Deep In The Grand Canyon

The walls whisper of billions of years, the rapids roar like thunder, and time drifts by as endlessly as the Colorado River flowing…

At first I mistake the noise for the sound of my own heart hurling itself against the bars of my rib cage as boatman Jan Yost maneuvers us toward the lip of the rapid. But then I hear it againclouder, closer, and directly overhead. Thunder.

Perfect. Here we are drifting toward Lava Falls, the largest rapid in the Grand Canyon, a spot where the entire Colorado River is churned into chaos, and even the sky above is about to go wild. I chuckle at the theatrical melodrama of it all: wind blowing in strange gusts, clouds swirling with rain, canyon walls cloaked in gray. “Now,” I think to myself, “if only we had some of that jagged horror-movie lightning.”

A lightning bolt cracks across the sky.

No rapid in the world is the subject of more campfire stories than fabled Lava Falls. Cutting through an ancient lava flow, it is a jumble of massive waves and roiling currents where the river drops 37 feet in a few hundred yards. It has been called the fastest navigable white-water rapid in North America.

The roar of the rapid sweeps our voices away. We have to shout to be heard. The sky above, the river below, and the dories in between. There is a gust of wind and the feel of the dory dropping down the first wave as if falling into an elevator shaft….

To most of its five million visitors a year, Grand Canyon National Park means breathtaking vistas, postcard views of imponderable reaches. Even without the Hollywood-style special effects, it is one of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet—277 miles long, 10 miles across, over a mile deep. Step to the edge and your sense of scale shatters like glass. Whole mountain ranges could be hidden down there. Set the Empire State Building in the sand on the canyon floor and its roof would barely peek out of the inner gorge.

The spectacle of all that space, of cliffs plunging a thousand vertical feet, of nothing between you and eternity but thin air shot through with golden light, can, for some, teeter on that fine line between wonder and terror. Visitors have been known to recoil with fright at their first glimpse. Several years ago, a German woman took one look over the edge and fainted, falling to her death over the rim. Four days later, a man from Japan was similarly overcome and toppled in.

For most, the view is less fatal but no less inspiring. It moves some to song, some to silence, and some to wedding vows. The sight of the Grand Canyon from the rim is, as one early explorer wrote, quite simply “the most sublime spectacle in nature.”

But there is another side to the Grand Canyon, one barely imagined in those guardrailed views from the rim. It is a world where you can run your hand over billion-year-old rocks, where the rapids roar like thunder and fern-draped side canyons echo with a silence so deep you can hear your own heartbeat. That world lies in the blue-green ribbon shimmering thousands of feet below the rim: the Colorado River.

“Everybody ready?” asks head boatman, chuck wales, as he shoves his boat, the Toroweap, off the gravel bar and into the river. We float almost motionless for a moment, the turquoise blue of the hull shimmering on the water, before we catch the current and move downstream. Three other boats fall in line behind, each one floating quietly in the pool of its own brightly colored reflection.

My wife, Jill, and I have joined 13 other passengers and six crew members for a 14-day journey down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In 1869, John Wesley Powell and his men—with a few bags of moldy flour and a large sack of coffee—became the first to complete this journey, filling in one of the last great blank spots on the American map.

Now, 23,000 people a year run the river. That’s not all that will be different. We’ll have steaks on the grill, ice for our drinks. And the wild, silt-bristled Colorado River has been tamed, a bit, by Glen Canyon Dam. Still, a float trip through the canyon is one of the great American adventures. Thoughts of dams vanish like mist at the first tug of the current, or at the sound of the first white-water rapid.

“Badger Rapid?” Jill half asks, half tells me, as we hear a rising rumble near Mile 8. We check the straps on our life jackets, tighten the strings on our sunglasses, and reach for the handholds.

You can run the river in 40-foot motorized boats, or in smaller, oar-powered rubber rafts that wallop and bend their way through the rapids. But we have chosen dories for exactly this kind of moment. “A perfect craft for the canyon,” says Derald Stewart, a dory builder and boatman who is rowing the Temple Butte just ahead of us. “Buoyant, quick, and. . . .” The bow of his boat dips into the rapid, slides down the slick, tonguelike first wave, and then rises, twisting slightly like a bubble caught in a crosswind, straightens, and curls down the other side. . . graceful.”

We turn to watch the other two dories bounce through the rapid—the maroon Redwall and the black Muav. They are craft of ancient lines: 18 feet long, flat-bottomed, flared out widely amidships, and swept up on both ends like a quarter moon. They seem to leap through the white water. Every wave, every pirouette of current, touches them, brings them to life. It is the motion…of dance. Exactly. The dories are dancing with the waves.

In the first days, there are only a few dances. Although there are over 160 rapids in the Grand Canyon—and some of the largest in the world—most of the big ones come later, in the lower canyon. Here, the boats drift quietly, moving easily beneath the slow parade of canyon walls.

Unlike the all-at-once views from the rim, the river-level views of the canyon are revealed one cliff face, one bend, at a time. It is a poetic way to see this landscape, each layer cut by the river a verse in the poetry of stone. It becomes a chant: Kaibab Limestone, Toroweap, Coconino Sandstone, Hermit Shale, Supai, Redwall, and down and down, as though we are sliding into the center of the earth. A river flowing backward in time.

We pass a side canyon where 300-million-year-old sea creatures called nautiloids swim fossilized in rock. We drift beneath cliff walls wavy with the lines of a riverbed turned to stone 400 million years ago. There are places in the canyon where the width of your hand can encompass nearly a billion years of geologic time. “Kind of makes our 70 years here on earth seem insignificant, doesn’t it?” I once heard a passenger say. “Or precious,” the boatman answered. “Or precious.”

Every bend yields something new. At Vaseys Paradise, a snow white fountain of springwater appears out of solid rock. Near Mile 50 I hike alone into a small grotto so silent I can hear my pulse—the red river flowing in my own veins. Once, we float up silently on a herd of bighorn sheep: seven ewes and two rams half hidden in the brush. In the stillness, we can hear the clicking of teeth as one of the ewes bites at an itch on its flank.

The dizzying cliffs and stifling heat can make the Grand Canyon seem a lifeless place, an empty stone house. At Unkar Delta near Mile 72, on a broad flat where the walls peel back a bit, letting in more light, lies the largest archaeological site in the canyon. From about 950 until 1150 A.D., when they were driven out of the canyon by drought, a group of Anasazi families lived on this spot, growing corn, hunting mule deer, and making pottery.

Other cultures have left pictographs, a few small granaries, graceful split-twig figurines sprinkled throughout the canyon. But it is the pottery at Unkar Delta that seems to echo the most. The ground sparkles with shards—sunset red, gray as fog, pinched clay braids, and the famous black-on-white pattern. Picking them up is like holding a chip of time in the palm of your hand. “The Anasazi potters have always inspired me,” says Jan Yost, an artist herself. “Here they were eking out an existence, and yet art was still so important to them that they spent precious extra hours just to make something beautiful.” How could they not, I think to myself, setting the shard back among the stones, with so much beauty all around them?

Dawn. the sun’s first light has just now brushed itself across the desert sky, turning it a soft, watery blue that will last only a few hours before the heat of the day. At this early hour, the canyon walls seem to lean in to stare at themselves in the river, their reflections swirling the water with ribbons of gold and orange and red. There is a canyon wren singing, its song skipping down the scale like pebbles sprinkled down a cliff face. The notes add music to a morning breeze already tinged with the aroma of brewing coffee and the soft scent of sage.

But there is more on the breeze than the smells of breakfast. There is an edge of tension. By Mile 93, the openness of the upper canyon is gone. The walls have closed in, gone dark with rock as old as time itself. At 1.7 billion years old, Vishnu schist is some of the oldest rock on the planet. The earth’s bones. It squeezes the river tight. The shadows seem to swallow the light. The air rumbles with the sound of rapids.

We have entered the Inner Gorge, the dark heart of the canyon. It is, as boatman Amy Wiley calls it, “the land of the giants.” Here are the rapids the Grand Canyon is famous for—Horn Creek, Granite, Hermit, Crystal. Granite lies just downstream, close enough to have rumbled all night in our dreams.

Packing goes slower today. People check and recheck their gear. The air seems heavy, and it is harder to breathe. We are about to put ourselves into the maw of the Colorado River’s power, into the very strength that has carved this canyon. To ease the tension, all the boatmen have slipped into black shorts—Vishnu shorts they call them, in parody of the rock that creates the Inner Gorge. Despite the humor, they take this stretch of river very seriously.

After a long scout, with Derald sketching the rapids in the sand to be sure of the route, all the boats run Granite safely. We relax a bit. Still, as the boatmen like to say, “Events occur.” This time, they occur in Hermit Rapid. The Temple Butte slides down the fourth of seven mountainous waves, lines up for the fifth in perfect position, and then is upside-down. Just like that. As quick as slapping a mosquito. From downstream, we hear a shout, “They’re over!” It is a sunny morning, already hot, but the water is frigid. A long swim can be dangerous. Two passengers come floating downstream. Kristi Washburn is wide-eyed but gives the thumbs-up sign when I yell to her. Ed Smith swims up snapping photographs with his waterproof camera.

With help, Derald rights the boat, the buoyant dory rolling back up easily, collects his remaining passenger, and floats down to a beach where we stop to regroup. The adrenaline is coursing like electric current. Everyone is talking. “I’ve never felt so helpless in all my life,” Ed says, still shaking with cold and with the enormity of what he was moments ago afloat in. “That river did whatever it wanted with me.”

No one is hurt. Nothing important is lost. Within a few minutes we are back on the water, running a whole string of rapids—Boucher and Crystal, some of “the Gems”—without incident. “There are just two kinds of boatmen in the Grand Canyon,” an old river saying goes, “Those who have flipped and those who are going to.” Later that night, sitting in the boats, drinking beer and retelling the story, Derald takes me aside and whispers “Jeff, if you put that in your article, just make sure and say I hit it square.” So…he hit it square.

The Grand Canyon is not a single gash. Hundreds of smaller side canyons cut their way to the main canyon, slicing their own depths through the rock, each one a beautiful brushstroke in stone. After a day in the big rapids, the river slows for a few days, giving us time to relax and explore. At Shinumo Creek we wade through jade green water to slide like river otters down a small waterfall on our bellies. At Matkatamiba, we create “butt dams” by sitting close together in the narrow creek to back up the water, and then jump up, racing the mini flash floods downstream. We take a whole day to wander the blue-green paradise of Havasu Canyon.

It is a world unimaginable from the rim—the sensuous swirls of rock, monkeyflowers tickling your calves, drops of water like dew on your face. If it was the power of water that created the Grand Canyon, it is its artistry that makes it beautiful. Deep in Havasu Canyon the rest of the world seems distant.

It is a calm before the storm. Near Mile 175, the nervousness among the guides returns. We are nearing Lava Falls. Forty-foot motor rigs have been flipped here, dories tossed end for end. Once, when I rowed my father through on a trip 14 years ago, he shook my hand four times below this rapid and said, “That’s the most exciting thing in my life since I met your mother.”

The guides scout for a long time, standing atop the black boulders pointing at the waves. The roar of the rapid is deafening. Jan stretches to limber up. Derald winds and rewinds the tape over a blistered finger.

The guides are back in the boats, and suddenly there is water everywhere—waves breaking over us like white mountains, sheets of rain hammering the dories. Thunder like rocks rolling in the sky; rocks rolling like thunder in the river.

“ABL!” I hear Chuck yell as we are shot out into the quiet water below. “Alive Below Lava.” As the last of the boats comes safely through the waves, the sun breaks out as if on cue.

“The world looks different below Lava,” Chuck says as our two boats float close together. “It always does.” With the big rapids behind us now, we drift in the current hardly dipping the oars, searching for bighorn in the cliffs. We soak each other in water fights with the bailing buckets to beat the heat and work on our campfire stories for the last night.

Thinking about what stories I will tell, I remember watching Jan sketching in a dory, Amy scrambling among the rocks to photograph the star-burst pattern of an agave plant. Each of us, in our own way, tries to capture a piece of a place like the Grand Canyon, something to carry away with us. Yet, is there a color on the palette for the softness of the sand in the morning? Or an f-stop for the taste, like iron, of fear in your mouth standing above a rapid?

For all the photographs and paintings, for all the words we write, the canyon remains just beyond the reach of our imaginations, ungraspable in its entirety. We take our memories, like a pocketful of colorful threads, and weave our own view of it as best we can.

Our final camp is on a small crescent of beach just above Mile 237 Rapid. Below, where the river goes still with the fat fingers of Lake Mead, a motorboat will meet us tomorrow and speed us back to a bus bound for Las Vegas. For now though, there are toasts to be made, stories to tell long after dark, sitting in the warm sand. And tomorrow, one final rapid to run. This time there are no Hollywood theatrics, no sky-splitting bolts of lightning. There are just soft shafts of sunlight draped across the canyon walls, the song of a canyon wren mixing with the roar of the rapid. And one last time, the dories dancing. It is enough. It is more than enough.

The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published, but we suggest you confirm all details before making travel plans.