Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [18]
For sixty miles out of the town of Green River, the river was sandy-bottomed and amiable. There were riffles, but nothing that could legitimately be called a rapid. The boatmen played in the currents, acquiring a feel for moving water; the others admired the scenery. As they neared the Uinta Mountains, they went into a sandstone canyon colored in marvelous hues, which Powell, who had a knack for naming things, called Flaming Gorge. The river bore southward until it came up against the flanks of the range, then turned eastward and entered Red Canyon.
In Red Canyon, the expedition got its first lesson in how a few feet of drop per mile can turn a quiet river into something startling. Several of the rapids frightened them into racing for shore and lining or portaging, an awful strain with several thousand pounds of boats, supplies, and gear. After a while, however, even the bigger rapids were not so menacing anymore—if, compared to what was about to come, one could call them big.
Beyond Flaming Gorge the landscape opened up into Brown’s Park, but soon the river gathered imperceptible momentum and the canyon ramparts closed around them like a pair of jaws. A maelstrom followed. Huge scissoring waves leaped between naked boulders; the river plunged into devouring holes. The awestruck Andy Hall recited an alliterative verse he had learned as a Scottish schoolboy, “The Cataract of Lodore,” by the English Romantic poet Robert Southey. Over Powell’s objection—he did not like using a European name—the stretch became the Canyon of Lodore.
As they approached the first big rapid in the canyon, the No Name was sucked in by the accelerating current before anyone had a chance to scout. “I pass around a great crag just in time to see the boat strike a rock and rebounding from the shock careen and fill the open compartment with water,” wrote Powell in his serialized journal of the trip. “Two of the men lost their oars, she swings around, and is carried down at a rapid rate broadside on for quite a few yards and strikes amidships on another rock with great force, is broken quite in two, and then men are thrown into the river, the larger part of the boat floating buoyantly. They soon seize it and down the river they drift for a few hundred yards to a second rapid filled with huge boulders where the boat strikes again and is dashed to pieces and the men and fragments are soon carried beyond my sight.”
The three crew members survived, but most of the extra clothes, the barometers, and several weeks’ worth of food were gone. The next day the party found the stern of the boat intact, still holding the barometers, some flour, and a barrel of whiskey that Powell, who was something of a prig, did not realize had been smuggled aboard. When they finally floated out of Lodore Canyon into the sunlit beauty of Echo Park, Powell wrote in his journal that despite “a chapter of disaster and toil ... the canyon of Lodore was not devoid of scenic interest, even beyond the power of the pen to tell.” And O. G. Howland, who nearly lost his life in Disaster Falls, wrote haughtily that “a calm, smooth stream is a horror we all detest now.”
Desolation Canyon. Gray Canyon. They were now in territory even Indians hadn’t seen. The landscape closed in and opened up. Labyrinth Canyon. Stillwater Canyon. They shot a buck and scared a bighorn lamb off a cliff, their first fresh meat in weeks. Powell, climbing a cliff with his one arm, got himself rimmed and required rescue by Bradley, who got above him, dangled his long johns, and pulled Powell up.
‘The country grew drier and more desolate. Fantastic mesas loomed in the