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Title: Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico
Author: E. L. Kolb
Release Date: August 10, 2004 [EBook #13150]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE GRAND CANYON ***

THROUGH THE GRAND CANYON FROM WYOMING TO MEXICO
By E.L. Kolb
With a Foreword by Owen Wister
New Edition

With Additional Illustrations
(72 Plates)
From Photographs by the Author and His Brother

TO THE MANY FRIENDS WHO "PULLED" FOR US, IF NOT WITH US DURING THE ONE
HUNDRED ONE DAYS OF OUR RIVER TRIP, THIS VOLUME IS RESPECTFULLY
DEDICATED.

It is a dogged courage of which the author of this book is the serene
possessor--shared equally by his daring brother; and evidence of this
bravery is made plain throughout the following pages. Every youth who
has in him a spark of adventure will kindle with desire to battle his
way also from Green River to the foot of Bright Angel Trail; while
every man whose bones have been stiffened and his breath made short by
the years, will remember wistfully such wild tastes of risk and
conquest that he, too, rejoiced in when he was young.

Whether it deal with the climbing of dangerous peaks, or the descent
(as here) of some fourteen hundred miles of water both mysterious and
ferocious, the well-told tale of a perilous journey, planned with head
and carried through with dauntless persistence, always holds the
attention of its readers and gives them many a thrill. This tale is
very well told. Though it is the third of its kind, it differs from
its predecessors more than enough to hold its own: no previous
explorers have attempted to take moving pictures of the Colorado River
with themselves weltering in its foam. More than this: while the human
race lasts it will be true, that any man who is lucky enough to fix
upon a hard goal and win it, and can in direct and simple words tell
us how he won it, will write a good book.

Perhaps this planet does somewhere else contain a thing like the
Colorado River--but that is no matter; we at any rate in our continent
possess one of nature's very vastest works. After The River and its
tributaries have done with all sight of the upper world, have left
behind the bordering plains and streamed through the various gashes
which their floods have sliced in the mountains that once stopped
their way, then the culminating wonder begins. The River has been
flowing through the loneliest part which remains to us of that large
space once denominated "The Great American Desert" by the vague maps
in our old geographies. It has passed through regions of emptiness
still as wild as they were before Columbus came; where not only no man
lives now nor any mark is found of those forgotten men of the cliffs,
but the very surface of the earth itself looks monstrous and extinct.
Upon one such region in particular the author of these pages dwells,
when he climbs up out of the gulf in whose bottom he has left his boat
by the River, to look out upon a world of round gray humps and hollows
which seem as if it were made of the backs of huge elephants. Through
such a country as this, scarcely belonging to our era any more than
the mammoth or the pterodactyl, scarcely belonging to time at all,
does the Colorado approach and enter its culminating marvel. Then, for
283 miles it inhabits a nether world of its own. The few that have
ventured through these places and lived are a handful to those who
went in and were never seen again. The white bones of some have been
found on the shores; but most were drowned; and in this water no
bodies ever rise, because the thick sand that its torrent churns along
clogs and sinks them.

This place exerts a magnetic spell. The sky is there above it, but not of it. Its being is apart; its climate; its light; its own. The beams of the sun come into it like visitors. Its own winds blow through it, not those of outside, where we live. The River streams down its

mysterious reaches, hurrying ceaselessly; sometimes a smooth sliding
lap, sometimes a falling, broken wilderness of billows and whirlpools.
Above stand its walls, rising through space upon space of silence.
They glow, they gloom, they shine. Bend after bend they reveal
themselves, endlessly new in endlessly changing veils of colour. A
swimming and jewelled blue predominates, as of sapphires being melted
and spun into skeins of shifting cobweb. Bend after bend this trance
of beauty and awe goes on, terrible as the Day of Judgment, sublime as
the Psalms of David. Five thousand feet below the opens and barrens of
Arizona, this canyon seems like an avenue conducting to the secret of
the universe and the presence of the gods.

Is much wonder to be felt that its beckoning enchantment should have
drawn two young men to dwell beside it for many years; to give
themselves wholly to it; to descend and ascend among its buttressed
pinnacles; to discover caves and waterfalls hidden in its labyrinths;
to climb, to creep, to hang in mid-air, in order to learn more and
more of it, and at last to gratify wholly their passion in the great
adventure of this journey through it from end to end? No siren song
could have lured travellers more than the siren silence of the Grand
Canyon: but these young men did not leave their bones to whiten upon
its shores. The courage that brought them out whole is plain
throughout this narrative, in spite of its modesty.--OWEN WISTER.

This is a simple narrative of our recent photographic trip down the
Green and Colorado rivers in rowboats--our observations and
impressions. It is not intended to replace in any way the books
published by others covering a similar journey. Major J.W. Powell's
report of the original exploration, for instance, is a classic,
literary and geological; and searchers after excellence may well be
recommended to his admirable work.

Neither is this chronicle intended as a handbook of the territory
traversed--such as Mr. F.S. Dellenbaugh's two volumes: "The Romance of
the Grand Canyon," and "A Canyon Voyage." We could hardly hope to add
anything of value to his wealth of detail. In fact, much of the data
given here--such as distances, elevations, and records of other
expeditions--is borrowed from the latter volume. And I take this
opportunity of expressing our appreciation to Mr. Dellenbaugh for his
most excellent and entertaining books.

We are indebted to Mr. Julius F. Stone, of Columbus, Ohio, for much
valuable information and assistance. Mr. Stone organized a party and
made the complete trip down the Green and Colorado rivers in the fall
and winter of 1909, arriving at Needles, California, on November 27,
1909. He freely gave us the benefit of his experience and presented us
with the complete plans of the boats he used.

One member of this party was Nathan Galloway, of Richfield, Utah. To
him we owe much of the success of our journey. Mr. Galloway hunts and
traps through the wilds of Utah, Colorado, and Arizona, and has a fame
for skill and nerve throughout this entire region. He makes a yearly