A few years after quitting his job to pursue a longtime dream of becoming a whitewater guide on the Colorado River, former șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű senior editor Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the adventure photographer Pete McBride, with a bold and unlikely vision. Together they would embark on a 750-mile expedition, by foot, through the Grand Canyon, moving from east to west—a journey McBride promised would be “a walk in the park.” Fedarko agreed, unaware that the tiny cluster of experts who were familiar with this particular trek billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.”

In keeping with the two men’s time-tested habit of cutting corners and flying by the seats of their pants, Fedarko and McBride proceeded to fast-talk a group of long-distance desert hikers into permitting them to tag along for the first part of their own through-hike, which began on September 25, 2016. In an excerpt from Fedarko’s forthcoming book, , he shares the grisly details of what happened on the eve of their departure.

“There’s a lot more coming,” Pete warned when he called me that night to explain that my house would serve as the staging area for all of the equipment, clothing, and food that he was ordering. “Your job is to wrangle everything together and get it squared away. Can you handle that?”

“Absolutely. Consider it done.”

Given how many packages were still on the way, I decided it was best to wait a bit before getting to work. When most of the boxes had been delivered, I’d unpack them and start testing important items such as the camp stove, the tent, and the DeLorme InReach, a handheld communicator that enabled two-way text messaging via satellite, but could also be paired with topographic maps on a cell phone—and would, if necessary, transmit an emergency SOS. But for the moment, I simply plucked each new package off the porch, carried it down the driveway, and tossed it into the garage.

I knew that the organizing and testing business was important, and I had every aim of flinging myself into the mission when the moment was right. But, alas, a hundred other urgent and pressing tasks intervened—laundry, napping, mowing the lawn—and despite my best intentions, the pile in the garage continued to grow. Then, almost without warning it seemed, September 24 arrived, and it was time to leave for the canyon.

The post My 750-mile Hike Through the Grand Canyon Started with an Epic Fail appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

To the untrained eye, a whitewater dory is a modified version of a traditional New England dory: the small boats (rarely longer than 20 feet from stem to stern) that were used by 19th-century cod fishermen to ply the gale-wracked sea waves off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. That rich North Atlantic heritage, however, is cheerfully cast aside by the fishing guides who live and work along a pair of rivers in the Pacific Northwest, where the shape of the classic whitewater dory (known as a drift boat on the McKenzie River and a river dory on the Rogue) is said to have been conceived, from scratch, right there in Oregon during the twenties and thirties. According to this story, credit goes to local boatwrights who invented a wickedly lively boat that guides could use to place their high-end clientele—celebrities like Babe Ruth, Ginger Rogers, and Herbert Hoover—over the best pockets of steelhead.

What no one can dispute is that it was the Oregon drift boats that first caught the eye of , the whitewater-rowing conservationist who, together with a vinegary river rat named , began adapting these craft to the Colorado River in the summer of 1962. ( had used wooden boats, too, in 1869, but those were round-bottomed, keeled, and notoriously hard to turn.) Litton’s boats evolved to incorporate a host of new features—a wider beam for lateral stability, closed decking to shed the waves, self-bailing footwells and watertight compartments for storage and buoyancy—into what is now called the Grand Canyon dory.

Regardless of their provenance or what they’re made of (wood, fiberglass, even Kevlar), all whitewater dories share three key attributes: flared sides, a sharply pointed bow that extends high above the waterline, and a flat hull with no keel. That last item calls for an added word of clarification, because while it’s true that a dory’s bottom is absolutely flat from side to side, the hull curves upward and out of the water at the bow and stern. It’s the shape of that hull—a feature known as rocker—that imparts a dory’s signature quality: responsiveness.

On a fast-moving river, a flick of an oar blade is enough to spin a dory on a hot dime or arrow it briskly through a minefield of exposed boulders. Beware, however: such dexterity comes at a price. Whitewater dories are finicky. They are unstable. And they are so outrageously fragile that they will break into pieces if you so much as think about flirting with a rock. In effect, you are the skipper of a floating eggshell.

Remove any of this boat’s signature traits and you’ve got something more elegant than a scow but less fair than a dory. Combine them all and you are staring at a thing of grace, a tool in which form and function blend with such fluid tact that, regardless of whether you are an angler on the Gallatin or a commercial rowing guide on the Colorado, each element of the oarsman’s equation—the river, the rocks, and the rowboat—seems incomplete without the other.
Ìę

The post The Best Little Boat in the West appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

IF YOU EVER take a guided river trip through the Grand Canyon, your guides are likely to tell you the story of Kenton Grua, Rudi Petschek, and Steve “Wren” Reynolds. These men are legends in the tight-knit fraternity of canyon boatmen, largely because of an adventure they embarked on in late June of 1983, when they defied common sense and the National Park Service and set off, at night, to attempt a record-breaking speed run down the Colorado River in a 17-foot wooden dory called the Emerald Mile.

Grua in the Emerald Mile

Rudy Petschek

Steve Reynolds

Kenton Grua

A map of the Colorado River.

Their starting point was the usual spot for Grand Canyon launches: Lees Ferry, a put-in 15 miles below the that’s marked as mile zero on river maps. The finish line was at mile 277: the Grand Wash Cliffs, near the entrance to Lake Mead. To get from A to Z, they figured, would require roughly two nights and days of furious rowing. That is, assuming they lived through it, since they were making their bid when conditions on the Colorado—especially at one notorious choke point deep inside the canyon—were almost as wild as they’d been in 1869, the year John Wesley Powell led a team that completed the first harrowing canyon passage on the then undammed Colorado.

That spring and summer, the river was especially furious, unpredictable, and deadly. Massive, rapid snowmelt from an epic western winter was straining the capacity of Glen Canyon’s mammoth concrete arch dam, completed in 1966, which regulated the flow of water into the Grand Canyon. By early June, Glen was holding back the runoff from 108,000 square miles, a region that included four western states. Failure of the dam’s enormous spillway tunnels was a serious possibility; to prevent it, federal officials took a series of extraordinary measures, at one point increasing the release of water to 92,000 cubic feet per second, the biggest torrent the canyon had seen in 25 years. But the runoff was something else, too: a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience, in the most direct and visceral way imaginable, the ancestral majesty of what was once the wildest river in America.

The central figure in this escapade was Grua, a 33-year-old boatman who worked for the revered founder of Grand Canyon Dories, Martin Litton. Grua, who died in 2002 at 52, was the ultimate river rat, a compact, supremely fit man with an eccentric streak that was balanced by an encyclopedic knowledge of the mysterious physics of the Colorado’s notorious rapids. Before his death, he gave a series of interviews to a friend and fellow guide named Lew Steiger, who was able to record Grua’s memories of the speed run and his impressions of the men he rowed with.

Grua’s partners in the venture were Reynolds, 33, a superb oarsman who was known for his precision and power, and Petschek, 49, who’d participated in the Emerald Mile’s maiden run in 1971 and then helped salvage the boat’s carcass after it was badly damaged in a river mishap six years later.

The men had all the requisite skills, but they lacked crucial pieces of information, since they skirted authority to make their run. They didn’t know that several guided groups (still on the river as the floodwaters rose) had been slammed by the hydraulics; only 12 hours before their 11 P.M. launch on June 25, at an infamous rapid called Crystal, a rafting party was torn apart, with one fatality. They didn’t know that the Park Service had helicoptered in a ranger to stand watch above Crystal, forcing boatmen to pull over before carefully picking their way past it. In short, they didn’t know that what they had in mind was borderline suicidal. And if they had known? They probably would have gone anyway.

A FEW MILES past , as Grua rowed through the canyon’s tamer early stretches, he paused at the end of every third or fourth stroke to glance over his shoulder and peer downstream, looking for the blur of whiteness that would herald a rapid. Wherever moonlight made it down to the river, he could discern the glimmer of wave tops. But in the long, canyon-obstructed reaches where everything went black, he was forced to rely on what he could feel—the subtle vibrations that the river sent through the wooden oar shafts into his fingers and hands, and from there to the places where his deeper knowledge resided. As he felt his way downstream, the river’s contours scrolled along the surface of his mind.

At the same time, Petschek and Wren were relying on a different set of sensory impressions to do their job, the crucial task of high-siding. Drawing on their innate feel for river hydraulics, which they could sense by cocking their ears and gripping the gunwales, they braced for the oncoming waves with a subtle lean of the shoulders or, when necessary, an explosive thrust of their torsos to maintain the boat’s equilibrium.

This work unfolded in wordless harmony. The plan was to row backward through calmer sections to maximize speed, but to push through the bigger rapids bow-first. Every 20 minutes the crew swapped roles, with each oarsman rowing furiously until he neared exhaustion. When his energy began to ebb, he would call for a breather, leaping toward the stern or the bow while his replacement scrambled into the oar station. The order of rowing—first Grua, then Petschek, then Wren—remained more or less the same, with each boatman circling the decks from cockpit to stern to bow as the dory raced downstream.

Combined, the men had more than 40 years of experience on the Colorado. Without that, they wouldn’t have stood a chance of completing the speed run, but even so, they knew they faced a monumental challenge. In the first hour of the trip, each began to understand that the river they were riding was something entirely new, a realization that was sobering and strange but also deeply thrilling.

For more than 20 years, the guides of the Grand Canyon had lived and worked on a diminished river, constrained by a dam that most of them believed should never have been built. But with this flood, time had unexpectedly been reversed, and the past—for a brief and intoxicating moment—had become the present. To contend with these challenges in the middle of the night, without pausing to scout before entering a rapid, all while rowing harder and faster than they ever had in their lives, would bring them closer than any living boatmen to experiencing America’s greatest river in its natural state. This was the Old Man himself, unbound, a thing of monstrous and terrible beauty. To be swept into the Colorado’s embrace, to race over its ancient bedrock, to surrender themselves to the fantastic and melancholy essence of its fleeting wildness, was something to marvel at. This was the river that had flowed through the dreams of John Wesley Powell. And like Powell and his crew more than a hundred years earlier, Grua, Petschek, and Wren were rocketing into the Great Unknown.

AS THE EMERALD MILE blazed downstream, what the men noticed first was how much had disappeared. In the upper stretch of the canyon, virtually every major river feature—the keeper holes, the crashing waves, the braided ribbons of current twisting upon themselves beneath the surface—had been washed out by the massive discharge from the dam. They found themselves considering the possibility that the speed run might be less arduous than they had initially feared.

Was this going to be a cinch? Grua wondered.

The answer arrived shortly after 1 A.M. as they entered a ten-mile necklace of nine chain-linked rapids known as the Roaring Twenties and encountered the first of the bizarre hydraulics that would plague them for the rest of the trip. The eddy fences were massive, and the standing waves—which were supposed to be stationary—were milling around on the river’s surface like a herd of coyote-spooked cattle, shifting position and angle without warning, colliding or collapsing on themselves with thunderous explosions. Trying to feel past these obstacles on the fly was alien and surreal.

At Twenty-One Mile Rapid, they had to dodge a series of moving whirlpools, huge and glistening in the dark. At Twenty-Four-and-One-Half, most of the current was flinging itself directly into the side of a limestone cliff on the right side of the river. Just to the left of that, the water formed three separate eddies, ovals inside ovals like the eye of a cat.

The Emerald Mile was batted about like a cork. Each time it rose and fell to meet another swell, the bottom slapped down with a harsh crack that reverberated through her chines and gunwales. The blows also rattled the white-knuckled crew, who were now wrestling with their biggest fear—that an exceptionally violent hit would fling one of them overboard and whisk him downstream in the dark.

Petschek, always meticulous, had anticipated this possibility and had brought new flashlights for each man to wear around his neck. But that wouldn’t do much good in a section like the Roaring Twenties, where the current was so fast and the turbulence so confusing.

Around 2:15, they punched through the last of the Twenties and entered the Redwall, a section of 360-million-year-old vertical limestone cliffs whose landmarks, lost in darkness, flashed past almost faster than they could register. On the right, at mile 32, was Vasey’s Paradise, where a lovely water-fall burst from the side of a cliff and cascaded through a hanging garden of ferns and flowers. A mile downriver on the left lay Redwall Cavern, a sand-floored amphitheater so vast that Powell had estimated—incorrectly—that 50,000 people could fit inside it. Several miles farther downstream was the site where the Bureau of Reclamation had drilled test bores for the first of two Grand Canyon dams that environmentalists had blocked in the late 1960s.

These were some of the most interesting spots in the upper canyon, places no dory trip would ever fail to stop. The Emerald Mile blew past them all.

AS THE NIGHT wore on, the flat-out rowing and ceaseless high-siding took a toll. By 4:10 A.M., as the men passed Saddle Canyon, a tributary at mile 47, the fatigue was showing in their hands. When a rower was relieved, his fingers would refuse to uncurl, forcing him to slide his fists off the ends of the handles, his fingers still forming an O. As he settled into the stern and peered downstream, he would straighten them one by one, gently massaging them back to life.

In their oarsmanship, all three men were evenly matched. But as the night wore on, Petschek and Wren found themselves reliant on Grua to assess the rapids that lay ahead. For years, Grua had been making careful notes, anticipating what floodwater would do along each bend and curve. As they moved downstream, he called out the invisible mile markers and features one by one, with uncanny accuracy. “Astonishing, man,” Petschek would remember years later, shaking his head. “He’d never run that water before, but Kenton had done it in his mind.”

Around 4:45, Grua warned that they were nearing the top of Nankoweap, one of the longest rapids in the canyon, which now featured a series of heavy laterals—angular, rolling waves that crashed together at the center of the river. As they powered through this crosshatched section of current, they sensed a subtle change in the night. The bottom of the canyon was still bathed in darkness, but the narrow ribbon of sky framed by the walls had begun to lighten, shifting from black to violet, and the rimrock was visible.

For the next hour, they raced through the false dawn while the river, wide and broad through here, swung sinuously from side to side. At mile 60, they entered a new layer of rock, the brown and coarse-grained Tapeats sandstone, and passed the confluence point where the turquoise waters of the Little Colorado River entered from the left. Just before 6:15, as they were approaching Chuar, a rapid at mile 65.5, the first rays of sunlight angled over the rim and lit the upper bands on the eastward-facing cliffs like the inside of a cantaloupe.

“Ah, thank God,” Wren said to himself. “We made it through the night.”

THIRTY-TWO MILES above one of the worst rapids of the trip—Crystal, at mile 98—the men were able to see things that had been invisible in the dark. The eddies were full of flotsam, mainly shattered tree branches and battered bits of driftwood. They also began to catch sight of other river expeditions, most still onshore with their boats tied up. The only people awake in these camps were boatmen on kitchen duty, boiling water for coffee. As the team whipped past, the boatmen stared, wondering what a lone dory was doing on the river at this time of the morning.

Around 7:20, the crew reached mile 76 and prepared to enter Hance, a long, jumbled stretch of standing waves studded with boulders and ledges. They had no intention of stopping to scout it, so they had only a few seconds to take stock and realize that a run through the center was out of the question. Grua, at the oars, decided to bear right and try to ride out a wave train that canyon boatmen normally were careful to avoid. With flawlessly timed high-siding from Petschek and Wren, they flew over the rollers without a hitch, but the size of the waves left them stunned.

At the bottom of Hance, the walls on either side of the river closed up and the morning sunshine was abruptly cut off. Here, the Colorado narrowed dramatically as the river entered Upper Granite Gorge, the canyon’s sub-basement. As the cliffs tilted toward dead vertical, it felt as if a set of stone gates had slammed shut behind them.

Squeezed to less than half its width upstream, the current began pushing against itself, and as the turbulence increased, so did the river’s power. The water seethed and churned, folding back and detonating. Now brute force was required to execute pivots that had been performed upstream with little more than a deft flick of an oar blade. The smallest mistake would flip the boat in a heartbeat.

The size of these haystacks was shocking: some were almost 20 feet from trough to crest, dimensions found on the open ocean. The wave faces were rapidly changing -direction, shifting from left to right and back again, forcing Grua to make furious corrections to meet them squarely:

BAM!—a strike from the left—wham—a blow from the right—with two more ahead, no chance of correcting for both, and a third looming in the middle just downstream—·ÉłóČčłŸâ€”BŽĄČŃ!

The dory reeled—it was about to go sideways and broach—but Petschek and Wren hurled their weight to the right, then left, then again to the right. Up the face of one wave, into the trough of the next. Curlers were coming over the bow from both sides, drenching the men in sheets that were heavy, green, and painfully cold.

Grua rode the rooster tail of current between the final pocket of waves, neatly threading them—but now a 20-foot whirlpool loomed into view. He corrected again—cranking sharply, pulling with his right oar while pushing on the left—and the dory snapped around on a hot dime, spinning 180 degrees. Then Grua leaned far forward, dug his blades into the water, and exploded, pulling on both oars, spearing the boat between the vortex and the eddy fence. And—whoosh—they were through, bobbing in the heaves of the spent rapid.

And so it went. They slammed through the rapids in the upper gorge—Sockdolager and Grapevine and Eighty-Three Mile—then made it past Zoroaster and Eighty-Five Mile and into Pipe Creek and the Devil’s Spittoon. It was intense and brutal and exhausting. But by God they were truly flying.

AS GRUA AND HIS companions approached the top of Crystal Rapid, Park Service Ranger John Thomas found himself wrestling with a tangle of conflicting impulses.

Word of the Emerald Mile’s illicit departure had been reported to a ranger at Lees Ferry, but by the time the news had reached the South Rim, Thomas was already aboard a helicopter and clattering into the canyon, under orders to flag down boats and warn them that the only way to get past Crystal was by hugging the shallow water on the far right shoreline. When the dory materialized, he knew nothing about the speed run. But Thomas was a boatman, too, and the instant he spotted the Emerald Mile the dominoes tipped over in his mind. Nearly 30 years later, he laughed about it. “I knew exactly who it was,” he said, “and what they were doing.”

Thomas’s time on the river had overlapped with the golden age of guiding, the period in which visitation had skyrocketed from a handful of eccentrics like Martin Litton to tens of thousands of river tourists. He was old enough to remember the freedom that had prevailed back then, when a man could launch a boat and disappear downriver without having to ask permission or wait in line. Like everyone who had known the Colorado during that era, Thomas mourned its passing.

Officially, of course, he couldn’t condone the men’s actions. This piece of performance art that Grua was trying to pull off was dangerous, irresponsible, and just plain wrong. In addition to undermining the authority of the Park Service and dishonoring the tragedy that had taken place at Crystal, Grua’s stunt was an insult to the people at the Glen Canyon Dam, who were desperately trying to prevent Lake Powell from blowing a gasket.

But as he stood and watched the Emerald Mile complete its approach, Thomas had to acknowledge the tremors of admiration and envy pulsating through his body. Yes, this was scandalous and deplorable and unforgivably dumb, but he also knew that a speed run under these conditions took ferocious courage and a shining sense of vision—and that, as such, it was glorious.

Thomas had no interest in telling the crew of the Emerald Mile that they had to pull over, so instead he did this: he walked away, pretending not to see. Without looking back, he turned from the river and started climbing a hill to a rock terrace above the rapid to watch the run unfold.

AS THOMAS ENACTED his charade, Grua was busy focusing on a ritual, a silent liturgy performed only at the top of the biggest hellbenders on the Colorado. Every boatman has one, and although the details vary, the basic outline, even today, is more or less the same.

First, you cup a hand in the river and run the water over the back of your neck and face to reduce the cold shock of what’s coming. Then you spit into your palms and twirl your oar blades to confirm that they’re rotating smoothly in the locks. Finally, you settle into silence and begin talking yourself into a mental space where you prepare for the threshold moment—the point where the world drops away, the jitters subside, and a cool resolve seizes the tissues of your chest and belly.

Grua drew several deep breaths and rolled his shoulders. He cast a quick glance toward the shore to gauge his speed, then snapped his gaze back to the current line, bending his mind to the task ahead.

Listen. Stare. Breathe.

Just beyond the bow post, he could see where the river dropped off. Past that line, erratic bursts of spray were being hurled into the air by invisible waves.

And now he waited for it. At the top of every rapid, a moment comes when the topography of the whitewater reveals itself. This happens in an instant; there is no preamble. One second you’re approaching a flat horizon line, the next, what lies beyond is visible in all its fury. That final flash comes like a slap in the face, the sting amplified by the knowledge that the choices you’ve made—your angle, your timing, your speed—are now irrevocably set.

As Grua approached this point of no return, he processed a few last-second details. A slice of calmer water was sluicing past the right-hand shoreline—he could see that now. But that water was too shallow for a wooden boat, studded with half-submerged boulders and laced with broken tree limbs that stuck out like punji sticks.

“Do you think I should cut right?” Grua shouted over his shoulder, looking for confirmation from Petschek.

“You don’t have a chance of doing it,” Petschek called back. “Keep her straight!”

The men braced as the current seized the hull and slung them toward the biggest mess of whitewater that any Grand Canyon boatman had ever seen.

From the shore, Thomas had a full view of the scene, and as he watched he was overcome by a sense of dread. Grua’s route would take them straight into the main hole. What the hell are you guys thinking? he wondered. Why are you all the way out there?

Then it hit him: Grua didn’t know what had taken place at Crystal during the previous 36 hours, so he had no idea of the horror show in store for anyone who failed to avoid the center and pick through the safer line on the right. All Thomas could do was stand there, exclaiming to himself, No, no, no!

PETSCHEK WOULD never forget what he saw as the Emerald Mile slid into Crystal’s maw and he got his first glimpse of the thing that rose beyond the hole.

“I remember looking downstream over the rest of the boat, and there it was, a wall of -water, absolutely vertical, that extended almost clear across the river,” he said. “Between two and three stories high, I think. Just a white wall of boiling water.”

The wall’s bottom face featured a texture of water that rivermen call glass. Smooth and unblemished, it rose cleanly for almost 30 feet, and inside its whiteness there was an aspect of deep green. But the top wasn’t glassy. It was enraged and seething—a churning fury created by the wave’s breaking apex.

To the men in the dory, it seemed as if the entire river was trying to surge over that wall, falling back on itself to create an endless, recycling grinder. It was like a psychotic animal, a leviathan attempting to eat its own entrails.

There was no turning away from this monster, and as they slid into its lair, Grua found himself marveling at the terrifying splendor. “It wasn’t a regular hole,” he later told his friend Lew Steiger. “It was perfection in a hole.” Thomas watched as the dory bulldozed into the trough and began clawing toward the crest. He could see Grua leaning forward, arms extended, the shafts of his oars cambering under the strain. And he saw this, too: the man at the front of the boat, who was wearing a blue life vest, was doing something illogical, an act that seemed to fly in the face of the most basic survival instincts.

With the dory now tilted almost straight to the sky, that man’s best option—his only option, really—was to crawl into the front footwell, using it like a foxhole. If he curled into a tight ball, he might be able to shield himself from the cannonade of water that was about to erupt over the bow.

The man was Wren, and he did just the opposite. Springing from his seat and lunging forward, he seized the gunwales on either side of the bow, anchoring himself to the front hatch so that his torso and head extended far out over the bow post. With his hooked nose and hawkish face, he was now jutting off the front of the Emerald Mile like a chrome-plated swan on the hood of a runaway tractor-trailer.

Wren’s primary hope was that his shift in body weight might somehow help drive the boat through the top of the water wall. But he was also trying to tap into something that transcended ordinary physics. Perhaps when the river gods saw him perched out there, they might fathom just how badly he wanted and needed the dory to get through Crystal. It was an act of supplication, a plea that the river would condescend to allow this little boat to surf through the chaos on the shining fortitude of her own righteousness.

No dice.

As the Emerald Mile reached the top of the wave, it simultaneously corkscrewed and fell back on itself—an end-over-end reverse flip with a twist. Thomas could see the three boatmen clinging like terror-stricken cats to the decking as the dory performed these dual rotations, a macabre ballet that he would later describe as a pirouette.

For Grua, Petschek, and Wren, getting tossed was brutal and blunt. “The flip was instantaneous—there was nothing rhythmic or graceful or easy about it at all—it was just boom,” said Petschek, who was summarily dumped into the river.

Grua was holding his oars as tight as he could. As the boat toppled, they flew from his hands, and he followed Petschek into the current. But the worst punishment was reserved for Wren.

The river was now handling the Emerald Mile like a 17-foot-long battering ram, and the force of the entire boat, all 400 pounds of her, was concentrated in the bow post. As the dory tipped and spun, the bow post shot out of the water with astonishing speed and drove itself into Wren’s face, smashing directly into his glabella, the part of the skull that sits between the eyebrows just above the top of the nose.

Then, like Petschek and Grua, he too was gone.

IN THE RIVER, each man was at the mercy of the same hydrodynamics—the savage turbulence and wrenching crosscurrents—that had dismantled a three-ton motorized rafting rig 24 hours earlier.

Grua got off easiest. He felt himself pulled down hard and twirled like a baton, but the current soon lost interest and spat him to the surface. When he blinked the water from his eyes, he saw that he was floating less than an arm’s length from his upside-down boat. Seizing the lifeline around the gunwale, he turned toward the sound of wet gurgles and spotted Petschek bobbing 20 feet downstream.

Petschek had been pulled a little deeper, but the river had released its grip after a few seconds, permitting him to flounder toward the surface. A few hard strokes were enough to put him within reach of Grua’s extended foot and grab on. At that moment, their priority was to right the dory, get her oars into the water, and lever her into Thank God Eddy, the last place to pull in before the current swept them into Tuna, the next rapid below Crystal. There was no time for discussion, but none was needed. Both men knew the drill, a laborious process of trying to turn the boat over using muscle, dexterity, and a flip line designed to help lever it upright.

Neither could see Wren, who was still in serious danger—wounded and battling the crosscurrents a yard below the surface. His first move was to run his hand across his forehead and hold it in front of his face to see if there was any blood. “What a stupid thing to do!” he would say later. “I’m three feet underwater and I’m wiping my head to see if it’s bleeding. Of course I didn’t see any blood. And then I just got sucked down deep.”

Going deep in the Grand Canyon is a horrifying ordeal, an involuntary trip to the absolute bottom of the bottom. It’s a poorly understood place—mysterious and frightening, where the topography and hydraulics can vary so radically, even within the space of a few yards, that no two visits are ever the same. Among those who’ve been dragged into that realm and permitted to return, some say it’s terribly still, a watery version of being locked inside a sarcophagus. Others describe currents so vicious that it feels like being caught in a cement mixer. A few report an eerie hissing sound, created by suspended particles of sediment as they sluice downstream. If the canyon has a symphonic requiem, this is it.

Whatever the case, almost everyone undergoes the same sequence of abuse. First, painful pressure builds in your inner ears, similar to what scuba divers suffer, and it gets worse as you’re pulled deeper. Next comes the cold—water temperature in the river is usually around 53 degrees, and it gets even chillier as you descend. But the scariest thing is watching the light vanish as the water color changes from foamy white to bright blue to deep emerald, then to absolute black.

Wren’s plan, following accepted wisdom, was to ball up while waiting for the current to release him. But after several seconds he was running out of air, and now he began a long and desperate crawl toward what he hoped was the surface.

At first he swam in darkness, but as his strength drained, he started to see signs of light—faint and tremulous and far above. He kept swimming, his arms and legs like dead weights. Finally, several seconds past the point where he thought he couldn’t muster another stroke, his head broke the surface and he drew a ragged, gasping breath of air.

When he cleared his eyes, he could see that he was in the middle of the river, racing downstream. Off to the right, he caught a glimpse of the dory, upside down, with Grua and Petschek clinging to the sides.

“OK,” Wren told himself, “get to the boat—get to the boat.”

But the current seized him and he disappeared again, pulled down for what he was certain would be the final time.

WREN'S SECOND dunking wasn’t as long as the first, but that hardly mattered. -Depleted, he was still reeling from the bow-post strike. When he flailed to the surface and caught his next breath, he had only one thought. “I just started swimming,” he said. “I don’t even know if I knew which direction I was going in.” He seemed to be making no progress—

he was barely able to go through the motions of dog paddling, and his life jacket was impeding what little progress he made.

Wren was swept past Thank God Eddy, and now the only remaining point of sanctuary was a tiny indentation in the cliffs just downriver. Somehow he made it, mustering an effort that let him paddle into the little pocket, where he wallowed through the shallows and draped himself over a boulder, convinced he would collapse and drown if he attempted to make the final steps to shore. When he wiped the blood from his eyes, he looked upstream and saw his companions standing on the bottom of the dory, which had been swept into Thank God Eddy, heaving on the lines and trying, without success, to right her.

Please right the boat, he pleaded to himself. I don’t want to get back in that water! Please, please, please.

After several failed attempts, Grua and Petschek glanced downstream, caught sight of Wren, and glared. The meaning was unmistakable: What the hell are you doing? Get out here. We need your help!

Wren groaned and slithered off the rock, slid into the water, and started swimming.

When he reached the dory, Grua and Petschek hauled him out, and together the three of them hauled away until the bottom slowly flipped. After they clambered back aboard, they took a moment to collect themselves, taking stock of what had happened.

Chunks of the bow post and stern were missing. Their cooler was blown open, and they realized that the entire eddy was strewn with floating trash.

Some of it belonged to the canyon—driftwood and twigs and trembling little atolls of brown foam. But there were other objects, too—soggy sandwiches, bobbing pieces of fruit, and a sodden lump that turned out to be Grua’s wallet. The covered storage hatch at the front of the boat had blown open, and most of their gear had been hurled overboard. They scooped items into the boat as fast as they could. In the midst of this, something else appeared—something hulking and huge that emerged like a breaching whale.

A gray 37-foot motor rig was plowing into the eddy so fast that it nearly smeared them against the rocks on the shoreline. In the stern was a boatman with his hand on the throttle, and he was almost as surprised as they were.

“Wow, I’m glad I didn’t hit you, man,” shouted the boatman. “I’m sorry, but I have to make this eddy—and if I was you I’d get outta here, because in about two more seconds, another guy is pulling in right behind me, and he isn’t nearly as good at this as I am.” With Wren and Grua continuing to snatch up pieces of fruit, Petschek scrambled into the cockpit, seized the oars, and pulled toward the eddy line. He had just broken through into the main current when something even worse than a giant motor rig materialized. Over the roar of the river, they heard a dull thuk-thuk-thuk and looked up to see an orange-and-white helicopter hovering directly overhead. It was the Park Service.

WHEN THE Emerald Mile flipped and disappeared, Thomas had immediately reached for his two-way radio. His signal was picked up by one of the repeaters on the South Rim, bounced to the dispatcher’s office in the park’s Emergency Services Building, then relayed directly to Thomas’s boss, Curt Sauer. When Sauer learned that a lone dory had been involved in an accident at Crystal, he knew it was Grua. Fearing that an evacuation might be necessary, Thomas summoned Helo 210, which at the time was flying above Phantom Ranch, only a few minutes away, to conduct a sweep and find out if any of the boatmen were injured or dead.

When the chopper reached Thank God Eddy and hovered over the dory, Thomas spoke to the pilot by radio.

“You see the boat?”

â€Ôš±đČčłó.”

“Is it right side up? What’s going on?”

“It’s upright.”

“How many people in it?”

“Tłó°ù±đ±đ.”

“Do they have oars in the water?”

“Yeah, they have oars in the water.”

Thomas was relieved. The Park Service wasn’t going to need to stage an evacuation. But the wheels of law enforcement had now been set in motion. Sooner or later, Thomas knew, there would be a reckoning—a development that, at the moment, was only one of several big problems besetting the Emerald Mile.

AS HELO 210 BANKED away, Petschek pulled the boat into a small eddy just above Tuna Rapid, and Grua tied them off to some rocks. They needed a time-out to collect themselves and make some decisions. Grua applied a butterfly bandage to Wren’s forehead and then set about doctoring the dory with a roll of duct tape from the repair kit.

The situation was grim. Most of their food was either lost or soaked, along with their spare clothing. The Park Service obviously had a bead on where they were and what they were doing. Grua and Petschek were exhausted and almost as badly beaten up as the dory itself. Worst of all, one of their oarsmen had just been cut down. As the biggest and strongest member of the crew, Wren was absolutely critical to the venture; now he was dazed, concussed, and bleeding like a stuck pig.

They were barely a third of the way into this venture, with 179 miles still to go—a stretch that included the rest of the Inner Granite Gorge and another three dozen rapids, including Lava Falls, the biggest of them all. And in another ten hours, they’d confront their second sleepless night of rowing in the dark. “At that point, we were very demoralized—I mean, extremely so,” Petschek said. “We were so beat up. I remember just wanting to get out of there. To not even be łÙłó±đ°ù±đ.”

Sitting in the boat, all three men acknowledged that the only remotely sane option was to haul the Emerald Mile out of the water, hike up to the rim, and limp home. No one in the river community would think any less of them for having been whipped by Crystal.

They looked at one another, each man seeking confirmation that his own instinct was shared.

Screw that, they agreed, and then started back downstream.ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę

Kevin Fedarko's book , from which this story is adapted, is published May 7 by Scribner.

The post Rocketing Into the Grand Canyon’s Great Unknown appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Map

Greg Mortenson

You listen with humility: CAI's approach to school-building is shaped by Mortenson's extensive travels in Pakistan and Afghanistan

THE HABIB BANK OCCUPIES a four-story building in Kabul’s Shahr-i-Nau district, a neighborhood that features an outdoor photo exhibit of Afghan land-mine amputees, an Internet cafĂ© that was blown up by a suicide bomber in 2005, and a man holding a trained monkey on a chain. At five minutes to nine on a Saturday morning, the monkey’s eyes dart toward the bank’s entrance as two men in combat vests come charging out through the doors.

The figure in front, a hulking six-foot-four American, is wearing a pair of size-15 Merrell clogs and a shalwar kameez, the pajama-style robes favored by men throughout Afghanistan. Behind him is a former Pakistani commando whose right hand is frozen into a kind of claw. In it, he clutches a plastic bag just given to him by the lady who brings fresh-baked bread to the bank’s employees every morning. The bag now holds 23 bricks of cash totaling $100,000. The cash is dusted with flour, and both men are running as if the devil himself were after them.

They jump into a cab that plunges into the morning traffic, speeding past tea shops and Indian video stores and into the Wazir Akbar Khan roundabout, where the driver unwisely opts for a shortcut that involves entering the thing in the wrong direction.

Oops.

A policeman blocks the vehicle and slams his fists on the hood. Then he reaches through the open window and starts shaking the driver by his lapels while unleashing a blast of enraged Dari, the language spoken throughout half of Afghanistan. From the backseat, the retired commando calmly vise-grips the driver’s neck and barks a one-word command: “Burro!”

Rough translation: “Floor it.”

The driver rams the accelerator, leaving the cop kicking the side of the cab as it resumes its race toward Kabul International Airport, where the men’s plane was scheduled to start boarding at 8:40 a.m.

“Hey, what time is it?” the American wonders as he stuffs cash into his vest.

“Nine-o-five,” the Pakistani grunts. “Too bad we cannot ring up Mr. Siddiqqi.”

Mr. Siddiqqi would be a big help right now. He ran the control tower at Kabul’s airport for 38 years—a period spanning the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, from 1979 to 1989; the anarchic civil war that followed; and the country’s seven-year imprisonment under the Taliban, from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion following September 11. Back then, anyone who had taken the trouble to pay a visit to the tower and have a cup of tea with Siddiqqi needed only to give him a ring if they were running late, and he’d hold their plane. Unfortunately, Siddiqqi’s recent retirement has now created the possibility of something unthinkable.

“We’re about to miss this plane,” the American mutters. “You know, we should probably call and find out—”

“—what Wakil is up to?” says the Pakistani, completing the thought. He punches the cell-phone code for Wakil Karimi, their Pashtun accomplice in this morning’s operation. Three seconds into Wakil’s woefully unacceptable report, the Pakistani’s face darkens with anger.

“What the hell are you doing sitting down drinking chai?! This is not an episode from Three Cups of Tea! Get your butt outside the airport—now!”

As the taxi weaves through donkey carts and battered minivans, the shouting continues. “Have our tickets ready! Have a porter standing by! Tell security to let us through!”

The men brace as the cab screeches to a stop at the airport entrance, and there stands poor Wakil, with his Areeba flip unit glued to his ear, enduring the novel misery of finding himself excoriated in person and over the phone at the same time.

“You know, some people say that we’re just totally winging things over here in this part of the world, but that’s not really fair,” the American remarks, somewhat defensively, as he shuffles toward the gate, where it is now being announced that the flight has been delayed for three hours.

Before completing the arc of an argument whose abundant illogic has escaped his notice, he pats his pockets to make sure he hasn’t dropped a stray wad of cash that will cover the annual salaries of 20 schoolteachers working in the mountains of northern Afghanistan.

“It’s true, of course, that back in the early days we may have been flying by the seat of our pants a bit. But, believe me, we are much more organized now.”

THE PROVENANCE OF THAT hundred thousand dollars, which was assembled through small and large donations from every corner of the U.S., was as diverse as America itself. It had come from Muslims and Hindus, Christians and Jews, Buddhists and atheists, and maybe even a Wiccan or two. Some of it was sent by a Baptist youth group in Alabama; some came from a North Carolina chapter of Future Teachers of America; and some was a gift from veterans of the 82nd Airborne Division. From Massachusetts, a 12-year-old girl named Gabby contributed $50 that she’d earned babysitting. Lorraine, a single mother from Simi Valley, California, sent in a box of pennies worth $7.47, followed later by a check for $25. From San Diego, an 82-year-old woman named Hannah, retired and living on a shoestring, wrote to say she wanted to help with what little she could spare. She gave $100.

Regardless of where the money originated, all of it had been funneled through a three-story office building at the east end of Main Street in Bozeman, Montana, the headquarters of the Central Asia Institute (CAI), an operation created to honor a promise made in 1993. That was the year Greg Mortenson—the fellow now catching his breath inside the converted shipping container that serves as our departure lounge inside the Kabul airport—attempted to climb K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. He did so while wearing a shalwar kameez, taking on this killer peak with a group of 12 underequipped climbers who were known as the Rejects.

Mortenson had launched the climb in memory of his younger sister Christa, who’d suffered from epilepsy and had died of a seizure on her 23rd birthday. After exhausting himself by taking part in the successful high-altitude rescue of another climber, he was forced to turn back 2,000 feet shy of the summit. Then, while trekking down the 39-mile Baltoro Glacier, Mortenson got separated from his Balti porter and wound up staggering into a village called Korphe, a place so destitute that roughly one in every three children perished before the age of one. It was in Kor­phe that he was offered shelter, food, tea, and a bed. And it was in Korphe, one afternoon during his recuperation, that he came across 82 children sitting outside writing their school lessons with sticks in the dirt—with no teacher in sight. One of them was a girl named Chocho, who made Mortenson promise to come back someday and build them a school.

The fulfillment of that pledge—the subsequent chain of events through which a lost mountaineer found his life’s calling by promoting literacy in the impoverished Muslim villages of the eastern Himalayas—is a story that, by now, a lot of people have heard. Two years ago, with the help of co-author David Oliver Relin, Mortenson, now 50, laid out his unusual saga in Three Cups of Tea, a book that tells the tale of how he sold his car and his climbing gear and started raising money for schools—literally one cent at a time, beginning with a school in Wisconsin where the kids filled two 40-gallon trash cans with 62,345 pennies.

When the book was published, in March 2006, it debuted at number 14 on The New York Times‘ nonfiction bestseller list before dropping off. Then, starting last year, sales began to explode. Driven by a surge of interest from women’s book clubs and churches, the book climbed to the top of the paperback list, where at press time it had spent more than 27 weeks at number one. As of October, Three Cups of Tea had sold 2.1 million copies, been printed in 19 languages, and spawned a sequel—due out next fall—that will complete the dirtbag-to-rock-star chronicle of a mountaineer who, by all reasonable expectations, could easily still be living out of the back of his car.

In the 15 years since his Korphe experience, Mortenson has made 37 trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan, logging nearly 250,000 air miles a year while organizing the construction of 78 schools that currently serve some 28,000 students. He’s also put together graduate-scholarship and teacher-training programs, paid to build women’s vocational centers, and underwritten water-purification projects. He has probably spent more time, traveled more miles, and come to know the region more deeply than any diplomat, soldier, academic, or aid worker in America.”Greg is my hero,” says newsman Tom Brokaw, who donated $100 in 1994, in response to a hand-typed letter from Mortenson that hundreds of other prominent recipients ignored. “This gentle but determined young man is winning hearts and minds one school at a time, in a part of the world where we rely too much on the military response and not enough on the humanitarian and social approach.”

As Three Cups of Tea‘s success continues, the Mortenson juggernaut shows no sign of letting up. In the past year, he’s made roughly 150 appearances in more than 100 U.S. cities, sharing his story with crowds of up to 20,000—a big change for a man whose slide shows, until just a few years ago, drew only half a dozen bored shoppers at REI and Patagonia stores. The CAI’s gross intake has grown from $480,000 in 2002 to nearly $4 million last year. These days, tickets to Mortenson’s presentations sell out within hours, hosts often have to book a second venue, and most speaking requests must be made a year in advance.

“The irony is that we’re actually trying to slow down our growth,” says Mortenson, who has the weary look of a bear in serious need of hibernation. “Yet the harder we try, the faster it seems to grow.”

Through it all, Mortenson has struck a chord with groups that don’t usually see eye to eye. In addition to speaking before Rotary clubs, in public libraries, and at college commencements, he has appeared at Islamic schools in Chicago, at a synagogue in New York City, and before a group of lesbian activists in Marin County.

And then there’s the U.S. military, currently in its seventh year of deployment in Af­ghanistan, where coalition casualties started exceeding those suffered in Iraq last May. In November, Mortenson—who served as an Army medic from 1975 to 1977—was asked to share his views about Pakistan and Afghanistan with General David Petraeus, whose focus on building relationships with local communities dovetails with the CAI’s approach. Sometime this winter, Mortenson is slated to do the same with the office of Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He has lectured at Annapolis, West Point, and the Air Force Academy. Three Cups of Tea is now recommended reading for officers enrolled in graduate-level counterterrorism courses in the Army, Navy, and Marines.

Mortenson is also widely respected overseas—rare for an American these days. He has given presentations in several countries, including Sweden, Tanzania, and the United Arab Emirates. Pennies for Peace, an offshoot of the original Wisconsin piggy-bank drive, now has programs running in Europe, Asia, and South America. Last year, it was picked up in South Korea, China, and Rwanda.

Mortenson’s visibility, however, has put him in the crosshairs of extremists and crackpots. In Pakistan, two religious clerics issued fatwas (since rescinded) calling for his expulsion. In August 1996, he was kidnapped in Waziristan and held for eight days before being released. Earlier this year, a CAI school in Afghanistan was attacked by the Taliban.

There have been some nasty reactions at home, too. “In the U.S., I get quite a bit of hate mail and criticism,” Mortenson says. “People have attacked me for working with Muslims, for acting like a colonialist, for being a traitor to America. But we continue to operate, because we have fierce local support. The communities we work in will do anything for education, and as long as they want schools, our mission is to provide them.”

THREE HOURS AFTER RUSHING to the airport, we finally board a 12-seat twin-turboprop Beechcraft and lift off over the brown expanse of Kabul. The plane is operated by PACTEC, a nonprofit that shuttles humanitarian workers around Afghanistan. PACTEC offers no beverage service, but the seat pocket does contain a laminated guide to avoiding land mines, which still kill or maim around 65 Afghan civilians every month. As the Beechcraft arrows toward Badakhshan, Afghanistan’s northeasternmost province, we gaze east toward the 19,000-foot peaks guarding the approaches to the Pakistani region of Baltistan, where Mortenson forged the ideas that define his mission.Ever since Islam was brought into the Baltistan area by itinerant Muslim sheiks in the 15th century, the privilege of learning to read and write has, in many mountain communities, been reserved for males. Like most experts, Mortenson is convinced that educating girls is the most important step in reducing infant mortality and bringing down birth rates—which in turn helps fight the ignorance and poverty that often nurture religious or ethnic intolerance. Thus every new school the CAI funds must provide access to girls.

“Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and search for work,” says Mortenson, who spent most of his boyhood in East Africa, where his parents—Lutherans from Minnesota—built Tanzania’s first teaching hospital, in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. “But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned. If you really want to improve quality of life, the answer is to empower the women by educating the girls.”The importance of girls’ education is widely recognized around the world. CAI’s special twist is the amount of time and effort Mortenson spends selling the concept on the ground. His guiding philosophy is summed up in his book’s title, which refers to a saying he heard in Korphe. “The first cup of tea you share with us, you are a stranger,” it goes. “The second cup, you are a friend. But with the third cup, you become family—and for our families we are willing to do anything, even die.”

“In order to get things done, it’s necessary to listen with humility to what others are asking for and what they have to say,” says Mortenson. “The solution to every problem over here begins with drinking tea.”

This might sound simplistic, but the results are impossible to dispute. Down inside the narrow mountain valleys that lie veined far below the Beechcraft—where more than 400 villages are now clamoring for a school—the first crop of CAI-educated women are preparing to launch their careers. Jahan Ali, 21, the granddaughter of the headman of Korphe, graduated in 2002 and is studying developmental planning in Skardu. She plans to go into politics. Shakila Khan, 21, graduated with the first class in Hushe School and is finishing her third year of medical school in Lahore. She will be the first female physician to emerge from an area of the country that harbors 1.2 million people.

“You could say that those women down there are making first ascents far more dramatic than those of the Western climbers who came into these mountains 30 or 40 years ago,” says Mortenson, who next March will receive the Sitara-e-Pakistan, Pakistan’s highest civilian award, which is almost never given to a foreigner. “They will have a far greater impact than the statistics buried inside the pages of The American Alpine Journal.”

True enough. And yet it was the sport of mountaineering—the strength of will it demands, the maverick impulses it can nurture and shape—that first inspired Mortenson’s radically unorthodox approach to building schools. Pointing through the plane’s window at the distant summit of Noshaq, at 24,581 feet the highest peak in Afghanistan, he explains the overall blueprint.”If you look at a map,” he says, “you’ll see that our schools are all in isolated pockets that have no educational infrastructure due to remoteness, poverty, religious extremism, or war. These are the areas where nobody else goes—and, basically, what we do is start at the end of the road and work our way back. We don’t want to build thousands of schools. We just want to put a few into the hardest places of all, then hope that the government or other NGOs will start moving toward us.”

The strategy has worked well in Pakistan, where Mortenson’s staff spent the late nineties target=ing the farthest-flung villages in the most remote valleys. In 1999, at the request of the Pakistani military, they launched projects in the Gultori region, where the armies of India and Pakistan were locked in fierce fighting along the Line of Control, which defines Kashmir’s contested border. The schools they put in, which were tucked into the mouths of caves, featured sloped roofs that can deflect rockslides triggered by artillery shells. That fall, they also started working with contacts in Afghanistan—an effort spearheaded by the broken-handed man now sitting in the back of the Beechcraft, whom Mortenson likes to call “our Indiana Jones.”

This is Sarfraz Khan, 53, who was shot through the wrist during a gun battle with the Indian army in 1974. After his military discharge, Sarfraz started plying the snow-covered passes that connect his home in Pakistan’s Chapursan Valley to the Wakhan Corridor, a narrow finger of Afghanistan, 200 miles long, that thrusts between Tajikistan and Pakistan all the way to China. Three or four times a year, Sarfraz would haul flour, sugar, and tea into the Wakhan—an area almost completely cut off from the outside world—and return with yaks and goats. The work helped create a unique skill set: He knew the terrain; he knew the people along the border; and he had a superb grasp of the local languages—all seven of them.

Mortenson met Sarfraz in 1999 and, the next year, dispatched him to survey the Wakhan’s infrastructure. Sarfraz found that after nearly three decades of war, there was barely a skilled mason or carpenter left in the corridor. His solution was to import teams of Pakistani craftsmen. With permission from the border police, he started escorting groups of 20 workers at a time over the passes without visas or passports. Every few weeks, he would return to monitor progress and pay the men with money he carried in saddlebags. He set such a relentless pace that at the end of one trip, upon reaching the far side of the pass, his horse fell to the ground and died.

By the summer of 2008, the CAI had built nine Wakhan schools, with five more in the works. Our current visit will include a typical mix of ribbon-cutting ceremonies, bill paying, and meetings to discuss new projects. The plan is to land in the provincial capital of Faizabad, then head east until we reach the end of the road, at the village of Sarhad.

That’s the scheduled itinerary, anyway. With Mortenson, there are always surprises, and the first arrives as our plane taxis to a stop and the copilot turns to face the passengers.”Welcome to Badakhshan,” he announces. “Whichever one of you guys has got the armed escort, they’re headed this way.”

EVEN BY THE EXTREME standards of Afghanistan—a country where a majority of the population has never known peace and the average life expectancy is 43 years—the province of Badakhshan, which contains the Wakhan Corridor, is a rough place. One telling measure is the number of women who die during pregnancy. In the U.S., the rate is 11 per 100,000. In Afghanistan, it soars to 1,800, and the situation in Badakhshan is as bad as anywhere in the country.

It’s also the only part of Afghanistan that was never conquered by the Taliban. Credit for that goes to some exceptionally tough local mujahedeen commanders, one of whom has just surrounded our plane with a dozen heavily armed men and several pickup trucks. Wohid Khan, 52, has dense black eyebrows and a precisely razored beard that’s just starting to turn gray. He started fighting the Russians at age 22; these days he’s in charge of border security in the eastern part of the province. Khan and 250 men patrol 840 miles of rugged terrain where the Wakhan shares a border with Pakistan, Tajikistan, and China. This is one of the most heavily trafficked heroin routes in the world, as well as a popular thoroughfare for gunrunners.

Like many mujahedeen whose schooling was cut short by war, Khan sees education as the key to reversing Afghanistan’s devastation—which is why he has given his full support to Mortenson’s projects. The father of several daughters, he’s especially passionate about building schools for girls. As a gesture of respect, Khan will provide Mortenson with a high-speed escort in three Ford Ranger pickups, rigs that carry shoulder-held rocket launchers and a .50-caliber machine gun mounted to a tripod.

We roar out of Faizabad, with three soldiers perched in the back of each truck, their Kalashnikovs between their knees. As we barrel along on unpaved roads, Mortenson explains that this is not his standard mode of travel.

“When Sarfraz and I come into the Wakhan, we’re usually in a beat-up jeep or a minivan that we’ve hired, and we’re constantly switching drivers to avoid getting ambushed or kidnapped,” he says. Sarfraz also switches up languages while concocting elaborate lies about who they are and where they’re going.

“When I’m worried, there is no stopping, no eating, no drinking,” Sarfraz says. “Greg’s life is very important to me.”

Traveling with Wohid Khan is different: Since he’s the local strongman, the only thing you have to worry about is hanging on. Khan’s drivers are under orders to push their rigs to the maximum speeds that the shattered roads allow—40 to 50 miles per hour. Moving fast is standard procedure, because the border-security force handles all sorts of problems over a huge area. Two weeks ago, a car transporting two teachers, both of their wives, and four children to a new CAI school in the village of Buzzai Gumbad accidentally shot off the road into the Amu Darya River. The driver and one of the families were drowned. The other family spent the night balanced on the roof of the car. Khan and his team raced to them the next morning and pulled the survivors to safety.

Khan can be quite ruthless about keeping these roads open, which is crucial for the flow of food supplies to the region. This becomes evident one afternoon when we encounter a truck that has obstructed traffic by stopping in the middle of the throughway. The commander gets out and walks up to a man who’s working on a broken rear wheel.

“Driver or mechanic?” he asks.

“Driver,” the man replies.

Khan smashes his fist into the man’s face, then kicks him in the stomach, twice. He gets back in the Ranger and we resume our journey.

“People criticize me for working with so-called warlords,” says Mortenson, “but sometimes you’re forced to choose between working with the resources at hand and not accomplishing anything at all. In the end, it’s all about relationships, and we’re willing to collaborate with almost anyone who shares our commitment to education.”

For the next two days, we bash though dry washes and small villages, pushing deeper into the most obscure corner of Afghanistan. When we reach Baharak, the valley forks in three directions and we head west toward Ishkoshem, a town of 20,000 families. Here, on the morning of our third day out, we come to the jewel of the CAI’s Wakhan program: an unfinished foundation about the size of a football field, filled with dirt, stones, and loose sand, future home of the Ishkoshem Girls’ High School.

The completed structure will be two stories tall and will host 1,200 female students. Costing more than $70,000, it will be the largest school ever built in this region, and it will have one of the most magnificent settings for any school anywhere. To the north loom the Pamir Mountains, painted with the shadows of high clouds, racing across the brown slopes in the lemon-yellow light. To the south are the sharper ridgelines and cliff faces of the Hindu Kush, armored in ice even now, in late July.

More than 100 men are clustered around the school’s foundation; they’ve come from as far away as Kabul to see the cornerstone laid. Off to the side is a group of about 40 girls, several of whom are clad in head-to-toe burkas. They are all waiting to hear Mortenson. After thanking everyone for attending, he offers a short speech, which is translated for the crowd.”This school is your school,” he says. “It is not a gift of the American government but of small people like yourselves, across the United States, all of whom gave small donations so that this school, and others like it, can be built in remote areas where education is needed.”

He glances briefly over at Khan, who listens carefully. “A wise man in this area once told me that these mountains have seen far too much killing, and that each rock you see represents a mujahedeen who died fighting either the Russians or the Taliban. But now that the fighting is finished, it is time to build a new era of peace. And the first step is to take up these stones and start turning them into schools.”

The applause from Khan and his soldiers is especially fierce.

THERE ARE MANY unorthodox aspects to Mortenson’s operation, but perhaps the oddest is his preference for hiring inexperienced, underqualified, often uneducated locals from whom he somehow extracts amazing results.

Take Sarfraz, who manages CAI programs in the Wakhan and Azad Kashmir. “Without Greg, I would be nothing more than a guy who trades yak butter,” he says. But Mortenson seems convinced he got the better end of the deal. “I’ve learned so much from this guy—the way he goes into the most rugged areas, unarmed and without fear, to meet with military commanders, warlords, and very shady tribal leaders,” he says. “Sarfraz is constantly moving, he’s culturally savvy, he’s smart and wily, he’s firm when he needs to be. Plus he’s got some humor and some charisma going for him, too. When it really comes down to it, I am a donkey, but Sarfraz is a king.”

Altogether, the CAI’s staff in Pakistan and Afghanistan totals about a dozen men. The roster includes a mountaineering porter, a devout Shiite scholar, a farmer who’s the son of a Balti poet, a taxi driver, a man who grew up in an Afghan refugee camp, a base-camp cook, and two former members of the Taliban. A quarter of them cannot read or write. Crucially, they are evenly divided among the regional subsects of Islam: Sunni, Shia, and Ismaili (a liberal offshoot of the Shia whose majority-recognized spiritual imam, the Aga Khan, is based in Paris).

“If it weren’t for Greg, you probably wouldn’t even find these guys in the same room sharing a cup of tea,” says Genevieve Chabot, part of the CAI’s American staff, “but with little pay and almost no supervision, they’ve somehow found a way to make it work.”

Whenever Mortenson is on the road, he travels with at least two or three of these men at all times. In Pakistan, they spend weeks racing about in the CAI’s battered green Land Cruiser with a box of dynamite stashed under the passenger seat—where Mortenson usually sits—so they can blast through rockslides and avalanches without having to wait for government road crews. In Afghanistan, they’ll travel for 30 hours at a stretch, pushing vehicles to the point of breakdown. In the spring and fall, they’ll hydroplane through the mud—which can be three feet deep in the Wakhan—until the axles get buried. While the drivers schlep off to find a yak team, they take off their shoes, and sometimes their pants, and start walking.

When Mortenson and his men arrive at their destination, the first thing they do isinspect the school, often surrounded by a scrum of children tugging them by the hands. Then they convene with the village heavyweights for a jirga, or council session. Jirgas are solemn gatherings that feature long speeches and dense deliberation; they usually extend through dinner and last long into the night. Toward dawn, Mortenson and company cram into an empty room or bunk down on the floor of the school. Two hours later, the circus packs up and heads off to the next project.

“Sometimes we don’t stop for five or six days,” says Sarfraz. “This is the only way to get to all the projects and to see all the people we need to see.”

“I think of these guys as the Dirty Dozen,” says Mortenson. “Most of them are renegades or misfits, but over the years we’ve empowered them to make a difference in their communities. And in response, they’re now running around doing a job that it would take a dozen organizations to match. It’s hard to explain, but I don’t really do much over here anymore except travel, drink tea, and watch them work. To these men, schools are everything. They would lay down their lives for girls’ education.”

OUR JOURNEY CONFORMS to the pattern of a typical CAI road trip. Each day begins at dawn, when Mortenson and Sarfraz wake up in the same clothes they’ve been wearing for more than a week, surrounded by the clutter of their mobile office. First on the agenda: morning ablutions, which consist of Mortenson smearing hand sanitizer on his face and hair while Sarfraz scratches himself. Then they pop the cap on their jumbo bottle of ibuprofen, and each man selects two or three tablets as a pre-breakfast appetizer. “When we’re going hard, we both go through about 12 or 15 of these things a day,” says Mortenson.

At this point, one of the two men may put on the pair of eyeglasses they share (they have the same prescription) while the other steps outside with the toothbrush. (Yep, they share that, too.) One morning, I ask Mortenson to provide a list of everything else that he and Sarfraz use together.

“OK, let’s see, we share our jackets, our razors, our soap, our socks, our shalwar kameez, our undershirts—”

How about underwear? Do they share that?

“Well, no, but …”

Mortenson hesitates, a sign that he may be concealing something. “Look, I’m not sure I want to reveal this, but there’s no sense in lying about it, either. It turns out that I don’t actually wear any underwear. I grew up in Tanzania, see, so I’ve kind of gone ‘alpine style’ for my entire life.”

“What about you, Sarfraz?” I demand.

Sarfraz looks mildly embarrassed. “Alpine style for me, too.”

“But one thing we don’t share,” Mortenson adds helpfully, “is our wives.”

“No, that we definitely do not share,” Sarfraz exclaims. “Wife sharing is a very bad idea!”Although we’re both really afraid of our wives, so I suppose you could say we share our fear,” Mortenson adds.

“Actually,” corrects Sarfraz, “I am afraid of my wife, of course, but I am also afraid of Greg’s wife, too.”

Tara Bishop, lodestar to the intergalactic mess that passes for Mortenson’s life, is the daughter of Barry Bishop, a National Geographic photographer who was part of the first American ascent of Everest, in 1963. Tara met Mortenson in San Francisco in 1995, at an event in which Sir Edmund Hillary spoke about his own school-building efforts in Nepal. A few hours after laying eyes on Mortenson, she announced her intention to “kidnap” him. They were married six days later. Ten days after that, Mortenson flew back to Pakistan to finish building the Korphe school.

Bishop, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, realized that she’d hitched her wagon to an unusual man. (“Greg is simply not one of us,” she likes to say.) But sharing a life with Mortenson has resulted in twists that even she might not have anticipated.

Their modest home in Bozeman lacks a third bedroom, so Mortenson and Bishop sleep in the upstairs hallway. Meanwhile, their daughter, Amira, 12, and their son, Khyber, 8, have been forced to adjust to having a father who’s often absent: Mortenson was away while his kids learned to walk, talk, and ride a bike. But the children have been treated to some exotic family vacations. Amira went to Pakistan for the first time at eight months, and on one special occasion she got a tour of the CAI’s latrine-building projects along the Baltoro Glacier.

When Mortenson’s on the road, Bishop keeps close tabs on him, dialing Sarfraz’s satellite phone every day or two as we move from village to village, where Mortenson is barraged by requests for assistance. In a place called Khun Dhud, there’s a man who wants money to set up a grocery store. In Ishkoshem, a pair of officials seek funds for a water-delivery system, while another is hoping for a hydroelectric plant. In Pigiz, the school principal needs desks and filing cabinets. The pleading is always polite, but the needs are endless: more books, more pencils, more uniforms, another school.

“We get proposal after proposal, and we have to say no to dozens of projects,” Mortenson sighs one evening, while hearing a request from a group of local women who want him to pay for a new vocational center, where they’d be able to sew clothing and crafts to sell in the village bazaar. “Some of these people have traveled for days to present us with their requests. Others have been turned down by everyone else they’ve asked. And often we’re forced to say no, too—like I’m going to have to do with these ladies right here.”

Standing before the women, he turns to Sarfraz. “Your budget for the Wakhan is finished for this year, no?” he asks. This is true, but it’s also a piece of pre-scripted theater that will lay the groundwork for a diplomatic denial of the women’s request.

“Finished,” Sarfraz confirms while pulling out his phone, which is ringing. He glances at the number and passes it to Mortenson, handling it as if it had spontaneously caught fire. It’s Tara Bishop, calling from Bozeman.

“Oh, hi, sweetie!” Mortenson says. He listens a moment. “Well, right now I’ve got some women who want a vocational center. I’ve got like 20 of them surrounding me, and they’ve got this really feisty leader, but I’m afraid we’re gonna have to say no, because … Oh. All right, I promise. Yes, sweetie. Bye now.”

His next words, directed at the women, are translated by Sarfraz: “Wife-Boss says we must somehow find the funds for your vocational center. Wife-Boss also says that you should consider using your vocational center to start a book club—”

Sarfraz’s translation is cut short by yet another phone call. This time it’s Suleman Minhas, the CAI’s operations manager for Pakistan, ringing from Rawalpindi to work out details of an “emergency” that arose earlier that day.

The man with no underwear, it seems, has been summoned to have a cup of tea on Sunday afternoon with General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan.

We have 72 hours to get to Islamabad.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, the group splits up. Sarfraz will spend the next week pushing east, all the way to the end of the Wakhan, where the most remote school in the CAI archipelago is located. Meanwhile, Mortenson climbs into one of Khan’s pickups. We spend the next three days barnstorming down the same roads we’ve just come up, while Mortenson works the phone to set up a series of charter flights. As Wellington once said of Waterloo, what happens after that is a close-run thing.

In Faizabad, we almost miss our plane but manage to board at the last second. In Kabul, Wakil Karimi nearly loses our luggage but performs a miraculous baggage transfer through the front door of the airport. Later, as our flight makes its approach into Islamabad, the pilot announces that a looming storm may force us to return to Kabul—but Mortenson’s connections in the Pakistan military arrange for a VIP clearance that allows us to land. We touch down just a few hours after Al Jazeera reports that the Pakistani parliament has initiated impeachment proceedings, pitching President Musharraf into the worst political crisis of his life.

The following morning, a small black Toyota Camry pulls up to the security barrier at the Marriott Hotel, where, five weeks from now, a truck bomb will demolish the entire building and kill 60 people. Musharraf’s office makes it clear I’m not welcome, so I cool my heels while Mortenson, clad in a spotless white shalwar kameez and a black vest, gets in the car. In addition to Suleman, he is joined by two other members of the Dirty Dozen: Mohammed Nazir, 29, who manages several projects in Baltistan; and Apo Abdul Razak, 75, who spent 40 years cooking for mountaineering expeditions in the Karakoram and now serves as Mortenson’s diplomatic emissary to recalcitrant mullahs, greedy bureaucrats, and bad-tempered gunmen.

Mortenson and the crew are shuttled into the military section of Rawalpindi, where the president lives, and deposited in front of an elegant, mogul-style residence. Bilal Musharraf—the president’s son—comes out to greet them. They are ushered into a waiting room adorned with a red carpet.

“Simple but elegant,” Mortenson later says. “Bilal presents a tray laden with almonds, walnuts, candy, and yogurt-covered raisins. Then a butler comes in and asks if we want tea—green tea with cardamom and mint. And then, all of a sudden, President Musharraf himself walks in. He sits down right next to me and says, ‘Thank you for taking the time to come and see us. We have prepared a brunch, and hopefully you can stay for a while. Perhaps we may even have time for three cups of tea today.’ “

Musharraf seems especially interested in acquainting himself with the CAI’s Pakistani staff, and Mortenson is happy to sit back and let them talk. Eventually, everyone is urged to move into a dining room where they’re joined by Musharraf’s wife, Sehba, and sit down before an elaborate buffet featuring chicken, mutton, and a host of other traditional dishes.

“We were supposed to meet him for 30 minutes,” Mortenson will tell me later that night, back at the Marriott. “We ended up being there for nearly four hours.”

This provokes astonishment and wonder from the CAI staff. “Most high-level delegations—they only get very short meetings with Musharraf,” marvels Nazir.

“No one will ever believe that humble villagers like us were there for almost four hours. Our families will never believe it. They will all think us mad.”

ALAS, THE MEETING’S IMPACT will be negated in three days, when Musharraf resigns from office. But as Mortenson sits and listens to his staff that afternoon, he isn’t thinking so much about the future. Instead, he’s reflecting on something that took place 37 years ago.

“When it came time for my dad to open the hospital in Africa back in 1971,” he tells me later, “he got up and gave a speech in which he predicted that, within ten years, the heads of all the departments would be locals from Tanzania. ‘It’s your country, it’s your hospital,’ he said—and when he did, there was this collective gasp from the expat audience. This was a community, you see, who assumed that getting anything done required a mzungu—a white man—wielding a kiboko, a hippo-hide whip.

“But you know what? That’s exactly what happened. My dad died of cancer in 1980, and two years later, when we got the annual report from the hospital for 1981, my mom showed it to me with tears in her eyes. Every single department head was from Tanzania, just as he’d predicted.”

I ask Mortenson if he has any similar predictions to make.

“My hope,” he says, “is that, in 15 years, the Dirty Dozen will all be women.”

The post No Bachcheh Left Behind appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It’s a fiery June morningÌęat Grapevine Camp, a spit of sand tucked along the banks of the Colorado River, deep inside the stone walls that frame the sub-basement of the Grand Canyon. From the surface of the river, the walls soar upward for more than a vertical mile, exposing geology that extends 17 million centuries into the past. During that span, the oceans have swollen and receded a dozen times, the continents have slammed together and cracked apart again, and a chain of mountains higher than the Rockies has been heaved into the sky and reduced to gravel.

Philosophically speaking, this is some heavy shit. Heavy enough to make a man perched on the bow of a humble raft at the edge of Grapevine—a man now staring at that staggering immensity of stone—scratch his head and wonder what it all might suggest about his own place in the universe.

But that doesn’t last long. Any confusion about where I fit into the cosmos is vaporized by the arrival of a hefty steel box that two of the guides on this 19-day river trip are slinging onto the aluminum deck of my raft with a rude, clattering ka-thunk.

“Heads up, there, my friend,”Ìęwarns Bill “Bronco”ÌęBruchak, a boatman who’s built like the beer truck he used to drive in Pennsylvania. “Don’t pull a muscle when you lift this thing.”

“Yep,”Ìęchimes in Mike “Milty” Davis, a small, cheerful guy with mischievous eyes and a snowy white beard. “That is one enormous box of poop.”

I seize the handles, heft the cargo, and stagger toward the tight space between the stanchions that cradle my 12-foot-long, fiberglass-reinforced oars. Two identical canisters are already anchored on both sides of the footwell, which is where I sit when I row this barge. The top of each can is emblazoned with a strip of red electrical tape labeled FULL!!!

As I start lashing down the new can, I glance over at Monte Tillinghast, who’s piloting the second baggage boat on this trip, a kitchen raft that’s tied up next to mine.

“Son, you do have a load there,”Ìęobserves Tillinghast, whose cowboy hat and surfer shorts make him look like a maritime version of the Marlboro Man. “You know, you might want to think about girth-hitching another strap onto that there—”

Monte’s suggestion, undoubtedly helpful and possibly of critical importance in how my day is about to unfold, is cut off when Andre Potochnik, the alpha boatman leading this trip, yells out, “Dories … ho!”

This sends Monte and me scrambling to complete our rigging and fall in behind the four dories, which, one by one, are now threading into the main current. As the last of these craft glides past my barge, the final member of our crew—a slim, deeply tanned woman named Billie Prosser—flashes a smile. “Hey, Kevin,”Ìęshe says sweetly. “Thanks again for doing what you do.”

Her four passengers nod gamely, but their smiles are a frozen mix of polite gratitude and mild repugnance. After nearly a week on the river, these folks know exactly what’s in the boxes on my boat. After all, they put it there. And although they’re deeply obliged for my services, they’re still trying to get a handle on who I am, what my job entails, and why in the world I agree to do it. It’s a look that says, Someone give this poor idiot some career counseling. Immediately.

Four years ago, at age 38, I wandered through the doors of Grand Canyon Dories, an outfitter in Flagstaff, Arizona, that runs commercial expeditions on the Colorado River, and found myself staring at a tiny navy of wood-and-fiberglass rowboats. There were only about a dozen of these sleek, flat-bottomed craft inside the boathouse on that morning in March 2004. They were all painted in bold colors, and several featured flat transoms inscribed with hand-drawn scenes from the river: a bighorn sheep, a cluster of columbines, a tree frog. Each boat was graced with the simplest and loveliest lines I’d ever seen.

At the time, I had no idea that dory boats, which had been used for centuries by cod fishermen on the gale-racked combers off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, had become legendary on the Colorado, where they are renowned for their speed and elegance. What I did know was that I was entranced. And in an impulse that defied logic and common sense, I decided—right then—that I was going to quit my job and somehow find a way to follow those boats into the water-haunted world at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Plenty of middle-aged men flirt with delusional schemes like this—and almost all of them wind up abandoning their fantasies once they come to their senses. For better and worse, I followed through on mine, even after I found out that becoming a guide involves a multiyear, unpaid apprenticeship in the exciting field of latrine management.

I didn’t care. In fact, over the next four summers, I volunteered for extra poo-boat duty to compensate for my lack of skill in crucial areas like, say, rowing. In the course of 14 trips through the canyon, I have transported more than 7,800 pounds of excrement over a total distance of 3,400 river miles—roughly equivalent to rowing an inflatable septic tank from Tijuana, Mexico, to Point Barrow, Alaska. The price I’ve paid for this dubious distinction has been both humbling and steep. At 43, I find myself with no wife, no kids, no dog, and virtually no bank account. Last year, according to a nationwide survey of incomes across the U.S., I made less money than a part-time doughnut fryer in Maryland and a hospital clown in New York.

For the most part, it’s been worth it—I wouldn’t trade my Grand Canyon experiences for anything. My other consolation is that poo-boating, gross though it may be, is important work. Every summer, about 25,000 people opt to ride motorboats, oar rafts, or dories down all or part of the river corridor through the canyon, a route that stretches 277 miles from the eastern head, at Lees Ferry, to the western terminus, on the shores of Lake Mead. These trips usually take between one and three weeks, and because the average person will produce an ounce of excrement for every 12 pounds of body weight each and every day, the river-running industry generates more than 100,000 pounds of human waste per year. Inside a narrow canyon that receives less than nine inches of annual rainfall and endures summer daytime highs in excess of 110 degrees, it doesn’t take much to imagine how ugly things could get if waste weren’t handled with extreme care.

Up at park HQ, they take this business seriously indeed. The River Permit Office, on the South Rim, distributes a 45-minute video with detailed instructions on how river trips must containerize human waste, cart it out in watertight boxes, and dispose of it at a sewage-treatment plant. No trip is allowed on the river without proper education for crew and passengers and a written commitment to pack it out. It’s a key component—perhaps the key component—of a complex set of rules that keep the crown jewel of the U.S. national park system as pristine as possible.

It’s also something most people don’t like to talk about.

If you sign on for a commercial Grand Canyon river trip, you’ll learn about all sorts of fascinating things, from the Colorado's maximum depth (85 feet) and minimum width (76 feet) to the number of rock layers exposed along its length (26). The subject you won't hear discussed is the one I'm most attuned to: poop handling, and the headaches and disasters it can entail. For example, you probably won't hear about the two guides who were driving back from a river trip when their poo cans fell off the back of their truck and burst open in the middle of the road, creating a fecal slick that a bicycle tourist wiped out on. Or the unlucky boatman who had a leaky toilet transform his rubber raft into a tub of raw sewage. Or the hapless guide who tripped while setting up the lavatory, plunged his arm into the poo box, and compounded his problems by vomiting all over himself.

Mishaps like these—which are the exception, not the rule, on most whitewater trips—underscore an unsettling fact that most commercial passengers never have to confront. To wit: A river runs through your Grand Canyon fantasies, and it’s not clean and sparkling. If I do my job right, you won’t have to dwell on that miserable reality. In a way, I’m like Quasimodo with an oar and a toilet brush. I'm not easy to look at, but things work a whole lot better when I'm around.

A Grand Canyon oar tripÌęusually involves 16 passengers who ride in four boats and are served by a crew of six. If it’s an expedition run by Grand Canyon Dories, each guide rows an elegant 17-foot dory named after a natural wonder that was heedlessly destroyed by man—in the case of the trip we’re currently on, the Ticaboo, the Yampa, the Lava Cliff, and the Vale of Rhonda.

Every trip is also supported by two inflatable rafts that boast absolutely none of the dories’Ìęseductiveness or charm. These baggage boats haul most of the gear, grub, garbage, and goop, and they’re assigned names that are considerably less lyrical. The first raft, the kitchen boat, carries a tangled assortment of tables, coolers, propane tanks, rescue gear, and watertight bags containing the clients’Ìęclothing. It’s usually called the Mule, Ox, or Clydesdale. The other boat, my boat, is called the Jackass.

The toilet setup aboard the Jackass relies on the classic “20-mil”Ìęammunition can, a narrow metal box—14.5 inches high, 18 inches long, and 8 inches wide—originally designed to store antitank grenade rockets for the army’s M1A1 bazooka. Each “rocket box” can handle approximately 50 deposits of human waste and tips the scales at about 45 pounds when full. Its key feature is a rectangular lid that creates a watertight seal to prevent spillage while locking in the odors (well, most of them). When the lid is popped open, an aluminum flange called a riser is placed on top of the box and a toilet seat is mounted on the riser. During an early river trip back in the 1970s, shortly after this system was developed, the toilet seat was accidentally left behind, the rims of the riser left telltale indentations on everyone’s bums, and the box got a nickname: the groover. (Some guides also call it the duker or the unit.)

Every evening when we pull into camp, the passengers clamber out of the dories and form a “fire line” at the bow of the Mule to help Monte unload the kitchen boat. Then everyone gets out of the way while I heave the toilet components onto the front deck of the Jackass and, with help from a guide, lug everything to a private spot, screened by trees or rocks, away from camp. I pull the lid off the box, slap on the seat, and declare the unit open for business.

Groover etiquette follows a strict protocol that the trip leader lays out in a “poo talk”Ìęon the expedition’s first night. The most dismaying moment comes when it's revealed that the rocket box is used exclusively for solid waste, while urine goes into a special five-gallon bucket placed nearby. (If everyone peed in the groover, all my rocket boxes would be full before we got halfway to Lake Mead.)

Many passengers are initially appalled by this. Here they are, each having paid $4,314 for a deluxe river experience, only to discover that their daily constitutional requires a pants-around-the-ankles shuffle between a turd box and a pee bucket shared by 21 other people. But once they get their minds around it, the clients usually come to see the unit in a radically different light. It’s not affection, exactly, but you could call it grateful acceptance.

Professional poo-men help things along with an eye for aesthetics. Over the years, every camp in the canyon has acquired an established groovering spot, and many of these locations are so sublime that they’ve become famous in their own right. At Whitmore Camp (186 miles from Lees Ferry), we like to set up under an overhanging chunk of black lava in a spot bathed in the scent of verbena blossoms. At a place called Ledges (mile 152), you have to climb 30 feet up a stone terrace and balance on a shelf of exquisitely sculpted Muav limestone. And at mile 136, you can sit on the thunder throne while staring into the center of Deer Creek Falls, the longest and loveliest cascade on the river.

Perched on the seat, it’s not unusual for passengers to take notice of things they missed during the day’s excitement: the trill of a canyon wren, the sweetest-sounding bird on the river, or the whorled mysteries of sunbeams playing among the interlocking currents of an eddy. “I’ve had passengers repeatedly tell me that groovering spots are some of the most exquisite places they’ve been,”Ìęsays Michael Ghiglieri, another guide I work with. “The pooper is often the place for meditation—so much so that people sometimes forget why they're sitting on the thing in the first place.”

We toilet wranglers take pride in our skills, and I’m pleased to report that our talents have received modest recognition. In 1997, a guide named Joe Lindsay put together a book-length homage to the trials of poo-boating called Up Shit Creek: A Collection of Horrifyingly True Wilderness Toilet Misadventures. In 2002, a part-time poo captain named Scott Phair—a former pig farmer from Maine who now works as a high school principal—produced a calendar called “Groovin’Ìęin Grand Canyon,”Ìęwhich featured photographs of the finest latrine venues on the river. At the time, Phair’s finances permitted him to print only about 20 copies of this landmark publishing sensation. But he's hoping his next trip through the canyon, this spring, will yield material for a more commercially ambitious redux version, due out sometime in 2009.

Things were not always this organized. Back in the early 1950s, when the business of Grand Canyon river trips was just getting started, the system was simpler, but not necessarily in a good way. “Our motto was ‘Go high and far, and don’t forget to take a match,’”Ìęrecalls 91-year-old Martin Litton, the founder of Grand Canyon Dories. “You’d go off behind a cactus or some rocks to do your business, then you’d pile a few twigs on top and burn it all up. That took care of everything.”

Well, yes and no. “Often, the toilet paper would fail to burn and you’d be left with a real mess,”Ìęsays one of Litton’s early boatmen, who prefers to remain anonymous. “Other times, you’d light those twigs and, before you realized exactly what was happening, the flames would get out of hand—at which point you'd have to start jumping up and down with your pants around your ankles, stamping out the fire and, of course, tromping all over your own poop. It became quite evident that something had to be done.”

The answer was a compact toilet designed for small sailboats, which was introduced to the canyon in the early 1970s. This “marine potty”Ìęfeatured a detachable tank containing a chemical known as Blue Goo, which is still used in RV parks to aid in fecal decomposition. “Every morning you’d dig a hole on the beach and you’d empty out the tank,” says John Blaustein, a veteran doryman. “It was grim business. The Blue Goo, which smelled like bubble gum, would splash everywhere, so afterwards you’d have to fling yourself in the river for a full-on bath. But then you’d fill the hole back up with sand, and that seemed to solve the issue. At least for a while.”

The problem was volume. As river-running caught on, the number of people floating through the canyon exploded from just 205 in 1960 to 9,935 in 1970. By 1971, 21 companies had licenses to guide passengers, and almost all these outfits were burying their toilet tanks’Ìęcontents on the camping beaches, the most popular of which were occupied nightly from May through September.

“With all that usage, the Goo started leaching up to the surface, so when you pulled into camp, you’d see these blue-green stains in the sand, and the first thing you'd be hit with was the smell of feces,”Ìęsays Brad Dimock, another veteran doryman. “There was also toilet paper all over the place, and the flies were everywhere. It was fucking hideous.”

That’s when Steve Carothers stepped in. A Flagstaff-based biologist, Carothers completed his first canyon trip for the Arizona Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1971. He was so horrified by what he saw that he set out to devise a better way. He quickly realized that a WWII rocket box, which could be purchased at any army surplus store for $10 to $15, offered an ideal container system. The trick was figuring out how to control the methane, a by-product of anaerobic decomposition, to prevent overheated boxes from detonating. (After cooking in direct sunlight, the expanding miasma of methane is capable of blowing the lid off the groover and enveloping an unsuspecting boatman in a blast of superheated crap. It's happened before; boatmen tremblingly refer to this phenomenon as a “pooplosion.”)

Carothers performed rudimentary tests involving glass jars, pipettes, and methane-generating contributions from his office co-workers. (Don’t ask.) He discovered that an ounce of formaldehyde was “extremely effective at retarding the gas production.”ÌęIn the fall of 1976, he published an article in Downriver Magazine called “It’s Time for Change, Let’s Haul It All Out!”Ìęwhich featured detailed instructions on the rocket-box system. In 1978, the Park Service made his technique mandatory—and, with only minor modifications, the system is still used today.

“What a tremendous difference it’s made,”Ìęsays Carothers. “This is probably the most significant contribution I’ve made to science and wilderness in the last 31 years.”

Carothers also discerns a philosophical dimension to his work. “In America, most of us are taught not to think much about our feces, and we’re certainly taught not to talk about them,”Ìęhe says. “But as human beings, we all produce about a pound of poo a day, and dealing with our shit responsibly is one way for us to face our humanity. Intellectually, that’s very satisfying to me. I suppose it's kind of a metaphor for life. Don't you agree?”

That’s hard to dispute. My only teensy gripe with Carothers’s system is that it funnels most of the degrading labor onto one guy: me.

A poo captain’s day is long and hard, and it usually begins at first light, when he gets up with the rest of the crew. On this particular expedition, the routine is pretty standard: While Andre, Billie, Milty, Bronco, and Monte fix breakfast and clean the dishes, I focus on my duties as the trip’s turd-transport specialist.

I start by rounding up my 16 pee pails—small plastic paint cans, purchased at Home Depot, which I place in front of the passengers’ tents every night so they won’t have to stumble off to the groover after dark. Then I stuff whatever garbage I can scrounge into a trash bag and drench it with liquid bleach to prevent the Jackass from turning into a floating fly farm. Today marks the end of our first week on the river, so I also perform a quick inventory to confirm that we have an adequate supply of toilet paper (one roll per person for every five days), Clorox crystals, hand soap, air freshener, and, most important, empty rocket boxes. (I carry a total of 11 to see us through a 19-day trip, with a one-groover safety margin.) Finally, I check the day-tripper—two smaller ammo cans containing a roll of TP, a jar of hand soap, and about four pounds of Feline Pine kitty litter. This system is for clients who cannot avoid using the toilet during the day.

Around 7:30, as the crew starts dismantling the kitchen, it’s time for me to encourage everyone to finish groovering. This is demeaning, but it’s also a bit of a power trip. When I yell “Last call on the groover!”Ìęwhat I'm really telling people is “No matter how important you are, I'm about to revoke your bathroom privileges for the next eight hours.”ÌęIt doesn’t matter that Steve sits on the board of the New York Stock Exchange or that Maureen is a highly placed official at the Commerce Department. It also doesn't matter that Ben pounds nails in Portland or that Emily, who runs a crane at the docks in Port Arthur, Texas, has been saving pennies for most of her adult life to afford this trip. In the eyes of the groover, everyone is created equal.

Everyone except me, of course. When the passengers are finished, I’m the guy who gets to grab a guide, dash up through the tamarisk trees, and break down the system.

If the groover is getting full, I lift it and drop it on the sand a time or two to “settle”Ìęthings—being extremely careful not to compress the contents too tightly. (After baking in the sun for another two weeks, the contents of a compressed rocket box can cement to form what we call poo glue, which will be almost impossible to remove at the Wildcat Hill Wastewater Treatment Plant, in Flagstaff.) Then I shower the inside with a furious deluge of Clorox crystals, which helps beat back the odor. We cart the toilet seat down to the river with the riser and urine bucket, where the urine is dumped in the water and all components get a thorough scrubbing. Finally, we seal the lid and begin the Morning Poo Parade.

This can be embarrassing. As we haul our load toward the beach, the passengers spot us coming and conversation often grinds to a halt. Someone might break the silence with a remark such as “Stand back, here comes Groover Boy!”ÌęOther times, there is a subdued chuckle punctuated with a joke like “Hey, did you know that Grand Canyon poop boatmen never die—they just smell that way?”

Ha-ha, I laugh, that’s really funny. Then I pretend to stumble, which sends everyone running down the beach screaming.

As the guides hoist the components onto my front deck, I leap aboard and start tying everything down, often rigging double and triple backups to ensure that nothing goes flying out. It’s a complex operation—I use nearly 40 cam straps to properly anchor the pee bucket, the 16 pee pails, the riser, the three bags of toilet paper, the garbage, the groover seat, and the rocket boxes, plus all my Clorox and cleaning supplies.

When the lashing is done, I’m surrounded by a mountain of trash and toilet products. You’re probably familiar with those wheeled carts used by folks who clean the bathrooms at airports and hospitals? Well, that’s what the Jackass looks like, with one big difference. When I’m finished rigging, I have to row the goddamn thing through some of the biggest commercial whitewater in North America.

As the Colorado RiverÌęmuscles down the canyon, it stair-steps through more than 160 rapids, the largest of which can casually flip a 37-foot motor raft or smash a dory to pieces. Take Horn Creek, which is on our dance card this afternoon. It features a pair of exposed guard rocks upstream of a double hole backed by two hydraulic jumps that are sometimes called the Great Wave and the Green Guillotine.

The key to unlocking Horn Creek lies just below the right guard rock, where the current forms a shallow wave, known as a “lateral,”Ìęthat radiates downriver in an expanding triangle. A textbook entry starts on the far right side of the river and involves rowing—sideways and backwards—to a point just below the right guard rock. The trick is to build enough momentum so that you punch neatly through the lateral and into the calmer water inside the triangle. It’s a straightforward move, but a heavily laden poop boat tends to complicate things. Imagine trying to row an outhouse, in reverse, down a wall of whitewater, and you’ve got some idea of what it feels like to take the Jackass through Horn Creek.

I watch as all four dories and Monte’s Mule thread the entrance flawlessly. As several passengers raise their arms and yell “Whoo-hoo!”Ìęeach boat skates across the tongue, harpoons through the lateral, and bobs merrily into the tail waves. Then it’s my turn.

Among apprentice boatmen, mistakes are inevitable, and as I plow across the tongue I commit a humdinger. Instead of spearing cleanly through the lateral, I rebound off it and ricochet directly into the vortex. The top of the Great Wave surges over the front of the Jackass, hitting me in the face and chest with enough force to knock the lenses out of my glasses, drive me out of my sandals, and hurl me over the side of the boat, straight into the Green Guillotine.

Oh, hell.

The ordeal of being tossed into the center of a Class V rapid is referred to as “getting Maytagged.”ÌęThe wash cycle starts with a sharp crack to the side of my head—the blade of my right oar—as the current sucks me toward the bottom of the river.

In situations like this, veteran boatmen will tell you it’s essential to remain calm. I’m in no mood to comply with this formula, however, because even though I can’t see a damn thing underwater, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what’s happening to the Jackass up on the surface. In my mind’s eye, it goes like this:

As the Great Wave flips the half-ton raft upside down, the boat drifts helplessly into the maw of the Green Guillotine, which starts clawing her to pieces like a pack of ravenous hyenas disemboweling the carcass of a wildebeest. As the lashings on the aluminum frame and the nose cones give way, my toilet supplies explode in all directions. But that pales in comparison with what I’m sure is being done to my poo cans. Unable to withstand the hammering, the lids are popping off, the rocket boxes are sinking like stones, and the collective contents of all five groovers are spewing out in a giant, thundering geyser: a toxic, 250-pound plume of raw waste that will turn this stretch of the Colorado into a Superfund site. It’s an appalling debacle, and surely it will spell the end of my dream of becoming a river guide…

Given what I’m picturing, it’s actually a bit of a disappointment when Horn Creek’s hydraulics, instead of drowning my sorry ass, shoot me toward the surface, where I’m squirted through the tail waves looking like a wet cat. I’m so horrified by what’s happened that my best option seems to be to dive back underwater and stay there. But suddenly I see the transom of the Vale of Rhonda, with Miss Billie Prosser at the oars, ordering me to grab her gunwale.

“Oh, my God, Billie, the Jackass!”ÌęI sputter as I latch on to the side of her dory and get dragged through the water.

“No worries,”Ìęshe says. “The Jackass had a great run. Much better than you did.”

And, sure enough, there she is. Despite my incompetence, my humble yellow dung barge has performed a series of deft solo moves—threading Horn Creek’s maelstrom on nothing more than the shining fortitude of her own righteousness—and now she’s bobbing in an eddy on the far side of the river. Beautifully upright, perfectly intact, she offers an important nuance to Steve Carothers’s Philosophy of Poop:

Despite your best efforts, it is not always possible to deal with your shit responsibly. But every now and then? Your shit will just take care of itself.

It’s now nine o’clockÌęin the evening. The toilet is up; the pee pails are distributed. Down at the edge of the river, where the dories and the rafts are securely tied to each other, the crew enacts an abridged version of the bedtime ritual on The Waltons—

“G’nite, Monte…”

“G’nite, Kevin…”

I unfurl my air mattress and crawl into my sleeping bag, and you’re probably wondering: So what goes through the mind of a 43-year-old man who’s about to spend the night sleeping on top of six poo cans?

Well, I should probably be planning how to rearrange those groovers in the morning, so that the Jackass will be balanced evenly for the enormous rapids downriver. But instead I’m dwelling on how badly I screwed up my run. Not just this afternoon’s bungled trip through Horn Creek, mind you, but the longer, more misguided run down the river that is my life.

During my trial-by-fire odyssey as a poo-man, I’ve often wrestled with the question of why I chose to do this and whether it has been an enormous mistake. Whenever I take stock of all the regrets and missed opportunities I haul around like the rocket boxes on my raft—the career I’ve squandered, the women I’ve let down—I can’t help but conclude that I’ve conducted myself like a jackass. By any accurate definition, my current state of affairs looks and sounds like failure. But on a night like this, as I lie on my boat floating in an eddy at the bottom of the canyon, with Jupiter’s lantern swinging in the sky, it doesn’t quite feel like failure.

Granted, I have spent some truly miserable moments on the river. But those ordeals have also been leavened by moments of simple, unvarnished perfection. I have seen summer thunderstorms send dozens of waterfalls simultaneously plummeting from the rimrock to the river. I’ve rowed past bighorn rams battling each other on the cliffs, the sound of their head-knocks echoing off the stone. I’ve napped on beds of columbine and hellebore orchids, and gazed at the turquoise waters bubbling from the subterranean pool that the Hopi believe to be the wellspring of life.

Those are wondrous things, to be sure. But the real reason I don’t feel like a complete loser has less to do with the gifts that I’ve been given and more to do with what’s been taken away. By stripping most of my pride, my apprenticeship has laid bare one of the more intriguing paradoxes of the Grand Canyon: the fact that this place has the power to render a person not only profoundly diminished but also radically expanded, often in the same breath. Of the many things that the canyon and the river supposedly offer, this may be the purest of them all.

So, yes, it’s true: If I keep at this baggage-boat gig for a few more years, I may someday enjoy the privilege of rowing actual passengers down the Grand Canyon. In the meantime, the Jackass needs a captain—a role that commands, in my experience, an unexpected dimension of dignity and even a measure of grace. It’s a job whose principal dividend, I suppose, is a subdued and somewhat battered frame of mind that, as the moon prepares to rise over the rim and the night cups the river in its hands, feels almost like happiness.

The post They Call Me Groover Boy appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

EVERY year on Mount Everest seems to generate a milestone of one sort or another, however dubious. The 2007 climbing season that just wrapped up saw the first use of a Ping-Pong table at Base Camp and the first summit attempt by a climber with no arms. But even by these standards, the season of 2006 was weirdly memorable for two reasons that, thanks to the ruthless symmetry between triumph and catastrophe in high-altitude mountaineering, neatly canceled each other out. A total of 480 climbers reached the summit of the world’s highest peak: a remarkable figure (the largest number to top out in a single season) and one whose symbolic import was surpassed only by the size of the butcher’s bill.

Party at Everest Base Camp

Party at Everest Base Camp

Party at Everest Base Camp

By the final week of May 2006, two climbers had plummeted to their deaths, three had succumbed to pulmonary or cerebral edema, another had died of exposure, two had fallen prey to exhaustion, and three had been buried alive by a collapsing serac. Most of those fatalities had taken place inside Tibet on the north side of Everest, a world utterly cut off from the mountain’s more familiar south side. But thanks to the Internet, news of these incidents had reached south-side Base Camp in Nepal. There, on the morning of May 24, photographer Peter McBride and I were sitting in our mess tent with Kami Tenzing, a sad-eyed and enormously capable Sherpa in his forties who served as our guide and translator.

As the three of us morbidly pondered the fact that 11 deaths had just made 2006 the second-worst season ever, we were half-listening to chatter filtering down from the summit on Kami’s radio congratulatory whoops announcing the final top-outs of the season. Kami had dialed to a channel used by New Zealand based șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Consultants, one of the largest commercial expeditions on the south side, when a young climbing Sherpa named Lakpa Tharke broke in to announce that he had an important message for his boss, Ang Tsering, the company’s head Sherpa, or sardar. Given the dark juju in the air, we braced for the worst.

“Ang Tsering, sir,” crackled a voice coming down from 29,035 feet. “Could you please inform our liaison officer that Lakpa Tharke, 25, from the village of Phortse, has just posed naked on the summit for five minutes?”

“This is a really bad idea,” Kami said after translating the remarks into English. From the other side of Base Camp, Ang Tsering keyed his radio and replied, “Five minutes? Naked? Impossible!”

His skepticism was swiftly echoed as Sherpas all over the mountain began transmitting their own opinions.

Five minutes?

Bullshit.

One minute, OK. Two, maybe. But five? No way!

Hearing the disbelief, Lakpa Tharke rose to defend himself. “I have three photographs,” he shouted. “That’s got to be at least three minutes, yes?”

Three? Mmm.

Well, who can say? Perhaps this might be possible

Stupid, yes, but possible.

“Oh, and please be sure to note,” Tharke added, “I am not doing this for the record. I am doing it for world peace.”

“What the fuck?” Kami exclaimed. “He could be doing this as a temperature experiment, a stunt, a personal statement. But world peace? He could have said anything other than that.”

“Hey, Kami,” I interjected, “this business of being naked on the summit would that be considered an offense to the gods of Everest?”

“Oh, how the hell should I know?” Kami barked, one of the few signs of exasperation he’d let slip in the 25 days we’d been together.

“Look around you,” he continued, waving his arm in a sweeping arc that seemed to encompass not only Base Camp and the mountain looming above it but all the events silly, heroic, tragic, and farcical that had unfolded in this surreal outpost during the previous month.

“People come up here and they feel like they can do whatever they like,” he declared. “What else do you want me to say? I have no idea what to think about anything anymore. Everybody here is completely insane.”

IT’S NO SECRET that during the past decade or so, Everest has become an experimental theater for the sort of behavior that any self-respecting alpinist finds repugnant and 2006 offered as vivid a reminder of this as you’d ever want to see. The 45 expeditions on both the south and north sides included a pair of Bahrainians hell-bent on setting a new world record for the fastest ascent of the mountain (this despite having no previous high-altitude-climbing experience whatsoever); a 62-year-old Frenchman who’d had a kidney removed just prior to leaving for Nepal; a young British climber who perished next to the north side’s main climbing route after reportedly being passed by more than 40 people; and a stricken Australian who was abandoned high on the North Col and later rescued but only after his guide had descended safely and telephoned the man’s wife to tell her the false news of her husband’s death.

Those stories underscored the notion that, on the tenth anniversary of what is still the most notorious disaster in Everest history the storm of May 10, 1996, which claimed the lives of eight people in 24 hours things were more out of control than ever. And as the climbing world once again took note of the self-indulgent grandstanding and pointless absurdity of it all, a fresh wave of outrage poured forth from mountaineering deacons like Sir Edmund Hillary, who told reporters in New Zealand that “the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying people just want to get to the top; they don’t give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress.”

When McBride and I left for Nepal, of course, most of these events had yet to unfold. Our arrival at Base Camp on May 9 coincided with the lull that settles in just before the summit rush. The Sherpas who perform the grunt work that enables commercial clients to ascend the mountain had already prepared the four camps along the South Col route hauling up tons of food and bottled oxygen and rigging miles of ladders and fixed rope. By then, almost every client had completed several acclimatization trips to Camps II and III (at 21,000 and 23,500 feet, respectively), and several of the more opulent expeditions had even taken helicopter rides back to Kathmandu to enjoy a “recovery break,” which involved splashing in the pool and playing roulette at the Hyatt Regency before returning for their summit bids. This meant that more than 500 jittery climbers and jaded Sherpas were now sitting in Base Camp with nothing better to do than drink, gab, and wait for a 72-hour window of clear weather so the summit assaults could start.

It seemed like the perfect time for McBride and me to start cataloging the excesses that, supposedly, had corrupted the world’s noblest mountain beyond any hope of redemption. Having dutifully done so, I am now able to report that, during the following three weeks, we witnessed a number of things that merited Very Deep Concern. However, we also discovered something that’s often lost on those who rush to condemn the Everest circus but that is gloriously evident to the intrepid tribe of fit, motivated people who come from all over the world each year to partake in this Himalayan version of Burning Man.

Namely: In addition to presenting a rather grotesque perversion of pretty much everything that alpinism is supposed to represent, Everest Base Camp also happens to be—and I’m afraid there’s just no other way to put this—an absolute fricking blast.

IT TAKES EIGHT days to get from the Nepalese village of Lukla to the foot of Everest. You know you’ve arrived when the trail slams up against a soaring atrium of ice-enameled rock that serves as a kind of Maginot Line separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. From this spot, you can see the tops of five world-class leviathans: Khumbutse, Nuptse, Lhotse, Pumori, and Lingtren. Everest is here, too, but its summit is invisible, tucked behind the mountain’s West Ridge. After a moment, your gaze peels away from the imperial-looking ridgelines and the cobalt-colored sky and tumbles down the mountain to the disheveled surface of the Khumbu Glacier, where roughly 11 bajillion tons of rubble are convulsing beneath your feet, emitting a grunting chorus of odd pops, ominous hisses, and digestive gurgles.

It’s a weirdly unstable platform. Every couple of hours a new fissure winks open or another humpbacked stone slides into a pool of meltwater with a blooping splash, like a walrus returning to the sea. And thanks to all that restless heaving, it’s the last place you’d expect to find, say, a small city. Yet as McBride and I could see, somebody had obviously decided it was the perfect spot to stage an entire Renaissance Faire.

Prayer flags streamed in all directions, snapping crisply in the hypoxic breeze at 17,600 feet. Beneath those flags sprawled an alpine metropolis of more than a thousand people crammed into some 250 tents that had been stocked with 3,000 yakloads of gear, food, and medical equipment (and which required a resupply of 200 additional yakloads every two weeks). The 27 expeditions spread along this half-mile strip had turned the place into a cross between a Central Asian bazaar and a pre-Christmas PlayStation sale at Wal-Mart. While cooks bartered everything from flashlight batteries to maple syrup, porters clad in shower sandals staggered beneath gargantuan loads of climbing rope, whiskey, and aluminum ladders. Crampon-clinking Sherpas mingled with windburned climbers, shuffling trains of exhausted yaks, officious-looking liaison officers from the Nepal Ministry of Tourism, and nappy-coated pack ponies whose saddle bells jingled merrily in the frost-chilled air.

This, we soon realized, was more than simply the world’s most rarefied ghetto of dirtbags. It was a United Nations of mountaineering whose members had cordoned themselves into boroughs, each boasting its own special zoning codes and municipal traffic patterns.

To put distance between themselves and the trails plied by the odoriferous yak caravans, the bulk of the five-star, commercially guided expeditions—which generally charge clients between $30,000 and $65,000 a pop—had clustered on the east and west sides of the moraine. This zone was populated by huge outfits in which dozens of climbing Sherpas and guides served up to 30 clients per group. They included șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Consultants, an American company called International Mountain Guides (IMG), and two crews operating under the umbrella of Henry Todd, the controversial Scotsman known as “the Toddfather,” who supplies much of the bottled oxygen on the mountain (and who spent nearly eight years in prison during the 1970s for distributing LSD in London).

Luxuristan, as we dubbed it, featured the densest concentration of massage tents, solar-powered showers, padded toilet seats, Internet-cafĂ© services, and plastic-flower bouquets in all of Base Camp—amenities that the managers of these camps found mildly embarrassing, but in a pleasantly resigned kind of way.

“Yeah, Everest is a bizarre place,” shrugged one team leader who half-jokingly allowed that the only qualification his company imposed on prospective clients was that their checks didn’t bounce. “A lot of people really don’t belong up here because, let’s face it, this is one of those places where you actually can buy your way in.”

At the top of Luxuristan’s pyramid was a special expedition run by Mountain Link, an American firm with about a dozen Sherpas, seven guides, a $400,000 budget, and only one client. Chris Balsiger was a sandy-haired, 54-year-old multi-millionaire from El Paso who was hoping to polish off the final piece in his Seven Summits campaign. Balsiger and his entourage enjoyed elaborate meals prepared by a chef who’d brought in 38 coolers stuffed with fresh vegetables, jars of salad dressing, and steaks. The Team Texas communications tent was equally impressive: Its solar-charged grid powered an array of sat phones, camcorders, laptops, and satellite uplinks that enabled team members to update their Web sites each day with podcasts and video footage. The tents also contained a film library with 60 DVDs, which the Texans generously shared with McBride and me.

I later reported these details back to Kami Tenzing, who gave a knowing nod. “Fifteen years ago, Base Camp was a different place,” he said. “Our only communication with the outside world was through the mail runners, who would walk all the way to Kathmandu and back. But now we have kerosene heaters, videos, and e-mail. And the type of clients who come to the mountain today are much more sensitive. We call them the Butter People.”

“The what?”

“Mar ke mi. It means butter person’ in Sherpa. It refers to people who are very pale, and who are always rushing to put on all their clothing the instant that they get cold. But then the minute they get hot, they are rushing to take all their clothes off again.”

“Basically, they’re soft,” he concluded, “and they tend to melt easily.”

THE BUTTER PEOPLE embodied the Everest excess that we all find so deliciously loathsome, so during the next few days McBride and I kept sneaking over to the Texas camp hoping to gather more dirt. Whenever we showed up, however, they wound up doing something nice, like feeding us eggs Benedict or insisting we join them for yet another movie. In the end, their generosity and decency made it impossible to hate them although the other commercial juggernauts of Luxuristan provoked plenty of rancor, especially among the smaller private groups who were having a harder time of things.

One of the most beleaguered parties was a two-man Czech team. It consisted of an experienced mountaineer with an intense gaze named Martin Minarik who, together with his friend Pavel Kalny, had launched an ascent of 27,940-foot Lhotse without any guides or climbing Sherpas. On May 9, after becoming disoriented and exhausted, Kalny took a fatal fall on the Lhotse Face. Having already forged ahead to prepare tea in Camp IV, Minarik failed to witness the accident. Kalny was found the next day by a group of Chilean climbers who remained with him until he died. His body was then placed in a sleeping bag, and Minarik retreated to Base Camp, where he discovered that his nightmare was just beginning.

Word of the incident had already reached Paul Adler, an Australian client with IMG who was running his own Everest blog. In violation of IMG’s policy, Adler fired off an unconfirmed “report,” preempting an official announcement by the Nepal Ministry of Tourism, stating that one of the Czechs was dead, without saying who. This threw both climbers’ families into a frenzy.

At the same time, having suffered such severe frostbite while searching for his partner that he could no longer walk, Minarik started asking the big commercial expeditions if they would order their climbing Sherpas to retrieve his friend’s body. But no one was keen to divert vital resources on the threshold of their own summit pushes. And, in any case, Minarik was either unwilling or unable to fork over the total of $2,000 that the Sherpas would have charged. When I paid a visit to his tent one evening, he lashed out in fury.

“Oh, these fucking commercial expeditions,” he fumed, pounding the air with his fists while his blackened toes marinated in a pan of lukewarm water. “They are so busy getting caviar and champagne up to Camp II, they can’t even bring themselves to help a fellow human being. It’s disgusting!” Minarik’s rage evoked both sympathy and exasperation throughout Base Camp’s second-biggest neighborhood, Schmoozistan a hodgepodge of less affluent non-commercial expeditions whose members were devoting most of their pre-summit time to paying social calls on one another. Setting foot anywhere inside this cheerful district, regardless of the hour, triggered a burst of hearty salutations —”Bongiorno!” “Dobryi den!” “Yo, dude Whassup?”—along with a nonrefusable invitation to drop inside for a toast.

Although Schmoozistan’s arrangements were more spartan than those of Luxuristan, each encampment took special pride in doing one thing better than the others. The Swiss had the most accurate weather reports. The Spaniards brewed the tastiest cappuccino. The Filipinos boasted the most impressive communications setup a satellite dish brought in by yak and powered by a 360-pound generator airlifted to Base Camp in a Russian helicopter. And the Indians offered up the best spiritual counseling. (Their leader, Brigadier General Sharab Chandub Negi, delivered elaborate sermons on the benefits of pranayama yogic breathing and Buddhist meditation.)

Schmoozistan’s eclectic cast also included the legendary Italian alpinist Simone Moro, 39, a balding and sinewy figure who was hoping to complete Everest’s first solo south-to-north traverse from Nepal to Tibet; a grimly obsessed 40-year-old Indian lawyer named Kalpana Dash who was making her third Everest attempt; and Toshiko Ushida, a 75-year-old Japanese woman with a warm smile who was intent on becoming the oldest person ever to summit. Rounding out the mix were teams from Mongolia, Turkey, and South Africa, plus three expeditions from South Korea.

Once you made it through the hospitality gantlet to Schmoozistan’s southwestern border, you crossed into Inebria. This cluster of mold-coated canvas tents was home to four ragged Sherpas who built and maintained the climbing route through the ever-shifting labyrinth of the Khumbu Icefall, the biggest graveyard on Everest. The Ice Doctors, as they’re known, had one of the most dangerous jobs on the mountain. And when they weren’t on duty, they loved to sit in front of their tents bathing in the sun and pounding whatever alcoholic libations they could get their hands on.

A stone’s throw away from Inebria sat the tiny municipality of Bunnystan a group of tents sheltering a team led by National Geographic Poland editor Martyna Wojciechowska, who appeared in Polish Playboy’s June 2001 issue and was hoping to become the first Bunny to stand on top of the world. Martyna was Base Camp’s favorite topic of gossip, and everyone delighted in trading apocryphal tales about her cosmetics, her narcissism, and the rude manner in which she supposedly treated her Sherpas.

“I’ve never actually hoped that somebody wouldn’t get to the summit,” remarked an American climber who, like most people peddling anecdotes about the so-called Energizer Bunny, had yet to even speak to her. “But I’ve heard so many horrible stories about the woman, I really hope she doesn’t make it.” Finally, there was the little patch of blackened mud and half-frozen yak dung that Kami Tenzing had reserved for McBride and me. We christened the place Bewilderabad.

BEFORE COMING to Base Camp, I’d been warned that interlopers who weren’t there to conquer the mountain were often treated with hostility. Yet among the many hospitalities of Luxuristan, Schmoozistan, Bunnystan, and Inebria, we never encountered the unpleasantness we’d heard so much about.

“You know what I just realized?” McBride said to me one afternoon toward the end of our first week. “I love this place!”

And who wouldn’t? Despite the frictions and tragedies, most folks bent over backwards to behave decently a state of affairs that, given the combustible mix of nationalities and ambitions, we and others found quite remarkable.

“Like everybody else, I’d read Into Thin Air and thought this place must be an absolute shit hole,” said Dr. Luanne Freer, Yellowstone National Park’s medical director and the head of Base Camp’s medical clinic. “It’s a weird little place, but it turns out that climbers are pretty fascinating people. And, besides, it’s really fun!”

Indeed it was, often in unexpected ways. Each morning, a special squadron of Nepalese workers fanned out to service the buckets beneath the toilet tents. Known as the Poop Doctors, they charged $1.05 per pound to gather up all the human excrement in camp (around 66 pounds per day). Whenever these men dropped by, the climbing Sherpas sounded off with a little song that went like so:

“Ah mo-mo, kekpa kelugkimi!”

Rough translation: “Holy shit, here come the Poop Doctors!”

Another important institution was the daily baseball game, which started around 4 p.m. and was played on a patch of ice that doubled as the Khumbu Klassic Golf Course. Base Camp also had its own mascot, a mutt named Shipton the Superdog. In late April, Shipton made canine history by undertaking an Incredible Journey through the Icefall to Camp II, where he allegedly stole 31 hard-boiled eggs from the IMG cook tent, then dug up a human skull somewhere out on the Western Cwm.

The only thing lacking in Base Camp was the kind of Club Med style tent hopping that had prevailed two years earlier, when there were 17 women on the mountain and, recalls Dr. Luanne, all eight of the pregnancy-test kits she’d brought with her got used up during the season. Nobody seemed to know why, but the buzz about 2006 was that romance was clearly down.

“Some years, it can be a real sausage-fest up here,” sighed one frustrated male expedition leader. “All I’m doing this season is sleeping in the dirt by myself.”

If Base Camp had a town center, it was the Himalayan Rescue Association’s medical center, run by Dr. Luanne and her assistant, a jolly emergency-room physician from Idaho named Eric Johnson. Dr. Luanne had started this service three years earlier, inspired by Tashi Tenzing, Tenzing Norgay’s grandson, and it was a huge hit. In addition to patients, the clinic hosted a three-man BBC film crew shooting a documentary called Everest E.R. The BBC guys spent their days lounging on a thick piece of blue ensolite strewn with girlie magazines that always drew an appreciative crowd of Sherpas. The ensolite got warm in the sun, so it was known throughout camp as the Beach.

The best time to visit the clinic was 5 p.m., when Dr. Luanne closed shop, the Beach was rolled up, and everybody ducked into the HRA mess tent for a popcorn-and-cocktails gossip session. I dropped by one wind-whipped evening just after the generator for the Philippine satellite dish had been delivered a breach of a long-standing tradition that restricted helicopter landings to medical emergencies.

“At the rate things are going up here,” Dr. Eric joked as he sipped on a Bombay Sapphire martini, “pretty soon people will go on supplemental oxygen day and night, starting at Shangboche [a village and landing strip at 12,000 feet], and never even have to acclimatize. I bet we’ll eventually see snow-machine shuttles and oxygenated suits up on the Western Cwm. And with all that nonsense, you know what? This place will still draw folks.”

“Really?” said Dr. Luanne.

“Absolutely,” he said. “The lure the drive of the world’s highest mountain is irresistible. People just can’t get enough of this place.”

TWO HOURS AFTER lunch on the brilliantly clear afternoon of May 17, cheers erupted on the edge of Schmoozistan. A British commercial team had just become the first of the season to tag the top from the south side. The Brits were followed by a group of South Koreans, a group of Filipinos, and a Swiss climber named Benedikt Arnold. This signaled the start of the spring summit frenzy. Up on the South Col, more than 100 climbers were primed to launch their final assaults, starting around midnight.

First thing the next morning, McBride and I strolled over to Bunnystan to see how Martyna Wojciechowska’s summit bid, which was supposed to happen any moment now, was coming along.

Bunnystan’s communications tent was run by Wojciech Trzcionka, a funny and mildly deranged reporter for a Polish newspaper who’d had such a great time at Base Camp that he was already scheming to return the following year to open up a hyperbaric oxygen bar. (After repeated failures at pronouncing his name, McBride and I simply called him Vortex.)

We arrived just as Vortex and Patrycja Jonetzko, a Polish physician with short blond hair and blue eyes, were belting out their national anthem to celebrate a minor miracle: Not only had the team summited, but they’d done so on the birthday of the late Polish pope, John Paul II.

“This is so exciting,” yelled Vortex, “that I’ve decided to smoke my last cigarette!”

Vortex’s radio was transmitting a blizzard of excited Polish chatter. Patrycja said the entire team was now on the summit, and that Vortex was speaking with Martyna’s teammate Tomasz Kobielski.

“So what are they saying?” I asked.

“Believe me, it’s not worth translating,” replied Patrycja. “Just a lot of bullshit.”

“Oh, c’mon, what are they saying?”

“Well, Tomasz is saying it feels very strange because they can’t go any higher, and Wojciech is telling him that they need to initiate their descent because there are some girls down here waiting for him in the bathtub.”

“Bathtub?”

“And now Tomasz is saying that they’re going to get the fuck off the fucking summit and come the fuck down.”

While talking to Tomasz, Vortex had been surfing the Internet, where he’d just discovered a report that Tomas Olsson, a Swedish climber on the north side, had fallen more than 5,000 feet to his death after a rappel anchor broke loose.

“This is really quite surreal,” observed Patrycja. “On the one hand, you have all these people celebrating. On the other hand, all these other people are dying.”

Vortex, meanwhile, had switched over to a Polish news site and uncovered another disturbing piece of information. Apparently, the Polish Everest team would be returning home on the very day that JP2’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, was scheduled to arrive on his first visit to Poland an event almost certain to upstage the press conference Vortex had set up to trumpet the world’s first Playboy Bunny summit.

“This is terrible!” Vortex exclaimed, slapping his forehead.

“You have to understand,” Patrycja told me, “that in Poland everything—even Everest—somehow always relates back to the pope.”

“Pasang!” cried Vortex, addressing his Sherpa sardar through the walls of the tent. “Do you have a cigarette? I need another cigarette immediately!”

THE WEATHER REMAINED stable and clear, and over the next few days the Spaniards, the Indians, and all the big commercial teams began putting climber after climber on top. Meanwhile, weird things were happening lower on the mountain.

At Camp II, Kalpana Dash, the Indian woman, had run out of steam and announced that, since she couldn’t summit, she would fling herself into a crevasse forcing her Sherpas to tie her into a special safety harness. Around the same time, Toshiko Ushida, the elderly Japanese woman, had bonked as well, and during her descent she’d taken so long to get through the Icefall that her Sherpa had reportedly considered flinging himself into a crevasse. And Chris Balsiger, the Texas millionaire, had stalled out just above Camp III.

“What a way to spend a million bucks, huh?” he quipped later, keeping a sense of humor about it. “But what else was I gonna do buy myself another boat?”

The mood was bleaker over at the Czech camp, where the frostbitten Martin Minarik had struck out in his efforts to retrieve the body of Pavel Kalny. Simone Moro, the Italian superclimber, had volunteered to lower Kalny into a crevasse during his solo traverse. But for some unknown reason, that hadn’t happened and now Moro was on the north side, apparently trying to argue his way out of a $50,000 fine for having crossed into Tibet without a Chinese climbing permit or visa.

Finally, Minarik had taken his problem to the people who probably should have volunteered to solve it in the first place. The South Korean Han Wang-Yong Cleaning Expedition was supposed to be collecting five tons of refuse, which mainly meant oxygen bottles and, alas, dead bodies. According to Minarik, the South Koreans had promised to bring Kalny down but then mysteriously withdrew their offer. On May 21, Minarik finally threw in the towel and left, cursing the cruelty of Base Camp from the back of a Nepalese porter who was literally carrying him. As a final insult, Nepal’s Ministry of Tourism later refused to refund his $3,000 “garbage-disposal deposit” because he’d left his friend’s body behind.

Later that afternoon, word arrived that the Polish cover girl had come down from the summit and was available to talk. I raced over to Bunnystan, where I was greeted by a willowy brunette who looked like she was having a bad-hair month and hadn’t taken a bath in 56 days.

Martyna Wojciechowska wasn’t quite as big a star in Poland as the pope, but she came pretty close. Back in the late nineties she’d hosted Auto Maniac, a TV show devoted to Formula One racing, before moving on to host Big Brother (Europe’s most popular reality show) and then starting an exotic-travel program called Mission Martyna that featured her sand-surfing in Chile and wrestling anacondas in Venezuela.

Mission Martyna was a hit until 2004, when the Energizer Bunny, while filming an episode that involved searching for elves in Iceland, suffered a car accident that killed her cameraman and shattered her spine. Doctors said her adventure days were over and told her she had to start “living like a normal person.” At which point she decided to climb Everest.

“I had to fight my way back,” she told me. “And the best way was to prove it’s possible for somebody who is not a climber to get to the top of the world’s highest mountain.”

“So how was the summit?” I asked.

“Well, initially it was very foggy, but then the fog lifted to reveal a beautiful view of Tibet. Mountains upon mountains enough to make you think the whole world is made of them. But it was so crowded up there. There was this Korean group, and they were all shouting and using their sat phones, and I couldn’t even hear my own thoughts!”

“What did you do in the midst of all that ruckus?”

“Well, I made some calls of my own. I had a live satellite connection with TVN2 which is the Polish CNN and with my mom, and with my boyfriend, Chris, who is a safari guide in Africa, and who had proposed to me a few days earlier. I must say, however, the summit was not what I expected.

“It was actually kind of a shabby moment,” she continued, “fighting to have a moment of beauty to yourself. You know, after my accident, I had thought that standing on top of Mount Everest would make me the happiest person on earth. But now I know this is simply not true. And suddenly it seemed like maybe it wasn’t so important after all.”

DURING THE FINAL WEEKS of May, the north side turned into a high-altitude morgue. Two days before Tomas Olsson’s fatal fall on May 16, an Indian climber named Constable Sri Kishan had toppled off the Second Step. A day later, David Sharp, the young mountaineer from Britain who’d been passed repeatedly as he huddled alongside the main climbing route, froze to death. On May 17, French climber Jacques-Hughes Letrange died from unknown causes. Two days after that, the Brazilian climber Vitor Negrete expired in his tent, probably from pulmonary edema. On May 22, Russian mountaineer Igor Plyushkin died in circumstances similar to Negrete’s. And the last fatality of the season took place on May 25, when Thomas Weber, a semi-blind German climber, succumbed to exhaustion.

By this point, there was still a handful of teams tagging the summit from the south side, but the cheering was getting drowned out by the yells of porters dismantling tents, packing goods, and reversing the massive flow of luggage downvalley.

Meanwhile, Kalpana Dash, the suicidal Indian lawyer who had been safely escorted back to Base Camp, was crying inconsolably in her tent. She blamed her third failed summit try on her Sherpas for forcing her to descend, and she’d decided to file a formal complaint against them the moment she reached Kathmandu.

I dropped by to ask why it mattered so much, given that she was still alive.

“Why?” she wailed. “Because Everest is my life it is my life! The summit of Everest is my dream. It is everything to me!”

Dash wasn’t the only one upset. Two days earlier, the South Korean cleaning expedition had, with fanfare, swept through Inebria and Bewilderabad toting garbage bags and a video camera but somehow managed to miss a burlap sack and two ancient pairs of underwear lying in the rocks beside our cook tent.

“Tell me, is this cleaning or not?” fumed Kami Tenzing, who clearly had reached the limit of his tolerance for Base Camp high jinks. “You know what they will do now? They will go to the media and report that they have taken hundreds of kilos of garbage down from Everest. In their country and in the eyes of the world, they will be heroes. But look at this shit! I hate these cleaning expedition guys—it’s such a scam, what they do!”

Then Kami’s anger took a sharp, unexpected turn. “So many Western climbers achieve fame on Everest with the help of us Sherpas,” he said. “But almost none of them ever give anything back.”

“Oh?”

“Every movie or story I have ever seen about Everest focuses only on the Western climbers—there is never any depiction of the Sherpas. I know it’s not necessary, but I wish they gave some credit for how hard we work, how heavy our loads are, how many times we go up and down, breaking trail between the South Col and the summit, or fixing the route on the Lhotse Face, and for the risks we take in doing these things. But they never do the Sherpas are always the hidden story. You don’t have to show everything, of course. But there should be some small credit given, no? Even just showing our faces? It’s true that we are working for you and that you are paying us. But it’s almost like we are slaves.”

Later, McBride and I ran these comments past Rodrigo Jordan, the leader of the Chilean expedition and the man who had found Pavel Kalny before he died. Jordan was one of the smartest guys in Base Camp, and he nodded emphatically when I told him about Kami’s remarks.

“They’re paid for what they do, so they’re not really slaves,” he said. “But the commercial clients up here aren’t mountaineers either, at least not real ones. Those that make it to the summit will unfurl their flags and take their photographs, and then the average American or German or Japanese who reads about it in the newspaper will never understand that 90 percent of the work was done entirely by the Sherpas. It’s not exactly a secret, but people don’t go out of their way to advertise this fact, either. So, yes, sometimes these men become very upset. And if you were one of them, you’d probably be pissed, too.”

ON MAY 25, McBride and I decided it was time to hit the trail, and it occurred to me that some of the finest moments in Base Camp were days like this. Each night, all the prayer flags froze, and in the morning, when the sun’s first rays hit these bright little squares of cloth, the ice crystals inside would evaporate and little puffs of steam would waft into the air in a way that made the flags look like they were breathing. Then the light would hit the Khumbu Icefall and start bouncing among the seracs, shimmering and coruscating until that entire jagged mass of blue ice seemed to levitate on the iridescent force of its own beauty. Base Camp seemed like a notch below paradise at such moments, and I recalled something the Energizer Bunny had said.

“Everything is so concentrated up here,” she’d told me. “Survival and death, suffering and happiness, ambition and humility. During these two months in Base Camp, you sometimes feel as if you’ve lived an entire lifetime in this place—don’t you agree?”

I did. Because, more than any other feature on Everest, Base Camp seemed to offer up a set of ideas that suggested, at least to me, that Sir Edmund Hillary’s condemnation of what this mountain has become might be profoundly mistaken.

First, there was the notion that every person connected with the place—the Ice Doctors and Poop Doctors, the Butter People and “slaves”—was both a hero and a victim in a drama of his own making, and that the hunk of rock at the center of that drama neither ennobled nor diminished those attempting to climb it but instead was simply there. And because it’s there, looming along the outer edges of human physiology and imagination, Everest had somehow distilled the essence of those drawn into its orbit their courage and ludicrousness, their foibles and fears and reflected those qualities back in ways that were both stark and urgently compelling.

Most climbers probably knew this already or learned it on the mountain. Because you simply can’t return from the most exalted place on earth without acknowledging your bottomless frailty, your utter insignificance, and the awkward fact that your life represents a bestowal of grace that you’ve done nothing to deserve. Nor can you fail to consider the prospect that one reason maybe the reason why the world, despite its many desolations and depravities, sometimes vibrates with such harrowing beauty is that horror and levity might be linked inside the human heart in the same ineffably mysterious way as sadness and love.

Finally, there’s the notion that these things may balance on a blasphemous paradox: the possibility that the act of climbing Everest might be rather superfluous. Because the most bewitching feature of the world’s highest peak may not, in fact, be located anywhere near the top. Instead, it may be folded into the absurd, oddly redemptive chaos of Base Camp right down at the bottom of it all.

Which, in the end, is where the most interesting forms of truth abide. Don’t you agree?

The post High Times appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When it comes to writing about a subject that’s so bleak and depressing that commercial failure seems all but guaranteed, it’s hard to beat the book that Michael Ghiglieri, a longtime Colorado River guide, was finishing up in the spring of 2001. His 408-page manuscript chronicled, in chillingly graphic detail, the many ways in which more than 600 people have met an untimely and traumatic end in the Grand Canyon.

Nicaragua

Nicaragua

Nicaragua

Nicaragua

@#95;box photo=image_2 alt=image_2_alt@#95;box

Feeling certain that they wouldn’t find a publisher to back such a macabre project, Ghiglieri and co-author Tom Myers—a physician who’d spent ten years treating patients on the Canyon’s South Rim—decided to pony up $45,000 in printing and production costs and release it themselves. They both tapped their savings, loaded up with books, and hit the road, distributing copies of Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon to bookstores, roadside cafĂ©s, and shopping malls in Arizona and Las Vegas.

“It was pretty humbling,” recalls the 60-year-old Ghiglieri. “It felt like we were two 14-year-olds looking for our first bag-boy jobs at the grocery store.”

The book swiftly found its audience, though, and by this spring Over the Edge was headed for its 17th printing, having sold more than 150,000 copies and become the bestselling item at the bookstores on the South Rim. It was the dark-horse publishing success story of the outdoor world, and this month Ghiglieri—who earned his Ph.D. studying chimpanzees in Uganda and is affectionately known to his fellow Canyon boatmen as “the Doctor”—will extend the brand to include a park that, like Grand Canyon, is a notorious death trap for unwary tourists and adventurers.

Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite, which Ghiglieri co-wrote with former National Park Service superintendent Charles “Butch” Farabee, is due out in late May. Like Over the Edge, Off the Wall is carefully organized according to the various ways one can bite the dust in the backcountry. In addition to rock falls, airplane accidents, and boating debacles, the books offer a rich smorgasbord of drownings, climbing errors, murders, tree falls, suicides, flash floods, BASE-jumping mistakes, and random disappearances.

The stories evoke grisly fascination, but they also serve up important don’t-be-this-guy lessons that, Ghiglieri hopes, might reduce the number of tragic mishaps taking place inside the parks. We caught up with the Doctor this spring to talk about his research, and about how good things can come from studying very, very bad accidents.

OUTSIDE: Would it be fair to say you’re completely obsessed with death?
GHIGLIERI: I’m not obsessed with death at all—in fact, I’m so unobsessed with death that I never want to do another book like Over the Edge or Off the Wall again. What I am kind of obsessed with is prevention, especially when so many of the accidents chronicled in both books are completely avoidable. It’s fair to say I became obsessed with that.

That’s really why you wrote them?
Yes. I’ve been a river guide for 34 years, and I was struck by the fact that people were getting killed and maimed in Grand Canyon and Yosemite every month of the year, yet back in the early days, nobody seemed to know or care about what, specifically, was going wrong. Records were kept, of course, but the files were often just thrown into a box somewhere and forgotten. So I thought it would be a good idea to gather and correlate this information and then look for patterns. In the process, I discovered it’s actually kind of fun to learn about this stuff. Especially if, you know, you’re not the one getting killed.

How did you get your hands on all this information?
The primary source was the Park Service’s own Incident Reports, but frequently the old reports were incomplete or lost or had simply been thrown away. So we looked in the county sheriffs’ reports, we read the complete microfilm records of every newspaper in northern Arizona and around Yosemite, we combed through all the history books, and we conducted extensive interviews. It was a pretty exhaustive process that, with each book, took about three years—a search for diamonds among the pebbles.

Can we really “learn” from these stories?
Absolutely. And some of the lessons are surprisingly simple and obvious. For example, one thing that amazed me was the number of folks in Yosemite who have insisted—and still insist—on wading into rivers just above the park’s gigantic, thousand-foot-plus waterfalls. The streambeds up there are incredibly slippery. You’ve basically got an invisible coating of snotlike algae covering a surface of highly polished granite that has water washing over it at 13 miles an hour. Which means that if you slip, you’ll travel 40 feet in about two seconds, and then you’re over the edge and gone. Yet people continue to wade out there—apparently they just can’t make the computational reality switch from suburbia to the real world—with absolutely horrible results.

It was a financial gamble for you to publish these books. What made you think people would want to read this stuff?
Look, if I had written a book called, say, Death in the City that outlined all the ways you can die in a really bad neighborhood—getting shot, getting run over, and so on—almost no one would buy the thing. But three or four million years of evolution have programmed us to pay attention to big, scary things that can hurt you in the natural world—storms, avalanches, glaciers, rapids, nasty animals, whatever. Every one of us has at least one ancestor who was eaten by a bear. Those are the kinds of threats that twang an atavistic nerve. We’re supposed to pay attention. That’s how you wind up not being the guy who gets eaten by the bear.

And yet—the dining habits of bears aside—some of this is actually quite funny, isn’t it?
You know, unfortunately, it is funny. There’s a lot of stuff in these books that’s just Darwin Award material, and it can be horribly entertaining to realize that “Oh, my God, I belong to a species with a huge range of intellect … and that’s the low end of the spectrum right over there.” Some of these incidents are almost an embarrassment to Homo sapiens. At a certain point, you begin to realize that the average squirrel possesses more intellect than the average human being.

Really?
People do some of the dumbest things you could imagine, things that no other species would ever do. How about Shane Kinsella, a Yosemite tourist from Ireland? After drinking one hell of a lot of wine in August 2005, he poses for a photo in which he’s pretending to fall into the river just above Upper Yosemite Falls, which is a 1,430-foot drop. The shot doesn’t work out, so his friend—who’s also been drinking a hell of a lot of wine—tells him to do it again. Shane obliges, only this time he loses his balance for real, falls in the river, shoots off the lip of the waterfall, spins into space, and, when he hits, explodes into pieces like a ripe melon. Only a human being—not even an amoeba—would make that mistake.

Do these stories ever bum you out?
Oh, yeah. It’s just awful, doing the research and reading through hundreds and hundreds of accounts of terrible things that people have done to themselves. But the whole process is kind of double-edged. On the one hand, I’m depressed by all these fatalities. But then, if two or three people who happen to read one of the books end up not doing something that might otherwise have killed them, I’ve done a good thing and saved a life.

Has anybody ever been upset by what you’ve written?
I was expecting to get a lot of “how dare you!” letters from readers of Over the Edge, but we got zero. In fact, it was just the opposite: We got letters from many people, especially relatives of those who died, expressing gratitude for the way the book gave them closure. Often they would write to say, “I never understood what happened. Finally I do. Thank you for writing this.” It was the last thing I was expecting. And it was really kind of amazing.

BAD ENDS: The best of the worst from Over the Edge and Off the Wall

At Grand Canyon…

Lane McDaniels, 42
June 12, 1928
River Mile 4, Navajo Bridge, Marble Canyon
McDaniels, a construction worker, lost his footing on a scaffold while helping build what qualified, at the time, as the world’s highest steel bridge and fell 470 feet into the Colorado River. No safetynet had been set up, due toconcerns that hot rivets might ignite it. Observers reported that McDaniels’s body appeared to “burst and flatten out” on impact.

United Airlines Flight 718 (58 people aboard); TWA Flight 2 (70 people aboard)
June 30, 1956
Chuar Butte and Temple Butte
TWA’s Super Constellation Flight 2 entered the airspace of United’s DC-7 Flight 718 at 21,000 feet. The pilots of both aircraft had flown off course—perhaps to give passengers a good view of the Canyon. The DC-7 overtook the Super Constellation, and its left wing sliced off the Super Connie’s tail. Both aircraft plunged into the canyon. There were no survivors.

Anthony Krueger, 20
March 25, 1971
Phantom Ranch beach
While camping with friends, Krueger imbibed a brew made from blossoms of the sacred datura plant, a poisonous weed with mind-altering properties. Several hours later, after trying to lift huge boulders, talking to nonexistent people, and eating dirt, he disappeared, apparently attempted to swim the Colorado River, and drowned. Five weeks later, his body was found seven miles downstream.

Trish Astolfo, 37
January 5, 1993
The Abyss, South Rim
Astolfo, reportedly inspired by repeated viewings of Thelma & Louise, tried to drive her Chevy Suburban into the Grand Canyon, but the vehicle high-centered before it cleared the rim. She then opened the door, walked to the edge, and leaped off—only to land on a rocky ledge 20 feet below. Injured but still alive, she crawled to a nearby precipice, dropped over its edge, and fell 150 feet to her death.

Donna Spangler, 59
April 11, 1993
Grandview Trail, in the Redwall below Horseshoe Mesa
Robert Merlin Spangler shoved his wife, Donna, off a cliff to avoid the inconvenience of a divorce. She fell 160 feet. After signing a confession to this and three other murders, Spangler got a life sentence and ended up dying of cancerin prison. He requested a National Park Service permit to have his ashes spread over the Grand Canyon. U.S. District Judge Paul G. Rosenblatt ordered the NPS to deny it.

Matthew J. Garcy, 20
October 24, 1997
Cape Royal
Garcy asked a bystander to take his picture and mail a letter that was sitting on the front seat of his car. He then handed his glasses to the bystander and jumped off the North Rim, falling 400 feet to his death.

BAD ENDS: The best of the worst from Over the Edge and Off the Wall

At Yosemite…

Pomposo Merino, age unknown
July 23, 1883
A sheep camp ten miles above Little Yosemite Valley
Merino, a shepherd from Mexico, was in the midst of telling fellow shepherd Henry Montijo about seeing a man knock away a pistol during a brawl. To demonstrate, he pointed his own loaded pistol at his head and struck it away. The pistol went off, killing Merino.

William L. Gooch, 22
May 19, 1976
Ledge Trail to Glacier Point
Hiking solo, Gooch scrambled down the Ledge Trail, which was officially closed and posted with a sign reading DANGER! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FOLLOW THIS ABANDONED TRAIL. Shortly after heading out, he detoured off-trail to fill his water bottle and slipped. Witnesses saw him sliding down a wet slab and heard him mutter, “Oh, shit!” as he fatally plunged 600 feet.

Sonia Janet Goldstein, 33; Richard Russell Mughir, 29
August 17, 1985
Glacier Point
At 7:45 a.m., two witnesses saw Goldstein’s body plummeting down the face of Glacier Point. Minutes later, they observed Mughir posing on the ledge with his arms open in a come-to-Jesus posture. According to investigators, who interviewed Mughir’s therapist, the psychologically unstable Mughir apparently had convinced Goldstein, his girlfriend, to join him in a suicide pact in which he stabbed her to death atop Glacier Point, tossed her over the side, then followed by jumping off the precipice himself.

Jan Davis, 58
October 22, 1999
El Capitan
Davis, a professional stuntwoman, jumped off El Cap to protest the National Park Service’s ban on BASE jumping in the park. Davis failed to deploy her chute in time and crashed into Yosemite Valley in front of 150 onlookers.

Vladimir Boutkovski, 24
August 17, 2001
Northwest Face, Half Dome
At 6:30 a.m., three climbers at the base of Half Dome heard a whoosh and saw a man falling in a skydiving position before slamming into the ground headfirst. Boutkovski, a Russian immigrant, had been studying the teachings of Carlos Castaneda. According to a report by an NPS investigator, a subsequent interview with one of Boutkovski’s friends revealed that the young man’s belief in “magic and mysticism” had led him to conclude that the jump would “free him from the bounds of earth.”

Joseph E. Crowe, 25
December 29, 2002
Zodiac route, El Capitan
Crowe was attempting to do a solo winter climb of an 1,800-foot route on El Capitan. Duringa snowstorm, he tried to rappel down, but his rope came up short. He froze to death, just 25 feet from the bottom.

The post That Had to Hurt appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It's a blustery April afternoon on the Colorado River, deep inside Grand Canyon National Park, and from his seat in the stern of a handsome little boat called the Sequoia, Martin Litton has just taken note of an intriguing development. Normally, the river down here is restless and kinetic, sluicing along with a muscular roll of its shoulders. At the moment, though, the current has mysteriously disappeared, and the water's surface has taken on the heavy, sullen stillness of a polished green gemstone.

Litton strokes his beard thoughtfully, then casts a glance behind the Sequoia to the boat I'm in, a yellow supply raft manned by a nervous-looking 57-year-old named John Blaustein. J. B., as everyone calls Blaustein, is sporting hipster shades and a cocoa-colored cowboy hat.

“You know, J. B.,” Litton calls out, “when things get all calm like this, it means the river's backed up by something. And in this case, what it's backed up by is an absolutely terrifying pile of boulders called Dubendorff.”

“Jesus, we're coming up on Dubendorff?” Blaustein yells back. A former Grand Canyon guide, J. B. now lives the agreeable life of a Berkeley-based commercial photographer, but once every summer he allows himself to be dragged down the river again. During these ordeals, he spends half his time pretending to complain about absurdly minor discomforts, the other half awash in a lather of angst over rapids like the one we're about to enter.

“I'm afraid it is,” replies Litton, who's clad in a straw hat, an indigo shirt, and black suspenders—an ensemble that makes him look like an Amish farmer gone to sea. “This is a terrifying place, J. B. Absolutely terrifying.”

“Absolutely terrifying” is Litton's favorite expression, a phrase he invokes several times an hour to describe everything from shifting weather patterns to the possibility that the six liters of Sheep Dip Scotch stowed in his hatch might run dry before the conclusion of this 280-mile odyssey through the rapids of the Grand Canyon.

There are 80 of these named rapids, a dozen of which serve up some of the biggest whitewater in North America. And though Litton and Blaustein know that Dubendorff, which marks the midpoint of most canyon trips, doesn't rank among the worst, it's not to be taken for granted. The run is a maelstrom of huge waves and sharp pour-overs that sound like the afterburners of an F-16. In the brief cushion of tranquillity before all hell breaks loose, Litton has a final thought to share.

“J. B.!” he barks.

“Whaddaya want now?”

“Do you know what the greatest pleasure in life is, J. B.?”

“No, Martin. But before we enter the mother of all rapids here, I'm sure you're about to tell me.”

Among a few other small vices, Litton delights in reciting scraps of literature; today's offering comes from Kenneth Grahame's 1908 classic, The Wind in the Willows.

“There is nothing,” he declares, “absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” Well, damn. As every Grand Canyon guide knows, this pronouncement by the river-loving Water Rat is potent stuff: the closest thing dirtbag boatmen have to an Apostles' Creed. Which is why Blaustein can only sit there looking trumped as Litton—who is currently 87 years old and may be making the last of his many, many runs through the canyon—lets fly with a wicked peal of laughter that booms off the soaring walls.

“TouchĂ©, Martin,” replies Blaustein, touching the brim of his hat as Litton and the Sequoia are seized by the current and abruptly disappear over the edge of Dubendorff. And with that, we follow the old man into the thunder.

Every trip down the canyon is special, but this trip is particularly fine because the man at its center has no antecedent. In the annals of Grand Canyon boating and conservation, Martin Litton is a unique force of nature, a tornado of ungovernable passions, soaring eloquence, and stiff-necked defiance quite unlike anything else that's ever blown through one of the most storied locales in American adventure.

Born in Gardena, California, in February 1917, Litton grew up exploring the California wilderness, served as a glider pilot in World War II, and started taking trips down the Colorado back in the fifties, eventually becoming the only outfitter to guide the river's ferocious rapids exclusively in the frail wooden boats known as Grand Canyon dories. These double-ended, flat-bottomed craft, which he played a key role in designing, are radically different from the ponderous oar boats that Major John Wesley Powell used during the first descent of the canyon, in 1869. Beautiful, delicate, and graceful, became—and remain—the sacred craft of the canyon.

Along the way, in his roles as a freelance writer for the Los Angeles Times, an editor at Sunset magazine, and a board member of the Sierra Club, Litton also elbowed into some of the most important environmental battles of his time. In 1956, he helped block two dams inside Utah's Dinosaur National Monument, and in 1967 he and others thwarted several dams on Idaho's Snake River. Thanks to Litton's years of public drumbeating on behalf of California redwoods, he's sometimes called the Father of Redwood National Park, which was signed into being in 1968. In that same year, he helped lead what is probably the biggest of all his crusades: a successful campaign to kill a pair of dams that would have stilled the Colorado as it winds through the Grand Canyon.

Today, Litton merits double-barreled distinction as one of the founding commercial river runners of the Colorado and one of America's greatest living conservationists: a man who, after 70 years of both reveling in and battling to preserve a treasure trove of natural wonders, has become something of a national treasure himself.

For all his accomplishments, though, there have always been contradictions, mostly in the form of Litton's puzzling personality quirks. He has fought for all sorts of restrictions to protect fragile landscapes, yet he loathes any government agency that musters the temerity to tell him where he can go and how to behave when he gets there. He inspires great loyalty, but his former employees describe him as the sort of mercurial boss who could switch in a heartbeat from charming to curmudgeonly to nitpicking. He bemoans the loss of solitude in wilderness but made his living by encouraging millions of people to go out and discover it. He's a paragon of environmental rectitude, and yet, throughout the sixties, in what Litton says was an action suited to “different times,” he concluded his 21-day canyon trips by dumping nearly a month's worth of empty beer cans and liquor bottles into the Colorado, telling his guides that “studies have shown the river to be deficient in silica and aluminum.”

“A very, very complicated person with deep flaws who has done extraordinary things,” says Brad Dimock, a river guide who's known Litton since 1973—and who, like everyone close to Litton, harbors sentiments colored equally by affection and exasperation. “I don't think you'd find a single heroic figure who isn't also burdened with contradictions. And when you look at the Grand Canyon today, it's impossible to say that Martin didn't make one hell of a difference.”

Perhaps Litton committed himself to the nation's most spectacular waterway because this landscape mirrored some of his own paradoxes. The canyon's signature attribute is a frigid river tumbling through a savage furnace of sun-blistered rock—a theater of hellish beauty whose sublime charms are matched only by the concussive force of its harshness. Held up as the supreme example of nature's forces laid bare, it is also a labyrinth of abiding mystery that's best grasped by traveling in the company of a man whose character, like the canyon itself, defies any attempt to contain it.

[quote]“The Grand Canyon is America's greatest scenic treasure—an experience made to order in wonder,” Litton declares. “Floating a boat down the Colorado? Why, it's simply the best thing one can do.”[/quote]

“There's just no explaining the old fart,” Dimock concludes. “He's still out there fighting his battles and rowing his frickin' boat. I just want to know when his last river trip's going to be.”

Last spring, Litton's former guiding company invited him to return for one more run. And so Litton duly presented himself before a group of bright-eyed passengers who'd paid up to $4,314 apiece to float alongside the most notorious boatman and rebel ever to drift the Colorado in a cloud of rapture.

“The Grand Canyon is America's greatest scenic treasure—an experience made to order in wonder,” Litton told the clients the night before they hit the river, congratulating them on having the good sense to join him. “Floating a boat down the Colorado River? Why, it's simply the best thing one can do.”

We begin where all Grand Canyon journeys begin: at Lees Ferry, 15 miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam. Gathered at the put-in ramp around three bulbous baggage rafts and six elegant, scimitar-shaped dories are 18 passengers from all over the United States, among them Duane Kelly and his wife, Cosette, a pair of retired teachers from Kansas City; Pat Newman, an accountant from Golden, Colorado, here with her husband, Dennis, who invents devices to monitor medical patients; and Devon Meade, a singer from Los Angeles, who used to perform backup vocals for Alice Cooper. An eclectic hodgepodge, the clients are united by the simple fact that all of them want to see the canyon and the river through Litton's eyes while it's still possible.

The trip has been outfitted by , the Angels Camp, California, company that now owns Litton's old guiding concession, and it's being led by Bill “Bronco” Bruchak, a barrel-chested former beer distributor from Pennsylvania who's been running the canyon for 28 years. Bronco is joined by Rondo Buecheler and Eric Sjoden, who have worked the river for nearly three decades, along with three members of the “Dale dynasty,” the most illustrious family in Grand Canyon dory guiding. Sue “Coyote” Dale—whom everybody calls 'Ote—is here with her son, Duffy (who started rowing a dory at the age of three while perched on his father's lap) and Duffy's uncle, Tim. Rounding out the crew are the baggage boatmen: Curtis Newell, Ryan Howe, and their grumpy court jester, Blaustein, who has known Litton since 1970 and collaborated with him on , a 1977 book that stands as the definitive tribute to boating on the river.

While the crew rigs the boats, Litton sits quietly in the Sequoia, his physical appearance bespeaking both weightiness and mileage. The skin on his face, framed by a thick white beard and mustache, is creased with wrinkles and flecked with broken veins. His eyes are a startling shade of blue. The backs of his powerful hands are covered with liver spots. Together, these features make him endearing and intimidating all at once—part Santa Claus, part Old Testament prophet.

Litton has been through the Grand Canyon at least 35 times, but even he doesn't know the exact number. In 1997, then 80, he set a record, which still stands, as the oldest boatman ever to run the canyon, rowing every rapid himself. But recently his age has started taking a toll on his reflexes, which is why the setup on this trip is a bit different.

Litton will spend the better part of each day rowing the Sequoia, but when we hit some of the more technically challenging rapids, Tim Dale will have to dance out of the stern and try to convince Litton to hand over his oars. It's an arrangement that will force Litton to take a backseat just as the action gets good—something that cuts directly against his grain. Over the years, Litton has won his share of victories and also tasted some bitter defeats; but in conservation battles and on the river, he has held steadfastly to the idea that you never compromise and never surrender.

“People always tell me not to be extreme,” Litton declares. ” 'Be reasonable!' they say. But I never felt it did any good to be reasonable about anything in conservation, because what you give away will never come back—ever. When it comes to saving wilderness, we can't be extreme enough. To compromise is to lose.”

For a man like Litton, relinquishing control is an onerous thing. “Try not to write too much about Martin not rowing all the rapids,” Tim whispers to me as the boats are being loaded. “This is the stuff that just breaks his heart.”

When the last of the drybags are finally stowed, Bronco gives the word and we shove off. As we drift downstream, the cliffs soar upward in a layered tapestry of pastels: pinkish limestone, buff-colored sandstone, and deep-red shale. The combination contrasts well with the brightly painted hulls of the dories.

Along with their colors, the most noteworthy features of these boats are their sharply pointed bows and sterns and their “rocker”—that is, the way their bottoms flare up quickly at the front and back. The design enables a dory to ride dry in all but the roughest water and to pivot with extraordinary quickness, because only part of the hull is touching water at any moment.

Bronco, Litton, and the other pilots send their 11-foot oars planing through the water with smooth, powerful strokes. As the blades emerge at the end of each stroke, the boatmen rotate their wrists with a subtle snap—a technique known as “feathering,” which turns the blades parallel to the river's surface and sends droplets flicking off the ends, flashing in the canyon light. The rhythm is crisp, silent, precise.

Feather . . . flick . . . flash . . .

Breaking the water into V-shaped ripples, the dories achieve a visual alchemy seen nowhere else. They appear to be suspended partly on the surface of the river and partly—through a trick of rocker and the magic of their radiance—on the air itself.

We won't see a horizon line again until we emerge from the canyon, in three weeks.

Over the next few days, a routine sets in. In the mornings we make our miles, pausing at side canyons for lunch and hikes. (Litton always skips the hikes but demands detailed field reports on which flowers are blooming.) By late afternoon we've usually reached camp. While the guides make dinner, the passengers gather around the Sequoia, break out cocktails, and listen to Litton hold forth. Our nights are dark and silent and studded with stars.

On the afternoon of the third day, we pull over at a beach where Bronco points to several large bore holes that, back in the fifties, were dynamited into the cliffs lining both sides of the river. This is where the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation once proposed anchoring the Marble Canyon Dam, a concrete wall that would have created a lake stretching all the way back to Glen Canyon Dam. A second structure, Bridge Canyon Dam, just above the edge of Lake Mead, nearly 200 miles downstream, would have drowned the bottom portion of the canyon. The spot we're standing on would have been submerged beneath a 300-foot-deep lake.

[quote]In the fifties, using the graceful wooden boats called dories, Litton helped pioneer Grand Canyon whitewater. In the sixties and seventies, he helped block two dams that would have turned the Colorado River into a lake.[/quote]

Back in the sixties, when construction was slated to begin, the Sierra Club was prepared to accept these monoliths as a necessary evil, a concession Litton deemed ludicrous. By 1963 he'd goaded David Brower, the Sierra Club's executive director and a man who once called Litton “my environmental conscience,” into waging an all-out war against the scheme. When the dams were finally stopped cold, in 1975, the environmental movement that Litton had played such a central role in creating—usually without taking any credit—had scored one of its greatest victories.

Standing here, it's hard to imagine a better illustration of the impact one person can have. But the sight of the holes appears to send Litton wandering off into a more sobering mental landscape: the wilderness of his own regrets. “In so many ways, the American West really was a paradise, but look at it now,” he tells the clients, who've gathered around him. “All you see are places that have been ruined because of greed. Ugliness. We had a paradise, and we lost it.”

One of the passengers asks Litton if he thinks he made a difference. “I don't know,” he says quietly, staring at his feet. “I suppose I never really succeeded in much of anything.”

The passengers find Litton's comments disconcerting. But to boatmen like Blaustein—who know the full scope of what Litton achieved—his words just seem dead wrong.

Litton made his first trip down the Grand Canyon in 1955 with an early guide named P. T. Reilly, a venture that inspired him to start putting his own trips together. This was at the dawn of commercial river running, when pioneering outfitters like Georgie White and the Hatch brothers were experimenting with army-surplus pontoons, which would morph into the 30-foot motor rigs and 18-foot oar rafts that are now the mainstays of Grand Canyon guiding. But for reasons of tradition, aesthetics, and stubbornness, Litton was determined to stick with wood.

The most promising design was a modification of a Grand Banks cod-fishing dory called a McKenzie driftboat. In the early sixties, Litton purchased a handful of these craft from two Oregon boatwrights and began taking friends down the Colorado. Every summer, more people signed up. And every winter, Litton dashed back to Oregon for more boats, ordering up design changes with each batch.

It was all pretty much a lark until 1968, when a story Litton had written at Sunset about threats to the California redwoods was spiked and Litton, in a fury, resigned. Within a few years, he'd become both a full-time wilderness activist and the admiral of a tiny navy of commercial dories, each painted in a distinctive hue and christened after a natural wonder that, in Litton's eyes, had been heedlessly ruined by man. Names included Hetch Hetchy (a valley just north of Yosemite that was flooded by a dam in 1914) and Music Temple (a feature in Glen Canyon, drowned beneath Lake Powell in the sixties).

Litton recruited his earliest guides from California—most were ski instructors who couldn't tell a gunwale from a chine but were willing to fling themselves down the Colorado armed with little more than cutoff jeans and toothbrushes. Together, Litton and this ragged platoon dedicated themselves to the idea that providing cheap, no-frills trips to high school teachers, Boy Scouts, and housewives would build a constituency of citizens willing to fight to protect the canyon.

During the earliest trips, everybody had to follow the boss. At the approach to each rapid, the boatmen would scramble to clip the passengers into their life jackets while Litton stood, waved his arms, and explained what needed to be done. “This is Sockdolager—for God's sake, pull left at the tongue!” he'd scream. Each oarsman would relay the message back to the next, then pray he wouldn't screw up too badly. The results were often spectacular.

One summer at Crystal, a rapid Litton's rookie guides were too terrified to row, he took three dories down by himself—hiking up the shore after each run—and flipped them all, shearing off hatch lids, splintering sterns, shattering oars. At Bedrock, the Bright Angel (named for a creek inside the canyon) was sucked beneath a boulder that raked off its entire side. And in 1970, Blaustein managed to ram the Hetch Hetchy into a rock in a rapid called Unkar, splitting the hull from oarlock to oarlock.

“I basically broke the boat in half,” Blaustein recalls glumly.

After each disaster, the guides would repair the worst of the carnage with plywood, duct tape, marine putty, and even driftwood. Then they'd go out and break everything all over again. “That was definitely the golden age of Grand Canyon boating,” recalls Rondo Buecheler. “And what made it golden was there were absolutely no rules, and we had no idea what the hell we were doing.”

When his crew finally started getting the hang of things in the late seventies, Litton stopped leading every trip and instead kept tabs using his company's vintage Cessna 195. He'd load up the plane with blocks of ice and cases of beer and then roar down the canyon at 150 miles an hour, buzzing the tops of the tamarisk trees and looking for his camps.

“We'd hear his approach and it'd be like 'Here he comes; everybody run!' ” laughs Andre Potochnik, a veteran dory guide. “Pedal-to-the-metal Martin. He'd strafe us with supplies, then fly off to Washington to lobby for whatever wilderness issue he was fighting at the time.”

By the 1980s, the dory fleet had become the envy of the river, and its oarsmen sat at the pinnacle of the guiding hierarchy. Whenever Litton returned to the canyon on a trip, boatmen working for motor and raft companies would pull alongside him in the eddies, or stroll over to his camp at night, and beseech him for a job. Around this time, however, Litton's abysmal business instincts—which included giving away trips to virtually anyone interested in conservation—began driving his company to the edge. In 1987, he was finally forced to sell Grand Canyon Dories to George Wendt, the president of OARS. The National Park Service approved the transaction on the condition that Wendt would devote two-thirds of his trips to dory ventures for ten years—a commitment that Wendt has maintained ever since, in honor of the heritage Litton created.

“What Martin did was just nuts,” says Blaustein. “I mean, here was this guy who wanted to run this great big river in these itty-bitty boats that broke every time they hit a rock. But, God, they were beautiful, and riding in them somehow made you feel very humble and pure and connected. And so Martin made it work. That was his vision for the Grand Canyon. It was the way he knew it should be done.”

All along the canyon, news has spread that Litton is on the river. One morning, a party of boaters pulls over to listen while he tells off-color jokes. A few days later, a crew of archaeologists beach their powerboats, whip out a banjo and fiddle, and perform an impromptu riff called “The Martin Litton Breakdown.” Another night, a fleet of rafts pull into an eddy just so the trip leader can toss Litton a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin. “Well, wasn't that nice?” says Litton, studying the label like it's a lost page from the Talmud. “Who in the world was that fellow?”

Toward the end of our first week, the canyon begins to change. First, the space between the cliffs opens up, letting us see all the way to the South Rim, more than 5,000 feet above. A day later, the walls narrow dramatically, and as the dories enter a ferocious rapid called Hance, the gates slam shut on the Inner Gorge.

This is the subbasement of the canyon. The walls are blacker than coal and the rapids feral. Every day they hit us with staccato bursts. Sockdolager, Grapevine, Horn Creek. Granite, Hermit, Crystal. Waltenburg, Bedrock, Upset. The huge boulders lining these cauldrons create deep, recirculating holes into which the entire river seems to disappear. The current seethes and churns, folding back on itself to form whirlpools, boils, and massive eddies. The rides are fierce, furious, and shockingly cold.

[quote]The boatmen's attachment to their craft is absolute. They fuss over them, paint them with scenery. On winter nights, one guide sometimes soaks in a scale replica of his dory as he dreams about the river.[/quote]

A half-century after Litton's first expedition, these waves are still enormous and their hydraulics explosive, but the challenge is not quite the same. The dories are now made from sturdy, closed-cell foam instead of wood, and oarsmen like Bronco have run the river so many times that it's rare to see them even flirt with a submerged rock. But while much of the carnage has faded, the dories' power over the guides endures.

A typical dory apprenticeship can last nearly a decade, longer than any other in the canyon. By the time a boatman has earned his place, his attachment to these custom-made craft—which cost up to $17,000, more than a season's salary for most guides—is absolute. You can see it in the way the boatmen fret over their dories: spit-polishing microscopic scratches on the hulls, glowering when passengers track dirt onto the decks. Perhaps the deepest evidence of their incorrigible love, however, comes out during the winter, when they're off the water.

Back home in Flagstaff, Duffy spends hours carving miniature replicas of his craft, the Paria, and his mom, 'Ote, touches up the stern of Dark Canyon, which she has decorated with a hand-painted scene of a butterfly landing on a wildflower. In Mesa, Colorado, Rondo tromps across the street to Bronco's driveway, where the men climb into Bronco's boat, the Yampa, wearing their down jackets while they drink Scotch and reminisce about rapids. As for Eric Sjoden, a few years ago he built a scale model one-third the size of his dory, the Virgin, and converted it into a bathtub at his cabin in Whitefish, Montana. He spends winter evenings soaking and dreaming about returning to the river.

“The dories have a grace in design that is astonishing—they're just so fucking gorgeous,” says Brad Dimock, who is coming out of retirement this season because he can't bear to be away from the boats. “The first time I ever rowed one, I was just stunned. And that feeling never really left. They're that cool.”

“What's so appealing about a dory?” says Bronco one afternoon, borrowing a line from Litton. “It's pretty simple. Rafts are ugly. Dories are beautiful.”

By our second week, the canyon isn't the only thing changing: The wind and water have started to peel back the more constrained layers of people's personalities. Doug Vavrick, a political consultant from Seattle, and his wife, Kathleen, frolic naked in the shallows during the evenings. And Pat Newman, who started the trip shy and withdrawn, has turned giddy. Each morning, she dashes around camp giving everyone a hug.

“Hugging's done an awful lot around here,” Litton observes after accepting a postbreakfast embrace. “It's what the younger generation seems to like to do.” (Newman is 60.)

The only person who hasn't transformed is Vernita Allen, but that's because she doesn't need to.

A 73-year-old retiree from Kansas City who's been down the river three times, Allen has undergone extensive cancer treatments and is now so weak that every day the guides have to set her in and lift her out of the boats. She knows this is her last trip. And in the process of bidding farewell to each feature of the canyon, she long ago arrived in the cerebral zone that the other passengers are just now discovering.

“I've seen a few people go down this canyon and not get changed, but not many,” she said to me one day. “There's just something about how minuscule you feel compared to how long it took to put this place together. It seems to put things in balance. It wakes you up. It opens your eyes. And afterwards, things are not the same. It's that space in the middle—that's why I come here.”

When Allen said this, I had no idea what she meant. But then, below Dubendorff, something happens and I do.

While floating along and staring up at the pinkish rock walls, it suddenly seems as if the canyon has reached out and cupped me lightly in the palm of its hand. Part of the sensation has surely come from bobbing down a current of warm air on the surface of a cool, green river. More than that, though, the feeling of languorous buoyancy has arisen from where I find myself in time. The circumstances I've come from seem irretrievably far behind: things that weighed on me at work are now irrelevant. Yet I'm also far enough from the end—of the trip, of the canyon, of this particular moment—that it's unnecessary to brace for reentry. I am suspended in a state of betweenness, not unlike the rocker of a dory. A state in which I can pivot and float in the luminous embrace of a pink-and-emerald haze that—right here, right now—strikes me as our true destination, the marrow of the journey.

A few minutes later, we pull over for lunch. After finishing my sandwich, I spot Litton sitting in the shade of a tamarisk and wander over to ask if he's gotten something to eat. He looks up at me, his blue eyes momentarily vacant, still lost in his thoughts.

“Thank you for asking,” he replies after a long pause. “I've had everything I could ever wish for.”

That, as it turns out, isn't entirely true.

For more than two weeks, Litton has graciously resigned himself to his subordinate role, cheerfully needling Blaustein while Tim Dale gets the Sequoia through the worst whitewater. But as the trip enters its final phase, the frustrations bottled up inside Mr. No Compromise are about to collide with the biggest obstacle on the river.

Just below the Toroweap Overlook, 179 miles downstream from Lees Ferry, the Colorado drops off a ledge and detonates. This is Lava Falls, a chaos of water and rock that, over the years, has ravaged more boats than any other rapid in the canyon. Even today it's a gamble, and when things go wrong, the results can be frightening: boatmen blown from their seats, oars cartwheeling through the air, passengers swimming for their lives.

The night before we reach Lava, Litton has a message for Bronco: “I've never been a passenger through Lava, and I'll be damned if I'm going to start now,” he declares. “I'll walk around.”

The next afternoon, the river is flowing at 9,000 cubic feet per second, not a bad level for running Lava. We'll go down the right side, a route whose entrance is extremely hard to judge. The tongue runs just to the right of a massive ledge hole that claimed the life of a client named Norine Abrams in August 1984.

[quote]Deep in the canyon, I'm suspended in time—pivoting and floating in the luminous embrace of a pink-and-emerald haze that—right here, right now—strikes me as our true destination, the marrow of our journey.[/quote]

A boatman who threads this entrance perfectly has just enough time to square up his bow before the current drives him directly into the center of an enormous, V-shaped standing wave. The hope is that this wave will push the boat slightly to the left. If it does the opposite, the boat rockets right and washes alongside a glistening slab of lava called the Big Black Rock. The rock is where Lava's other victim, a client named Andalea Buzzard, was stripped of her life jacket and drowned in August 1977. (Neither fatality occurred on an OARS or Grand Canyon Dories trip.)

After the crew ties the boats off to the right-hand bank and scouts the rapid, Litton and Bronco put their heads together for a powwow. Then Litton returns to the Sequoia and, without any ceremony, takes his seat at the oars.

“Let's move,” he says quietly.

As we drift into the current, things suddenly get very quiet. Sitting in the Sequoia's bow with Curtis Newell, I can hear only the creak of the oars and the muffled roar of the falls. “Well,” Litton announces, “here we go.”

He handles the entrance flawlessly: You could spit into the ledge hole as we flash past it and slice down Lava's incline toward the V-wave. Litton gets in two good strokes, lining up the dory. Then the V-wave smashes us with the force of a runaway coal truck. The river gathers into a fist and punches straight over the bow, a haymaker of solid water as thick as wet cement. The decks and the footwells are swamped. The boat reels.

In the midst of this mess, I turn to see that one of the Sequoia's oars has been wrenched out of its oarlock. I also can't help noticing that Litton—who's been drenched and spin-cycled like a cat in a washing machine—looks happier and more alive at this moment than any sane 87-year-old probably should. The old fart is actually grinning.

Then I face forward to see that we're sluicing directly toward the Big Black Rock. Litton heaves on his remaining oar with everything he's got. No dice: The rock's coming up fast, and we're about to hit it.

As the river rolls around the massive rock, it tends to create a pillow of moving water that rises and ebbs with each surge. Through a combination of angle, timing, and Littonian luck, the Sequoia arrives just as this pillow is building. Instead of slamming us into the rock, the water cradles the boat for a second, then gives it a nudge and washes us around the left side. The rock's dripping surface races past, almost within reach, and we find ourselves back in the main current, bucking through the tail waves.

“You did it, Martin! You did it!” the boat's four passengers yell.

“I didn't do anything at all!” he protests. “I was rowing shabbily. Very shabbily.”

“Jesus, Martin,” someone calls out, “if you didn't do it, who the hell else did?”

“Why, the boat, of course,” he says, indignant at having to spell out something so obvious. “It was the dory that did it.”

Two days later we make our last camp, on the edge of Lake Mead.

The next morning, Vernita Allen, Pat Newman, and the rest of the passengers bid farewell and board a blue jet boat that will connect them to city-bound shuttle buses. The guides lash the dories and rafts together and, with help from an outboard, begin motoring toward the gates of the Grand Wash Cliffs, where the land flattens and the river sprawls into the slack water of Lake Mead.

Eric Sjoden and Ryan Howe set up a faded purple lounge chair so Litton has a place to sit. Bronco hands him a sandwich that Rondo prepared the night before. While Curtis sets a bottle of cold Dos Equis into the cup holder of Litton's chair, Tim unfolds Duffy's teal-colored umbrella and holds it over the old man's head. Then, as the rig drifts toward the lake, everyone gathers around and sits at Litton's feet. For the boatmen, it's a chance to relish this last bit of river with their old boss and to think about his place in the canyon.

What will probably endure most in the minds of these guides is the memory of how, against all logic and common sense, Litton launched a fleet of frail boats bearing the haunted names of vanished wonders. They'll also remember him as a warrior cut from the same cloth as Ed Abbey and David Brower: a fighter who turned the tables on stronger adversaries. And they'll remember that Litton, at 87, insisted on rowing himself through the fury of Lava Falls.

“He taught us about belief and how to make a stand,” Bronco says to me quietly as we pass through the Grand Wash Cliffs. “He showed us that when you really believe in something, you don't ever compromise. Compromise is what you let the other guy do.”

All those things are surely worth remembering. But what I'll remember from this journey is something different.

I never knew Litton during his period of towering strength, so I won't be able to recall his victories, his militancy, or his fire. Instead, what will stay with me is the memory of how he conducted himself as he confronted forces that can never be defeated—age, infirmity, and time—and how his conduct illuminated the Grand Canyon in an unusual way.

These days, a Grand Canyon river trip is no longer the same pioneering quest it was when men like Powell and Litton first took it on. But what remains is, in some ways, even bolder and more challenging: an odyssey that offers incontrovertible evidence of how small we are—not much different, really, from the fossils laid down 340 million years ago in the Redwall limestone above the Marble Canyon dam site. By imparting this sense of almost overwhelming humility, a trip down the canyon opens the door to insights about the place's deeper relevance.

When you row the river with Martin Litton, you come to understand that the Grand Canyon is “America's greatest scenic treasure” not simply because of the thrills and the fun—which are tremendous—but because it reminds us of who we are, and who we are not, and of what we most need to become. This isn't something Litton ever said to me directly, but I think he knows it in his bones. He knows it because the elements of his legacy—his dories, his canyon, his river—all come together to underscore one emphatic little parcel of truth.

Which is what, exactly?

Well, as it happens, the Water Rat nailed that one, too. “It's my world, and I don't want any other,” he said of the river. “What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing.”

It's easy to set up a Grand Canyon trip, and you can still arrange to go this year. Since private trips aren't in the cards right now—the National Park Service, which oversees the canyon, has a 12-year wait list and has temporarily stopped adding names—commercial outings are the only option.

Pick Your Boat
Dories: The guide rows while you shift weight to balance the vessel against crashing waves.
Paddle Rafts: You and five others provide the muscle while the guide rudders you through the biggest holes.
Oar Rafts: The most stable ride, these guide-rowed boats give you a platform to lounge and take in the scenery.
Kayaks: If you can handle Class III rapids and paddle for two straight weeks, you can chart your own course.

Pick Your Length
The standard trip runs 225 miles and lasts two to three weeks. You can also opt for the weeklong portions to or from Phantom Ranch. If you have to choose, the lower portion features the best side hikes—like Havasu Canyon, with its three cascades.

Pick Your Month
The river is a chilly 50 degrees year-round, so choose your time based on the air temperature. April, May, September, and October are relatively cool, with highs in the nineties, while June, July, and August days often hit 110. Our pick: October, a cool month featuring postsummer quiet.

Pick Your Outfitter
OARS has run dories and oar boats in the canyon since 1964. Nine to 22 days, $3,213– $5,103; April–October;
Arizona Raft șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs offers all-paddle raft trips and “partial-paddle” trips, featuring oar boats for rest breaks. Six to 16 days, $1,565–$3,260; May–October;
America's premier kayak school, the Otter Bar Lodge, runs one Grand trip a year. Non-kayakers can ride in the support rafts. Fifteen days, $3,075; September;
Canyon Explorations/ Expeditions uses oar and paddle rafts and offers specialty trips, including one accompanied by a string quartet. Seven to 16 days, $1,810–$3,485; April–October;
Arizona Outback șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs can take you on foot to the pools of Havasu Falls. Three to five days, $1,250–$1,550; March–October;

The post Ain’t It Just Grand appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT MALANA as a high school exchange student in Bombay. There were six of us in the program that year, and in the spring of 1983 we headed north to the Kullu, one of the loveliest valleys in India: a sanctuary of towering forests and thundering cataracts ringed by the snowcapped peaks of the Pir Panjal, one of the longest ranges in the Himalayas. The place was a magical alpine kingdom whose Sanskrit name, Kulanthapitha, means “End of the Habitable World.”


All of which sounded cool enough. But what really fired our imaginations was a story we heard about Lord Shiva, the most fearsome deity in the Hindu pantheon, who once spent a thousand years in a meditative trance induced by smoking an ungodly amount of the cannabis growing in riotous profusion around Malana and, indeed, throughout the entire Kullu.


At the head of this valley is a town called Manali, a former staging point for caravans that plied the southern arm of the Great Silk Road. The Kullu’s tranquillity was disrupted in the 1960s when Western hippies transformed Manali, which sits at 6,765 feet, into a smoke-shrouded shrine for anyone seeking cosmic enlightenment and killer weed. Which is pretty much what it was when my high school friends and I showed up.


Our goal had been to trek from Manali to Malana via a 12,000-foot pass called Chandrakhani. What we had in mind was a psychedelic ramble taking in both the natural beauty and the natural intoxicants of the area. What we got was a debacle highlighted by an ice storm so vicious that a herd of cattle gathered around our tents one night and froze to death, a flash flood through a streambed where my dysentery-stricken companions and I were seeking relief—forcing us to run for our lives with pants around our ankles—and a midnight raid by a platoon of Indian policemen who mistakenly thought we’d actually gotten our hands on some charas. Needless to say, we never made it to Malana.


So why go back? Because a score needed to be settled, as I struggled to explain one chilly March afternoon to Khem Raj Thakur, 26, who owns a Manali-based adventure company called Snowland Holidays. Khem is a diminutive man with refined features, a quick smile, and a gift for unflappable courtesy that prevented him from bluntly telling me and my travel companion, New York–based photographer Teru Kuwayama, that the idea of making a late-winter dash over the pass was insane. Instead, he gently tried to show us why it was insane.


First, no one had been over Chandrakhani since the previous autumn, so he knew nothing about existing conditions. Second, as he carefully pointed out, Malana’s residents deem all outsiders to be untouchables—a theme I hadn’t heard before. “If you go there,” he warned, “you will not be made to feel at all welcome.” And finally, Khem noted, hashish is thoroughly illegal.


Under the Indian government’s 1985 Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, possession of charas is punishable by up to a year in prison. Despite this prohibition, each year the Kullu District produces about 11 tons of charas, the bulk of which is smuggled to Europe and sold under names like Shanti Baba and White Widow. Hashish has traditionally been treated with leniency by Indian police in places like Malana, though there are occasional crackdowns, and as is true anywhere, the drug trade is dangerous. In the past decade, more than a dozen foreigners trekking in parts of the Kullu notorious for charas consumption have either disappeared or been murdered in crimes that have remained unsolved—perils that, in Khem’s view, were not mitigated at all by the addition of an Israeli ex-commando to our party.


Ah, yes, the commando.


Ido Neiger, 28, grew up on a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee. He learned to snowboard at Mount Hermon, Israel’s highest mountain, which has the distinction of housing the only ski resort in the world that’s been shelled by Hezbollah. After high school, Ido (pronounced “Ee-doe”) joined a special-operations demolitions unit in the Israeli army. Since leaving the military in 1997, he has divided his time between earning cash at de-mining projects in places like Bosnia; jetting off on snowboarding excursions to New Zealand, Serbia, and Breckenridge; and hopping from one full-moon backpacker rave to another across Nepal, India, and Thailand, where he dances to trance music and consumes prodigious amounts of hash.


I’d met Ido two weeks earlier, skiing in Kashmir. Upon running into him again outside Snowland’s office, Teru and I realized he was just what our trip needed: a Jewish snowboarding Virgil who could shepherd us to the heart of Malana’s charas inferno. We begged him to join us.


Ido accepted only after Khem reluctantly confirmed that, yes, the trip would enable him to inscribe his name in the annals of Himalayan adventure by nailing the first snowboard descent of Chandrakhani Pass. Stunned by our idiocy, but bowing to the fact that we were going anyway, Khem agreed to set up the trek.

KHEM ASSIGNED US A 26-YEAR OLD named Vinay Sharma, who sported a thin, carefully trimmed Zorro mustache and who said he’d been to Dharamsala three times to meet the Dalai Lama. Also on board was a porter named Khem Raja, whom we called Raja to avoid confusion with his boss at Snowland. Raja, 28, was bald and rotund, and his left hand bore the tattoo of a heart with an arrow through the middle. When I asked about it, he produced a doleful sigh suggesting that his boat had been severely buffeted by the turbulent emotional currents of unrequited love, but he would only say that it was “a long story—a very romantic, but also very sad, long story.”


We launched the next morning, clambering onto the roof of a bus in Manali (Ido wanted some fresh air), and spent several hours alternately bewitched by the beauty of the early-spring landscape and terrified by several near decapitations involving low-hanging power lines. The bus wheezed up the road to the village of Naggar, where we disembarked, hoisted our packs, and started hoofing it.


In no time, the road morphed into a footpath that led us up through fields dotted with bleating sheep. We passed a chain of colorfully painted tea stalls, each of which had a radio blaring a love song from a different Bollywood movie. Lost in the bucolic tableau, we momentarily blocked out all worries.


That didn’t last long. The first sign of the trouble to come was Raja, who started falling behind the moment we stepped off the bus. As we waited, Vinay divulged that, technically, Raja was not a porter. No, he usually drove for jeep safaris, chauffeuring tourists in Ladakh—a line of work that had rendered him scandalously out of shape and unable to carry a full load.


When we passed through the last village before entering the high forests, Vinay placed a call to Snowland, asking for reinforcements. By nightfall we were joined by Kamal Bahadur, 40, whom Khem had recruited from a group of Nepalese laborers who spend most of the day smoking cigarettes outside his office. Kamal’s entire gear kit consisted of a pair of socks, some Chinese rubber shoes, a pair of pants, a wool shirt, and a frayed hat.


Later that evening, as we built a fire to warm our bolstered group, Ido brought Teru and me up to speed on the mysteries of Cannabis indica (a source of both marijuana—the dried flowers—and hashish, which is made by refining the plant’s resins). As he explained, the southern foothills of the Himalayas specialize in “hand-rubbed” hashish, a method requiring laborers to walk through fields of ripe cannabis, massaging each flowering branch between their palms and fingers.


“When a layer of sticky resin builds up,” Ido said while he rolled a joint using some inferior hash he’d purchased in Kashmir, “the collectors whisk their hands together until the resin clumps into small balls, which are then pressed flat with the palms.”


The secret behind Malana’s superlative hashish lies partly in the village’s heavy rainfall and good soil (cannabis plants there can grow to 12 feet) and partly in the village’s unique harvesting technique. In most cases, hand-rubbing produces somewhat low-quality charas, but in Malana, workers wait until the plants are at peak ripeness before making a single pass through a crop, rubbing each leaf for about 20 seconds.


“Each worker is only able to collect between five and ten grams a day,” Ido noted, “but the resin is really pure and potent. After it has been kneaded, it is buried in a cool, dry place and allowed to cure.”


This hash, known as Malana Cream, is prized for the allegedly rapturous, cerebral clarity of its high. Before coming back to India, I’d done some Web surfing and stumbled across a review by an expert who sampled the hash sold in Dutch coffee shops for the Smokers Guide to Amsterdam and who goes by the alias “the BushDoctor.” According to the doctor, Malana Cream boasts “an unusually soft and smooth inhale, with flavors like a chocolate biscuit” that yield “an excellent body high, without dopey feelings,” leaving “a bit of a numb feeling on the back of the throat that has you reaching for a cool bevie from the juice bar.”


Northern India’s finest year for hash was probably 1995, when the weather was wet in the summer but dry during the fall harvest. Later that winter, a batch of Malana Cream made its way to Amsterdam, where it was entered in the Cannabis Cup Contest—a prestigious annual event sponsored by High Times magazine—and won distinction as one of the two finest hashish smokes in the world.


Ido passed his joint, and everyone inhaled except for me. (I was, I suppose, saving myself for later.) Then we all leaned back and stared into the Himalayan night. Beyond the glow of our fire stretched a dark canopy of forest; above that, framed by the branches of the fir trees, arched the silvery bow of the Milky Way.


It was the last moment in our journey that could be described as even remotely pleasant.

EVERY AUGUST, HUNDREDS OF HINDU PILGRIMS converge on the village of Naggar to ascend Chandrakhani Pass and pay their respects at an elaborately carved temple in Malana dedicated to a local god named Jamlu. The trip usually takes seven hours, one way. A few foreigners have managed to sprint to Malana and back in a single afternoon, because the distance is only eight miles. Getting there took us four days.


On day two, we found ourselves slogging through snow that came almost up to our knees. As the temperature dropped, we thrashed and cursed. We spent that night huddled in tents beneath the top of the pass, and by the next afternoon, despite the heavy going, we were nearing the top.


As we crested the pass, however, there were no high fives. The sad truth was that the descent would be even more difficult than our climb: The way down was slightly steeper than a black-diamond ski slope, leading through a streambed that doubled as an avalanche chute. The final slopes stretching down to Malana consisted mostly of bare rock glued together with mud. Aside from the obvious aesthetic disappointment, this meant that, after hauling his enormous Sims Project snowboard to the top of the pass, Ido would be denied the chance to rooster-tail down to the best hash in the world.


There was no time to moan, though. Dense black clouds were already obscuring the 15,000-foot peaks that loomed around us. We had to hustle before darkness came on.


Fortunately, it wasn’t raining—unless you count the scree showers that our descent touched off, triggering mad dances as those of us below scrambled to avoid getting konked. In several places we each went sprawling, clawing at tufts of dead grass to stop from cartwheeling down the mountain.


Then it started to rain.


After two hours of dodge-and-pray, we fetched up beneath a rocky overhang and collapsed. Teru crept into his bivy sack while Ido, Vinay, and the porters crawled into their tents. I was too tired to do anything, so I simply burritoed myself in a tent fly and stared up into the sky as the rain turned to frozen slush.


Before drifting off, I detected an odor emanating from the vestibule of Ido’s tent. “Thank God we get to Malana tomorrow,” Ido moaned softly. “This is the last of my hash.”

WE REACHED MALANA’S OUTSKIRTS in pouring rain at 11 the next morning. While Vinay dashed off to seek permission for us to enter the village, Raja delivered a brief lecture on guest protocol.


There are about 500 people in Malana, Raja explained, and they claim to be descended from war-weary soldiers who deserted the army of Alexander the Great around 327 b.c. Which helps explain why the village has spent the last 2,332 years giving a cold shoulder to the rest of the world. Malanans see themselves as alpine aristocracy. They forbid their children to marry beyond the handful of clans in the village. They run their own legislature, court, and system of law enforcement. And, most important for us, they treat all visitors, Hindu and non-Hindu alike, as pariahs.


“The local people do not like outsiders, whom they consider unclean, and therefore we must not be touching anyone like this,” said Raja, brushing his hand on my shoulder. “If you touch any person, he will have to wash himself to be OK. If you touch the wall of his house, then you will also touch everything inside—the plates, the pans, the furniture—and we will have to pay a fine for the appeasing of Jamlu.


“However,” he cheerfully added, “they will be happy to sell you some charas, if you are interested.”


And with that, our little band of untouchables began sloshing through the filthiest place any of us had ever seen.


The yard of each house was host to a waterlogged mound of rags, candy wrappers, cardboard, plastic bags, and rotting vegetables. Armadas of litter sluiced through the narrow, muddy lanes. While women poured pots containing dark, moist unmentionables from the balconies of two-story wood-and-stone houses, frightened children scuttled out of our way, averting their eyes and hissing, “No touch! No touch!” Every few yards, some severe-looking young man with black, slicked-back hair stuck his head out a window to inquire, “Cream? Cream?”


Peppered throughout the village were signs meant for us: WARNING: TOUCHING THE SACRED OBJECTS WILL COST YOU FINE OF RUPEES 1,000! While studying one of these, I realized I’d fallen behind our entourage. I snapped my notebook shut and, in the process of scrambling down the lane, stumbled into the path of a small boy.


“Waaauugh!” he squealed, motioning for me to step off the lane. I did, but that put me too close to a house whose wall was emblazoned with yet another do not touch sign, prompting me to windmill my arms and hop to the opposite side of the path. There I nearly collided with a yellow-eyed ram that eyed me with disgust, and the horror of the situation hit home. I was about to pollute somebody’s goat.


I spun around and raced to join my companions, who had succeeded in reaching our guesthouse—the only one open to outsiders. It was a two-story structure with bare concrete floors. After the elderly woman who ran the place showed us to our rooms, we stripped off our soaked gear and gathered at one of the windows, where we watched the rain stream down like it would never stop.


“The villagers here think they are the most superior people on earth,” Raja said, shaking his head. “It is their belief that no one is equal to them.”


He stared at the rain a few minutes. “I think perhaps it is their loneliness that has given them this idea.”

WE WERE SHARING THE GUESTHOUSE with the sole foreign visitor in Malana besides us, a middle-aged European woman who works as a roving environmental activist and who asked not to be named. Dressed fashionably in black hiking boots and black raingear, she was campaigning to prevent the Indian government from constructing a hydroelectric dam in the drainage several miles below the village. The dam would require a road, and the road would destroy the out-of-touch quality that makes Malana unique.


“If they succeed,” she lamented, “it will change this village forever. Visitors will start coming in droves. The people will stop being the people they are. And because of all that, the vibrations of this place will change, too.”


While Vinay, Kamal, Raja, and Teru stood in the hallway digesting this, Ido went off to score some Cream. He came back with 15 black disks, each about the size of a communion wafer. The wafers were sealed inside plastic bags and bore the whorls of the fingers that had pressed them. Each one emitted a powerful, earthy pungency you could smell through the plastic.


As Ido described it, the purchase had been a very Malana-like experience. Two guys in the street sold him the hash, but instead of handing him the bags directly, they insisted on dropping them in the mud. When he tried to give them the roughly $30 they wanted, they made him drop the money in the mud, too. To mark a successful transaction, one of the Malanans tried to light a cigarette, but his lighter wasn’t working. So Ido struck a match and held it out.


The seller pointedly refused—not even a flame could be permitted to pass between them.


“They obviously don’t want outsiders here, but they want to make money off of us anyhow,” Ido groused. “This custom of not touching makes them very afraid—afraid of even small things. Which makes me afraid. I’m afraid to walk somewhere I’m not supposed to. I’m afraid to touch something I’m not allowed to. It’s enough to make you crazy.”


He halted. “The vibes of this place? They totally suck.”


Later that night, our group sought refuge from misery by demolishing a hand-rolled doobie the size of a Cuban cigar, wadded end to end with Malana Cream. We all inhaled furiously and then retreated deep into our own personal landscapes of stuporous introspection.


True to the BushDoctor’s promise, Malana’s storied charas was exceptionally smooth—but, truth be told, the monumental hallucinations I’d anticipated for two decades never really materialized. Instead, I underwent an initially pleasant buzz, comparable to being mildly drunk, that slowly but surely sent me cartwheeling into a despair as dense and dark as the hash itself. An hour or so later, I found myself staring saucer-eyed through the rain-streaked windows, awash in an oceanic sadness over the realization that I had traveled far, endured much, anticipated keenly… only to arrive at a soaking-wet garbage dump whose residents greet weary travelers with nothing but suspicion and contempt.


Drowning in melancholy, self-pity, and rejection, I hung my head and bowed to the incontestable conclusion that the problem, surely, was not the fabled hash, but me. Was I so uptight that I failed to merit even a single flash of profound insight? Apparently. Either that or the BushDoctor had seriously overrated Malana Cream. Either way, I desperately wanted to go home.


But then, somewhere amid my funk, a tiny pebble of an idea seemed to tumble from out of the ether and drop at my feet. In keeping with my black mood, this idea wasn’t all that pleasant. In fact, as psychotropic epiphanies go, it was really rather ugly and harsh. But here, for what it’s worth, is the insight that presented itself:


Over the years, I’ve read an awful lot of travel literature extolling the virtues of destinations that have remained untouched by the outside world, places that, by dint of such isolation, are thought to embody elusive truths that the rest of us seem to covet or need. Until reaching Malana, though, I’d never considered that a twisted version of the reverse might also be true. To wit: that when a place regards itself as sacrosanct simply because its residents are too afraid to touch something new and strange, or be touched by it, they may possess neither wisdom nor spiritual richness. Instead, they just become more impoverished than they already are.


That night, I decided I agreed with our dam-fighting acquaintance—albeit for reasons she might find blasphemous. If a hydroelectric dam eventually succeeds in opening this village up, I thought, surely it would be a momentous thing for the people of Malana, who may be forced, finally, to rid themselves of some squalid prejudices that have made them petty and mean. For the rest of us, this will probably qualify as something of a loss, if only because this nasty, wicked little place will no longer be able to offer up an instructional lesson in the costs of self-induced isolation.


A lesson, as it turned out, that did not fully reveal itself until the next morning, when we stumbled to our feet, packed our gear, and got the hell out of Malana.

IT WAS STILL POURING AS WE DESCENDED the steep, narrow trail through the drainage where the Indian government wants to construct its dam. A few hours down this track, the deluge abated briefly just as we were passing through a grove of immense fir trees whose dripping trunks were wreathed in scarlet rhododendron blossoms. Beams of light shot through the wet branches, making the canopy look like the clerestory of a Gothic cathedral.


Standing beside the trail were three children—a boy of about six and his younger sister, who was carrying a baby on her back. As we passed, they smiled sweetly and asked if we had some candy to spare, a request Vinay obliged by taking off his heavy pack and producing several pieces of chocolate. As he extended a handful, the children’s demeanor abruptly changed.


Glaring, the boy and the girl sternly informed Vinay that he needed to put his offering on the ground before they would condescend to touch it. Then the gurgling toddler, taking a cue from his siblings, flung a pointed finger at the forest floor.


Given what we’d already seen, no one should have been surprised; it was a shabby moment that seemed to rob Vinay’s gesture of its kindness and decency. But it was a generous moment, too, because it unwrapped the gift that Malana ultimately offers to each of its visitors—the gift of realizing that you cannot truly appreciate the central importance of human touch until you see what happens when it has been rendered taboo.


Filthy, hostile, terrified of its own shadow, Malana is the sort of place you should never, ever visit, because when you get there, you may wind up deciding that you’d rather be dead. Which, of course, is precisely why Malana is such a rewarding destination. A place that, like the object of all worthwhile journeys, gives back more than it takes away.


In the end, is that not the reason we travel?

The post Bad Trip appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

IT’S A CRISP PREDAWN MORNING AT 12,000 feet in northern Wyoming, and a crescent moon is bleeding off just enough light to illuminate a narrow ledge snaking across the southeastern face of the Grand Teton. The ledge is called Wall Street, and it extends like a stone catwalk along the mountain’s near-vertical flanks to a point where it appears to intersect with a massive ridge that ladders up toward the summit. Just five feet short of that ridge, however, Wall Street fractures, with pulse-spiking abruptness, into a thousand-foot drop to the glacier below—a void of inky air that swallows the beam of Chris Morris’s headlamp.

exum mountain guides, grand teton, the tetons

The signature spire of the Grand Teton

exum mountain guides, grand teton, the tetons

First-year Exum guide Chris Morris

exum mountain guides, grand teton, the tetons

Faces of the guild: clockwise from top left: seventh-year guide Amy Bullard, and Exum co-owner Al Read, Tom Hargis (with son Connor), and Peter Lev

exum mountain guides, grand teton, the tetons

The high life: clockwise from top left, fourth-year guide Chris Bassett at the Lower Saddle; Grand Teton weather; guide Jim Williams; inside senior guide Jack Tackle’s cabin

exum mountain guides, grand teton, the tetons

“Stellar dude”: Jack Turner outside his cabin at Guides’ Hill

exum mountain guides, grand teton, the tetons

Co-owner Mark Newcomb

exum mountain guides, grand teton, the tetons

Senior guide Jack Tackle

exum mountain guides, grand teton, the tetons

From left: Chris Morris lead-climbing on the Exum Ridge; scoping out the rappel

exum mountain guides, grand teton, the tetons

From left: Chris Morris walking “The Horse,” a knife edge on the Exum route; and belaying a client

A seasoned mountaineer with alert hazel eyes and a brushy beard, Morris, 38, is more than a month into his rookie year with Exum Mountain Guides, and today it’s his job to shepherd me and two other clients to the top of the 13,770-foot Grand. Making it up and back down safely is not a problem for Morris, who exudes a catlike combination of power and agility that enables him to flash across a steep slope of precarious talus hauling a 65-pound pack without dislodging a single stone. For his city-dwelling clients, the climb isn’t such a cakewalk.


Tied into the rope behind me is Chuck Procknow, 47, a Denver investment banker with short gray hair and a quick laugh. Right now, Chuck looks as if he’d rather be basking in the soothing blue glow of his computer screen. Instead he’s trying to tie a length of rope onto his daughter Hillary’s climbing harness. The climb is Hillary’s 17th birthday present from Dad, and thus far it’s required her to, among other things that will impress her friends back home, spend a night in a mountain hut clogged with 12 flatulent male strangers before waking at 3 a.m. to confront the yawning gap at the end of Wall Street.


I’ve come along to watch Morris in action and to find out what it takes to make the cut as an Exum guide. Morris, who arrived from Boulder a little more than a month ago with his new wife, Kim, a documentary filmmaker, is one of only two first-year guides who’ve been tapped to try out for Exum this summer. His apprenticeship has placed him under relentless scrutiny by the veteran guides who teach and lead clients on a wide range of climbs in the northern Rockies. If his performance passes muster, he may earn an invitation back for a second season, the next step on the eight- to ten-year apprenticeship path in the most elite mountain-guiding service in North America.


At the moment, though, the normally benign Morris has fallen into a stern mood. The weather is looking suspect, his team is moving slowly, and we’ve reached a crucial point in our climb. Back in 1931, when a young climber named Glenn Exum arrived at the end of this ledge, ropeless and wearing a borrowed pair of leather football cleats two sizes too big, he simply leaped across the chasm—a bold, unprecedented move that opened the route to others. These days, teams negotiate the obstacle in a slightly less desperate fashion, performing a hand traverse on a narrow crack while their boots feverishly claw the granite wall. It’s the Grand Teton’s equivalent of turning onto a one-way street: Prior to crossing the gap and starting the 12 pitches that lead up the Exum Ridge, it’s possible to bail out and descend via an easier route. But once across the gap, the only way to get off the mountain is by firing up and over the top, which leaves you vulnerable to Wyoming’s infamous, and sometimes lethal, summer storms.


Three weeks ago, on July 26, 13 self-guided climbers from Idaho were halfway up the ridge on a notoriously sketchy stretch of rock known as the Friction Pitch when one member, a young mother named Erica Summers, was struck by lightning and instantly killed. The others were left stranded, five of them seriously injured, more than a thousand feet above the Middle Teton Glacier. It took a 50-person squadron of park rangers and search-and-rescue teams, plus a pair of Bell 206-L4 high-altitude helicopters, nearly three hours to pull the survivors off in fading light and foul weather. Neither the incident nor the rescue involved any Exum clients or guides, but it dramatically demonstrated the consequences of poor judgment on the way up the route.


“OK, let’s go,” Morris announces abruptly. “We’re maintaining a good pace, but if the weather goes bad, I’ll pick up the speed considerably—and I’ll expect you guys to keep up.”


With that, Morris flits expertly across the gap, disappearing up the ridge and into the darkness.

ABOUT SIX MILES PAST the southern entrance to Grand Teton National Park, a narrow dirt road turns off of Highway 191 and dead-ends in front of a large, green meadow framed by sawtooth peaks and dotted with 11 Park Service-brown plywood cabins. This tiny community is known as Guides’ Hill, and it serves as home to Exum’s tribe of legendary climbers, who gather each summer for the brief ten-week Teton high season.


Inside each 10-by-20-foot cabin, ice axes, carabiners, and racks of climbing protection hang from the ceiling, competing for space with cookware and battered mountaineering parkas. The walls display a hodgepodge of maps, totems, and prayer flags that the occupants have fetched back from Patagonia, the Karakoram, and far-flung points in between. There’s no indoor plumbing, so residents must share showers and washing facilities at a wooden bathhouse next to the parking lot. At the center of the enclave are several picnic tables and a fire pit where vets and rookies gather to chow down and talk shop on rope techniques, route conditions, and other alpine esoterica.


The cabins are occupied by senior staff, while newcomers like Morris must fend for themselves. Chris and Kim plunked down next to Jackson Lake in “the Discomobile,” a 1983 Chevrolet Land Yacht RV with orange shag carpeting, dark paneling, and a yellow mood light in the shape of a cross. “We had a killer setup,” Morris told me. “I’d get home, drop my pack, hit the water, and sea-kayak for an hour, and then Kim would meet me at the door of the Land Yacht with a plate of food and a can of cold beer. It was paradise.” Other guides bunk with friends in Jackson or, as a last resort, camp discreetly throughout the park, moving every week or two to avoid getting booted by the rangers.


Cantankerous, colorful, and roiled by clashing personalities, this eclectic confederacy of dirtbags, freebooters, and aristocrats represents the crowning ambition of working guides all across America. Thanks to an invite-only policy, however, it’s considerably easier to break through the doors of an Ivy League university than to get tapped by Exum—an honor generally reserved for those who combine exceptional achievements (first ascents, new routes, exploratory trips overseas) with the patience and poise necessary to chaperone couch potatoes out of their comfort zones and up into challenging vertical terrain.


Exum Mountain Guides is a private corporation that holds the longest unbroken climbing concession in any American national park. Since its founding in 1929 by Paul Petzoldt, a pioneering young Tetons guide from Idaho, it has grown from a tiny mom-and-pop operation that barely generated enough cash to cover the owner’s bus fare home each fall to a flourishing business that runs a mountaineering school and leads more than two dozen established climbs in the Tetons each summer, plus expeditions throughout Wyoming’s Wind River Range.


Last summer, Exum hosted approximately 5,000 clients, about 1,000 of whom ascended the Grand, its showcase climb. Depending on the number of climbers in their party and the difficulty of the route, individuals pay between $400 and $600 apiece for the experience. Exum draws all kinds, from boldface names—Cheryl Tiegs, Christy Turlington, Chelsea Clinton, Robert McNamara, Tom Brokaw, Jerry Spence, and Jordan’s Queen Noor—to Boy Scouts, high school teachers, and Rotarians. Today the corporation is owned and operated by a group of seven people. Al Read, 65, the president, and Peter Lev, 64, the financial officer, have both been with the company for 43 years; 69-year-old vice president Rod Newcomb’s tenure stretches back 40 years, and technical supervisor Tom Hargis, 56, has served as a guide since 1977; Read’s wife, Susan, is the office manager, while Cyndi Hargis, Tom’s wife, manages reservations. The youngest owner is Newcomb’s 37-year-old son, Mark, a 15-year guide who is being groomed for a leadership role.


Together, this group controls corporate policy and divvies up profits among themselves while sharing considerable decision-making power with a group of 19 senior guides who, in most cases, have been with Exum a quarter-century or more. Regardless of title, each of the 73 working guides is paid on the same scale, and guides who commit to the entire summer typically gross between $7,000 and $18,000, including gratuities.


It may seem strange for someone like Chris Morris, who ran his own guiding company in Alaska for 12 years, to be enlisting with a group that requires him to undergo a potential ten-year apprenticeship before he can even be considered for the position of senior guide. Why run this gantlet? Because joining Exum is like hitting a trifecta on the mountain-guide circuit: a well-paying gig with a blue-chip company, unimpeachable prestige, and the chance to spend the summer networking with peers who run successful off-season operations and private trips all over the world. If Morris survives this tryout season and beyond, it will take his career to a level he never dreamed of touching as an obscure, overworked entrepreneur humping through the mud and mosquitoes of Talkeetna.


“There are lots of other great guide services out there,” Morris told me, “but none with the depth and the knowledge that Exum has. They’ve been around forever. The Tetons are some of the most beautiful mountains anywhere. And you’re working with the best. Even the people you don’t click with, you still have great respect for, because everybody is so accomplished. I’ve done an awful lot of guiding. But when you get that letter of invitation, it’s like you’ve arrived.”

A THICK BLANKET OF SNOW still drapes the high peaks when the Exum alums and neophytes fly, drive, bike, and hitchhike in from mountain ranges all over the world, assembling in a large log cabin not far from the Exum office at 8 a.m. on June 30: Guides’ Day. This is the official start of the summer season, so the attire is mountain casual—Hawaiian shirts, shorts, and river sandals. But the laid-back dress code belies the high-powered rĂ©sumĂ©s in this room full of alpha dogs.


Near the front of the room is Rolando “Rolo” Garibotti, 33, an alpinist who holds the record—under seven hours—for the Grand Traverse, a route linking nine Teton peaks that takes most clients two days to complete. Standing in the back is Jim Williams, 49, the first person to have successfully guided all Seven Summits in one year. Behind Williams is Miles Smart, 24, who holds speed records on four Grade VI Yosemite climbs. Near the window is Brian Harder, 42, who spent four years as a sniper with the 101st Airborne Division, and Cindy Tolle, 42, who has a Ph.D. in microbiology and has freighted each of her three children to the top of the Grand Teton—in utero. Not here, but certainly felt, are Stephen Koch, who recently attempted to snowboard Everest; climber and filmmaker David Breashears; and the late Alex Lowe, who died in 1999 in an avalanche on Tibet’s Shishapangma.


“In that room, you just wonder if you can measure up,” Morris tells me later, confessing to a bad case of Guides’ Day nerves. “I don’t care who you are, or what you’ve done, or how bad you think you are; when you see how many of the best of the best are actually there, it’s intimidating.”


Rod Newcomb, sitting in for Al Read, who’s ill, welcomes everyone back and then calls for an introduction of the new guides. The crowd focuses on Wesley Bunch, a tanned, sinewy mountaineer from Jackson with a massive blond afro.


“This is Chris Morris,” says Bunch. “I’m here to tell you that nobody can handle a shovel at 17,000 feet better than this guy.”


The remark elicits a few smiles, but he’s not joking. Bunch, 40, has been with Exum for 11 years and is a close friend of Morris, having guided with him in Alaska. In June 1998, the two led efforts to save seven climbers injured in three separate accidents on Mount McKinley’s West Rib—the biggest rescue in the history of Denali mountaineering. Impressed by Morris’s “quiet competence,” Bunch approached Read last year and suggested that Morris be invited to apprentice.


Read receives about 40 such nominations for new guides each year; on average he invites fewer than five to try out. What drew the boss’s attention in this instance was Morris’s connection with Erik Weihenmayer, the blind climber from Colorado. After successfully, if painstakingly, guiding Weihenmayer to the summit of McKinley in June 1995—Morris walked a few steps in front of his sightless client for ten hours a day, ringing a cowbell and calling out descriptions of the terrain in a verbal shorthand that included terms such as “knee bashers” and “rollers”—they went on to knock off Aconcagua, Mount Elbrus, and Antarctica’s Vinson Massif together. Perhaps most impressive, in late spring 2001, Morris helped Weihenmayer become the first and, to date, only blind climber to summit Everest. “I thought that if Chris has the patience to guide a blind person up Everest,” Read told me, “then surely he’s going to have the intuition and the caring to guide Exum clients.”


After Morris’s introduction, it’s Susan Detweiler’s turn. Detweiler, 38, is a Coloradan who has spent 14 years guiding in the Rockies and the Cascades, as well as on McKinley and Aconcagua. She has long brown hair, rock-scratched forearms, and an air of intense, thin-lipped resolve. Last winter, when Read expressed interest in meeting her but was unable to schedule a get-together, Detweiler drove to Jackson and offered to ski 20 miles to the backcountry cabin of a senior Exum guide for her interview—a display of determination that impressed Read.


For Morris and Detweiler, basic training officially starts this evening with the “phone-in,” a nightly ritual that requires all guides to call the office after 8 p.m. and listen to a recording of their climbing assignments for the next day. For the first few weeks, the two rookies will “audit” climbs (read: assist senior guides for free) until they are deemed suitable for the next phase: teaching rock school and leading one or two climbs a week for the rest of the season. At the end of the summer, the company’s 19 senior guides will huddle for discussion and then provide written recommendations to the owners. The crux of the rookie season takes place on September 10, after the new guides have departed, when the owners convene in Jackson for a star-chamber confab to decide which recruits merit an invitation to continue their apprenticeship.


But that’s still months away. For now, the rookies are just trying to grasp the folkways of this guild as the Guides’ Day gathering rolls through wide-ranging topics like how many bowls should be left for guides in the storage locker at Exum’s Grand Teton high camp and the current condition of the park’s wolf pack, bison herd, and bear population. (Clients often quiz the guides about local wildlife.) On the whole, the meeting has the backslapping atmosphere of counselors returning to camp. But toward the end of the morning the tone shifts as an older guide with deep-blue eyes and a gray ponytail strides to the front. This is Dave Carman, one of Exum’s two chief guides, and he’s here to deliver a succinct reminder before everyone splits for the rest of the day.


“Many of our clients are exhausted and at the limits of their abilities, and they make mistakes,” he solemnly tells the group, which has grown quiet. “Sometimes they release their brake hand just when somebody falls. Sometimes they step on the exact rock that you’ve told them not to. Or they untie their knots when you’re not looking and then tie back in poorly. What this means is that our clients are trying to kill each other, they’re trying to kill themselves, and they’re trying to kill you. Each of us needs to remember this at all times. That’s our job.”

ONE MORNING TOWARD THE END of July, I arrive at the Exum office, a pitched-roof cabin surrounded by aspens and firs, just down the road from Guides’ Hill. The base is buzzing as younger guides pull up in their battered pickup trucks and brightly painted vans while a few veterans mill around, introducing themselves to clients and gearing up for climbs on Symmetry Spire and in the Wind River Range.


Over the last month, Morris has sailed through his audit climbs and quickly been dropped into the teaching-and-guiding rotation. Today he’s taking me and two clients who have enrolled in Rock School for a session on a crag near Hidden Falls. Dressed in Patagonia river shorts, a pair of well-beaten Nike Air Exum approach shoes, and a blue ball cap, he looks the part and converses with his new clients about their climbing experience, hometowns, and professions. But once class begins, he’s all business—even when client Mike Cloyd, a 33-year-old accountant from upstate New York, tries to get him to open up.


“So what’s the biggest mountain you’ve climbed?” Cloyd inquires.


“Well, I guess that’d be Everest,” Morris replies. “Now show me how to tie that bowline knot again, my friend.”


For the next two days, Morris will patiently walk us through a range of rudimentary climbing techniques—rope handling, knots, rappels, and top-roping. The aim is to teach clients these new skills and then apply them on the Grand in the “caterpillar” system, a method unique to Exum, in which clients belay one another in turn as the team works its way up the mountain.


Later in the morning, I catch sight of Jack Turner, a senior Exum guide who put up pioneering routes in Colorado and Yosemite in the 1960s before becoming a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois. Turner, who is also an acclaimed author (The Abstract Wild; Teewinot: A Year in the Teton Range), is standing about 20 feet below us, winding up an elaborate lecture on the origins of belaying to a group of 16-year-olds.


“I’m told by education experts that you kids have an attention span of about five seconds,” booms Turner, who wears a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat and sports a close-cropped white beard. “Well, your attention span has to be more than five seconds here, because when you yell down and tell your partner it’s OK to climb, I consider it a moral contract that you’re going to do nothing but watch out for that person until she gets to this ledge and says, ‘Off belay!’ Because if you don’t, if Johnny here decides to start picking his nose while his partner is climbing”—Turner energetically drills into his nose with his index finger—”then it’s like Sally here is getting pushed out a window of an eight-story building, and she is going eight floors into the deck.”


Turner pauses for emphasis.


“Does everyone here know what that means? It means that when Sally hits the ground, she will look like Alpo. Everybody here know what the inside of a can of dog food looks like?”


The kids laugh.


“It’s not funny, right?” barks Turner. “Anybody here think that’s funny?”


The kids clamp their mouths shut and shake their heads no.


“As I explained earlier, this is very different from European guiding, where you are basically just baggage that the guide is hauling up the mountain. Here, you have a responsibility, which is an American way of doing things . . .”


The kids stare up at him quizzically until Turner continues with something they can relate to a little easier.


“And failure to take that responsibility means that Sally’s going to look like what?”


“Alpo!” comes the chorus.


At the end of the day, as we’re boarding the boat that will take us across Jenny Lake and back to the Exum office, Morris tells me about the past few weeks. “The person I probably learned the most from, at least in the schools, was Turner,” he says. “What amazed me about Jack is that he’s got a bunch of people standing around, and you have to keep them entertained for the entire day but also present this information so that they’re going to remember it in days to come. It’s pretty important that you teach the stuff well, because these people are going to go up the Grand and be using these skills and hopefully not killing each other, right? Jack will kill me for saying this, but watching him teach is kind of like hanging out with your grandfather. He’s a stellar dude.”

TO FULLY UNDERSTAND LIFE as an Exum guide, you need to know something about the two guys who got the whole thing started. Paul Petzoldt came to Jackson from Idaho in 1924 at the age of 16 and, with no climbing experience, proceeded to pull off the fourth ascent of the Grand Teton wearing cowboy boots and toting two cans of beans, a quilt, and a penknife that he used to cut steps into the ice. Glenn Exum, who was also from Idaho, moved to Jackson in the summer of 1929 to play saxophone at the Jenny Lake Dance Hall. Unlike the disheveled Petzoldt, who looked like a cross between a grizzly bear and a large potato, Exum was a mustachioed rake who bore a striking resemblance to Errol Flynn. The two men became friends and founded the Petzoldt-Exum School of American Mountaineering, offering to take campers to the top of the Grand for $23 a head.


Among their early clients was one of particular importance, a Scotsman named Sir Albert Victor Baillie, Dean of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle—private chaplain to the King and Queen of England. The Dean of Windsor didn’t climb, but he had such a good time hiking around the Teton’s meadows and lakes, and dipping into Petzoldt’s stash of moonshine, he invited both men to visit him in England during the mid-1930s.


Apart from being an amazing opportunity for two Idaho roustabouts in the midst of the Depression, the trips to England and Europe exposed both Petzoldt and Exum to the tightly regulated system of European mountain guiding, where guides chaperoned no more than two clients at a time and offered none of the instruction that might encourage clients to pursue the sport on their own. It left a poor impression on the two Americans, clashing with their philosophy of self-reliance in the wilderness.


Petzoldt passed away in October 1999, and Exum died in March 2000, but their thinking lives on. “Glenn and Paul were both of a very like mind,” says Exum co-owner Peter Lev. “Their feeling was that this is simply not the way things work in America. Their idea was to teach people, not to make them slaves to guides who refused to part with their knowledge.”


The protocol that evolved at Exum places unique demands on the guides, who must handle three or four people while simultaneously processing a stream of fluctuating data that includes, among many other factors, the condition of the route, changes in the weather, and the progress of other rope teams on the mountain. All of which, the guides will tell you, is specific to the Tetons. This intimate knowledge of their home turf has helped cultivate an attitude of defiant independence and unassailable autonomy—qualities that contributed to a tradition of eccentricity and irreverence among legendary Exum characters from the past.


Chuck Pratt, a pioneer Yosemite wall climber, used to forbid clients from bringing Quaker Oats on climbs because, the story goes, he and Yvon Chouinard—the founder of Patagonia Inc. and also, briefly, an Exum guide—had once been forced to spend three days in an Arizona jail, where they were fed nothing but oatmeal. Willi Unsoeld, the alpinist who lost nine toes to frostbite during the bold 1963 first ascent of Everest’s West Ridge, horrified his clients by pretending to fall off his own rappels, screaming the entire way down. And Gary Hemming, an American famous during the sixties for first ascents in the Alps and a daring rescue of German climbers on the Dru (and infamous for getting drunk and picking fights in bars), was beaten unconscious one night by three ax-handle-toting cowboys in an alley behind a Jackson bar. Hemming later died, in 1969, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head near the old Guides’ Hill at Jenny Lake.


As Exum has grown larger and more buttoned-down, the company has come under increasing pressure to shed its unorthodox past and conform to international standards, particularly those promulgated by the American Mountain Guides Association, in Boulder, an affiliate of the Gstaad, Switzerland-based International Federation of Mountain Guides Association. This summer, Exum’s helmet policy came into question. Clients have always been required to wear helmets, and in 74 years the guide service has had only three clients die on its watch, a safety record that is much better than industry averages. But guides can don helmets at their discretion, and the owners have grown uncomfortable with the laissez-faire rule.


One afternoon, the entire guiding staff gathers on the patch of grass outside the main office to debate the helmet policy. Jim McCarthy, a lawyer from Jackson and a past president of the American Alpine Club, has come by to see if he can talk some risk-management sense into the Exum gang.


“It is absolute madness for your employers not to require you to wear helmets all the time,” he declares. “If there’s a death and you’re not wearing a helmet at the time, Exum will be sued, and you will be named. A single case will wipe out this guide service, and your livelihood along with it.”


The pronouncement provokes a flurry of protest, especially from Tim Toula, who has been at Exum 14 years and who is so strong he can perform multiple one-armed pull-ups.


“Can we not all agree that we’re leaders?” he demands, strutting across the grass and windmilling his arms. “Are we going to allow some guys who don’t even know how to rock-climb to make this decision for us?”


Nods all around.


“Are we going to continue to use our judgment and freedom to make the right choices about safety, or are we going to just go”—Tula puts his head down and begins bleating like a sheep—”Baaaa-aaaa! Baaaa-aaaa! Baaaa-aaaaa!“


As his colleagues clap and laugh, Al Read, who has been listening without comment, stands up.


“All right, that’s it,” he says. “We’re all going to have to wear helmets from now on.”


The message is clear: Independence is fine, but it isn’t going to trump corporate decree. Anyone who doesn’t want to abide by the new policy is free to find work at another guide service.

CLIMBING THE GRAND is a two-day proposition: one day hiking to Exum’s hut on the Upper Saddle, where you spend the night, and the summit day, which typically starts between 3 and 4 a.m. Morris, Chuck and Hillary Procknow, and I are all up by 3. We ram down some food, gear up, and are en route by 3:45. By the time we’re across the Wall Street gap, dawn is breaking in lavender striations across the eastern horizon. Just above the first pitch, a tawny stretch of 5.4 rock known as the Golden Staircase, Morris yells down to Chuck and Hillary.


“You guys need to be making your transitions much faster, OK?”


No response. In the darkness below, it’s impossible to see what’s causing the holdup. Morris raises his voice a notch and yells again.


“Chuck, are you climbing?” Pause. “No? Well, get on it!”


For all his spartan professionalism, Morris is not a climbing fascist. He intersperses his reprimands with frequent compliments, telling Chuck that he’s “climbing like a badass” and christening Hillary a “Teton wild woman.” Coaching clients while at the same time tuning in to all the various factors around you—weather, rockfall, other climbers—may be a guide’s most important skill.


“One of the things about the guides who don’t make it here is that they lack a certain quality of heightened awareness,” says Jack Turner. “It’s not as though they’re not careful, but sometimes you just pick up on what Wittgenstein called ‘fine shades of behavior,’ little things that would pass by the casual observer—like the manner in which someone double-checks to make sure that a knot has been properly tied—in which they’re not being as careful as you think they should be. These are vague issues of judgment and trust—very subtle, very fine, very delicate shades of behavior. Vibes are what I call ’em.”


The challenge, of course, is to strike a balance between drill-sergeant seriousness and inspiring support. Rookies are evaluated on many criteria, from technical mastery to how they get along with the senior guides, but the most important may also be the most subjective: the Turnerian vibe—an almost intuitive sensitivity to the circumstances of each climb. It’s a quality that the Exum guild observes closely, if discreetly, and it can have a lot to do with getting a second-year invitation.


“I never felt like I was being scrutinized, ever, but you know they’re watching you, making their evaluations all the time,” says fifth-year guide Brian Harder, 42, recalling his first season. “There’s a large number of aspiring guides here, and a few weeks into the summer, you just stop seeing one or two of them. You never really know why.”


Following Morris up the Grand, we’ve shot past the Friction Pitch, where the Idaho climbers were struck by lightning. At 9:30 a.m., we top out on the blocky summit, shed our packs, break out our energy bars, and gaze north toward Yellowstone through a light scrim of sleet. Barely five minutes pass before Morris issues the order to rope up.


“I don’t mind telling you guys that I don’t like the look of this weather,” he announces. “Let’s move.”


The descent follows the Owen-Spalding route, which involves a scramble down another ridge with some dicey loose rock and a long 120-foot rappel off an overhanging cliff. At one point a rope team appears below us, led by a guide from Jackson Hole Mountain Guides—another Teton outfitter—and they make a dash to reach the belay station before we do. In the process, a client on that team kicks loose a small rockslide, which peppers the rappel chute, where a third team is descending. No one gets hurt, but Morris is furious at the guide. “Fucking asshole,” he huffs, breaking Exum’s no-profanity rule.


We reach the Lower Saddle without further incident, snatch up our gear, and race down Garnet Canyon to emerge three hours later at Lupine Meadow. This is Morris’s final climb of the season; he’s cutting his summer short by two weeks to return to Boulder for his wedding celebration and to start an off-season business as a personal trainer. While Hillary shakes Morris’s hand, Chuck thanks him profusely, apologizing about being slow.


“What I always say,” Morris responds, “is that it’d be like me trying to walk into your office to do your job. You gotta realize, man, I’d bankrupt your entire company in about two hours.”

BY SEPTEMBER 10, snow is already returning to the high country and Exum’s summer season is drawing to a close. By now, most of the cabins at Guides’ Hill have emptied out and the occupants have begun their autumn migrations to places like Patagonia, the Alps, Africa, and Park City, Utah. For some, the departure came earlier than they had hoped. Halfway through the summer, a guide who had been on the apprentice track for several years was asked to leave.


“He was very, very good with people, but it takes more than that to survive the process here,” says Peter Lev. “He just wasn’t quite as switched on as he needed to be. He didn’t have that quality of having eyes in the back of his head.”


Today, six of the seven owners—Lev, Al and Susan Read, Rod and Mark Newcomb, and Cindy Hargis (Tom Hargis is away teaching a clinic)—gather at a bed-and-breakfast in downtown Jackson to decide the fate of the rookies and a handful of “overflow” guides, recruits who are still in their first few seasons and haven’t yet transcended evaluation. I’ve been permitted to sit in on this meeting on the condition that some names and details not be revealed. The pace is brisk, the tone serious, with none of the joking that lightens most Exum get-togethers.


Read, who has brought along the written appraisals from the senior guides, opens the meeting without any preamble, launching right into a pull-no-punches appraisal of the guides on his list. The meeting goes smoothly, with the others occasionally voicing their own opinions in terse one-word summaries: Solid. First-class. Keeper. Superstrong.


The group hangs up on only one young guide, who handles clients well but who, according to one senior guide, hasn’t been paying sufficient attention to safety issues. It’s a classic case of questionable vibes.


“We have this problem,” Read says, turning to me. “One of the senior guides doesn’t like one of the new guides.”


Then, back to the group: “OK, now we have this case of [the disputed candidate],” says Read, “and needless to say, the senior guides wrote a lot about him.”


Peter Lev: “I simply can’t understand or accept it. I don’t buy it for a minute. This is an example of extreme unfairness.”


Cindy Hargis: “He’s still not anyone’s best friend, but he’s a good, strong, hardworking guide.” Peter Lev: “He is also a very solid, safe climber, very strong, very attentive in all possible ways.”


Rod Newcomb: “What did the report say?”


Al Read, reciting from the senior guides’ report: ” ‘Needs procedural review. Personality versus trust, judgment, and safety.’ But he seems fine to me, too.”


“You know,” says Mark Newcomb, “it might be the case that he just has to learn a few things about where to belay and methods for handling four people. It does happen a lot with overflow guides, who learn a thing but then it will be two weeks or more before they actually get that assignment that puts them on the Grand. Maybe that’s the case here, and if so, I don’t think that’s a reason not to invite him back. I remember that I screwed up a lot in my first few years.”


The group consents to ask this guide back, on the condition that he is earmarked for intensive observation next year. If he fails to improve, it will almost certainly be his last summer at Exum.


They march through the rest of the names, including Morris’s fellow rookie, Susan Detweiler, approving each of them for return invites without much discussion. “OK,” concludes Read, “that’s all we have to say about guides.”


The only odd thing is that Morris hasn’t been mentioned. After the meeting, Read explains the exception: Just before Morris took the Procknows and me up the Grand, he was called into the Exum office and told that if he was interested in coming back next summer, he’d be welcome.


The early nod signaled how impressed the old pros were with the rookie. It was a moment that must have ranked as a high point in his career. But I can’t really say. In all the hours that we spent together, Morris never said a word.

The post The House of Rock appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.