Down the Great Unknown (27 page)

Powell's delight and astonishment at the sheer scale of the West's natural wonders echo that of his contemporary Melville, celebrating the grandeur of whales. Each man felt that the glories of his subject could scarcely be compressed to human scale. “Give me a condor's quill!” Melville cried. “Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!” and Powell was no less fervent.

Bradley, characteristically, was harder to enthrall. “The scenery from the top,” he wrote, “is the same old picture of wild desolation we have seen for the last hundred miles.”

The difference in tone reflected a genuine difference in style between Powell, a romantic who saw the world as if it were a Thomas Moran landscape, and Bradley, the prototype of the down-to-earth, pomposity-piercing common man. The difference in temperament was magnified by the contrasting ways in which the two men composed their journals. Bradley, who had next to no impulse to rhapsodize in the first place, jotted down his notes at the end of long, draining days.
Powell, inclined by nature
to operatic excess, wrote at his leisure years later, with all the time in the world to buff and hone his memories.

As practical as he was in many ways, Powell had more than a little of a Don Quixote in him. Embarked on the quest of a lifetime, he found himself endlessly dazzled by sights of almost supernatural splendor. Bradley took the Sancho Panza role, seeing scrawny chickens and angry publicans where Powell marveled at giants and castles and princesses.

Finally, on July 21, the repairs and the measurements were complete, and the expedition set off downstream once more. Powell now seemed as eager as the men to be heading into the unknown. “We start this morning on the Colorado,” he wrote excitedly, but almost at once the new river showed that they had been right to fear it. “Rapids commenced about two miles from the junction and have now become continuous,” Bradley wrote. “We can't run them or rather we don't run many of them, on account of our rations. We are afraid they will spoil and if they do we are in a bad fix.”

Afraid to run the rapids, the men had to line or portage them. It was even crueler work than usual. “Two very hard portages are made during the forenoon,” Powell wrote. As lavish as he was with the likes of “grand” and “superb,” Powell was just as stingy with “hard” and “difficult.” But to unload the boats and carry hundreds of pounds of supplies along a rocky trail in 100-degree heat, and then to stagger along under the weight of three waterlogged wooden rowboats besides, was enough to sap the spirit of the strongest man. To know that the reward for doing it once was to repeat the entire process around the next bend was nearly unbearable.

In a crushing day, the expedition advanced a total of eight and a half miles. The men lined several rapids and portaged four. In one of the few rapids they
had
tried to run, the
Emma Dean
had been swamped yet again. “We are thrown into the river, we cling to her, and in the first quiet water below she is righted and bailed out,” Powell wrote, “but three oars are lost in this mishap.” The two other boats, having witnessed the
Emma Dean
's struggle, pulled ashore upstream of the rapid, but it took them all afternoon to portage it. “Have made two portages within 100 yds. above,” an exhausted Bradley wrote at day's end, “and there is another waiting not a hundred yds. below.”

Even when the men had dragged themselves ashore at the end of the day, their labors were not quite done. The camp they had found was so boulder-strewn there was scarcely room to lie down. The remedy was to dig out the sand that had collected near the biggest boulders and carry it to a spot where it could be patted into a pallet of sorts. Bradley managed a wry summary of this first, discouraging day. “So I conclude the Colorado is not a very easy stream to navigate,” he observed.

Back on the river the next morning, the men quickly came to a huge pile of driftwood along the riverbank. They set to sawing new oars for the
Emma Dean
from some cottonwood logs. The boats already needed repairs again, too, for they had taken a pounding in the previous day's giant waves. They had advanced a paltry mile and a half downstream. Powell and Walter set out to measure the height of the cliffs and, while they were at it, to gather some sap for recaulking the boats from the pine trees growing on the rim.

On the third day on the Colorado, July 23, the Powell expedition found itself outmatched again. “We come at once to difficult rapids and falls, that, in many places, are more abrupt than in any of the cañons through which we have passed,” Powell wrote. Bradley agreed. They had never seen rapids like these, either in number or in severity. “All the way rapid,” Bradley wrote, in a kind of private pidgin. “Much of the last three miles we have let down with ropes.” The canyon seemed to be closing in ominously. “Rapids get worse as we advance and the walls get higher and nearly perpendicular.”

The rapids continued without letup. In a single half-mile stretch, Sumner reckoned, they ran five bad rapids and portaged four. The hard day's labor won them only five and a half miles. “We camp tonight above a succession of furious cataracts,” Bradley wrote. “There are at least five in the next mile around which we shall have to make portages.” Powell's descriptions were, as usual, more lyrical and less focused on the chores to come. “Our way . . . is through a gorge, grand beyond description,” he wrote, with nearly vertical walls rising some sixteen hundred feet above the river. In a section where the river ran swiftly but relatively peaceably, “we seem to be in the depths of the earth, and yet can look down into waters that reflect a bottomless abyss.”

They
were
in the depths of the earth, or near enough. What in ordinary circumstances would be merely a mishap could be deadly here. Twenty years later, one of the first men to try retracing Powell's route made camp in this same difficult canyon. Climbing near camp, he lost his balance and wedged his leg into a tight spot between two boulders. “It was only a few seconds, but it seemed an hour while I was waiting to hear those bones snap,” he wrote later. “In that short time, I realized the whole situation; where we were, the height of the limestone cliffs, the distance to outside assistance, the heat of the summer, and that when those bones gave way—the end. Not a sudden blotting out of existence, that was not what I feared, but with a mangled leg, a sure, but lingering, death in that hot desolate canyon.”

The towering cliffs had caught Bradley's eye, too. He tried to convince himself that they did not mean what they seemed to. “We have as yet found no place in the Colorado where we could not land on either side of the river,” he wrote, “for though the walls come quite close to the water yet there has always been a strip of fallen rocks or a sand bank.” If there was no shore to pull to, there would be no choice but to run the rapid, no matter how dangerous.

Only three days before, the men had clamored to return to the river. Now, camped above a long line of intimidating rapids, sweltering in temperatures that topped 100 degrees during the day and barely fell at night, exhausted by the endless lining and portaging, they were beginning to unravel. The horrific new canyon—they named it Cataract Canyon, to acknowledge its fierce rapids—had spooked everyone.

As it should have. Cataract has long been known as the “graveyard of the Colorado,” the melodramatic name more than justified by dozens of drownings over the years. Approach a professional boatman and ask point-blank if Cataract scares him. (It is a breach of etiquette for an outsider to pose such a question, as it would be for a civilian to pipe up at a VFW lodge, but let us ask regardless.) “Hell, yes!” he will answer at once, and indignantly. “I may be addicted to adrenaline,” the tone implies, “but I'm not
crazy
.”

Two of the earliest and boldest river runners, Ellsworth and Emery Kolb, set out down the Green in September 1911. Like Powell, they left from Green River Station, Wyoming, their destination the Grand Canyon. The Kolb brothers were photographers who would do anything for a picture. They lugged a movie camera along on their river trip and filmed their flips and crashes and their good runs, too. This first-ever white-water documentary made their career; until 1976, when he died at age ninety-five, Emery showed the flickering, black-and-white film four times a day in his studio at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

The brothers nearly added their names to the roster of Cataract Canyon's victims. “We always thought we needed a certain amount of thrills to make life sufficiently interesting for us,” Ellsworth wrote. “In a few hours' time in the central portion of Cataract Canyon, we experienced nearly enough thrills to last us a lifetime. In one or two of the upper canyons we thought we were running rapids. Now we were learning what rapids really were.”

Modern boats (and life jackets) have failed to tame Cataract. A fatal accident in 1997 was more or less typical. The victim was a forty-year-old boater named Melvin Fisher. “Fisher's raft flipped in Little Niagara, . . . dropping seven people into the water,” according to a police blotter–style accident report. “This hole has been the site of several other fatalities. . . . Fisher washed two miles through four more rapids before his party could catch up. He was found blue and pulseless.”

Faced with Cataract Canyon's roiling waters, Powell and his men spent half the afternoon and evening of July 23 in worried conversation about their prospects for surviving the expedition. They carefully examined the barometric readings to see how much their elevation had dropped since the start of the trip and how much farther it still had to fall before they would finally emerge from the canyons. “The conclusion to which the men arrive seems to be about this,” Powell wrote, “—that there are great descents yet to be made, but, if they are distributed in rapids and short falls, as they have been heretofore, we will be able to overcome them.” On the other hand, they might come to “a fall in these cañons which we cannot pass, where the walls rise from the water's edge, so that we cannot land, and where the water is so swift that we cannot return.” What then?

For men whose fate was not in their own hands, such speculation was irresistible but useless. From the start, everyone had understood that the crucial question was whether the river dropped toward sea level in a series of many short rapids or a few Niagaras. Hundreds of miles downstream, in the midst of the worst rapids so far, they were no nearer an answer. All they could do was echo Powell's plaintive query, “How will it be in the future!”

Even when it came to matters of life and death—perhaps
especially
when it came to matters of life and death—the men rejected anything that smacked of earnestness. “They speculate over the serious probabilities in jesting mood,” noted Powell, whose own tendency was to discuss serious matters in a voice best accompanied by cracks of lightning and ominous minor chords. Bradley professed to welcome any challenges the Colorado could muster. “Let it come,” he wrote. “We know that we have got about 2500 ft. to fall yet . . . and if it comes all in the first hundred miles we shan't be dreading rapids afterwards for if it should continue at this rate much more than a hundred miles we should have to go the rest of the way
up hill
which is
not often the case with rivers
.”

Bradley seemed pleased with his joke—the underlined words (here in italics) in his journal served as a kind of elbow to the ribs—but it was only a joke, a convenient way to keep the unthinkable at arm's length. Like the others, Bradley knew there was no choice but to make the best of what had begun to look like a very bad predicament. All they could do was hope that the river would show mercy.

They set out early the next day, fighting the most dangerous rapids they had seen. The rapids were produced by huge, sharp-angled blocks of rock that had broken off the cliffs and fallen into the channel, forcing too much water through too small a space. “Among these rocks,” Powell wrote, “in chutes, whirlpools, and great waves, with rushing breakers and foams, the water finds its way, still tumbling down.” Four times in less than three-quarters of a mile the men found themselves forced to portage. “Had to take everything around by hand and around the second we had to carry our boats over the huge bowlders which is very hard work as two of them are very heavy, being made of oak,” Bradley wrote.

There was plenty of drama to complement the hard work. “
Kitty's Sister
had another narrow escape today,” Sumner wrote. “While crossing between rapids Howland broke an oar in a very bad place and came very near being drawn into a rapid that would smash any boat to pieces.”

In all, they advanced less than a mile and camped above yet another rapid. “They tell me [it] is not so bad as the others but I haven't been to look at it yet,” Bradley wrote. “They don't interest me much unless we can run them. That I like, but portage don't agree with my constitution.” By contrast, the unwaveringly cheerful Andy Hall found even these endless days agreeable. Bradley, as naturally gruff as Hall was sunny, watched his young colleague with admiration and puzzlement. “Andy has been throwing stones across [the river] for amusement tonight,” Bradley remarked. At least, he might have added, Andy was not singing.

Sumner, exhausted though he was, managed to spare a moment to admire the scenery. The canyon walls, he wrote, were “3/4 blue marble, the remainder grey sandstone, lightly touched with red by a thin bed of red shale on the top.” (The colors conjured up, for one modern-day river runner and writer, thoughts of “God gone mad with the Play-Doh.”) A closer look dispelled any dreamy speculation about the beauty of their surroundings. “Driftwood 30 ft. high on the rocks,” Sumner noted. “God help the poor wretch that is caught in the cañon during high water.”

He certainly would have little chance of helping himself. When the Colorado is in flood through Cataract, rapids that ordinarily are distinct merge into white-water marathons. One stretch called Mile Long Rapid ends in a rapid called Capsize that features a giant, boat-flipping hole smack in the middle of the river. Waves can tower twenty feet and can flip even the enormous motor-powered rafts that ride through ordinary rapids as imperturbably as city buses plow through puddles in the street. For oar-powered boats, capsizing is closer to the rule than the exception. In one trip in high water a few years ago, the last boatman in a line of ten watched as eight of his nine predecessors flipped. In some high-water years, the National Park Service stations a motorboat and a paramedic just below the biggest rapids to deal with the inevitable near-drownings.