Almanac - Grand Canyon - Powell
CANYON ALMANAC
JOHN WESLEY POWELL'S REPORT
A largely self-taught naturalist and explorer, John Wesley Powell led the first recognized Grand Canyon navigation in 1869. The mission produced epic scientific, geographical and geological reports on the terrain Powell called “The Great Unknown.” But as the passage below forecasts, the voyage was far from smooth, with lost boats, lost provisions and near starvation in the canyon’s depths. Three of Powell’s companions did not return.
Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries (1875)
All the scenic features of this cañon land are on a giant scale, strange and weird. The streams run at depths almost inaccessible; lashing the rocks which beset their channels; rolling in rapids, and plunging in falls, and making a wild music which but adds to the gloom of the solitude. … Low mesas, dry and treeless, stretch back from the brink of the cañon, often showing smooth surfaces of naked, solid rock. In some places, the country rock being composed of marls, the surface is a bed of loose, disintegrated material, and you walk through it as in a bed of ashes. Often these marls are richly colored and variegated.
In other places, the country rock is a loose sandstone, the disintegration of which has left broad stretches of drifting sand, white, golden, and vermilion. Where this sandstone is a conglomerate, a paving of pebbles has been left, a mosaic of many colors, polished by the drifting sands, and glistening in the sunlight.
… These cañon gorges, obstructing cliffs and desert wastes, have prevented the traveler from penetrating the country, so that, until the Colorado River Exploring Expedition was organized, it was almost unknown. Yet enough had been seen to foment rumor, and many wonderful stories have been told in the hunter's cabin and prospector's camp. Stories were related of parties entering the gorge in boats, and being carried down with fearful velocity into whirlpools, where all were overwhelmed in the abyss of waters; others, of underground passages for the great river, into which boats had passed never to be seen again. It was currently believed that the river was lost under the rocks for several hundred miles. There were other accounts of great falls, whose roaring music could be heard on the distant mountain-summits.
There were many stories current of parties wandering on the brink of the cañon, vainly endeavoring to reach the waters below, and perishing with thirst at last in sight of the river which was roaring its mockery into dying ears. The Indians, too, have woven the mysteries of the cañons into the myths of their religion. … More than once have I been warned by the Indians not to enter this cañon. They considered it disobedience to the gods and contempt for their authority, and believed that it would surely bring upon me their wrath.
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FURTHER EXPLORATION
Read more from this classic of canyon literature here.
Taylor Bruce