Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

I've stood in the rim of this canyon a hundred times before.

Every time, I'm inspired by this massive landscape.

Sweeping vistas, the unfathomable scale.

The light play that renders every scene unique for eternity.

But that's not why I come back.

From here, you miss its true essence.

There's only a hint of what's hidden below the shadows,

out of view.

It's what I can't see that brings me back.

It's only from deep inside these shadows

that you discover a texture, a complexity, even a rhythm.

Hundreds of canyons within canyons,

like the airways in a lung,

breathing and diffusing life into an unseen world.

Unexplored places so deep, so remote,

that no human has ever seen them before.

This is my obsession: to find the last of the Great Unknown.

That's cold.

When people look at Grand Canyon,

I think there's this notion that it's all about

these giant landscape views,

but that's not what gets me excited about Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon to me is about thousands

of microenvironments hidden so deep in wilderness so remote

that you'll never see another human.

I'm fascinated by the fact that 142 years

after John Wesley Powell came through Grand Canyon,

you can still find places where no human's ever been.

When John Wesley Powell came through Grand Canyon in 1869,

he called it the Great Unknown.

But really, the Great Unknown wasn't the river,

which Powell was navigating and exploring.

The Great Unknown is what's between the rim and the river.

It wasn't until Harvey Butchart came here as a canyon explorer

in the 1940s that the Great Unknown

was starting to be explored.

And Harvey Butchart was someone who was extremely interested

in exploring landscapes.

This huge expanse, this massive, convoluted canyon,

really hadn't been explored in modern times,

and what was known about it was forgotten.

The native peoples, the Indians,

had been moved on to reservations, they were gone.

The prospectors and miners were gone,

so all that information was gone with them.

And for Harvey, it was wide open.

It was a fantastic time to explore Grand Canyon,

to get in to the places that no one knew about.

And so, Harvey did just that.

He was really, really motivated to get into Grand Canyon

and check out places that, as far as anyone knew,

no one had been there.

He eventually got into climbing buttes and stuff,

but he left the slot canyons alone.

Those were too risky, too dangerous,

needed way too much gear,

and took way too much effort to try to do.

And even if he got down one of these things, it's like,

"Where do you go from there?"

If you couldn't cross the river, or go downstream,

or get back up,

you were gonna be trapped.

And that'd be a tough place to die.

Harvey knew it.

There was no safety net,

so he avoided them like the plague.

Following in Harvey's footsteps was a man named George Steck.

And George, like Harvey, was somebody

who was very bright, a brilliant man,

and very passionate about Grand Canyon.

George, unlike Harvey Butchart, wanted to do more

lengthwise traverses below the rim,

and he wanted to do them in loops.

Another big goal that George had was to walk the entire length

of Grand Canyon below the rim.

A huge feat, only had been done at that point

by a couple of people.

And this particular trip, he got to the point which really was

at the crux of the hike.

It was a very deep and steep and unclimbable canyon

called the 150 Mile, and it was impossible to get out

without some technical gear and climbing experience,

and so that's where George relied on

his brother's climbing experience, Allen.

He learned his technique, his craft in Yosemite Valley,

climbing the big walls in Yosemite.

And so it was a perfect combination of George's ability

to get through the canyon lengthwise

and Allen's ability to get through slots

that started the whole thing.

S.O.B. Canyon was just the one little piece of the puzzle

that we had to get up.

We not only had to get up to avoid being swept away

by a flash flood, we had to get up to get to our cache,

where all our food was

because we were at the end of the cache period,

which meant we were out of food, and that little bucket of food

up there was important for us to get there.

Otherwise, we'd be lost.

It'd be the end of us.

You know, when you look at that area

where the chalkstone is, it's all just worn so smooth,

and there's not much to hang on to.

I was able to climb that chalkstone.

Don't ask me how I climbed it.

But I did, and in my notes I say I slithered up a pocket.

Of course, all this time, it's drizzling.

It drizzled even when we started the day.

But now, it's turning into a slight rain.

Of course, you know damn well what a flash flood's like,

and you realize it could happen right there,

so as we were struggling up, soaking wet,

getting colder and colder as we got higher,

our fingers starting to cramp up,

beauty was the last bloody thing that we were focusing on.

We wanted to get the hell out of the canyon alive.

That was the most important thing.

Beauty will come later, somewhere else.

And so, we finally got to the climb out point.

My god, we were happy for that.

What is it, about 60 feet or 70 feet?

You just climb up the face.

We were just excited to get out,

there was no doubt about it,

and we worked as hard as we could, as fast as we could.

As the sun went down, all we heard was falling water,

and then suddenly there was quite a roar,

suddenly a bunch of water appeared,

falling, cascading water.

And we had visions of being just sort of swept off

into the void with the water getting up

to our chest and that would be the end of us.

We just shook our heads, thinking,

"What would've happened if we'd been lower down in them?"

You know, I think the Steck brothers,

when they first ascended S.O.B. Canyon,

had no idea how important that route would become.

Thirty years later,

S.O.B. Canyon is the most significant

canyoneering route in all of Grand Canyon,

and it leads to some of the finest slots

you can find anywhere in the park.

But canyoneering is a team sport and to dig even deeper

into these areas, I needed a competent canyoneering partner

as excited about Grand Canyon exploration as I am.

And nobody is better than Todd Martin.

Rich has very strong organizational skills,

almost bordering on a personality disorder.

He loves the puzzle, the route finding,

and the logistics.

He spent literally hundreds of hours pouring over maps

by Butchart and Steck to figure out these routes.

Harvey's maps are like the sacred scrolls

for Grand Canyon hikers.

He seemingly went everywhere.

But when you look closely at those maps,

you'll notice he walked around all the slots.

Todd and I were able to follow Harvey's routes

right to the entrances of those secret places,

and all we had to do is open the door.

Once inside, we were blown away.

The majestic marble hallway

and all the dark, foreboding chambers in upper Deer Creek.

The hypothermia-inducing pools in Panameta.

The 400-foot waterfall and garden.

But perhaps the best of all is Climax.

The long, sinuous limestone corridors, the huge cathedrals,

and then there's the Corkscrew room.

Probably the most unique feature in all of Grand Canyon.

After descending 130 slots in Grand Canyon,

we found some incredible stuff.

But, you know, the easy slots have been done.

Hell, even the hard slots have been done.

All that's left are these enormously difficult slots.

And if I think back over the last four years,

the one slot that has captured my attention more than any other

is the slot we call Obsession.

It has the potential to be the very best slot

we've ever found.

This is probably one of the most remote,

most difficult expeditions we've ever put together.

When you look at the satellite photos,

the slot has outstanding characteristics.

The problem with this slot has been that it's

just so hard to get to, and so hard to get out of.

This is a different kind of canyoneering

than people are used to.

This is expedition-style canyoneering.

Pack weights get pretty heavy.

Pushing 50 pounds is not unusual at all.

We've got pack rafts, wet suits, canyoneering gear,

and 650 feet of rope,

not to mention all of our backpacking gear.

Sometimes I think hiking in Grand Canyon

is just sheer physical punishment.

The route through the Kaibab Limestone

was just a steep chute.

There's no trail on this route.

You're fortunate if you can find

a semblance of a trail created by a bighorn sheep.

That's about the best you're gonna do out here.

Sometimes you're walking on dirt clumps that are stuck

to the side of the wall and you can see that they're

only about this thick, and you wonder,

well, if I step on that, is it going to hold my weight,

or is it just going to collapse off

and drop 400 feet?

The nasty Coconino Traverse ends with the talus slope,

down to the esplanade,

and some of the easiest hiking of the trip.

It rolls along in this wide-open landscape

and all of a sudden just breaks over a cliff

and reveals a super narrow slot below.

It's really exciting as hell to actually be here looking

at the head of this lot from a distance

of less than half a mile.

It's the culmination of a lot of work.

On an exploration like this, every move has a consequence.

Over days, and miles, and thousands of vertical feet,

these consequences pile on top of each other,

like the canyon's geological layers.

The most terrifying consequence of all

is not having enough rope.

If you underestimate the scale of Grand Canyon,

you're trapped.

Once you pull your ropes at the first rappel,

there's no going back.

The only option is to get to the river.

Hm.

Put my wetsuit on for that.

You're testing this pothole first, not me.

You just have to be sure to weight it down.

Weight it down.

There's just something stunningly beautiful

about getting into a limestone slot canyon

and rappelling through that canyon

and looking at the textures on the walls,

looking at the canyon's twists and turns,

looking at what erosional forces have done over time

to carve this crack in the Earth, and being challenged

by all the problems that come about

when you're descending a technical slot.

The pools that you've got to swim, the anchors

that you've got to construct, all of the problem solving

to actually get out on the other side alive.

-Can you see it, Bill? -I can't tell from here.

I'm not gonna be able to see it till right until it touches.

And suddenly, the bottom drops out.

Heads up! Rocks!

75 feet. 70 feet.

Okay.

When we got to the Temple Butte,

all of the sudden, it starts to make this dive.

There's a chute, there's a rappel,

and then another rappel.

When I saw that, I was like, "Oh, man,

we are not far from the river!

And we still have a long way to go."

We had 800 feet to go at that point,

and I was really sitting there racking my brain

about whether the maps were right

and whether we had enough gear to get out of that canyon.

About a 300-foot rappel that is mostly overhanging.

You can see the river down there.

There's still one more rappel to go,

and it's getting late in the day.

How are you feeling?

I'm feeling great,

except butterflies in the stomach sometimes.

Something this big.

There was, I think, an audible sense of relief

when we heard the rope bag

hit all the way down at the bottom of the drop.

At least at that point we had the confidence

that we were going to be okay.

This is pretty much free-hanging.

Without a doubt, that's the scariest part

of an expedition like this.

You can look at the satellite images, the topos all you want,

but until you see the big drop for real,

you have no idea if you'll make it.

Oh, wow. That was epic.

Perfect.

I think that's probably all I need.

Damn, that looks--

Bomber.

Really?

Rope!

We rappel out of a no-name canyon in the middle

of Mohave gorge, and we have no way home.

All we have is a small patch of sand and cliff walls.

The only way we're getting out of here

is floating out of here in these boats.

A century and a half after Powell first explored

this river, the canyon still reveals her secrets,

one layer at a time.

Solving one mystery only inspires us

to search out a dozen more.

I guess part of me hopes that there is no last

of the Great Unknown.

As we drift away, another exploration is behind us,

but the obsession still remains.