In “Fierce Country,” following a rafting icon through Crystal rapids

Even at breakfast the energy is different on big-rapid days in the Grand Canyon. And day 12 is one of those days. The air feels keyed up after the storm, the river redder, thicker, warmer. 

Over 6 fast miles, we hit three of the biggest rapids of the trip. Granite and Hermit come quick below camp, less than a mile apart. They’re both a series of mangly wave trains, thick with the muscle of the river. Granite is steep and choked with teeming lateral waves. Hermit is just huge. Huge. Heavy enough to stop a boat and flip it end over end. Long enough that it’s hard to hold your momentum as you row through the compression. Brute force is the one thing that will get you through. 

We move through them clean, nerves jangly, breathing deep because we know Crystal is coming. While Hermit is a pulsing roller coaster you want to hit hard down the middle, Crystal is the opposite. Instead of force you need to rely on finesse as you avoid two huge, boat-flipping holes, fighting all the river’s energy as it pulls you toward them. Below them, the current splits around an island, which can make for a nasty, rocky swim. If you lose someone off the side of the boat, they can get sucked down the wrong channel and dragged over rocks. 

We clamber up to the scout point on Ego Beach. I have busted toes and bruised shins. Grit in my scalp and peeling heels. Evelyn, who is rowing the boat I’m in, points out the skinny line between a reef of rock and the edge of the hole, barely a boat wide. “You have to wait in the current till it pushes you past the rocks and then pull like hell away from the hole,” she says. I can see the tension in her jaw. Jeff is standing next to us, moving his hand in the air, tracing the line he wants to run. There is no other good option besides the sneak. 

Crystal wasn’t always like this. In 1966, a thousand-year flood ripped a ridgeline of rocks down into the river, forming a new rapid that is long and mean. It became Georgie White’s favorite rapid, but she didn’t take the sneak line we’ll be taking. She ran right through the meat of the white water in her big boat, sometimes disappearing for a while in the hole, the G-rig bucking and rolling in the water. 

Georgie was the first female Grand Canyon guide. She was one of the first and only people running the river for years, and she was the only woman guiding for decades. She’s one of my heroes, although she’s complicated and it took me a while to find her. I’m down here in the canyon to see if I can understand her better. I want to understand why I’d never heard her story until I’d been embedded in the outdoor world for years, and why it’s been so hard for me to find heroes in that world.  

We cast off into the current, and at first we seem good. We’re right on line until we grab a corner of slow current, and suddenly we’re sideways and dropping toward the hole. Evelyn pulls like hell. The boat tips precariously. Suddenly I’m looking down into the trough of the wave, near vertical. Evelyn yanks on the oars, everything stops for a slow, slow second, and then we’re spinning out of it, backward but upright. It’s a while before I remember to breathe again. 

On Tuna Creek Beach, below the rapid, we compare our runs and make celebratory tuna sandwiches. Evelyn is giggling, tension released, and as we chop veggies and fruit she tells the story of another Crystal run: one of Georgie’s. 

In 1983, a stormy winter led to high flows, and the rocks in the rapid moved, creating new hydraulics, bigger than anything river runners had seen before. In late June, after a death in the rapids, the Park Service ordered commercial trips to walk around Crystal Rapid. They told boaters launching at Lees Ferry and dropped notes by helicopter to the trips already in the canyon. The warnings were tied to a sandbag with red streamers. “Camp high, don’t run Crystal,” the note read. 

Georgie put on the river in mid-June, so she must have gotten the note, but she said the river was moving so fast that she didn’t realize how far downstream she was until she looked up mid-snack and realized the boat was right above Crystal, floating in. 

Instead of stopping to portage, she gunned through Crystal instead. Actually, reportedly she didn’t gun it. Above the rapid, she shut the motor off, hunkered down in the motor well, and aimed straight for the middle. 

Her 37-foot-long boat stood straight up before getting sucked back into the hole. It came up again, spitting out 5 passengers and assistant guide Daryl Bates before dropping back into the hole for another round where it threw off the rest of the passengers and all of the baggage. By the time the boat washed out of the hole, heading for the gravel bar below, the only person still onboard was Georgie. 

From shore it looked like a maelstrom. A group of rangers who had pulled off to scout and plan their route through Crystal watched Georgie’s boat come through. They were slack-jawed when they saw the carnage, straps popping, people flying. They had no choice but to get in their boats and chase Georgie downstream, trying to pick up people and gear in the fray. 

Bates said it felt like being whitewashed in the ocean: He thought he might never come up again. When he surfaced, he heard Georgie yelling at him to grab one of the other passengers, floating a few feet away, but the current was so strong he couldn’t. It took them 45 minutes to get the boat to a beach, collect all their passengers, and assess the damage. 

When Terry Brian caught up to Georgie, she had all her people and was bemoaning the loss of her lucky horseshoe, which was in one of the dry bags that had ripped off. When he asked her what happened, she famously said, “Well, I told them to hold on. They just don’t make passengers like they used to.” 

Adapted from Heather Hansman’s “Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild”