Natural Springs of the Grand Canyon

THE QUEST FOR WATER NATURAL SPRINGS IN THE GRAND CANYON QUENCH HIKERS' THIRST FOR ADVENTURE

The interior of the Grand Canyon opens beneath the head of South Bass Trail as if acid cut through hundreds of square miles of rock. Pausing at the edge, I tightened the straps on my backpack as a group of three travelers showed up. We all peered down as if about to jump from an airplane. As we exchanged bits of information about our lives - the quick discussions often had at trailheads - someone casually asked how much water I was carrying. "A quart," I said. Their brows furrowed. They studied my gear and boots to see if I had ever been hiking a day in my life. My thinking was that for a three-day winter hike, a quart of water would get me down a thousand feet, where I would set camp and head off looking for more water in the form of springs. They kept staring at me. I had to break the silence. "How much are you carrying?" I asked. "Three gallons each," was the answer. Hearing of such extra weight made my back ache. My brow furrowed. I studied their gear and boots. We smiled politely at each other, said farewell and set off, equally convinced that the other was going to die. Now, don't mistake what I am saying here. Carry 3 gallons of water if you wish and ignore the ascetic fools who explore the Canyon sweating while you've got enough to gargle and spit out after each meal. I carried only a quart because the Grand Canyon is really a "well," dug 6,000 feet into the Earth, and hosts a hive of springs. In certain locations, water bursts from cliff walls and rushes out of cracks in the Canyon floor. Spilling between terraces and precipices, ropes of water lace the deep insides of the Canyon. It takes only time and endurance to learn to find them. More than 900 square miles of plateau land north of the Canyon gather rain and snowmelt. This surface water sinks into the ground through incalculable cracks, faults and cav-erns beneath. In some cases, the springs fill and empty in a matter of days, while others steadily dole out water that has waited in the Earth for thousands of years. When I came down South Bass Trail, I was still new to the Grand Canyon, but I already had a routine for desert travel. At the end of every day, I suit up with a small pack of empty containers and set out from camp looking for water. I spend more time exploring and hunting water than I do carrying a pack full of gear and food.

Grand Canyon, but I already had a routine for desert travel. At the end of every day, I suit up with a small pack of empty containers and set out from camp looking for water. I spend more time exploring and hunting water than I do carrying a pack full of gear and food.

By the end of that day, as the people I met earlier were likely settling into a comfortable meal with plenty of drinking water, I was thirsty down inside the Canyon. I poked in and out of crevices with the scurrying intensity of a mouse, pushing my finger into soil to test for dampness. By sunset I'd found hardly a trace of moisture.

Just before dark, I reached behind the cables of a black widow spider's web. Beneath a small ledge I felt a sponge of moss. I pushed into the center and water squeezed out. I maneuvered a bottle into place and sat for an hour as drips of seep water gave me a new quart.

While I waited, I pulled out my notebook and wrote details about the spring: the type of rock, the direction it faced, the vegetation nearby. It was small, but enough to keep me alive. Those notes I took began the first of hundreds of pages and many years of recording the springs of the Grand Canyon. Some entries indicate volume, temperature and plant species; others report on taste or smell. One section relates the entire day I timed with a stopwatch the sequence of water drops, looking for some concealed pattern.

As I waited for my second quart bottle to fill, I looked into the dark canyons below. Water waited down there. I couldn't hear it or smell it, but I knew.

The Colorado River, a peculiar beast in the Grand Canyon, remains a stranger to the desert. It hardly visits. It just keeps moving, cutting and growling as if frustrated with the desert's imposing rock. Each time I have gone down the river, the desert passes around me, a quiescent observer of the river's restlessness. Each time I think, This is not desert water, and I tie off the boat and explore far from the river on foot, looking for the real desert water. South Bass Trail had begun my search, and the river now provided a convenient way to get farther inside.

I first came down the river as a cook for a rafting group. After preparing a meal one evening, I abandoned camp and scrambled up a narrow canyon in the rippled orange floors of Hakatai shale. I carried bread and an apple for my own meal. Miles from the river, small waterfalls flowed over domes of rock, sheeting into pools below. I followed them to a slot canyon where six full-grown cottonwood trees extended from the floor, crowding toward the last daylight. In the back of the slot ran a thread of a waterfall. It emanated from a spring in the limestone just above. The waterfall met a small pool, huffing up champagnelike air bubbles.

By its location on the south side of the Grand Canyon, I knew the spring was old, technically known as "fossil water," likely dating back thousands of years - maybe to the last Ice Age. I removed my boots and stepped into the pool of ancient water, moving slowly so the basin would not muddy. Like tumbling balloons, the eggs of canyon tree-frogs swept out from under my feet. I rested my hands on each wall and leaned toward the waterfall. It had carved itself a thin 30-foot-long trough down the rock face. Streaks of its white water slipped into the pool, hardly troubling the surface around my legs. I touched the waterfall with a single finger. The water broke around my finger and rippled the pool below. I pulled back.

Later in the year during a 20-day Grand Canyon hike, I came to a place where the water on the walls dripped like candle wax. Pillars and caves hung over the floor of a side canyon. The rock, called travertine, was a remnant of the mineral-rich water from the spring. You could see how springs had overlapped and migrated over time and left eerie plastered shapes all over the Canyon.

Where springwater moves swiftly, such as in waterfalls, travertine forms slabs of white rock, smooth as sculpted marble. The basic minerals of travertine exist in most of the springs here and are dissolved into the drinking water, which supplies most human developments in Grand Canyon National Park. I once spoke with a man who had worked in the park for 10 years and drank from the park's supply all that time. During his stay, he passed nine kidney stones, which he blamed on pearls of travertine gathering in his body.

I hiked upward through the hard, soapy folds of rock. The spring, the size of a large stream, revealed itself in waterfalls and rock-lined lagoons. So much of the canyon wall had tumbled in, the place turned into a steep labyrinth of chambers glued together by travertine. The spring filled every passageway. I took off my clothes and draped them on one of the boulders. I climbed through dark openings, where streams sprayed over my back. Ten or 12 waterfalls furrowed into the velvet mosses.

I swam through deep pools of springwater, beneath cascading sheets to openings beyond. I crouched like an animal in a hole, pressed against the walls, squinting as I looked up through the drips. Shafts of sunlight shone between boulders.

I looked out from this thicket of water and rock and saw the desert beyond. Prickly pear cacti hung from arid ledges. Sharptipped agaves nested in the dusty debris of crushed boulders. I squared my hands around my eyes, framing out the desert so all I could see was the green shroud around me. It was a mossy, equatorial rain forest in the desert. The plants there appeared outlandish both in number and diversity: rock mat, maidenhair ferns, bear grass, yellow columbines, crimson monkeyflowers, lemon verbena, saw grass, pore-leaves, Western redbuds, acacias, birchleaf buckthorns, squawbushes, peppergrass, Fremont barberries, seepwillows, lip ferns and brittle ferns. And orchids not yet blooming - orchids in the desert seemed nearly mythical.

Maidenhair ferns ruled that particular canyon. They grew upon themselves in such numbers as to build flying buttresses off the walls. The spring strained through the great mounds of ferns, forcing hundreds of gallons of water from their undersides. I stepped beneath one of the balconies. Cold dabs of water spattered against my body until they accumulated andran, covering my skin like winding snakes. The sound of water pouring on rocks at a thousand intervals was that of a long night's rain. I kept my eyes closed inside this rainstorm. When I came out to the sunlight, shaking water from my body, I found my clothes, riffled through them and pulled out my notebook and a pen. Already, in less than a year of traveling by boat and foot, I had recorded a couple hundred Grand Canyon springs.

As I hunted the springs, I found myself enchanted equally with the huge and the minuscule. At some I only drank and moved on, while others were the entire focus of my being there. On my most recent trip into the Grand Canyon, two years after the spring below South Bass, a friend and I walked for nearly two weeks with no other purpose but to see a particular spring. We clawed off-trail with heavy packs, climbing and ducking boulders and collapsed cliff faces. After seven days of this, we reached a spring that thundered from a hole in a canyon wall. Huge, cold boils of water surged from the rock. We put on the wet suits we had carried and dove into the hole. We pulled and swam, breathing cool, misty air along the ceiling of the cave. Following the beams of our headlamps, we spent more than an hour tracing subterranean wells and rivers. All of this was springwater, yet to see the light of day. It felt the temperature of a glass of ice water. In places we swam against the chill, and in others we climbed along damp, exposed ledges. Our lights seemed feeble against the darkness, disappearing into reflective wells of deep green water. The architecture of the cave fluctuated wildly, going from thin, roaring passages to open chambers decorated with grottos and small waterfalls. Passages went on for hundreds of yards, winding deep within the seemingly solid rock of the Grand Canyon.

Far inside the spring, my voice stolen by the clamor of dark rapids, I stood with half my body in the water. My arms held me against the current, hands clutched to sprayed-wet rock. The first Grand Canyon spring I had found behind the spider's web near South Bass Trail could have seemed inconsequential at this moment. It had taken an hour for its drips to give me a quart. Now I stood against thousands of gallons rushing by in a matter of seconds, deep within the source of the spring. In drips or in rivers, the water emerged sweetly from the Earth, fed by the Grand Canyon's underground maze. I bent forward in the cave and drank. AH EDITOR'S NOTE: Before entering the Canyon, hikers should be aware of the Grand Canyon National Park Service's safety recommendations, including how much water they should carry. Sometimes bat droppings pollute pools of springwater, making it unhealthy for humans to drink without treating. Information: (520) 638-7888; www.thecanyon.com.

A naturalist and wilderness guide, Craig Childs lives in the backcountry, and sometimes in his cabin in western Colorado. He is the author of Grand Canyon: Time Below the Rim, published by Arizona Highways Books. Gary Ladd has explored the Grand Canyon for the past 37 years and has quenched his thirst on water from many of the springs gushing from the walls of the side canyons. He lives in Page.