IN THE WAKE OF POWELL

IN THE WAKE

OF POWELL AN ESSAY BY CRAIG CHILDS

WHAT WOULD POWELL HAVE thought seeing an outboard skiff motoring up the Colorado River, rooster tail lifted behind it? This is where he floated the final gates of Glen Canyon in late July 1869. Powell was leading the first cartographic expedition down this river, and we would have been a shock to see coming the other way. This is where the expedition was finishing the last calm-water stretch of Glen Canyon before the limestone gates of the Grand Canyon. Major John Wesley Powell would have looked from his chair, strapped to the top of one of his wooden boats, and puzzled at the scene unfolding before him. The aluminum skiff, driven by a sturdy, weathered man who'd been taking people up this river for 37 years, was towing a wooden dory. The smaller dory bucked and sloshed in the skiff's wake, where it took on too much water and abruptly sank.

I imagine Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran, would have stood from his chair and said, “Holy mackerel, those fellows have swamped their boat!” The swamping was in late summer 2018, 149 years and a couple of months after Powell's expedition. The driver, hired to get us up the river, cut the outboard on his square-backed skiff and looked behind us. The dory sank beneath the river's surface not muddy and thick, like Powell found it, but as clear as an aquarium.

A man riding in the skiff stripped his shirt and dived into the river. He swam to the sunken dory and began gathering beers and dry bags that were starting to float away. I wondered what Powell would have thought seeing our circus the privilege of a known river, not a dangerous and unknown course, as he had seen it.

Every bend brought sights unknown to Powell and his crew. They were navigating a waterway they knew next to nothing about, wondering if they were approaching a waterfall, an inescapable plunge between cliff walls, no way out for them.

At countless campfires, tales have been recited about Powell's first big drops in Cataract, oars lost, boats damaged, or the story of the three men who gave up and marched out at Separation Rapids near the end of the Grand Canyon,

"And now the scenery is on a grand scale. The walls of the canyon, 2,500 feet high, are of marble, of many beautiful colors, often polished by waves, and sometimes far up the sides, where showers have washed sands over the cliffs." - John Wesley Powell

yon, never to be seen again. A bighorn was finally shot in Glen Canyon, 80 pounds skinned, they guessed: a feast for explorers who'd been near-starving on what was left of their bacon and sacks of moldy flour.

After the punishing rapids of Cataract Canyon, making a mile a day at times, they found themselves flushed into gentle waters and rounded cliffs, entering Arizona Territory from the border of what now is Utah. This is where Powell would have seen us and probably ordered his men to row to our perplexing ordeal where, 10 minutes into our expedition, we'd sunk our first boat.

We dragged the dory an East Coast Swampscott meant for ocean and shoal travel, not rivers onto a wet-sand beach and emptied it out. We pushed it, upside down, across the deck of the skiff and tied it down. The dory was our Emma Dean, our version of Powell's favorite wooden boat, and about the same size, at 17 feet long.

The skiff's pilot born in Morenci, living most of the year in Snowflake and keeping a small house in the desert near here started the outboard and resumed our upstream travel. We passed the same streaked and salmon-colored formations Powell saw a century and a half before us. This is where he and his men floated past a canyon system he fell in love with.

In three months, Powell led his expedition of nine hearty souls by wooden boats from recently named Wyoming Territory to the newly minted state of Nevada. They were here to make a map from the top of the Green River to the bottom of the Colorado the last large, unmapped part of the Western frontier.

Powell found that these rivers weren't like those in the East. He was used to lush, clear streams building into big, calm rivers flowing marshily to the coast. Powell was raised in Western New York, in a land of deciduous woods and waterfalls. In 1856, before the war, he rowed the Mississippi from Minnesota to the sea. It was huge and lazy most of the way.

He found rivers of the West to be temperamental, sunk deep into the land, leaving high banks and debris from floods, boulders jumbled into massive rapids. The only water in the country was here. No swamps or lakes, just rivers cutting into rock like band saws.

Powell waxed poetic when he wrote in his journals, his penmanship atrocious he'd lost his right arm and his writing hand at the Battle of Shiloh seven years earlier. Having climbed out of the canyons to a high point where he could see the country, he scribbled, "From which the gods might quarry mountains."

At that same location, one of the less enthusiastic crew recorded in his journal, "The same old picture of wild desolation we have seen for the last hundred miles."

I talked to Christa Sadler, an author, educator, longtime Grand Canyon river guide, and avid fan and reader of Powell. She's listened to and told Powell stories more times than she can remember, fire-lit at the howling bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Sadler said, "Soft rocks give you good water, and hard rocks give you bad water; that's what Powell learned."

"Bad water" means big rapids and terrifying drops, which Powell correlated with the presence of granites and limestones. Good water was calm, where his boats could make up to 30 miles a day, the result of softly eroded sandstone built into canyons a thousand feet deep.

Glen Canyon was good water. Flowing through rock shaped like muffins and capitol domes, as if the land were being kneaded, the Colorado River relaxed. Rapids were hardly big enough to name. In a hollowed-out bend of a dry tributary, canyon walls folded together like drapes. Powell's brother Walter, a traumatized Civil War captain who also was on the expedition, broke into an old Mississippi freedom song. His baritone voice would have echoed as if in a cascade of band shells.

Powell wrote, "It was doubtless made for an academy of music by its storm-born architecture; so we name it Music Temple."

Today, the place where Walter sang is beneath the waters of Lake Powell.

"The singing in Music Temple really strikes me," Sadler said. "Art doesn't happen unless you can rest enough to take the time."

Sadler sees Glen Canyon as a sigh of breath between the battering rams of harder canyons. They'd heard the Grand Canyon was ahead, trouble brewing. "He obviously didn't know what the Grand Canyon was going to be like," Sadler said. "All he had to compare it to was Cataract, Lodore, Flaming Gorge. And those had been extremely difficult."

Glen Canyon would have been like falling into a bed of rose petals. "When you look at the entirety of the river, from the Green all the way down, Glen Canyon was definitely one of the easiest parts," Sadler said.

I SANG THAT NIGHT, CAMPED ON A BEACH, guitar ringing across the water. Moonlight drifted through Glen Canyon, what is left of it: a 15-mile fraction from the dam down to Lees Ferry. The rest, at least 80 miles, is under Lake Powell. We'd come to float the remaining free-running stretch.

In the morning, we loaded up and pushed our various craft — the wooden dory, a paddleboard and pack rafts, six of us altogether—into the current. We pressed upstream, toward the dam. First light unfurled down a bone-white edifice 710 feet tall, a concrete seashell inserted between canyon walls. Reservoir water backed up on the other side seeped through the porous sandstone, lining the cliffs with dark, flowing springs and hanging gardens. The river, filtered by the reservoir, was cold and crystalline, eelgrass waving below us, trout drifting and darting.

I rowed the dory. Port Orford cedar creaked with every stroke in a vessel secured with copper rivets and brass screws, built back in Flagstaff by author, historian and prolific Grand Canyon boat builder Brad Dimock (see Whatever Boats You Float, page 42). This dory was not what Powell would have used, but it was closer than the paddleboards and our gaggle of inflatables.

On the rim stood metal monsters of pylons conveying hydroelectricity toward Los Angeles and Phoenix. Transmission lines soared across the canyon, glistening like spider strands. Two ravens flew along a sunlit sandstone wall, hard to tell which were the ravens and which were the shadows. This is to the dam and be out by the afternoon. We were taking two nights instead. I wanted slowness, for us to settle into Powell's trip through the Glen like a needle into a groove.

POWELL WORE HIS CREW THIN BY TAKING precious time on sandstone strata and fossil recordings. If he was to be the first to map the region, he would do it thoroughly.

He climbed at every opportunity, getting himself up into chimneys and cracks, scrabbling with his one arm. He emerged to see the great, forested rise of Navajo Mountain, triangulating off landmarks he'd spotted from past vistas. This was how he made his maps.

He returned alone, in the midnight dark, to camp, where his crew stayed put, wanting to get on with the trip and for the major to stop fancying around. They were near-starving, two months into the expedition and running perilously low on food.

Perhaps it was his attention to geology, his wonder at this arid, water-shaped landscape, that gave Powell a vision for how the Dry West could be reliably and sustainably settled. He later developed maps of watersheds and drew boundaries that looked like landscape rather than four-square games. He was something Powell would have recognized looking up from the river to admire the birds' grace. He wouldn't have understood the power lines, but ravens, he knew.

The rest of the day we floated, rowed and paddled. The paddleboard was turned into a gear barge, towed behind one of the pack rafts. Our traveling river party passed through cleaves of bedrock, galleries of silver-black patina and cliffs that hemmed tightly around us.

You could float this 15-mile stretch in a day, get a ride up trying to persuade D.C. that the settlers it sent out here would find not abundance, but drought and hardship.

Powell proposed that each watershed be locally governed and managed so that actual decision-makers had skin in the game, rather than being managed by larger, outside entities. He asked Congress to withdraw Western lands from purchase until he could complete an irrigation survey and determine how scarce water could be allocated.

It didn't work. Land speculators and railroads appealed more loudly to Congress. Powell's study was defunded, and the rush to fill the West continued.

Twenty-four years after his first expedition, Powell said to an audience in Los Angeles, “I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands."

"At one place I have a walk for more than a mile on the marble pavement, all polished and fretted with strange devices and embossed in a thousand fantastic patterns. Through a cleft in the wall the sun shines on this pavement and it gleams in iridescent beauty."

Powell was right. He saw the future we're now in: water wars across the West, rivers siphoned from different basins, emptied from one place and poured into another, much of it protested and tangled up in courts.

Sadler said, "When we talk about Powell on the river, he's just a cliché. Beard and suspenders. My interest in him wasn't piqued by this. It was later - how he proposed we settle the West."

She added, "Rather than looking at the land and saying, 'We can do whatever we want with it,' he said, 'Here's what it is, and here's a way we can do this."

I asked if the Southwest would have been as prosperous under Powell's vision. She said his plan wouldn't have ultimately stood, saying, "He couldn't have imagined 4 million people in the Phoenix Basin or 20 million in Los Angeles."

I asked her, "But if it had stood?" Sadler said, "We'd all be better off."

THE SHAPE OF THE CANYON HAS NOT CHANGED since Powell came through. Same bends, same cliffs. End of the day, we explored a dry side canyon that would have caught his eye, a ribbon of shadow cutting into golden cliffs. With pack rafts pulled up through willows and tied off, we climbed into the canyon.

Late-day light shed across the upper palisades. Cool air slipped downward through slots and waterless pourovers, pockets of shade waiting all day to let go of their stores. Redbud trees gathered in the narrowing dim. Sand was untracked but for pocket mice, lizards and beetles. No people had been here, at least not recently. Powell would have been, though. He would have frustrated his crew and tied off, setting tracks to see what he could see.

We followed this corkscrew canyon until it ended in a high, narrow impasse. We gathered shoulder to shoulder, breath to breath in the final, steep squeeze. Powell would have gone higher, I thought. He would have shimmied with the nub of his right arm.

Back to the boats, we put on the river at dusk and floated the bends of the Glen. Stars came out before we reached camp, a swath of bright sky over a dark canyon.

In the morning, we set off from our second camp. Ropes of eelgrass and rainforest colors waved beneath the river's surface. Sun cut through long stretches of shadow, and our boats glided into and out of shade and light.

A crowd had gathered at a viewpoint a thousand feet up from the river. They accessed it off a highway out of Page, standing at a railing for the sunrise. There were 30 or 40 people up there, and we must have looked like grains of rice floating below. Tourists overlooking Horseshoe Bend would have seen a vast desert expanse with an unnaturally clear river winding down inside of it, not much changed since Powell came here, the air tainted with a little more pollution.

Powell would have glanced up to the same point. What would he have thought seeing tiny figures peering down? Four million in the Phoenix area, 20 million around Los Angeles? Would he have been shocked, or not surprised, knowing this was coming?

He had more on his mind than this. Glen Canyon would soon open wide at Lees Ferry. Immediately, it would clamp down again, rocks hardening, leading into limestones and granites of the Grand Canyon: bad water. The tunnel of love was ending, and Powell wrote, "This bodes toil and danger."

The expedition left Glen Canyon behind on August 5, 1869, continuing below Lees Ferry into the rapid-strewn maw of the Grand Canyon. Almost 150 years later, we pulled onto a concrete ramp, end of our journey. Rafts downstream from us were pushing in, following Powell deeper into the Earth. AH

RAFT GRAND CANYON