The Emerald Mile

The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

Kevin Fedarko

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781476735290
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

From one of Outside magazine's "Literary All-Stars" comes the thrilling true tale of the fastest boat ride ever through the Grand Canyon, atop the legendary Colorado River flood of 1983. In the spring of 1983, massive flooding along the length of the Colorado River confronted a team of engineers at the Glen Canyon Dam with an unprecedented emergency that may have resulted in the most catastrophic dam failure in history. In the midst of this crisis, the decision to launch a small wooden dory named "The Emerald Mile" at the head of the Grand Canyon, just fifteen miles downstream from the Glen Canyon Dam, seemed not just odd, but downright suicidal.The Emerald Mile, at one time slated to be destroyed, was rescued and brought back to life by Kenton Grua, the man at the oars, who intended to use this flood as a kind of hydraulic sling-shot. The goal was to nail the all-time record for the fastest boat ever propelled—by oar, by motor, or by the grace of God himself—through the heart of the Grand Canyon atop the Colorado River from Lee's Ferry to Lake Mead. Did he survive? Just barely. Now, this remarkable, epic feat unfolds here, in The Emerald Mile.

PART I

The World Beneath the Rims

By far the most sublime

of all earthly spectacles . . .

the sublimest thing on Earth.

—CLARENCE DUTTON

The Grand Canyon at the Toroweap Overlook, by William Henry Holmes, 1882.

1

First Contact

It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such a wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed . . . and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

—WALLACE STEGNER

IN the winter of 1540, just nineteen years after Hernán Cortés had marched into the heart of Mexico and looted the riches of the Aztecs, a young Spanish nobleman named Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was given supreme command of the largest expedition of conquest in the brief but magnificently profitable history of the New World. When Coronado’s company mustered in the central square of the town of Compostela on a Sunday morning in late February, the column behind him included 230 horsemen recruited from the nobility of New Spain, sixty-two heavily armed foot soldiers, and five friars. Although the leaders of this glittering assembly were all Spaniards, the ranks were also enlivened by a smattering of other nationalities—five Portuguese, two Italians, a Frenchman, a Scot, and a bugler from Germany, plus more than a thousand Tlaxcalan Indians, whose primary duties involved tending to the fifteen hundred horses, mules, and cattle that shuffled inside the vast cloud of dust that rose in their wake. One witness in Compostela described them as “the most brilliant company ever collected in the Indies to go in search of new lands.”

Coronado’s military escort was led by Melchior Díaz, an intrepid horseman and scout who was destined within a few months to become the first European to cross the mouth of the Colorado River where it entered the Gulf of California—and who was fated, just a short time thereafter, to suffer a cruel and freakish death. (While attempting on horseback to run his lance through a dog that was attacking his sheep, he skewered his groin and bladder on the back of his own weapon.)

The vision that had drawn these men out of Mexico was Cíbola, a complex of seven cities that was rumored to lie far to the north and whose treasures were said to defy belief. If the stories that had been peddled to Coronado were true, the walls of Cíbola’s palaces were encrusted with emeralds, the doors were studded with sapphires, and the handles of those doors were wrought from the purest turquoise. The rulers of Cíbola were said to sup on golden plates and quench their thirst from golden goblets, and on warm nights they lay beneath trees whose branches were festooned with tiny bells of hammered silver. But most tantalizing of all were the palace storerooms. Richer than the vaults of the Incas or the Aztecs, they were rumored to be stuffed with gold and silver, emeralds and pearls, and fine cotton shawls to a depth of nine feet.

Aside from their horses, the most valuable assets of Coronado’s company were their arms, which were unlike anything seen before in that part of the world. In addition to the usual assortment of swords and maces and pikes and halberds, their weaponry included nineteen crossbows, seventeen harquebuses, and a handful of small brass cannons on wheels. Along with these implements of warfare, every soldier in Coronado’s column carried a mental image of himself seizing some portion of Cíbola’s fabled treasure for his own. Even a tiny piece of that hoard would be the making of a man’s fortune, the thing that would change the direction of his life no less dramatically than the acequias—the irrigation canals that had been brought from Arabia to Spain by the Moors—can alter the shape and flow of a river by pouring it onto a man’s fields.

That prospect was sufficient to pull Coronado’s men through the arid plains of Sonora and across the border into what is now Arizona, past the silver-studded hills surrounding the future town of Tombstone, then up onto the highlands of the Mogollon Rim, through what would later become the Apache National Forest. By the middle of that first summer, however, the fantasy that spurred them had begun to break apart on the hardened surface of the baked desert that lines the western edge of New Mexico. It was there, less than fifty miles southwest of the present-day city of Gallup, that the explorers stumbled upon Háwikuh, a pueblo of the Zuñis, whose adobe abutments Coronado immediately prepared to storm in the belief that he was about to pillage the first of Cíbola’s great cities.

Despite finding themselves hopelessly outmatched by the Spaniards’ horses and guns, the Zuñis launched a ferocious counterattack with clubs and arrows that brought them almost to the hooves of the Spanish mounts, where they were able to knock the supreme commander senseless with a well-aimed rock. When he regained consciousness, Coronado was given the news that God had granted them a glorious victory in this battle, the first formal military encounter between Europeans and natives within the future territory of the United States. He was also informed that the Zuñi storehouses held no precious metals or gemstones. Háwikuh’s stockpile of wealth, most of which was kept in simple clay pots, consisted primarily of dried corn and pinto beans.

This moment marked the start of an unpleasant awakening in which Coronado was forced to grapple with the disheartening possibility that Cíbola might be nothing more than a beautiful illusion, a chimera of the desert. Before succumbing to this truth, however, he persisted in watering the fading flowers of hope by ordering several small reconnaissance parties to break off from the main column and conduct exploratory forays on the chance that one of them might stumble upon something of value.

One of these teams, a squadron of twelve men led by an intrepid young captain named Don García López de Cárdenas, was dispatched from Háwikuh and ordered to ride deep into what are now the Navajo and Hopi reservations to chase down rumors of a “great river” that was said to lie somewhere off to the northwest and which might connect with the same river whose mouth the luckless Melchior Díaz had earlier crossed.

As September spilled into October, Cárdenas and his companions made their way to the Hopi village of Tusayan, then headed through a forest of piñon and juniper trees until, to their surprise, the ground abruptly gave way, and they found themselves gazing across what appeared to be an inland ocean of air. Here they confronted a vision that future visitors to this remarkable corner of the world would one day deem more wondrous than the mythical riches of Cíbola.

Perhaps it’s worth pausing for a moment to acknowledge, from the standpoint of Europe’s exploration and conquest of the New World, just how early in the morning it still was. In the autumn of 1540, there was not a single European settlement—not one—along any coastline or anywhere within the interior of what would eventually become the United States. It would be sixty-seven years before the first group of English settlers began battling starvation at Jamestown, and another thirteen years after that before the Pilgrims sighted the cliffs of Cape Cod from the decks of the Mayflower. George Washington would not be born for almost two more centuries, and the better part of a third would slip past before Lewis and Clark even started their great journey up the Missouri River system. Yet there stood Cárdenas and his men, on the brink of a prodigious chasm that was destined to emerge as perhaps the most iconic landscape feature of a nation that did not yet exist. Of all the natural wonders in America—the waterfalls of Yosemite, the geysers of Yellowstone, the great trees of Northern California—this was the very first to be discovered, although discovery was hardly the right word.

By the time Cárdenas arrived, much of the terrain inside that abyss had not only been traversed and explored but also inhabited, first by three successive waves of Anasazi, the ancestors of the modern Hopi, then later by the Hualapai, the Paiute, the Havasupai, and half a dozen other tribes. The ruins of entire villages were down there, where the granaries had been stocked with corn and canals had channeled water across fields for hundreds of years until, sometime during the twelfth century, the bottom of the canyon was mysteriously abandoned. There were secrets and legends too—places where shamans had worshipped, where young men had conducted vision quests, and where the spirits of the dead were said to cross over into the afterlife. Nevertheless, Cárdenas’s arrival marked a crucial point in the history of this landscape.

At that moment, the continent from which these explorers hailed was at a peculiar crossroads, with one foot testing the waters of the Renaissance and the other still firmly planted in the Middle Ages. The printing press, one of several technologies that would do the most to shape and transform the future, had barely begun shouldering aside the impossibly laborious business of copying illustrated manuscripts by hand. Johannes Kepler, Sir Francis Bacon, and Galileo had not yet been born. Mercator projection maps had not yet been invented; complex numbers were still awaiting discovery. The words geography and geology had not even been added to the English language. And yet, the first tremors of the seismic shifts that would rock the face of the world were already being felt.

From a three-story tower within the walls of the city of Frauenburg, the great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was preparing to publish On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, his treatise positing the radical notion that Earth was not the center of the universe, which would herald the arrival of the scientific revolution. In Rome, Bologna, and Venice, the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci had teased out the conceptual principles behind single-span bridges, comparative anatomy, plate tectonics, aeronautics, and the science of fluid mechanics. And oddly, although Spain was still a stronghold of religious orthodoxy—and thus fiercely resistant to these new ideas—the country that had given birth to Coronado and Cárdenas stood at the forefront of these developments in one crucial respect, because no country had a greater command of water. It was on the Iberian Peninsula that the Romans had done some of their most impressive work on arched dams. Here was where the Muslims had laid down the foundations of reservoir-driven irrigation, and where Christian engineers were now refining the concept of hydraulic power. In short, Spain was the seedbed of the technologies that would eventually converge to harness one of the most unbridled but potentially useful forces in all of nature, a wild river.

Thus the era of Cárdenas’s arrival at the edge of the canyon offered the first promise of a world that was not only ruled but also controlled by man. And now, here where the piñons and the junipers gave way to the buff-colored caprock, that vision was colliding against one of the most implacable expressions of nature’s indifference to grand schemes—a landscape whose essence suggested that such a conceit was perhaps no less arrogant, and no less rife with the potential for unintended consequences, than a horseman’s thinking that it was a simple matter to run his lance through a dog that was pestering his sheep.

Years later when Pedro de Castañeda, one of the chroniclers of the Coronado expedition, set down the story of this first encounter, he offered not a single detail of Cárdenas’s reaction as he and his men peered into the abyss for the first time. But if those men had anything at all in common with the tens of millions of visitors who would later follow in their footsteps, it’s a reasonable guess that not one of them said a word—that they simply stood, rooted in silence, their breath snatched away by the vision that had been laid at their feet.

Although no one now knows precisely where this incident took place, it’s almost certain that it occurred along a section of the South Rim that is known today as Desert View. This promontory offers one of the most dramatic of all vantage points into the canyon—a place where it completes a great arc, bending from the east to the north in a sweep whose view is so arresting that the National Park Service would later erect a tall stone watchtower for public enjoyment.

Somewhere close to this spot, Cárdenas and his men found themselves looking out at a formation called the Palisades of the Desert, a dramatic set of banded cliff faces that form the canyon’s southeastern rampart. From the base of the Palisades, a series of benches and precipices descends like a crudely hewn set of stairs toward a glittering ribbon of silver and green that winds through the bottom far below. On the opposite side of that stream, a matching set of cliffs and ledges ascends to the North Rim. And yawning between those two rims stretches a void as wide and deep as a landlocked sea, an impression strengthened not only by the shimmering blueness of the air itself but also by the armada of clouds that scud past at eye level, casting shadows beneath their bellies that ripple and dance amid the shattered stones that lie shipwrecked below.

Gazing down toward that thin trickle of water winding sinuously between the buttes and mesas rising from the center of the gorge, Cárdenas scoffed at the claims of his Hopi guides, who assured him that this was no mere stream, but a mighty desert river whose width measured half a league across—several hundred yards. Certain they were exaggerating, the Spanish captain dismissed their pronouncements as absurd, judged its true breadth to be no more than eight feet, and ordered his party to begin moving west along the rim in search of a promising place to descend to this creek.

Three days later, they arrived at a break in the escarpment where Cárdenas directed Captain Pablos de Melgosa and two of the nimblest foot soldiers to scramble down to have a look. Many hours later, they returned with news that this giant arroyo was far more treacherous than the view from the top had led them to believe. In fact, Melgosa reported, they had penetrated only a fraction of the way down before further descent became impossible—although they had gone far enough to confirm that the Hopi had not overstated the size of the river. But what sobered the reconnaissance party even more were the monstrous dimensions of the interior—a landscape so huge that even its minor features had made them feel hopelessly diminished. To illustrate the point, Melgosa pointed to a single stone column. From the rim, it appeared to be roughly the height of a man, did it not? But no. In fact, it had proved taller than the great tower of Seville, the belfry that rose 344 feet from the Catedral de Santa María de la Sede, the largest cathedral in the world and, tellingly, a crowning point of reference for a Spaniard of that era. They must have felt that they had lost their bearings entirely.

In both a literal and a symbolic sense, this was entirely true. Without a single familiar object to impart some sense of scale—a man sitting beneath the shade of a tree; an ox pulling a plow through a field—it was impossible for the Spaniards to gauge the immensity of this declivity. They had no conception that they were staring into an abyss whose volume exceeded a thousand cubic miles, a distance and depth that dwarfed anything they or any other European had ever encountered. They had no notion that, for much of its length, the top and the bottom of this canyon were separated by more than a vertical mile of rock, which meant that if it had somehow been possible to lift up every peak in the Pyrenees and drop them neatly into that expanse, each mountain would easily fit inside the bottom and not a single summit would peer above the rim. They also had no way of fathoming that, from its eastern reaches to its western terminus, the abyss ran for 277 miles, arguably the longest canyon on earth. Nor did they comprehend that the span between the South Rim and the North Rim averaged roughly ten miles, or that the canyon’s six hundred bays and tributary arroyos could push that width back to fifteen, twenty, even thirty miles. Finally, they were unable to grasp or appreciate that the river of which the Hopi spoke served as the premier drainage channel for the entire Southwest, a waterway that gathered together all the runoff of a region...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Map
• Launch
• Leviathan
• Part I: The World Beneath the Rims
• Part II: America’s Pyramids
• Part III: The Sweet Lines of Desire
• Part IV: The Master of the Emerald Mile
• Part V: The Gathering Storm
• Part VI: The Maelstrom
• Part VII: The Speed Run
• Epilogue: The Legend of the Emerald Mile
• Acknowledgments
• Photographs
• A Conversation with Kevin Fedarko
• About the Author
• Notes on Sources
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Photograph Credits
• Index
• Copyright