The Emerald Mile
In the winter of 1983, the largest El Niño event on record, a series of "superstorms," battered the West. That spring, a massive snowmelt sent runoff racing down the Colorado River toward the Glen Canyon Dam. As the water filled the dam, worried federal officials desperately scrambled to avoid a dramatic dam failure. In the midst of this crisis, a trio of river guides secretly launched a small, hand-built wooden boat, a dory named the Emerald Mile, into the Colorado just below the dam's base and rocketed downstream, where the torrents of water released by the dam engineers had created a maelstrom. The river was already choked with the wreckage of commercial rafting trips: injured passengers clung to the remnants of three-ton motorboats that had been torn to pieces. The chaos had claimed its first fatality, further launches were forbidden, and rangers were conducting the largest helicopter evacuation in the history of Grand Canyon National Park. A river run under such conditions seemed to border on the suicidal, but Kenton Grua, the captain of that dory, planned to use the flood as a hydraulic slingshot that would hurl him and two companions through the most ferocious white water in North America on the fastest boat ride ever through the Grand Canyon.
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What Hacker News says
- There is a great book called The Emerald Mile that touches on some of this history, and other Grand Canyon history, using the story of the fastest traversal as the narrative device. Highly recommend. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15803144-the-emerald-mil...
- For people who find this interesting I would highly recommend the book Emerald Mile [0]. Amazingly well written book about glen canyon, grand canyon, lake powell, glen canyon dam, dorys people, racing boats down the canyon and a near catastrophe in the dam building.
Also lets not forget the classic Desert Solitaire [1]. It too is well written and very interesting, in the book they take small inflatable boats and just float down Glen Canyon not long before it gets flooded.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15803144-the-emerald-mil...
- Just read the Emerald Mile - great read. I was interested in the story of running the river, but the story of the dam and its near failure was the best part. For anyone interested in the engineering of the dam, it’s well worth a read, and youcan skip the parts about the boats if you want.
- Three books anyone interested in the Colorado River generally or Glen Canyon Dam specifically should read are
Cadillac Desert. A history of how all the dams came to be.
The Emerald Mile. Things got pretty perilous at Glen Canyon Dam owing to it being too full at the wrong time of the year. In the midst of this, three guys decide to take advantage of flow levels we're unlikely to see again in our lifetimes to set an all time record for running the Grand Canyon. This is on my personal list of the greatest true stories ever told.
Down The River (or anything else by Edward Abbey, really). The titular essay is about a trip down the Colorado. Abbey was an ardent critic of Glen Canyon Dam for flooding Glen Canyon. Better known for writing The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, but Down the River more specifically deals with the Colorado.
- Edward Abbey is on my reading list but I haven't gotten there yet. I will definitely recommend The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko. It says its a story of the fastest trip down the Grand Canyon but its really a story of the history of the river and the balance that society has currently chosen between recreation/conservation and development. It also has a great description of the major problems at the Glen Canyon Dam in 1983
