On Dick McCallum:
“McCallum believed in all freeze-dried food, and did for years, and years, and years. You’d get lean and mean at the end of the summer from eatin’ that stuff. Richmoor dehydrated food, and he had this one that he loved—he always packed a couple of the chili-macs. I think that was his signature meal. But, God, these dried banana chips! We wouldn’t take any booze. And he started sending a few soda pops, and he loved grape soda pop in steel cans.
We’d always jettison the damned grape soda the first night out, to lighten the boats, and everybody hated it. Those cans sank like a rock. At night, one of the traditions was to go ahead and drop all that off in the river. There’s probably five or six tons of that stuff up at Boulder Narrows, a popular camp for our first night, on the left. Tons of ’em in there. McCallum would send two fresh onions on the trip. That was the fresh food. That was the exciting night, yeah. Powdered eggs, powdered cheese, you name it, it was all powdered food.”
On McCallum’s Kitchens:
“ (add) a little water and throw the shit in. It was fast. (laughs) It was incredibly fast. It was, the pump-up little white stove and some wood. But in general, back then, we had a lot of family stuff, and Georgie kind of set a lot of things in McCallum’s mind and in just river running in general. You’re down there to see the Grand Canyon, you aren’t down here to eat. Yeah, McCallum was from the Georgie school. We had little rubber inflatable duckie ponds for tables, and stuff like that. You know, eating was just a necessity.
We never did get real tables, people would perch around and we’d cook on these rocket boxes. Lay it on these rocket boxes that we pack stuff in and made that the foot-high table, and that was it. It was brutal, but you didn’t know any better, it was fine, it was campin’.”
On Passenger’s Expectations In “Those Days”, Just Wanting To Get Out Alive…”
“No, they had a great time. We didn’t have a lot of people, even in the seventies, you didn’t have the sophistication that you do now and what you can take. Gave ’em basically tube tents, which was an oversized garbage bag to sleep in, for tents.
We went through the “blue goo” toilet stage for awhile, the chemical toilets and this and that, until they finally got the crap-in-a-box technique down.
But, it was reasonable. You know Mac’s trips didn’t cost a lot of dough, He was into giving these little scholarship deals to kids. It was much more “ma and pa,” but also just much more of kind of an adventure experience, than a catered outdoor trip, which I think most of ’em have become now anyway. I think that’s fine. I don’t think you need to go to the extremes of the Hollywood extravaganzas that happen down there now, where you wipe their butt and set up their cot and put their little Kleenex box there with them.
On Doing “Hollywood” trips:
“No, no. (that) would make me want to puke. But Fort Lee, you know, Tony Sparks said, “Look, there’s a certain amount of clientele out there that wants top dollar and wants to be catered to fully. And that’s great, but in general down there, you take good care of the people and you get ’em through. Now look, we take so much gear now, which is fine—I mean, we sleep on Paco pads. But back then too, we’d send people off on hikes you know? We’d be patching the boats or some- thin’, and we’d tell ’em where they were, and tell them to use common sense. I also think clientele was probably more exposed to—the people going down there had more experience out-of-doors, a base experience out-of- doors, than they do now.
On The Deer Creek Trail And Just Sending Them Out There:
“Those people aren’t going to fall—the people that are really afraid of heights. It’s the idiots that fall. It’s the, “Oh, you know, I’m a athlete, even though I’ve only walked on sidewalks for the last thirty years, I have no trouble.” Those are the people that go down. It’s not the wall huggers.
But I think there’s also in our litigious society, if anybody stubs their toe they want a full assessment. I mean even on this big wigs’ trip that I just went on, these guys that are supposed to be making all the decisions of the Grand Canyon, this one guy comes up to me and you see it all the time, it is so classic. He “boo- booed” himself. He just had a little ding somewhere. He brought it out and was concerned you know. I mean it was a very shallow abrasion. “Go wash it off, and we’ll keep an eye on it.” That’s part of the trip, leavin’ some of your hide. You take the sand out of it, you leave some hide down there.”
On Boatman Stuff:
“Basically, don’t think you can just smoke every- thing ’cause it’s your tenth trip of the year, and every- thing has gone great, you’ve got it wired and you know that water, because it will come up and slap your ass. Before a rapid (Don Neff) was great to watch. He would check everything and he’d make sure everybody...he’d get all the people involved. Not scared, there’s a difference between getting people involved and getting people scared.
I’ve run some dory trips, I’ve seen some damned dory dissertations by the leaders about boats flippin’. Dear God, the people are almost in tears and they didn’t want to get in the boats. They get on my boat, and I go, “Don’t worry about all that shit, you guys hang where you are, I’ll do the high-siding, I’m the big fat kid, and let’s go out and have fun…
…You know, you (do) need to check out some stuff, make sure the damn jackets are tight, tell ’em to help you out, tell ’em to look around the boat.”
On High Water, 1983:
“Three wild years…
The Western boat had flipped a week before… And the dam was shaking—this was just before the spillways began to disintegrate and everybody was really nervous. It was after the Tour West flip and the Georgie flip and all that. It was at 72,000 [cfs].
But there were about four trips getting ready to leave (Lees Ferry), and this ranger John Dick comes down and goes, “The river’s closed, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. You guys can’t go.” And McCallum just goes to the phone and calls up [Superintendent] Dick Marks and I was way impressed with McCallum. Looking back on it, it was a great moment for him. He calls up Dick Marks and says, “Well, you can’t stop me from going.” And Marks goes, “Sure I can, you won’t be insured.” And he goes, “You have it all wrong, pal. You’re a rider on my policy, we’re leaving.” He said, “Hey, I was down here before the dam. This river’s fine, you’ve just gotta go in the right place. You’ve gotta go in the right place when it’s low. Screw you. Bye.”
So off we go on our little high-water adventure, and you know, it was great. But it was screamin’. One of my first memories of it is, “You better not dick around leaving.” You know how usually when a rowing trip takes off, there’s somebody brushin’ their teeth, and somebody dickin’ around coiling the rope. And somebody up there talking to a passenger, and you all kind of head off. We did that once— we pulled out of there, and we dicked around, and God, everybody was gone. There were no eddies either. We were way down there before we could stop over, and everybody goes, “Wahoo! Hoo-hah!” And then after that we realized that it was like, “Gentleman, start your engines!” You’ve got all the ropes tied, all the people in there, all the jackets on, and everybody with their boats on shore, whether you were holding them yourself or somebody holding them. And you’d look around and go, “Are you ready to go?! Are you ready to go?!” Because if you didn’t leave all at the same time, you wouldn’t see anybody, until they stopped.
Hell, it was new for us. I mean, it was wild. We camped down at North, somewhere in there, because we’d gotten a late start by all the hoobaba there. The next day, we pretty much cruised down to Buck Farm.”
There was no sand in Redwall, we had lunch back there on the boats. We got into camping way up the side streams because you could float up there. And every night the helicopters would come in and give you nifty little notes like, “Be safe, camp high.” Well, that was a gimmee.
So, then we wound up going down to the Little Colorado and decided, because we were screamin’ downstream, to do a couple-day layover. Well we rowed up there a mile, up the Little Colorado River. And watched the water come up. We were at Little Colorado when it came up to its peak. We had to keep moving our kitchen and camp uphill.
The water was warm, it was coming off the top of the dam, so we went toodling on our way. We went through the gorge and got to Crystal, and everybody was there at Crystal, and the choppers. Terry Brian was the river ranger there with his walkie-talkie, and showed somebody how to use it, and rode through with Dennis Harris. Of course we all walked our people over.”
On Crystal Being Scary at 100,000:
“Well, it was scary just because you could get sucked out there. It was open enough where, if you wanted to be right up on the right hand shore, that way was huge. Trees were out in the water. But when you walked up to that [overlook], you saw the top of that wave over the trees. That wave never washed out, it just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
Oars was there, Dr. Ghiglieri with Bruce [Helin] and all that. So, we all make it through okay, and rocked down the right. We all patted ourselves on the back and collected all the people who of course walked around on the Indian ruin where everybody was havin’ lunch. And we all take off, and Ghiglieri flips in the tailwaves. Brian hauls him out of the water and the first thing he says is, “My name is Michael Ghiglieri and your brother hates my guts.” That’s a different story. That goes back to running with Ghiglieri in Turkey. So we chase his boat down and we don’t get it until Agate.
Further Downstream, 1983:
But probably one of the more interesting things is going into Granite Narrows down there, because that current would just slam you into the right. And McCallum, when he left [Lees Ferry], he goes, “Be watching Granite Narrows.” And we were goin’, “What the hell you talkin’ about?!” So, we went in to do the little porthole there, the narrowest part, and all of a sudden this current was just smashing—and it was flat water, just totally flat. It was Brian first, then myself, then Brad, and then Fritz I think was kind of the order, and then Dennis. Brian went in there and I just see him get raked into the wall, Brad and I are on
Chubascos [giant 22-foot Maravia rafts], Fritz and Dennis and Brian are in [18-foot] Rogue Rivers. So (chuckles) Brian just gets slammed into this wall, and then the current carries down along it, and so he’s just getting drug along the wall.
And I go, “Oh great, I’m gonna go in there and pancake on my brother and kill him. My mom will really hate me, because she likes him best.” So, I go in there, and I caught the rear end of his boat, just the back corner, I just mowed into it, and it shot him out of there like a rubber band, up against the wall.
But so, you’d slam in there, turn sideways and then get raked down the wall. Flat, you know, tearin’ off your whatever. Motor rigs were slammin’ into it. There was paint, for years, way up. Motor rigs would go in there, blowin’ out side tubes. So that was pretty interesting.
When we got off, it had dropped down to 80,000–85,000 [cfs]. But we got the full crest…
Yeah, those were my best running years. And that’s when we started cuttin’ the boats down a little bit, just rowin’ those Green Rivers or Rikens, just mixin’ up the gear a little bit. But Moody and I ran several trips, and Dugald [Bremner] kind of came on board, he had done some work for ARTA. He was the new guy, we didn’t really know him much. We get down to Lava, and we’re all lookin’ at Lava and it’s gonna be a right run, and we go, “Go ahead!” Now where in the hell is Bremner? “Where the hell is Dugald?!” Dugald comes over the hill dressed like ARTA, your classic, with the war paint on, and a war bonnet. We all look around and look at him. He sees us all looking at him and he looks at us, stops and pauses a minute, shakes his head (yes), and we all look at him and we all shake our heads (no), so he goes back over the ridge and takes all that happy shit off and comes over. (laughs) He’s the new kid on the block. But we were more into straight shootin’ it, I don’t know. I admire him for tryin’ it out though.”
More Boatman Type Stuff:
“And I think the river’s kind of throwing that out there, ’cause when you’re runnin’ a boat down there and you might not like to run Hance at 5,000 [cfs] but you don’t have much choice. So, why say, “Oh, this is right, this is wrong”— you go down there and you do it. Hey, the wind’s blowing. What do you do? You deal with the damn problem! You don’t go home and wait for better weather. You don’t call up the Bureau and tell ’em to shut off the wind. You deal with the damn problem and do the best you can. So I think that’s why you get a strong character of people down there. You have to have powerful personalities to stay down there a long time. I mean, powerful in yourself.
I don’t think overriding powerful, but you know, if you needed to go somewhere and get a bunch of goddang guys together, ad hoc, to survive something, that would be a great well. That’s a great barrel of monkeys to take along with you.
On Those Guys (Boatmen):
“Yeah, guys you had to go to war with. I don’t have that one all licked. I’ll cuss up and look for somebody to lash to the flogging post with the best of ’em. But I’ve worked on that down there, and just, I think having the opportunity to be down there to see that perspective, and in people, too. Being able to be color blind, being able to be across the board, being able to clean your slate when you’re looking at somebody to see them for what they are. Because you see everybody everywhere. You see ’em when they’re elated, you see them when they’re pissed off, you see ’em when they’re awestruck, you see ’em when they’re uncomfortable, you see how they’re dealing with other people.
It’s a great equalizer of mankind, everybody shits in the same box.”
