What it was like to retrace the first expedition down the Grand Canyon a century later 

Our pontoon rafts, the Grand and the Green, ease down a windraked Colorado River. Sheer 3,000-foot walls lift to the sky on either side, flying from gigantic red battlements the wild clouds of an August thunderstorm. Ahead, the swift caramel-colored waters seem to vanish at a bright line. Only an occasional spit of spray beyond, and an angry growl in the throat of the Grand Canyon, warn of the danger ahead. 

The growl grows to a roar as the current sweeps us onward. Now the thrashing tops of "rooster tails," where the river explodes against unseen rocks, rise into view. In another moment we are at the brink and look down upon Lava Falls Rapids in all its fury. 

"Hang on!" yells Ron Smith, pilot of the Grand. Fists tighten on ropes lashed across the plywood deck. Then we slant to the right, the fat rubber nose tilts sharply, and we drop into the thundering maelstrom. 

A hissing wave slams aboard with the force of a fire hose. Buried in a seething brown torrent, the bow struggles upward like a fish breaking the surface. Now we leap to the crest ahead and slide again into a chasm of churning foam. The Grand buckles and shudders as angry waves wrench at the ropes, flail the rubber bags holding our supplies, swamp the cockpit where Ron steers with the straining outboard motor. 

We drive toward a huge rock of lava blocking the river near the right bank. Its glistening black flank seems to rush at us; in another instant we pile against it. The boat tilts crazily on the raging waters. 

Then we are blown clear and washed down through tumbling tail waves to the safety of the lower river. The worst of the canyon's rapids lies behind us. Last summer our small National Geographic Society expedition battled mighty Lava Falls Rapids and more than 200 others on the Colorado River during a 300-mile voyage through Marble and Grand Canyons. Our destination: a rendezvous with history. 

It was in the summer of 1869 that a band of 10 intrepid men, led by Maj. John Wesley Powell, a one-armed veteran of the Union Army, became the first to master the Colorado River and its unmapped canyons. Their journey through the last important unexplored region of the West, their courage in the face of the unknown, the tragic fate that three of them met on the very eve of triumph—all these are now a part of our Nation's heritage. 

(Who mapped the Grand Canyon? This forgotten female mountaineer.)

Departing from Green River, Wyoming, on May 24, 1869, Powell pushed his small flotilla of four boats through a 1,000-mile gantlet of canyons that to this day carry the names his party gave them: Flaming Gorge, Red, Kingfisher, Lodore—where one boat was dashed to pieces—Desolation, Cataract, Glen. 

In early August, Powell's party arrived where Lees Ferry, Arizona, is today. Burned by desert sun, drenched by almost daily thunder squalls, their energy sapped by constant portaging of the heavy boats, the explorers faced murderous Marble Canyon and beyond it the awesome void of the Grand Canyon. 

Parts of the Colorado today lie pooled behind huge hydroelectric dams, but the 240 miles below Lees Ferry remains much as it was then. Glen Canyon Dam, 15 miles upstream, releases enough water to keep the river as high as it was that summer of 1869. We intended to commemorate Powell's voyage by following his wake through Marble and Grand Canyons. 

Rafts named for parent streams

Ron Smith, a strapping veteran of western river-running, held out a strong hand to help me aboard our pontoon raft, the Grand. 

"Welcome to the poor man's Kon-Tiki," he said. "It's not much to look at, but there's one thing about it I like—it floats." 

Our party was divided equally between the Grand, christened with the old name of the headwaters of the Colorado, and its sister raft, named for the Green River and piloted by Art Gallenson. Naturalists John and Frank Craighead, with Frank's son Lance, came down from Yellowstone to add to their study of wild rivers by running one of the wildest of them all. When photographer Walter M. "Toppy" Edwards and I arrived, Mike and Kenny Garrett, sons of National Geographic Assistant Editor W. E. Garrett, were helping to load the supplies aboard. 

Handling the bow lines were Bill Belknap, an old hand on the Colorado, and geologist John Evans, on leave from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. John had participated in the first climb of the Vinson Massif, Antarctica's highest mountain. Fran Belknap and Loie Evans signed on, to our delight, as camp cooks. 

Gift of mud from distant buttes

The riverside willows of Lees Ferry waved a farewell as the Grand and Green drifted out onto a quiet river. We bobbed momentarily on the riffle at the mouth of the Paria, and it tossed a few tentative splashes into our laps. That little river, draining miles of high plateau country, was steadily pumping mud into the Colorado's green current. 

Ron leaned over and scooped up a cupful of the brown water, tasted it, smacked his lips, and handed the cup to Mike Garrett. 

"Here, Mike, get used to our well." 

Gradually but firmly the western cliffs rose against the sun. We drifted under the high silver arch of Navajo Bridge, which carries U.S. 89A across the gorge. Then the high limestone walls drew together and closed gently behind us. We were locked from that time on in the fastness of the canyons. 

The long sculptured aisle of Marble Canyon has been so cleanly cut into the plateau by the river, grinding for 10 million years with rocks and pebbles, that it seems machine-tooled. During its 60-mile passage through Marble Canyon, the Colorado drops some 400 feet. We were riding down a staircase of rapids, step by foaming step into the earth. 

Bill Belknap, sporting a grizzled beard, brought along the experienced river-runner's duffle—swimming trunks, toothbrush, tennis shoes, shirt, pants, and a copy of Powell's book, The Exploration of the Colorado River. 

Now, after we banged through Badger Creek Rapids, Bill gruffly delivered a passage from Powell's journal. The words came to life as we beheld again the places he discovered. 

"And now," Bill read, "the scenery is on a grand scale. The walls of the cañon, 2,500 feet high, are of marble, of many beautiful colors, and often polished below by the waves.... At one place I have a walk, for more than a mile, on a marble pavement, all polished and fretted with strange devices, and embossed in a thousand fantastic patterns." 

Below big, rough Soap Creek Rapids, we found such a place—slabs of polished limestone overlapping like giant black-and-white pancakes. The sun rode high and made a caldron of the canyon as we climbed onto the burning pavement. 

John Evans and Ron Smith stayed behind, dousing the rafts with water. Ron was concerned that the air inside, expanding in the sun's heat, would burst them. 

On a small ledge we found one of Marble Canyon's grim mementos—an old inscription chiseled into the face of a rock: 

F. M. BROWN 
PRESIDENT DCC & PRR CO. 
WAS DROWNED JULY IO, 1889 
OPPOSITE THIS POINT

It was the tragic end of another of those large-scale dreams that so many men brought to the canyon country, only to be broken by it. 

Frank Mason Brown, a Denver businessman, was encouraged by Powell's voyage to try something incredibly difficult: to build a railroad to San Diego through the Grand Canyon. He formed the Denver, Colorado Canyon and Pacific Railroad Company, and set out in the spring of 1889 to survey the route. 

In the small rapid below Soap Creek, at Salt Water Wash, Brown's boat went over. His oarsman was thrown into the current and swept to safety, but a whirlpool sucked Brown under. When, a moment later, engineer Robert Brewster Stanton came by, only Brown's notebook was bobbing on the surface. 

Just five days later the party, led now by Stanton, hit 25-mile Rapids. The current drove a boat rowed by Peter Hansbrough and Henry C. Richards under an overhanging cliff and capsized it. Both men drowned. 

Two nights afterward a violent storm blew through the canyon. "Nowhere," wrote a dejected Stanton, "has the awful grandeur equalled that night in the lonesome depths of what was, to us, death's canyon."

As we ran House Rock Rapids, the afternoon darkened and a rising wind blew silver rain in slanting lines against the shining-wet canyon walls. We tied the boats at the foot of the rapids and scrambled up a steep sand hummock to a rock shelter, where we stood and watched the river change before our eyes. It thickened into a brown stew churning with logs and branches washed down by the storm. We noticed with alarm that our boats were acting as breakwaters; within an hour an island of jagged timbers was building up against the side of the Green, tied upstream. We waded in to fend off the debris. 

A tense drama of men and an angry river was played in the light of lanterns and flashlights. Through a long night we pushed and pulled the boats to keep them clear of twin perils—the rocks of the shore and the heavy daggers of wave-borne driftwood. 

Explorers find an unmapped treasure

In the cool dawn, bats wheeled overhead and a canyon wren sang its heart out in a tumbling torrent of melody that is surely one of earth's most beautiful sounds. Soon after, Marble Canyon revealed one of its secrets. 

At Shinumo Wash, 30 miles below Lees Ferry, Lance Craighead and John Evans climbed a little cliff and made their way around a smooth elbow of rock. They soon yodeled for us to follow. Mike, Kenny, and I climbed up and found John Evans with a rope around his waist. Beyond him and lower down was the mouth of a cavern. 

"Grab on," he said, "and let yourselves down slowly." At the bottom of the slope we beheld a breathtaking scene. 

The waters of the wash, descending from the Painted Desert that rims Marble Canyon, had hewn out a series of chambers in the limestone. They seemed carved out of the finest silver or pewter; the walls, polished smooth as ivory, closed overhead to narrow skylights. 

The first chamber was warm with red light reflected from the far canyon wall. We swam a green pool and chimneyed up through a crevice into the second chamber by bracing backs and feet. Oval-shaped, it held a second pool. Beyond that was an arched doorway leading up again to a third chamber that had the mood of an ancient chapel. All three chambers were quiet, hushed, almost hallowed. We named the place Silver Grotto, a new treasure of Marble Canyon.

Into the unknown—on a shoestring

Orange flames of our fire licked against the night while Fran and Loie prepared supper. The aroma of canned corned beef and cabbage filled the air as I walked alongside the river and gazed across at the ghost of another campfire of a century ago. 

Around it I imagined the members of Powell's band: Powell himself, the one-armed leader, chatting with his brother Walter, who had left part of his mind in a Confederate prison camp. The boys called him "Old Shady," from the lusty way he sang that Civil War ballad. Sullen Jack Sumner, a rawhide-tough hunter and trader, had served as Powell's guide in the Rockies the previous summer, and he had recruited four of the crew—Billy Hawkins, Bill Dunn, O. G. Howland, and Howland's younger brother Seneca. 

Three more members had joined them in Wyoming. One was a young Englishman named Frank Goodman; after rapids claimed one of the boats on the Green River, he left the expedition, gladly forfeiting a chance for fame. The second was Andy Hall, a robust, high-spirited bullwhacker of 18. 

The last was Sgt. George Y. Bradley. A loner, thoughtful, fair in his judgment, Bradley was a man of cool and constant courage. He so disliked "chasing Indians" around Fort Bridger, Wyoming, that he jumped at the chance to join Powell's party, and Powell had enough influence in Washington to obtain Bradley's discharge for that purpose.

Why were they there? Powell, in a last letter from Green River, explained, "The object is to make collections in geology, natural history, antiquities, and ethnology for the institutions assisting the work." He had $1,100 from the Illinois Industrial University (now the University of Illinois), and less than that from the Illinois Natural History Society, under whose auspices the expedition operated. The Chicago Academy of Sciences provided $100, and the Smithsonian Institution loaned some instruments. The rest had come out of Powell's own pocket, now nearly empty. 

He did have one more unofficial sponsor: Ulysses S. Grant, Powell's old commander, had arranged for him to draw free Army rations—or the cash equivalent—for 12 men. He took the cash, to pay his boatmen. 

A shoestring expedition, with, as Powell wrote, a modest purpose "to add a mite to the great sum of human knowledge." All they had to do was what no man had tried before. 

On August 9, 1869, they found Vaseys Paradise, where a clear waterfall gushes from the limestone 100 feet above the river. We also stopped to admire it. In the gentle rain of its spray, the slope is covered with ferns, poison ivy, and wild flowers. Powell, who named it for a botanist friend, described it as "a wall, set with a million brilliant gems." 

Dour Jack Sumner, little given to esthetic musings, called it "a pretty show." Then he added, in Sumner style, "I would not advise anybody to go there to see it." 

Powell's men would have been incredulous, as indeed most archeologists were a short time ago, if someone had suggested that man had gone there to see it 3,000 to 4,000 years earlier. One of the prime mysteries of the Grand Canyon country is associated with caves in this vicinity.

Here, in 1933 and 1934, explorers found about two dozen strange figurines, each made from a single tapering willow branch, split lengthwise, with the ends wrapped back and around to form an animal. 

Since then, other western sites have yielded figurines. In 1954 spelunkers Arthur L. Lange and Raymond deSaussure reported seeing such figurines in four Grand Canyon caves. They also made a grisly find. While exploring the dark reaches of a cave along Cremation Creek, their heads brushed something soft. Their upturned flashlights revealed a four-inch hank of human hair, wrapped in cord and dangling from two sticks. The purpose of the fetish remains unknown. 

Dr. Douglas W. Schwartz, Director of the School of American Research at Santa Fe, New Mexico, made a study of the four figurine caves and obtained the first carbon-14 dates. They were shockers. Two specimens yielded dates of 1580 B.C. and 1150 B.C.—close to 2,000 years older than any other artifact then known from the Grand Canyon. 

What forgotten people could have penetrated to the remote fastness of these canyon caves so many centuries ago? Thus far, nothing has been found to link the figurines with any historic culture. 

Below Vaseys Paradise and the Redwall Cavern, Powell was impressed by "one great bed of marble, a thousand feet in thickness. In this, great numbers of caves are hollowed out, and carvings are seen, which suggest architectural forms, though on a scale so grand that architectural terms belittle them." 

He was describing the Redwall formation, a limestone rampart that girds the river. Its castellated battlements seem to press against the sky. The caves Powell mentions are today called the Royal Arches and the Triple Al coves—huge apses hewn out of the limestone by wind and water. Their shadowed interiors contain inner arches and columns and dark recesses, the whole resembling the burial chambers of kings from a time of giants.

Indeed, from the Arches to the Alcoves, the river has a somber character. The walls lift 3,000 feet above black-stained rock and gnarled mesquite trees. Here the Colorado has collected drear mementos of tragedy. 

In 1949 an experienced river-runner, 79 year-old Albert (Bert) Loper, was swept out of his boat in 24 1/2-mile Rapids and never seen again. We passed the boat, its stern bashed in, resting under a mesquite tree. Beside President Harding Rapids, we left wild flowers at the rough grave where railroad surveyor Peter Hansbrough lies buried under a pile of stones with a large rock as his headstone. 

There is another grave on this rocky slope, that of a Mormon youth drowned in 1951 in Glen Canyon. His body washed two-thirds of the way through Marble Canyon to come to rest here in this solemn, peaceful cemetery.

Ancient ruins huddle high on a cliff

Sun-struck, regal, the basin of Nankoweap welcomed us with light and green trees and wide white beaches. As we ran the curving rapids, a boisterous toboggan ride down a mile of rushing waters, we were able to make out ancient structures, high up where the talus slope meets the wall of the cliff. 

It is a hard climb of 800 feet, more nearly vertical with each step, until the last 50 yards are a ledge-to-ledge struggle. At the top, tucked under the cliff, a series of small store rooms remains in near-perfect condition, even though no one has used them for 800 years. 

Kenny and Mike Garrett squeezed next to me on the ledge, and we gazed out upon a nature so profligate with her wonders that it numbed the senses. Dark clouds had built up far south of us; lightning stabbed a faraway world; then a rainbow arched over the entire canyon, anchored to one rim. 

"How did anybody ever make a living up here?" Kenny asked. 

"They sold hot dogs to river-runners," Mike joked. 

"They had to be mighty hungry," replied Kenny, looking back down that long slope.

Unsolved mystery: Powell's hieroglyphs

Powell had noted these and other ruins with great interest. In Glen Canyon he investigated an old dwelling with a kiva, the sacred underground room which the modern Pueblo Indians, like their ancestors, reserve for religious rites. At the Little Colorado his men found ruins, fragments of pottery, and hieroglyphs—which later investigators have searched for in vain. 

The one-armed soldier-scientist made a shrewd and correct observation, that the ruins were those of "the people who inhabited this country anterior to the present Indian races." In later years, as founder and first head of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, Powell would help to open the long-closed book of the history of our Indian tribes. 

At Unkar Creek, downstream from Nankoweap's cliff structures, the river bends abruptly to the east and churns through rapids in the shadow of a 600-foot cliff. Opposite the cliff, beyond a wide beach piled high with driftwood, a gentle slope contains the ruins of an ancient Indian village. Here Dr. Schwartz and a crew of 20 stalwart students had spent the broiling days of June 1968 excavating dozens of sites. 

"It's good every time," he said. "Going over that rim is good each and every time!"

Doug Schwartz greeted me as I stepped out into the blast-furnace heat. The temperature was 124 degrees on the sand near the river. They might as well have been digging in hell. 

"The heat is bad enough, but it's the wind that gets us," Dr. Schwartz told me. "It blew the whole camp down as soon as we had set it up. Then we set it up again, and it blew down again." 

The canyon reveals no trace of human habitation for almost 2,000 years following the makers of the mysterious twig figurines. Then, about A.D. 700, a new people arrived on the North Rim. Archeologists call them Anasazi, a Navajo word for "the ancient ones." Their history is beginning to emerge from dim nomadic beginnings in the western deserts, through a more settled stage when the people lived in round houses, through the Pueblo period—when they built huge cliff dwellings at places like Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, and Wetherill Mesa. Today modern Pueblo tribes, such as the Hopi and the Zuni, struggle to continue their immemorial traditions in the midst of floods of tourists.

In this long period, the depths of Grand Canyon itself figure prominently in only one brief hour, between A.D. 900 and 1150. At that time the tide of Anasazi settlement swept down from the rims of the canyons of the Colorado into places like Nankoweap and Unkar. 

"I'm beginning to look upon Unkar as a kind of Anasazi Appalachia," Dr. Schwartz said. "Three or four families, probably from the North Rim, came down here about A.D. 950 and built close to the river—more people than we had previously thought. Somehow they eked out a marginal existence. Then they left. We think a great outwash from a storm might have ruined their crops. 

"After a hundred-year gap, a large group moved in and occupied the dunes and hillsides. Perhaps a change of climate caused them to move down here. There are more than 50 sites on this delta—storage rooms and granaries and houses and kivas. Then, by 1150, it was all over. I would say that two or three generations lived here over about 100 years and then vanished. There's a lot we don't know, and this is a hard place to find anything out. I think some answers can be found on the rim."

Eight miles below Nankoweap, the Little Colorado merges with the Colorado. Up its narrow canyon, boxed by 3,400-foot skyscrapers, is the sipapu—the weird travertine dome where the Hopis believe their ancestors emerged from the underworld. 

Powell's party reached the silt-laden Little Colorado on August 10. They had run Marble Canyon in a week, but their store of provisions was dwindling. Sergeant Bradley complained to his diary, "We have had no meat for several days and not one sixth of a ration for more than a month..." And ominously, "The men are uneasy and discontented and anxious to move on. If Major [Powell] does not do something soon I fear the consequences." 

For all of that, Powell camped here for two days to fix his position. It was a crucial thing to know. By his reckoning, they were already as far south as the Mormon town of Callville, which meant that the Colorado had to turn west, through totally unexplored country.

With a sextant, Powell climbed the 2,000-foot cliff near the river and looked westward. There he could see "the edge of a great plateau, from which streams run down into the Colorado, and deep gulches in the escarpment which faces us, continued by cañons, ragged and flaring, and set with cliffs and towering crags, down to the river." It was, as Powell said, the "Great Unknown." On August 13 his boats entered it. 

As we left the Little Colorado, we took note of one other ruin—a chilling one. Far up at the topmost corner of Chuar Butte, small mirrors seemed to be flashing in the sun as our raft moved. "Hey, look up there!" Kenny Garrett said. 

"Somebody's signaling." He scanned the cliff with binoculars. 

"That's the wreckage of an airplane," Bill Belknap said. "You're too young to remember it, Kenny." 

The debris scattered above us is all that remains of what was at the time the worst disaster in the history of commercial aviation. On the morning of June 30, 1956, in a sky spotted with thunderheads, a DC-7 with 58 persons aboard and a Super Constellation carrying 70 people collided over the Grand Canyon. The planes plummeted down almost three miles to a greater unknown than Powell's. No one survived.

Granite Gorge marks a new beginning 

When our rafts reached Unkar, Doug Schwartz and his archeologists, like the Indians, had gone. In a thrill-a-minute ride, we skirted the cliff through wild Unkar Creek Rapids. By evening, we made camp before the entrance to the awesome Granite Gorge. 

On the rim above us we could make out the stone tower at Desert View. It was probably near there that the first Europeans to behold the Grand Canyon came through the piñon forest to the edge of the abyss. 

They were a company of Spaniards seeking gold and heathen souls as a part of Coronado's expedition to find the fabled Seven Cities of Cíbola in 1540. Their captain had a name like the ruffle of Castilian drums—Don García López de Cárdenas. He was searching for a great western river mentioned by the Hopi Indians; he found both it and the canyon it had carved.

For four days his soldiers felt their way along the rim and probed into the canyon. Scouts returned from one descent to report with awe that a spire of rock apparently no larger than a man when viewed from above was, in fact, higher than the tallest tower in Seville. Frustrated, Cárdenas turned away. 

In a cold morning rain, we waited for higher water to float us over Hance Rapids. 

I asked Bill Belknap, our resident expert on canyon lore, how the rapids got their name. "From Cap'n John Hance," he said, "probably the first white settler on the canyon rim, and one of the West's premier storytellers."

"You mean liars?" 

"Never," Bill said. "For example, he used to tell about the time the canyon was so filled with heavy clouds that he started walking across on snowshoes. The clouds started to clear and he just made it to the top of Wotans Throne. It was two days before enough clouds showed up to enable him to get to the North Rim. The clouds were thinner, but so was he!" 

Under the lowering sky, we pounded through Hance, a wide, tumultuous sweep of thrashing waves spiked with rocks. 

Then we drifted into a V-shaped cleft of stark-black schist walls, slanting upward from an unknown depth of earth. It had the feel of a fortress, an inescapable prison of black rock, under a black sky, on the current of a black river. Blood-red piping edged the sleeves of the thrusting rocks. A thousand feet of this satanic stone rose straight up on either side, and far beyond it fiery-hued walls shone in the sun. We were at the bottom, in the very crack of doom.

Knockout punch of the world 

At Sockdolager Rapids some of the canyon's biggest waves roll in a roaring cadence between the walls of schist without missing a beat. Powell thought this was the wildest place he had ever seen—the Sockdolager, or knockout punch, of the world. 

"The waves were frightful beyond anything we have yet met," wrote Bradley, "and it seemed for a time that our chance to save the boats was very slim." 

How different were our rafts—balloons of neoprene that could bend, twist, and wriggle through the rapids—from the four narrow-beamed wooden craft used by Powell. 

His larger boats, the Maid of the Cañon, the Kitty Clyde's Sister, and the No Name, must have handled like logs. Despite stout watertight compartments fore and aft, the danger of such boats had become evident in Lodore Canyon, where the No Name was dashed onto a rock and broken in two. They were terrible to manhandle over boulders littering the canyon floor, and it was infuriatingly awkward to "line" them through rapids—ease them downstream with ropes from shore. Powell portaged and lined the rapids far more often than he ran them.

The major and Sumner went ahead in a lighter craft, the Emma Dean, 16 feet of pine with a dancing jackstaff flying the flag of the United States with its 37 stars. In the midst of Sockdolager, the small Emma Dean was swamped when a wave rolled right over her, but she somehow kept afloat. Then a whirlpool spun her around and she went into the lower rapids stern first. She came out of the run half-drowned but safe. 

Hance, Sockdolager, and then Grapevine—this giant staircase of rapids ranks among the angriest and most dangerous anywhere.

Phantom Ranch—a welcome refuge 

Powell decided that to run Grapevine would be suicide. So, "clinging to the side of the granite cliff," they began to work the boats through on long ropes. Darkness caught them halfway down. The exhausted men secured the boats and crawled onto the wall, where they found inches-wide ledges to stretch their backbones upon while they vainly sought sleep, "tucked around," said Bradley, "like eve-swallows." 

Grapevine gave the Green a spin, too. A flailing rope bit into the valve of one of the pontoon sections and ripped it out as neatly as a cork from a wine bottle. The raft crumpled along its left side and was thrown out below the rapid wobbling badly. 

Repairs made, we drifted toward the welcome beach at Phantom Ranch. 

It was hard to realize, as we stretched out by our warm fire that evening, that two million people, during the course of a year, come to stand on the rims far above us. We could make out lights from Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim, ghostly will-o'-the-wisps floating high in the quiet darkness. 

While the national park embraces 1,052 square miles, the few miles around Grand Canyon Village are the Grand Canyon for most visitors, partly because of the tourist facilities—though these are increasingly strained during the summer. 

The world comes to look and to wonder, and to back away from the brink. 

I had felt that strange fear the first time I stood at the rim near Hopi Point. The abyss opens at your feet. You stand a single step away from overpowering space, filled to the limit of vision with an eternity of aging, crumbling rock. Far below, the river flashes at the bottom of time.

Life zones span a continent

The mile-deep gorge of the Grand Canyon spans four of the major life zones of the North American Continent. Each 1,000-foot increase in elevation is equivalent to a 300-mile northward move. Thus the ravens that float with such maddening freedom from the bottom of the gorge to the top of the plateau pass through four life zones, comparable to walking from the arid deserts of Mexico to the cool green forests of southern Canada. 

In the gorge itself, rainfall totals only 10 inches a year. More abundant rains reach the South Rim—16 inches in an average year—and a forest of piñon pine, Utah juniper, and sage covers the Coconino Plateau there. On the North Rim, 1,500 feet higher, precipitation averages 25 inches a year. The Canadian forest of spruce and fir and aspen is covered in most winters with 150 inches of snow—a deep blanket that has to be plowed through in May, when the bottom of the canyon is already feeling 70° to 80° F. temperatures. 

To know the canyon for what it is, a man must walk down into it. Two trails, the Bright Angel and the Kaibab, snake along switch backs from the South Rim and drop down, down, down to Phantom Ranch in the inner gorge. The park's famous mules wend down Bright Angel. 

The one man who has walked more miles of the canyon than any other must be Dr. Harvey Butchart. A slight man with muscles like piano wire, Dr. Butchart headed the mathematics department at Northern Arizona University until his retirement in 1967. Each vacation he has tramped the canyon. 

He was sitting in the living room of his comfortable home in Flagstaff when I first met him. Spread out on his lap were large maps of the canyon, marked with black lines. 

"Each of those lines represents a hike I've made," he said. "I've hiked about 20 miles a day, about 45 days a year, for about 17 years. It comes out to about 15,000 miles."

Canyon offers no second chance 

I scanned the lines, traveling so smoothly and easily over the white paper, and tried to match them against what really was there sheer cliffs, narrow ledges, plunging ravines. 

"It's a violent environment," Dr. Butchart said. "In 1960, a Navajo from the reservation walked down the old Tanner Trail from Lipan Point and kept going until he fell over dead from dehydration. A Catholic priest and two boys went down near Moran Point the year before. They didn't carry enough water. One boy survived. 

"You have to respect the canyon because there aren't any second chances out there. It's the lure of overcoming danger, and intellectual curiosity, that keep me at it." 

Dr. Butchart can go for four days on a 24-pound pack, eating only dried fruit, cereal, and sardines. We planned better fare for lunch, and he rose from his chair and limped to the closet for his coat. He motioned to his ankle. 

"A fool thing," he said. "It happened a few weeks ago near Elves Chasm. I made a jump," he indicated a span of about seven feet, "and sprained my ankle." 

"Still hurt much?" I asked. 

He smiled. "Only the embarrassment." 

I kept that in mind a few days later when I hiked down the Kaibab Trail. I was not 10 feet below the rim when the entire perspective began to change. And once out from the first line of cliffs and through the Redwall, I stepped also out of time and space.

The canyon soars around you, and you walk on and on and on without a line of it changing, or your objective getting any closer. Your legs float you through an endless spectacle that seems to have neither beginning nor end. What startles, and then comforts you, is that you are absolutely alone, and absolutely in command of your own survival. 

I was climbing down through two billion years of the history of our planet. My footprints stirred the dust of vanished deserts; my boots crunched the tiny skeletons of creatures that lived in seas long gone. It gives a man some measure of eternity. 

It is easy to say that shale is simply hardened mud, that sandstone is just sand grains cemented together, or that tiny sea creatures gave up their shells to make limestone. But to see towering 200-foot cliffs of sandstone surmounted by 650 feet of shale, topped by 700 feet of limestone and another 800 feet of sandstone and shale, and more above that—it gives one the eerie feeling of looking deep into the very ribs of our planet.

Powell returned to seek new answers

Canyon geologists are fond of the story of the cowboy who rode to the brink, looked down, and remarked to his horse, "By golly, something happened here!" 

Powell dedicated many years of his life to finding out what did happen. In the early 1870's he returned to the canyon country with geological expeditions better equipped than his first; the maps they produced filled in white spaces in the United States atlas. The major was influential in establishing the U. S. Geological Survey, and became its second director. He was also one of the founders of the National Geographic Society. 

Those honors and achievements were far in the future, however, when his tired band made their way to the beach at Bright Angel Creek, where Phantom Ranch, a picturesque glen of cottonwood trees and rustic wood-and stone cabins, now stands. The major took a sad inventory: "We have now only musty flour sufficient for ten days, and a few dried apples .... We must make all haste possible." 

The Craigheads had to leave us at Phantom Ranch, but the Grand and the Green went on, hastening after Powell.

Beyond the hostile waters of Hakatai and Walthenberg Rapids, the massive Redwall seems to step closer to the river. The Colorado swings south into a wide U-shaped bend, around Explorers Monument—a panorama of baking walls of such magnitude that our rafts seemed like tiny chips awash in the gutter of a Wall Street. In this stupendous landscape, the canyon has hidden away one of its delicate wonders. 

We tied to the left bank and made our way across a rocky, stove-hot talus to the side of a small stream. Over great boulders, around a series of stepladdered pools, is Elves Chasm, where Royal Arch Creek finds its way to river level by way of a beautiful waterfall. 

The fall plunges into a deep pool, and with in moments John Evans was plunging with it. His roar of pure delight at the freshness and coolness of the water echoed in the small canyon. The water creates a microclimate of moist vegetation—maidenhair ferns cling to the stony walls, and brilliant monkey flowers, like red orchids, peer from a lush garden of greenery. 

A shadow dimmed the canyon as we got back into the boats. "Looks like it's time for our daily thunderstorm," Mike said. 

But this one was different. The sky turned blue-black as we drifted downstream, and the rain came washing through the air in vast translucent sheets. Then we saw a sight that drew us to the shore again for a closer look.

Flash flood plunges into space 

Through a notch at the distant top of the southern Redwall, a gigantic muddy waterfall was cascading down, a fantastic feather of red water billowing out through a thousand feet of space. 

The fall dropped down into a basin hidden from our view by a line of cliffs, from which a 300-foot spillway of sandstone led over broken stones to the river. 

We walked toward it, half-blinded by the driving rain but still gazing in astonishment at the spectacle of that mighty fall. 

"Where can all that water be going?" I asked Bill Belknap. 

"Well, there's only one place it can come out," he said. As if on cue, an angry sea flared up at the top of the spillway ahead and exploded down the steps toward us. 

"Run! Run!" yelled Ron Smith. 

We leaped over boulders like bighorn sheep as the flash flood roared down the gully, grabbing at our heels before it whooshed down to the river and spilled a torrent of red mud into the brown stream. 

"After a shower," wrote Bradley, "it is grand to see the cascades leap from the cliffs." 

But how grand he did not say, and we had not imagined until we saw it.

The next day, in flooding sunlight that filled the vast gorge with warmth, we turned west with the river and entered a most majestic place. Conquistador Aisle seems designed for ceremonies of the gods. Its 4,000-foot walls march in procession on either side, adorned with huge bays. Its monumental rhythm, from river to rim, gives the awed traveler an impression of power beyond man's imagining. 

But the Colorado exacts a price for such beauty, as it had from us in the throat of Crystal Rapids: water smashing aboard, the raft groaning as decks slip and ropes turn to iron from strain, a cavern of water opening before us as we veer away from the cliff and slip into the maw. The great wave hits us. With a crack like a rifle shot, Toppy Edwards' waterproof photographic rig—15 pounds of camera and case bolted to a heavy tripod—snaps off and hurtles backward past his head like an artillery shell. 

And alternately, for every hazard the canyon offers a reward—the relief of sun-warmed sand on water-wrinkled feet, the pristine world of polished stones and cleanly sculptured white sand bars, the chill splash of shade under a tamarisk tree, the skittering flight of bats as they pour like blown leaves from a high cave, chuckwallas and collared lizards scampering away from the crackle of a bright driftwood fire. 

One night in particular will remain in my memory. We were camped on a beach below a big and rough rapid. John Evans was plinking his guitar and singing—"Roll, Riiiver!"—when a glow lighted the crests of the cliffs above us.

"What on earth is that?" 

Then we realized it was moonlight, bathing the high world above us before it had by a side stream, we encountered our first desert bighorn sheep, standing like a majestic trademark on the rim above us. 

The bighorn has lived in the canyon for many thousands of years, but the burro was introduced only recently, by prospectors in the last century or so. Naturalists call it an "exotic," an improbable word when applied to this long-eared, ambling animal. 

In the competition between bighorn and burro for water holes and forage, the exotic is clearly winning and the native losing. The National Park Service, faced with a hard decision, has found it necessary to control the burros' numbers lest they starve out the mountain sheep altogether. 

As we slipped ever downstream, we made one brief side trip that Powell did not—into Havasu Canyon by way of its almost hidden entrance. Havasu Creek has cut so narrow a passage to the river that a man can stand in the middle and touch each side. Beyond is a spacious glade with green grass—real grass—and crystal-clear pools that bubble and gush between silver rocks under a canopy of leaves.

Up this side canyon eight miles, beyond huge and spectacular waterfalls, lies the verdant Shangri-La of 260 Havasupai Indians, where their tribe has lived for centuries. 

In 1776, more than two centuries after Cárdenas had discovered the Grand Canyon, a Spanish priest, Francisco Tomás Garcés, found his way into Havasu Canyon by "a very precipitous trail." He stayed for five days with the Havasupai, noting with amazement that the canyon was so deep that the sun did not become visible until ten in the morning. 

In recent years the number of tourists seeking out this Eden has increased, despite the hardships of reaching the village, Supai, by a long horseback trek from the plateau.

(The best summers of my life were spent at the Grand Canyon Lodge. Now it’s gone.)

Where water met a river of fire

We had been in the canyon for 20 days when we reached Lava Falls Rapids, 180 miles from Lees Ferry. Here a cataclysmic event a million years ago dammed the Colorado. Erupting from a canyon to the north, a river of lava poured into the great gorge.  

Worn and hungry as he was when he discovered the place, Powell was carried away by it. "What a conflict of water and fire there must have been here!" he wrote. "Just imagine a river of molten rock, running down into a river of melted snow. What a seething and boiling of the waters; what clouds of steam rolled into the heavens!" 

Over the years, the Colorado has gnawed away the lava dam, and fallen boulders have created the river's most fearful rapids. 

High above our camp at Lava Falls towered Toroweap Overlook on the North Rim. It is the only place on the canyon rims reachable by automobile where the visitor can look straight down on the river. 

On the way to Lees Ferry, I had found my way to Toroweap down the 65 miles of dirt road from the end of the pavement near Fredonia. I had also found the comfortable stone house of Ranger John Riffey, a spare, weathered man of wry humor who has patrolled this 200,000-acre district of virtual wilderness for 25 years. 

"When I came here, I figured I'd do 10,000 acres a year, and have it all covered once before I go," he said. "But I still see something new every day—a sure sign of failing memory."

We drove down to the overlook. With my heart banging like a loose piston, I inched along a narrow shelf toward the edge and peered over into nearly 3,000 feet of blue space. At the bottom, the brown back of the Colorado River glinted in the sun; muted by distance, the thunder of its rapids sounded like a sustained violin note. 

I dangled my feet over the edge and sat there, stunned by the scale of the scenery. It seemed to me I could throw a rock across the gorge; yet the opposite canyon wall was three-quarters of a mile away. 

The rim at Toroweap seemed very far away as the Grand and the Green fought through spectacular Lava Falls and entered the canyon's little-known western portion. 

Powell, at this point, was racing for his life. On August 25 the men lined the boats through Lava Falls. Bradley noted, "We commenced our last sack of flour tonight." 

The following day their spirits lifted with a long run through the widening canyon. "A few days like this," Powell exulted, "and we are out of prison." Then they came, near noon on August 27, to Separation Canyon and its huge rapids. "To run it would be sure destruction," Powell noted glumly, though he later decided to make the attempt. "The spectacle is appalling to us.... There is discontent in camp...," Bradley wrote. "I fear some of the party will take to the mountains...."

Three leave river—to die on land 

The next day three of the men, the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn, refused to go on. 

They preferred to risk climbing out. Powell's lead boat, the Emma Dean, was beached and abandoned, and the other two were lightened by leaving behind barometers, fossils, minerals, and ammunition. Bradley described how the depleted party "dashed out into the boiling tide with all the courage we could muster. We rowed with all our might until the billows became too large to do anything but hold on... and by good fortune both boats came out at the bottom." 

They waited to see if their comrades might now take the Emma Dean and run the rapid. But the three had shouldered their guns and gone—walking up what has been called, ever since, Separation Canyon. 

Separation is not a "good out," as old canyon hands put it, though it looks like one. From our camp at the riffle—the rapid is now drowned under water backed up by Hoover Dam—I walked up the canyon, and the illusion is one of a wide boulevard between distant buttes glowing rust and gold in the sun. It invites the traveler, weary of his canyon prison, but leads into many blind canyons.

Nevertheless, the Howlands and Dunn puzzled their way out. At the top, as Powell heard the next year from a Mormon scout, they met a band of Shivwits Indians, who fed them. The next day they went on. No sooner had they gone than a messenger arrived, telling the Indians that a small band of prospectors had killed a squaw. The Shivwits naturally assumed that Powell's men were the guilty ones. They tracked them to a water hole, where the men had made camp, and "filled them full of arrows." 

On Sunday, August 29, 1869, Powell's remaining boats covered 42 1/2 miles through country improving all the way. And the following day, at noon, they were out. 

Ten men and four boats had set out from Green River, Wyoming, 1,000 miles and 98 days before. Now two boats and six men—the Powell brothers, Bradley, Sumner, Hall, and Hawkins—merged from the unknown. 

They came upon a party of Mormons, three men and a boy, hauling a seine at the mouth of the Virgin River. They were only 20 miles from the town of Callville. Their long, dangerous ordeal was over.

Gateway to the outside world

"Our joy," wrote Powell, "is almost ecstasy." Bradley's last sentence was, "I wrote a line ... to assure Mother I was all right, but I was so intoxicated with joy at getting through... I don't know what I wrote." 

We felt some of that same release. The Grand Wash Cliffs opened their portals to the west and the blue sky widened as the Grand and the Green, mud-caked and much used, entered the choppy sea of Lake Mead. Yellow wild flowers spilled down a brown hill, and a fresh wind turned back the leaves of trees. 

"Well, we made it all in one piece," Ron said. He spoke for all of us, but, strangely, we also had a touch of regret. We looked back at the Grand Wash Cliffs, the canyon's western gateway, and Mike Garrett said, "Maybe we'll do it again someday." 

That is what we were all thinking. That lonely, lost, beautiful world at the bottom of the canyon had cast its spell. I would always hear a canyon wren singing somewhere in my memory.