IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK

OUTSIDE: Rat on each other: Who fought on the river? Who was the crybaby?

DAVIS: It's embarrassing to say, but everything went remarkably smoothly. On river expeditions, there's generally a point when things begin to unravel. But in this case, it was almost effortless.

MACGillivray: There was that time Jack Tankard jumped into the fire.

OUTSIDE: !?!?!

MACGILLIVRAY: He was one of our trusted cameramen and that crazy guy everyone falls in love with. He'd write music and perform it at the drop of a hat—and he's unique, let's say. So, yeah, one night he fell into the campfire. It was out, but the coals were still warm. He didn't really feel much pain. He'd, uh, had a few drinks.

DAVIS: In retrospect, this trip was quite a gamble. You take Bobby and his daughter Kick, myself and my daughter Tara, and put us all together, and none of us knew each other. If for some reason there had been a personality clash, it would have been impossible to hide. But Tara and Kick are now bosom buddies, and Bobby and I found out that it was almost a miracle that our lives haven't intersected before.

KENNEDY: I had owned a whitewater company that did first descents all over Latin America, and I'd lived in Indian villages. When Wade and I started talking, we figured out that we had been in the same river valley in Colombia at the same time. We'd probably been the only two white people there at the time.

DAVIS: On this trip, part of the joy was the challenge of dealing with all the equipment. Carrying a 350-pound camera to the top of a 1,000-foot wall was certainly a bonding experience.

MACGILLIVRAY: That was remarkable. About eight people, including Wade and Bobby, lugged that thing for an hour and a half up switchbacks—with all the accessories, all the batteries, all the magazines of film. We strapped it to the cliff and left it there overnight, then went back up for another shot the next morning.

OUTSIDE: Wade, you've descended dozens of rivers, but this was your first run down the Colorado. How does it compare?

DAVIS: It's so unrelenting—one cataract after another. My highlight was probably Lava Falls, which I'd been hearing about forever. When I floated the idea that I'd like to take a crack at rowing Lava, Greg lit up and said, "That's cool—we can film it!" But I had no idea what he had in mind. I woke up the next morning and they were rigging this Rube Goldberg contraption for mounting the Imax 3-D camera right behind my head. There was another great moment when we were all at a spot called Redwall Cavern and suddenly this storm gathered. You study the geology of the canyon and you read Thoreau writing about the gentle movement of wind upon rock, and then you suddenly see a flash flood for the first time and you see that this is not about anything gentle.

KENNEDY: There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and it was pouring rain. Waterfalls started bursting off the sides of the canyon, but they were brown.

DAVIS: Brown and kicking off stones with these explosions. It was really wild.