We climb from ledge to ledge, from fall to fall, up pitches of some difficulty. We watch the boatmen traverse one ledge with a rather indecent exposure, two hundred feet of vertical space full of nothing but gravity. The ledge is three inches wide. There are no handholds. Most of us choose the sole alternate route, a humiliating crawl on face and belly through a claustrophobic tunnel.
More wonders wait beyond.
The route terminates in a kind of amphitheater deep in the cliffs, where warblers sing in the redbud trees and a whispering, shimmering, vaporous veil of crystalline water slips down and down, over moss and algae, past maidenhair fern and helleborine orchid, from the notch in the canyon far above our heads. A breeze caresses the leaves of the willows, hackberrys, box elders. The spirit of John Wesley Powell will understand, high in his haunt on the rim of Great Thumb Mesa. If time is the mind of space, the Colorado is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever.