The Changing Rapids of Grand Canyon—
Soap Creek Rapid

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times for the Kolb brothers on November 8, 1911. Emery and Ellsworth were having the time of their lives, retracing the route of the Powell expedition, matching Powell expedition photos, making movies, and living the good life on the river. They ran the rapids in the upper basin, cruised through Glen Canyon, and had little trouble with Badger. Then they encountered Soap Creek Rapid, their biggest challenge to that point on their trip.
You see, Soap Creek Rapid had a real nasty reputation. A raft carrying ten prospectors wrecked here in 1872 (Dellenbaugh, 1907). Powell did not even consider running the rapid. Frank Mason Brown, president of the Denver Colorado Canyon and Pacific Railroad and leader of the Brown-Stanton expedition, drowned just downstream of Soap Creek in July 1889. Never mind that the drowning occurred near the riffle at Salt Water Wash, Soap Creek got the rap. In 1896, Soap Creek was the only rapid in Grand Canyon that George Flavell lined after vividly describing its hazards in his journal. George Wharton James perpetuated the reputation in his own inimitable way, referring to the “dreaded Soap Creek Rapids” (James, 1900). Never mind that his guide in 1897, Nathaniel Galloway, had rowed James downstream to Badger Creek Rapid and pretended that it was Soap Creek (surely Nat knew the rapids better than that).
Inflated reputation or not, Soap Creek garnered the Kolbs’ attention. They noted its sinuous array of boulders, “violent current,” and “twelve-foot waves” playing “leap-frog” over its initial “eight-foot fall” (Kolb, 1914). They concluded that it wasn’t as bad as some of the rapids they had run in Cataract Canyon, but there were complications; they would run it one boat at a time, relying on the luck that had been with them since Green River, Wyoming. While Ellsworth entered the rapid in the Defiance, Emery filmed the historic first attempt. Ellsworth missed the first rock in mid-channel, but then Lady Luck took a holiday. He pulled with full strength, but his stern gently touched another rock just downstream. He hoped that the boat would swivel and continue downstream bow first, but instead he was thrown out, clinging onto the gunwale of a boat that was briefly pinned. Then the boat pivoted and turned upright, and Ellsworth climbed back into the cockpit and landed it in the middle of the rapid. He hiked back upstream to try it again.
The second time, in the Edith, he missed his entry and was carried over the pourover dead center in the rapid. The Edith almost stood vertically in the second wave, then flipped in the cacophony of turbulence. After crawling from beneath the boat, Ellsworth scrambled on top but was promptly swept off by a large wave. He kept his grip and stayed with the boat, and Emery rowed the Defiance to his rescue. They were swept downstream, finally pulling to shore over a mile below the rapid. By the end of the rescue, Ellsworth found that “somehow I had lost all desire to successfully navigate the Soap Creek Rapid.” In 1923, recalling the events of that day in 1911, Emery Kolb insisted that the U.S. Geological Survey expedition portage Soap Creek. The ten trip members took an entire day to move their five boats and one and a half tons of equipment, and Soap Creek kept its status as the most fearsome rapid in Grand Canyon.

Four years later, Clyde Eddy launched the first gonzo river trip, replete with a dog and a bear cub. Eddy had read Dellenbaugh’s account, and he had no intention of running Soap Creek either, but the river god had other plans for Clyde. Upon reaching Badger, and thinking it was Soap Creek, Parley Galloway (Nat’s son) was eager to run the rapid, but Eddy ordered the crew to line it instead. Rowing through a rainstorm and an upstream wind, the crew boated the three miles to Soap Creek. Not knowing they stood on the brink of “the dreaded rapid,” Parley read the water and decided to run it. As Eddy gushed in his account, “I permitted myself to enjoy the thrill of the wild and dangerous ride” (Eddy, 1929). It was not until five months later, on a second trip through Marble Canyon, that Eddy realized he had been lost; Parley Galloway was the first person to successfully run Soap Creek Rapid.
But reputations die hard. The “Dusty Dozen,” otherwise known to history as the Frazier-Hatch expedition, saw the rapid at 3,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) and portaged. The Carnegie-Cal Tech expedition of 1937 also lined. Shortly thereafter, Buzz Holmstrom, on his historic solo trip, had heard enough about Soap Creek that he had promised himself he would portage. Expediency overruled caution, however, and he ran it, writing in his journal, “At Badger my knees got very weak—but they were like steel rods compared to the way they were here—if that channel wasn’t entered just right with crosswise momentum it does not take a blueprint to tell one what would happen.” (Dimock 2001) Then, abruptly, no one was bothered by Soap Creek Rapid again. Not Norm Nevills, who in 1938 seemed to prefer hiking to boating; not Holmstrom on his repeat trip in 1938; and not Don Harris and Bert Loper, who ran all the rapids with glee in 1939. Something had changed.
We learned of the long ago changes in Soap Creek Rapid well before we had carefully read the history. Comparing old and new photographs revealed changes made subtle by the large annual floods that used to roar down the Colorado River. When Ellsworth Kolb ran the rapid, he faced a steep initial drop through exposed rocks into a series of holes. These holes were either filled in with smaller rocks thrown into the rapid during a debris flow in the late 1930s, or deposition a little farther downstream in the rapid backed the flow up sufficiently to stifle the violent hydraulics. The net change to the rapid is that it is easier to run now; the holes turned into the waves that make Soap Creek Rapid like a little rollercoaster ride.
More often than not, debris flows make Grand Canyon rapids easier to navigate. The 1966 event at Crystal Creek created a hellacious hazard that gave debris flows a nasty reputation for bad changes in the river corridor. However, as we have learned at Lava Falls (in 1995), Granite (1984), Waltenberg, and Soap Creek rapids, some debris flows raise the depth of water over dangerous rocks or create runs that offer alternative routes. By narrowing wide rapids, or inserting a boulder or two in strategic places, debris flows can improve the navigational safety of some rapids. Next time you enter Hance Rapid, eyes blinded by the afternoon sun, and you wonder where that Whale Rock is down there, look over at Red Canyon and say your little prayer to the river god. It’s gonna happen some day.
Bob Webb and
Diane Boyer