On June 25, 1983, as the biggest snowmelt in a quarter century raged down the Colorado River, three rivermen slipped a wooden dory onto the thrashing Leviathan of whitewater under the cloak of night, launching down river and into history books.
So begins Kevin Fedarko’s nonfiction tour de force The Emerald Mile, The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History through the Heart of the Grand Canyon.
The book delivers on the promise of its title, chronicling how Grand Canyon legend Kenton Grua and two companions hatched and pulled off the audacious – and illicit – speed record, rowing the 276 miles through the bottom of the canyon in an astonishing 36 hours, 38 minutes.
But The Emerald Mile goes beyond just harrowing adventure. Packed with fascinating natural history, early exploration tales, little-known dam events and the colorful characters who shaped – and were shaped by – the Grand Canyon, The Emerald Mile reads more like a sweeping and beautifully constructed love letter to one of America’s best recognized but least understood places.
“First of all, it’s an expression of my affection and my passion for this place,” Fedarko said. “But it’s also answering the writer’s impulse to sort of open a window to a world that’s kind of hidden and secret, despite the fact that everybody recognizes its profile.”
Fedarko, who has been touring with the book since its release in May 2013, is bringing The Emerald Mile to Durango for a presentation and book signing Thursday at Fort Lewis College. The free event is the fall programming kick-off for Center of Southwest Studies.
CSWS Director Jay Harrison said the center endeavors to highlight relevant regional topics in its programming and is working specifically to address a growing concern with environmental planning and resource management.
“As we developed our fall schedule this year, we kept coming back to the Colorado River, so we decided to book Kevin first,” Harrison said.
Fedarko, who is based in Flagstaff, will be discussing the tale at the center of The Emerald Mile, but he will also touch upon modern issues that threaten the Grand Canyon – including two development proposals that were the subject of an op-ed he wrote for The New York Times in August.
The hope, he said, is to “give expression in a public forum to what an extraordinary place the Grand Canyon is, and what an extraordinary set of responsibilities a place like that carries with it in terms of stewardship and conservation.”
Fedarko, who has written for Time, Outside and Esquire magazines, stresses that he did not discover the story of the speed record. It’s a story that’s part and parcel of the canyon’s oral history, one of the yarns routinely told by river guides around campfires to rapt clients. Fedarko first heard it while he was working on a river-guiding crew.
“It’s woven into the experience of being on the river at the bottom of the canyon around a campfire at night listening to guides tell stories,” Fedarko said. “That’s how I came to it ... so many of those stories circled back to this one season, this one runoff and the events that unfolded in that epic year.”
It took Fedarko a little while, however, to realize there was more to it than a simple adventure.
“The dimensions of this story kind of transcended ... what I would call the adventure genre,” he said.
Instead, the speed run is best understood in the context of the many layers of history, politics and nature that envelop it: the hydraulics and geology that created the place, the intrepid spirit of its best-known characters, the vessels that have explored its deepest chasms, the wall of concrete that dammed the up-river water and the human control – or illusion of control – that came with the dam.
Those factors merged in a wild and nearly disastrous fashion that summer in 1983, thanks to an astounding El Niño snowfall and torrent of snowmelt that caught dam managers unprepared and forced park officials to halt rafting trips. In the confluence of these extraordinary events, Fedarko recognized the components for a book.
Thus impelled, he set out on what would become 10 years of exhaustive research and writing. Through archive digging, interviews with boatmen, sifting through government water documents and reading transcripts, he excavated the story of that summer in impressive detail and staged it against the broader backdrop of the canyon’s history.
The result is a nail-biting and eloquently told tale of man-eating rapids, a reservoir on the brink of overflow, the exquisite art of dory building, fire-filled conservationists, a rule-breaking winter, a singular river guide and a culture of camaraderie and collective awe that exists at the bottom of the canyon.
“It was really about opening a window into a world that captured me, and that I wanted in to try to capture on the page,” Fedarko said. “Suffice it to say, the Grand Canyon is a really, really important landscape that is central, I would argue, to the understanding of any citizen of this country.”
kklingsporn@durangoherald.com
If you go
Center of Southwest Studies will kick off its fall programming with a presentation by Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History through the Heart of the Grand Canyon, at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Vallecito Room in the Student Union Building at Fort Lewis College, 1000 Rim Dr. A book signing will follow. Visit www.swcenter.fortlewis.edu for more information.
