Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  So, on entering the obstacle course that is a rapid, Powell had no choice but to run blind and at full speed. The result was “calamitous,” in Dimock’s judgment, but it is hard to blame Powell. Galloway’s seemingly obvious ideas had never occurred to any of the mountain men who wandered the West before Powell, and for two decades after Powell, his successors missed them as well. It was not until Galloway made a successful trip through the Grand Canyon in 1909, and two brothers named Ellsworth and Emory Kolb took up his technique for a Grand Canyon trip of their own in 1911, that the “facing your danger” technique finally grew common.

  On June 18, 1869, with the river flowing smooth and fast, it was easy to dismiss thoughts of danger. The expedition had reached the junction of the Green River and the Yampa (sometimes called the Bear), which flowed into the Green from the east. This was a checkpoint, if not quite a milestone. In his trip West in 1868, Powell and his guides had explored some stretches of the canyon cut by the Yampa. To have reached almost-familiar territory seemed a good omen. The cliffs were lower here, too, rising only some four hundred feet instead of two thousand or more. As the walls fell, the men’s spirits rose. Powell decided that the low walls signified the start of a new canyon and, more important, the end of the much-feared Lodore.

  All the signs seemed good. After the rigors of the previous ten days, the men needed a break from their labors, and this seemed an ideal spot. They camped on a bit of land between the two rivers and settled in happily. “Opposite the mouth of Bear River there is the prettiest wall I have ever seen,” Sumner wrote. “It is about three miles long and five hundred feet high, composed of white sandstone, perpendicular and smooth, as if built by man.” After a series of highly satisfactory experiments involving whoops and shouts, the men named it Echo Rock. (It is known today as Steamboat Rock because of a vague resemblance to a steamship run aground in the desert.)

  Most of the crew were busy fishing, Bradley chief among them. The fish were temptingly big, so large and lively that time and again they broke free just as Bradley brought them to the surface. (“Bradley was much provoked,” Sumner noted happily.) When the count reached four lost hooks and three broken lines, Bradley settled down to do battle in earnest. By twisting four lines into one and fashioning a two-inch-long hook, he finally hauled in a ten-pounder and retired satisfied.

  With the rigors of Lodore behind them, the men were moved to valedictory thoughts. Powell seemed to waver back and forth between grim memories of hardships endured and strained attempts to convince himself that the recent ordeal had actually been a splendid jaunt. “This has been a chapter of disasters and toils,” he wrote, “notwithstanding which the cañon of Lodore was not devoid of scenic interest, even beyond the power of pen to tell. The roar of its waters was heard unceasingly from the hour we entered it until we landed here. No quiet in all that time. But its walls and cliffs, its peaks and crags, its amphitheaters and alcoves, tell a story of beauty and grandeur that I hear yet—and shall hear.”

  Oramel Howland betrayed no such mixed emotions. Safe on shore for the time being, this survivor of Disaster Falls professed a yearning for more rapids. “A calm, smooth stream, running only at the rate of five or six miles per hour, is a horror we all detest . . . ,” he wrote. “Danger is our life, it seems now, almost. As soon as the surface of the river looks smooth all is listlessness or grumbling at the sluggish current . . . But just let a white foam show itself ahead and . . . jokes generate faster and thicker than mosquitoes from a bog, and everything is as merry as a marriage bell.”

  Bradley knew better than to provoke the river gods with blasphemous wishes for rough water. The Yampa looked to be about 120 yards wide and 10 feet deep, virtually as big as the Green, and Bradley declared hopefully that this indicated good times to come. “I predict that the river will improve from this point,” he wrote, “for the more water there is the wider channel it will make for itself and the less liability will there be of its falling in and blocking up clear across.”

  In any case, whatever lay ahead was certain to be an improvement on Lodore. That canyon, Bradley observed, had been “the worst by far, and I predict the worst we shall ever meet.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE FIRST MILESTONE

  They celebrated their escape from Lodore with a happy, lazy interlude of a day or two in camp. Lazy, at least, in comparison with what they had just accomplished. The weather was good and spirits were high. Powell, Bradley, and Oramel Howland explored a short way up the Yampa. The cliffs were light gray sandstone, in some places forming walls about a thousand feet high and in others jagged, sloping terraces that extended for a mile or more. The three men fought their way upstream against the current, making only four or five miles’ progress in several hours of hard work. (“When we have rowed until we are quite tired,” Powell wrote, as if he had been hard at it, “we stop.”) The return trip, with the current this time, took only twenty minutes.

  Everyone else had been content to stay in camp, fishing or snoozing. The following day, a Sunday, was even quieter. The most taxing project the men took on was scrawling their names on Echo Rock. Bradley spent part of the day trying to salvage a photo album he had brought with him. He had taken great pains to keep it dry, but now he saw that water had spoiled most of the pictures. “Mother has but one eye while all that is left of Aunt Marsh is just the top of her head,” he lamented. “Eddie has his chin untouched while Henry loses nearly all his face . . . One of Lucie’s lost a nose but luckily it was the poorest one and I have a good one left.”

  Powell, as always, had been more restless than anyone else. He spent the day climbing to the top of the canyon to see what he could see. On an exceptionally clear day, he could make out the Sweetwater and Wind River Mountains 100 miles to the north, the Wasatch and Uintas to the northwest, and the Rockies more than 150 miles to the east. Far below him he could see the river gleaming.

  The next day was business as usual. The men launched the boats at seven in the morning and found themselves back in the hard, red sandstone they feared. The river cut through “a narrow, dangerous canyon full of whirlpools,” Sumner noted, “through which it is very hard to keep a boat from being driven on the rock.” They had already weathered countless hazards, but this new canyon would be the worst place yet for a smashup. “If a boat should be wrecked in it,” Sumner went on, “her crew would have a rather slim chance to get out, as the walls are perpendicular on both sides and from 50 to 500 feet high.”

  Powell, who usually focused his descriptive energies on rapturous accounts of the scenery, echoed Sumner’s fears. “The walls are high and vertical; the canyon is narrow; and the river fills the whole space below,” he wrote, “so that there is no landing-place at the foot of the cliff.” This was new, and it wasn’t good. From the start, Powell’s plan had been to run those rapids that seemed doable and to portage or line those that seemed too dangerous to run. But now the river had revealed a new trick. Portaging and lining were only possible if there was some kind of beach or rocky shore along the river’s edge. With a river enclosed between sheer walls, plan B was suddenly irrelevant.

  Since their first few days on the river, Powell and his men had spent most of their time hemmed in by towering cliffs. But even though in most places it would have been difficult to escape over the walls, there was at least a bit of leeway within the canyons—there had always been the possibility of heading to shore to detour around a rapid.

  Until now. All along, they had been in the predicament of mice trapped in an endless hallway. Even worse, it was a hallway with a channel of water rushing down the middle. But it had always been possible to sneak to safety by moving away from the water. Now, at least temporarily, that option had been snatched away. Now the hallway was flooded wall to wall.

  They were at the river’s mercy, and the river was not feeling merciful. The Yampa had added its flow to the Green, making for far more water than the expedition had yet seen. Bradley’s guess that this would prove good news
was not panning out. “All this volume of water,” Powell wrote worriedly, “confined, as it is, in a narrow channel, and rushing with great velocity, is set eddying and spinning in whirlpools by projecting rocks and short curves.”

  The Balkans, someone once observed, are an example of what happens when too much history is squeezed into too small a space. Here the Green taught an analogous lesson. “The cañon is much narrower than any we have seen,” Powell wrote. “With difficulty we manage our boats. They spin about from side to side, and we know not where we are going, and find it impossible to keep them headed down the stream.”

  That made for “great alarm,” Powell conceded, but soon enough the mood lifted. The boats were as out of control as twigs in a stream, but they were still afloat and intact. Perhaps the river was merely boisterous and rowdy rather than bad-tempered. “It is the merry mood of the river to dance through this deep, dark gorge,” Powell wrote, “and right gaily do we join in the sport.” But then, almost without warning, the emotional weather changed again. “Soon our revel is interrupted by a cataract; its roaring command is heeded by all our power at the oars, and we pull against the whirling current.”

  The Emma Dean pulled to the cliff that walled in the river on the right, and Sumner and Dunn rowed hard against the current to try to hold their position along the rock wall. Fifty feet downstream, a rapid roared. Powell signaled the freight boats to pull over where they could. The Kitty Clyde’s Sister ducked into an alcove along the right-hand wall and sat in an eddy, a bit upstream of Powell. Caught by herself, the Maid of the Cañon drew near the cliff on the opposite side of the river from the other two boats and fought to hold her position. Like soldiers trying to hide from rooftop snipers, the men clung grimly to the walls.

  But they could not hide forever, and from where they stood, they had no means of scouting ahead. Powell spotted a horizontal crevice in the rock face, about ten feet above the water and a dozen or so feet downstream from the Emma Dean. They drew their way cautiously toward the crack in the rock. One of the men scrambled up to it, the others flung him a rope, and he tied up the boat. Powell climbed to the crevice, too, and found that there was room to crawl upstream. That was the wrong direction, away from the rapid, but in a short distance the crevice opened up, and Powell found he could pick his way higher up the cliff face. In fifty feet, he came to a rock shelf, a kind of thin, natural catwalk. Then it was a matter of following the shelf back downstream to a position even with the rapid. From there, Powell clambered down a pile of rocks to river level.

  The Maid still had to cross the river, to join the Emma Dean along the right-hand cliff. She made it. The Sister, in the meantime, was on the correct side of the river but still hidden in her alcove, out of sight and out of hearing, the farthest away from the rapid of the three boats. Powell, now on foot at the rapid, spotted yet another crevice. This one stretched in the direction of the Sister. Powell crawled along the crevice and, when he had come as close to the Sister as he could, yelled with all his might. Eventually someone made out his voice above the water’s noise. Powell shouted orders to the Sister’s crew to move downstream to join the other two boats. Afraid to commit to the river, the Sister crept along the cliff face, the men grabbing desperately at every crevice and knob they spied. Finally, the three boats were together a few yards above the rapid. “Now, by passing a line up on the shelf, the boats can be let down to the broken rocks below,” Powell wrote. “This we do, and, making a short portage, our troubles here are over.”

  The “troubles” had taken up three or four hours, but no one made much of them. In their journals that evening, Bradley and Sumner each devoted more space to the afternoon’s fishing. By this time, a bad time in the boats hardly counted as news; a good meal was a front-page story. Oramel Howland was the hero of the day. He had set aside his mapmaking duties “and soon had a score of large trout,” Sumner noted happily, “the first we have been able to catch so far.” When Sumner recorded the great event in his journal, he paid tribute to his friend by referring to him not simply by name but as “Mr. Howland.”

  The good fortune continued into the next day, June 22. It began in fine fashion with a breakfast of fried trout followed by what Sumner, in the Emma Dean, called “a splendid run of six miles through a continuous rapid.” For the freight boats, the run was not quite as splendid as all that. “One of the boats in trying to make a landing could not be held when she touched,” Oramel Howland recalled, and had instead spun down the river through the next rapid, out of control and dragging 120 feet of line from the bow. Even so, everyone muddled through.

  Soon after, lured by the sight of sheep and deer tracks on a sandy beach at the foot of a rapid, the men pulled to shore. The hunters set out optimistically, but, here at least, life was as frustrating as always. “They hunted with their usual success,” Bradley grumbled. (In camp later that day, Bradley would set out in search of easier prey. He returned proudly bearing four quarts of currants.)

  By one o’clock, the men had finished lunch and returned to the river. If the hunting had left anyone out of sorts, the bad moods vanished quickly. Powell was positively exuberant. “Into the middle of the stream we row, and down the rapid river we glide, only making strokes enough with the oars to guide the boat. What a headlong ride it is! Shooting past rocks and islands! I am soon filled with exhilaration only experienced before in riding a fleet horse over the outstretched prairie. One, two, three, four miles we go, rearing and plunging with the waves.”

  Powell was, admittedly, a man who could be thrown into ecstasies by a fossil or a fern. The previous day, describing a section of river that had threatened to drown him, he had written delightedly that “the waters waltz their way through the cañon, making their own rippling, rushing, roaring music.” On this glorious day, however, everyone shared his enthusiasm. Sumner, ordinarily a man of few (and sardonic) words, sounded fully as romantic as his leader. The expedition was, he wrote excitedly but not quite accurately, “dancing over . . . waves that had never before been disturbed by any keel.”

  They ran, Sumner wrote, in “splendid style.” Occasionally their style proved not quite a match for the river’s power, but the men continued undaunted. Toward the end of one long rapid, for example, Sumner described “a place about a hundred yards long that had a dozen waves in it fully ten feet high.” There was no place to land, and so Sumner and Powell and Dunn rode through, bucking and leaping and trying their best to hit the waves straight on, the boat filling nearly full of water but the men finally emerging safe and gleeful, though “looking like drowned rats.”

  As the boats sped along, the canyon walls grew gradually lower until, at about four o’clock, the men suddenly emerged into what Sumner described as “a splendid park.” This was the third time that the dependably caustic Sumner had used the word “splendid” in a single journal entry, and even Bradley was only slightly more subdued. “We came out into an exceedingly beautiful valley full of islands covered with grass and cottonwood,” he wrote. “After passing so many days in the dark cañons where there is little but bare rocks we feel very much pleased.”

  Since passing through the Gates of Lodore, Powell and his men had been traveling through territory that, though it remains nearly empty to this day, is now familiar to many tourists. This early part of the route cut across the vast area that stretches across northwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah and is now known as Dinosaur National Monument. Slightly farther south, Powell would follow the Green through what is today Canyonlands National Park. With their cliffs and buttes and endless erosion-carved vistas, these are the sort of landscapes that inspire modern Americans to say they love the desert. And, indeed, it is easy to love, especially from inside an air-conditioned car or from a lounge chair on a patio with a margarita in hand, salt glistening on the rim, and an endless water supply available a few steps away at the turning of a faucet.

  But Powell and his crew, whose notions of landscape had taken form in the rolling fields of Wisconsin
and Illinois, the dappled forests of Vermont and Massachusetts, or the snowy peaks of the Rockies, found little to admire. Surfeited with rock, they reveled in the simple pleasures of flopping down on soft grass and stretching out to rest in the shade of a tree. What desert connoisseurs like Edward Abbey would later see as starkly beautiful struck these men as barren and lifeless. Land, it went without saying, should be useful—it should be fertile, or rich in timber or minerals, or, at the very least, suitable for grazing. To heap superlatives on these raw stones would be to prefer a skeleton to a lush nude.

  Nature herself, Powell implied, seemed to have little use for the desert. The clifftop plateaus high above the river were home to majestic elk and noble eagles, but the desert below was a kind of nightmare zoo where “rattlesnakes crawl, lizards glide over the rocks, tarantulas stagger about, and red ants build their play house mountains.” Occasionally a scrawny rabbit might flit by, chased by a mangy wolf, “but the desert has no bird of sweet song, and no beast of noble mien.”

  “The whole country is utterly worthless to anybody for any purpose whatever,” Sumner concluded flatly, “unless it should be the artist in search of wildly grand scenery, or the geologist, as there is a great open book for him all the way.”