Torrence and Fellows Expedition - 1901

"When about noon, we reached the mighty jaws past which there was to be no escape, a feeling of nervousness and dread came over me for the first time. Right then I made the only discouraging speech that was made during the entire trip, and I said to Torrence. 'Will, your last chance to go out is to the right. You can make it there if you wish, but if we cross the river at this point there can be no return; we must go on.”

- Abraham Lincoln Fellows, writing about the place where the 1900 expedition abandoned their trip.

The trip in 1900 generated statewide and national interest in the tunnel, so Torrence Fellows was directed by leaders in Washington, D.C. to continue surveying. Unlike the trip in 1900, this trip was conducted in mid-August to take advantage of summer heat and lower river levels. In addition, they packed lightly. Giving up the idea of boats, they brought an inflatable rubber air mattress for floating and rubber bags to hold cameras instruments, rope and other equipment.

1901 Expedition

On August 12, 1901, they rode the train to Cimarron to begin the trip. They made their way downstream rapidly, but it was difficult to navigate rocky shorelines. Snowmelt still fed into the river and some sections required swimming.

"One remarkable point which we passed I called the Giant Stairway. The walls looked almost as if cut into enormous steps by some Titan of old, while statues, turrets and pinnacles adorned the rugged precipices on either side. Leaning out a little from one of the giant steps was a long, thin rock like needle, entirely detached from the cliff. It seemed extraordinary that it could so hold its position for centuries, as it had apparently done."

- Abraham Lincoln Fellows

Accounts of the 1901 expedition differ and may have been distorted, condensed, or romanticized. The summary below draws from texts of lantern slide shows developed by both Fellows and Torrence for audiences years later.

After two nights in the canyon, they faced the Narrows. They made their way along the north side of the river and then swam across to a gravel bar just above the Narrows and below the difficult falls. From the gravel bar, later called “Foster's Slide,” they could see only partially through the Narrows as the cliff face bends around to the left. They could see, however, the popping and bubbling foam at the top of Whirlpool Rapid just beyond the walls of the Narrows.

"At the 'Narrows' the fun began. The canyon is full of great boulders, which form bridges across the stream. Over these we must scramble, one getting on top and pulling the other up. These rocks were slick as grease, and hard to climb. We spent a day in going a quarter of a mile."

- William W. Torrence

Both made it through and safely avoided the rapid. Wilbur Dillon, an assistant hired for their trip, had come down a steep draw nearby. He prepared a fire and food, which Fellows and Torrence ate before continuing downstream.

They continued yet another day, scrambling up talus slopes and slipping on smoothly polished boulders. Fellows was nearly impaled on a sharp piece of driftwood wedged between rocks as he was swimming through a pool. They traveled downstream constantly in and out of the chilling water:

"For ages masses of black rock had been falling from above, and in this narrow part had got wedged between the walls of the canyon, forming a tunnel through which the river rushed in a winding course at terrific speed. Mass after mass had fallen until above the tunnel rose a great volume of rock. The most likely thing was that [we] would be sucked down into the maelstrom or dashed to pieces against the rocky walls."

- William W. Torrence

They were both successful in making in through the swift pools and rapids. They traversed the canyon by the Painted Wall, continued downstream, and met up with Dillon again at the mouth of Red Rock Canyon.

Fellows and his team of surveyors and engineers poured over the canyon for two more years, and their results eventually led to the start of tunnel construction in 1905.