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JOHN VERNON is the author of eleven books, including the book of poems Ann, the memoir A Book of Reasons, and the novels La Salle, Lindbergh's Son, Peter Doyle, All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar, The Last Canyon, and the forthcoming Lucky Billy. His work has appeared in Harper's, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many other magazines, journals, and newspapers. Two of his books have been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and he has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts grants. Professor Vernon is the 21st faculty member at Binghamton University to be named a Distinguished Professor; he teaches in the Spring semester each year.

Publisher's Synopsis of The Last Canyon
The Last Canyon brings to life one of the most treacherous river expeditions ever undertaken. In 1869 a one-armed Civil War hero named John Wesley Powell launched four boats on the Green River in Wyoming Territory, undertaking what would be the last major voyage of discovery in American history, through its only remaining terra incognita: the remote and barren course of the Colorado River.

At the outset of his journey, Powell believed the inaccessible canyons of the Colorado were uninhabited. He was wrong. What Powell called "the great unknown" was in fact well known by an obscure band of Paiute Indians who had lived on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for centuries. In John Vernon's hands, this gripping chapter of history is in fact two stories: that of Powell and his crew, and that of a lively band of Paiute. Vernon deftly leads us into perilous geographical and emotional territory toward an inevitable encounter between the two groups. Ninety-nine days and one thousand miles after the trip began, Powell emerged from the Grand Canyon with two boats, not four, and five men out of the original nine.

Powell's adventure is a story of triumph, hardship, bravery, and ultimate tragedy. The Great Canyon traces simultaneously a voyage of discovery and a chronicle of loss, an exploration of both unknown land and the unplumbed human heart.

LINK: Houghton Mifflin site for The Last Canyon

An excerpt from The Last Canyon,
copyright 2001 by John Vernon; published by Houghton Mifflin:

They rounded a bend and Wes said to no one, "Look at that!" Bill turned around. Halfway up the red wall on their right a spring burst through the vertical rock and shot out and gushed down the cliff--white water pouring over mauve marble. Below, in its path, green vegetation cascaded toward the river, fanning into thickets. Water-cress in lush beds, maidenhair ferns, monkey-flower, poison ivy.

A half mile downstream the river made another turn and on its outer bend a cave had been scooped out of the limestone by

high water. Here they stopped and climbed a hill of sand into the cave, tucked underneath a huge overhang of rock. The cave was just a wink in the cliff's enormous brow yet inside it was forty feet high and several hundred feet deep, pinching back
to a five foot ceiling in the rear. Its floor was pure sand. Looking out from its shadow they watched, across the river, enormous rock walls of red, blue, and yellow shift in and out of sunlight. The sun even leaked alongthe cave's upper mouth painting its lip red.

Here, Hawkins cooked a meager dinner and they sat in the sand behind the shadow line, feeling radiated heat five feet away.

They pushed off again. The canyon walls rose. On the right bank four mergansers flew upstream toward the boats low along the cliffs a few feet above the water. Ten minutes later they were flying downstream along the opposite bank.

A canyon wren practiced its descending fluting scale.

High on the wall a raven flew south, her shadow rising and falling across polished stone. Two ravens equally black, shadow and bird, united in the niche where she slowed up and landed. Below this niche where seams of limestone met, one blue-red, one brown, the yellowish profile of a boat appeared--curved bottom, flat top. This, in cross-section, was an ancient riverbed. The exposed earth here spilled unexpected secrets, and the
rattleboned men were going back in time, sliding deep into the past. Wes felt it more than knew it--sensed all of them devolving. They'd lost weight, their clothes hung like rags, some had no shoes, their nerves had been frayed, the leaky boats were lighter and felt ready to collapse at the
flick of a wave into piles of clattering wood. And every foot forward stripped off more human padding.

They floated nearly motionless underneath the sun.

The clouds rolled in and it rained that afternoon. Rills and streams ran down the canyon walls and scrolls of mud curled over the rims. In the gloom of side canyons hung curtains of rain. Mud and sand polished walls, the rain washed them off, the sun exploding from clouds dried them to a luster. Beneath the boats the river grew red and rose a few feet and more rapids began and they had to portage. Then the canyon widened and the river calmed down. Broken ridges led to cliffs terraced on their brows thence to great volumes of rock stacked against peaks and rising through fractured planes and shadows, with glimpses in the distance of purple and gray timbered
slopes, the highest they'd seen since leaving Wyoming.

Deeper and deeper they went into the earth--Wes hadn't thought it possible.For the last four days he'd been watching for the Paria River on their right. Now his mind shifted, revising the landscape. They were past the Paria, inside a new canyon. Back where this canyon so modestly began what he'd called Ute Creek must have been the Paria. He'd have to tell Ora. By his reckoning, they'd already they'd traveled a good fifty miles through Marble Canyon. If that puny stream was in fact the Paria they were now on the verge of the last canyon, the greatest of all: the two hundred plus miles of nameless oblivion Lieutenant Ives had tried to travel up in 1857. He didn't get very far. Instead, he and his party crossed overland to the Little Colorado River, circumventing the Great Canyon, then tried unsuccessfully to reach the spot ahead--it had to be close--where the Little Colorado met the Colorado.

In camp that night, to Ora's irritation, Wes argued these corrections.

"You mean that wasn't Ute Creek back there?" Ora asked.

"Couldn't have been."

"Then where on earth was the Crossing of the Fathers?"

"Back where we thought so the first time. Where we found the carved steps."

"Where I thought so. You thought it wasn't."

"I couldn't be certain."

"Does this mean we're lost?"

"Don't be foolish, Ora. We're on the Colorado River. We know where it comes out."

"I'll be running out of paper with all these corrections."

"No need to redraw them. You can make final copies when the trip's over."

"That's not the way I do things. I like to get it right the first time. It saves a lot of trouble and headache later on."

"Well, my friend, that's the wrong attitude. Mapmaking is an imperfect business. A map is never finished."

"Mine are."

"I doubt it. How far do you make it we've come through this canyon?"

"Sixty-five miles."

"That far?"

"That far."

"I make it less than that. We should meet the Colorado Chiquito sometime tomorrow if I'm right."

"If you're right."

Wes heard chants in the earth that night. He knew what they were: a trick of the mind and of the sounds of wind and water persisting in the canyon. Still, they were chants, not unlike plain song. They were voices in his ear rising from the depths, rising and falling, keeping him awake.

The next day, as usual, a broad band of sunlight struck the tops of the walls across the river to the west. Directly overhead the sky above the eastern rim was imminent with light. The air below the rim, over-exposed, seemed to volatize, then the sun erupted and it was already hot. They ate in silence and packed and started off and ran a whole string of rapids on slackened boats whose frames had been knocked out of true repeatedly. In the middle of the day a foul smelling stream brown as a rotten orangeentered from the left: the Little Colorado.

Part Nine, section 2, pages 238-241