Marble Canyon. Marble Canyon. Photograph by J.K. HILLERS, U.S. Colo. Riv. Exp.
The next day was begun by accomplishing the portage over the rapid which had punished the prospectors for their temerity and for their lack of proper morals, and then we made most excellent progress, successfully putting behind us eleven lively rapids free from rocks before we were admonished to pause and make a let-down. Then camp was established for the night with the record of ten and three-eighths miles for our day’s work. At one place we passed a rock in the water so large that it almost blocked the entire stream, which had averaged about two hundred feet in width, though narrowing at many places to no more than seventy-five. The current was always extremely swift, while many whirlpools added their demands, though they gave us no serious trouble. It is exasperating, however, to be turned around against one’s will. The canyon at the top for a considerable distance was not over three-quarters of a mile wide. The depth was now from fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred feet. There were always rapids following quickly one after another, but so often they were free from rocks, the dangerous part of most rapids, that we were able to sail through them in triumph. On the 20th, out of thirteen sharp descents, we easily ran twelve, all in a distance of less than seven miles. The average width of the river was one hundred and twenty-five feet, while the walls rose to over two thousand feet, and at the top the canyon was about a mile and a quarter from brink to brink. This brought us to Vasey’s Paradise, so named after a botanist friend of his, by Powell on the first descent. It was only a lot of ferns, mosses, and similar plants growing around two springs that issued from the cliffs on the right about seventy-five feet above the river, and rippled in silver threads to the bottom, but as it was the first green spot since leaving the Paria its appearance was striking and attractive to the eye that had been baffled in all directions except above, in a search for something besides red. Now the narrow, terraced canyon, often vertical on both sides for several hundred feet above the water, grew ever deeper and deeper, two thousand, twenty-five hundred, three thousand feet and more, as the impetuous torrent slashed its way down, till it finally seemed to me as if we were actually sailing into the inner heart of the world. The sensation on the first expedition, when each dark new bend was a dark new mystery, must have been something to quite overpower the imagination, for then it was not known that, by good management, a boat could pass through this Valley of the Shadow of Death, and survive. Down, and down, and ever down, roaring and leaping and throwing its spiteful spray against the hampering rocks the terrible river ran, carrying our boats along with it like little wisps of straw in the midst of a Niagara, the terraced walls around us sometimes fantastically eroded into galleries, balconies, alcoves, and Gothic caves that lent to them an additional weird and wonderful aspect, while the reverberating turmoil of the ever-descending flood was like some extravagant musical accompaniment to the extraordinary panorama flitting past of rock sculpture and bounding cliffs.