The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hopi village of Tusayan, then headed through a forest of piñon and juniper trees until, to their surprise, the ground abruptly gave way, and they found themselves gazing across what appeared to be an inland ocean of air. Here they confronted a vision that future visitors to this remarkable corner of the world would one day deem more wondrous than the mythical riches of Cíbola.

    P erhaps it’s worth pausing for a moment to acknowledge, from the standpoint of Europe’s exploration and conquest of the New World, just how early in the morning it still was. In the autumn of 1540, there was not a single European settlement—not one—along any coastline or anywhere within the interior of what would eventually become the United States. It would be sixty-seven years before the first group of English settlers began battling starvation at Jamestown, and another thirteen years after that before the Pilgrims sighted the cliffsof Cape Cod from the decks of the Mayflower. George Washington would not be born for almost two more centuries, and the better part of a third would slip past before Lewis and Clark even started their great journey up the Missouri River system. Yet there stood Cárdenas and his men, on the brink of a prodigious chasm that was destined to emerge as perhaps the most iconic landscape feature of a nation that did not yet exist. Of all the natural wonders in America—the waterfalls of Yosemite, the geysers of Yellowstone, the great trees of Northern California—this was the very first to be discovered, although discovery was hardly the right word.
    By the time Cárdenas arrived, much of the terrain inside that abyss had not only been traversed and explored but also inhabited, first by three successive waves of Anasazi, the ancestors of the modern Hopi, then later by the Hualapai, the Paiute, the Havasupai, and half a dozen other tribes. The ruins of entire villages were down there, where the granaries had been stocked with corn and canals had channeled water across fields for hundreds of years until, sometime during the twelfth century, the bottom of the canyon was mysteriously abandoned. There were secrets and legends too—places where shamans had worshipped, where young men had conducted vision quests, and where the spirits of the dead were said to cross over into the afterlife. Nevertheless, Cárdenas’s arrival marked a crucial point in the history of this landscape.
    At that moment, the continent from which these explorers hailed was at a peculiar crossroads, with one foot testing the waters of the Renaissance and the other still firmly planted in the Middle Ages. The printing press, one of several technologies that would do the most to shape and transform the future, had barely begun shouldering aside the impossibly laborious business of copying illustrated manuscripts by hand. Johannes Kepler, Sir Francis Bacon, and Galileo had not yet been born. Mercator projection maps had not yet been invented; complex numbers were still awaiting discovery. The words geography and geology had not even been added to the English language. And yet, the first tremors of the seismic shifts that would rock the face of the world were already being felt.
    From a three-story tower within the walls of the city of Frauenburg, the great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was preparing to publish On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres , his treatise positing the radical notion that Earth was not the center of the universe, which would herald the arrival of the scientific revolution. In Rome, Bologna, and Venice, the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci had teased out the conceptual principles behind single-span bridges, comparative anatomy, plate tectonics, aeronautics, and the science of fluid mechanics. And oddly, although Spain was stilla stronghold of religious orthodoxy—and thus fiercely resistant to these new ideas—thecountry that had given birth to Coronado and Cárdenas stood at the forefront of these developments