• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1554 0

distance, banded like shells. The Grand Mesa, to the east, the largest mesa in the world, rose to eleven thousand feet from desert badlands into an alpine landscape of forests and lakes. Wind-eroded shiprocks loomed over the rubblized beds of prehistoric seas. Battlements of sandstone rose in the distance like ruins of empire. Deep in uncharted territory the Colorado River, then known as the Grand, rushed in quietly from the northeast, carrying the snowmelt of Longs Peak and most of western Colorado. The river’s volume had now doubled, but still it remained quite placid. Was it conceivable that they were near the end of its run? Powell was tempted to believe so, but knew better. There were four thousand feet of elevation loss ahead. On the 21st, after a short stop to rest and reseal the boats, they were on the water again, which was high, roiled, and the color of cocoa. In a few miles they came to a canyon, frothing with rapids. They lined or portaged wherever they could, ran if they had no alternative. Soon they were between vertical walls and the river was roaring mud. Cataracts launched them downriver before they had time to think; waves like mud huts threw them eight feet into the air. The scouts would venture ahead if there was room enough to walk, and return ashen-faced. The canyon relented a little at times, so they could portage, but the river did not. In one day, they made three-quarters of a mile in Cataract Canyon, portaging everything they saw.

During the daytime, the temperature would reach 106 degrees; at night the men shivered in their dank drawers. Some became edgy, prone to violent outbursts. Bradley’s incendiary moods lasted through most of a day, and he would run almost anything rather than portage. Powell’s instinctive caution infuriated Bradley, as did his indefatigable specimen gathering, surveying, and consignment of everything to notes. The pace was maddeningly uneven: they would do eight miles in a day, then a mere mile or two. Two months’ worth of food remained, most of it musty bread, dried apples, spoiled bacon, and coffee. Once, Billy Hawkins got up in the middle of dinner, walked to the boats, and pulled out the sextant. He said he was trying to find the latitude and longitude of the nearest pie.

On the 23rd of July they passed a foul-smelling little stream coming in from the west; they called it the Dirty Devil. The big river quieted. The hunters took off up the cliffsides and returned with a couple of desert bighorn sheep, which were devoured with sybaritic abandon. The sheep were an omen. For the next several days, they floated on a brisk but serene river through a canyon such as no one had seen. Instead of the pitiless angular black-burned walls of Cataract Canyon, they were now enveloped by rounded pink-and-salmon-colored sandstone, undulating ahead of them in soft contours. There were huge arched chasms, arcadian glens hung with maidenhair ferns, zebra-striped walls, opalescent green fractures irrigated by secret springs. Groping for a name that would properly convey their sense of both awe and relief, Powell decided on Glen Canyon. On August 1 and 2, the party camped in Music Temple.

By the 5th of August, they were down to fifteen pounds of rancid bacon, several bags of matted flour, a small store of dried apples, and a large quantity of coffee. Other than that they would have to try to live off the land, but the land was mostly vertical and the game, which had never been plentiful, had all but disappeared. They met the Escalante River, draining unknown territory in Utah, then the San Juan, carrying in snowmelt from southwestern Colorado.

The river on which they were floating was made up now of most of the mentionable runoff of the far Southwest. They were in country that no white person had ever seen, riding the runoff of a region the size of Iraq, and they approached each blind bend in the river with a mixture of anticipation and terror. Soon the soft sandstone of Glen Canyon was replaced by the fabulous coloration of Marble Canyon. Then, on August 14, the hard black rock of Cataract