The rapid below our camp was just as bad as its roar, we found, on
running it the next day. Most of the descent was confined to a violent
drop at the very beginning, but there was a lot of complicated water
in the big waves that followed. Emery was thrown forward in his boat,
when he reached the bottom of the chute, striking his mouth, and
bruising his hands, as he dropped his oars and caught the bulkhead. An
extra oar was wrenched from the boat and disappeared in the white
water, or foam that was as nearly white as muddy water ever gets. I
nearly upset, and broke the pin of a rowlock, the released oar being
jerked from my hand, sending me scrambling for an extra oar, when the
boat swept into a swift whirlpool. Emery caught my oar as it whirled
past him; the other was found a half-mile below in an eddy.
Some of the rapids in the centre of Marble Canyon were not more than
75 feet wide, with a corresponding violence of water. The whirlpools
in the wider channels below these rapids were the strongest we had
seen, and had a most annoying way of holding the boats just when we
thought we had evaded them. Sometimes there would be a whirlpool on
either side, with a sharply defined line of division in the centre,
along which it was next to impossible to go without being caught on
one side or the other. These whirlpools were seldom regarded as
serious, for our boats were too wide and heavy to be readily
overturned in them, although we saved ourselves more than one upset by
throwing our weight to the opposite side.
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