Pella Rook and Eren Tal stood on the high timber check overhead frame above the Third Gate intake throat. She looked down into a churning cooking pot of yellow-brown mud, peat foam, and mountain hemlock that crashed against the trash-rack with bone-shaking violence.
The roar was so loud that conversation was impossible without leaning close to another person’s ear and shouting at the top of one’s lungs. The spray rose fifteen feet into the air, freezing as it fell, coating the timber handrails in jagged crusts of river ice that felt like broken glass under Pella’s leather mittens. The wind tore through the gorge in violent, freezing gusts that whipped the spray directly into their eyes. That forced them to squint against the stinging stone grit.
Beneath their boots, the eight-inch ash beams of the overhead frame trembled with a nonstop, sickening back-and-forth swing. Twenty-two cycles a second, the natural ringing hum of forty thousand tons of river water being jammed through a twelve-foot stonework throat. The trash-rack itself consisted of twenty-four heavy bronze I-beams, anchored deeply into the solid mountain stone doorstep with lead-poured spreading bolts. These upright bars were designed to catch drift timber before it could reach the cast-iron water gate gates downstream. But the volume of floating debris coming down the canyon was never seen before.
