River Master by Cecil Kuhne

Author:Cecil Kuhne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Countryman Press
Published: 2017-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

PART V

THE GRAND CANYON

DAYS 82–99:

AUGUST 13–30

* * * *

BRIEF TIMELINE

August 13: Grand Canyon

August 25: Lava Falls

August 28: Desertion of Three Men

August 30: Grand Wash Cliffs

CHAPTER NINETEEN

LEAVING THE LITTLE COLORADO RIVER BEHIND them, the members of the Powell expedition were absolutely certain of one thing: they were entering a canyon more dramatic and perilous than any they had seen before.

The summits surrounding them loomed 6,000 feet above the river and were often miles away. The collage of lofty mesas, buttes, and pinnacles overwhelmed the men with its remarkable grandeur. The enormous gorge they traversed was one eminently befitting the name they bestowed upon it: the Grand Canyon.

In his book The Emerald Mile, Kevin Fedarko describes the challenges facing the expedition: “From the moment they entered the Grand Canyon, the walls rose higher, the space between them narrowed, and the scale of everything shifted. By the end of the first day, several layers of limestone and sandstone had pushed out of the shoreline next to the river and shouldered the rimrock a quarter of a mile into the sky. As each stratum stripped back from the next in a stairlike progression, the entire ensemble began to take on the contours of a giant wedding cake of rock. By the third day, the walls displayed a horizontally banded palette of some half a dozen colors that ranged from tawny gold to deep maroon and later, a rose-petal pastel that seemed to smolder with an inner fire, as if it bore the reflected glare of a furnace deep inside the earth. As the boats penetrated farther into this labyrinth, the cliffs were sculpted into dimensions that were both breathtaking and sublime.”

As the expedition hastened its way downriver, the Colorado was increasingly studded by enormous boulders and deep holes in the rushing current. The steep, forbidding walls hemmed in the party as the river became narrower and its swirled currents more and more tortured. A deep, sullen roar raged downstream almost constantly, and at times the entire river seemed to vanish from sight. Its furious waves were beaten to foam as they plunged and boomed ever onward.

Powell described the imposing depths of the canyon:

The walls are about three thousand feet high—more than half a mile—an altitude difficult to appreciate from a mere statement of feet. The ascent is made, not by a slope such as is usually found in climbing a mountain, but is much more abrupt—often vertical for many hundreds of feet—so that the impression is that we are at great depth; and we look up to see but a little patch of sky.

It was August 13, and the expedition had been on the river for 82 days. They were of course unaware of it, but they were only 17 days (and some 200 miles) away from the end of a journey that seemed like it would never end.

The strain on the men was becoming unbearable. Extreme exhaustion, shrinking supplies of food, quickly deteriorating boats, brutal heat, and a cataclysm of whitewater were to blame.

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