The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko Page A
Authors: Kevin Fedarko
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of them cold, white-water streams cascading from the tops of the Rockies: the Fraser, the Blue, the Eagle, the Roaring Fork, the Fryingpan, and the Crystal.
At the center of a crescent-shaped valley that would later become the farming town of Grand Junction, the Grand picked up the Gunnison River, then crossed into Utah, wheeled left, and began drilling south through the same badlands into which the Green had disappeared—an impenetrable landscape of bald mesas, wrinkled cliffs, and isolated pockets of mountains whose snowy peaks looked like icebergs marooned in an ocean of impossibly blue air. Somewhere out in that maze of wind-raked stone, the two rivers, which by now had covered a combined distance of nearly twelve hundred miles, arrived at a secret place deep inside what is now Canyonlands National Park, a spot known as the Confluence, and merged to form the Colorado.
More than a thousand miles downstream from the Confluence, the Colorado emerged from the Grand Canyon and was joined by the Virgin, a tributary whose waters arrived just east of where Lieutenant Ives’s steamboat had come to a crashing halt. Almost everything that lay between those two distant points was a complete mystery. In fact, explorers had reached and forded this stretch of the Colorado at only a handful of places, and since the time of Cárdenas, no one had undertaken a systematic effort to navigate or chart the course of the river. On the Corps of Topographical Engineers 1855 map of the Southwest, the most definitive piece of cartography of the day, a dotted line of almost lyrical uncertainty traced across the empty space to represent the engineers’ best guess as to where the water ran. Butthe actual details of most of that journey—whether the Colorado doubled back on itself, whether it cascaded over waterfalls the size of Niagara, or bored through underground tunnels—was anybody’s guess. Herein lay yet another unique attribute of the challenge that Powell had laid before himself.
When white explorers advanced into the American wilderness for the firsttime, they were almost never pioneering a new route. Men like Lewis and Clark, Jedediah Smith, and John Charles Frémont were, with rare exceptions, following the immemorially ancient trails used by Native Americans for trade, hunting, and war. Not so with Powell. Although parts of the Grand Canyon were known intimately, many sections had never been touched. The shoreline of the river itself was so riven by impassable cliffs that the first traverse on foot would not take place until 1977. In Powell’s day, Indians and mountain men alike traded in the widespread belief that no one who ventured upon the Colorado would emerge from the canyon alive. The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop.
The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi.The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.)
Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the
At the center of a crescent-shaped valley that would later become the farming town of Grand Junction, the Grand picked up the Gunnison River, then crossed into Utah, wheeled left, and began drilling south through the same badlands into which the Green had disappeared—an impenetrable landscape of bald mesas, wrinkled cliffs, and isolated pockets of mountains whose snowy peaks looked like icebergs marooned in an ocean of impossibly blue air. Somewhere out in that maze of wind-raked stone, the two rivers, which by now had covered a combined distance of nearly twelve hundred miles, arrived at a secret place deep inside what is now Canyonlands National Park, a spot known as the Confluence, and merged to form the Colorado.
More than a thousand miles downstream from the Confluence, the Colorado emerged from the Grand Canyon and was joined by the Virgin, a tributary whose waters arrived just east of where Lieutenant Ives’s steamboat had come to a crashing halt. Almost everything that lay between those two distant points was a complete mystery. In fact, explorers had reached and forded this stretch of the Colorado at only a handful of places, and since the time of Cárdenas, no one had undertaken a systematic effort to navigate or chart the course of the river. On the Corps of Topographical Engineers 1855 map of the Southwest, the most definitive piece of cartography of the day, a dotted line of almost lyrical uncertainty traced across the empty space to represent the engineers’ best guess as to where the water ran. Butthe actual details of most of that journey—whether the Colorado doubled back on itself, whether it cascaded over waterfalls the size of Niagara, or bored through underground tunnels—was anybody’s guess. Herein lay yet another unique attribute of the challenge that Powell had laid before himself.
When white explorers advanced into the American wilderness for the firsttime, they were almost never pioneering a new route. Men like Lewis and Clark, Jedediah Smith, and John Charles Frémont were, with rare exceptions, following the immemorially ancient trails used by Native Americans for trade, hunting, and war. Not so with Powell. Although parts of the Grand Canyon were known intimately, many sections had never been touched. The shoreline of the river itself was so riven by impassable cliffs that the first traverse on foot would not take place until 1977. In Powell’s day, Indians and mountain men alike traded in the widespread belief that no one who ventured upon the Colorado would emerge from the canyon alive. The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop.
The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi.The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.)
Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the
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