" Under the circumstances it seemed
like a wise precaution and we took his giant-powder, as he had
suggested.
The river had fallen two feet below the stage on which we quit a month
before. A scale of foot-marks on a rock wall rising from the river
showed that the water twenty-seven feet deep at that spot. No
measurement was made in the middle of the river channel. The current
here between two small rapids flows at five and three-fourths miles
per hour. The width of the stream is close to 250 feet. The high-water
mark here is forty-five feet above the low-water stage, then the river
spreads to five hundred feet in width, running with a swiftness and
strength of current and whirlpool that is tremendous. The highest
authentic measurement in a narrow channel, of which we know, is one
made by Julius F. Stone in Marble Canyon. He recorded one spot where
the high-water mark was 115 feet above the low-water mark. These
figures might look large at first, but if they are compared with some
of the floods on the Ohio River, for instance, and that stream were
boxed in a two hundred foot channel the difference would not be great,
we imagine.
One of the young men who greeted us when we landed came down with a
companion to see us embark. On the plateau 1300 feet above, looking
like small insects against the sky-line, was a trail party, equally
interested. They did not stand on the point usually visited by such
parties but had gone to a point about a mile to the west, where they
had a good view of a short, rough rapid, the little rapid below the
trail, while it was no place that one would care to swim in, had no
comparison with this other rapid in violence.
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