Crystal Rapid

Believing the stream to be Shinumo Creek, Robert Stanton stopped at Crystal Creek on February 8, 1890, to climb Point Sublime. Here a disgruntled crewman elected to abandon the expedition. After an arduous winter trek he arrived "nearer dead than alive" at a line shack on Buckskin Mountain.
Before 1966, the mild rapid at Crystal appeared "much like Boucher, long, wide and slow at first, steep and clear at the last." The rapid is scarcely mentioned in any early river accounts, although the Carnegie Institute expedition portaged the upper section in November 1937. An unusually intense storm began on December 7, 1966 and dumped fourteen inches of rain in a thirty-six hour period along the North Rim. The resulting flood in Crystal's upper drainages obliterated Pueblo sites that had escaped floods for the previous 900 years. Crystal Creek's rampaging water and mud flows pushed the debris fan 200 feet farther into the Colorado, creating an impressive, ulcer-generating spectacle called Crystal Rapid.
--Kim Crumbo
(from A River Runners Guide to the History of the Grand Canyon)