Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Nearly all of the time, the creeks that plunge down the ravines of the Grand Canyon will barely float a walnut shell, but the flash floods resulting from a desert downpour can dislodge boulders as big as a jitney bus. Tumbled by gravity, the boulders carom into the main river and sit there, creating a dam, which doesn’t so much stop the river as make it mad. Except for the rapids of the Susitna, the Niagara, and perhaps a couple of rivers in Canada, the modern Colorado’s rapids are the biggest on the continent. Before the dams were built, however, the Colorado’s rapids were really big. At Lava Falls, where huge chunks of basalt dumped in the main river create a thirty-foot drop, waves at flood stage were as high as three-story houses. There was a cycling wave at the bottom that, every few seconds, would burst apart with the retort of a sixteen-inch gun, drenching anyone on either bank of the river—two hundred feet apart. To run Lava Falls today, in a thirty-foot Hypalon raft, wrapped in a Mae West life jacket, vaguely secure in the knowledge that a rescue helicopter sits on the canyon rim, is a lesson in panic. The Powell expedition was running most of the canyon’s rapids in a fifteen-foot pilot boat made of pine and a couple of twenty-one-foot dories made of oak—with the rudest of life jackets, without hope of rescue, without a single human being within hundreds of miles. And Powell himself was running them strapped to a captain’s chair, gesticulating wildly with his one ...