So well did they now get on, running rapids and making fine time, that they began to look forward with great hope to a speedy termination of the canyon.  When therefore the river took an unexpected turn towards the south and the lower formations once more began to appear, till the black granite, dreaded and feared, closed again threateningly about them, they were considerably disheartened.  At the very beginning they were compelled to make a portage.  Then they reached a place which appeared worse than anything they had yet seen.  This was partly due to the condition of the men and it was partly a fact.  They could discover no way to portage or to let down, and Powell believed running it meant certain destruction.  They climbed up and along on the granite for a mile or two, but there appeared no hope for success.  In trying to secure an advantageous position from which to view the fall Powell worked himself into a position where he could neither advance nor retreat.  His situation was most precarious.  The men were obliged to bring oars from the boats four hundred feet below, to brace into the rocks in order to get him safely back.  The absence of his right arm made climbing sometimes very difficult for him.  This was on the side opposite their first landing.  Descending, they recrossed the river and spent the whole afternoon trying to decide on a plan.  At last Powell reached a decision.  It was to lower the boats over the first portion, a fall of eighteen or twenty feet, then hug the right cliff to a point just above the second drop, where they could enter a little chute, and having passed this point they were to pull directly across the stream to avoid a dangerous rock below.  He told the men his intention of running the rapid the next morning, and they all crossed the river once more to a landing where it was possible to camp.

New and serious trouble now developed.  The elder Howland remonstrated with Powell against proceeding farther by the river and advised the abandonment of the enterprise altogether.  At any rate, he and his brother and William Dunn would not go on in the boats.  Powell sat up that night plotting out his course and concluded from it that the mouth of the Virgen could not be more than forty-five miles away in a straight line.  Calculating eighty or ninety miles by the river, and allowing for the open country he knew existed below the end of the Grand Canyon, he concluded that they must soon reach the mouth and be able to find the Mormon settlements about twenty miles up the Virgen River.  Then he awoke Howland and explained the situation, and they talked it over.  The substance of this talk is not stated, but Howland went to sleep again while Powell paced the sand till dawn, pondering on the best course to take.  The immediate danger of the rapid he thought could be overcome with safety, but what was below?  To climb out here, even were it possible, was to reach the edge of a desert with the nearest Mormon town