And the boatmen, they look even worse than the boats. Seven little wooden boats and seven furtive, grinning boatmen with fourteen hairy, crooked legs. They look like overgrown gnomes. I feel like Snow White, stumbling into the wrong fairy tale. A Disneyfied nightmare. Time to back out of this deal. I knew there was something queer about the whole setup, this supposedly free ride on the new Grand Canyon subway. Be wiser to hike it, maybe, stepping from boat to boat all the way to Lake Mead, our destination, 277 miles downstream.

I’m looking for a way to creep off unnoticed when my escape is interdicted by the approach of two of my twenty or so fellow passengers. Some fellows. One is a dark brown exotic wench in a tiger-skin bikini; she has the eyes and hair of Salome. The other is a tall slim trim sloop of a girl with flaxen hair, and elegant sateen thighs emerging from the skimpiest pair of Levi’s cutoffs I have ever seen. I pause. I hesitate. I reconsider.

Following my bowsprit back to the beach, I join the crowd around Wally Rist, the head boatman, who is demonstrating—on the exotic Salome—the proper way to fasten a life jacket.

Minutes later, all too soon, without adequate spiritual preparation, we are launched forth on the mad and complex waters of the frigid river. John Blaustein, photographer and boatman, has cajoled me into his dory, making certain I do not escape at the last moment.

We pass through the Paria Riffle without upset, much to everyone’s relief, as John strains at the oars. Nine years earlier, when I was ranger here, I took my girl friends for rides down these riffles, whacking the waves with a Park Service motorboat. How many propellers did I screw up that summer, pivoting off rocks and driving blindly into unobserved gravel bars? Three or four. (Too much beer, too little bikini.)

A nice little runoff comes in from the Paria River, staining the Colorado a healthy hue of brown. Anything, any color—Day-Glo purple, chartreuse, shocking pink—is better than the unnatural translucent green, like Gatorade, of our river as it comes strained through the penstocks of that Glen Canyon Dam.

We pass the little beach where, years before, I used to lie on the sand and watch my favorite birds: turkey vultures, shrikes, ruby-throated hummingbirds, rosy-bottomed skinnydippers. Above, on a windswept sunbaked stony bench under the mighty Vermilion Cliffs, is the new Park Service all-metal campground, packed with Winnebagos, house trailers, pickup-campers, trail bikes, jeeps, motorboats and the other paraphernalia necessary to a holiday in the wilds. Four miles downriver from Lee’s Ferry we glide beneath the Navajo Bridge, 467 feet above, which spans the opening to Marble Gorge. As the canyon walls rise on either side of us, a new rock formation appears: the Coconino sandstone.

This is Marble Gorge, entrance to the Grand Canyon. Entering here over a century ago, Major John Wesley Powell wrote as follows in his diary: