Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [20]
Soap Creek Rapids, Badger Creek Rapids, Crystal Creek Rapids, Lava Falls. Nearly all of the time, the creeks that plunge down the ravines of the Grand Canyon will barely float a walnut shell, but the flash floods resulting from a desert downpour can dislodge boulders as big as a jitney bus. Tumbled by gravity, the boulders carom into the main river and sit there, creating a dam, which doesn’t so much stop the river as make it mad. Except for the rapids of the Susitna, the Niagara, and perhaps a couple of rivers in Canada, the modern Colorado’s rapids are the biggest on the continent. Before the dams were built, however, the Colorado’s rapids were really big. At Lava Falls, where huge chunks of basalt dumped in the main river create a thirty-foot drop, waves at flood stage were as high as three-story houses. There was a cycling wave at the bottom that, every few seconds, would burst apart with the retort of a sixteen-inch gun, drenching anyone on either bank of the river—two hundred feet apart. To run Lava Falls today, in a thirty-foot Hypalon raft, wrapped in a Mae West life jacket, vaguely secure in the knowledge that a rescue helicopter sits on the canyon rim, is a lesson in panic. The Powell expedition was running most of the canyon’s rapids in a fifteen-foot pilot boat made of pine and a couple of twenty-one-foot dories made of oak—with the rudest of life jackets, without hope of rescue, without a single human being within hundreds of miles. And Powell himself was running them strapped to a captain’s chair, gesticulating wildly with his one arm.
The river twisted madly. It swung north, then headed south, then back north, then east—east!—then back south. Even Powell, constantly consulting sextant and compass, felt flummoxed. The rapids, meanwhile, had grown so powerful that the boats received a terrible battering from the force of the waves alone, and had to be recaulked every day. As they ran out of food and out of caulk, Powell realized that the men were also beginning to run out of will. There was mutiny in their whisperings.
August 25. They had come thirty-five miles, including a portage around a spellbinding rapid where a boulder dam of hardened lava turned the river into the aftermath of Vesuvius. (That, as it turned out, had been Lava Falls.) There were still no Grand Wash Cliffs, which would signal the confluence with the Virgin River and the end of their ordeal. They saw, for the first time in weeks, some traces of Indian habitation, but obviously no one had lived there in years. Occasionally they caught a glimpse of trees on the canyon rim, five thousand feet above. They were in the deepest canyon any of them had ever seen.
August 26. They came on an Indian garden full of fresh squash. With starvation imminent, they stole a dozen gourds and ate them ravenously. “We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth,” wrote Powell. “And the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands or lost among the boulders.... But,” he added hopefully, “a few more days like this and we are out of prison.”
August 27. The river, which had been tending toward the west, veered again toward the south. The hated Precambrian granite, which had dropped below the riverbed, surfaced again. Immediately came a rapid which they decided to portage. At eleven o’clock in the morning, they came to the worst rapids yet.
“The billows are huge,” wrote Bradley. “The spectacle is appalling.” It was, Jack Sumner wrote, a “hell of foam.” The rapids was bookended by cliffs; there was no way to portage and no way to line. There wasn’t even a decent way to scout.
After the party had had a meal of fried flour patties and coffee, O. G. Howland asked Powell to go for a walk with him. The major knew what was coming. It saddened him that if