What a din that water sent up!  We had to yell to make ourselves heard.  The air vibrated with the impact of water against rock.  The rapid was nearly half a mile long.  There were two sections near its head staggered with great rocks, forty of them, just above or slightly submerged under the surface of the water.  Our low stage of water helped us, so that we did not have to line the boats from the ledge, eighty feet above the water, as others had done.  The rapid broke just below the lower end of the sheer rock, which extended twenty feet beyond the irregular shore.  The Edith went first, headed upstream, at a slight angle nearly touching the wall, dropping a few inches between each restraining stroke of the oars.  Bert crouched on the bow, ready to spring with the rope, as soon as Emery passed the wall and headed her in below the wall.  Jumping to the shore, he took a snub around a boulder and kept her from being dragged into the rapid.  Then they both caught the Defiance as she swung in below the rock, and half the battle was won before we tackled the rapid.

Our days were short, and we did not take the boats down until the next day; but we did carry much of the camp material and cargo halfway down over ledges a hundred feet above the river.  For a bad rapid we were very fortunate in getting past it as easily as we did.  Logs were laid over rocks, the boats were skidded over them about their own length and dropped in again.  Logs and boats were lined down in the swift, but less riotous water, to the next barrier, which was more difficult.  A ten-foot rounded boulder lay close to the shore, with smaller rocks, smooth and ice-filmed, scattered between.  Powerful currents swirled between these rocks and disappeared under two others, wedged closely together on top.  Three times the logs were snatched from our grasp as we tried to bridge them across this current, and they vanished in the foam, to shoot out end first, twenty feet below and race away on the leaping water.  A boat would be smashed to kindling-wood if once carried under there.  At last we got our logs wedged, and an hour of tugging, in which only two men could take part at the same time, landed both boats in safety below this barrier.  We shot the remainder of the rapid on water so swift that the oars were snatched from our hands if we tried to do more than keep the boats straight with the current.  That rapid was no longer the “Bold Escarpment,” but the “Last Portage” instead, and it was behind us.

The afternoon was half gone when we made ready pull away from the Last Portage.  There were other rapids, but scarcely a pause was made in our two-hour run, and we camped away from the roar of water.  The canyon was widening out a little at a time; the granite disappeared in the following day’s run, at noon.  Grass-covered slopes, with seeping mineral springs, took the place of precipitous walls; they dropped to 2500 feet in height; numerous side canyons