Powell and his men had grimmer concerns than the tidiness of their campsites. They had just passed the rapids that, twenty years later, would prove disastrous for the Stanton expedition. Frank Brown, the would-be railroad tycoon, would drown just downstream of Soap Creek Rapid, at Mile 12, below Lee’s Ferry. Hansbrough and Richards would drown at 25 Mile Rapid. By the time Powell and his men reached Redwall Cavern, at Mile 33, they had made it by Badger Creek Rapid and Soap Creek and Sheer Wall and House Rock and the nine or ten rapids that make up the Roaring Twenties.
There was no letup, and there would be none, and, as if in passing, Powell made the key observation that explained why. “A creek comes in from the left,” he wrote, “and just below, the channel is choked with boulders, which have washed down this lateral cañon and formed a dam, over which there is a fall of thirty or forty feet.” Wherever side canyons join the Grand Canyon, that is, sudden floods can dislodge boulders and unstable chunks of cliff and fling them into the main channel where they squeeze the river into abrupt, angry rapids.
Powell was the first to figure it out, but Stanton, in the ill-fated expedition of 1889, was the first eyewitness. Stanton and his exhausted men climbed out of the Grand Canyon just thirty-two miles downstream of Lee’s Ferry. Already, they had endured three drownings and countless near misses. Still to come was one final fright, a kind of parting gift from the Grand Canyon. The day before, the survivors had watched helplessly as their leader’s corpse floated downstream. Now, as they hiked out of South Canyon to what they hoped was safety, the skies opened and the rain poured down in what seemed like solid sheets of water. Stanton described the scene:
As the rain increased, I heard some rock tumbling down behind us, and, looking up, I saw one of the grandest and most exciting scenes of the crumbling and falling of what we so falsely call the everlasting hills. As the water began to pour over from the plateau above, it seemed as if the whole upper edge of the Canyon had begun to move. Little streams, rapidly growing into torrents, came over the hard top stratum from every crevice and fell on the softer slopes below. In a moment they changed into streams of mud, and, as they came farther down, again changed into streams of water, mud and rock, undermining huge loose blocks of the harder strata, and starting them they plunged ahead. In a few moments, it seemed as though the slopes on both sides of the whole Canyon, as far as we could see, were moving down upon us, first with a rumbling noise, then an awful roar. As the larger blocks of rock plunged ahead of the streams, they crashed against other blocks, lodged on the slopes, and, bursting with an explosion like dynamite, broke into pieces, while the fragments flew into the air in every direction, hundreds of feet above our heads, and as the whole conglomerate mass of water, mud, and flying rocks came down the slopes nearer to where we were, it looked as if nothing could prevent us from being buried in an avalanche of rock and mud.
This was a debris flow. Powell and his men had never seen such a thing, but they would come to recognize its signature all too well, for in the Grand Canyon it is debris flows that make rapids. A debris flow is a kind of thick mud river, like an enormous, slow-motion avalanche made of wet concrete. Because it is so viscous and so powerful, a debris flow can dislodge and carry boulders that a flash flood could never budge. Boulders and trees slide and tumble and spin along helplessly as the flow snags them and drags them downhill. Some accounts describe “car-sized objects” riding atop the flow, but reality is more dramatic. Cars generally weigh under two tons; in 1990, a debris flow in the Grand Canyon swept a 280-ton boulder into the river.
John McPhee described a recent debris flow in Los Angeles. A house sat in its path:
The parents’ bedroom was on the far side of the house. Bob Genofile was in there kicking through white satin draperies at the panelled glass, smashing it to provide an outlet for water, when the three others ran in to join him. The walls of the house neither moved nor shook. As a general contractor, Bob had built dams, department stores, hospitals, six schools, seven churches, and this house. It was made of concrete block with steel reinforcement, sixteen inches on center. His wife had said it was stronger than any dam in California. His crew had called it “the fort.” In those days, twenty years before, the Genofiles’ acre was close by the edge of the mountain brush, but a developer had come along since then and knocked down thousands of trees and put Pine Cone Road up the slope. Now Bob Genofile was thinking, I hope the roof holds. I hope the roof is strong enough to hold. Debris was flowing over it. He told Scott to shut the bedroom door. No sooner was the door closed than it was battered down and fell into the room. Mud, rock, water poured in. It pushed everybody against the far wall. “Jump on the bed,” Bob said. The bed began to rise. Kneeling on it—on a gold velvet spread—they could soon press their palms against the ceiling. The bed also moved toward the glass wall. The two teen-agers got off, to try to control the motion, and were pinned between the bed’s brass railing and the wall. Boulders went up against the railing, pressed it into their legs, and held them fast. Bob dived into the muck to try to move the boulders, but he failed. The debris flow, entering through windows as well as through doors, continued to rise. Escape was still possible for the parents but not for the children. The parents looked at each other and did not stir. Each reached for and held one of the children. Their mother felt suddenly resigned, sure that her son and daughter would die and she and her husband would quickly follow. The house became buried to the eaves. Boulders sat on the roof. Thirteen automobiles were packed around the building, including five in the pool. A din of rocks kept banging against them. The stuck horn of a buried car was blaring. The family in the darkness in their fixed tableau watched one another by the light of a directional signal, endlessly blinking. The house had filled up in six minutes, and the mud stopped rising near the children’s chins.
Debris flows are rare because they require, simultaneously, torrential rains and cliff sides poised to collapse. But even rare events happen sooner or later, and the Grand Canyon has all the time in the world. Start with that abundance of time, add the canyon’s endless cliffs, stir in its dramatic rainstorms, and you have a recipe for debris flows. And, accordingly, nowhere else in North America have debris flows shaped the landscape as they have in the Grand Canyon.
The first lesson for geologists is that the classic picture of erosion nibbling the canyon walls away grain by grain is wrong. The true picture is not one of crumbling rocks but of crashing boulders, as rare but violent storms take great bites from the canyon’s flanks. “Debris flows move entire slopes,” writes the geologist Robert Webb, “not just individual grains of sand.” A second lesson is that the Grand Canyon is, for now, in equilibrium, a battleground for two stalemated opponents. Tiny sidestreams, aided by debris flows, throw boulders into the main channel. Even the mighty Colorado has only a certain amount of energy to expend, and the river is using its energy not on cutting a deeper channel for itself but on eroding and removing the boulders choking its path. When the climate changes again, one warring side or the other may gain an advantage, but for now the canyon’s depth is unchanging.
For river runners, those geological insights pale next to a more practical one—debris flows make rapids, and the Grand Canyon is ideal spawning ground for debris flows. Powell had seen that rapids could form in this way, but the truth was far worse than he realized. The Grand Canyon is joined by countless side canyons, every one of them guaranteed, sooner or later, to fling its river-choking cargo into the Colorado’s path. For Powell and his weary men, that meant an endless series of rapids.
• • •
On August 10, the men advanced only fourteen miles but encountered thirty-five rapids. “We run them all though some of them were bad ones,” Bradley wrote. “One was the largest we have run in the Colorado for we have gone more cautiously in it than we did in the Green.” Bradley had complained throughout the trip that Powell insisted too often on hauling the boats around rapids, and he had not changed his mind. At first he had argued that portagin
g and lining were difficult and dangerous and unnecessary. Later he complained that they wasted precious time (and therefore precious food). Those objections still held, and now Bradley added one more. “I think we have had too much caution and made portages where to run would be quite as safe and much less injurious to the boats.”
At two o’clock in the afternoon, the expedition reached the Little Colorado, a tributary of the Colorado that the men also called the Chiquito or the Flax. They were not impressed. “It is a lothesome little stream,” Bradley wrote, “so filthy and muddy that it fairly stinks. It is only 30 to 50 yds. wide now and in many places a man can cross it on the rocks without going in to his knees.” Sumner’s judgment made Bradley’s sound like a love poem. The Little Colorado was “as disgusting a stream as there is on the continent . . . half of its volume and 2/3 of its weight is mud and silt.” It was little but “slime and salt,” “a miserably lonely place indeed, with no signs of life but lizards, bats, and scorpions. It seemed like the first gates of hell. One almost expected to see Cerberus poke his ugly head out of some dismal hole and growl his disapproval of all who had not Charon’s pass.”
The mud that so revolted Bradley and Sumner was runoff from summer thunderstorms. In dry weather, the Little Colorado runs a brilliant, tropical blue (because of calcium and sodium and other dissolved minerals). The green Colorado and the blue Little Colorado run side by side for a time, independent ribbons of color like stripes on a flag.
In rainy weather, the Little Colorado runs muddy. Unlike Powell’s men, modern tourists tend to revel in the mud, as if the river were a mud bath at a posh spa. They splash in the goop like puppies, reveling in the warmth after the Colorado’s iciness. (The water released into the Colorado at Glen Canyon Dam comes from two hundred feet below the surface of Lake Powell and is a painful forty-eight degrees. Just splashing water on your face to wash up takes an effort of will. Holding your head underwater long enough to wash your hair actually hurts. Hypothermia can become severe in five minutes. For those who fall off their boat, it is a greater risk than drowning. Often the two work in tandem, for a person plunged into cold water immediately begins to hyperventilate, and the desperate, reflexive attempts to catch one’s breath may lead instead to swallowing great mouthfuls of water. )
But the Little Colorado is enticingly warm. Commercial trips all pull over at the river junction, like mini-cruise ships at a Caribbean harbor, and spill their passengers ashore. If the water level permits, the more adventurous—and less fastidious—attach their life jackets around their waists like giant diapers (to cushion collisions), lie on their backs bobsledder style, and shoot and slither their way down the muddy river through a mini-rapid or two. It is like bobbing in an enormous glass of chocolate milk while a titanic six-year-old stirs it with a giant spoon.
Powell planned to stop for a few days to measure the latitude and longitude of the mouth of the Little Colorado. The men were not pleased, but they knew this was part of the bargain. “We are sorry to be delayed as we have had no meat for several days and not one sixth of a ration for more than a month,” Bradley wrote, “yet we are willing to do all that we can to make the trip a success.”
On August 11, their second day in place, Sumner and Walter Powell set out to take measurements. The walls, they found, were three thousand feet high, more than half a mile. “The ascent is made, not by a slope such as is usually found in climbing a mountain,” Powell wrote, “but is much more abrupt—often vertical for many hundreds of feet—so that the impression is that we are at great depths; and we look up to see but a little patch of sky.”
Powell hiked upstream a few miles along the Little Colorado to explore. He went, as usual, without a weapon. “As we were on the edge of the Apache and Havasupai Indian country, his act was foolish, to say the least,” Sumner complained, but Powell saw nothing more dangerous than a couple of rattlesnakes. The most striking sight was the river’s “tumbling down over many falls.”
Had Powell ventured eighty or a hundred miles upstream, and had the recent rains been heavy enough, he would have had a jaw-dropping surprise. There he would have encountered the muddy waterfall now known as the Grand Falls of the Little Colorado. In dry weather, there is almost nothing to see. But in full flow, the cataract is 185 feet in height, slightly higher than Niagara. An exploring party coming down the Little Colorado above the fall would have almost no warning that they were about to plunge to their deaths. The country just above the waterfall is fairly flat, and the river’s descent is gradual. Not until about a quarter mile above the fall does the pace begin to pick up. By then it would likely be too late.
A geologist who had grown up near Niagara Falls once asked Powell why he assumed there were no such falls on the Colorado. “Have you never seen the river?” Powell shot back. “It is the muddiest river you ever saw . . . I was convinced that the canyon was old enough, and the muddy water swift enough and gritty enough to have worn down all the falls to mere rapids.”
This was more good-natured swaggering than a serious response. In the long run, Powell was quite right—waterfalls eventually create the conditions for their own demise, like termites who consume the home they live in. The problem, which Powell understood perfectly well, is that we live in the short run. His “argument” amounted to the claim that, because ice cream eventually melts in the heat, no one should expect to see an ice cream cone in July. Powell had made up his mind to tackle the Grand Canyon, risks be damned. The indisputable existence of the Grand Falls of the Little Colorado, in a region geologically identical to the one he was traversing, highlights how much of a gambler he was.
While Sumner and the Powell brothers ventured off exploring and taking measurements, Bradley stayed in camp and sulked. He had good reason. Like a soldier stuck in the trenches for months and no longer able to imagine any luxury that could compare with a dry pair of socks, Bradley was beset by mundane miseries. Camp was “filthy with dust and alive with insects,” and Bradley could not escape “for I have nothing to wear on my feet but an old pair of boots in which I cannot climb the mountains and which are my only reliance for making portages.” Modern boatmen wear rubber sandals (a Grand Canyon boatman invented Tevas), but Bradley and the others were condemned to leather boots that fell apart in the water and tore open on the rocks.
Bradley went barefoot in his boat and in camp when he could, and he had a pair of moccasins to wear when the sand was too hot or the rocks too sharp. But his spirits were as low as they had been all trip. “I have given away my clothing until I am reduced to the same condition of those who lost by the shipwreck of our boats. I cannot see a man of the party more destitute than I am. Thank God the trip is nearly ended.”
Without maps, this was little more than a hopeful guess, but Bradley tended to round off nearly all his gloomy thoughts with an optimistic note, the better to keep himself going. The others shared his melancholy and frustration. Only Powell, still reveling in the delights of geology, seemed cheerful, and the men found their leader’s good humor more infuriating than inspiring. “If this is a specimen of Arrazona a very little of it will do for me,” Bradley wrote. “The men are uneasy and discontented and anxious to move on. If Major does not do something soon I fear the consequences, but he is contented and seems to think that biscuit made of sour and musty flour and a few dried apples is ample to sustain a laboring man. If he can only study geology he will be happy without food or shelter but the rest of us are not afflicted with it to an alarming extent.”
On August 12, still in camp, the men were growing frantic. Bradley had copied his notes, but he had finished with even that make-work project. The men had pinned down their position, so the mapmaking duties were discharged. “There remains nothing more to be done that is absolutely necessary for lat. and long. are sufficient and we ought to be away in the morning,” wrote Bradley. “Don’t know whether we shall or not.”
It was Powell who had measured their latitude. The finding had a practical significance that none of
the men could miss. The expedition had already made it as far south as they needed to go. They were now at the latitude of Callville, Nevada, the tiny Mormon settlement that signified a safe escape from the Grand Canyon. From now on, every mile west was a mile toward home, and every mile in any other direction was a life-threatening detour.
In the meantime, the weather did its bit to add to everyone’s misery. “I am surprised to find it raining nearly every night in a country where they say rain seldom falls,” lamented Bradley. After long, wet days battling rapids on the river, tourists hit by monsoons today echo the same words as they cower in their tents in their soaked clothes and listen to the rumbling thunder and worry about where they left their life jacket and whether the whipping wind will find it and toss it into the river.
For no clear reason, Powell seemed to consider the junction of the Colorado and the Little Colorado to be the true beginning of the Grand Canyon. By modern reckoning, the expedition had entered the Grand Canyon some sixty miles before. Powell called that first stretch of canyon, from Lee’s Ferry to the Little Colorado, Marble Canyon. Today the name “Marble Canyon” is still used, but it designates a part of the Grand Canyon rather than a separate entity.
On their last day camped at the junction of the two rivers, Powell scrawled a note in his river diary. “Take obs. Capt. climbed Mt.,” it read in its entirety. Years later, in Washington, D.C., Powell composed a journal entry to mark the same milestone. The words are the most famous ever written about the Grand Canyon.
Down the Great Unknown Page 27