company’s bottom line to the point where GCD was soon stumbling from one season to the next on the threshold of bankruptcy. Even worse, perhaps, Litton’s efforts to stem the flow of red ink were often rather crude. While other companies were providing expensive amenities such as tents, sleeping cots, and steak dinners on the grill, his commissary consisted mostly of canned goods—baked beans, stewed tomatoes, fruit cocktail—and instead of handing out tents, he gave everyone a tarp and told them to decide how to rig it. He also tried to trim costs by buying up consignments of day-old bread and cases of cheap beer near his home in Palo Alto and then flying them to Hurricane in his single-engine Cessna 195, a vintage tail-dragger with a radial engine and a propeller that had once exploded in the middle of a takeoff. Whatever pennies he might have saved on the food were consumed in the cost of aviation fuel required for the flight, but this never seemed to dawn on Litton (perhaps because the only thing he loved more than boating was flying). Upon landing at the little airport in Hurricane and delivering the supplies to the boathouse, he would start rummaging through the trash cans, pulling out used paintbrushes and seizing upon half-empty tubes of glue, demanding to know why these perfectly good items were being thrown away. This combination of big-picture profligacy and nit-picking parsimony might have been amusing to the boatmen if his most effective cost-saving measure, by far, had not been to pay his guides the lowest wages in the entire industry. While boatmen at motor companies were earning as much as $60 a day, Litton’s biggest earners pulled down no more than $25 for each day they were on the river—and on top of this they were expected to devote additional days to repairing whatever damage they inflicted on their boats without any pay whatsoever. One might assume that under such conditions his employees would have trickled out the door along with the lost revenue. Oddly, however, their sense of loyalty seemed to grow only stronger with time. In river hydrology, a phenomenon known as headwater capture touches, at least metaphorically, on what may have been taking place inside the heads of these men. Headwater capture is based on the notion that a river is an erosive machine that is perpetually transporting rocks, pebbles, and fine sediments downstream, continuously cutting back from its point of origin like a kind of liquid buzz saw. As this work unfolds—as more and more material is taken up and carried away—the headwaters recede until the river eventually cuts its way through to a basin occupied by an entirely different river. At this point, whichever river is flowing at a higher elevation will change course and begin flowing into its captor. This process informs a compelling theory that attempts to explain how the Grand Canyon was originally carved—the idea being that the canyon was incised by not one ancestral Colorado but by two separate rivers, the more powerful of which seized the other and turned it from its original course. Headwater capture is also an imperfect but useful concept for understanding what happened to Litton’s guides: men whose lives were flowing in one direction, then hijacked and irrevocably changed. Partly, this rerouting stemmed from the pull exerted on them by the beauty of the dories, an attraction strengthened by Litton’s practice of assigning each member of the crew his own boat, which would be his alone to row and care for. But the most potent element in the equation was the subversive sense of purpose the boatmen derived from belonging to a company that offered the longest, slowest, cheapest expeditions in the canyon as a way of building a constituency of ordinary-citizen activists who would fight to protect the environment. Following Litton’s lead, his guides gradually began to see themselves not as part-time summer employees but as role models and teachers. This imbued them with a sense of purpose—one might even call it a mission—for why they were there and what they were doing, responsibilities that went considerably beyond the challenges of mastering a set of delicate and unforgiving boats. The issue of mastery, however, was destined to remain an unsolved problem that would make extraordinary demands on Litton’s fledgling crew throughout those early years. And here, too, they found that Grand Canyon Dories occupied a unique and sometimes unenviable niche within the river hierarchy, one that would put them through a miserable series of trials until they had honed their skills to become some of the finest oarsmen the canyon had ever known. 7 The Golden Age of Guiding Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. —KENNETH GRAHAME, The Wind in the Willows DURING the Emerald Mile’s heyday, the years between 1971 and 1975, no one had the faintest clue how to run the complete current that ran through the bottom of the Grand Canyon smoothly and safely, time after time, in small wooden boats filled with commercial clients. Litton’s crew quickly realized that the dories had two glaring liabilities. First, they were so delicate that even a tentative scrape against a rock was enough to administer nasty dings and scratches, while a direct hit enabled the canyon to drive its fist straight through their hulls. Second, they were exceptionally finicky. The slightest miscalculation would dump them upside down. The boats also had the potential to do things that no other craft could, which meant they could be absolutely thrilling to drive. But they could only achieve that kind of performance at the hands of an oarsman who understood the nuances of white water and knew exactly how to thread the eye of the needle. In the earlier years, not a single doryman, including Litton himself, came close to meeting those standards. As a result, most of those initial dory trips resembled exploratory free-for-alls whose carnage invited comparison with that of the days of John Wesley Powell. “Try and imagine a group of boatmen who had no idea what the hell is around the next bend,” recalls John Blaustein, one of Litton’s first guides, who had never touched an oar before his first trip in 1970. “Christ, it was like a war zone down there.” During the first few seasons there were zero instructions and just one general rule, which was that everybody had to follow the boss, the only person in the company who possessed at least a vague notion of how the rapids worked. Litton, however, had an incorrigible habit of taking his eye off the ball, as he was often likely to be in the midst of yet another instructional lecture or anecdote, rather than paying attention to the river. Thus he’d be caught completely unaware—pointing out some feature of the canyon, building to the punch line of a long story, or concentrating on lighting up a cigar—while merrily drifting downstream with his back to an upcoming rapid. When one of the passengers gently inquired about the jet-engine roar emanating from around the bend just ahead, he would spring to action, ordering life jackets to be zipped up, drinks put away, hatch lids slammed down and battened, all the while looking for a dry space to stow his cigar. In the midst of this frenzy, he would stand up to take stock of where they were, then turn to face the line of boats behind him and issue instructions about the name of the rapid and what needed to be done: All right, everybody, this next rapid is called Forester, so we’re going to swing left at the tongue. . . . Hang on—this doesn’t look like Forester. . . . Oh, Jesus, it’s Waltenberg! Pull right! For God’s sake PULL RIGHT! As each oarsman struggled to relay this message back to the next boat and prayed he didn’t screw things up too badly, Litton braced for the onslaught. What unfolded next was often spectacular. One afternoon at a rapid known as Bedrock, the Bright Angel was sucked beneath an immense boulder that splits the river in two, and its entire side panel was raked off. (A portion of the hull had to be rebuilt the following morning, using pieces of driftwood before the crew could complete the trip.) On another occasion, the Lava Cliffs smashed up against a rock in the middle of the river and submerged, forcing her guide and passengers to abandon ship. Forty-eight hours later when the river subsided, a Park Service helicopter lowered a river ranger onto the wreckage to attach a cable, the other end of which was run through a winch onshore in the hope of pulling the carcass loose. As the boat swung downstream, the cable snapped and the dory vanished for good, never to be seen again. Litton’s attitude toward these disasters was philosophical, perhaps because he realized that nothing that might happen on the river could compare with the ordeal of crash-landing gliders into the Netherlands or Bastogne. In the summer of 1971, Blaustein (whose nickname was JB) rammed the poor Hetch Hetchy into yet another midriver rock at a place called Unkar, where the river cuts along the base of a thousand-foot sandstone cliff. He struck with enough force to split the hull from oarlock to oarlock. “It was a terrible mess,” he recalls glumly. “I basically broke the boat in half.” Litton, however, was unbothered. “Don’t feel too awful, JB, the dories have been damaged this badly before,” he said. “Just never all at once.” After each of these disasters, the crew was forced to pull the boats onto a sandy beach and attempt to repair the worst of the devastation using whatever materials presented themselves: duct tape, steel wool, marine putty, loose pieces of lumber that had washed ashore. When the boats were finally able to float, the dorymen would drift down to Lake Mead, hobble back to their Utah warehouse, and rebuild the fleet for the next trip. Then they’d go out and break everything all over again. The learning curve was steep and painful. Gradually, however, Litton and his team began to unlock some of the mysteries of the river’s hydraulics. The key to it all, they eventually realized, lay in the arcane art of reading white water. Along the 277 miles that separate Lee’s Ferry from Lake Mead, the Colorado falls slightly more than one vertical mile, but half of this drop takes place inside roughly 160 discrete pockets of white water whose linear distance, when added together, amounts to less than 10 percent of the canyon’s length. This configuration, which is referred to as a pool-and-drop phenomenon, means that the river is composed of long, languorous stretches of tranquillity punctuated by intervals of unholy chaos. Those pockets of chaos are strewn along the entire length, but they tend to run in clusters. While a handful are located in the upper and lower parts of the canyon, the majority are clumped in an area known as the Upper Granite Gorge. Here, where the cliffs are almost vertical and the Vishnu schist is exposed, the river corridor narrows and the hydraulics can turn exceptionally violent. Within the gorge, the consequences of an accident grow geometrically. One of the things a novice boatman realizes upon meeting white water for the first time is that the waves in a river are not at all like those in the ocean. The most salient difference is that in the ocean the water remains in a fixed position and the waves move in lateral pulses, almost always rhythmically, often predictably, and generally in more or less the same direction. On a river, precisely the opposite set of mechanics unfolds: the water moves downstream, while the primary hydraulic features of a rapid—eddies, whirlpools, and waves of all shapes and sizes—essentially remain fixed. Among many other consequences, this means that while ocean waves tend to be far larger than their riparian counterparts, a stretch of white water on a fast-flowing river can achieve an explosiveness that is rarely encountered on the open sea. Another difference is that the obstacles on a river that must either be avoided or surmounted—rocks, tree limbs, complex bends, and irregular features of the shoreline that jut into the current—are often impossible to discern until one is virtually on top of them. And because the current is continuously hurtling downstream without a break or pause, even small errors are compounded with breathtaking speed by the instant and terrible force that the river can bring to bear on a boat in trouble. The challenge is perhaps best envisioned by trying to imagine being caught in the middle of an avalanche as it roars down the side of a mountain. Among the many problematic features lurking within the interior of a rapid, perhaps the most treacherous is known as a hydraulic jump, or, in river runner’s parlance, a keeper hole. This is a crater that forms on the surface of the river as water races across the top of a submerged ledge or boulder. Large keeper holes can achieve formidable dimensions—sometimes up to thirty feet deep and fifteen feet wide—and they are often paired with an enormous stationary wave, or “haystack,” on their downstream edge that breaks back upon itself, and is thus constantly flushing anything buoyant—a raft, a wooden oar, a person wearing a life jacket—back into the hole in an endlessly recirculating swirl. It is a difficult thing to imagine without having seen it firsthand, but perhaps the most lucid expositor of this hydrodynamic phenomenon is the science writer David Quammen, who is also an expert kayaker. As Quammen explains it, a keeper hole is essentially “a whirlpool laid on its side with its axis of rotation perpendicular to the main current—a cylinder of moving water that rotates continuously, like one of those giant spinning brushes at an automatic car wash.” For a rough approximation of how it feels to become entrapped in one, Quammen invites his readers to take a pass through the car wash while riding a bicycle.I Although keeper holes often form the deadliest part of a rapid, a host of other features must also be navigated, including boils, laterals, cauldrons, eddy fences, rooster tails, and always, of course, boulders—some exposed but many others, often the deadliest, concealed just beneath the surface. All the river-running advice in the world cannot adequately prepare a person for his first encounter with truly gigantic white water: the ferocity of the noise and turbulence, the mosaic of whorls, the fugues of competing currents that follow separate and unpredictable paths—colliding, snapping like the tail end of a whip, or diving straight to the bottom of the river, where they can scour out holes up to ninety feet deep inside the Grand Canyon. To a casual observer, the combined picture is one of total insanity, a raging mess of tangled lines, studded with rocks and drenched with spray that flies in every direction. Each rapid, however, possesses an architecture of its own, and a skilled boatman is often able to scan and trace the layout as clearly as an electrician can interpret a circuit drawing—a talent that was captured best, perhaps, by Mark Twain, who was a skilled riverboat pilot long before he became a famous writer. “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice,” Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi. “And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.” For Twain, a river was a series of fluid riddles that could be unlocked and solved. And this was the task to which Litton and his crew would have to apply themselves if they were to have any hope of threading through the chain-linked sequence of maelstroms at the bottom of the canyon. By the 1990s, all of the monster rapids had been exhaustively surveyed, mapped, and ranked according to a rather complicated scale, unique to the Grand Canyon, composed of Arabic numerals ranging from 1 to 10 and spread across four different levels of water with pluses and minuses to connote gradations. In the early days, however, the maps were crude and the rankings had not yet been refined. But everybody agreed that roughly thirty rapids were more than capable of smashing your boat, ending your career, or killing you. Badger, Soap Creek, House Rock, Unkar, and Dubendorff could all get you into serious trouble at low water. A couple of the Roaring Twenties, a series of ten back-to-back rapids between Mile 20 and Mile 29, could be especially nasty at high water (although one or two of them turned ugly at low water too). The same was true of another chain farther downstream, whose links were named after semiprecious stones—Agate, Sapphire, Turquoise, Ruby, Emerald, and Serpentine—and were thus collectively referred to as the Jewels. Grapevine, Zoroaster, Specter, and Granite Park were mostly benign, but each concealed a feature or two—a rock, a standing wave, a reversal—that could easily knock you into next week. A bright handful, such as Sockdolager, Hermit, and Upset, were mostly pure fun, but they would flip you in a second if you failed to maintain your angle. Hance, Granite, and Horn Creek were complex and mercurial, while others—almost always Bedrock and invariably Lava Falls—were just plain vicious. Beyond the rapids themselves, the river also concealed a host of other obstacles, wicked spots whose names offered a sufficiently graphic warning of what they would do to you if you let them. The Fangs. Helicopter Eddy. The Green Guillotine. Forever Eddy. The Devil’s Spittoon. No two of these challenges were alike, and when Litton’s crew came to realize that the linchpin of good boatmanship lay in fluency at reading water, they all became devoted scholars of current. The bulk of these studies took place when they anchored their boats at the top of a nasty stretch of the river, climbed to a vantage on the cliffs that afforded a comprehensive view, and sat down on the rocks to dissect the rapid with their eyeballs. At irregular intervals, one of them would stand up, pad back to their anchorage point, gather up an armload of driftwood, and start tossing it into the current. As the sticks hurtled downstream, the veil that concealed the matrix of white water was pulled back and the crew was able to take apart the features piece by piece, mapping them out in their minds. This they would do for hours, watching and waiting as each of them framed a plan. Then they would select another vantage that offered a slightly different angle and go through the whole exercise all over again. Finally, they would talk things over exhaustively, and when the talking was over, silence would set in as each boatman retreated into private space to memorize his run, codifying and rehearsing the sequence of moves he would make so that he would have something to hang on to when the chaos hit. When each man was satisfied, it was time to return to the boats and give the theories a try. So they proceeded in this staccato fashion. Running, stopping to scout, then running a mile, or maybe ten, and stopping for another scout. Day after day, week after week, until they had floated through the Grand Wash Cliffs and arrived at Pierce Ferry, their takeout point on the eastern end of Lake Mead. Then they pulled the dories from the water, hauled them back to Hurricane for repairs, and made the long drive up to Lee’s Ferry to greet another group of clients and start the same journey all over again. Down the long length of the summer, past the equinox and deep into autumn, they wove their way through the labyrinth, pausing only for a hiatus in winter before once again rejoining the flow of the Colorado when the snows started to melt the following spring. In tracing this route, they formed a community unlike any other, a brotherhood of boatmen bound by their love of the canyon, their infatuation with the dories, and above all, the witchery of white water. And somewhere in the midst of this circuit, the river came to lose the bilateral dimensions of a linear highway and was instead transformed into something that more closely resembled an enchanted circle, an endless loop—not unlike the hydraulic jumps whose secrets they strove to unlock—that revolved back upon itself in a continuous swirl of wonder and madness. To a doryman who applied himself to learning to read white water in this manner, each rapid, from the smallest riffle to the biggest hellbender, gradually came to develop a face, a personality, and a range of moods—and the key to unlocking those rapids’ riddles lay in finding one’s line. On any given day, for any given set of conditions, which could vary in accordance with the speed and level of the water, the strength and direction of the wind, the angle of the light, and a host of subtler variables, a path almost always led through the chaos, a ribbon of relatively smooth downstream current that would enable you to thread the gauntlet. Often, this line was extremely narrow, no more than a couple of feet. But if you could tease out its arc and then assemble the proper sequence of moves—skirting a rock here, kissing an eddy there—it was sometimes possible to skate through the entire mess as cleanly as a Cooper’s hawk cleaves the leafy canopy of a forest. It required a high degree of precision to pull that off consistently, however. And the challenge was further exacerbated in an unsettling but also thrilling way because the medium was fluid, always in flux, and therefore the line did not hold. Some days it would shift, occasionally it would dead-end, and every now and then the damn thing would disappear altogether. This meant that one’s command of white water was slippery and elusive, could come and go without warning. Sometimes the river itself changed: a rapid that seemed benign and forgiving on one trip would turn dark and ugly a month later. Other times, the shift took place inside one’s head. It was not unusual to nail a difficult stretch of white water for a season or two, snapping off one flawless run after another, and then, for some unfathomable reason, find that you had lost your mastery. Then you would be consigned to flipping repeatedly or smashing against the rocks time and again until things shifted back into place and your mojo returned. One insight the dorymen drew from this was that only a frog’s hair of difference separated a successful run from a complete cock-up, a space that was defined by a few inches of current or a quarter stroke of an oar. Which side of that gap you were on depended heavily on your skills and your competency, and the connection you had cultivated with your boat and the river. But it depended even more on something you had absolutely no control over. When it came to rapids and wooden dories, an awful lot of luck was involved. The river was a beast that could be neither controlled nor tamed, only run with. And to be allowed to run with the beast, you had to accept and embrace and ultimately find a way of celebrating its inscrutable, ungovernable, glorious wildness. That didn’t, however, dissuade the dorymen from trying to figure out the key to the code. Their days and weeks unfolded, good or bad, in accordance with their skill at discerning those ephemeral lines, and so they discussed them endlessly. Hunched over their coffee in the mornings, gathered around the kitchen at night after the passengers had gone to bed, they compared notes, traded theories, attended to one another’s sermons. They choreographed wavy pieces of performance art in the air with their hands, and they scratched out elaborate diagrams in the wet sand with the tips of their fingers. Many of them also kept careful notes, filling up their maps and logbooks with checklists, reminders, admonitions, and curses. Immersed within the canyon’s hidden republic of white water, they struggled so obsessively to unravel its mysteries that it sometimes seemed as if nothing else mattered. At night, the rapids flowed through their dreams. As their knowledge deepened, growing more detailed and intimate with each passing season, their verbal shorthand changed until they found themselves speaking a kind of secret language, all but unknowable to the passengers and the rookies, whose vocabulary was peppered with expressions that made no sense to people who could see only chaos when they gazed into the current. The dorymen knew that on the left side of Hance was a partially submerged sleeper, a boulder they called Whale Rock, which acted as a kind of hydraulic magnet, almost as if it had its own tractor beam that would pull you onto it and leave you marooned in the middle of the river. They reminded one another that Hermit boasted twelve separate haystacks, the biggest and loveliest of which was the sixth—but you had to hit it “dead-nuts square” or it would flip you end over end. They talked about how the right side of Sockdolager featured a pair of staggered crunchers that seemed impossible to split, but if you punched the first wave slightly off-center with the right side of your bow, its crest would knock you to the right and set you up perfectly for the second. At Upset, they understood that the key to skirting the giant hog trough at the bottom was to get on the inside ridge of the left lateral, then tell yourself that, even though it seemed as if the hand of God Himself was about to spear you into the left wall, the invisible ribbon of current would whisk you straight through the maelstrom and deliver you—soaked, safe, and happy—into the tail waves. Because their lives spun around an axis of entropy, rituals and superstitions arose, and with these things came something that bordered on mysticism. They called the wind Mr. W because they believed that naming him out loud would call him down to play havoc with their runs. They carried special charms—heart-shaped stones, girlfriends’ bracelets, clay amulets baked in midnight campfires—and rubbed their surfaces for good luck. They reminded one another constantly that each encounter carried the potential for both disaster and ecstasy. Some rapids could hurt you, some could drown you, and some could render you impotent with rage. There were rapids rich in gradation and texture, and rapids that were existentially wretched in the simplicity of their violence. There were rapids that you feared and rapids that you hated and rapids that you would be a fool to take for granted, even under the most benign conditions imaginable. But on those days of wonder, when the tumblers in the lock were oiled and turning flawlessly, any one of those rapids could also transport you into a dimension of pure, unadulterated joy that had no analogue in any other part of your life. The taste of that joy was absolutely intoxicating, a kind of drug, and perhaps the most potent part of the charge lay in the irrevocability of the moment when you untied your boat, and you and your partners peeled out into the current above a rapid in a tight and graceful little arc like a formation of miniature fighter jets. For a minute or two, you would find yourself drifting on a flat and glassy cushion of serenity as the current slowly gathered its speed and heft beneath the bottom of your boat and you drifted toward this thing that waited, invisible, just beyond the horizon. It was silent during those minutes, the only sounds being the creak of your oars in their locks and the dipping of the blades as you made a few microadjustments in the hope of putting your hull squarely on the one tiny patch of current that would insert you through the keyhole in the cosmos. Then in the final seconds, you would start to hear the dull, thunderous roar, and you could see the little fistfuls of spray being flung high into the air. This, perhaps, was the most riveting moment of all, because by now all of your decisions had been made—you had done your homework and sought a point of balance between instinct and analysis, listening to the data flowing from both your brain and your gut, and now you were well and truly committed. This thing you were running down had no brakes, no rewind, no possibility of a do-over. You would ride the surge of your adrenaline and surf the watery crescendo that was about to explode before you, and you would accept the consequences, good or bad, along with whatever gifts or punishments the river was prepared to dish out. There were lessons there, insights a man could put in his pocket and take out later, long after he was out of the canyon, tiny compass points to steer by during those seasons when the river that was your life turned turbulent and ugly. You could learn things about yourself that you would never learn in civil society. And if you were lucky, you might navigate to a place that would enable you to glimpse, however obliquely, a bit of who you truly were. There was nothing else quite like it, the way this river could braid terror and rapture so tightly together. And although it wasn’t always possible for Litton’s crew to fear and love the rapids in the same instant, sometimes those feelings toggled back and forth with such fury that they generated a charge not unlike the voltaic current that was running through the power cables at the base of the Glen Canyon Dam. Once you had felt that energy coursing through your synapses, you simply had to return to it again and again, chasing the elusive electric butterfly into the vortex. In this way, white water became the dorymen’s elixir and their narcotic. Because they literally lived on the river—riding its back by day, bobbing asleep in their boats upon the eddies at night—they became part of the water itself. It ran down their veins and bored into the chambers of their heart. It framed their world, it greased their engines, it shaped the subtext of the dialogue they conducted with themselves, with one another, with the gods they worshipped. And out of all of this emerged a connection that bound the dorymen to the water, the rocks, and the boats they rowed more intimately than any of the generations of river runners that had preceded them. As far as they were concerned, anyone in a motor rig or a rubber raft had only run his or her fingers along the surface of those truths. Even John Wesley Powell himself, they were half convinced, had barely touched the magic. The other companies didn’t necessarily see it this way. Massive rubber rafts had their own quirks and challenges, and when you threw motors into the mix—their habit of pulling tricks such as breaking down in the middle of a rapid—things could become complicated indeed. All of which meant that rival outfitters often took a rather dim view of the dories—not necessarily of the boats, which they coveted, but of the boatmen and what they thought of themselves. To many of these outfitters, Litton and his crew seemed little more than a gang of snooty purists who subscribed to the delusion that they were better than everybody else, an impression that was convincingly underscored by Litton’s insistence on referring to the rubber rafts as “baloney boats” and his penchant for warning his passengers that, in addition to being ugly, the boats were dirty and unsafe. “God, no!” he would declare whenever one of his clients asked if he had ever ridden on a motor rig. “Lord knows what can happen aboard those contraptions—not to mention the diseases you’re liable to contract.” Unfortunately, this gave rise to some intense rancor and ill will, which in turn created lasting divisions within the guiding community, pushing the river-running industry in the direction of a loose confederacy of tribes whose members considered everyone else a bunch of knuckleheads who had no business being on the river. However, on one thing everyone was united. During this period, a remarkable geomorphic event took place deep inside the canyon that changed the face of the river. They all agreed that it was more or less the biggest thing that had happened to the bottom of the canyon in the 426 years since C?rdenas had stumbled onto the place. Among other consequences, it created, in the space of a single winter’s night, the meanest and ugliest stretch of white water that anyone had ever seen. I. The interior of a hydraulic jump within a major rapid inside the Grand Canyon is subjected to some shocking forces, and the ordeal of being trapped in one of these underwater tornadoes is called “getting maytagged.” As a further illustration of how dangerous they can be, consider that sometimes the only option for a person trapped inside a keeper hole is to dive toward the bottom of the river in the hope of becoming caught in the downstream current, thereby funneling under the breaking wave.