Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico

by E. L. Kolb

The rapid below our camp was just as bad as its roar, we found, on running it the next day. Most of the descent was confined to a violent drop at the very beginning, but there was a lot of complicated water in the big waves that followed. Emery was thrown forward in his boat, when he reached the bottom of the chute, striking his mouth, and bruising his hands, as he dropped his oars and caught the bulkhead. An extra oar was wrenched from the boat and disappeared in the white water, or foam that was as nearly white as muddy water ever gets. I nearly upset, and broke the pin of a rowlock, the released oar being jerked from my hand, sending me scrambling for an extra oar, when the boat swept into a swift whirlpool. Emery caught my oar as it whirled past him; the other was found a half-mile below in an eddy.

Some of the rapids in the centre of Marble Canyon were not more than 75 feet wide, with a corresponding violence of water. The whirlpools in the wider channels below these rapids were the strongest we had seen, and had a most annoying way of holding the boats just when we thought we had evaded them. Sometimes there would be a whirlpool on either side, with a sharply defined line of division in the centre, along which it was next to impossible to go without being caught on one side or the other. These whirlpools were seldom regarded as serious, for our boats were too wide and heavy to be readily overturned in them, although we saved ourselves more than one upset by throwing our weight to the opposite side. A small boat would have upset. On two occasions we were caught in small whirlpools, where a point of rock projected from the shore, turning upstream, splitting a swift current and making a very rapid and difficult whirl, where the boats were nearly smashed against the walls. Below all such places were the familiar boils, or fountains, or shoots, as they are variously termed. These are the lower end of the whirlpools, emerging often from the quiet water below a rapid with nearly as much violence as they disappeared in the rapids above. These would often rise when least expected, breaking under the boats, the swift upshoot of water giving them such a rap that we sometimes thought we had struck a rock. If one happened to be in the centre of a boil when it broke, it would send them sailing down the stream many times faster than the regular current was travelling, rowing the boat having about as little effect on determining its course as if it was loaded on a flat-car. The other boat, at times just a few feet away, might be caught in the whirlpools that formed at the edge of the fountains, often opening up suddenly under one side of the boat, causing it to dip until the water poured over the edge, holding it to that one spot in spite of every effort to row away.

Then we would strike peaceful water again, a mile or perhaps, so quiet that a thin covering of clear water over the top of the silt-laden pool beneath, reflecting the tinted walls and the turquoise sky beneath its limpid surface. Gems of sunlight sparkled on its bosom and scintillated in the ripples left behind by the oars. When seated with our backs to the strongest light, and when glancing along the top of such a pool instead of into it, the mirror-like surface gave way to a peculiar purplish tone which seemed to cover the pool, so that one would forget it was roily water, and saw only the iridescent beauty of a mountain stream.

The wonderful marble walls—better known to the miners as the blue limestone walls—now rose from the water's edge to a height of eight or nine hundred feet, the surface of its light blue-gray rock being stained to a dark red, or a light red as the case might be, by the iron from the sandstone walls above. There were a thousand feet of these sandstone layers, red in all its varying hues, capped by the four-hundred foot cross-bedded sandstone wall, breaking sheer, ranging in tone from a soft buff to a golden yellow, with a bloom, or glow, as though illuminated from within. As we proceeded, another layer could be seen above this, the same limestone and with the same fossils—an examination of the rock-slides told us—as the topmost formation at the Grand Canyon. This was not unlike the cross-bedded sandstone in colour, but lacked its warmth and richness of tint.

A close, examination of the rocks revealed many colours, that figured but little in the grand colour scheme of the canyon as a whole—the detailed ornamentation of the magnificent rock structure. A fracture of wall would show the true colour of the rock, beneath the stain; lime crystals studded its surface, like gems glinting in the sunlight; beautifully tinted jasper, resembling the petrified wood found in another part of Arizona, was embedded in the marble wall,—usually at the point of contact with another formation,—polished by the sands of the turbid river.

All this told us that we were coming into our own. Four of the seven notable divisions of rock strata found in the Grand Canyon were now represented in Marble Canyon, and soon the green shale, which underlies the blue limestone, began to crop out by the river as the walls grew higher and the stream cut deeper.

One turn of the canyon revealed a break where Stanton hid his provisions in a cave—after a second fatality in which two more of this ill-fated expedition lost their lives—and climbed out on top. Afterwards he re-outfitted with heavier boats and tackled the stream again.

Just below this break the scene changed as we made a sharp turn to the left. Vasey's Paradise—named by Major Powell after Dr. Geo. W. Vasey, botanist of the United States Department of Agriculture—was disclosed to view. Beautiful streams gushed from rounded holes, fifty yards above the river. The rock walls reminded one of an ivy-covered castle of old England, guarded by a moat uncrossed by any drawbridge. It was trellised with vines, maidenhair ferns, and water-moss making a vivid green background for the golden yellow and burnished copper leaves which still clung to some small cottonwood trees—the only trees we had seen in Marble Canyon.

In our haste to push on, we left the brass motion-picture tripod head on an island, from which we pictured this lovely spot. A rapid was put behind us before we noticed our loss, and there was no going back then.

Another turn revealed a Gothic arch, or grotto, carved at the bend of the wall by the high water, with an overhang of more than a hundred feet, and a height nearly as great, for the flood waters ran above the hundred-foot stage in this narrow walled section. Then came a gloomy, prison-like formation, with a "Bridge of Sighs" two hundred feet above a gulch, connecting the dungeon to the perpendicular wall beyond; and with a hundred cave-like openings in its sheer sides like small windows, admitting a little daylight into its dark interior. The sullen boom of a rapid around the turn sounded like the march of an army coming up the gorge, so we climbed back into our boats after a vain attempt to climb up to some of the caves, and advanced to meet our foe. This rapid—the tenth for the day—while it was clear of rocks, had an abrupt drop, with powerful waves which did all sorts of things to us and to our boats; breaking a rowlock and the four pieces of line which held it, and flooding us both with a ton of water. We went into camp a short distance below this, in a narrow box canyon running back a hundred yards from the river, a gloomy, cathedral-like interior with sheer walls rising several hundred feet on three sides of us, and with the top of the south wall 2500 feet above us in plain sight of our camp, the one camp in Marble Canyon where our sleep was undisturbed by the roar of a rapid. But instead of the roar of a rapid, a howling wind swept down from the Painted Desert above, piling the mingled desert sands and river sands about our beds, scattering our camp material over the bottom of the narrow gorge.