Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  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.

  On the evening of July 24, 1869, when another man might simply have flung h
imself on the ground in nervous exhaustion, Powell climbed a boulder near the river’s edge and spent an hour gazing at the water in fascination. Watching the waves in the gathering darkness, he was still studying, still categorizing, still enthusiastic, above all, still curious. “The waves are rolling, with crests of foam so white they seem almost to give a light of their own. Near by, a chute of water strikes the foot of a great block of limestone, fifty feet high, and the waters pile up against it, and roll back. Where there are sunken rocks, the water heaps up in mounds, or even in cones. At a point where rocks come very near the surface, the water forms a chute above, strikes, and is shot up ten or fifteen feet, and piles back in gentle curves, as in a fountain.”

  Decades later, when boatmen began to run rapids for sport, they would name the watery formations that Powell had identified and add others to the menagerie. Powell’s crests of foam, for instance, capped tall, pyramid-shaped breaking waves that are now called haystacks. The water he saw piling up against the face of an enormous limestock boulder was a dramatic example of a pillow. The mounds or cones were mini-horizon lines where the river poured over a barely submerged rock and dropped abruptly into a hole. The ten- or fifteen-foot-tall fountain marked a spot where a stretch of particularly fast-moving water collided with a rock, forming what today’s river runners call a rooster tail.

  Powell had not found every entry that would someday have a place in a white-water glossary, but he had made a considerable start. A complete inventory could come later; the key accomplishment was sensing that there was system underlying what appeared to be chaos. A white-water Mendeleyev, Powell shared his Russian contemporary’s yearning to uncover the natural world’s hidden order and pattern. The difference was that Powell conducted his research not at a chemist’s bench but at the bottom of a thousand-foot canyon.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  FLASH FLOOD

  In years to come, many river runners would find themselves staring at the same waves that had commanded Powell’s rapt attention. (“As soon as we had decided on a channel we would lose no time in getting back to our boats and running it,” wrote Emery Kolb, “for we could feel our courage oozing from our finger tips with each second’s delay.”) The rapids in Cataract Canyon are numbered, and Powell had arrived at numbers 21, 22, and 23, the most feared of all. In recognition of their special status, they are also known as Big Drop 1, Big Drop 2, and Big Drop 3. The worst is Big Drop 3; its most harrowing feature, though it is the only path to salvation, is a smooth and skinny raceway that slithers between two enormous holes. Since the 1950s, it has been known as Satan’s Gut.

  On July 25, Powell and his men tried to run Big Drop 1. This was an uncharacteristic decision, and, it immediately became clear, an unwise one. “The Emma Dean is caught in a whirlpool, and set spinning about,” Powell wrote, “and it is with great difficulty we are able to get out of it, with the loss of an oar.” Chastened by the near-crisis, Powell insisted on returning to lining and portaging. For the rest of that long day, the men inched their way downstream. In Powell’s account, there are none of his customary lyrical descriptions or upbeat pronouncements. “We camp on the right bank,” he wrote, “hungry and tired.”

  Forty years would pass before someone managed to run the Big Drops. The run is still intimidating today, especially in high water. When Cataract is in flood, boatmen can lose track of where they are. Unable to identify which rapid they are in, they careen along until they reach the Big Drops, which are unmistakable. No longer lost, they are in deep trouble nonetheless.

  At flows higher than about forty thousand cubic feet a second, stopping between the Big Drops to scout and make plans becomes impossible, and the three rapids merge into one giant, interminable horror called simply Big Drop.

  The first, and easiest, stretch features a series of giant standing waves that, if all goes well, should do no more than fill your boat. Then comes a series of unrunnable holes that must be dodged (in a boat quite likely hobbled by a load of water), and then, if the boat is still right side up, another set of towering waves. The only “choice” is to ride through these waves, but hidden among them is a joker—an “exploding” wave that breaks and crashes at irregular, unpredictable intervals. When this fickle beast seizes on a boat with the bad fortune to venture near at feeding time, the boat capsizes, regardless of its size. The boatman, in the meantime, has yet another task. At the same time as he is fighting through these waves, he must maneuver his way to the right, to avoid an enormous “pourover” hole that lies just beyond them.

  The writer and boatman Pam Houston wrote a prize-winning short story that deals with running Cataract’s rapids in flood, among other things. The white-water passages, Houston says, are not fiction at all but an exact depiction of a near-catastrophic trip of her own. Houston and her passenger made it through the towering waves of Big Drop 1 uneventfully and almost dry (unlike Powell). The trouble began at Big Drop 2, which has as its central feature a gigantic boulder that forms a pourover called Little Niagara.* “I was worried about a funny little wave at the top of 2 on the right-hand side,” Houston wrote, “a little curler that wouldn’t be big enough to flood my boat but might turn it sideways, and I needed to hit every wave that came after it head on.”

  She decided to miss the wave by scooting a bit to the right, wondered if she had overcompensated, and realized in one stomach-turning moment that

  we were too far right, way too far right, and we were about to go straight down over the seven-story rock. We would fall through the air off the face of that rock, land at the bottom of a seven-story waterfall, where there would be nothing but rocks and tree limbs and sixty-some thousand feet per second of pounding white water which would shake us and crush us and hold us under until we drowned.

  I don’t know what I said to Thea [her passenger] in that moment, as I made one last desperate effort, one hard long pull to the left. I don’t know if it was Oh shit or Did you see that or just my usual Hang on or if there was, in that moment between us, only a silent stony awe.

  And as we went over the edge of the seven-story boulder down, down, into the snarling white hole, not only wide and deep and boat-stopping but corkscrew-shaped besides, time slowed down to another version of itself, started moving like rough-cut slow motion, one frame at a time in measured stops and starts. And of all the stops and starts I remember, all the frozen frames I will see in my head for as long as I live, as the boat fell through space, as it hit the corkscrew wave, as its nose began to rise again, the one I remember most clearly is this:

  My hands are still on the oars and the water that has been so brown for days is suddenly as white as lightning. It is white, and it is alive and it is moving toward me from both sides, coming at me like two jagged white walls with only me in between them, and Thea is airborne, is sailing over my head, like a prayer.

  Then everything went dark, and there was nothing around me but water and I was breathing it in, helpless to fight it as it wrapped itself around me and tossed me so hard I thought I would break before I drowned. Every third moment my foot or arm would catch a piece of Thea below me, or was it above me, somewhere beside me doing her own watery dance.

  In 1969, Gaylord Staveley, a professional boatman with more than a dozen years’ experience on the Colorado, decided to celebrate the centennial of Powell’s 1869 expedition by retracing his journey (using modern river-running techniques and lighter, more maneuverable boats). Cataract Canyon provided the expedition’s first real danger. Staveley’s party made it safely by Big Drop 1, where Powell had run into a whirlpool, and by Big Drop 2, where Houston had plunged over a colossal boulder. Staveley scouted Big Drop 3 from shore while the others in his group ate breakfast. He returned without an appetite.

  The rapid was formed by a kind of natural dam made “not of smooth concrete but of cruel, mighty rocks,” Staveley wrote. “The river above was nearly brought to a standstill by their close-set, steeply coursed arrangement from bank to bank. Then, when it finally pitched over
the edge, the waiting rocks instantly tore it to shreds.” Ellsworth Kolb, the turn-of-the-century photographer and river runner, had blanched at the same sight. Worst of all, Kolb wrote, were the “jagged rocks, like the bared fangs of some dream-monster.”

  Satan’s Gut, gleaming and glossy as a scar, marked a boat-wide course between two “bottomless, thrashing abysses.” Staveley and his fellow boatmen stood above the rapid, trying to commit its features to memory. One man methodically threw pieces of driftwood into the maelstrom, one after the other and at various distances from shore, to see what became of them. Most swept over the edge and disappeared from sight. Only those pieces that went straight down Satan’s Gut reappeared downstream. The visual cue to watch for, the boatmen decided, was a particular wave, about three feet long and six inches high, capped with white foam. The left side of that wave marked the entrance to Satan’s Gut. Staveley took the first boat.

  In the instant I could look down on the rapid before dropping in, I realized the water had carried my fourteen-hundred-pound boat a little differently than it had the arm-sized chunks of wood. With inches as important there as whole boatwidths would normally be, I was in the wrong place—we should be taking the middle of the wave instead of the left one-third! These realizations were projected against my stare down—down, down, down—into a monstrously thrashing void just three feet off my left stern quarter. There was, I know, one stroke, one deep, desperate holding stroke from my feet against the bulkhead up through pushing legs and taut stomach muscles and shoulders and elbows and then a prolongation of it by hauling the oars back just as far as I could lean. I may have gotten part of a second one like it. They would have been upstream strokes, weakening the right oarpull toward the end, to get both holding and right-quartering action. Satan’s Gut was on my right, a half boatwidth away!