Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  Powell did not invent the notion that the sweep of time is nearly endless. Before him, Lyell and Darwin and countless others had painted the same picture.

  “Water-drops have worn the stones of Troy and blind oblivion swallowed cities up,” Shakespeare had written nearly four centuries before. But the Grand Canyon served as an unmatchable emblem of that almost ungraspable abstraction.

  Still, even if Powell had never emerged from the Grand Canyon to spread the news about earth’s antiquity, the message was in the air. Nineteenth-century Americans recognized that the story of the arid West is an epic tale of erosion, and slowness is erosion’s defining trait. Where wind and rain and rivers have carved mesas and buttes and canyons, we can be sure the work has been going on through long ages. If we see a deep well, and then see that the man digging it is equipped with only a teaspoon, we can be sure that he has been digging for a good long while.

  Dinosaurs provided the public with further proof that the earth had a long history, and the first decades after the Civil War were the great age of dinosaur discovery. Scientists roaming the West stumbled over dinosaur bones at every turn. At one site in Wyoming, bones of bygone creatures lay so thick on the ground that a sheepherder used them to build a cabin. During a brief stop at an isolated train station in Nebraska in 1868, a Yale scientist took a moment to examine a jumble of bones unearthed by someone digging a well. He recognized them as coming from ancient ancestors of the modern horse. A discovery made while an impatient conductor held the train proved to be one of the great finds in the history of science.

  But, on a geologic scale, the first dinosaurs stumbled to their feet only the other day. The oldest rocks in the Grand Canyon, in contrast, are nearly two billion years old, not quite half as old as the earth. On a timeline where the history of the earth is compressed to a single year, dinosaurs show up only in mid-December and vanish on December 26. (Humans make their appearance on the evening of December 31. Columbus discovers America at three seconds before midnight.)

  The first white men to peep over the rim of the Grand Canyon were Spanish conquistadors, in 1540, led by Hopi guides. (For more than two hundred years afterward, no whites returned.) The Spaniards could make no sense of what they were seeing. The conquistadors’ “discovery” of the Grand Canyon, one early writer scoffed, was “akin to a dog’s discovery of the Moon.” A few agile conquistadors tried to climb down to the river, but they gave up after making it about one-third of the way. “From the top they could make out, apart from the canyon, some small boulders which seemed to be as high as a man,” Pedro de Castañeda reported. “Those who went down and who reached them swore that they were taller than the great tower of Seville.”

  It is hard to place ourselves in the position of those who encountered the Grand Canyon unprepared by countless descriptions and pictures. For the modern traveler, familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then complacency. No early visitor tiptoeing to a canyon rim responded with anything but awe. Consider, for example, this description of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, a petite version of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. The writer was Nathaniel Pitt Langford, a brave and adventurous explorer and one of the first white men to describe what is now Yellowstone National Park. He wrote in 1870, a year after Powell’s exploration of the Grand Canyon.

  “Standing there or rather lying there for greater safety,” Langford recalled, “. . . I realized my own littleness, my helplessness, my dread exposure to destruction, my inability to cope with or even comprehend the mighty architecture of nature. . . . A sense of danger, lest the rock should crumble away, almost overpowered me. My knees trembled, and I experienced the terror which causes men to turn pale and their countenances to blanch with fear, and I recoiled from the vision I had seen, glad to feel the solid earth beneath me.” Langford was clinging to a spot of ground tourists now know as Inspiration Point.

  Canyons stunned their first eyewitnesses partly because their size is so far beyond human scale. The Grand Canyon especially, at a mile deep, ten miles across, and nearly three hundred miles long, dwarfs all who would take its measure. But size is only part of the story. Unexpectedness plays just as large a role. Mountains are miles high and the ocean is seemingly infinite, but they announce their presence from a distance. The sight of a snowy peak or the tang of an ocean breeze beckons the traveler.

  From an airplane, where even the Grand Canyon looks like a gash ripped in the earth, the view makes a kind of sense. From river level, as Powell and his men had seen, a canyon emerges gradually, unfolding over the course of days and weeks. But approached on foot, a canyon is a shock. Until the last moment, there is no hint of anything special in the neighborhood—park rangers at the Grand Canyon are asked, over and over again, where the canyon is—and then, suddenly, the ground disappears from before one’s feet.

  The Grand Canyon proclaims, with the force of a slap to the face, “This is very old.” Curiously, that message is only half right. The rocks that the canyon reveals are billions of years old, but the canyon itself is young. This is no paradox. A tree might be hundreds of years old, but the axe cut that revealed its rings might have been made only yesterday.

  The Grand Canyon is somewhere between four and six million years old. Geologically speaking, to be a mere five million years old is to be barely out of diapers. (In that short time, the river has carried away all the rock that once filled the canyon rim to rim. Before the dams were built, the Colorado carried an average of five hundred thousand tons of sand and silt—enough to fill a line of pickup trucks stretching the full width of the United States—past a single point every day. It is no wonder that the river ran red and muddy.)

  “The most emphatic lesson that the canyon teaches,” observed the geologist William M. Davis, one of Powell’s disciples, “is that it is not an old feature of the earth’s surface but a very modern one . . . It is properly described as a young valley.” If the Grand Canyon were truly old, Davis explained, it would hardly be worth going to see. In time, as erosion continues on its relentless course, “the main canyon shall slowly wear deeper and deeper, and the side canyons, increasing in length and width, shall consume the entire plateau, hundreds of miles north and south of the river, and thus the whole region shall be reduced to a featureless lowland but little above sea level.”

  Most of the Grand Canyon is an enormous layer cake (or, more precisely, a hole cutting through an enormous layer cake). The individual layers are hundreds of feet thick and have formed over tens of millions of years. The deeper the layer, the older, like the clothes on a teenager’s bedroom floor. The changes from one layer to another testify to a landscape that has changed again and again through the ages.

  The Coconino Sandstone, for instance, is near the rim and therefore young. A mere 200-odd million years old, it is a remnant of a former desert, an eternity of blowing sand dunes now glued in place. But what was once a desert has also been a coastal plain and the site of a warm, clear sea. The Hermit Shale, which sits beneath the Coconino Sandstone, was laid down by rivers dropping their loads of silt and mud at what was once a seacoast. The five-hundred-foot-thick Redwall Limestone is formed, in part, of countless tiny seashells that rained gently down onto the ocean floor three hundred million or four hundred million years ago.

  More is gone than remains. If the Grand Canyon is a journal recording earth’s history, vandals have torn out over half the pages. At one juncture that Powell named “the Great Unconformity,” layers of rock that differ in age by 1.2 billion years lie one atop the other. All the intervening years have eroded away without a trace. It was another of Powell’s pet themes. “Beds hundreds of feet in thickness and hundreds of thousands of square miles in extent, beds of granite and beds of schist, beds of marble and beds of sandstone, crumbling shales and adamantine lavas have slowly yielded to the silent and unseen powers of the air, and crumbled into dust and been washed away by the rains and carried into the sea by the rivers.” Someone left the cake out in the rain.

  We ca
n see those layers and deduce their history because the Colorado River has sliced its way downward inch by inch through thousands of feet of rock. “The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools,” wrote Thoreau, “but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”

  Even more so when those touches aren’t so gentle. The Colorado cuts down as it flows not simply because the water is moving but also because the river carries a swirl of rocks and pebbles and grit that help it abrade its way. (For similar reasons, stonecutters in quarries use abrasive-coated wire blades to cut blocks of stone.) The cutting does not proceed at a steady pace. For much of the year, the rocks and sand may sit in place on the river bottom. Come the spring thaw or a sudden flood, though, and the river grinds those rocks against the channel bottom. Multiply by ten thousand centuries and you have a canyon.

  The river’s sawing is only part of the story. The Grand Canyon is so deep because it is part of an immense geological formation called the Colorado Plateau, which has been soaring upward while the river has been cutting its channel. The entire plateau, which straddles the Four Corners region where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet, has risen one thousand feet in just the past million years. Picture, Powell said, a buzz saw spinning in place while the log it was cutting rose up: “The river was the saw which cut the mountains in two.” (And the canyon is so wide—rather than merely as wide as the river itself—because erosion bites into its exposed sides.)

  For Powell and his fellow geologists, all this was irresistibly exciting. In the nineteenth century, the West was a geologic boomtown. Geology in Europe and back East was far more difficult because the landforms there had been squeezed and twisted into almost unfathomable shapes and then hidden by trees and bushes and grass. What was elsewhere concealed by vegetation was here stripped bare. Better yet, Grand Canyon country was a region of neat layers resting tidily one atop another, color-coded, hundreds of feet thick, and extending for hundreds of miles. Best of all, the landscape was neatly sliced open by canyons that served geologists as dissecting kits served anatomists.

  Old World geologists could scarcely conceal their envy of their counterparts in the American West. “The history of the rocks there is so simple,” one British geologist complained when he learned of Powell’s findings, “that a child could read it.”

  This was partly true and partly sour grapes, for the challenge of the Grand Canyon is as much psychological as intellectual. The river is barely visible from the rim. Where the Colorado does appear, glinting in the desert sun, it seems tiny and insignificant. (The Spanish conquistadors had estimated that it was six feet wide.) “It looks about large enough to turn a village grist-mill,” observed Clarence Dutton, the great nineteenth-century geologist, “yet we know it is a stream three or four hundred feet wide. Its surface looks as motionless as a lake seen from a distant mountain-top.” How could this placid stream cleave five thousand feet of rock?

  For Powell and his weary men, who were battling the river on a daily basis rather than squinting to make it out in the distance, it did not take a leap of imagination to believe in the Colorado’s power.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE GREAT UNKNOWN

  Late in the afternoon of August 8, after an exhausting day of portaging, Powell’s men dragged themselves into camp and collapsed. The roar of a rapid just downstream promised that the next day would be another ordeal. A second rapid loomed about five hundred yards beyond the first one, “but we can’t get down to look at it,” Bradley wrote, “for the walls come down to the water and it is too deep and swift to wade past it.” The trap was squeezing shut.

  Powell was happily studying the scenery, but Bradley had no time for such distractions. Restless and jumpy, he found himself veering back and forth between frank confessions of dread and hearty proclamations of confidence. “We are interested now only in how we shall get through the cañon and once more to civilization though we are more than ever sanguine of success. Still our slow progress and wasting rations admonish us that we have something to do. Fortunately we are a happy-go-lucky set of fellows and look more to our present comfort than our future danger.”

  That “comfort” didn’t amount to much. They were all stuck “in a cave of the earth,” Bradley complained, trying to look forward with anticipation to a breakfast of beans that Hawkins had promised for the next morning. The “future danger,” on the other hand, was all too real. “Hard at work early,” Sumner wrote the next day, August 9. “Made 4 portages and ran 27 bad rapids in 13 miles.” The rapids were “furious,” Bradley wrote, though he recorded his customary hopes that “this series of heavy rapids is about ended.”

  Not all the sights were ominous. “The river turns sharply to the east,” Powell wrote, “and seems enclosed by a wall, set with a million brilliant gems. What can it mean? Every eye is engaged, every one wonders. On coming nearer, we find fountains bursting from the rock, high overhead, and the spray in the sunshine forms the gems which bedeck the wall. The rocks below the fountain are covered with mosses, and ferns, and many beautiful flowering plants.” (And poison ivy, as modern tourists have learned.)

  It was, Sumner agreed, “the prettiest spring I ever saw.” Powell named the spot Vasey’s Paradise, in honor of a botanist who had traveled in the Rocky Mountains with him the year before. Struck by the welcome burst of greenery against “the unending barrenness of the cañon,” Bradley lauded it as “the prettiest sight of the whole trip.” Sumner, characteristically, downplayed his own enthusiasm. “The white water over the blue marble made a pretty show,” he conceded. “I would not advise anybody to go there to see it.”

  Only two miles downstream they came to another spectacular site, now called Redwall Cavern. “The water sweeps rapidly in this elbow of river, and has cut its way under the rock, excavating a vast half circular chamber,” Powell wrote. The space, “if used for a theater, would give sitting to fifty thousand people.”

  No theater could have a more spectacular setting, though Powell exaggerated its size perhaps tenfold. Today, with the Colorado dammed, the undercutting that formed the cavern is at an end. (In the flood year of 1983, though, river runners floated deep inside the cavern and tied up to its ceiling.) For boatmen and passengers on the Colorado today, Redwall Cavern provides a welcome chance to leave the cramped confines of the boats and run and play on the vast sandy beach. No sooner has the first boat tied up than the Frisbees start flying. Where Powell and his hungry, fearful crew gawked in wonder, tourists in cutoff dungarees and Day-Glo bathing suits roam the beach and slather suntan lotion on their peeling skin and decide if it’s late enough in the day to crack open a beer.

  Redwall Cavern itself remains exactly the immense stone clamshell that Powell saw. In some ways, the Grand Canyon has changed considerably since Powell’s day. Because the dams catch the Colorado’s load of mud and silt, for example, the river often runs green rather than red. Other changes show the hand of man more directly. Navajo Bridge soars overhead at Mile 4, for instance. A rustic lodge called Phantom Ranch sits at Mile 88. Test holes drilled in the cliffs at Mile 40 mark the spot where the Bureau of Reclamation intended to site Marble Canyon Dam.

  Against a backdrop as enormous as the Grand Canyon, though, such signs of human intrusion are rare. For nearly all its 277 miles, the Grand Canyon looks from river level just as it did a hundred years ago, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand. Photographers have traveled throughout the Grand Canyon rephotographing the earliest pictures of it, taken shortly after Powell’s first expedition. In nearly every case, trying to tell which photo was taken when Ulysses S. Grant was president and which taken only the other day is nearly impossible, a harder variant of the children’s puzzles that challenge the reader to “find six differences between these two drawings.” Is that the same cottonwood tree in both photographs? What happened to that piece of driftwood? In some cases, where the river flows happened to match, photographs of the same rapid taken one hu
ndred years apart show the identical holes in the identical places.

  If Powell and his men were captured by a time machine and sent to the Grand Canyon today (at a time when the river happened to be muddy), they would see nothing for miles and miles to indicate that it was not 1869. The illusion would last until a jet passed high overhead or a raft of tourists rounded a corner. Up above, at Grand Canyon Village, the canyon’s South Rim is thick with tour buses and restaurants. Down on the river, there are no buildings, no signs, no maps or trash cans, no more than a handful of human alterations to the landscape. Nearly everywhere it is many hours or days to the nearest electrical outlet. There are no camps as such, simply beaches where the river has deposited some sand.

  The camping spots are pristine, scrupulously maintained by hikers and boaters who would no sooner leave a gum wrapper in the Grand Canyon than they would a Big Mac in the Sistine Chapel. Twenty thousand visitors a year travel the river and leave scarcely a sign. Commercial boatmen, in their shorts and T-shirts, are more punctilious than the starchiest English butlers; let a single blob of jelly from a sandwich fall onto the sand and someone will scoop it up and carry it off before it stops trembling. The National Park Service’s river rangers scour campsites inch by inch looking for “microtrash.” A cigarette stub or a bit of candy wrapper a quarter-inch square is a major find. A river ranger will cross a churning river to retrieve a beer can he has spotted bobbing in an eddy, an act roughly akin to a trooper’s darting across a six-lane highway to pick up a plastic bag snagged on the guardrail.

  If rangers find signs of a campfire (fires are forbidden), they clear away the evidence to avoid giving ideas to future arrivals. Half-burnt logs are flung into the river, blackened rocks scattered, even ashes lugged away in a bucket. As in Powell’s day, anyone venturing into the canyon must bring his supplies with him. (Fishing is permitted.) And just as everything must be brought in, so must everything be carried out. Every river trip carries its own “toilets”—metal boxes with the top lid temporarily removed in favor of a toilet seat. Many a river passenger pays $200 a day to ride downstream in the company of an ammo can or two of human waste.