Produced by Ted Garvin, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreaders Team
By E.L. Kolb
With a Foreword by Owen Wister
New Edition
With Additional Illustrations
(72 Plates)
From Photographs by the Author and His Brother
1915
Dedication
It is a dogged courage of which the author of this book is the serenepossessor—shared equally by his daring brother; and evidence of thisbravery is made plain throughout the following pages. Every youth whohas in him a spark of adventure will kindle with desire to battle hisway also from Green River to the foot of Bright Angel Trail; whileevery man whose bones have been stiffened and his breath made short bythe years, will remember wistfully such wild tastes of risk andconquest that he, too, rejoiced in when he was young.
Whether it deal with the climbing of dangerous peaks, or the descent(as here) of some fourteen hundred miles of water both mysterious andferocious, the well-told tale of a perilous journey, planned with headand carried through with dauntless persistence, always holds theattention of its readers and gives them many a thrill. This tale isvery well told. Though it is the third of its kind, it differs fromits predecessors more than enough to hold its own: no previousexplorers have attempted to take moving pictures of the Colorado Riverwith themselves weltering in its foam. More than this: while the humanrace lasts it will be true, that any man who is lucky enough to fixupon a hard goal and win it, and can in direct and simple words tellus how he won it, will write a good book.
Perhaps this planet does somewhere else contain a thing like theColorado River—but that is no matter; we at any rate in our continentpossess one of nature's very vastest works. After The River and itstributaries have done with all sight of the upper world, have leftbehind the bordering plains and streamed through the various gasheswhich their floods have sliced in the mountains that once stoppedtheir way, then the culminating wonder begins. The River has beenflowing through the loneliest part which remains to us of that largespace once denominated "The Great American Desert" by the vague mapsin our old geographies. It has passed through regions of emptinessstill as wild as they were before Columbus came; where not only no manlives now nor any mark is found of those forgotten men of the cliffs,but the very surface of the earth itself looks monstrous and extinct.Upon one such region in particular the author of these pages dwells,when he climbs up out of the gulf in whose bottom he has left his boatby the River, to look out upon a world of round gray humps and hollowswhich seem as if it were made of the backs of huge elephants. Throughsuch a country as this, scarcely belonging to our era any more thanthe mammoth or the pterodactyl, scarcely belonging to time at all,does the Colorado approach and enter its culminating marvel. Then, for283 miles it inhabits a nether world of its own. The few that haveventured through these places and lived are a handful to those whowent in and were never seen again. The white bones of some have beenfound on the shores; but most were drowne