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

in one crucial respect, because no country had a greater command of water. It was on the Iberian Peninsula that the Romans had done some of their most impressive work on arched dams. Here was where the Muslims had laid down the foundations of reservoir-driven irrigation, and where Christian engineers were now refining the concept of hydraulic power. In short,Spain was the seedbed of the technologies that would eventually converge to harness one of the most unbridled but potentially useful forces in all of nature, a wild river.
    Thus the era of Cárdenas’s arrival at the edge of the canyon offered the first promise of a world that was not only ruled but also controlled by man. And now, here where the piñons and the junipers gave way to the buff-colored caprock, that vision was colliding against one of the most implacable expressions of nature’s indifference to grand schemes—a landscape whose essence suggested that such a conceit was perhaps no less arrogant, and no less rife with the potential for unintended consequences, than a horseman’s thinking that it was a simple matter to run his lance through a dog that was pestering his sheep.

    Y ears later when Pedro de Castañeda, one of the chroniclers of the Coronado expedition, set down the story of this first encounter, he offered not a single detail of Cárdenas’s reaction as he and his men peered into the abyss for the first time. But if those men had anything at all in common with the tens of millions of visitors who would later follow in their footsteps, it’s a reasonable guess that not one of them said a word—that they simply stood, rooted in silence, their breath snatched away by the vision that had been laid at their feet.
    Althoughno one now knows precisely where this incident took place, it’s almost certain that it occurred along a section of the South Rim that is known today as Desert View. This promontory offers one of the most dramatic of all vantage points into the canyon—a place where it completes a great arc, bending from the east to the north in a sweep whose view is so arresting that the National Park Service would later erect a tall stone watchtower for public enjoyment.
    Somewhere close to this spot, Cárdenas and his men found themselves looking out at a formation called the Palisades of the Desert, a dramatic set of banded cliff faces that form the canyon’s southeastern rampart. From the base of the Palisades, a series of benches and precipices descends like a crudely hewn set of stairs toward a glittering ribbon of silver and green that winds through the bottom far below. On the opposite side of that stream, a matching set of cliffs and ledges ascends to the North Rim. And yawning between thosetwo rims stretches a void as wide and deep as a landlocked sea, an impression strengthened not only by the shimmering blueness of the air itself but also by the armada of clouds that scud past at eye level, casting shadows beneath their bellies that ripple and dance amid the shattered stones that lie shipwrecked below.
    Gazing down toward that thin trickle of water winding sinuously between the buttes and mesas rising from the center of the gorge, Cárdenas scoffed at the claims of his Hopi guides, who assured him that this was no mere stream, but a mighty desert river whose width measured half a league across—several hundred yards. Certain they were exaggerating, the Spanish captain dismissed their pronouncements as absurd, judged its true breadth to be no more than eight feet, and ordered his party to begin moving west along the rim in search of a promising place to descend to this creek.
    Three days later, they arrived at a break in the escarpment where Cárdenas directed Captain Pablos de Melgosa and two of the nimblest foot soldiers to scramble down to have a look. Many hours later, they returned with news that this giant arroyo was far more treacherous than the view from the top had led them to believe. In fact, Melgosa reported, they had