WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? The Night Three Men Launched Into the Deadliest Flood the Grand Canyon Had Ever Seen

The spring of 1983 began with too much snow.

By the time the Rocky Mountain snowpack started to melt, the largest El Niño event on record was already pushing water down the Colorado River at a rate that no one in charge of managing it had planned for. At Glen Canyon Dam, the engineers were watching their spillway tunnels destroy themselves from the inside, cavitation eating through three feet of reinforced concrete and into the sandstone bedrock of the canyon wall behind it. They were holding back twenty-seven million acre-feet of water with plywood. They were eight inches from losing control of one of the largest dams in the American West.

Fifteen miles downstream, three men dragged a wooden boat to the water's edge and launched it into the flood.

Nobody told them to go. Nobody permitted them. The National Park Service had closed the river. A ranger was stationed at the deadliest rapid in the canyon specifically to stop boats from running it. Twelve hours before the launch, a commercial passenger had died at that same rapid.

They went anyway.

Kenton Grua, Rudi Petschek, and Steve Reynolds were not reckless men. They were three of the most experienced whitewater boatmen alive, and Grua, the man at the oars of the green wooden dory called the Emerald Mile, had spent thirty years studying the Colorado River at a level of detail that no one in any official capacity had come close to matching. He had walked the entire length of the Grand Canyon alone. He had run it faster than any non-motorised crew in history. He had been waiting for a flood exactly like this one because he had calculated what a flood like this would do to the canyon's hydraulics, and what it would make possible.

What it made possible was the fastest boat ride in the history of the American West.

What it almost made possible was three deaths.

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? is the true story of two parallel emergencies that played out simultaneously in June of 1983 along the Colorado River: the engineering crisis at Glen Canyon Dam, where a team of professionals improvised their way back from the edge of catastrophe, and the unauthorized speed run of the Grand Canyon, where three men and a wooden boat covered two hundred and seventy-seven miles of the most dangerous whitewater in North America in thirty-six hours, thirty-eight minutes, and twenty-nine seconds.

It is a story about obsession and mastery, about what it means to know a wild place more deeply than the institutions charged with managing it, and about the specific, narrow kind of courage that belongs to people who have spent their lives studying exactly the kind of danger that now surrounds them.

It is also a story about a river. The Colorado runs through this book the way it runs through the canyon: continuous, indifferent, and more powerful than anything built to contain it.

For readers of Into Thin Air, The Perfect Storm, and Endurance. If you have ever stood at the edge of something enormous and wondered what it would take to go in, this book is for you.