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Mark Stemm Photo
The
Day of the Thousand Thousand-foot Waterfalls
George Sibley
It
was a miserable morning in a transcendent landscape. We huddled in the
rafts
under a steady businesslike rain, learning about all the leaks in our waterproof
gear, while looking out and up to waterfall
after waterfall, waterfalls
coming freefall in 500 or 1,000 foot leaps over the great limestone
walls in the
lower Grand Canyon. Shifting convocations of
mist, fragments
of clouds drifted through and died against the walls; occasionally
rocks rattled
down the walls, startling us and plopping into the river; but mostly we
just
huddled stunned by the wet chill and that great gray dream of beauty as
hours,
miles passed and the waterfalls kept
appearing
around each turn and bend of the river till we were no longer amazed,
and just
wondered when or if it would stop raining – but not really hoping
for that,
knowing that the waterfalls would also stop.
We'd
been lucky that morning; we’d woken to a threatening sky, but
managed to get
breakfasted and all packed up and ready to go before it started to
rain. We
were one of those instant societies that come together for a couple
three weeks
in the Grand Canyon – twenty-some of us,
under the
guidance of half a dozen members of the tribe of boatmen (two of ours
were
women). Some of us were small clumps of couples and friends traveling
together,
but all of us had been strangers to most of the rest of us when we'd
started
from Lee's Ferry two weeks before the day of the thousand thousand-foot
waterfalls.
We were by then already well into the social sorting of genuines to be
enjoyed,
creatives to be followed, incompetents to be helped, arrogants to be
tolerated,
and the like, as we went with the river by day and a sandbar by night,
setting
up a movable feast every evening, ephemeral civilization at the bottom
of the
debris and chaos of ever-moving water, air and rock that is the Grand
Canyon.
I
was officially there as a “boatman’s assistant”
– thanks to Brad Dimock, a
fellow writer and friend whose life has been
intimately involved with the Grand Canyon for
35 years.
“Assistant” meant I sliced and diced as prep cook, did
dishes, hauled the
groover, and otherwise made myself useful at our nightly
civilization-on-a-sandbar. Beyond that, I was just a passenger, which
was fine
with me and everyone else – no responsibilities out on the river
itself, thank
god.
But
that morning – the rain began around 8:30,
abrupt and hard, just as the boatmen were lashing the last drybags
down. The
groover was already aboard – a sure sign of imminent departure.
But it was
raining hard enough so they sent us back up the beach to wait it out,
under an
overhang because of possible falling rocks. We stayed there maybe 45
minutes,
and watched the world change before us.
Immediately
across the river, we saw water begin
to
trickle in a little pinkish stream out of a notch 80 or 100 feet above
the
river, splash down onto a sloped ledge 20 feet above the river, then
off that
into the river. But the trickle began quickly to grow in size, and then
we saw
another fall start above that one, feeding into it, that second fall
– what, 300
feet above us? 500? John Wesley
Powell carried
surveying instruments that let him estimate heights more accurately
down there,
but I just guessed, then discounted my guesses 25 percent because I
prefer
understatement to hyperbole.
Then
we saw yet a third waterfall start
from the distant
top of the visible canyon, at first just a thin thread of white falling
free
the full height of the tallest limestone, then, within minutes, growing
to
something very much like the pictures of Yosemite's bigwall waterfalls.
And a few hundred feet downstream from that one, another waterfall
came over the rim, and then as far downriver as we could see through
the rain
and mist, waterfall after waterfall....
Meanwhile,
within 15 or 20 minutes, the river changed: the translucent green water
we'd floated on for two weeks became an opaque red slurry that was
visibly rising
as we watched. And our triple waterfall right across the river grew
redder as
more water came down; the top one stayed pink, but the one off the next
lower
wall turned red, and the one closest to us began to look like a great
spill of
blood – the thick brownish-red that blood is while it's still
inside. Its
volume – both quantity and sound – was huge and intense as
it pounded on the
bottom ledge; there was no further mystery about how water
could carve rock down there, or more accurately, beat it to sand
– although
what pounded down on the ledge looked and sounded like something closer
to mud
than water.
The
rain eventually settled down to a steady but less imposing downpour,
and the
boatmen decided we might as well head on down the river. Just a
quarter-mile
downstream, Brad shipped his oars to take a picture; the boatmen have
an
“adopt-a-beach” program whereby they take pictures of the
same beach every time
they go past it, to monitor changes, and his beach was – he
thought – just
ahead.
But
after a minute he got a funny look on his face. “It's
gone,” he said. He
pointed out the place where it had been, his last trip only three weeks
earlier;
now it was gone, the last of it possibly washing out only a few minutes
before
we got there.
So
on we floated – Brad’s beach probably sifting along the
bottom of the river
below us – watching these incredible 500 or 1,000-foot freefalls
of water
off the rim. Some of them were red or pink, but many were the white and
gray we
expect waterfalls to be. What is it
about a waterfall
that is so mesmerizing? It’s something to do with the release,
the letting-go
that we mistake for freedom. And leaping down like these were, in 200,
500,
1,000-foot free falls – something to do with excess too, or maybe
just
extravagant abundance, all that potential energy being just
exuberantly,
flagrantly flaunted in sheer beauty.
I
do not know if there were really 1,000 of them; I didn't count; I was
too busy
watching them, and thus may have succumbed to hyperbole after all, a
common
problem in the canyons.
Despite
having studied and written about “the Colorado Rivers,”
Upper and Lower, on and
off for the past 30 years – mostly more political stuff –
and having a deep
abiding fascination with all of its many manifestations in the life of
the
American Southwest, it was my first time on the river through the Grand
Canyon
– the “Middle Colorado” – which makes me shy
about writing on it, being just a
tourist.
Furthermore,
it’ll probably get me thrown out of this broadshouldered magazine
to confess
it, but I didn’t enjoy the rapids. I’m not a water
person – a sinker, not a swimmer; and getting whapped head-on by
a few hundred
gallons of cold water became a
marginal idea
of fun. Sliding down the tongue of every rapid – feeling the water
pick up the raft the way the lift cable picks up a quad chair at a ski
area, to
carry us into a place where I couldn’t really believe the boatmen
had much
control over what happened – the only thing more rapid than the
rapid was me
rapidly praying to any god or gods lurking down there in the basement
chaos of
creation.
Brad
– who has been down rivers all over the Western Hemisphere
– says the
Colorado’s rapids are not “mean or angry”; they are
just “big and jumpy,” but
“angry” or “jumpy” is a pretty fine distinction
when you’re sliding down one
standing wave into a trough and looking up at the ten-foot thrashing
wall of
the next wave you’re either going to go up or through or some of
both.
I
was lucky; we only had one close call where I found myself standing on
one tube
trying to push the tube on the other side back down from near vertical
to horizontal.
Then the standing wave stood down or something – I have no
delusions about
having successfully flattened it myself – and
we were ejected from the rapid, minus our boatman who
did get thrown
overboard, more or less horizontal again with me sprawled in the bottom
of the
raft.
I
most enjoyed the long calm stretches where the river sometimes hardly
seemed to
be moving – and was in fact often moving back upstream in subtle
eddies as much
as downstream. The boatmen let us passengers row occasionally in those
calm
stretches, and I learned how elusive the current could be – a
mere thread of water
winding among back eddies and upwells and sinks.
But
mostly I was happy to just sit and watch geology and hydrology happen
or not as
we moved slowly through it all. The bigness of the Grand
Canyon
is obvious enough from postcards, and needs no further comment –
it doesn't
help descriptively to use more sesquipedalian synonyms: massive,
monumental, stupendous,
et cetera. “Big” is a sufficient descriptor for that most
obvious quality of
the Grand Canyon.
But
what gradually came to me after a few days was the fragility of
it – fragility
on a scale that boggles the comprehension. We would go past a piece of
rock
that had cracked away from a wall and slipped twenty feet or so, to sit
partly
in the water but still leaning
against the
wall – but the piece of rock was the size of a three-story
building, and one
wondered how far up the opposite wall the wave from its fall would have
washed
our raft. It is all falling apart, down there, but the parts are really
big –
although they do all end up as sand.
The
river moves the sand along – quickly in places, ever so slowly in
others – and the
eddies piles it up against the walls, and seeds blow in and try to
anchor it,
and boats full of people with luggage land there and create moveable
civilization.
But eventually it rains harder and longer than usual, or rocks roll
around on
the bottom and shift the current, and that stirs the sand and it
follows the
people on down the river. Everything is moving on through except for
the
standing waves in the river and the standing walls above the river.
The
really big walls the waterfalls
spilled over
are limestone; the Grand Canyon alternates thick layers of hard
limestone with
sloping layers of softer shales and sandstones, until you get down to
the
“basement” schist and granite of the inner gorges.
At
Lee’s Ferry, where most Grand Canyon trips start, the layer of
Kaibab limestone
emerges from under the sandstones of the Colorado Plateau, rising out
of the
river itself right there, then ascending as the river descends until
within a
couple days it is only occasionally visible thousands of feet above the
river,
capping the high plateau that bears its name. But the most impressive
formation
in the canyon, to this tourist anyway, is the Redwall limestone –
the Redwall
and Temple formations together that create the thousand-foot vertical
walls over
which poured the high falls we saw the day of the thousand
thousand-foot waterfalls.
The
rain finally stopped about midday,
and the sun began to break through the clouds. We all pulled over onto
a big
shelf of rock, and heated up some water
for
instant soup and tea to warm the innards as the sun quickly took over
the task
of warming up the outards. Rain gear came off, poly-pro dried out
– and
somewhere during that flurry of activity, the waterfalls
stopped falling. And already, except for the blood tone of the river,
it seemed
more like something dreamed than something remembered. Who could
believe a thousand
thousand-foot waterfalls?
Several
people on our journey were on their second or third trip through the
canyons.
Brad stopped counting about fifty trips ago. But I am pretty sure my
first trip
will be my last. Mostly, this is because, like I said, I am not a water
person. Everybody needs to find a geography that fits, and mine is the
high
valleys and mountains, where the streams are small and many. Brad
Dimock’s is clearly the canyons; he is in all
ways thoroughly
immersed in the river in the canyon, knows its natural history and its
human
history; his stories from his own history in and with the canyon and
its places
and people greatly enriched the experience of being there for all of
us.
But
another reason for thinking, now at least, that I don’t want to
go back was the
day of the thousand thousand-foot waterfalls.
How could the river and its canyons and the weather, that eternal
collision of
earth air water fire, conspire or contend more magnificently than that?
Accept
the blessing; don’t push the luck; next time I’ll probably
fall in.
Published in Mountain Gazette, May 2009.
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