strewn with bleached white tree trunks, and the uniquely flowing rock formations of cherry-red travertine that decorate the canyon in hanging curtains under a wall-to-wall cerulean sky.
Below Mooney, which we descended by a system of tunnels, chain ropes, and downclimbing, a faint trail disappeared into tall thickets of grasses that sprang from the sandbars. We waded down the streambed for another three miles and came to Beaver Falls, a group of interlaced and terraced pools that receives only a small fraction of the visitors as the upper falls. Here the travertine builds up dams across the stream that form horseshoe-shaped pools, each spilling over into the next. The falls drop about fifty feet and are spread out along a two-hundred-foot- long corridor in the canyon. They reminded me of the thermal pools my family had visited in Yellowstone almost a decade earlier. Five miles past Beaver Falls, the creek drops into a narrow channel where the turquoise waters of Havasupai spill directly into the often muddy-brown torrent of the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. My sister and I didn’t have time to go all the way to the river, so she sat on a rock above Beaver Falls while I balanced my way across the dams to reach the west shore of the creek. In my wet sandals, my footing was unsure, but I made it over to a rock shelf alongside the dams that was guarded by a barrier of prickly-pear cactus. I needed to go upstream on the shelf, somehow bypassing the garden of four-foot-high cacti, to gain a wider series of dams where it would be easier to cross back to the east side. The best strategy looked to be climbing about ten feet up the rock wall above the shelf and traversing over the cacti. I went for it, despite doubts that my sandals would grip the steep, wet travertine.
Perched a body’s length above the largest of the prickly-pears after five moves from right to left, I pinched a hold with my left hand that stretched my body into an X. As I shifted my weight onto my extended left foot, the travertine broke off, and the resulting jolt of my body on the knob I was holding in my right hand caused it to disintegrate as well. Suddenly, I was slipping down the travertine slide on the toe tips of my sandals, facing the rock. I had enough time to spot the prickly-pear closing in on my ass. The branches and paddles were naturally arranged in a curve close to the wall, with two separate cacti at the shelf’s lip. In my brief downward glance, the prickly-pear bushes turned into a grotesque smile, like a ravenous oversized fly-trap about to enjoy an overdue meal. Just before my heels met the top of the cactus, I sprang off the wall, turning a half rotation in midair to clear the tallest part of the spiny plant.
My feet hit the sand straddling a three-foot-high branch of the pear-shaped paddles-the nose of the smiling face. The landing would have been safe, except that my momentum had pushed my body into a crouch to absorb the fall’s energy. Spine-covered pear paddles met the sensitive soft tissue of my inner thighs. Recoiling from dozens of impalements, I burst back into the air. I stood bowlegged on the shelf above the travertine dams and aqua pools like a dismounted cowboy. My sister’s shout, “Are you okay?,” allowed me to defer looking down for another five seconds while I replied, “Yeah…but I fell on a cactus.”
I twisted and maneuvered my way out of the cactus garden, then dropped my shorts. The fabric of my gray long underwear was polka-dotted with red spots of blood. At the center of each crimson bull’s eye was a half-inch- long barbed cactus needle. I plucked for twenty minutes and removed the most offensive thorns, then took off my long underwear to hunt for the smaller, more hairlike spines. Extracting them one by one, I lost count somewhere past a hundred. Nearly an hour later, Sonja shouted over the water noise for me to pull my shorts back on-there were other hikers approaching. I stuffed my gray tights into my pocket and crossed the dam to see who was coming. These were the only other people we had seen below the village. They were two gregarious guys about my age, also from Phoenix, heading down to camp at the Colorado River. I wanted to see the lower part of Havasupai, but as my sister had little desire to make the sixteen-mile round trip, I arranged to meet Jean-Marc and Chad at the river by ten the next morning to make the return trek together.
Sonja and I returned to climb the Mooney Falls tunnels in the fading light. For our dinner back at camp, we laid out some pre-cooked turkey on crackers to go with our main course of macaroni and cheese. Even for backcountry cuisine, it was basic fare, but we weren’t there to celebrate a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner-we were most thankful about being with each other in such an inspiring place. After a chocolate bar each for dessert, we hung our food to protect it from the ring-tailed cats and raccoons and crawled onto our open-air tarp, the two lone occupants of the half-mile-long campground. My sister rolled over and fell asleep as I sat with my headlamp and tweezers for about forty-five minutes, trying to extract the remaining prickly-pear barbs from my inner thighs. It eased my embarrassment to know that no one was watching my peculiar ritual of awkward stretching, rubbing, plucking, prodding, and grimacing-my tweezers and I had the canyon to ourselves. It would be a full week before I found and removed the last spine, a fine hair impaled in my left buttock, while watching football on television in my town home in Chandler.
By seven A.M. the next morning, I was descending the canyon by headlamp, downclimbing the ropes and chains at Mooney Falls, splashing through the streambed, and hiking swiftly through the grasses and reeds bordering the sandbars and creek banks past Beaver Falls. I was exactly on time for the rendezvous at the Colorado River, where Jean-Marc and Chad offered me some of their coffee, freshly brewed on their backcountry stove. We hung out on the slate ledges along the downriver side of the Havasupai outlet, overlooking the comparatively monstrous Colorado, and scoped out swimming possibilities along the south shore of the river. Chad waded out throughthe confluence zone of Havasupai Creek to get a picture of the mixing line where the translucent waters first met the rushing madness of the Colorado’s black-opal current.
What possessed me to follow Chad out into the water, pass him to climb onto the last rock at the upstream edge of a powerful eddy, and then cannonball into the Colorado River, fully clothed, without a life jacket…Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Chad did get a funny picture of me, balled up in midair and unthinkingly bound for disaster, but had he and Jean-Marc not acted as fast as they did in the ensuing moments, it would have been the last picture anyone ever took of me, silly or otherwise. As I plunged in and came to the surface, I gasped at the unexpected temperature of the river-a hypothermic 50 degrees-over twenty degrees colder than the tropically warm Havasupai Creek.
My thick long-sleeved shirt and pants became ten-pound weights, and my running shoes dragged my feet plumb as the current swept me along the edge of the fifteen-yard-long eddy. Kicking off my shoes, I swam hard and fought my way into the eddy within five feet of shore in deep water. I noticed I was no longer getting any closer to solid ground. The circular eddy current was too strong to overcome. As I made stroke after stroke, I watched the shore move past. Chad and Jean-Marc were watching me and called out, “Aron, do you need help?” My pride replied, “Nah, I’ll make it,” as I took in my first swallow of river water.
Chad must have heard panic in my voice, because he dashed up the ledge behind the short beach to their campsite, thirty feet away, as I recirculated upstream in the eddy. Pushed from shore by the eddy current, I was quickly caught by the main current and the cycle began to repeat itself. As I attempted to unbutton my long-sleeved shirt to alleviate the drag, I instantly submerged and couldn’t get more than a single button undone before I needed air. The icy grip of the Colorado constricted my chest, making my breathing a shallow and rapid gasping. After swallowing three gulps of water and immersing a second time, I abandoned the shirt removal. Downstream of the eddy, the canyon walls rise straight from the water in two-to-three-hundred-foot cliffs for a thousand yards until the river turns right and disappears at the corner. I knew if I were swept past the Havasupai Creek eddy, I would drown long before I had another chance to get out of the river, and indeed it would be another hundred river miles until the current would spit my remains onto a beach at the upper end of Lake Mead. A newspaper headline flashed in front of my eyes: IDIOT ENGINEER DROWNS IN GRAND CANYON, BODY RECOVERED IN LAKE MEAD.
I thrashed at the water, straining for the eddy. At the farthest downstream edge, I broke through the eddy line and cried out, “Help! Help!”
Chad was up on a ledge returning from the campsite. “Jean-Marc, here!” Chad tossed a coiled accessory cord to Jean-Marc, who was fifteen feet away from me.
“Aron, grab hold!” He threw out the line, but it fell in the eddy, upstream of my position, and quickly floated out of my reach.
“Unnnggh,” I grunted. I continued to swim as hard as I could manage toward the shore. The cold was crippling me, numbing my legs, my arms, and my core. Jean-Marc retrieved the cord and tossed it out again, but the eddy current had already swept me past the beach and out into the overwhelming force of the Colorado. Concentrating on the eddy line, I kicked my lethargic legs and pumped my arms freestyle. I didn’t see Jean-Marc hand the cord off to Chad, but when I broke into the eddy again five seconds later, Chad had already thrown the coil and was shouting, “Aron, grab it! Get it! It’s right there!”
I reached to my right and brought my hand down on the thin black line as it drifted limply in the eddy. Chad yanked on it to reel me in, and I lost my sodden grip on the cord. The crush of disappointment nearly drowned me.
