Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection

Rob Elliot Interview

Interview number: 53.17

[BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A]

This is the River Runners Oral History Project, it's May 9, 1996, and we're in Flagstaff. This is Lew Steiger doing the interview. We're talking to Rob Elliott.

Steiger: ...what I normally do is try and start way back, kind of at the beginning, and try to get an overview of your background, your family situation, and... kind of your life before you got into river running. That sort of puts your answers and opinions in perspective for everybody. So if we could start out with kind of a thumbnail résumé. Where'd you grow up, what was your family life like? What was it like as a kid? And end with how you got started with rivers.

Elliott: So we're goin' way back. That's fine. I was born and raised in Oakland, California, up in the Montclaire Hills. We weren't high enough in the hills to see over the top of the Piedmont out to the Golden Gate, but we could look north to the Camponelle [U.C. Berkeley campus] and we were out on a knoll. From my earliest memories, I remember being in a very expansive place, geographically, where I could always look out and up and have as much space as I wanted. That was very important to me. It was also a pretty undeveloped area, and we had a ten-acre wood of eucalyptus trees that all my little buddies and I thought of and spoke of as "the wilderness." And that's where we would go to, and where we would explore, that's where we would make forts and treehouses. And for me that's a place I would also go to to get away from home. I liked my home, but there were some things about my home that I only realized later in my life that... I actually learned and felt more comfortable out-of-doors. I felt more comfortable going to the wilderness, and that really became much more of my home than a house, where my family home was. We were given a very long tether. I remember when I was as young as eight, ten, eleven years old, that I'd get together with some of my buddies on our bicycles and we'd go up to Skyline Boulevard in Oakland and over across the top of the hills, over into Contra Costa County, and just go for hours and hours. We'd tell my mom on Saturday morning at eight o'clock. We'd pack a lunch and we'd say, "Hey, we're goin'. We'll be back at dinner." "Where you goin'?" I'd say, "We're goin' to Skyline Boulevard." And we'd go miles and miles and miles and come back late. I was allowed almost a constant trust by both my parents, my mother and my father, that I wouldn't get into trouble, that somehow I would be protected. It really taught me a lot of self-sufficiency early on. My first river trip was when I was four years old. That would have been 1948 on the Sacramento River. And I still have vague memories of it, but also reading some news articles about it too. My father and mother had a double Klepper folding kayak. We put in at Redding on the Sacramento River and went thirty-two miles downstream to Red Bluff. I sat between my mother's legs in the front, and my six-year-old sister, Joanne, sat between my father's legs in the back. And the four of us went on a little family outing, down the Sacramento River, just us. It was fascinating, it was great fun. It was like this is a neat place to be and a neat way to do things.

Steiger: How'd they get the idea to do that?

Elliott: My father moved from Michigan, Ann Arbor, to the San Francisco Bay Area when he was nineteen years old, when he enrolled in UC-Berkeley in architecture school. I don't remember the year exactly, but he was born in 1906. When he was nineteen he moved to the Bay Area. He had done some canoeing back in Michigan, just with some friends, so he was comfortable with the water. When he got to the Bay Area, he joined the Sea Scouts and they went on whaling boats, whatever, rowing out on the San Francisco Bay, when he was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old. So he always loved the water, was familiar with the water. And his life was divided kind of in thirds: the first third was technical rock-climbing with pitons and ropes and Sierra Club buddies. The middle third was ski touring where he had a lodge up in the Sierras. They'd drive five hours, and he and my mother and their buddies would go eleven miles by moonlight on a Friday night and ski all weekend, and then ski out Sunday and drive back to the Bay Area. The third phase of his life was river running. He didn't really start, in a commercial sense, into river running until he was forty- eight years old. But there was still, "How did he get to that point?" That's your question. Why did he buy a Klepper fold-boat and take his family down the Sacramento River in 1948? He got together with some friends, a guy named Bruce Grant, and a guy named Maynard Munger--Julie Munger's dad--and some other people. Oh, and Bryce Whitmore, an early river runner in California too, and they started this group, this section of the Sierra Club called the San Francisco Bay Chapter River Outings Group, or whatever they're called. And what they did is, they ordered these folding kayaks from Germany. There were three brand names I remember--Klepper, Erbacher, and Hammar --three brand name folding kayaks that were made in Germany, believe it or not, in the forties, they started making those. They ordered them out of catalogs, and they were shipped across the Atlantic and they got these boats and put them all together and started kayaking.

Steiger: And this is in the early forties?

Elliott: Well, this would be the mid-forties, after the war. This would be probably around 1946 or 1947, because I was born in 1944, right at the end of the war. And we went on this first trip in our double Klepper kayak when I was four years old, which would be 1948. So I think it was either 1947 or 1948, so I guess it's mid-forties that they ordered these boats so they could go kayaking. They ordered singles, they ordered doubles. In fact, my mother's single Hammar kayak was the first kayak I tried out when I was fifteen years old when I went on a Sierra Club trip on ... oh, up on the North Fork of the Clearwater in Northern Idaho. And I kayaked on that trip with my mom's single Hammar folding kayak. And so we could reconstruct when I was fifteen, but that would have been 1959. But let's go back to the late forties. So they just started kayaking. They kayaked for about maybe, oh, eight years or so into 1953, 1954, 1955. And then about 1955, I'm going to guess, maybe 1956, my father bought some military surplus ten-man inflatable assault rafts, and he became an Explorer Post [Boy Scout] advisor. Back then Explorer Posts had their thing, they either backpacked or they did fish or public service or climbed or whatever. And he said to his Explorer recruits, "We're going to do river running," and they said, "Terrific! Sounds great!" And so they built frames and they got oars and they put these rafts together. This would have been 1955 or 1956, when he had already done quite a bit of kayaking up to that point with Sierra Club friends in the Bay Area. (pause to adjust microphone)

Steiger: It sounds like your dad was really active in Scouting, like that was a big deal for him.

Elliott: Uh-huh, and very active in the Sierra Club, which was also a big deal.

Steiger: An Explorer Post, that's a Scouting deal, right?

Elliott: That's a Scouting program. It's kind of like for the graduates of the Boy Scouts. They would go into Explorer Scouting, so they'd be a little bit older; they'd be in their mid-teens, like fifteen, sixteen, even up to seventeen years old. And he was this Explorer Post advisor. Now the relevancy here is that they went off and did rafting, and they started rafting on the Eel River, the Klamath River in Northern California, the Rogue River in Southern Oregon, et cetera, and meanwhile he had already been boating for ten or twelve years with his Sierra Club buddies from the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club, and they were just doing one-day trips, two-day trips, sometimes three-day trips--the [?]Tuolomne, the American, the Stanislaus--and they got to the point where his Sierra Club buddies finally kind of helped him put some things together. And they said, "Well, Lou, we want to do longer trips, we want to go on the Rogue River, we want to go on the Klamath River for five days, but we can't carry all of our stuff. Can some of your Explorer Scouts bring along a raft or two and carry all our stuff?" So that's how that got married together, and that would have happened along about 1957, 1958, 1959, right in there in the late fifties that he married the two together: the Explorer Scouting with the rafts, and his kayak buddies. And so the Explorer Scouts would come along, and they'd happily go along for free and row all the kayakers' gear on the Klamath River or the Rogue River in Southern Oregon, just for fun. It was a hobby still at that point. And then very soon after that, I can't remember the exact year, but Stewart Kimball, who must be eighty-two or eighty-three years old right now, he was the chairman of the Sierra Club River Outings Program. He lived in Orinda, California. He just came down the Grand Canyon with us last May of 1995. Terrific old guy. He asked my dad to be the chairman of the River Outings Subcommittee of the Sierra Club National Outings Committee Program, which my father did. And I think my father began that in, again, about 1955 or 1956, right when the Echo Dam stuff was big time, was going on in Dinosaur National Monument. And that's when the River Outings program of the Sierra Club really started to take off, because it was the Sierra Club's idea, "We've got to get our membership out on these rivers. We've gotta get them on these rivers that we need to save. We gotta get them in Dinosaur National Monument by the hundreds, if we can, so that they can write their congressmen, so that they can write letters to the editor, so that people can learn about the need for saving these incredible places, such as Dinosaur National Monument." That was the thrust behind the Outings Program for the Sierra Club. So my father became the chairman of the River Outings Subcommittee of the Outings Program for the Sierra Club in 1955 or 1956. And he held that position for about a seven-year period through the late fifties. So he started taking the Explorer Scouts, and instead of just running kayak support for free, the Explorer Scouts were eighteen years old or whatever, and they didn't want to be Explorer Scouts anymore, they wanted to graduate. And what did they graduate into? They graduated into rowing boats for my father for Sierra Club trips such as on the Rogue River in Southern Oregon, because there were no outfitters on the Rogue River at the time, suited for running twenty or thirty people down the Rogue River. There were little drift boat outfitters at the time.

Steiger: Already.

Elliott: Yeah, already--Helfrich Brothers, et cetera. For example, I remember our very first Sierra Club outing on the Rogue River where we went along, and one of the drift boaters came along, and he was head cook and just kind of led our group down the river, because we had never run it before. But it was the Explorers that had graduated into becoming river guides at this point, for the Sierra Club Outings Program.

Steiger: I hate to digress again, but I can't stand it. This Scouting deal: I remember being a Boy Scout when I was a little kid, but it seems like my generation, it seems like I lost that about the eighth grade, and it seems like Scouting in general doesn't occupy near the position today that it seems to have done then. What was the deal?

Elliott: I think the Boy Scouting program was a much bigger deal back in the fifties and sixties than it is today. It's still a big deal today. George Bain, we both know him, he has been a Scout leader, and his son, Wesley Bain, has been big in Scouting the last two or three years. So it's still going on, we're just less--you know, we just don't run in those circles, Lew. I mean, it's still....

Steiger: [??] (laughter)

Elliott: But it was pretty big back then, and I think it's big today. But I don't know if the Explorer Program is still going on. I remember when I was in Boy Scouts, and one year when I was a Tenderfoot in Boy Scouting jargon, we took hardwood boards and steamed them in old five-gallon milk jugs, and bent them to the contour of our backs, and took cotton cord and laced it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, so that would go against our back. And then we put screw eyes in the hardwood boards, and then we would put all of our gear in a great big bundle of a tarp and fold it all together and put it on the backpack, and then we all learned the spider hitch for tying it on the backpack. We learned a lot, but it was incredibly antiquated. The very next year I had a paper route, and I saved up my money. The first thing I did was when I was eleven years old I bought a life membership in the Sierra Club, which is kind of an interesting little side story in itself. That's what I wanted to do with my paper route money when I was eleven years old. I didn't tell my parents. I was kind of a private, really shy person--especially when I was younger. Still am kind of shy. The treasurer of the Sierra Club, Lewis Clark called up my dad and said, "That's a terrific thing that your son did, Lou!" And he said, "What?!" And he said, "He just sent us a check for a hundred dollars for a life membership in the Sierra Club." My father was dumbfounded, said, "What?!"

Steiger: You were eleven years old?

Elliott: I was eleven years old. I did that for two reasons: one was because I really believed in the Sierra Club and thought that protection of the earth and what they were doing was really important. There was another reason, Lew, and this is the businessman in me: I went, "I'm eleven years old right now. This costs a hundred dollars today. It's only going to go up. And I've got a lot of years left, and I can be a member of the Sierra Club for seventy years for a hundred dollars. Such a deal!" (laughter)

Steiger: You really did think that? So this is 1959?

Elliott: No, no, this would be 1955.

Steiger: You were born in 1944, went on your first river trip in 1948. Elliott: Well, back to the Boy Scout story. The second thing I did with my paper route money was I bought a Kelty pack, that I saw an ad for Kelty pack in the Sierra Club magazine and went, "Wow, I want a Kelty pack." So I show up at the next fall outing on Mount Diablo or whatever, with the Scouting program, and everyone still has their stupid, archaic, heavy backpacks that they built the prior year, and I show up with my Kelty pack with all the zippers and pockets and everything organized beautifully, and they couldn't handle that. I mean, that was the end of Scouting for me. They kind of ostracized me and they were quite jealous and it just didn't work out from there on out.

Steiger: Really?!

Elliott: Oh yeah, I left Scouting right away at that point, and I said....

Steiger: Because ______.

Elliott: They couldn't all have Kelty packs--or they could if they just went out and made a little bit of money and sent their thirty-five dollars to Kelty Manufacturing and ordered their pack.

Steiger: Interesting. What did your dad do for a living when he was doing that?, when he was doing the Explorer stuff and all that.

Elliott: My dad was a printer and lithographer. He started a printing company, because that was his father's line of work. His dad died when he was a junior in architecture at UC-Berkeley in architecture school. And his mother said, "Hey, we've got to take over the business, son," and that's what they went off and did. He ran it with his mother for several years. And he embraced the whole new technology that was coming on at that time in the late thirties, early forties, of offset lithography. I still remember going down to the print shop on Saturdays and Sundays in downtown Oakland on Jackson Street and just hanging out. My dad was kind of an inventor of sorts. I remember on the second floor of his printing shop he had a darkroom, but the darkroom was also a camera. You'd walk out one door from the darkroom, and you'd walk into this room that was about eight by eight by eight, I suppose, and it was a camera, because it had a great big lens in one wall, and then he had a vertical pallet that he would put all his information on that he was going to print. The pallet was on a sliding rod outside the lens of the camera room that we were inside of. And he would just open up the camera lens and look through there and look at the material with flood lamps on it, and he'd push the rods along from inside this camera box room to where it was in focus. Then he'd turn the lights off and then he'd put a sheet of film behind another pallet inside the camera box room, and he'd flash it. He made his own way of making printing plates for his offset lithography. He was a real inventor. And we loved it. He also had a fireman's pole from the second floor where they did all the film developing and stripping and everything and making of the printing plates. And then you'd go down the fireman's pole and deliver the printing plates to five or six different press operators down on the first floor. So he was a small businessman and had a printing firm.

Steiger: And the fireman's pole was because you had to get it there fast, or just 'cause it was fun?

Elliott: Oh both! (laughs) I mean, why not make workin' fun?, was my dad's idea. His idea of a vacation was just a change of work. But all the river running stuff was a hobby for him. And the way he made his money was with this printing company. And he also printed a lot of information for the Sierra Club and he printed a lot of different things and brochures. So he learned a lot about advertising from running the printing business. But really, he somewhere along about the mid-fifties, he seriously lost interest in the printing business. And he just kind of left it to his employees to run it, and all summer long he'd be off running river trips for the Sierra Club Outings Program--which I'll get into shortly here. But he lost money for ten years. He lost money probably from 1954, 1955, right on up through the early sixties--1962, 1963, 1964.

Steiger: Lost money in the....

Elliott: In the river business. And that was all just subsidized by profits from the printing business. And then he got to a point where instead of just hook, line, and sinker selling the printing business and making a big shift into river running, if he needed some rafts he'd sell off a press, which is an asset for producing profits, right? So he wasn't necessarily thinking ahead on all this stuff. He'd sell off a press and buy a bunch of rafts. And then the printing business would be a little bit smaller, perhaps, because he was sort of neglecting it at the same time, because his heart was really, at this point, just sunk completely into running river trips.

Steiger: Did he get heat from your mom or his mom?

Elliott: (chuckles) You bet he did! Not from his mom, because his mom, I think, had died by that time. But he got heat from my mom. She's still alive, living down in Sedona right now. Her name is Claire. She essentially confronted him and said, "We've got four kids in just a few years heading into college. We have this printing business that is making pretty decent money to pay for their college education. And now we're going to lose it all in the river running business and they won't be able to go to college?! This is nuts!" Well, his response was, "You're right, Claire, we won't be able to send them to college. But we'll be able to give them all summer jobs, and they can earn money and pay their way through college from their summer jobs." I mean, there's a whole different logic than my mother's logic. And I certainly favor my dad's logic, and I'm really glad he made the decision he did. We made good money as young guides when we were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one. Paid our way through college and so it all worked out.

Steiger: Wow, so that was really it, "We're not going to just give them.... We'll give them a job, then." (laughter)

Elliott: "We'll employ our kids," yeah.

Steiger: Make money and then they can go to school.

Elliott: Yeah.

Steiger: Well, where did you get, at the age of eleven--back to that--those two ideas: one, that the Sierra Club was cool; and two, that it would be such a deal to get a lifetime membership?

Elliott: I don't know. There's some things about my youth that I don't completely understand. Three years earlier than that, when I was eight years old, I had a birthday party. I still remember this. The whole family was there, and extended family, [and they asked], "What did you wish for?" And I said, "If I tell you, it might not come true." And they said, "Oh, come on, come on, what'd you wish for?" And I said, "I wished for world peace." They, of course, were all dumbfounded. To me, that was reality. To me, wishing for world peace at eight years old was not precocious, or buying a life membership in the Sierra Club at age eleven was not precocious--that's just what I wanted to do and did it. So I don't know. My life has always been driven by some pretty fundamental values, Lew, and I can't say exactly where they came from. I can look at my parents--like this self-sufficiency thing, for example--where they always gave me a really long tether and just believed in me. There, that's it. My parents believing in me was certainly a fundamental thing, and I knew they believed in me. We went off and ran these river trips for people when we were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. And I still remember a trip on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River where I was the head boatman. I was nineteen years old, and there was a fifteen-year-old running a boat, and a seventeen- year-old, and the "old guy" was twenty-four. I forget his name right now. And I added it all up and divided it by seven and went, "Wow, the average age of this crew is seventeen and a third!" Why we didn't kill people is beyond me-- other than the fact that my dad believed in us. We had this kind of unspoken thing between all of us young guides-- you know, that we'd confront some major obstacle, whether it was logistical or the river or rapids or whatever, or equipment repair which we were always doing, and say, "Well, God, if Lou thinks we can do it, I guess we can do it. Let's do it!" There was always a presumption of solution. There was always a presumption that we could work anything out that we set our minds to. I mean, life was an adventure, and all of those early years in my late teens was adventure and not problems and obstacles. You know, "Why are these trucks breaking down, and why do we have this bullshit equipment that's not working?" No, we never thought that way--it was just, "Hey, we're all kind of on the growing edge of something big here, and it's just for us to figure out."

Steiger: Briggs bears that out. I remember he did a little--not for the oral history ______but I asked him how he got into river running and it was like, "Oh, I wanted to do a Grand Canyon trip and all these kids showed up." (laughter) "And I thought, 'Oh, shit, here's all these kids. We're going to have to go down the river with a bunch of snot-nosed kids... And it turned out those were the boatmen." (laughter) Elliott: Oh yeah!

Steiger: You were there!

Elliott: And I was there, we were kids. Yeah, I was there, I have some pictures that Briggs took on that trip in 1967 and God, I was a skinny little guide. I was twenty-one years old when I first starting running down here. I think I was twenty-three on that trip that Briggs came on in 1967. I still remember a guy that walked up to me at Lee's Ferry in 1966--I forget his first name, but his last name was Kramer, and I stuck out my hand and Mr. Kramer said, "Where's Elliott?" And I said, "I'm Mr. Elliott, you can call me Bob." I was called Bob then. You know, he wouldn't shake my hand. He said, "Well, you've done four things wrong already. I said, "Well, what's that?" He holds up four fingers and he goes, "The motel reservation, blah, blah, blah. And this other thing. And then there's this. And then there's this." He really put me on the spot right from the start. And I think one reason he put me on the spot was because I'm twenty- two years old, but I'm lookin' like I'm seventeen. I mean, I was pretty young and small. He took me around to the back of his car and he opens the trunk--this big luxury Buick of some kind--and he had this beautiful bag. I can still remember it, it was kind of a raspberry color, big wide-tooth nylon zipper. And then he had a zipper flap over the bag that was covered by Velcro. This was 1966, Velcro had just come out. I had never seen Velcro before, and I thought this was the coolest invention there was, Velcro. That's cool. On the side of his bag was this little world, and it said, "Kramer Industries." And I knew this guy has been planning this for months, he really wants to go. So I turned to him and I said, "Mr. Kramer, I really think the very best thing to do would be for me to call the office in Oakland and instruct them to give you all your money back, including something for your travel expenses for getting out here." And he said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, you're really so unhappy already at the start here, and so unhappy with what we're doin' in running this trip, that I don't think I can make you happy. And I think everyone else is going to have a much better trip if you just don't come, and we'll just give you your money back." And he was dumbfounded. He did not expect this response. And he changed his attitude completely at that point. And I think that all he was looking for there was, "This kid's going to ruin my trip." I think he was just very uneasy and uncomfortable and insecure, fearful--which is very legitimate back in 1966 at Lee's Ferry in the Grand Canyon, and that these kids are going to run him down the river. And I think when I stood up to him like that, very directly, very assertively, it was like I had passed some kind of test for him. Then he was secure, then he was fine, "Cool, let's go."

Steiger: Yeah, it worked out? How was he on the trip?

Elliott: Oh, he was great on the trip. In fact, I still remember. I remembered just three days ago when we camped right at Kanab Creek and we ran the rapids early in the morning. I thought of Mr. Kramer because I had my assistant run the boat at Kanab Creek and we swam Kanab. As you know, it's a pretty easy rapid, a number three, but it's long. Mr. Kramer and I swam the whole rapids all the way through, and we got pulled up onto the raft at the end and he told me then how important this trip was for him, and it was a really big accomplishment for him, and that he didn't have any feeling in his legs because he'd had polio as a kid. And I looked at him very differently at that point, and I went, "He's had to fight his whole life, every step of the way." And I just went, "Wow, that's cool. I like you, Mr. Kramer."

Steiger: Did they make the bags, or he just had a bag made with his name?

Elliott: He just had a bag made. But where we got off on this, was running trips as kids, with all the responsibility.

Steiger: I want to look back, just for a second, then we can move forward. The other thing that kind of has struck me is when you were a little kid, you said right away that you thought of these woods as being wilderness. Did you use the word "wilderness"?

Elliott: We called it "the wilderness."

Steiger: And where did you get that word, where did that come from? Was that from being in a Sierra Club family, do you think? Were the grownups using that word?

Elliott: Okay, this would have been around maybe age nine or age ten. I'd already been exposed to Sierra Club as a family and Sierra Club families, and we'd always get together and go on outings and stuff. So I'm sure that the word was already part of my vocabulary of just hearing it a lot in discussions, in groups, and talking about wilderness. So I think we called it the wilderness simply because it dramatized it, it enhanced it, it made it something remote, it made it something special, it made it something very distinct and different from our home. But it was not a fearful place, it was not the deep, dark woods. It was a refuge, it was a place to go. And I remember in my own mind as a child with some strange and abusive things in my childhood that were another part of my life, apart from the incredible values and things that I learned from my parents, there were some other things that were abusive, like living a double world and a double life. The wilderness was my sanctuary; it was where I would go off to regain my wholeness as an abused child. (pause) I wasn't going to get into that, and that's probably where I'll leave it. I learned a lot of things from my dad, a lot of things. I was both abused by him in sort of a Jekyll and Hyde dual world situation, but at the same time that I was abused by him, I learned some things from him, from his good side, from his good nature, that gave me the very tools to cope with and uncover [the early trauma of] my life as I've lived it and gone along. And those tools were an incessant curiosity, an incessant striving for the Truth with a capital "T," which I learned from my dad, from the good dad. And the other things I learned from him were that nature was a sanctuary, that the natural world was to be exalted above all other things. I learned that from my father. And so those two values that I learned from my dad very early-on were also my salvation and my uncovering and my learning to cope with and understand the bad father, the evil side, and learn to come to grips with that too.

Steiger: So it seems like he was kind of hard on everybody around--kind of hard-driving.

Elliott: Yeah, he was a real hard-driving person. He was a driven person for sure, and he had many incredible sides to him that I learned from over the years. He had an incredible generosity for people. All people mattered, whatever their background, whatever their perspective, wherever they came from. And this appreciation for diversity is another value I certainly learned from him. The value of giving back I learned from my father. The value of altruism. He always gave a lot to the Sierra Club and to environmental causes, but he also on the Sacramento River--the first trip I took-- later on over the years he took blind Boy Scouts down the Sacramento River, completely for free. He just did the trips for free. Or there was a period of time in the mid-sixties when he worked with youth at risk--they weren't called "youth at risk" in Oakland/San Francisco Bay area back in the mid-sixties--but where he worked with a guy named Herb Eloesser in Berkeley, California, and Herb helped screen and find some of these youth at risk that he thought had promise, and my father worked with them and developed them into river guides, to bring them out of where they were headed and their backgrounds and their environments.

Steiger: Actually made 'em river guides!

Elliott: And made 'em river guides, you know. And I worked with these guys, and I learned to appreciate the diversity of different backgrounds and where we all come from.

Steiger: Maybe what we ought to do is kind of go for kind of a big picture look ______[dragging microphone obscures comment].

Elliott: Let's do that. Let's get away from some of the values and high-flyin' stuff--they'll always kind of creep back in--and go into some of how the big company.... There's one more story from my childhood that I'd probably like to share that will help lay the foundation for where I came from. My first money-making experience on rivers, let's say. I was a little guy, so I couldn't row a boat until I was probably seventeen years old. But the first trips that I ever went on was for two summers when I was fourteen and fifteen years old. This would have been 1958 and 1959. I took a Greyhound bus from Oakland, California, to Vernal, Utah, in mid-June of 1958, to work on Hatch trips, but not for Bus Hatch and Don and Ted, but for the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club had these great big trips--I mean, they were huge. They were like eighty people on the trip. That's how they ran things back in those days. We went on the Yampa River in Dinosaur National Monument; and on the Green River through Ladore Canyon. I'd work for six weeks, from mid-June to first of August or so, and then I'd take the Greyhound bus back home. And I remember when I first arrived in Vernal, Utah, mid-June of 1958, it was 2:00 A.M. in the morning and I didn't want to wake up Don and Ted Hatch who were, I think, living with their dad and mom at the time. Their dad was Bus Hatch, a really early river runner. And Bus came on these trips too. There was this driving hailstorm, 2:00 A.M. in the morning, I didn't want to wake them up, so I just crawled underneath a truck in their warehouse yard and laid out my sleeping bag and went to sleep. Those were really fun trips. And my job, I was called a "pot boy." And my job was to haul water, wash the pots, gather the firewood, arrange the firewood, and just be a camp helper all the way through. Those were really fun summers. I remember my mom's first advice was, "You'll need seven pairs of socks, Bob, because you'll want a clean pair of socks each day." Of course, we look back at that and we just laugh, you know. It only took me about two days to realize that I don't need seven pairs of socks--no socks will be just fine. (chuckles)

Steiger: Wow. So Bus Hatch was still out there doing it?

Elliott: He was still out there. He rowed a boat in 1958. He was a really interesting guy. He was small, and a great storyteller. Really a fun-loving guy, kind of a Type "B" personality, and I remember he had brown hair, closely cropped, and he had a very broad face and ruddy cheeks and he was kind of small and a stocky little guy--smaller than Ted--Ted's much bigger than his dad, Bus, was. But Don was small, and Don took after his father, genetically, in terms of his physique, his stature.

Steiger: When you say "Type 'B,'" what's that mean?

Elliott: Type "B"? Oh, laid back, meaning he's not intense or driven. More just "take it as it comes," sort of a thing, that kind of a guy.

Steiger: Don't get too wound up about stuff.

Elliott: Don't get too wound up, yeah. (chuckles) So Lew, you want to go into this whole thing of the evolution of the company? How it moved from the hobby stage into becoming a Grand Canyon company? Or what?

Steiger: That would be great, but while we're at it, back to the Sierra Club thing. This story that you just told has brought up a bunch of things for me. One question--and this is really for the big picture oral history thing--I keep getting a different story on these Sierra Club trips. The story I started out with in my own mind was, the thrust was that we ought to get these people out here so they'll be a force for lobbying to save these places. (

Elliott: Yes.) But you talk to a guy like Fred [Burke]and stuff, and these guys, and it's like the Sierra Club was just cashing in, this was a racket. These river trips, they realized it was actually a good fund-raising kind of deal for them. I wonder what's your take on all that?

Elliott: My take on that is it's a rather cynical view. And I'm sure there might have been those people within the Sierra Club who went, "Wow, if we take three hundred people this summer through Dinosaur National Monument on these river trips, yes, they will be a force for conservation, but they will also become life members. They'll also give us lots of big money so that we can grow and get bigger and be more influential for saving rivers." But it still all came back to saving rivers, Lew, to saving wild places, to saving the earth. And to say that, "Oh yeah, they were doing this just to cash in, to raise a lot of money and get bigger," is a little bit of a cynical view. Sure they wanted to get bigger, sure they wanted to cash in, but it was to advance their mission. It was to advance their mission to save these places.

Steiger: They were definitely believers.

Elliott: They were believers, yeah.

Steiger: One other question, and we'll try to let you get back on track. Where was Bus Hatch and all that? Where ______.

Elliott: I don't know. I mean, sure, I became a life member of the Sierra Club, but I didn't try to prosyletize Bus Hatch when I was fourteen years old. I mean, I wasn't even aware of where the Hatches stood on environmental values or conservation. I mean, they ran Sierra Club trips because they were contracted to do them. They weren't running the Sierra Club trips because they really believed in the Sierra Club mission, necessarily. I mean, that's kind of hindsight retrospective. But let's go back to real time in 1958, say, or 1959 when I was back there in Dinosaur National Monument: I was not the least bit aware of the "big picture," stuff. I was just there going on a river trip, working my ass off and having a good time.

Steiger: And wood was a big deal. Elliott: Oh, gathering firewood was on my role description, if I had a role description. Wood was a big deal, you bet.

Steiger: But you guys didn't have to go find a place for the toilet or any of that?

Elliott: No, we had outhouses in Dinosaur back in those days, at the camps.

Steiger: ______even had 'em then.

Elliott: I can't remember exactly, I don't know. It's just as likely that we had trenches where you just crap in the trench and then bury it, you know, and go on to the next camp.

Steiger: Well, I'll shut up and let you keep goin'.

Elliott: (chuckles) Let's try to take it in short order from the hobby phase, the Explorer Scouts, and the kayak support, into this realm of the Sierra Club Outings Program where my father first started running trips for the Sierra Club on the Rogue River. And then we went up to Idaho, and the Hatches hadn't really moved from Utah into Idaho that much yet, and my dad decided, "Well, we want to run Sierra Club trips on the Salmon River too; and the main Salmon, and the Selway." And we started on all those rivers. The first one would have been 1959, which was a joint trip between the American Whitewater Affiliation and the Sierra Club. And my dad was the outfitter, and that's the trip that I wasn't big enough to row yet, as I was only fifteen, and I ran the North Fork of the Clearwater in my mom's Hammar folding kayak. Then the next year I was sixteen in 1960, seventeen in 1961, and those were the years where we went on this circuit--"we" being my dad's company, which was the American River Touring Association, which has since become ARTA River Trips. And so when I was eighteen years old, my first trip that I was a head boatman on was when I was eighteen on the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. And here's how the circuit went--and this was all through the early sixties, starting in 1961 for me--we'd do two trips for the Sierra Club on the Rogue River. Then we'd move over to Idaho and we'd do maybe one trip on the Selway River, two trips on the Middle Fork of the Salmon, and then a trip on the main Salmon, and then we'd move up to British Columbia and do one or two trips on the Canoe River, which came into the Columbia River at the top of Big Bend, went from Revelstoke into the Columbia and we went down the Columbia a couple of days, and then we went back to Kamloops which was our headquarters city. Then we'd come home at the end of the summer. That was the circuit. About eight or ten of us had this great big old one-and-a-half ton Dodge moving van that was open-air with a little platform on it. And we'd put all the gear on the platform and all the gear in the back. We'd crawl in underneath the platform and drive all over the West when we were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, running these trips. My dad would be with us sometimes, and sometimes he wouldn't. We'd just be runnin' 'em. I remember one trip we got off the Rogue River--this would have been when I was eighteen, 1962. There were ten of us, and we only had room for four in the truck with all the gear. We came off on a Saturday, and we were starting a Selway trip on the following Monday. We had two days. We had already put in the food orders, and we got all the food picked up at the IGA Food Market in Grant's Pass and we're headed out. We had to call ahead to Lewiston to an IGA Market there and say, "We don't have any meat. Can you pull together the following meat order and freeze it and we'll be there in twenty-four hours to pick it up?" And the guy said, "Well, what kind of credit do you have?" "Credit?! We'll just bring cash when we get there." He says, "Well, how do I know you're gonna come through with it?" And we just tried to explain what we were doing. We were just kids on the phone, explaining all this. Then we got the manager of the IGA Market in Grant's Pass to vouch for us and say, "Yeah, yeah, these guys are for real," and we placed the meat order. My sister said, "There are ten of us and six of us aren't going to fit in the truck. What'll we do?" And I said, "Let's divide up into three teams of two and hitchhike. And the first team to get to Idaho doesn't have to wash any dishes or pots on the first trip on the Selway." We just made it a big game, and off we went. I had Phil Norgaard in my team. He was really young then, only fifteen. I was pretty young at eighteen. I remember we got a ride in a 1961 Ford Galaxy and we drove ninety miles an hour all the way to Portland. The guy had a gun in his center console, and we were just like, "This is nuts! This is incredible, but we're gonna win the race!" Then it took us eleven rides to get to the Dalles, which is only about one hour to the east of Portland. "We're not gonna win it now." We went into the freight yard and asked when the freight train was coming through to Pendleton and the guy says, "Comes through about 11:30 pm." We said, "Okay, thanks." And Phil says, "What are we gonna do now?" I said, "Well, let's go take in a movie. It's seven o'clock. We'll just sit in the movie theater for a while until the freight comes through." So we did that, and we went over to this used car lot, waiting for the freight to come. We heard the freight coming way down the tracks, and this cop drives up across from us and his spotlight pans through the used car lot, right across our chests, and we're frozen. "Freeze! Phil, don't move." The spotlight comes back and lands right on us. We go, "Now we're for sure not gonna win the race." And the freight comes through, going pretty fast but slowing down. It's going maybe twenty-five miles an hour, twenty, fifteen. I said, "Phil, if we don't get on this freight by the time it passes, then we're for sure not gonna win the race, we're goin' off to jail." So we throw our packs in a freight car, and there's only about five cars left on the train, and it's goin' maybe fifteen miles an hour, twelve miles an hour at this point, and we just start runnin' as fast as we can, and grab on about three cars from the end. (swoosh) Get onto this one freight car and ride all the way to Pendleton. We wake up about 4:30 the next morning. I look up around this long bend of the track before Pendleton and we see all these bums, and I say, "Hey Phil, let's go talk to the bums. I've never met a bum before." "Cool." And I'm thinking back to a Steinbeck novel or something that I'd read a couple of years earlier, and I want to go live this thing, right? And we go and meet these hobos... And he says, "Well, wait, what about our money?" He had forty bucks, I had forty bucks. I said, "Here, fold it all up small and I'll put it inside my bathing suit pocket inside my Levis." "Okay, that's cool." And we go up there, and these bums are pretty benign--had a cuss word about every third word, and I was really struck by how limited their vocabulary was, and how much they could say with a handful of cuss words. We finally made it to Idaho sure enough. We were the second team into Idaho, and we head off on the Selway River. We go down to the first camp, about seven miles, to a place called Running Creek and we camp. Our team has to wash pots now. And the next morning, I'm the last boat to shove off, and I run back in the bushes because I have diarrhea, and I take off my bathing suit, and it's really bad. I take my bathing suit, turn it inside out, wipe my ass, and just throw the bathing suit in the bushes. Put my Levis back on, push off down the river, and off we go another ten miles down the river to the next camp. Phil comes up to me and says, "Well, you got my forty bucks, Bob?" And I go, "Oh, shit!" (laughter) I say, "It's in my bathing suit." "Well, get your bathing suit." "No, no, you don't understand, my bathing suit has crap all over it in the bushes back at Running Creek." "Oh, no!" So we go to talk to the head boatman-- Steve Gantner. And Steve says, "Yeah, you guys can go back there." So we said, "We'll walk back tonight before dark..."

Steiger: Ten miles!

Elliott: Ten miles. It gets dark about 9:30 in Idaho this time of year. "...and get the bathing suit. Roll up in a blanket, sleep overnight, and then we'll get up at 4:30 in the morning, we'll be back in time for breakfast. Let's go!" And so (laughs) we go about a mile up the way, across this little bridge, start walking up this road. We said, "We didn't know there was any roads around here!" You know, it's the wilderness, right? And then we hear this Jeep coming up the road, and this guy stops and says, "Where you goin'?" I said, "Running Creek." He says, "That's ten miles, it's seven o'clock at night." "Yeah, we gotta hurry." "Okay, I'll take you as far as I can go." "How far does the road go?" "The road goes about a mile up here, and we can take you that far at least." "Okay." We drive down in this big long meadow with these ruts in it and half-way down the meadow he hangs a hard left turn and we go into this little clearing and there's this Cessna airplane. Mr. Henke was his name. He's from Redding, California. He says, "Hop in." We go, "Hop in?!" He says, "Yeah, there's a landing strip up at Running Creek too. If we hurry, you can get your bathing suit and swim back across the river. We'll get you back here and you'll be back in your camp in time for dessert." (laughs) We said, "Cool. This is good!" (laughs)

Steiger: Amazing.

Elliott: And so we hop in Mr. Henke's Cessna airplane, we fly up to Running Creek and land on this strip that's at about a ten degree pitch up the hill and I run as fast as I can down to the river, take off my Levis, swim across the river, go right to my bathing suit, grab it, swim back across the river, give Phil his money, pocket my money, hop back in the plane, we get back, and Mr. Henke goes down and he buzzes our camp about a mile downstream from his little cabin area, lands us, and drives us back to the bridge and we walk down to camp, pull into camp about 9:15 at night, just before dark, just in time for dessert. We tell 'em the story.

Steiger: That is unbelievable.

Elliott: (laughs) One of my favorite stories.

Steiger: A sign of the times. And what year was that?

Elliott: That was.... Correction here: I think I started out by saying that was 1961 when I was seventeen. It was 1962, I was eighteen. I remember the year because it wasn't a 1961 Ford Galaxy, it was a 1962 black Ford Galaxy, brand spankin' new, that drove us ninety miles an hour from Grant's Pass to Portland.

Steiger: Incredible!

Elliott: It was.... I mean.... You know, Cam Stavely [field personnel manager, Arizona Raft Adventures], his response to that would simply be, "Everything works out." It all works out, Lew. (laughter)

Steiger: One way or the other.

Elliott: One way or the other, yeah. So that's the circuit we did. [Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia.] We did this circuit for four or five years, all through my late high school and early college years. And we started pickin' up some operations to complete the circuit. My dad kind of developed his company, ARTA [which became ARTA River Trips], in what I call a clockwise fashion through the West, with the Rogue in Oregon, and then over to the Selway, Middle Fork and main Salmon Rivers in Idaho. And then up to British Columbia. But after we stopped the British Columbia trips--we did those for only a couple of years--we started picking up operations down in Utah. And that's how we picked up permits throughout the West. But then you go, "Well, where does Utah fit in? Where does the Sierra Club fit in? Where does the Grand Canyon begin with all of this?" And if you want, let's move on to that.

Steiger: Yeah. Actually, just a couple of questions just to clarify. Now, this was one crew? Did you just have one crew that would go do all the trips, or would you ______.

Elliott: The one crew did the circuit that went Oregon-Idaho-British Columbia. After we started pickin' up operations in Utah--principally Glen Canyon--is when we started to pick up the multiple operating areas that ran simultaneously at one time. In fact, this would have been about 1959 when my dad started runnin' the Glen Canyon operation. It was late in the life of Glen Canyon. Right around that same time, early sixties, there started to be an Oregon crew that ran just the Rogue River all summer long. There started to be an Idaho crew. The Idaho crew started in 1963, running just Idaho all summer long. And in 1963, when I was nineteen years old, was when I first became an area manager, it was called, or in charge of one state, and I was in charge of Idaho in 1963 when I was nineteen. And I looked young--I looked sixteen. People would come and just be blown away. They're already freaked-- river running was a pretty new thing back then, and they already felt they were hangin' it out. Then when they came down the river with kids, and, you know, this one trip in 1963 where the average age was seventeen-and-a-third, it was pretty amazing. We didn't think that much of it. We thought, "Yeah!" I mean, at this point, after several years, we just figured, "Yeah, we can do this." Anyway, it must have been 1961 that my dad started running Sierra Club trips through Glen Canyon. The area manager for Southern Utah at that time was Dick Norgaard, who since has become a resource economist at UC- Berkeley, and he was a great photographer. I still remember discussions with Dick in 1962, when he tried to coax me into coming down to run trips in Utah in the desert, and I just said to Dick, "Oh man, I like all the green trees. I like the fresh water clear as window glass that you can see fifteen feet to the bottom of the river, and it looks like you can touch it. The desert is just.... You know, there's no life, it's just all the sameness to it. And I love the richness of the Idaho rivers and British Columbia." And Dick just kind of.... I remember seein' his face, he just kinda shook his head and realized that he wasn't gonna convince me of a thing until I saw it for myself. And the first trip I ever did in desert country in canyons on the Colorado River was in March or April--Eastertime of 1962, I think. I was nineteen years old and I was the head cook for a fifty-two-person Sierra Club trip. And David Brower was on it, Francois Leydet, and Eliot Porter. Eliot Porter was a famous photographer [published by the Sierra Club in The Place No One Knew, and In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World], and Francois Leydet [a Sierra Club author]. It was kind of like being on the river with Bus Hatch in 1958. I had no appreciation for the big picture implications of being on the river with David Brower and Eliot Porter back then in Glen Canyon. But I remember the trip very well. And Dick Norgaard was absolutely correct. Without trying to convince me of anything, I realized that desert country was really my next thing, where it was at for me. I remember one part of that trip in particular [Glen Canyon, 1962], because it was absolutely pivotal in bringing me back to some of my early values, and setting some of my values for the rest of my life. We got to Aztec Creek, which is the creek that came down from Rainbow Bridge, and I'd talked the rest of the crew into preparing breakfast for everybody so that I could run up there by myself and come back early, because I wanted to get back early to camp--it was a layover camp, so I could bake a birthday cake in a dutch oven for someone that had a birthday that day. And it's six miles up to Rainbow Bridge, so I left early, about 5:00 A.M., and half-walked/half-run all the way up to Rainbow Bridge and saw it and said, "This is really cool." Half-walked/half-run half-way back to camp. And at this point it's about late morning, noontime or so, I suppose. And I just stopped jogging and just slowed to a comfortable walk. My head was swimming with the implications of what we were doing on this trip and why we were there, and it was really only a year away, or two years away at most, that this place was going to be flooded forever, no one else would ever see it this way. And I just started bawling, I just started crying. I didn't know the word at the time, but it was an epiphany. This was like a religious (chuckles) "flash of light" for me, that this place was gonna be lost, this place that was just so incredibly special. It was some of the finest of all of God's expressions on the face of this earth. And right then and there [I] decided that I needed to commit a major part of my life to conservation of the environment and saving the earth and saving these really special places. So it was an important trip for me.

Steiger: The Glen Canyon area. So that was....

Elliott: [In] 1962 and 1963.

Steiger: And that was your first look at Glen Canyon.

Elliott: That was my first look at a desert river.

Steiger: Period.

Elliott: Period.

Steiger: And it was an eighty-person trip?

Elliott: Fifty-two.

Steiger: And Francois Leydet and Eliot Porter and those guys....

Elliott: And David Brower.

Steiger: Now, did they continue that with Martin through the Grand Canyon? How did all that.... That was a different book, huh? That was Time and the River Flowing?

Elliott: Time and the River Flowing came out after The Place No One Knew. The Place No One Knew was about Glen Canyon. Time and the River Flowing was about Grand Canyon. So this is just ahead. That's the sequence those books came in.

Steiger: Yeah. And so Glen Canyon really was that awesome, huh?

Elliott: Oh yeah, it was an incredible place. I remember after dinner that night at Aztec Creek, David Brower's daughter, Barbara Brower--she was fourteen, but very old for her age, and very precocious. She and I sat up very late that night--believe it or not, this is a Sierra Club trip--and we used paper plates! Barbara and I sat around the fire after the coals had burned all down, and just threw a new paper plate on the fire, and then we'd talk until the plate had burned all up, and then threw another plate on the fire. And we did that for about two hours on into the middle of the night, just talking about this place. She was kind of chastising me for how I could possibly run up to Rainbow Bridge and run back and not even see the place. I gave her a little different slant and explained what I had been through that day. It was pretty special... God, those were special trips, special times, special places. That was 1963, and we didn't run the Grand Canyon--my dad's company didn't run the Canyon until 1965. If it's time to jump ahead to 1965, and our first trip through the Grand Canyon, then we can do that. Is there anything else you want to go back to?

Steiger: What do you think? ______on that one. Okay, so just to sum up now, you've moved through the early days of ARTA, and you guys are running the circuit and your dad has slowly built up businesses in these different areas--Oregon, Idaho, Utah. California? Or not so much?

Elliott: It's really interesting that California seems to be left out. So let's come back to that and fill that in a little bit more. Our really early trips in California ... late fifties, let's call it, or early sixties also. We were doing mostly the Klamath River. We weren't really started on the Stanislaus and the American and Tuolomne. They didn't come along until a little bit later. We didn't do a lot of weekend trips yet, or short trips--they were all five-day trip minimum in the early years. So that meant other rivers. The Klamath was the only trip that was longer than a weekend trip in California.

Steiger: And that was deliberate, you just were interested in doing the shorter trips?

Elliott: They just weren't quite "discovered" yet. I mean, for example, my dad and I--mostly my dad, I helped--made my first kayak when I was age sixteen. This would be the year after I kayaked the North Fork of the Clearwater in Idaho in my mom's boat. The next year we had a Czechoslovakian mold [for making fiberglass kayaks] that we used in the Sierra Club, San Francisco Bay Chapter, River Outings Program, and we were all making boats back then. So my dad and I made a fiberglass kayak for me in 1960 when I was sixteen. We made it that spring, and I remember going with the first people to go down the Stanislaus River, which were Sierra Club kayakers. It was with Bryce Whitmore, it was with Elsa Bailey, after which Bailey Falls was named, and I was on the trip where it was named. I kayaked in the Stanislaus in 1960, and when we got to Bailey Falls, it was kind of low water. I don't know what that meant, maybe eighteen hundred cubic feet per second. And Elsa went down first, and she smacked the back of her kayak and tore off the last foot of her kayak. It was kind of getting late in the day already, and we were just running it through as a one- day trip, the nine miles from Camp Nine. So I stayed back with Elsa while the others went on. I helped her and we taped her boat all back together.

Steiger: Duct tape?

Elliott: Well, we didn't have duct tape then. We mixed up a batch of fiberglass right there on the spot and poured in a lot of extra catalyst to flash it and fixed it right there and let it sit in the sun for a bit.

Steiger: You had a patch kit?

Elliott: We had a patch kit. And so that's why it was named Bailey Falls, and off we went to catch up. So the Stanislaus was not run commercially before 1960. I think it wasn't until 1961, 1962, or 1963. When my dad started running multiple operations, which would have been about 1963, when he started doing a crew on the Rogue River, a crew in Idaho which I headed up, a crew down in Utah, which Dick Norgaard headed up in Glen Canyon--about that same time he started up a California operation, and his first area manager for California was Bryce Whitmore. And Bryce went off to develop his own company a couple of years after that. And that would have been, I think, about, oh, I'm going to take a wild guess here, it could be a year or two off. I think that would have been 1961 or 1962..

Steiger: Now this Stanislaus trip you were talking about: were you guys the first ones to run it or anything? Other people had?

Elliott: There might have been some other people that ran it. That may have been a first descent, I'm not sure. I'd have to go back. I don't even know if some of those characters are still around.

Steiger: But you guys, nobody on the trip had been there before. (

Elliott: Oh no.) "Let's go check out ______."

Elliott: "Let's go check out this river." None of them had ever run it before. It was a first descent for all of us, and very possibly the first descent. This would have been.... And I remember, because it was with my brand new kayak my dad and I had just made that spring, this red Czechoslovakian slalom boat. And I was sixteen at the time, so that was 1960.

Steiger: So nobody'd ever gone.... Were you guys scared? Was there any question that you could--were you sure you could make it? Did you know what you were gonna to run into? What'd all that feel like?

Elliott: Oh sure I was scared. I mean, I was pumped--but excited. And I was just so in awe of the people I was kayaking with because they were all like eight, ten, twelve years older than me, and that they would even let me come along, being a relatively inexperienced kayaker. I did not have a roll really down yet. In fact, I remember swimming twice on that trip. I think I only did a successful roll once. Oh yeah, it was definitely a big deal. It was definitely pretty exciting stuff, for sure. So what else do you want to fill in?

Steiger: Well, that was pretty good. I guess we could move ______. (brief break) We need to get into the Mexico phase, and then maybe we'll go into the ______.

Elliott: So, the last big story was Glen Canyon, age nineteen, 1963. And that was also the year that I first took on some significant responsibilities as the area manager of the Idaho operations. So let's talk a little bit, Lew, about some of the equipment realities, what we used and what we were up against, what we faced. I already mentioned that we had this one-and-a-half ton Dodge furniture van for a truck. I learned how to shift on a transmission without any synchromesh, and we had to double-clutch every shift up, and double-clutch every shift down, and it was pretty amazing. I remember coming down into Deadwood Lodge where our headquarters was--kind of back of nowhere, south of McCall, Idaho. I was jammin' the brakes the whole way because I had the transmission caught between low and high range, so I was not in any gear really, and burning the brakes out. Unfortunately some of our best drivers--I was only about eighteen at the time--were in the back of the furniture van, underneath this platform that had all the rafts and stuff on it, because there was a little side door that went in under there. That kind of gives you a little snapshot on some of the trucks that we used. But let's talk about the equipment: A raft unit, what was it? It was a ten-man inflatable assault raft, not painted, so this was black, with a little sponson around the outside of about four inches in diameter, all the way around, which was supposed to keep some of the splash off of the boat. Actually, what it served to do was it served to catch the upstream current and flip the raft easier, really. (laughter) And then on top of this raft, we had these frames that were like an "H" and they were made of two-by-sixes painted ARTA green, which was sort of a marine green color. And one two-by-six down each side of each boat, and then a two-by-eight across the middle that we sat on and rowed from. And then right behind us we had this little poop deck, we called it. It was like half-inch plywood with two-by-three-inch rails on top, with holes drilled all through 'em and we put our boxes up there and lashed all the boxes on. And then we get to camp, we take all the boxes off, we'd unbolt the poop deck from the frame and turn it upside down on top of the boxes, and of course it became a "poop" table at this point, and that's how we set up the camp scene. The oars were military surplus, just as the boxes were and the rafts were, and even some of the early life jackets, which we can come back to--let's not forget those early kapok life jackets. The oars were good- quality oars. For example, we'd take maybe an eleven- or twelve-foot oar and cut a little off the blade and cut a little bit off the shaft and make a new handle and turn it into a pretty stout nine- or ten-foot oar. But I think we rowed these ten-man inflatable assault rafts with nine-foot oars. We just kind of copied what the Hatches did for their oars, which was pretty archaic, and that was we took some of this conveyor belting and cut it into strips. Then we drilled two holes through the oar, thus weakening it and exposing the inside of the oar to potential rot, and bolted on this "U" shaped piece of conveyor belting. And then we'd put it on the thole pin. We never used oarlocks from the git go--we used these thole pins, and which actually, as you know from the history of river running, predates oarlocks. They used to have two thole pins in a boat, whether it was Greece or Norway or wherever they had the boats, and throw the oar between the two thole pins and row. We had a single thole pin, with the oar held to the thole pin by this conveyor belting strap. The thole pins, actually, they weren't just mere bolts, they came off of the crossbars to telephone poles. And they held a glass insulator on top of the thole pin, which of course when it's on a telephone pole it's not a thole pin at that point. And we'd unscrew the glass insulator balls, and there'd be lead threads, and we'd just throw the thole pin in the fire and melt off the lead, and then voilà, we'd have a thole pin that we'd bolt into this "H" frame, into the two- by-sixes.

Steiger: And forget about putting the glass thing back on it.

Elliott: Of course, yeah. And they were beautiful thole pins because they were slightly tapered and came down with a really nice bevelled shoulder on them where they screwed onto the raft frame. We thought they were the cat's meow, "This is really neat." So we'd throw the oar on. Now, let's jump this into an actual trip. Here we are headed down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in late June, putting in at Dagger Falls, elevation I think about 5,600 foot, pretty high, and it's snowing. We put on the river, and the snow stops and we go down, the sun comes out a little bit and it starts to snow at camp. This would have been about 1962 in late June. I remember that trip very well, because we had a lot of rafts: I think we had nine rafts on that trip. By the first camp we had broken eleven oars, because we didn't have oar clips, the oar was held very securely to the thole pin, and as soon as you dipped that downstream oar deeply enough, it gets caught in the rocks. You know, instead of jumping off the pin it breaks something--in this case, usually the oar. So we had eleven oars broken by the first camp. Here's how we fixed 'em: We'd take this oar, and if we were lucky, the breakage was maybe over a foot or so. We had these incredible repair kits with all these epoxy resins and stuff, and screws and lots of vice grips, of course, and "C" clamps. And we'd take these oars and we'd paint 'em all up with epoxy resin, squish 'em back together, put some screws into 'em, and then we'd take parachute cord and wrap them all the way around the full thing and then clamp it all together with "C" clamps overnight, and repair as many oars as we possibly could to proceed the next day.

Steiger: You'd dip the parachute cord in resin?

Elliott: Yeah, and then we would paint more resin around the parachute cord.

Steiger: ______at night ______fix all the oars.

Elliott: Oh yeah, and that was true in Idaho in the early sixties. It was also true in the Grand Canyon throughout the mid and late sixties. We'll get to some equipment stories in the Grand Canyon that'll turn your eyeballs. But that's kind of what the equipment was like in those early days. The food was just as good, just as incredible--almost--as it is today. I remember we had beef stroganoff in the early sixties, and we had fresh fruit salads, and we always baked in the dutch ovens, from the very early days. Cornbread--we always had fresh-baked gingerbread with whipping cream-- not in a can, of course, you'd have to whip it. We had great food right from the early days on.

Steiger: Well now that's a departure from what most people say. Most of the early companies, it's like one of the things you hear is "Spam out of a can," or whatever. Not so with you guys.

Elliott: Unt-uh.

Steiger: I wonder where that came from?

Elliott: I'm not sure. I do remember that my dad.... My older sister Joanne did a lot of the food organizing and planning the menus. But I also remember a gal that came with us on the Canoe River, which would have been about, oh, 1961 or 1962, up in British Columbia. And she came along just for her culinary skills. And she turned us all on to a beef stroganoff recipe in 1962, I guess it was, maybe as early 1961 she turned us on to this really simple beef stroganoff recipe that has become a staple for about thirty-five years.

Steiger: You guys are still doing it?

Elliott: Still doin' beef stroganoff.

Steiger: How do you spell the Canoe River? Like the boat?

Elliott: Yeah, like the boat, canoe. Well, let's jump back and fill in a little bit on some other stuff too. Speaking of food reminds me of two stories about the Mexico years. For several years my father ran fall trips along the coast of Mexico around the Puerto Vallarta area, from the north of there--I forget the little town--down to the Bay of Banderas. And they were Sierra Club outings too, in these great big flat rafts. And we could get into some stories on that if you want to take the time, but the two quick stories is always this kind of "can do, get the job done" sort of story. We weren't catching fish for two days, and I was the head cook, and I was sixteen years old. This would have been in 1960. I was put in charge of the cooking, partly because I spoke better Spanish than my father. So I would go to the markets and buy all the food. Well, we hadn't caught fish for two days, and the menu was heavily reliant on seafood. So I walked two miles into this little community--a tiny dusty community--and went up to the grocery store, looked at the counter, and all they had was condensed milk and some sacks of flour and stuff like that, and not really very much. And some cans of mackerel, I think. "Oh, God, how can I pull a meal together out of this little dusty town?!" I walked by this lady's front yard, and she had a bunch of chickens in the yard, and I went up to her and I said, "Would you be able to butcher these chickens for us? so we can make a chicken stew or something tonight." Well, my Spanish wasn't very good, and she didn't really understand me, but I thought she did. She said, "Sure, yeah, I'll do that. Just bring me a great big pot and I'll put the chickens in it." So I went back, got our great big pot, probably three-gallon, four-gallon pot--a big aluminum stock pot and left it with her. I came back about 4:30 in the afternoon, expecting to have all these chickens, and I was going to have to figure out how to cook 'em now for forty-five people. [I] walked into her house and she produces this pot of chicken stew with all the chicken in it, and tomatoes and some potatoes and onions and this roux. It smelled so good, and seasoned. And I just could not believe what had just happened, from this communication problem [with] this lady. And so I said, "Great!" I had a friend with me, we each grabbed one-half of the stock pot full of chicken stew and walked it back into camp and our job was all done for just a few dollars. So it was really fun in some of the early Mexico days also. I remember also that my dad went off to Mexico, and I think I was seventeen--this would have been 1961. We needed a bunch of new guides, because we were growing rapidly in the early sixties. That was just on the eve of starting to run these multiple operations in multiple areas and we needed more guides to be able to grow that fast. And he went off to run trips in Mexico in March and April for the Sierra Club, and he placed an ad in the Sierra Club Bulletin, "Wanted: Guides to train to run river trips," and told my sister and I the first of March or whenever this was, "Look over some of these letters that come in and see if you can pick out some good guides that we can train later this spring." And he took off to Mexico for a couple of months. My sister was nineteen and I was seventeen. We would go to work after school there, and the phones just were ringin' off the hook--we probably had three hundred applicants for guide positions in about three or four days, and my sister and I are scratchin' our heads. This is our early management challenge for us as young managers, and we're going, "This is nuts! I guess Dad thought we could handle this." So I just turned to my sister and I said, "Okay, let's make a first cut just based on how well they write their letters and their background and how excited they seem to be about this thing, and tell all the other ones 'forget it.'" And we made a first cut. We said, "Okay, now, fill out this application." We made up an application form, sent it all out to them, a hundred applications come back. I said, "Oh my God, we still have a hundred people." We only need sixteen. And so then we made another cut, and we cut it down to, I think the top forty. And we set up interviews with the top forty for the next weekend. We came in, we started doing interviews. People walked in without any appointments, and we interviewed them. We did a team interview, my sister and I. And then we divided up and interviewed sometimes two people at a time. It was so nuts I couldn't believe it! And we came up with the top, I think, twenty-four candidates out of that. And we had a meeting on Monday night and told them all, "Okay, you're the top twenty-four candidates. In two weeks we're gonna go up on a four-day training trip on the Klamath River over your spring break from school, and only sixteen of you are going to get jobs for the summer." So we went up on the Klamath River two weeks later, and we had too many people for the boats, we couldn't train that many that fast. My sister said, "What are we gonna do?, we can't fit 'em all in the boats." So what we would do is, we would put twenty in the boats for training, and do a rotating thing. And then the other four would drive the shuttle for the day-- but they had an assignment. They had to go up into all these little farmhouses and backwoods places, knock on the doors and interview people and get the history of the place.

Steiger: Wow! So you could interpret.

Elliott: So we could interpret. And their job was to come back to the camp each night, different groupings of four and five guides, and tell us stories around the campfire, what they learned during the course of the day. So we had our own little oral history project goin'. And at the end of that experience, we came up with sixteen really fine guides. I can't remember very many of their names, but I do remember the Hildebrand brothers, Ross and Kern. Their dad was an anatomy professor at UC-Davis. They stayed with us for about six or seven years, all the way through grad school, and were two of our finest guides. And I'll come back. It's a nice segue into our first Grand Canyon trip in 1965 also, because the Hildebrand brothers came out of that training program in 1961 and guided through the early sixties for us and were on our very first trip in the Grand Canyon in 1965.

Steiger: So you're trying to ______, you're seventeen.

Elliott: My sister was nineteen.

Steiger: And you're just gettin' out of high school?

Elliott: I'm a junior in high school at this point.

Steiger: And your sister is....

Elliott: She's a freshman in college. Steiger: And you guys are goin' to school, but meanwhile you've got to come home from school and deal with this business thing that your dad's got goin'.

Elliott: Yeah.

Steiger: And he's off where in Mexico?

Elliott: Runnin' these trips along the coast of Mexico out of Puerto Vallarta in these great big rafts.

Steiger: And like on the Klamath, was anybody else doing it? Was there anybody else running it? Did you guys have competitors?

Elliott: No, it's just us that was up there. We were it.

Steiger: And your dad, this idea of growing, what possessed him? Did he have a vision or something?

Elliott: (laughs) Did he have a vision? Oh my God, did he have a vision! He was consumed by vision. He was a visionary. Okay, a couple little personality things about my dad: He was one of the world's great salesmen, for starters. He could tell stories vastly better than I could ever tell stories. And he played the banjo and the guitar and the piano all by ear. He was a great entertainer and people fell in love with him all the time, and would follow him to the ends of the earth. And he was a visionary in terms of telling my mom, "No, we can't send our kids through college, but we can build this river company and give 'em jobs and they can pay their way through college." He was the kind of guy that could look ten years out and say, "This is where it's gonna be at ten years from now, so let's get started." And that's how he looked at river running. His favorite thing was program development. So we'd be running the Rogue River and he was already thinking Idaho. We'd be runnin' the Rogue River in Oregon and three rivers in Idaho and the Selway and the Salmon--Middle Fork and main Salmon--and he'd be thinkin' British Columbia. We'd be doin' these trips in British Columbia and he'd be thinkin' the coast of Mexico. We'd be doin' the coast of Mexico and he'd say, "Hey, these exact same rafts would work on the Colorado River through Glen Canyon." So he'd be thinkin' Glen Canyon. And so he'd be off doin' these things, developing these programs, leaving my sister and me and my other sister, Linda, who worked as a reservationist in our office, and my brother Jim, who worked in logistics and drove trucks. I could organize logistics and people and get things done, but my brother's forté was anything mechanical. He could build anything, repair anything, in terms of making the trucks work and building and designing new rafts and raft frames and systems and stuff like that. While my dad was generally off.... You know, this is kind of an overgeneralization, Lew, so bear with me. But my dad's forté if you will, or his vision, was program development. And the rest of us would come along behind, making it all happen, picking up the pieces.

Steiger: So how many brothers and sisters [did you have]? You had your older sister Joanne. And then where were you in the chain and who were the others?

Elliott: I was the second, and then my brother five years younger was the third, Jim. So Joanne was born in 1942, I was born in 1944, Jim was born in 1949, and Linda would have been born in 1951. Linda was the youngest girl.

Steiger: Wow, that's wild. ______keep all these things. Now, with these ten-mans, that's the boat I started out in, was a ten-man. Which way did you guys sit? (Elliott laughs heartily) You know there's a wider bow and then there's a little stern. Which way were you lookin'? And did you sit in the middle of the boat ______?

Elliott: We sat slightly behind or upstream of the center of the boat, so that when we were altering our ferry angles, the boat would turn around us as the pivot point. So we were just behind center, or upstream of, or toward aft, toward the stern of the boat, of center. And the big [wide] part of the boat, the upturned end of the boat went through the rapids first.

Steiger: That was the bow. (

Elliott: Yeah.) The true stern was behind you guys. Elliott: Correct. Though the Hatches, who were running the Middle Fork at the same we were, ran 'em exactly the opposite and put the upturned end upstream to give 'em less hull resistance [and they also ran the boats without the "flip rails" inflated, because they caught the current.]

Steiger: ______pulled to that end.

Elliott: So you could pull to that end. But I don't know, we liked to keep more water out of the boat when it was snowing out in late June on the Middle Fork. (laughs)

Steiger: Wow, what an amazing story--the whole thing.

Elliott: Shall we jump to the Grand Canyon?

Steiger: I guess we'd better, huh?

Elliott: Eh, we can always backtrack. Yeah, we'd better keep at it. Okay, so it's back to this kind of circuit and then moving from the circuit, meaning Idaho-Oregon-British Columbia circuit into just single-area operations, which my focus was Idaho. This would have been 1963-1964 when I was nineteen, twenty. And then in 1965 is when my dad first decided, I think it was in the spring of 1965 he first decided, "Hey, let's do the Grand Canyon." Now, he had done a trip previously when he was chairman of this River Outings Program for the Sierra Club, several years prior. He had done a Sierra Club trip in the Grand Canyon, and we need to do a little more research here, Lew, because I'm not sure if that early Sierra Club trip was with Georgie White or with the Hatches. I think it was with Hatch.

Steiger: He went on it?

Elliott: He was the Sierra Club leader on a Hatch trip that contracted, but that he signed the contract with Hatch to do the trip. He signed the contract as chairman of the River Outings Program for the Sierra Club. He contracted with the Hatches to do it, and I'm not sure of the year. I'm willing to guess that that's probably going to be like maybe 1958 or 1959 which is also right at the end of his being chairman of the River Outings Program of the Sierra Club. In the early sixties, right around, oh, 1961, 1962, after doing this for seven years, starting in 1956 or so, there started to get to be some "jealous" people, but also some fair-minded people on the River Outings Program that said, "Hey, Lou Elliott is over here developing this river company, getting bigger and bigger every year we look at it. Meanwhile, he is contracting on behalf of the Sierra Club with his own river company. There's a clear and obvious conflict of interest here." So Stewart Kimball had to confront my father on that, which would have been probably about 1961 or 1962-- probably 1962--and said, "Lou, it's a conflict of interest, can't do this anymore. You're going to have to bid on your own trips, and you're going to have to send out bids to everyone else, and the bids all have to come in to an objective third party on the Outings Committee here to evaluate."

[END OF TAPE 1 -- more to follow]

ROB ELLIOTT INTERVIEW (continued)

[BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]

So he did that for one year, and he bid on his own trips, and he outbid everybody else and still got the business, but he said, "This is nuts," or "They've turned against me," or whatever. I'm not sure what was going through his mind at the time, and he said (laughing), "I'm off into new horizons anyway. See ya' later." And he left the Sierra Club Outings Program at that time. But also right around his last year on the Outings Program, he went on this Hatch trip through the Grand Canyon. So, then five or six years go by....

Steiger: This is a motor trip?

Elliott: This is a motor trip -sort of. I mean, you probably know the way the Hatches ran it back then: the early bridge pontoons were twenty-seven feet long, not thirty-two or thirty-five -they were a little bit smaller, a little bit shorter, and they had motors hanging out over the back to go through the flat water, but they rowed the rapids, with double rowing positions, with great big oars, thirteen- or fourteen-foot oars, two guides rowing the boat. And they would get to the rapids, and they'd pull the motor up and they'd row through the rapids. This would have been around 1960, 1961, 1962, but you'll have to get those stories from Ted. Have you done Ted yet?

Steiger: No.

Elliott: Better pick him up here, he's....

Steiger: He's like next on the list.

Elliott: Good, okay. Okay, so cut from 1959 to 1965 and the spring of 1965, and my dad has a board of directors with ARTA because -and another part of the story with the incredible growth, here a quick footnote, Lew, is that my dad, from the very beginning ran ARTA, organized ARTA, American River Touring Association, as a nonprofit association.

Steiger: Had it set up that way?

Elliott: Had it set up that way.

Steiger: What was he thinking?

Elliott: Marketing. He was thinking he could get vastly more editorial support from newspapers and magazines if it was the American River Touring Association, Incorporated -a nonprofit association for river running. And that was his whole idea, and that's why he set it up that way. And he was a master at generating press coverage with major dailies and magazines. And he had a guy named David Kay who worked with him in the early sixties during this real incredible growth spurt in the early sixties of multiple operations, who would set up tours for my dad, and he'd get in his motorhome and two weeks before he arrived in Tucson, Arizona, or whatever, they would have received three or four news releases, black and white photos, and David Kay would have already gotten interviews set up with the Arizona Daily Star, or whatever it was at the time, and my dad would go in and interview with these people in cities all around the country, generating these newspaper articles for their travel sections or major dailies, all through the early sixties.

Steiger: Things about river running and that kind of thing.

Elliott: Yeah. And that's where he was really a master salesman. He set ARTA up as a nonprofit for two reasons: he set it up because he honestly believed that, he honestly believed that he didn't want to make any money at it, he just wanted to take the profits and turn it all back into making it bigger and more and turning more and more people on to river trips. And if they were all turned on to river trips, and turned on to nature, and families could come together and enjoy this experience on the river, and learn about the natural world, that they were all going to, at some level, become advocates for preserving it. That was always part of his thinking, and that's why kind of that Sierra Club model, if you will. And that was why he set it up as a nonprofit. There was also the utilitarian pragmatist, Lou Elliott, that said and knew, "This is also good sales, because we can generate this media support, press coverage as a nonprofit." So that's why he set it up that way. So there we are, back to the spring of 1965, and as a nonprofit association, he had a board of directors. There was a guy named Grant Rogers on the board, and an accountant from Pasadena named Charlie, and each had these nice little nuclear families with a husband and wife and two kids, and they got together and said, "Hey, Lou, take us down the Grand Canyon." So he had eight people. "Sure, it'll cost you this much. And I've never done it, but I went down once with the Hatches several years ago, and let's go do it!" The board members' families would underwrite the trip by paying for your families to come. And so it was these two families, eight customers. This was August of 1965. There was my father, there was Steve Gantner and me, and the two Hildebrand brothers, Ross Hildebrand and Kern Hildebrand -the four of us as guides or guides-in-training to run this boat in the Grand Canyon.

Steiger: Because you've never even seen it.

Elliott: I'd never even seen it. But let me back up a little bit. I had had some prior motor experience along the coast of Mexico. Most importantly, I had some prior motor experience on the John Day River that ran south to north in the heartland or the middle of Oregon and flowed into the Columbia. We only did it once as a Sierra Club trip, but it was with these long rafts that were six feet wide, twenty-four feet long, looked like a great big giant air mattress, eighteen- inch diameter tubes all joined together and parallel. And we had two of these rafts -no, we had three of them. We had two side-by-side and then another single unit. We had only three engines, and we started having so much engine trouble on Day Two that two engines weren't working. They were three different kinds of engines, so we couldn't cannibalize anything. We'd broken all the handles, and this would have been probably about 1963 or 1964, I can't remember exactly, and I was rapidly becoming the best motorboatmen on these rafts, these "Huck Finn" type things on the John Day River. My father could see that, and so he was prompting me. I remember this Johnson that we had: we put a pair of vice grips on the accelerator throttle and I sat on the hood of the engine, because the handle was all broken off, and I reached down with my left hand and would use the vice grips to do the throttle, and I would grab the base of the engine with my right hand -this is the only engine still running at this point, and we still had two days to get out of there -and braced my feet on the side of the transom and steered with my butt all the way down the river. What we did is, we took this twenty-four-foot raft and we put the other raft in front of it, so the boat's forty-eight feet long at this point. It wasn't much of a whitewater river, but it still had a lot of currents and eddies, and it really forced me to learn exactly how to read current way ahead, and to read the influence of eddy currents. If I allowed those tubes to get across an eddy line, then it was gonna start ferrying against the eddy and move me right into the shore at the bank, and we're gonna be in trouble. And so that's where I first learned how to run a motor, on the John Day River. So here we are, off back to the Grand Canyon with these two families on this trip. We had a thirty-five-foot -it was the bigger bridge pontoon at this point, not twenty-eight-footers, a thirty-five-foot bridge pontoon.

Steiger: Thirty-five or thirty-three?

Elliott: Thirty-three, sorry, Lew. Yes, you're right, it was thirty-three, and it was black, we didn't paint it. And my father took a.... (break to change battery) My father took a tractor tire tube - not the tube, actually, it is the protector between the tractor wheel and the tractor inner tube. [called a "boot"] It's really quite thick. And he took this [boot] and made it into an oval in the very back of the floor of the thirty-three-foot pontoon, and glued it into the floor so he made this well. And then he had parachute cord that was laced all around this unit, and it pulled the tractor tube now welded to the floor of the boat, up off the water level and up around the whole back of the boat, so that you could stick an engine down inside. Because it didn't occur to him that, hey, we could just cut the floors out of these boats.

Steiger: But the motor wasn't hanging over the back end?

Elliott: No. He knew he didn't want to hang the motor off the back end like on the Hatch trip he was on, because it was just floppin' all over the place back there. He knew that he wanted the motor protected inside the boat.

Steiger: So you've got a floor, but you've got a hole in the floor.

Elliott: So we have a floor, we didn't cut out the floor, we still had to bail this sucker, but we stuck the motor through this engine well, inside the back of the tube, through this hole in the floor.

Steiger: So, how come you're not rowing your ten-mans? Why did you go with a motor anyway?

Elliott: I don't know. I don't really know.

Steiger: Is it just because that's what everybody did?

Elliott: I think that's probably it -that's probably what everyone did, except Norman Nevills. I mean, that's what everyone was doing in the early sixties. We went, "My God, we have these two families, they have little kids, this is huge water, nothing like we've seen even on the Salmon or anything. So let's do this big motorboat." That's how we decided to do it, and that's when we started on motors -but, catch the next part of the story, it's critical. About a month before the trip, these students from UC-Berkeley call us up and say, "Hey, we have this little paddleboat. We want to go through the Grand Canyon. Are you runnin' any trips down there?" My dad said, "Yeah, we're runnin' our first trip in about a month." They said, "Can we come and bring our paddleboat? And how much would it cost?" He said, "You can bring your own boat, yeah. A hundred bucks each, and you paddle yourselves down the river, and we'll provide you support. We're goin' anyway, a twelve-day motor trip." So they brought this amazing boat down the river. I'll try to describe it in words as best I can and as succinctly as I can. It's made up of about eight tubes -nah, maybe ten tubes. Each tube is about, oh, eight inches in diameter along the bottom of this boat, except for the outside tubes, which were about ten inches in diameter. So the floor of the boat is made up of eight tubes, the two outside tubes are ten inches. However, these tubes are all inserted inside of nylon sleeves -they're not welded together, they're inside of nylon sleeves that are all stitched together. Not only that, but there's aluminum ribs to the boat. These aluminum ribs go through other nylon sleeves that are stitched perpendicular to the nylon sleeves in which the tubes are thrust. And so this tubular arrangement is rather like the hull of a boat as it comes up around the side, and the tubes are all stitched together so they come together to form a prow in the front of the boat. In the back the tubes start to come toward each other in the stern, but instead of making a prow, they end in a little transom about three and a half feet wide and about maybe fourteen inches deep. It's made of three-quarter-inch or one-inch plywood. In the middle of that plywood transom is an oarlock with a seven-foot oar that rudders this unit. And then you have three people on each side that are paddling. They're not sitting on the tubes, because the tubes wouldn't support them with these aluminum ribs and stuff - rather you're sort of laying down on your butt and your hip, leaning over the side of the boat with short little canoe paddles, four-and-a-half-foot-long canoe paddles, and paddling furiously along, while one guy in the center with the seven-foot oar is ruddering.

Steiger: And you can really rudder!

Elliott: Oh, this is a great unit! And so we have a hybrid trip right from the git-go -a paddleboat and a motorboat for twelve days in the Grand Canyon, August 1965. And it's an incredible trip, one of the finest trips I've ever run in the Grand Canyon. We only flipped the paddleboat twice: one was in 24½ and one was at the top of Hance. I wasn't in it at 24½, but I was in it in Hance, and I was ruddering. (Steiger laughs) Whoops!

Steiger: Well, it's your first time you've ever seen it.

Elliott: We're entering too far to the right in Hance, and we go down....

Steiger: Imagine that, the first time you've ever run it. (laughs)

Elliott: Oh yeah. And we go down two -you know how there's the double tongue on the right side? We're in the bigger right-hand tongue, and we go down and I said, "Oh, God, we're too far to the right." And I rudder us left, and I say, "Forward, forward!" and they're paddling furiously. But we go into the lateral wave, kind of three-quarter sideways. Over we go, right in the top tongue of Hance. And we swam for a long ways, Lew. We swam all the way through the Son of Hance, and it was the longest swim I had ever had professionally, or personally (chuckles) on a white water river. But those are the only two times we flipped over, the entire trip. But the other thing I remember on the trip was that we never hit a rock once. We probably had about 30,000 cubic feet per second, steady, the entire trip. We didn't have peaking flow back in 1965. I think the motor stalled on us only twice in a rapid, 'cause it kind of flooded out, and it always started on the first crank, each of those two times. And it was the most flawless trip I've ever run in terms of props, in terms of the motor, in terms of everything.

Steiger: And it was 30,000, in 1965?

Elliott: It seemed. We didn't know. It just seemed like a lot of water, which I know, it doesn't make sense, because they're trying to fill the lake at this point. Why are they runnin' 30,000?

Steiger: What time of year was it?

Elliott: August. The only thing I can think of is that.... You know, I mean, back then, to crank all eight generators full bore, was 28,500. It might have been 28,500, and they just needed the electricity someplace. You know, I don't know what the deal was.

Steiger: It wasn't really fluctuating?

Elliott: It was not fluctuating very much at all. It was pretty high, a lot higher than we expected it. So we moved. The other (chuckles) notable thing I made about it is we had a Les Jones scroll map -that's all we had. But all these other trips we ran over the years up in Idaho and Oregon and stuff like that, we didn't even have as good as the Les Jones scroll map. The first time I feasted my eyes on a Les Jones scroll map, I thought, "Wow, is this cool or what?!" I still have the map down in my garage. And we'd write notes all along it, just like Les Jones wrote notes all along it. This is an incredible map, but we still lost our way a little bit, and we're down there in the Muav Gorge. We arrive at National and we go, "I don't think this is National Canyon." And we never even saw Havasu. (chuckles) We just set up for the little rapids at Havasu -we never even stopped at Havasu. This is a twelve-day motor trip, and we didn't even do Havasu! Oh, we were mortified.

Steiger: Did you know that Havasu was a good place [to do?]?

Elliott: Oh yeah, I'd hiked down Havasu as a Boy Scout on an Easter trip, gosh, probably when I was about thirteen, hiked into Havasu in 1957.

Steiger: It stands to reason it'd be easy to miss it, wouldn't it?

Elliott: Yeah, oh yeah.

Steiger: If it was your first trip.

Elliott: We didn't hike down to the river with the Boy Scouts -we just went to the village and swam around in the pools there and stuff.

Steiger: Now, why was it a twelve-day trip?

Elliott: I don't know why we did it so long. I don't know why he did twelve days other than....

Steiger: That's what they did.

Elliott: That's what they did, you know. I'm glad we did it in twelve days, because we needed an hour or two every day just to fix things that were breaking all the time.

Steiger: So you guys traded off in the boats? You didn't have to run the motorboat all the time?

Elliott: No, unt-uh, we traded off. I got to run Lava. We were lookin' over Lava and we looked at it for, oh God, probably an hour (laughs) it was so hot. We'd look at it, you know, and look back at the banks, and all the rocks would seem to move back the opposite way the current had been moving. My dad turns to me and asks, "Well, would you like to run it?" I said, "You bet!" (laughs) I mean, I was flattered. So that was cool. We ran it on the left because we had so much water. I think I have a picture somewhere of that first run in Lava.

Steiger: So you've got four boatmen that were goin', and you just traded off runnin' these two boats. (

Elliott: Yeah.) And your dad and everybody just took turns driving that motorboat?

Elliott: Uh-huh, yeah. That set us up for the next season, because the number one and number two guides for 1966 was myself and Steve Gantner. And so my dad scheduled -he thought, "Oh, we should be able to fill three 12-day Grand Canyon trips in June, July, or early August, prime summer months, in 1966. That shouldn't be too hard." But you gotta remember, that there were only seven, eight, or ten trips a summer of all the commercial outfitters back in 1965 and 1966, and so he thought that was pretty optimistic. He had nine days in between each of the three 12-day trips, for turnaround time to repair equipment, buy more food, relax a little bit and get ready for the next trip. Seemed good, especially since my dad was one of the early people at Lee's Ferry that caught.... [19.4 minutes into this side of tape, tape goes blank]

Steiger: This is part two of the River Runners Oral History Project. This is an interview with Rob Elliott in Flagstaff. This is May 9, 1996. It's still just me, Lew, and still Rob Elliott. We're just pickin' up right where we left off. We were down there in the bottom of the Grand Canyon on this first ARTA trip. Elliott: Actually, we're through with that trip. It was twelve days and we flipped the paddleboat twice, and it was a terrific trip all-in-all: the accountant and his family, and Grant Rogers and his family, had a terrific trip and we loved it. And we provided ourselves some fundamental training and figuring-out of equipment systems and stuff. So we headed into 1966. My father optimistically, he thought, heading for the scheduling of two boat trips, so thirty people, fifteen on a boat. We were gonna, of course, graduate to side tubes at that point. [In] 1965 we didn't have side sponsons on this thirty-three-foot pontoon. We just had a single unit. So we added the side sponsons in 1966, so we can put fifteen people on a boat. Let's go to thirty people a trip and do three 12-day trips, nine days in between each trip. But, my father way underestimated demand. We filled up those three 12-day trips, thirty people per trip, along sometime by about March 15 the following spring. My dad turns to me on Easter break from college and says, "Bob, I want to schedule two 9-day trips in those two break slots between the two trips, if you think you and Steve can just run the trips all summer long. I'll have support crew, two sets of equipment, so I'll have a whole second set of equipment for the two 9-day trips." I said, "We don't have any days off at that point." He says, "I know, but this is when the people want to go, and this is when we can book 'em. So you do a twelve, and the very next day you do a nine, the very day you get off you do a twelve, the very day you get off you do a nine, the very day you get off you do a twelve." And I said, "I'm game if Steve is. Yeah, sure." And Steve said, "Cool, we'll do it." So Steve and I ran those two boats, five trips back-to-back, so that would be 12-9-12-9-12 in terms of the total number of days in a row that we ran in the Grand in 1966. It was pretty incredible, because I don't know where we got the energy. Well, I do a little bit, but we were so jazzed. Here's a couple of stories with it. My dad could hardly keep up on the motor maintenance, and we had Johnsons. But he also was trying out a new engine called a McCullough Ox, and the McCullough Ox was a great big, heavy engine that easily weighed as much as the Honda four-strokes we're using today. But they had this great big propeller, about a ten-inch diameter propeller on the bottom, and much lower rpm than the Johnsons, and he thought this would be the cat's meow. This is like for running barges. We don't need a speedboat motor for running a barge, for God's sake. And Steve and I, he worked it out, because we were getting tired, getting flogged by the end, and we came off one of these nine-day trips toward the end -I think it was the second 9-day trip on this schedule, and we were slated to hike out of Whitmore Wash and drive to Lee's Ferry and start the final twelve-day trip. And the guy that we met at the bottom of the Whitmore Trail had a message from my dad and said, "I can't get enough engines. You've gotta bring one of your engines off." And we looked at our engines, and the McCullough was working pretty decent for us, and the other engines were really on the fritz -we thought they'd be lucky to get the rest of the trip out to the lake with our assistants runnin' 'em. So we said, "Okay, let's take the McCullough." So we took two fourteen-foot oars, because back in those days, you could have a spare engine, but you also had to have spare oars on your motor rigs, like the Hatches had. The Park Service said, "The Hatches row 'em with oars, and you're runnin' with motors, if the motors don't work, you can at least row 'em, so you have to have oars." So we had these oars. We'd never think to [row] the thing, we have the side sponsons on at this point. That's pretty nuts, to row a boat with side sponsons. So we said, "Let's take the oars, we don't need them anyway." And we took these two fourteen-foot oars and we cradled the 120-pound McCullough engine in between 'em and put 'em on our shoulders and humped 'em on out the Whitmore Trail in the middle of the day (

Steiger: Oh my God!) and loaded them into the Jeep that was waiting for us at the top, and off we went for Lee's Ferry to run the final twelve-day trip. The kind of equipment we ran with was just incredible. I remember a trip in 1967 where we forgot the pumps at Lee's Ferry in the truck, and so my dad thought, "Well, we'll just put life jackets around the pumps and drop them off the Navajo Bridge to these guys. So we're comin' underneath the bridge, and they're wavin' at us from the top of the bridge, and we're trying to understand what's goin' on, and then we see these two things drop in the water. We don't know that we forgot the pumps at this point. And so we got to pick up the splattered pumps. (laughter)

Steiger: They're in pieces?

Elliott: Oh, they're in pieces, they're all broken up from the impact on the water, and go, "There's our pumps. Now what do we do? We don't got any pumps. Oh, for God's sake." So we just ran the trip without pumps. But I remember that somewhere around, oh, Fishtail area, maybe upstream from there -Kanab Creek? I forget the rapids that we did it on, but we sliced the boat on a piece of muav limestone and we cut right down two tubes and across two diaphragms and we didn't have any pumps. And so we got to Kanab Creek about two in the afternoon, and we baseball stitched up this long tear across two diaphragms, glued it all together. By then, dinner was ready. Then after dinner the crew comes to me and says, "How are we gonna blow this boat up, Elliott?" And I go, (chuckles) "These don't take a lot of inflation. It'll only take a pound and a half. We can blow that with our mouths." They go, "What?! you must be nuts." I said, "Nah. If we just take turns. We got three valves goin' here, and we'll just keep rotating, and we'll just go down there with a couple of beers and start blowin' up these tubes." So we blew up three sections, entirely by mouth. Took us about two hours. But that was the equipment scene. I mean, I was amazed at how much I learned about repairing outboard engines and changing carburetors from one engine to another, and of course changing the water pump impellers constantly. I never knew any of this stuff, my brother was the mechanic. Just learned it by doin' it down there on the river. So there's the early years. We'd better jump into the Outward Bound years and then back into how ARTA switched over to oar and why -how that all worked out. Is that okay, Lew?

Steiger: Yeah, one little detail question: what was the water like that year?

Elliott: I don't remember the water really well. It's not going to be really accurate.

Steiger: It wasn't like super-low.

Elliott: It wasn't super-low, and there wasn't super peaking power, because I remember running for three years, until 1967, before I woke up to my first motor raft stuck on the beach from low water. So peaking power was not a regular thing for us. And in 1967, it was on a June trip, it was stinkin' hot, I was camped at Forster, and woke up the next morning, and -it was a one-boat motor trip -and my boat was a good thirty, forty yards from the river.

Steiger: I hate it when that happens.

Elliott: I hate it when that happens! And the folks looked at me and go, "What happened?" And I went, "I don't know." I couldn't explain peaking power, I didn't know about peaking power. I couldn't explain that, "Oh yeah, they stopped running the generators to save electricity, it was the middle of the night, when you count far enough back up to the dam...." I didn't know anything about those flows. I just knew that I'll never park my boat on a shallow beach like that again. It wasn't until two o'clock the next day that the water came up enough to float the boat so we could move on downstream. So we had a pretty hot, stinkin' day at Forster.

Steiger: I don't want to digress....

Elliott: Keep goin', you ask the questions, we'll take what time we need. Let's go.

Steiger: Okay. Now, you guys started in 1965, you had the Les Jones scroll map, that's all you knew about the Grand Canyon. (

Elliott: Yeah.) What did you know, like in terms of interpretation? You don't even know why they're lettin' water out of the dam. (

Elliott: No.) What was your take on, say, the geology and stuff like that? And then the next year that you were working, how did that stuff evolve?

Elliott: Okay, in 1965 I'm a junior in college, first trip in the Grand Canyon. What do I do? I go back to UC-Davis where I'm an English major, and the first class I sign up for is geology. My roommate was a geology student too. I spent sixty or seventy percent of my study time that entire fall just on the geology course, and just sort of did my English literature and stuff on the side. My real focus and my real consuming interest was geology. I remember we had two hundred students in the class, and I've always been pretty competitive, and so Ron Gestor who became an ARTA guide for a period of years and lives in Northern California now, was in the class with me, and I competed with Ron. He was a geology major. I remember by the end of the semester I was fourth in the class, as an English literature major. The first twenty people in the class were all geology majors. And I remember Ron was just a little tweaked at that. But I had a use for the knowledge, I had a use for the information. And so I just soaked it up. So I was able to go into 1966 and do a pretty darned-fine job teaching the geology. I remember we took a natural history class from a college down the river, some geology students one year in, must have been, 1967. And they asked me to give a lecture on the geology. A geology professor asking me to give a lecture on geology. And so I decided to give a lecture to the class, I think it was down at Nevills, and I decided to give it on geomorphology of the river and why rapids form, and debris fans and fault zones and all that stuff. And what I did is, I read from Powell. You may remember that incredible quote from Powell, I think it's August 5, where he talks about "In our observations we've noted that where the strata parallels the river we have this kind of a river, and when the strata is falling and we're cutting obliquely up through the strata, it's swift but no rapids. But when the strata turns upwards and the river cuts down through it, then we have rapids and falls; and it's rapids and falls like that that we are beset with this morning." And I took that passage out of Powell, and that became the focal point for the geology lesson about the geomorphology of the river. And when I was all through, the geology professor just -he clapped and said, "That was terrific, that was good stuff." So that's how we did the interpretation.

Steiger: Figured it out pretty fast.

Elliott: We figured it out pretty fast.

Steiger: Okay, didn't mean to spin you off there. (pause)

Elliott: Where we at, Lew?

Steiger: Well, we've just had a season where we gotta get from motoring to.... How are you doing?

Elliott: I'm fine, don't worry about me. I told my office one o'clock. That's an hour from now, and I can always call 'em and come in a little after that. We're okay.

Steiger: Okay, we gotta get from motorin' to paddlin' (

Elliott: Okay.) and ______.

Elliott: Okay, we're at 1966 and then we run full season, all season long in 1967. I think probably the most notable thing about 1967 -1967 or 1968 -I guess it was 1967 -other historians and researchers can correct me on this, and that's fine, I don't care -the exact date is less important -we had an Easter trip, Sierra Club, three boats, thirty-six people. And that is the great photo in Life magazine of a boat flipping in Lava Falls.

Steiger: You were on that trip?

Elliott: No, I was not on that trip, because Easter break didn't coincide with my spring break at UC-Davis, so I wasn't able to run in spring on the Easter trip of 1967. Hey, all river runners that have seen that photo remember it well. There's a guy in a red rainsuit on the shore. His mouth is so wide open, his camera's at his side, he can't even take a picture. And other people are on the boat, just hanging onto this webbing of ropes across the boat. I mean, why we didn't catch somebody in the ropes is beyond me. And there's another guy -it might have been the guide -in the back, he has his (chuckles) hand over his mouth, and it's like, "Oh shit, here we go!" I mean, the boat is well over the tip- over point. And the story is notable because it was the third raft in the series. The other two rafts just went out and picked everybody up. They untied the boat, rolled it over, had it all fully-rigged back again in about three hours, and were on their way.

Steiger: No big deal.

Elliott: No big deal. But here's the big deal: this guy wants to sell this photo to Life magazine, some photo contest or something, and my dad hears about it. He's freaked. He says, "Oh, man, this'll be really bad press." My dad, who was the great salesman, really blows it at this point, Lew, let me tell ya'. He calls up Life magazine and just implores them to keep our name out of the photo caption. Don't say anything about.... It wouldn't be fair, don't say anything about American River Touring Association as the outfit or anything like that. I mean, this is just gonna scare people off. He didn't even want them to publish it. "Don't publish that photo." And the guy said, "We're gonna publish the photo. But okay, we won't mention American River Touring Association." Was that stupid or what?! I mean, here was an [opportunity]....

Steiger: Did you think it was dumb? Elliott: I was only in on the decision after the fact, and I wasn't really asked about the decision. It was just the story I heard later in the fall from my dad. But what a stupid mistake that was. Yeah, obviously, we should have had American River Touring Association in the caption of that photo.

Steiger: (inaudible) That is a classic picture.

Elliott: It is. Okay, so, there we are....

Steiger: Actually, we're moving to paddling, but there's one thing we don't want to.... I guess we're moving to rowing, because we don't want to forget the snout boats.

Elliott: Yeah, we won't forget the snout boats. We're movin' to rowin', and stop me if there's an important point you want me to elaborate on.

Steiger: Well, I'm tryin' to stay with it.

Elliott: Okay. So, full season in 1967, we're pumpin' up the use big time. Easter trip with, like, thirty-six, forty people, or something like that. This is before the restrictions on thirty-six were comin' down. I mean, there's a huge Sierra Club charter. Spring of 1967, full season in 1967, really pumpin' up, crankin' up the use. Now we have two sets of equipment goin' by 1967, so two logistical cycles, so we can really get the use, because the demand is there. It's just takin' off, 1967 and 1968. I'm out of college at this point, and I graduate in June -actually December of 1967 is when I graduated, because I had to go one extra semester because I took a semester off when I was a sophomore to go down to travel around South America for about three months, and that's a story in itself. So I had to take an extra semester, and I didn't graduate, and I went to UC-Berkeley for my final semester and graduated in December of 1967. So then I'm full-bore manager at this point with my dad, and operations manager. I guess I'm twenty-four about this point.

Steiger: And this is manager now of Grand Canyon? Or still Idaho?

Elliott: No, I'm the manager of Grand Canyon. I'm the area manager for Grand Canyon.

Steiger: And that happened....

Elliott: That was 1966, 1967, and 1968 -those three years. I'm area manager now -not operations manager for the whole ball of wax. I'm an area manager of Grand Canyon for those years, age twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. And March of 1968 I turn twenty-four. I'm out of college for a couple of months, and the Vietnam era is full-crank at this point. Two weeks after my twenty-fourth birthday I get my 1-A notice that I gotta report, I gotta go. And I show it to my dad and I say, "I'm not going. I don't believe in this." And he couldn't believe that. He couldn't believe me on that. He said, "Whatcha gonna do?" I said, "Well, I'm gonna become a conscientious objector to war. I don't think this is right." I took ten days off, went over and stayed in a friend's little cabin in Marin County in Ross, California. I'll always remember this. And I was hosted by a good friend where I was going to the Unitarian Church in San Francisco across the Bay, and his name was Dory Schwab, S-C-H-W-A-B. I just sat and read and read. I read a lot, I wrote a lot, and I must have written forty pages of material. I distilled it down to the ten best pages I could write, submitted it to my draft board (which helped that it was Berkeley, California), and two weeks later they told me I was a CO, conscientious objector to war. They didn't even ask me to come in for an interview, to verify that yes, I indeed was the author of this paper of why I should not be in the military. So got out of the military. This was, oh, early or mid-April at this point, and I'm about to head down the Grand Canyon for another season -or so I think -and I get another notice from my draft board saying, "Okay, you have to do alternative service. You have four choices: you can carry bedpans in a mental hospital, you can drive trucks for Goodwill Industries...." I forget the third choice. And the fourth choice was "Other," blank. Go find something to do that meets alternative service requirements. And I had heard a friend was working for the Colorado Outward Bound School. We'll just call it Outward Bound from here on out for the discussion. His name was Chris Brown. Chris' old girlfriend was Libby Frischman, and Libby was my girlfriend as a junior and part-way through my senior year in college. Libby told me about Chris Brown and working for Outward Bound as a CO for his alternative service. And I thought, "far out!" So I wrote a letter -I still remember, it was on pink paper, it was half a page long, and I said, "I'd like a job, here's my background running river trips. Hire and train guides. Here's all the places I've been. Went to South America, did some snow and ice climbing, and I've generally been around." And they called me up and had about a ten-minute interview over the phone and hired me on the spot and said, "Okay, we need you to report July 2, 1968, at our Marble base camp in the Snowmass Maroon Bells Wilderness Area, and I was jazzed. I thought, "Okay, this is cool." So I ran a few trips that year: spring, Easter trip, 1968, and I ran the month of May and all of June in 1968 and then went off to Outward Bound for two years, because that's what I had to do for alternative service. And I still remember my interview at the Marble base camp with the associate director, Gary Templin. Gary was asking me all sorts of questions about climbing and knots and what routes I'd done and where I'd climbed and how much ice experience I had up in Glacier and South America and things like that. Just really curious -he's not asking me anything about rivers. At the end of the interview he says, "Well, Rob, we're gonna send you out for twenty-three days with a patrol of nine students in the Maroon Bells Snowmass Wilderness Area on a mountaineering course. And I said, "That's cool, I want to do that. That's great. But what about the river program?" And he said, "Oh, man, we just need so many mountaineering instructors and we're so strapped, we're growing so fast ourselves, we decided to put off the river program for a year." So I worked for Outward Bound for the first several months as a mountaineering instructor, which was way cool and has a whole mess of stories all to itself. The next spring I sat down with Joe Nold, the director of Colorado Outward Bound School, and Joe Nold said, "Okay, we want to start the river program in Dinosaur National Monument on the Yampa and Green Rivers." All we had to do was get a special use permit at the time. This would have been winter/early spring of 1969. He said, "We're gonna run it with the women's courses where there's a module. They'll run some in the mountains, some on the river, for three days, et cetera, four days. And we'll also do it with some specialty programs, management seminars, and some high school students. We have a special grant from East High in Denver. We'll run spring programs with them in the month of May. Let's go!" The only thing Joe told me -this is probably actually the fall, maybe November, of 1968 -the only thing Joe told me was, "I want you to design the program, Rob. The only constraints I'm really gonna give you is that it has to be all paddle." I had never paddled in my life. I had kayaked, of course, as I told you earlier in the interview, and I'd run a lot of rivers, I knew rivers. I had never paddled a raft, ever. And I told Joe that. He said, "That doesn't matter. You've had enough river background, and you know Outward Bound now, and I know Outward Bound, and I know people, and I know how this all works, and it can work paddling. Just figure out how to do it." I said, "Okay." So the next weekend -I forget when that was, but sometime in the winter we took a raft -it was probably in the spring, actually. I bought six rafts -they were Green River rafts, built in West Virginia, from my dad, for Outward Bound. We took one of these rafts in the spring -in March, I think -in Dinosaur, and took a bunch of Outward Bound instructors, some of whom had had some river background -kayaking and stuff -and we had four days to work with. I said, "Okay, the objective here is we're gonna just go figure this thing out and write a manual on how to paddle a raft. We'll have that manual written when we get off the river four days from now. Let's go." And we did it, we just figured it all out and how to do it. And that's all that Outward Bound ever ran in all of 1969 and all of 1970. But by the time I walked away from Outward Bound in the fall of 1970, we had sixty-two paddle instructors, fully qualified, that had gone through the training program and knew how to captain, how to paddle instruct in Dinosaur National Monument. The other interesting thing of note was that about sixty percent of them were women. Joe Nold and I never ever talked affirmative action. We never ever talked male/female, the woman/man thing. We never even discussed it. We just hired and trained women and guys for programs and hired the most competent people we could find, and trained and retained the most competent people we could find. It didn't matter if they were men or women -it never even crossed our minds. It probably crossed Joe Nold's mind, it never crossed mine, and we never ever talked about it the entire time in Outward Bound. And so by July of 1970, technically my alternative service was up, but I made a commitment to Outward Bound to stay with them through the summer program. Another interesting thing Gary told me -Gary was a Green Beret.

Steiger: This is Gary....

Elliott: Templin, the associate director that hired me. And I was a conscientious objector to war. So here's this CO and this Green Beret trying to work things out together. And Gary was actually a really neat guy -Gary Templin, I mentioned earlier. And he hired me for three hundred dollars a month for Outward Bound. I worked my entire first year for three hundred dollars a month -never complained, never said a thing. He said, "I'll pay you three hundred dollars a month, Rob, because that's what a private first-class in the Army would get. And that's what you're doin' here, is alternative service." I said, "Cool, that's fine, I'm just happy to be here." I never said a thing. He came to me at the end of the first summer in 1969 and said, "Rob, we want you to stay through next summer. I know you're up with your alternative service, and it's only right that I raise your salary to seven hundred dollars a month. This private first- class bullshit doesn't really hold anymore. You've proven yourself."

Steiger: Now you're a sergeant? (laughter)

Elliott: I just said, "That's cool. I like the job, I'm havin' a good time. Happy to do it." So here we are the fall of 1970, Outward Bound is behind us. In the summer of 1970 my father came along -we had an extra space....

Steiger: Hold it, I just need to recap now. So you started the Outward Bound paddling program. (

Elliott: Yes.) They had the idea. They said they wanted to be paddling. (

Elliott: Yes.) But that was it. That's all you had, was learn how to do a paddle program. (

Elliott: Yeah.) That's wild. Now, one other question: What did your dad do in the war? He was pissed at you for being a conscientious objector?

Elliott: Well, he started the river business pretty late in life, when he was like forty-eight years old or something. And so by the time I'm doin' Outward Bound, he's in his late fifties.

Steiger: Where was he in World War II?

Elliott: Well, he got out of World War II because he did all the printing for all the military bases in the Bay area, and he printed all their tabulating cards for their payroll programs and stuff on his letter presses. And when he was conscripted to go off to World War II, he called up the head of the Naval shipyards in Alameda where he did all their printing for them and said, "Want me to go off to war, or do you want me to stay around and keep doing all your printing for you?" And the guy said, "You're not goin' to war. You're doin' your job for your country right here."

Steiger: Interesting.

Elliott: Yeah.

Steiger: Okay, not to digress, it's just that's such a different take on it, those two time periods.

Elliott: Those two time periods, yeah.

Steiger: So, back to 1970?

Elliott: So, back to 1970. I got back to Oakland, California, and I'm twenty-seven years old. Oh, summer of 1970 first. We were doing this management training seminar on the Green River through Lodore Canyon, four-day trip. We have a cancellation about two weeks before the trip, so there's room for one person. I went up to Gary Templin and I said, "Gary, can my dad come along on this trip? I'd really like him to come and see what I've been doin' in Outward Bound. He doesn't know much about this." And Gary said, "Sure, you bet." So I called up my dad, he came along. He had a good ol' time. That was the first that I learned that he wasn't really a very good boatman. (laughter)

Steiger: You didn't know that before?

Elliott: I didn't know that before. He was a great visionary, he was a great organizer, he was a great salesman, he was a great motivator of people, and he taught us all how to row, and he taught us about currents and eddies, and he was great at methodology, but he himself was not really a great boatman or a great guide. That's why I took the rafts down the John Day River, not him. That's why I ran Lava Falls on the first trip through for ARTA in 1965, because he wasn't all that confident. He knew that I was the better boatman.

Steiger: Did you understand that....

[END TAPE 2, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B] Elliott: I didn't understand that about river trips until this management training seminar with Outward Bound. I understood that about other things.

Steiger: When he told you, "You want to run it?" did you realize it was because you had better ______?

Elliott: No, I didn't. I just thought he was....

Steiger: Being nice or something.

Elliott: Well, I just thought he was kind of giving credit. I thought he was honoring me, for sure. I didn't think he was doing it because he lacked the self-confidence. But he didn't run the motor that much in 1965. He's already in his early fifties by then. Of course, I'm in my early fifties right now. But the point is that he was great in many, many ways. He was not a great athlete. He taught me to ski when I was seven. By the time I'm eleven, I'm already a much better skier than he. And it's kind of the same thing with river trips. But I didn't realize this until the management training seminar with Outward Bound. And they say, "Oh, hey Lou, you have some river background, you captain." We rotated captains in the first hour on the water at Outward Bound, so that everybody was brought right into (

Steiger: Here's what's goin' on.) here's what's goin' on, right from the git-go. We'd have, you know, six captains, ten minutes apart in the first hour on the water, just to figure -you know, to kind of sort the crew out, get them sorting each other out, early on. We could go into all sorts of methodology digressions if you wanted, Lew. So my dad's captaining the boat with Outward Bound, and (chuckles) he's really not doing a very good job. And I kind of realized, either the old guy's kind of lost it here [he was 64 years old at the time], or he never was really good at this -meaning reading the river. So, he did learn what Outward Bound was all about, and he learned what I had been doin' for a couple of years, which is important to the next part of the story. Did you have something else you wanted to ask?

Steiger: No, let's keep going. This Outward Bound stuff is really important.

Elliott: Absolutely! This Outward Bound stuff is critical. It is essential stuff to come back to when we get into the wilderness stuff, when we get into the participatory, philosophical stuff, Lew, (

Steiger: Yeah.) because it started with me -not in Outward Bound, because I could fill you in on my dad. Long before Outward Bound, my dad was into the participatory philosophy, long before I went to Outward Bound, and I learned that from him. I only developed it and honed it with the Outward Bound philosophy.

Steiger: I think it's really important for....

Elliott: You want to do that right now?

Steiger: Well, I don't know. I don't want to break the.... We might have to reschedule, because as far as where we're at right now, I want to do this history, but in terms of the [interview], maybe we need to just reschedule one more session.

Elliott: I'll do as many sessions as you want. But let me tell you this next segment, and then you make a call at that point, about five minutes down the road here, whether you want to come back to some of the philosophical stuff - which is fine, because it all weaves in. It's much better to weave it all in, than to just talk equipment evolution, and then to talk program evolution.

Steiger: When it comes to lifting up the whole commercial sector, we need to tap into this stuff.

Elliott: When you want to talk.... Okay, then let's weave some of the philosophy into it. But let me tell you this next part, then you make the call to bring it back however you want on the philosophy stuff. So, I moved from Denver to Oakland, California, in October of 1970. And my Dad says, "Rob, I want to hire you as ARTA's operations manager with total control over six-state operation: California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona." The Wyoming program was a contract program, we weren't the outfitter. I would just be the contracting agent for ARTA for the Wyoming program, so let's forget the Wyoming program. There's five states of operations we had at this point, going simultaneously -huge company, 140 guides, equipment all over the place -this being 1970 and going into the summer of 1971. And he wants me to be the operations manager over the five states. And so the hierarchy would be me, and then I'd have an area manager in each one of the states that would answer to me. And so it was all the operations stuff, all the programs stuff -no finance, no marketing -but all the other stuff. I said, "Yeah, I think I'm ready for that, I think I'd like to do that." It was a big step, it was a big leap, but I'd already been doing some simultaneous programming in Outward Bound, two or three trips simultaneously, and had learned a lot, a lot of management skills in Outward Bound also. It was still a big leap. "But," I said, "it's conditional." And he said, "Conditional on what? I'll pay you whatever you want. You're the man I want for this and I think you're ready for it." I said, "No, no, no, I don't care about the money part. This is conditional on three things." He said, "What's that?" I say, "In Grand Canyon we've got to convert." We had eleven thousand user days at that time, and I said, "In Grand Canyon I want to convert seventy-five percent of the Grand Canyon operation to oar power from motor power in a five-year period, phase it in. You market it, and I'll set up all the operations, do all the hiring and training." And he said, "Cool, let's do it."

Steiger: Right there?

Elliott: Right there, no problem.

Steiger: ______reasons why.

Elliott: Easy discussion. He'd been on that Outward Bound program, and we'd kept up communications over the years, and he was ready, and he thought that was appropriate. Fine with that, no problem first condition. So I take a big breath and I go, "(sigh) Alright, the first one's down. Cool." He said, "What's the second?" And I said, "We have to have a paddle option on every trip all over the West, that we can run paddleboats safely. That means a paddle option on every trip except the Selway River and the Tuolomne, California: the American, the Stanislaus, the Rogue, the Main Salmon, the Middle Fork, the Utah trips. And I think I even have a way to do paddling down the Grand Canyon - just like that first trip in 1965, remember?" He said, "Yeah." And so I hold my breath. And remember, he'd been on this Outward Bound trip where we did all paddling, (aside about tape) and he says, "Okay, no problem. I think that's the right thing to do, let's do it." I said, "It's gonna take equipment, take a lot of training. It'll take manuals." And he says, "Okay, what's your third condition?" I said, "We've got to immediately and aggressively start recruiting and hiring women guides." And he says, "Oh really?!" I said, "Yeah, I just left Outward Bound and we had sixty-two qualified people in Outward Bound -sixty percent of them were women, didn't even occur to us. And I'm moving into a company that has no women unless they cook."

Steiger: There weren't any?

Elliott: Unt-uh. And he says, "We can't do that." And I said, "What do you mean we can't do that? You know there were two women instructors on that program in Outward Bound you did with us. They were pretty mongo, they can handle it. What do you mean 'we can't do it'?!" And he said, "Rob, think of the liability. They're not strong enough. We're gonna flip boats, we're gonna wrap boats, people are gonna die, we're gonna go to court and we're gonna lose. That's nuts!" I could see he'd really dug in his heels. And I could also see that I had gotten quite a bit of progress already in this discussion. So I wanted to cut my losses about this point, and I said, "I'll tell you what. You say that the big problem here is strength." He said, "Yeah." I said, "Okay, how strong do you have to be to be a paddle captain?" He says, "Well, yeah, the girls could do the paddle captaining just fine." He called 'em "girls," I call 'em "women." That's part of the problem here. He says, "But you just have to be smart, and you've got to mold that crew, you've got to get 'em all working together. You can do the whole thing as a paddle captain. You've got to get your crew all worked into it, and you've got to read the river better. Yeah, women can do that. I don't have a problem with intelligence here, it's just strength." And I said, "Okay, what do you say we just hire women to do the paddle rafts then, which you just agreed to? And that's all the women -we'll just do the paddle rafts." And he says, "Okay, I'm willing to compromise with you on that." And I just took another big breath and went, "Okay, we got it." Once they're in, there'll be no holding back. And that's the way it worked out, that's the way it started.

Steiger: That is wild! Yeah, and about then, let's see, who'd we have? There was Georgie [White].

Elliott: (laughs) Yeah, about then, summer of 1971, we had Georgie, and not too many other women. Steiger: We are gonna run out [of tape] here at some point. But we can just pick it up. I don't want to slow you down, because you're on a roll.

Elliott: I know, but this is where you have to make a call here, Lew, and decide: Do you want more history? or do you want to start weaving-in philosophy?

Steiger: You've got twenty minutes.

Elliott: Don't worry about that, Lew!

Steiger: Well, I am.

Elliott: I can call the office and tell 'em I'll be a little late.

Steiger: We've got the time on the tape. Well, I think for me, I want to just keep goin' as long as you can stand it. I mean, we do need to get to these things. I'm starting to be concerned as far as the ______.

Elliott: We can start to go into the.... (tape turned off and on)

Steiger: So you just told your dad....

Elliott: These three conditions.

Steiger: I'm curious as to why those things were important to you. Where'd you come up with that stuff? Like why switch a big percentage to rowing, et cetera? And if that's a digression, if....

Elliott: No, no, no, let's talk about it a little bit, but we'll be kind of thinking out loud together here, Lew, because believe it or not, I'm not sure I've ever really asked myself that question, and I'm a pretty introspective guy. Why -did - I -confront my dad with these three rather fundamental elements to evolving ARTA, and in effect, also evolving the river industry? (sigh) My dad was a pretty intimidating kind of guy -not so much in his manner, but because of his accomplishments, and because of his silver tongue, because he could talk you into or out of just about anything. So he was a pretty intimidating guy to go up against. I remember when I was sixteen and he came up to me in the offices there on Jackson Street in downtown Oakland and said, "Rob, I'm really glad you're takin' to this river stuff so much. I'm really glad you like it as much as you do, because the reason I'm doin this is because I want to build up a company that I can pass down to my children, and pass down through the generations" -kind of an old German ethic, right? from the German side of our stock. And he tells me this and I look at him and he's a pretty intimidating guy, and I look at him and I say, "Dad, that may be true, but I don't buy it. I think you do it because you love it, and because you love doin' it, and because it just (chuckles), you know, cranks your motor. I don't think you're doin' it to pass down to me, and I don't buy that bill of goods. I love river running, and I will probably go into river running, but I'll do it because that's what I choose to do, not because it's being handed down to me." And I don't know where I got the guts to go up against this pretty intimidating guy with that kind of stuff. (sigh) But I also had some powers of observation. I would just kind of stand back.... I mean, in those years if I had a "totem" if you will, it would have been an owl, it would have been "watch and learn, see what you can pick up about people and stuff." I picked up and learned a lot about him -all the good and all the bad. And I'd also noticed that he had a huge ego, which I didn't cater to very well. He also really attracted "yes men" around him -people that could just stroke him and say, "Oh yeah, Lou, that's a terrific idea, you should do that." He needed that. But I wasn't a "yes man", because I commonly confronted him on some of this stuff. And he came to me one day, I think when I was about nineteen, and said, "Rob, I really need your opinion" -I think it was some really sticky personnel issue -"because I know I can get an honest response from you, you're not gonna 'yes' me along." And I took that as one of his supreme compliments to me, was that, "Cool, alright, it's workin'. We're there, we're equals now." So that was important in terms of his relationship to me and mine to him. We were also, I think, at some fundamental level, pretty competitive together. I was competing and developing my strengths of logistics, in particular, and some of this philosophical stuff that was building up and developing within me, against his strengths as a motivator, a salesman, a visionary program developer. But let's go back to that question: Why did I feel so strongly about hiring women? Why did I feel so strongly about paddling? Why did I feel so strongly about converting seventy-five percent of the third-largest company at the time, to seventy-five percent oar? And I don't know exactly, except that it was some combination of my father and his influence and his philosophy and his thinking, and taking that away, off to Outward Bound. And everything I learned from Gary Templin, and in particular Joe Nold, and the whole Outward Bound School, and moving right into that and working with that and loving it, and drinking it so deeply, and then coming back to my dad's company and presenting these things to him -but all I'm doing is presenting a lot of his same philosophy right back to him in a slightly different form, because I was able to go off for three years to Outward Bound and retool it in a way.

Steiger: Yeah, it sounds like he was doing [those things] all along.

Elliott: Yeah, and he was already doin' a lot of that stuff already.

Steiger: How do you spell Nold?

Elliott: N-O-L-D, that's Joe Nold, I think the second director of the Colorado Outward Bound School, which was begun in 1962, and which I first started to work for in July of 1968 and worked through September of 1970. So let's go back a little bit, if you want, to weave in some of the philosophical stuff, then that's fine. My dad was always big as a participatory kind of guy. His style of programs, his operations style, his "philosophy," if you will, was to get everybody involved as much as possible. I mean, he'd get them right into the kitchen, helping cook everything. He'd get 'em around the campfire, singin' songs at night. He'd get 'em helpin' with the chores and everything. And that's just what we did. And as young guides in the early sixties, some of these Idaho stories and stuff, we'd be standing around in our little clique -the guides, meaning -talking about our guide stuff, and he'd walk by us quietly, and he'd turn over to us in a sideways glance and just kind of whisper and project, "Mingle!" That was all we needed. We went, "Oh fuck, we've gotta go mingle. We're not mingling with the folks." And then we'd go mingle with the folks, and we'd bring it back, we'd bring it back to integration. And that was fundamental here. This is a fundamental philosophical thing that I think is essential to many of the best-run outfits, and AZRA does not have a handle on this per se, but it has always been my philosophy, which I no doubt learned from my father, Lew, that the antidote against burnout was seein' it fresh through the eyes of each and every guest we took through the Canyon or down the river, wherever it might be. The antidote against burnout wasn't goin' and findin' private space for yourself so you could regenerate -the antidote was through the eyes of the people that were discovering it for the first time, that "fire in their eyes" that Rod Nash speaks of. [See "Rod Nash" interview, River Runners Oral History Project.] I learned that from my dad and the people themselves that we took down the river, and we had to mingle. Have to mingle to break down the barriers, so that in the end there isn't this sense of the guide and the guided, or the served and the server -so that there was more of a coming-together. There was not a protection of the "guide mystique." We were to share that, we were to teach that. We would get people behind the oars with us, whether it was a fifteen-year-old kid or a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother, and teach them how to row, about currents and eddies. We taught that because my father said to teach it to people, and because it broke down the role barriers. And if we shared what we knew, it would break down the mystique, it would open them up, and we then might be that much more interested in what was passionate in their lives, and share that back from them to us. And what they were seeing in the Canyon they would share with us, and we'd all pump-up from it.

Steiger: I bought-into that segregation thing ______my career where that was definitely going on. I think we all go through it, where you are in a little boatmen's club, and there is definitely a distinction. But like you're saying, I think one of the keys to survival -what I didn't figure out forever and ever -it's that you get a lot more out of it if you're the guide, that these people have all kinds of stuff to give you. It's not just how pumped they're gettin' on the place, a lot of times it's what they bring from wherever they're coming from that you can tap-into. You know, their stories and all the stuff that you can learn from them. I think we overlook that sometimes.

Elliott: Some of it, also Lew, was that I certainly learned from my dad. But I was always a questioner, throughout my whole life, from very early-on. I said one of the big values that he taught me was this incessant quest for the truth, and whether it was the truth of my childhood and my family of origin, or whether it was the truth about the universe and nature and how it all fits together and works, or whether it was the truth about people and what makes people tick. I always questioned things, and I loved that, I still do that. I did that all through college too, and getting ready for this interview, I kind of thought through what were some of the really major influential thinkers that were important to me in college in English literature and philosophy, et cetera. And when I worked for Outward Bound and I had this half- hour interview with Gary Templin and he said, "You're gonna go off into the Maroon Bells Snowmass Wilderness Area with nine students for the next twenty-three days." I said, "Wow, that's terrific, Gary! I need three things." And he said, "What?" I said, "I need literature. I need anything that tells me what Outward Bound is all about, how it works, why it exists, what its mission is. Secondly, I need who in the base camp here at Marble is the best thinker on all of this stuff and can articulate it and talk to me? I want to go on walks with them and just talk to 'em." The guy's name was Chris George. "Thirdly, I need an assistant instructor who knows some of your systems and can do orienteering, because I am weak at orienteering. That's my weak point." So I started to pull together some of my own readings and some of my own literature that supported the Outward Bound stuff. Probably the most significant piece of literature in all of that stuff -there was two things: one was Rachel Carson's A Sense of Wonder. She's noted in the early sixties for writing Silent Spring. That was the big red flag that said, "Wait! We are poisoning the planet, we are poisoning ourselves with DDT and pesticides." And that became a paradigm shift in the environmental movement at that point. That's Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. You're probably familiar with the book, you've probably read it.

Steiger: No, I haven't, I'm ashamed to say. And also, A Sense of Wonder? That's the title of a follow-up, sort of?

Elliott: I don't know if it was written before Silent Spring or after, but the book that I got my hands on was A Sense of Wonder, and I've read this quote many, many times to Outward Bound groups and to river trips and stuff. You want me to read it?

Steiger: Yeah!

Elliott: Okay, 'cause this is a great quote. A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us, that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the Good Fairy, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the source of our strength. She was an incredible writer. There's some other great quotes here too. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. And she goes on, on that one too. It's one of my favorite Rachel Carson quotes. But as I was developing my own sort of "internal syllabus," if you will, for Outward Bound courses, the literature that I went back to, that was the most formative for me, was Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Divinity School Address. This seems pretty obtuse, but let me read three quotes from it in here. The first quote is probably one of the most important. I'll just read all three in a row as he wrote them. This is from page 99. It is a low benefit to give me something. It is a high benefit to enable me to do somewhat of myself. That's the first quote. That's pretty essential stuff. And he has stuff before it and after it, but those are the essential words, the essential message. But here's another really important quote from the same Divinity School Address. He's talking about some of the great men of his day, the Wesleys, the Oberlins, saints and prophets. And he says, Thank God for these good men, but say "I also am a man." Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. That is certainly a formative quote in my college years that I've applied to my river running. So those are the first two quotes. But here's my favorite, and this is essential to Outward Bound. This is also essential to my philosophy through life. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he announces I must find true in me, or wholly reject. And on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. So I've always been interested in the world of ideas, and the philosophical stuff, and always introspective. But my father wasn't so much introspective as out there living this stuff. But I would remember having philosophical discussions with him: one was on altruism.

Steiger: Well, now where'd you run across those? Was that when you were....

Elliott: That was in an American literature class.

Steiger: Now you ran into those before you went to work for Outward Bound? (

Elliott: Yeah.) This is Ralph Waldo Emerson and....

Elliott: Ralph Waldo Emerson. This is in the 1800s when he.... Steiger: And this is in a book?

Elliott: The title of the book is Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism, Channinge, Emerson, and Parker, introduced by Conrad Wright, and it's just an essay.

Steiger: But that writing of Emerson's, was that published under separate cover at first?

Elliott: No. Maybe it was, but this was printed in 1964. I picked up on it in a class in my senior year at UC-Davis, and... The Literature of American Transcendentalism was the name of the course.

Steiger: Great quotes. (

Elliott: Oh yeah.) ______.

Elliott: That's hot stuff. Emerson. It exalts the value of the individual, Lew. He says that the individual's experience in the world has merit, has value, no matter who he or she is, and that it's not for some philosopher or some river guide or someone else to say that, "Oh yeah, they got the answers." And all we need to do is kind of turn their head over and take the knowledge, take the truths of the world, and pour it in, like a jug into a mug. That's what we called it in Outward Bound. We can do this jug-to-mug, or we can do this as experiential learning. And of course what Outward Bound is all about is experiential learning. But the foundation of experiential learning is what Emerson is talking about there, that we have it all inside in our core that we can access, if we're given the right prompting, the right experience, the right provocation. And it values, it exalts the individual.

Steiger: What is that first quote about enabling instead of....

Elliott: Oh, it's all there on the tape.

Steiger: We'll get it ______. That's a great quote.

Elliott: It's good stuff. So I learned this participatory ethic from my father when he would walk around, and we'd be kind of segregated from the guests and he'd say, "Mingle!" And then I went to college and read Emerson. And then I went to Outward Bound and learned, (chuckles) and lived experiential learning in the outdoors as a methodology. And then I came back to my father and said, "We've got to do paddle rafts." Not to paddle, to get the folks doin' it; to get them involved, because that's where the discovery is.

Steiger: "And, By the way, we gotta have women."

Elliott: And why do we have to have women? It's real easy. (chuckles) Because women, more than any other ingredient -for me, back in the early seventies -softened this male ego river guide, and brought us back to our humility.

Steiger: Well, you know, it's funny. Here's your dad saying, "Mingle!" on the one hand, and yet he's totally bought- into the mystique on the other hand that women couldn't possibly row this boat.

Elliott: Well, you could also say that he was just buying-into risk management, Lew; that he was buying-into avoiding the court cases and the liability bullshit.

Steiger: Doesn't want to deal with these problems.

Elliott: I remember some of those early Grand Canyon trips in 1965, 1966, 1967. I remember a couple trips in particular, but I would always look for the people that weren't gettin' into it, that weren't connecting with the experience, and ask, "What's goin' on here?" And I remember one point, somewhere down around Nautiloid on the second day of a nine-day motor trip. And there's this guy who's just not gettin' into it. He wasn't talking with anybody, he was very quiet. I went up to him and I said, "Hey, we're kinda startin' dinner late here. We need a bunch of firewood. And it's really helpful to have it in different sizes: some little twigs to get it cranked up, some bigger stuff to keep it goin', and then some bigger stuff to make it last. And then some other small stuff to poke it in when you need to flame up the fire to cook. Would you mind gettin' a couple of people and organizing them to get all that pulled together?" It's just what he needed. He was a retired Navy guy, and all of our woodpiles, at every camp, Lew, from there on out, here's your big wood, here's your medium wood, here's your small wood -all just the right length for the firepan. He got into it, he loved it. There's another guy that was really quiet. I was having a bunch of motor problems, and as I said, my brother was the mechanic, not me. And I said, "You know anything about engines?" He kind of perks up and says, "Yeah, I know a little about engines." Sounds like my brother: doesn't like people so much, but he sure likes engines. So I said, "I've never changed a carburetor before. I think that's what the problem is. Can you listen to his engine with me?" Three days later I had him runnin' the thing! running' the motorboat -not through the big stuff. He got into it, he loved it. There's another trip, Lew, I think this was (sigh) July of 1967. It was called the Washoe Pines Camp. They were out of Carson City, Nevada, I believe. And forty-eight hours before the trip went out, I had a new swamper coming down from Northern California, and he got sick and he wasn't able to come. I was told this at Lee's Ferry the night before the trip. They didn't have anyone for me. It was a one-boat trip, it was just me. And I went, "Oh man!" It's a nine-day trip, one boat, one guide, that's me. The guys driving the truck can help me rig it, and they're comin' tomorrow morning, about nine hours from now. What am I gonna do? So I just went to sleep and figured, "When I wake up in the morning, something'll happen." I woke up in the morning and I was thinking -they were about an hour away -and I said, "They're gonna have to run the trip." So they arrived in their vans from Northern Nevada and I went right up to the director of the program and I told him what had happened, and he was really worried, and I said, "Wait, wait, we've got this thing solved." And he said, "What're we gonna do?" And I said, "I'm runnin' the boat, the kids are runnin' the trip. I'll show 'em where the hikes are, I'll pick out all the camps, naturally, and I know where all the food is in the boxes. We'll divide 'em all up into food crews. They'll do all the cooking, all the clean up, unload the whole boat, load it all back up, and they'll have a good old time." And he kind of said, "I think you're onto somethin' here." This is the year before I went to Outward Bound. I didn't know anything about Outward Bound then. I just ran the boat, and they did it, they ran the trip. One of the finest trips I've had down there in the Grand Canyon -they just ate it up. So the mingle thing, the participatory thing, the Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes -it's startin' to all come together. And off to Outward Bound, and Joe Nold says, "They all gotta paddle. You can't row. Only one guy gets to row. If they all paddle, they all get to do it." I was a little resistant at first, because I'd never done it, you know. We figured it all out. I'd never done it. What'd I do? I take all the instructors and I say, "Okay, let's go do it. We are gonna write a manual by the end of this four-day training trip that we're on." I don't know, that's just the way it came together. So back to October 1970, and I'm talking to my dad, we gotta do a paddle raft. Well, that's pretty easy, that came out of the Outward Bound thing. We gotta hire women. That's pretty easy, that also came out of the Outward Bound thing. And that also came out of my distaste for his rather huge ego, and the notion that I was young and liked women. The whole idea was that I saw an awful lot of incredibly competent women in Outward Bound, and I also saw that they softened this over-inflated Outward Bound instructor mystique of "the big mountaineer." They helped bring us all back to earth. And that was essential. I didn't explain it that way to my dad, he wasn't gonna hear it that way. But why seventy-five percent oar power in five years? Boy, I don't know, I can't say, other than it's a whole life evolving.

Steiger: And why seventy-five percent and not a hundred percent?

Elliott: (chuckles) That's a really good question. At first it was going to be 100% conversion to oar, and in the thick of the controversy, we stopped at 75%; for three basic reasons: (1) We run great motor trips. People have a great time, people who might not sign up for an oar trip. (2) It keeps our options open to shifting market demand. And (3) If I ever wanted to sell, the company would be worth more. (sigh) I came out of this thing, Lew, as a motorman. Well, yeah, but you could say, "Rob, you came out of this thing rowin' ten-man assault rafts in Idaho and Oregon and British Columbia." That's true, but I had run enough motor trips, 1965 through 1968 to know that they were really fine trips. The people had a very legitimate experience in the Grand Canyon. They discovered things, they learned things, they were excited, they were passionate. The fire was in their eyes on those motor trips, every bit as much as on the oar trips I've run since. And the real thing that they were discovering was not the place, but themselves, and what was goin' on inside. And perspective, and what was important in their lives and what wasn't important. And that can be done on any kind of trip -I'm convinced -with enough time. With enough time to just let things move along at a natural pace, too. But I still wanted to run oar trips -partly because the company, remember, had its motor operations in Glen Canyon in 1962, 1963, 1964, and it had its motor operations in the Grand Canyon 1965 through 1970, but it had oar trips all over the West. We had oar trips all through seven or eight different rivers in California, the Rogue River in Oregon, three rivers in Idaho. We're still doin' some stuff up in British Columbia once in a while. I mean, we had oar guides that we could draw from, it was easy for us. We didn't have to take motor guides and switch 'em - though certainly some of them did, and some of our truly legendary guides switched from motor to oar, like Wesley Smith and others. But there were also guides that had four or five, six, seven years rowing, and bring 'em to Grand Canyon and row. No problem. The person that I hired to run with that, to go with that, the key figure, was Peter Winn. You may remember a couple of stories in Christa Sadler's book.

Steiger: I remember when I started as a swamper, I remember ______Pete and Mike.

Elliott: Mike Winn, his brother. David Winn, another Winn brother. A guy named Chuck Nacos -black curly hair, tall lanky guy.

Steiger: Let's see now, we're making the switch, but we're not gonna go to those ten-mans, we're gonna get these snout boats. I don't know if ______.

Elliott: Well, yeah, I don't mind gettin' into that.

Steiger: Because that was an interesting....

Elliott: I know, that's kind of nuts -I know, I know. But....

Steiger: Well, I was amazed at how well those guys used those boats, how hot your crew was with them.

Elliott: Well, and then the woman thing. Women rowing snouts! I mean, that's another part of the story also. Okay, why snouts? Fair question. Because we have ten-mans all over the West. And of course at this point, after Outward Bound, we don't have ten-mans all over the West, we have Yampa rafts, we have Green River rafts- the early rafts that came out of Whitewater Manufacturing out of West Virginia. So why didn't we use those? We already had 'em, that's what people knew how to row. And I think that we were kind of daunted by the logistical thing: How do you carry enough gear for twelve days through the Grand Canyon? And how do you carry all these people? We weren't used to running anything longer than five or six days up to that point, except for Grand Canyon motor rigs. By this time our trips have dropped from twelve days to nine days, and we're runnin' mostly nine-day and eight-day motor trips in the Grand Canyon by 1970. There's just an incredible amount of gear. And that was my dad's forté and my brother's forté - Jim -was equipment and gear. I wasn't the inventor, I was more the people person and a program person and a manager. They were the equipment people. So in a way, it was turned over to another department. So those equipment decisions were made by Jim Elliott, Pete Winn, Lou Elliott. And they saw that big desert rivers on the Colorado had been run successfully with great big oar boats by the Hatches, and by Western River Expeditions, and by other folks that rowed great big rafts -so let's do it! And so we took twenty-eight-foot pontoons, which were now sort of being phased out in favor of the thirty-three-foot pontoons, and we hired someone to shorten them. We didn't start out with snout boats, we started out with shorty pontoons: twenty-two-foot long pontoons, where you take out one or two chambers and you glue 'em back together at the diaphragms and there you have a boat twenty-two feet long and nine feet wide that you row with thirteen- or fourteen-foot oars. They were horrendous -especially in the wind. And we rowed those in 1971, five trips. And we started right out, from the git-go, twenty-one percent of our allocation in that first year of 1971 went down the river on shorty pontoons with ARTA. And it didn't take long -after the end of that first year the guides went, "These boats are really pigs -especially in the wind. We're gonna break our bodies apart if we keep rowing these."

Steiger: And these had floors in, or no?

Elliott: No, we'd taken the floors out by this point, yeah. We'd taken the floors out by this point. And so the winter of 1971-1972, Peter Winn and my father and Jim Elliott, as a three-person team in Martinez, California, went to the drawing board. Let's design three-segment, articulating snout boats on the twenty-two-foot bridge pontoons -that of course were the sponsors or the side-riggers, outriggers to the motor rigs, because we had a whole mess of 'em. And they manufactured these big steel frames that they had galvanized with wood parts that were encased in fiberglass - yeah, they were heavy, but they lasted twelve years. We built fourteen of 'em, and we gave two of them to the Museum of Northern Arizona, which later were bought by Steve Carothers. Steiger: Carothers and Ruffner?

Elliott: Carothers and Ruffner, which they used for fish research and stuff. And we used those from 1972 through 1976 -only snouts in our oar-powered trips. And during that time period in 1971 we ran twenty-one percent oars; 1972 we ran twenty-four percent oar; and then I started to lose track of the figures. We moved up to, oh, fifty, sixty-two percent oar by four years later when we were zooming in on our target of seventy-five percent in about a four-year or five-year period. That's also a whole story in itself in terms of as we were getting out of as much motor stuff, that's when we hired River Equipment Leasing Company [Relco], which is already part of your oral history project in terms of your interviews of Bruce Winter and Bill Gloeckler. And that can be woven-into the whole history here. But we still ran some of our own motor rigs, even with RELCO running their own motor riggs, until about -these guys might remember better than me -(sigh) until about probably 1976 or 1977. Then we cut out ARTA motorboats completely and it was only RELCO like 1977, 1978. And then when the RELCO contract came to an end, we pulled some of our own motor stuff at about the twenty percent level by the end of that decade. We ran twelve-day oar trips to Pearce on snouts. We had pretty decent water in the mid-seventies. And we did a lot of hiking and they were great trips. We'd go eleven and a half days to Bridge Canyon, mile 234, and then we would stop and have dinner. And then we'd put all four snout rigs together and we had about thirty people counting the guides and an assistant. And we'd made dinner on the shore and two of the guides would strap the rigs all together and put beer cans over the thole pins to protect against injury, fill-in all the holes in the decking area, and make a great big flat barge. And then we'd all get back on it and have a big slumber party all night long. Depending on the trip, we'd either sleep or party or whatever on down to Pearce Ferry the next morning and then motor on out. The boat would come up and give us a motor and we'd motor on out from there. Very important to point out at this point, that starting in 1972 -and it wasn't my idea, I'd love to give credit to whoever had the idea -they started to bring a paddleboat along. It was probably Peter Winn. What'd they bring? It was just a play boat, a toy boat. 12 foot Avon Redshank.

Steiger: But you had said that was one of your dad's things. So your thing for being operations manager of the whole deal was just running trips all over ______.

Elliott: Runnin' trips all over. And I wasn't thinkin' the Grand Canyon at this point.

Steiger: Not viable, too big, too....

Elliott: Not viable for paddle rafting, except we had run a paddleboat in 1965, but I was talking to Peter Winn -I'm pretty sure, I'm a little fuzzy on this, Lew -I was talking to Peter Winn about this paddle stuff in 1972, which would have been winter of 1971, 1972, and talking about How can we do paddling in the Grand Canyon? But it wasn't my idea -it was more Peter Winn coming to me and saying, "God, Rob, you're doing paddling all over the West in these other rivers. Why...."

[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B. Tapes 3 and 4 to follow.]

ROB ELLIOTT INTERVIEW (continued)

[BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE A]

Elliott: " ... in these other rivers -why not the Grand Canyon?" And I kind of go, "How?!" And he says, "That's easy, we'll just bring along a little paddleboat and we'll keep it out in Marble Canyon and we'll deflate it and roll it up at Unkar and we'll pull it out again below Lava, and the assistant guide'll run it. We have an assistant on every trip, and the assistant will run the little paddleboat." So we did that, I think starting in 1972, and I think it was Peter Winn saying, "Yeah, let's do this, and it'll tie right in with the other ARTA programs all over the West." So I was game, "Sure, let's do that." So that's how paddle rafting began in Grand Canyon for ARTA. And we didn't run our first all paddle trip with bigger boats like the Green Rivers, until we ran the whitewater school, which is another whole chapter here, Lew.

Steiger: (unclear) Elliott: And we started a whitewater school in 1971. The first two instructors were me and Duncan Storlie, and we ran a whitewater school, five-week program: Rogue River, Idaho, final expedition down through Lodore Canyon in Utah in the fifth and final week. And Roger Hoglund was on the trip, Louise Teal was married to Roger Hoglund. Louise Hoglund didn't go on the whole whitewater school in 1971, she went on the final expedition, though, with her husband, through Lodore Canyon on the American Whitewater School run by ARTA. Then she became a swamper with her husband, and then she became one of our early oar-powered guides in the Grand Canyon. And of course that's all documented in her book, Breaking into the Current. But I think the first female oar-powered guide was Marilyn Thompson, who was the girlfriend of Allen "Crazy" Wilson.

Steiger: Crazy Allen.

Elliott: Crazy Allen. He wasn't crazy, naturally -he was crazy just because he was so spontaneous and so fun-loving, and so uninhibited. And Allen's one of these people that shift from motors to oars in the early seventies. I think by 1971 he saw what was happening, and he went to Peter and said, "Hey, I want to start rowin'." In 1972 he started rowin'. Marilyn had already been swampin' for him as his girlfriend in the motor division, so she went along as an assistant, I think in 1972, rowin' snouts. By the end of the summer, she was rowin' snouts in 1972. And that's all documented in Breaking into the Current.

Steiger: So really, the shift to women, it wasn't like an overnight thing -it was just, you said, "Okay, we're gonna...." (

Elliott: No, but we....) ______we're not ______.

Elliott: Okay, the shift to women began with women as paddle captains in paddle rafts, starting in the summer of 1971, because that's what my father agreed to. And women started doing some rowing on California rivers the summer of 1971 on a, quote, "experimental" basis. And women were rowing as assistants down here in Grand Canyon in 1972 for ARTA. And I think Marilyn might have run her own boat at the end of 1972 -you could check with Louise on this -but by 1973, women were rowing. By then we were two years into hiring females, and my dad caved, my dad realized, "Okay, I won't be able to stop this."

Steiger: So then Louise came and then Suzanne. Did she start sometime in there?

Elliott: Suzanne Jordan started -her brother, Jerry Jordan, was an early oarsman for us. Can't remember the years exactly, Lew. It was probably, oh, maybe 1973, 1974. And there's another little piece of history you have to get here, but let me finish up on Suzanne. Jessica Youle, who I was married to in 1974 and 1975 and early 1976 -Suzanne came up to me and Jessica in the summer of 1974. She'd gone down the river as an assistant with her brother Jerry on an ARTA oar trip and said she'd never run a river before in her life, said, "I want to do this, I want to be a guide. What do I do?" I said, "Suzanne, you go off and you go to a whitewater school -ARTA runs one -and you work for another company someplace for a couple of three years. Once you have some experience under your belt, you come back. And then we'll consider giving you a job. But we can't start you from scratch with zero river background." She says, "Okay." I didn't hear anything from Suzanne for three years. She came back, and she worked two years and she became ARTA's area manager for Southern Utah, Cataract Canyon, I think in 1976. And she came to me in the fall of 1976, after climbing the ladder quickly through ARTA -probably would have been in whitewater school in 1975; guided California, Idaho, wherever, Utah, 1975; and then she ran the operation in 1976 in Canyonlands for ARTA - and came to me in the fall of 1976 and said, "Well, I'm back." And I just had to laugh. She said, "I did what you told me." And I said, "You're hired." And that probably would have been 1977.

Steiger: I remember seein' her there, up in ______. Paul Thevenin told a story -just for your edification, and not ______or anything. Louise, when I interviewed Paul, he said Louise came on that trip with him -she was a passenger -and she told him at the end of that trip, "I'm gonna go make my husband do this." (laughs)

Elliott: Is that right?!

Steiger: Yeah, she made him come out. She made Roger....

Elliott: Roger was a stockbroker, they lived in Tucson at the time, I believe. And then Louise would have gone home and said, "Roger, you gotta do this." That would have been the summer of 1970, then, that Louise was on with Paul Thevenin, because it was 1971 that Roger signed up for the very first American Whitewater School run by ARTA. So I trained Roger in a five-week program in the summer of 1971. And then Louise, you know, worked with her husband as a swamper, starting in 1972.

Steiger: This is such a vast subject, it's making me crazy. I feel like I need to keep us rollin' here, but there's so many things ______.

Elliott: So many nuances, yeah.

Steiger: Yeah. Another thing I really wanted to touch on.... Well, we should stay with the philosophy. I don't know, do we have time? How are you fixed for time?

Elliott: I'm fine, let's keep going. Let's keep goin' for a little while. I checked with Allen, and as far as meetings, decision-making, checks to sign and whatever, and he said, "Oh, hey, Rob, take your time."

Steiger: I've got about thirty minutes of tape left.

Elliott: So I just want to go in by late afternoon for an hour, hour and a half.

Steiger: We've got thirty more minutes, and then I'll just have to come see you....

Elliott: Some other time, okay.

Steiger: If that's okay.

Elliott: Sure! Let's decide what do we want to focus on for the fore, and when ARTA became ARTA Southwest, later to become Arizona Raft Adventures. Shall we cover that in the mid-seventies?

Steiger: Yeah, let's do it.

Elliott: Okay, jump into it. In the summer of 1971, I guess it is -1972? No, 1973 -summer of 1973. ARTA's running, oh, approximately forty percent oar, sixty percent motor at this point in our phase-in of oar-powered operations. I'm still operations manager for ARTA's five-state operations in the West, and we have area managers down here in Grand Canyon, and Peter Winn was the sub-area manager for the oar-power program in Grand Canyon. RELCO was doing some of the motor trips by this time, and then some other guides were doing motor trips just for ARTA also -people like Crazy Allen Wilson, Wesley Smith, and some other people -and I do a great injustice to forget their names and not remember -Mike Castelli, Bob Hasselbrock and his wife Dolores, they managed one year. So there I am in 1973, and I'm goin' pretty nuts for three years, 1971, 1972, 1973, all through my late twenties, and just cranked-up on this incredible growth curve. And we're approaching 140 guides. We have the whitewater school going, we have operations going in five different states, we've introduced paddleboats by this time all over the West. And we are well on our way toward our phase-in of oar boats in the Grand Canyon. And I'm workin' sixty hours a week in the summertime, goin' nuts, and guides come into my office that I used to be good friends with, and they want to just chat, and we chat for about ten minutes and then I start lookin' at my watch, and then I have to kind of break it to 'em that we've gotta cut it off, I've got stuff to do. And I'm hatin' that, just hatin' that. And that summer of 1973, I decided I just gotta get out of the office, I gotta make a tour of the operations. So I set up to go on a Rogue trip, about a five-week tour of the operations, up on the Rogue. Rather than just checking in with area operations and doin' this by plane or car or whatever, I decided I'm gonna be on the river for at least three days in every operation, with the area manager for that state. That's the way I've gotta do it, to check in with them. I want to do this by river, not sittin' in someone's office. And as I go on this tour of the West and I come down into Utah about four weeks later, after checkin' in with Wyoming, I go on three days, I do a Westwater portion of an eight-day Westwater and Canyonlands trip. And on that trip I met Jessica Youle and we got tight and ... she went the rest of the way down through Canyonlands with her dad while I went off to check in on the Arizona operation, hiked in at Havasu, took four days of an oar trip on down to Pearce Ferry, and then came back to headquarters and called Jessica at her hotel where she had gotten off Canyonlands and said, "Hey, what are you doin'? You goin' back to Massachusetts? Why don't you come down with me, we'll go back to California together and I have a segment of the whitewater school that I want to go up and run with Peter Winn up on the Main Salmon, and you could come along and do that with me." And she said, "Cool." And then we moved into together that fall and she lived with me throughout the fall of 1973 and winter,1974. Now, the reason I brought Jessica in is a very critical thing. I'm goin' nuts, my dad is goin' even further afield. He's runnin' trips on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia at this point. He's runnin' trips on the River Tara, in Yugoslavia. He's all over the map, and leavin' me to pick up all the pieces and run everything. He comes home from Yugoslavia and I'm checkin' his expense account and I said, "What happened to this $5,000 check? Who is this person?" And this was like two months after he'd written it, and we're tryin' to track down the money and keep all the books together, and he says, "Well, there was this family, and they didn't have hardly anything. There were these lumber guys, and they take logs down the Tara River, and they strap all the logs together and they row 'em down the river that way with big sweep oars on each end of the set of logs. And that's how we're gonna run people down the Tara River next year, on these logs with these guys. And that was an advance." (laughter) And I said, "Oh really?! Cool, okay, why didn't you tell me?" I think he was just a little embarrassed, or he didn't want me to confront him.

Steiger: Run people down on logs! (laughs)

Elliott: I wasn't concerned about the logs, but the $5,000 check to this struggling family in the mountains in the Tara Valley of Yugoslavia. And who's this guy that's gonna run trips for us on the Tara River next year in Yugoslavia?! But it was that kind of thing, you know. Every month there was something like that. And Jessica could see that I was just goin' nuts. And I was probably gonna go on like this until I died of a heart attack at age thirty-three or somethin'.

Steiger: Your dad was gonna run you into the ground.

Elliott: Yeah, my dad was gonna run me into the ground. And it was Jessica's influence, and Jessica's bolstering me up and giving me some confidence, that allowed me to confront the guy, which I did some five minutes to five [o'clock] on a February afternoon, on a Friday, in the winter of 1974. And I went up to him and I said, "Dad, this isn't workin' for me, goin' around cleanin' up your messes, and I'm not happy. I'm going nuts. I'm workin' too hard and I'm gonna die young, and I don't want to do that. Here's what has to happen. You've gotta retire" -he was sixty-two at the time - "or I've gotta quit and start my own company. Or I gotta go off and work for the competition, because I love this business. Or we can divide it up." And I guess I put this off until five minutes to five on a Friday afternoon, because that's all the time we needed. And this is just like my dad, and just like me and our relationship, for me to get all pumped up and making things larger than life. Just like confronting him when I came home from Outward Bound, he made it so easy. He said, "I don't want to retire, I love this business too. And I'll be damned if I'm gonna go head-to- head in competition with you, after everything I've taught you. So that only leaves dividing it up. You go home and you talk to Jessica and you have a proposal on my desk 8:00 A.M. Monday morning on how to divide this thing up, and we'll make it work." Five o'clock, we went home. And that's just the way it kind of worked out. I went home and talked to Jessica and she said, "Cool. This is exciting. This is important for you, Rob." And I knew it. I needed to break away -probably a whole lot earlier than that. But Jessica's father was an investment banker out of Chicago. So we called up Jessica's dad, Clint, and talked all about (chuckles) organizational structure and hierarchies and corporations and gettin' money, and by the end of the weekend workin' about twelve-hour days and writin' and writin' and studyin' and talkin' to Clint on the phone five times -we had a proposal on my Dad's desk Monday morning, 8:00 A.M., to buy the Grand Canyon operation from he and my mother. And he said, "That sounds good, sounds good, let's do it, let's set it up."

Steiger: Now was that ______.

Elliott: Not quite so easy. I remember that Jessica and I decided, "Well, we'd better get married, so that the folks realize that this is a for-real proposition and that we've got some stability and security in this relationship, as well as runnin' a company together." So we got married and went down to Big Sur for our honeymoon, and we worked through our entire two-day honeymoon on staff hiring and scheduling and a newsletter to all the guides at Grand Canyon as to what was happening. And [we] moved down to Arizona April 1, 1974; started runnin' it, took on the name ARTA Southwest. Jump ahead five years. The end of the contract. Jump ahead to January 1979, fifth year of the contract -four, five, six, seven -1978, I guess, fifth year of the contract, January. We call up.... Steiger: "The contract" is the contract with your dad?

Elliott: Okay, we had a contract with my dad, with ARTA.

Steiger: Not with the Park or anything.

Elliott: No, no, no. We got the permit in Grand Canyon, and I still remember it, because Bob Yearout [phonetic spelling] who is now chief of concessions for the entire national park system, was basically in Mark Law's position -he ran the river unit operation, and was also an up-and-coming concessions manager for the Park Service. And I still remember, we pushed through this permit transfer from beginning to end, in the spring of 1974, in seventeen calendar days. Bob might wince if he ever reads this article, but I still remember signing the papers at Western River Guides Association meeting in Reno with my dad, my mom, Jessica, and me, and Bob Yearout. So that was the contract with the Park. The contract we had with ARTA was that they would do one hundred percent of our bookings for twenty percent commission, and we do all the operations. So that's what we did through 1978. January of 1978, we go to all the Park meetings and we're startin' to study concession law. We got this RELCO contract out there, and concession law told us that (chuckles) fifty percent of all of the revenues from a subcontract operation can go to the federal government. We're scratchin' our heads and goin', "We gotta get out of the RELCO contract. Not only that, but we've got all our eggs in one basket with ARTA doin' one hundred percent of our bookings at an exorbitant rate of twenty percent. This isn't good either." And Jessica and I in the fourth year of our running down there in 1978, really had to do some soul searching. But by this point, we'd done all of our own guest evaluation forms as to how they liked their trip and the guides and the experience, and blah, blah, blah. It was a two-page, front and back, and there were six boxes on the bottom of page two of this questionnaire of, "Who would you like to get on our mailing list to send out information?" And we'd send all of these forms to ARTA in California and they'd send out brochures. We made copies of all the forms first, of course, and stuffed them away for a rainy day. The rainy day came in January of 1978. We contacted Steve Cutright--he was the head of ARTA at the time, general manager, and my dad, and we wrote letters. All we said in the letter was that the fifth year of the contract was up soon. We want to talk to you guys about doing some of the bookings ourselves, and we went to talk to you about renegotiating this twenty percent thing down to a little more market rate here, something lower. They were extremely threatened by that. They refused to answer our correspondence, or return phone calls, or even discuss it with us. And we got to August in the final contract year, and Jessica and I looked at each other and went, "We're gonna be hung out to dry, and we're just gonna have to go for it." And so we knew when they had a board of directors meeting on a Saturday in that August of 1978, and my mom was the secretary of the board. We called them, up, my mom answered the phone at ARTA and we said, "Mom, we have a message for you to take into the board meeting, if you wouldn't mind, if we can dictate it to you and you transcribe it and tell the board." And we just said, "We've written letters, we've made phone calls, there's been no response, and we're goin' out on our own here. If you want to book trips with us next year, you can, at fifteen percent commission...." And we had been called ARTA Southwest for five years, and we didn't say anything about the name. She took that message into the board. We started our own mailing list from all the guest information we had over the years, and we called up George Wendt from OARS and said, "George, can you help us do some bookings down here? We'll pay you fifteen percent commission." He said, "Sure, we'll help. Be happy to give you a bunch of bookings at fifteen percent commission." Remembering that our allocations were all locked-in just a few years earlier in 1972, and George had become a lot more successful than what his meager allocation in 1972 allowed him to run. So he was happy to book with us. And we booked sixty-two percent that next year, but not before ARTA called us up and said, "You're not using ARTA, that's our name. Cease and desist." And we already had our name on our letterhead, already printed, as Arizona Raft Adventures, because we knew that was comin', and didn't care. So I was quite surprised: we just booked out sixty-two percent that first year, which we felt pretty proud of. And then we went into a protracted two-year legal battle with ARTA where Jessica and I put about $70,000 into legal fees in 1979 and 1980, and my mom and dad put about $90,000 into legal fees also -but as part of the defense, it wasn't Lou and Claire against Rob and Jessica. The ARTA board had worked enough people around and gotten new people onto the board that the very first thing they did was fire my dad as president of ARTA, kicked him off the board, then they sued all four of us. ARTA sued Lou and Claire and Rob and Jessica as a joint action, contesting an illegal permit transfer in the spring of 1974. We fought that for two years and settled out of court, and agreed to book with them at fourteen percent commission at a sliding scale, 80-60-40, etc. But, for everything they failed to book on that sliding scale -let's say one year they were supposed to book sixty percent and they only booked fifty, we'd pick up that extra ten percent the next year and we could book on our own as a last-minute little clause that I (snaps fingers) threw into that contract. Thank God, because we moved into the recession years of 1980, 1981, and they could not book even at their reduced booking level under the settlement, the agreement that we had with them. So we picked up the bookings on our own throughout the early eighties and switched that all around. That's some of the dirty laundry, seamy side of the whole thing, but....

Steiger: I didn't realize it was so contentious.

Elliott: Oh yeah. That was some rough years in there, for sure. (sigh) I'm startin' to get played out for now.

Steiger: Yeah, I think so too. Can we schedule another session? (

Elliott: Uh-huh.) If you don't mind, I think....

Elliott: Well, the philosophy stuff, which we can pick up on more of, we've planted the seeds, we've woven some of the philosophy stuff into the story, into the history here. So we have enough seeds and kernels of all that philosophy stuff woven through the history that we can pick that up again, and it'll be just a very natural segue into all this allocation issue that we're headed into with the Colorado River Management Plan.

Steiger: Yeah. Well, it's interesting how this whole empowerment angle plays out between you and your dad. We should get into that.

Elliott: (chuckles) Oh, that's the fascinating part of the whole thing. The amazing thing is, between me and my dad, is that when I was a little tiny kid, he abused me and my siblings when he was controlled by "the bad dad," in a long chain, generationally, of abuse. But when he was "the good dad," which was most of the time, he taught me some incredible values, and gave me some incredible experiences and incredible opportunities -taught me the love of nature and the beauty of nature. He taught me how to rely on myself, and he taught me about the wonder of diversity in human beings, and how to value so much coming from so many different people, that I never, ever wanted to hire Lou Elliott clones, or Rob Elliott clones. From the early days, I always wanted to hire a diversity of personality types, because that reflected our guests, and there was strength in diversity. And then this ultimate value, this quest for truth and uncovering things and making things work, figuring out essential values, the essential qualities to what makes the world tick, and people, the natural world, the world of business -and fundamental truths, whatever it happened to be. He taught me all that too. My mom -I shouldn't leave her out -she taught me some big stuff. The major thing my mom taught me was there is security in adapting -the adaptive model, is what she taught me, which she also learned from my dad. And that was there's not security in the status quo, there is security in being a willow and being able to bend and move and change.

Steiger: Because she was good at that.

Elliott: She was good at that. She had to learn that to survive. And I learned that from her, much more than I learned that from my dad -the security that came from being able to adapt and move and look ahead and not get stuck in ruts, not get stuck in the status quo.

Steiger: I guess we can wrap this up for now. I have this little list which we didn't quite [finish?].

Elliott: Well, Lew, we only got through the ARTA years. We only got through about 1980 or so, and there's fifteen more years of evolution.

Steiger: Pretty significant.

Elliott: Pretty significant years in the evolution. The big thing we didn't touch on was the motor/oar controversy of the late seventies.

Steiger: Yeah, we need to do that.

Elliott: We need to do that. That's huge, that's big. And then the whole thing, which I began in 1979-1980 with Marvin Jensen, as we moved into the early eighties on the Colorado River.... Oh, what was it called? The Glen Canyon Environmental Studies, Phase One. And there was two or three years that predated the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies, Phase One, of activity, that started to come along with the uprating of Glen Canyon Dam, which I think....

Steiger: Oh, 'cause you were in on the ground floor of that.

Elliott: I was in on the ground floor of that.

Steiger: [Were you the one that] sounded the alarm on that?

Elliott: No, I was co-chairman of a recreation committee -co-chairman with Marv Jensen -on the uprating of Glen Canyon Dam, which I think was 1979 or 1980, right around there. And that really began the Glen Canyon environmental stuff that I worked on for fifteen, sixteen years -I forget exactly some of those early dates. So there's that phase too.

Steiger: Yeah. Just in terms of the guide audience, the other thing I wanted to make sure to hear about is how your company has evolved over the years, where labor is concerned, all the things that you've gotta deal with.

Elliott: I might make a phone call to Jessica, because I bought Jessica's interest in (whew) the mid-eighties. It might have been 1986, [I] I bought Jessica's interest in AZRA out in 1986, so she was with it for twelve years, and we only were married for three years, but we co-managed and co-owned the company for another nine years after we were divorced. And the reason I brought her back into it.... What were you just talking about before that?

Steiger: Just labor ______.

Elliott: Oh yeah, yeah. The reason I brought her back into it is that we had some big labor turmoil years when we had these really strict divisions of the company, which began in 1977 and lasted through the early eighties, where Jessica had her division, and I had my division and never the twain shall meet -different trucks, different boats, locks on the warehouse, you name it -which was a very interesting period. But we also had some important labor strife in there, and we had kind of a labor uprising when we paid 'em forty bucks a day for five years in a row. (laughs) And with no indexing to inflation, or cost of living or anything. This would have been through the late seventies and around 1980. And the guides wanted to form a union. It would have been (whew) about 1979 or 1980 they wanted to form a union, so we should talk about that. But before Jessica left the scene in 1986, we got our shit together, indexed salaries to inflation, and most importantly, started our boatmen advisory committee, which gets a lot of talk among guides. The important thing to remember is that the boatmen advisory committee has been around for something like thirteen or fourteen years at AZRA -this is not a new thing.

Steiger: But that was something you guys....

Elliott: Something that Jessica and I started.

Steiger: Yeah, that's one....

Elliott: Early eighties.

Steiger: I'm not really aware of the internal tensions in your company -just looking at it from the outside. I mean, I don't really think about it, but I sort of had this vague sense that you guys have been extremely advanced in that area.

Elliott: We have been, but our two big tension periods were late seventies, where we almost had a vote to unionize or not. The guy that headed that up was a guy named Mike Bronson. He was an oar guide in the late seventies. And then the other more recent labor strife stuff began in the late eighties, And that was with the unfortunate loss of some legendary figures at AZRA, like Wesley Smith and Martha Clark and Jimbo Tichenor, and all that story. And that starts to get kind of personal in there.

Steiger: Well, I don't know that we're gonna.... I interviewed Wesley, amazing interview, totally. We're actually gonna run that here pretty quick. Well, we're gonna run it in the next issue, as a matter of fact. But I don't want to get into.... Elliott: Into "why they had to move on" stuff.

Steiger: Well, I don't know. The angle is just, I didn't really realize that all this stuff came through all kinds of strife. I mean, what interests me is you seem to have a well-designed situation, actually.

Elliott: I think we have an exceptionally well-designed situation, but it has come through two major evolutionary periods. We came out of incredible strife in the late seventies, pulled it together, boatmen advisory committee, wages indexed with inflation, blah, blah. But then we went through some strife of a very different nature in the early eighties. (

Steiger: More personal.) More personal.

Steiger: Well, we don't need to get into the personality stuff.

Elliott: I don't particularly want to do that, I don't think.

Steiger: Well, I'm not lookin' for that. I mean, I guess what I would be interested in touchin' on is just -I'd like to see it in a positive light, just in terms of what have you had to deal with, what innovations have you come up with, and what I'm drivin' at there... and that's political, but.... I guess what I'm fishin' for is just some kind of enlightenment across the board, for whoever out there might read it.

Elliott: I can talk about that, Lew, and I'll think about it between now and our next interview session, but it would be wrong to paint a picture that is only roses, because it looks great from the outside, and it is great on the inside also, but only I think really great in the last two or three years. It's been great -that's not fair either -I mean, it's been great for a long time, but.... [And this is where Lew ran out of tape for Session One, about 39.7 minutes into Tape 3, Side A, of the audio tape (Tr.)]

* * * *

Part Two of an oral history interview with Rob Elliott. This is actually DAT tape number three. We're in Flagstaff, it's now May 14, 1996, and we're gonna pick up where we left off last week.

Elliott: Why don't we take a moment, Lew, to either pick up where we left off, or think through what were the big areas that we missed. Were there any? We covered an awful lot of ground, but were there any big areas that were missed or that we didn't move on to? I have two or three that come to mind that I'd like to cover this morning. One is that motor/oar era -meaning the controversy area in the late seventies -and exactly why did I, through ARTA and then Arizona Raft Adventures, convert from one hundred percent motor to seventy-five percent oar? And the struggle during those times and how it all resolved. And just as importantly, why AZRA still runs motor trips. That's just as big a question as Why did we convert? So that's an area. You mention the whole area that you could call employee relations -wanted to cover some of that -and I'll just let the questions come from you, 'cause I don't know exactly what you want to talk about in there. And I want to make sure we come back to some of the philosophical stuff we certainly touched on, or maybe even discussed at great length, but that whole notion -and I don't know who first coined this word, whether it was you or someone else -but that whole principle, the unguiding principle of how to get out of the way and give people permission to have their experience in the Grand Canyon.

Steiger: That would be a good one to end with.

Elliott: Yeah, that'd be a good one to come around to end with.

Steiger: I wish I [could take credit for that] -unfortunately it's Rod Nash. (laughter) Wish I'd have thought of it. I wish it'd been somebody else who said it, but he said it and he said it really well.

Elliott: That's okay.

Steiger: There's one that you left out that I also wanted to make sure that we don't forget, and that is the early seeds of the whole Glen Canyon Dam battle, how they rewound the turbines and all that stuff.

Elliott: Yup, oh yeah.

Steiger: I think that's real important. In my mind, really, the whole history, we did pretty good from the pure oral history standpoint. It was like we got to the early seventies. Basically, we got to, kind of, the formation of Arizona Raft Adventures, and we left off, we really don't have a picture of the company, a picture of the history of the company at all, really from the very early seventies to today. So as far as sketching ______.

Elliott: We definitely got through the.... We got through the mid-seventies, we got through the name change, we got through the oar conversion, but right now, if we ended the interview right here, people would think that AZRA's oar- powered program was snouts. We have talked about small oar. We didn't talk about our two-year dabbling in dories. (laughs) So we can go a little bit into that.

Steiger: Maybe we should pick it up there.

Elliott: On the historical note, you mean?

Steiger: Yeah, is that okay?

Elliott: That's fine, you bet.

Steiger: Well, the other alternative -you kind of phrased it -maybe I'm gonna water us down too much -the other thing is, it sounds like you're really ready to address the motor/oar thing.

Elliott: Yeah.

Steiger: Let's start with that.

Elliott: Yeah, that'd be fine to start with that, because we kind of left.... Well, we didn't really leave off with that, but we certainly gave it a big hit already.

Steiger: You articulated it really well just here when we started.

Elliott: Remembering back to the first segment of the interview, I remember you asking me, when I went and confronted my father after Outward Bound -this would have been October of 1970 -and negotiated with him that, "Hey, I want to convert ARTA's Grand Canyon operations from one hundred percent motor to seventy-five percent oar over a five-year period," and you asked, "What made you think of that?" And I remember I was kind of struggling with that. I'm not sure. Either I've forgotten or I wasn't very clear at the time, so I want to revisit that just a little bit more, because I've thought about it since we last talked. Certainly spending three summers, over two and a half years with the Colorado Outward Bound School was instrumental in terms of the whole notion of participatory river running, by paddle -even in an oar boat and getting a guest to row. And it's, of course, much tougher to hand the tiller over to someone in a motorboat. I mean (chuckles) you kinda don't do that. And we don't even do that at AZRA. So Outward Bound was an influence. Also, it was some of the businessman in me, Lew. I looked at it, and I looked at the ratio of motor trips to oar trips in the Grand Canyon and I noted that all the big companies are motor trips and most of the oar trips are small. And I just sensed in the early seventies, that there was either a much bigger, untapped market for more oar trips than were being offered, or there was a shift in the marketplace toward longer trips, toward "upping the ante on adventure," if you will. And so it was partly a market decision, looking at it and going, "Hey, I think the market is there for a big shift for one of the larger companies to embrace oar-powered trips." That was part of it too. Part of it was also just the philosophical notion. I remember reading some material by Rod Nash, and we actually published an essay of Rod Nash's in a newsletter to all of the ARTA customers. And I think this probably would have been in the early seventies, maybe 1971 -I'm not really certain. And I'm not even certain that Rod would remember this, and I don't know exactly where I got the material. I know I published it with his permission, but it was a short essay that basically outlined the differences in his mind between motor and oar, and his major point, as I recall, was it wasn't the noise, it wasn't the size of the boats, it wasn't the speed of the trips -though indirectly, I suppose, the speed of the trips. It came down to just a matter of distinction between a motor powering over nature, versus just pushing off from shore and taking nature, taking the river on its own terms and at its own speed, and just floating along with it. And certainly some of those thoughts influenced my decision in those days. And this became, in the mid-seventies, toward the late seventies -and I don't remember the exact year, but this is right around when there were certain people within the National Park Service, and I don't even know their names -I'm not sure that anybody really knows their names. It's one of those (chuckles) where, "Yes, there were people in the Park Service." Were they at Grand Canyon? Were they back in Washington, D.C.? Could we come up with a list of names? But there were these people that definitely wanted motors out of the Grand Canyon. I was certainly never trusted by my colleagues. I was never trusted by the owners that operated motor trips. Some of it, I'm sure, was maybe some of the things I said in outfitter meetings, some of the rhetoric. But it wasn't just that they didn't trust me because of what I said or because of the rhetoric I embraced -they didn't trust me because of what I did, because ARTA switched over to seventy-five percent oar. That was a pretty threatening thing right around that same time period. I remember a funny little story where I've always been a good friend of Ted Hatch's, because of those early years in Dinosaur National Monument, 1958 when I was fourteen years old, and I still like Ted a whole lot. I was walking in Black Bart's Restaurant -this is sometime in the early eighties--to meet an AZRA group for dinner, and Ted was standing out there, and he kind of stammered around and bumbling around said, "Rob, are you coming to this thing too?!" And I said, "What thing? I'm going to an AZRA dinner." And he went, "Oh, whew!" and he made some kind of little joke there. And what I came to realize later -and I don't know how I learned this later -but all the motor outfitters were getting together with Gaylord Staveley and some of the others and apparently Ted was gonna put on some kind of little skit, or some kind of a little bit of a roast between the oar- and the motor-powered outfitters. And I think I was gonna be roasted that night. I never heard the outcome, but I do remember how uncomfortable Ted felt just thinkin' that I was gonna be there! (laughs) It was pretty funny. He'll remember when he reads this! So anyway, as I also said earlier, Lew, you asked the question, "Why did you get this idea? Why did you shift to seventy-five percent oar?" and I think just as interesting a question is, "Why didn't I go all the way?" And AZRA, I think the perception out there in the marketplace among many people is that, "Oh, yeah, AZRA's an oar-powered company." And there's a lot of people that are even kind of surprised when they see an AZRA motorboat on the river. "Oh, I didn't know Arizona Raft Adventures ran motor trips!" And for some reason that's the way we're thought [of]. So I've thought a lot about why didn't we move over? The first area is because of just the philosophical reasons. I was able to work things out with the motor-power outfitters in the late seventies, and basically have no problem embracing choice in the marketplace, the notion of the diversity of experience in the Grand Canyon, and the very big notion that motors help ease congestion, they give an opportunity for trips to fall back and catch up later, or to keep ahead of a wave of trips going through the Canyon, and this gave them that mobility to avoid congestion, and I still believe that. And lastly, motors aren't harmin' the environment. You know, it's not like snowmobiles and wildlife; it's not like Jeeps in the desert -they just don't hurt the environment. As to the question, Why does AZRA still run motor trips? I'd say the number one reason is because we run great motor trips. The people have a good trip, they have a great experience in the Grand Canyon. And I want to be able to speak to the notion of having a great experience in the Grand Canyon, no matter what the trip type. And I think that makes me better able to speak to that. Also, we've been able to go after a niche. That niche is smaller trips -we run one-boat motor trips; longer trips, they're eight days to Diamond; and off-peak starts. We start on a Friday. I'd like to take credit for going after this niche, but actually we picked up going after that niche when Tony Sparks from the Fort Lee Company left the business. That was the niche that he had created: small trips, a little bit longer, off-peak starts. And we just moved into that same niche that Tony left unfilled.

Steiger: I think that's a great schedule. When I started workin' for Fred, that was what we ran, eight days to Diamond. I mean, for my money, I mean, that's when I think of the good trips. That was what I hated to see go. ______.

Elliott: So does that cover it good enough? (laughs)

Steiger: Yeah, that covers that one.

Elliott: Should we go back and pick up a little bit of the history in the mid-seventies?

Steiger: Yeah. So let's see, where were we? We had the snout boats. Why? Because we could put more stuff on them. Elliott: Exactly. I mean, the notion of a two-week expedition through the Grand Canyon with twenty-four people and where do you put everything? Hey, we just (laughs) were movin' over from motor rafts where you could take down just about everything you could imagine you might need. So I think that's probably why we went to the bigger oar boats initially. And we ran those all the way through -only that style of oar boat - through 1976, along with this little Avon Redshank that we would paddle around with the assistant guide on the trip -not through the really big stuff, though some trips I think they took it through the really big stuff and didn't always include that in the trip leader report at the end of the trip. But what happened in 1977, you may recall that that was the super-low water year where there was an extremely low in-flow to the lake, and they decided to cut it back to below 3,000 cubic feet per second, right up until about the third week of June. And motor companies had to just cancel and start their seasons the last week of June. And at that point, we figured, "Hey, it's gonna be really hard to get snouts through the Grand Canyon in twelve days on 3,000 cubic feet per second of water or less. So that's when we went to Vladimir Kovalik and bought six smaller rafts, eighteen feet long.

Steiger: Must have been Havasus.

Elliott: Yes! Havasus! And we bought 'em for a good price, six hundred bucks a piece.

Steiger: That is a good price!

Elliott: And so Vladimir helped us out, and we decided, "Okay, we can start runnin' small oar boats and get down the Canyon at 3,000 cubic feet per second in the first part of the season in 1977. No one knew exactly how long the low water was gonna go on for. I mean, it was a really up-in-the-air kind of situation. We thought, "Hey, if we have low water all season long, we'd better make the switcheroo now, or we're gonna be in deep trouble. We'll have to send all the people home and send all their money home."

Steiger: Don't wanna do that.

Elliott: No, I don't wanna do that. So along about that exact same time in the history of the company, I had mentioned Jessica Youle as being an important figure in giving me the support to separate things from my father. And about this time, Jessica and I had gotten a divorce in early 1976, and at this point we decided to still manage the company together, we were still fifty percent owners of the company, and we divided it into two rather unusual divisions of the company, which held for almost a ten-year period from 1977 through 1985, so for a nine-year period. And the two companies were the Havasu/Motor Division and the Snout/Paddle Division. (chuckles) What does that mean? Jessica managed the small oar trips which we ran in Havasus -that's why it was called the Havasu Division -and all of the motor trips. And I loved paddling and Jessica hated snouts, so I said, "Okay, I'll do the paddle trips and the snout trips in the other division." And we ran four distinct trip types at the time. Jessica did two of them, small oar and motor; and I managed two of them, and that was the snout boats, the large oar, and paddleboats. And we ran it that way right up through the early to mid-eighties, we ran those divisions. And they were very distinct divisions -distinct to the point where locks on my half of the warehouse, her half of the warehouse, and distinct to the point of one of her managers buying the same truck one year that I bought, but making sure he bought a different color, so they could have their own identity and they could say, "No, that's our truck," kind of thing. It was a very serious kind of division that made it very difficult to bind or keep the company culture bound together also.

Steiger: Crews interchanged between the two?

Elliott: Very rarely. The crews were pretty distinct. There were crews in the Havasu Small Oar Division who didn't want anything to do with paddling, so they worked for Jessica. There were ones that loved paddling and either loved snouts or were willing to row snouts, that worked for my division. It was like two companies, in an operational sense. Jessica went to law school in the early eighties, I think starting about maybe 1982 or 1983 or so. And then in the big water years of 1983, 1984, 1985, it was pretty exciting times, and I don't know if we're gonna have time to talk about all that excitement. I basically got to a point where Jessica was like an absentee manager for her division, going to law school. And it wasn't working real well for me, so I basically sat down and figured out how I could make an offer to buy out her half of the company that she would be able to work with -and that's what we did. We accomplished that in, I think it was June of 1986 is when I bought out Jessica's half of the company. So that brings us pretty much up to the mid-eighties, but let's go back just a bit to, I think around 1979, because that was when I first started to become actively engaged in the Glen Canyon Dam issue. Everyone thinks of the Glen Canyon Dam issue and the environmental impact statement in eras or phases known as Glen Canyon Environmental Studies, Phase One; Glen Canyon Environmental Studies, Phase Two.

Steiger: "Prior to GCES-I...."

Elliott: (chuckles) You got it! Prior to GCES-I, which started up, what, 1981 or 1982 or something like that? About two years prior to that was when the Bureau of Reclamation first decided that they wanted to study rewinding the generators at Glen Canyon. Over the almost twenty years that the dam had been in existence, they got to the point where, "Ay, we need to maintain these suckers. We need to rewind the generators," but naturally the state of the technology had changed in twenty years. So not only could they rewind 'em, but inherent in that action of rewinding the generators was uprating them, which would allow them to produce more electricity and crank more power through the system. The figures that I remember -and these won't be exactly accurate -but was 28,000 -it might have been 28,500 cfs -was as much as they could crank through the generators before they were uprated.

Steiger: That was as much water as they could get through there, and still make power?

Elliott: Yes, exactly, through all eight of the generators. And through the uprating, they were gonna be able to move it from 28,000 cubic feet per second, up to 31,500. And actually, that figure turned out to be low, and they were actually able to go up to around 32,000-33,000 cubic feet per second more than what they had projected that they would even be able to, through the uprating. That's when environmentalists first realized, "Ah-ha, there's something going on here. This is going to change the dynamic of the Canyon." Already we were seeing how much had changed throughout the seventies with the dramatic increase in peaking power generation in the seventies, compared with the 1960s. Because once they had the lake filled, then they could produce a lot more peaking power all through the seventies. That's when we were seeing these dramatic thirteen-foot movements up and down, and we were seeing daily operations as low as 3,000 cubic feet per second, and as high as 28,000 cubic feet per second. Just up, down; up, down -dramatic. So the environmentalists were becoming quite concerned with that. When this rewind and upgrading of the generators came along, I believe in 1979, is when the environmentalists, the Sierra Club and other groups, realized that "Ah-ha, this gives us a handle; this gives us an opportunity to influence policy, to get in there and see what can be done." Much to the credit of the Bureau of Reclamation, they created some constituent committees, I believe in 1979, and the committee that I sat on -in fact co-chaired with Marvin Jensen -was called the Recreation Committee. And that was so Bureau of Reclamation could meet with the different constituencies, the different "interested publics" as we've called them through the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies and the EIS process, to talk about what their plans were and their intentions were with the uprating, and what our needs and interests were, et cetera. So that's really when it began, and that's when we first began to raise the questions, "Well, maybe there should be an environmental assessment on the uprating."

Steiger: So the Bureau actually opened the door. They said, "Well, we gotta have this 'constituent panel'" -if you will - "to address this uprating that we are planning." And that's what kind of notified all you guys this was going on?

Elliott: Yes. And the Bureau didn't necessarily initiate these constituency committees. Let's not call them panels, because that gets it all confused with the constituency panel on the Colorado River Management Plan. They were constituent committees, and I'm relatively certain that it was a combination of environmental interests working with the Park Service, and then the Park Service going to the Bureau of Reclamation and saying, "Hey, there are some constituent interests here that need to be voiced. Why don't we form some committees to start meeting with them?"

Steiger: ______didn't just in a vacuum say, "Hey, we gotta plug all these other guys in, _____," ______, squeezed 'em a little bit ______?

Elliott: Yes. My first contact on it was.... I'm tryin' to think of who first made the contact with me, and I believe it was Marvin Jensen who was running the River Unit Office at that time -was talking to me about, "Hey, Rob, would you be interested in sitting on this committee with me?" Then he and I became co-chair of it.

Steiger: Well, now who in the environmental committee actually sounded the alarm? Where did the idea that an E.A. [environmental assessment] had to be done, come from? Elliott: Boy, I'm not sure how much we can put of this down in print -not that any of it's private, because it's not. It's just that my memory is a little bit foggy on it as far as who the exact players were environmentally, because this predated the Grand Canyon Trust. But it certainly didn't predate the Sierra Club -they'd always been a key player. I'm quite certain that the Sierra Club was represented in these discussions, but I don't remember the exact Sierra Club figure who sat in on this committee, if anyone did. They might have had their own committee that was separate from the Recreation Committee. The Recreation Committee was fishing, outfitting, guiding, the Park Service, et cetera.

Steiger: And so you were it for the river. There was Marv was the Park and you were the river runners. They probably had a fisherman.

Elliott: Yeah, exactly, because there was no Grand Canyon River Guides back then either.

Steiger: Or Grand Canyon Outfitters, or anything. There was Western River Guides, wasn't there?

Elliott: Yeah, there was. I think it's fair to say that the early outfitters that were most active in Western River Guides were Pat Conley... he's not an owner, he was the manager for Tony Sparks' Fort Lee Company -and he's still very active and interested in outdoor adventure programs, and he's a real estate broker here in Flagstaff now. And he in fact was the president of Western River Guides Association for at least a couple of years, maybe two terms. He could have been president for four years, Patrick Conley. But Gaylord Staveley was also very actively involved in Western River Guides Association in those early years, as was I. And then there were a lot of outfitter members. But I'm pretty sure it was because of my active role in Western River Guides Association that I was asked to be on this committee. I feel like I'm stumbling around a bit here, Lew. I remember having a bunch of meetings in Page in a conference room of the Bureau of Reclamation, and that there was maybe twenty people in the room -several meetings -but looking around the room I'm goin', "Do any faces pop out at me? No."

Steiger: Who was there, yeah.

Elliott: Yeah.

Steiger: (confirms spellings) I just got interviewed by a guy I told to talk to you yesterday, Bob Poirier. He's a political science professor and he's writing a paper on the flood flow, but he was asking for background. This is fresh in my mind, because, you know, one of his questions was "Now where did all this start?" And I sat down and vaguely remembered, "Well, you know, there was this big flap about how they rewound...." I told him "rewound the turbines." I couldn't even remember ______. (Elliott laughs: Exactly.)

Elliott: Well, one of the jobs I gotta do is clean out the AZRA archive. We have this room upstairs in the loft in our warehouse that has oodles of material probably going back twenty years. I mean, guest evaluations from the 1970s, for example -I mean, stuff that we should have thrown out a long time ago. And because of this interview, I'll be a lot more cautious than I otherwise would have been in terms of what do I save and what do I throw out? For example, let's say I come across a whole file box of the uprate rewind stuff in the late seventies, early eighties -hey, I'll hang onto it.

Steiger: Oh yeah. I mean, you could give it to the library.

Elliott: Or I'll trot it on over to the Cline Library!

Steiger: We have the River Runners Collection, and who knows. I mean, it's like you look at the Kolb Collection or the Belknap Collection -they're really getting a pile of stuff over there. And I don't know, it's hard to say what's the good of that, but I like the idea of it sittin' in the vault there, as opposed to just being thrown away.

Elliott: Well, to me I think one of the really good things is this is a very interesting history, the whole Glen Canyon Dam issue, because the National Environmental Policy Act passed in 1969, but the dam was constructed in 1960, in 1962 they started holding the water back, and the dam was a major federal action under NEPA, but predated NEPA, so what can you do? So the big question here became, The dam's already there. And it became the operations of the dam; it became management actions that were deemed, or considered as major federal actions.

Steiger: What's really interesting to me there, I don't know if we got it on tape or not, but you're runnin' a trip with Stewart Udall (

Elliott: Uh-huh.) who I guess is a regular client of yours. I guess from Russell Martin's book, The Story that Stands Like a Dam, I got the impression that Udall was really instrumental in NEPA. I don't know how true that is, but I had the impression that he had kind of a crisis of conscience after being beat up over the Grand Canyon dams -kind of rethought his whole thing and really nudged the whole country in the direction, really supported the National Environmental Policy Act, which is kind of resonant, you know, that it all came full circle.

Elliott: That could well be. The trip that I'm going on with Stewart goes out June 10 with AZRA, a thirteen-day oar trip, and oh yeah, it was one of the first trips I hung my hat on for the schedule for the 1996 season. Stewart's an old friend, not so much from bein' a repeat customer, but because of our association together on the Grand Canyon Trust board of trustees. I really regard Stewart in a very real sense as kind of a mentor. I regard him as, you know, if we can borrow the Native American sense of having elders who are the wise people of a culture, that carry the wisdom with them in their later years, then Stewart Udall is that person for me. I'm very excited and look very forward to this trip with him. I might do a little bit of research and study between now and then so he and I can talk about some of these things more.

Steiger: Yeah, you know, I'm thinkin' I should sit him down and interview him too. I wonder.... I'm gonna try to line that up after the trip, just because it seems like for this project, it would be really interesting.

Elliott: Well, after the trip might be great. I'll be happy to talk to him, be an intermediary on trying to set something up, Lew. After the trip would be better than before, because all sorts of things -events as well as ideas -will have been restimulated for him by having gone on the river.

Steiger: I think so, and I know he's gettin' up in years, and I feel like it wouldn't hurt. We really need to kind of set as much of that journey down as possible. (

Elliott: Uh-huh.) I think it'd be good to do. But just to reiterate and get us back on track, okay, the interesting thing is, the environmental players, okay, there's some people sittin' down lookin' at the upgrading, and probably the Sierra Club is the environmental force. There is no Grand Canyon Trust, there is no [media?], is there? or Friends of the River? Was there any of those guys?

Elliott: Um....

Steiger: I remember going to a meeting in San Francisco -I was going to school in Santa Cruz, I think, and so I was close by. It seems like I remember going to San Francisco and testifying somewhere about peaking power. Do you remember anything like that? I vaguely remember sittin' in a meeting.

Elliott: I think there was a Friends of the River back then, definitely, because the Stanilaus fight, where we lost the Stanilaus River to the New Melones Dam, and then the subsequent fight for wild and scenic status for the Tuolumne River were back in that same era. So yes, the Friends of the River was very definitely big then, but I just don't know who the players were. Anyway, the two things -we're too foggy on this to spend much more time on it, right now anyway, except for two things that were big when the uprate and rewind was coming along, late seventies, early eighties. There were two things: one is that yes the operations of a dam, the management policies themselves, could be regarded as a major federal action, therefore triggering compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. The second big thing was this was the infancy of bringing in the other players, bringing in the other publics, bringing in the other resource values to determine policy -other than water and power. Water and power ran everything, no matter what. I mean (chuckles) all through the mid part of the 1900s -I mean, for fifty years, the second quarter and third quarter of the century. It was all run by water and power, with virtually no consideration given to cultural values, to recreation values, even to the endangered species values, et cetera. So this was the beginning, these were the very initial beginnings of broadening that constituency base, to talk, to listen to these other resource values that were impacted by the operations at Glen Canyon Dam. Steiger: Interesting. So just to run this -again, to kind of wrap this topic up -a quick recap of events is there was this swirl there in the late seventies that led to, the eventual result of the early meetings of the committee that you guys were on, was the formation of Glen Canyon Environmental Studies, One. And that went on for several years, was interrupted by this little small event called (laughter) "The Flood of '83." (laughter) But it led to, the conclusions that it drew were that the management of the dam really did have a huge impact on the downstream situation. And from GCES-I, what did we get? We just got an environmental assessment that just said peaking power was an issue and it needed to be studied further. And so then there was GCES-II. It was in the works, and then things heated up and GCES-II was kind of already underway when ______.

Elliott: Exactly. GCES-II was underway when on July 27, 19.... Hm.

Steiger: Was it 1990 or 1991?

Elliott: [In] 1990 or 1991 when Secretary Manuel Lujan basically announced that yes, we need to do an environmental impact statement on the operations of Glen Canyon Dam.

Steiger: We were all on a trip then. I don't know if you remember. Wasn't I on a motor trip with you? I was just a boatman, workin' for George; and you were there and George was there; and all those congressional guys were there. (Elliott chuckles) Remember that? And Duncan Patton was there.

Elliott: I remember it very well, but I don't remember the year. Did we hike in at Phantom Ranch?

Steiger: You guys did.

Elliott: Yes! I think a whole lot of people hiked in at Phantom Ranch.

Steiger: It was just announced that... first the trip was scheduled just because they were jockeying over GCES-II and then all of a sudden there was this announcement that the EIS had been called for.

Elliott: This trip I think was in early August of that same year. And you'd have to talk to George to get some more on that -maybe even Duncan Patton. I remember it really well. George and I came along as the two outfitter representatives, and you were one of the guides. Was Ed Smith one of the guides?

Steiger: No, it was Dave Lyle... leadin' the trip.

Elliott: That's right, I remember that. There was a whole bunch of water people and power people and environmental people on that trip, and some people from congressional offices were on that trip.

Steiger: Virginia Turner from DeConcini's office, Lanich from George Miller's office, Steve Lanich. Anyway, I digress. I'd totally forgotten that. Well, I don't know, do we need to talk about that anymore?

Elliott: No, I don't think so, let's move on, 'cause we're right around the same time period here in the early eighties. I know we're jumpin' around, but hey, that's okay. Let's jump back to Rob Elliott's buy-out of Jessica Youle in the summer of 1986, because there were several things in the mid-eighties that started happening, or that I and some of the key managers at AZRA started to bring into the company at that time. Right around that same time -I think it was either 1986 or 1987 -we began our Boatman Advisory Committee... [Inserted afterthought:] If there is any one thing that is essential to AZRA's company culture, that began a decade or more ago, it was the creation and nurturing of AZRA's advisory committee. What it is, is it's a group of four guides who are generally senior guides at AZRA, but anybody can run for this position. It's a position that people are elected to by their peers, so as soon as they have run four or more trips in the Grand Canyon, then they can nominate themselves to be on the advisory committee, and then everyone who runs four or more trips in the Canyon in a season votes, I believe in July, for their peers to represent them on the advisory committee. The function of the advisory committee is to represent all of the guides' interests, but more importantly represent the guides' perspective in how to better accomplish the AZRA goals -whether that is in program structure or equipment needs, or altering the hiring or training standards just a little bit among the guides. But what it comes down to is this is where the guides make input to AZRA management on how better to achieve the AZRA goals -just that simple. And it provides that opportunity for AZRA management to sit down four times a year, and it's a paid position, ten dollars an hour, I believe, to sit down for about a day and a half three or four times a year, to talk through all this stuff. And the chairman of the advisory committee is AZRA's field personnel manager, Cameron Stavely. And Cam does a great job chairing all these meetings. But it's one of the management tools that I'm most proud of at AZRA. We also in 1987 started our profit-sharing plan, which is just another term for a pension plan. And we had brought in some other things, like the paying of an equipment allowance. We had brought in, in the late eighties, a participation in the EAP program, which is the Employee Assistance Program for dealing with issues related to substance abuse or even career changes or any other major problems that employees -including guides, of course -might be going through. I was trying to think of who were the players in all of that, and when did that all start happening, and that was all around 1987, 1988, that AZRA first set its goals down in writing, for example. I mean, we had operated for an awful long time period before we even had our goals put down in writing, and it was in the mid- eighties that we did that. The AZRA goals could even be excerpted and included as a sidebar to this article if we wanted to. They basically come in four forms, and that's the AZRA guest and his and her experience is preeminent and offering this opportunity to create more in their lives: more joy, more ... perspective ... through river trips in the Grand Canyon. That was number one. Number two is providing a healthy, harmonious workplace for AZRA employees, where everyone is regarded as an essential part of the team and rewarded commensurate with their contribution to achieving the AZRA goals. Number three is providing a reasonable opportunity to make a profit and run it like a business. And number four was the broader physical environment and social environment to give back to those environments and to support the Grand Canyon and even the world environmentally, because that is what supported and sustained us in our opportunity to run this business. So those goals were first set down in the mid-eighties.

Steiger: It's really interesting, 'cause that's like about ten years ahead of the curve. I mean, here we are, it's 1996, and there's you guys and Can-Ex and ARR, and there's a few others, but as an industry we're just starting to grapple with those, now. My question to you is What brought you to think about those things so far ahead?

Elliott: I'm really ... not ... sure exactly what ... was the genesis for sitting down and putting pen to paper, because it wasn't computers -for us, anyway, back in 1985, 1986 -to write down our goals. I did some continuing education, going to do some management courses and accounting courses at NAU. I might have picked up the whole notion of management by objectives from one of those courses. I know that I went to some seminars and was very interested in some of the management work that Peter Drucker was doing. So again I think it was just being interested in the world of ideas. But also I'd been in the same business, Lew, for thirty years, and anything unchanged becomes boring. It's like as soon as I had learned how to run motor trips, I guess I wanted to figure out how to run oar trips. As soon as I ran oar trips, I wanted to figure out how to run paddle trips. Or as soon as we figured out how to run a river company, then I wanted to figure out how to get all involved in the environmental stuff and influence government policy. And then after figuring out the environmental stuff and how to influence government policy, I wanted to get into creating a profit-sharing plan and figure out the world of investing, and how to get the money we were making, to make more money on top of itself. It wasn't so much to get rich or get famous or any of that stuff -it was, as much as anything, a pervasive curiosity as to how things work, and how to make more out of something that was already happening. It's like, "Well, what's the next phase here?" And I have to look at that, and this interview with you has been a major provocation to me to sit down and go, "Am I on the brink of a different phase right now, in how I look at river guiding, how I look at outfitting in the Grand Canyon?" And it's almost like, "Do I create this new phase, or is the new phase coming?" and I figure out how to get on board and work with it. When I look at the next new phase, it would be, again, in some sense, back to ideas, back to what makes it all work, back to, "Well, what's really important here?" Back to the very thing that many of our customers and many of the outfitted public, regardless of the company, come to deal with on their trips in the Grand Canyon -and that's perspective, and figuring out "What's the essential value here? What's important in my life? What's meaningful? What makes me feel good?" I'm kind of drawn back to that same question for me, and this interview with you helped spark that, helps provoke that. And I have to go, "What's really important about my relationship to the Grand Canyon? What is really important about guiding down there and outfitting down there?" And what we need to do [is] not [to] protect it so much as advance it to help [it] realize its fuller potential -not just in AZRA, but in all of guiding in the Grand Canyon, all of outfitting.

Steiger: So, what is it?! What do ______? Elliott: It's some of the ideas, the pivotal words that come to me is "unguiding," "permission," "perspective," "discovery" -words like that. And just hanging out and reading the Boatman's Quarterly Review, you can't help but come across some of these ideas and some of these new buzz words. And unguiding is certainly one of the favorite words that I've picked up from reading the Boatman's Quarterly Review, because it's one of those words that in and of itself is provocative. Unguiding?! Wait, I'm a guide. Now I'm supposed to unguide?! You know, it's great that way, Lew, because it makes you think.

Steiger: That goddamn Rod Nash! (laughter)

Elliott: I was on a trip last summer, and we were doing a hike up Kanab Creek, to Whispering Falls. And I think I was cleanin' some stuff up and I was sweep anyway, and so my wife Karan English and I started walking up Kanab Creek kinda late, behind everybody else, and we came upon two of the guides that were on the trip. And I just started chatting with two of the AZRA guides. One of them is Mike Campbell. And we were talking about what is guiding and what is good guiding and what are we really supposed to be doing down here. And Camby used a great expression in that conversation, and that was we have to "get out of their way," we have to "give them permission." And he just kind of left it there, because that's provocative also -give them permission. Why do we have to give them permission? And permission to do what? And I think the people really look to us, the guides, for cues on what's an okay way to behave down here. And in giving them permission, we say, "Yes, permission to go off and explore," or "permission to say, 'Hey, can I do that? Can I row the boat?'"

Steiger: (mock nervousness) Okay.

Elliott: Yeah! (laughter) And we give them permission to become more of themselves, that people don't give themselves enough permission to do back home. And so some of it's that discovery thing. I mean, AZRA does not have a corner on the discovery market at all. Rod Nash may think that the noncommercials have a corner on the discovery thing, but I would challenge that directly with thirty years of guiding in the Grand Canyon, that the noncommercials do not have the corner on discovery. And AZRA does not have the corner on discovery -that there are many, many people in the Grand Canyon on outfitted trips that discover an immense amount. Of course they discover more about the world around them, they discover who John Wesley Powell was, and why he was such a neat guy. And they discover all of this geology that is just opened up to them like this huge textbook in front of their faces. And they learn more about how the world fits together and how natural systems function a little bit more, just chatting with the guides and reading about it in the Larry Stevens guide. But more important than all of that discovery is how much they discover of themselves and who they are, who they want to be, what they want to be more of in their lives, and their relationship to the earth. I've fought and had so many discussions, Lew, about why do people's lives seem to change from these experiences? Maybe it's twenty percent of the people you could say, yes, have substantive changes in their lives. Maybe it's forty, maybe it's fifteen, maybe it changes with different outfitters, maybe it's a higher percentage on noncommercial than commercial, maybe it's a higher percentage on a longer trip than a shorter trip. I don't really know, but the question still remains: Why do people's lives change? Or why do people decide to change their lives after they've been in the Grand Canyon for a period of days? And I think the number one thing.... (chuckles) I mean, there's maybe a tendency to run off with some of the credit here as guides and say, "Aren't we cool? We really had an impact on these people's lives, didn't we?" Which of course is absurd. You could say, "No, it wasn't us, it was the Grand Canyon." The Grand Canyon is what changed these people's lives, and we gave them permission. We unguided, we got out of their way, we made it possible. And we can come back to how we do that, but there's something even.... The Grand Canyon certainly gets a great deal of the credit, yes, but there's something else that comes before that too, and that's the person themselves. And (sigh) they come -a high percentage of people come for an experience in the Grand Canyon because whether they are conscious of this or not, they are looking for change in their lives. They are already on the cusp of change. There's something already starting to stir them in some way, and they go, "Hey, Honey, why don't we go and do a trip in the Grand Canyon this year?" Maybe they'd been thinkin' about it for seven years, and they've talked about it every other year for seven years, and finally decided, "Let's go do it this year." What made them decide this year? Well, something was stirring in them, they were looking for something. This is an overused word -they were seeking, and so they came to the Grand Canyon. They didn't know how to go do the Grand Canyon, they had never touched an oar or a paddle in their life, perhaps, and so they go and look for an outfitter in the Grand Canyon. And I'm not even sure how much it matters who the outfitter is, or who their guides are, as what is their state of readiness for the experience? How ready are they to receive? Back in the late seventies when we were looking at all this oar/motor power stuff, there was another figure in the world of ideas out there beside Rod Nash. (tape turned off and on) Another reason in talkin' about some of these ideas, Lew, as to why in the late seventies some of the motor outfitters questioned where I stood on the motor/oar issue, and that was because we -and I can't remember the year, I might be able to dig this up in the files when I clean out the AZRA archives -it might have been in the late seventies, and we did a trip at the behest of Bo Shelby who was one of the early sociological researchers and is still very active, and he's going to continue to be a player on the allocation issue between the commercial and noncommercial sectors. I believe he's with the University of Oregon, I'm not sure, but it's from some university in the state of Oregon. And AZRA pulled together this trip, working with Bo Shelby to run a river trip, of course, but as a sociological experiment also. We ran a combination motor-oar trip -not motors and oar at the same time. We took thirty people in two groups of fifteen. One group started on a Thursday from Lee's Ferry and went on an oar trip to Bass, Mile 108, in six days. Starting two days later on a Saturday, another group of fifteen went on a motor raft on a four-day trip from Lee's Ferry to Bass. And when the two trips met at Bass, everybody switched boats. So the ones that went to Bass in six days by oar, left the Canyon in four days by motor from Bass; while the fifteen people who arrived at Bass in four days by motor, left the Canyon in six days by oar. So each group of fifteen had a ten-day experience in the Grand Canyon - each group with six days by oar and four days by motor, just flip-flopped as to whether they experienced the Upper Canyon or the Lower Canyon by oar or by motor. And then they were all researched, they were all surveyed, they were all questioned. They were interviewed and filled out questionnaires as to their relative experience in the Grand Canyon by mode of travel. Anyway, I mention this because Bo Shelby presented me with a paper that never found its way -I don't believe ever found its way -into the literature, on the sociology of modes of experience in the Grand Canyon, because it was more a philosophical tract than it was sociology. And Bo Shelby was talking all about left brain and right brain stuff. And this is in the late seventies, and this paper that Bo shared with me was a pivotal piece of work in terms of ideas for me, and that was the whole notion of receptivity. The left brain is a very active male, analytical, action, kind of go-out-and-do part of our brains. And the right brain is more intuitive, feminine, more receptive. And I think what Bo really wanted to study -and I don't know if he ever did study, if he ever concluded any of these studies - but I think he was looking for that elusive point on a trip where people switch from the left brain to the right brain. They switch from tasks and analysis and thinking, over to receiving, to the intuitive. And at what point on the trip does that begin, and....

[END TAPE 3, SIDE B. Tape 4 to follow.]

ROB ELLIOTT INTERVIEW (continued)

[BEGIN TAPE 4, SIDE A]

Elliott: ... and what are the elements of what we do as guides to trigger that change between the left brain and the right brain, to where people can receive? And my way of thinking is they can start to receive the incredible depth of the experience and everything it has to offer for them. I've always thought that this "magic point," whether it was an oar trip or motor trip or whatever, but just in my life experience in guiding, was somewhere around day three and a half on a very rough and coarse average. So if they're on a five-day trip, they get one and a half days when they're at this heightened ability to receive the experience more fully, if you will. And if they're on a longer trip, if they're on a twelve-day trip, then they still have eight and a half days left when they.... And I know this is a very overgeneralization, but this whole notion between left brain and right brain experience, for me began with looking at this unpublished work by Bo Shelby.

Steiger: So what was the gist of it, his whole thing? What'd he decide as far as where the lobes crossed?

Elliott: I don't know, I lost touch with him. I never really found out. In fact, I suspect that he just got -for his time, especially -he was just way off in left field somewhere. And to some who read this interview, they'll think, "Oh my God, Lew and Rob are way off in left field right now. They're way out there." And at the time, I'm certain that a lot of Bo Shelby's peers, his colleagues, probably thought, "Whoa boy, Bo is way out in left field on this," and I doubt that.... He may not have been successful in either getting the funding, or being able to produce a work that would sustain peer review, et cetera. I've always wanted to bump into Bo Shelby at a conference or an airport some day and go, "Hey, Bo, what did you ever do with that work on left brain, right brain stuff?" Steiger: The trip that you described, what'd they learn from that experiment, from flip-floppin' the people? Do you remember specifically what kind of conclusions those people drew at the end?

Elliott: Now I don't remember the conclusions. But I think that one of the conclusions was, "Hey, we had a great trip in the Grand Canyon!"

Steiger: Everybody did.

Elliott: Yeah, everybody had a great trip in the Grand Canyon. "Wow, we got it all! We got the whole Grand Canyon, the entire Grand Canyon in ten days, a little bit more than half of it by oar, a little bit less than half of it by motor. We got the best of both, we got to be all on this one big raft together as one big happy family part of the time, and then on the other six days of that trip we got to split off in these three smaller rafts and break up and come back together at the end of the day. I mean, wow we had a motor to help us make it all the way through in ten days, but we also got six days under oar power. What a cool thing!" I think what the people discovered was their trip was what they liked.

Steiger: Interesting.

Elliott: It's kind of like when you buy a car: you discover that, oh yeah, the one I bought is what I really like. (laughter)

Steiger: Yeah, especially after you've spent that money. There's one thing, though, that comes up for me there -not to digress too far, ______, but just to share with you -______I have run a whole bunch of different trips. Different kindsa trips. And I don't know how you factor this into the equation. What I notice is- whether it's a five-day trip, blastin' through, or a sixteen- or nineteen-day dory trip, I notice certain emotional peaks that I think are more tied to where you're at in the trip itself. And one of the things, it's real interesting the difference brought on by a split, you know, compared to a trip where you went the whole way through. I look at the Grand Canyon like here's this little storybook, you know -especially when you start at Lee's Ferry and go I don't know where. I'll try to wrap this up here. But you know, when you start at Lee's Ferry and go to the lake, that's what I started doing, running those eight- day motor trips. (

Elliott: Uh-huh.) You could predict what would happen is, you'd start up there at Marble Canyon and you go down, very slowly you work your way through the rock layers. And you get in and there's a little bit of rapid excitement, and everybody's scared. Then they kind of get over that. Then you start really thinkin' about these rocks, and then you think about the Indians, you know, the Hopi's, the Little Colorado, and that's kind of a.... you know, wow, you think about all these ancient cultures. You think about kind of a perspective of ahhh... man and the planet, and the planet itself. And then whammo, here's the great unconformity ______, and then here's these huge rapids in the inner gorge. And where you're going the whole way through, we would invariably see people absolutely sky-high right after you ran the gorge. I mean, that just would blow the doors off it. You know. And that was whether it was three days or four days or whatever. When you got through the big rapids, like on a motor trip, that'd just blow the doors off of everybody. And I've seen on it the rowing trips, same thing, where everybody's goin' the whole way through. But it's really different on a split.

Elliott: Split trips are definitely a big part of this. Let's pull this discussion, because I want to respond to that.

Steiger: I don't even know what the question was.

Elliott: Well, I know what the question is. The question is, Wait, river trips in the Grand Canyon change people's lives, or they choose change, they feel more comfortable with change, they feel more provoked to want to change their lives in some way. Or a lot of them do anyway. Whether it's small ways or big ways or loud ways or quiet ways or whatever. And we're talking about how they do that. They themselves get the credit, first. (

Steiger: Yes.) The Grand Canyon gets the credit second. Guides get the credit next. And that comes to this whole thing about unguiding, about permission, about loving the place so much that it shows all over our faces and all over our whole being every moment from when we wake up to when we go to sleep at night. Then the fourth thing [is] the outfitters. And part of what you're talking about here in terms of split trips, comes down to the outfitters. And it's like, Well, what are the choices that outfitters make that enhance this opportunity for self-discovery on a river trip? And what are the choices that outfitters make that perhaps impede this quickness of opening to self-discovery, or to receiving what the Grand Canyon experience has to offer us? And I haven't really thought that through, but that is the topic you're looking at. Split trips is one of those dimensions -time. Length of trips is another dimension. Group size is another dimension. Mode of travel is perhaps a dimension here. Creating an opportunity for solitude is one of the things here -but that's the guides. But it ties in with the outfitters too, because the outfitters have to schedule enough time in terms of what we sell the public to allow for that opportunity for silence and for solitude and to get off by yourself, or to drift with the motor turned off for a period of time.

Steiger: I have to give you credit. I'll make this one quick too. It is the outfitters. You have a huge impact in a way that I didn't realize. Here's what's weird for me, one of the things that's come up for me in this interview is -I went on the GTS [Guide Training Seminar] -I'd never been on a paddleboat, I've always admired 'em from afar. (

Elliott: Uh-huh.) I mean, I've always really respected that and thought that was really good, but also really scary, because (with catch in voice) my God, ______(comment obscured by laughter) you're dependent on this team, all these people. (laughs) What if they don't go when you tell 'em to go, [and so on]? How do you deal with it when they're weak, when they don't.... You know, all those things were always real scary to me. Got on a paddleboat with Bill Karls who works for you. When we were on this trip he says, "Lew, come on the paddleboat on this day." So I got on it with him, and it's like we get down there, and the first thing he does is -you know, there's a whole group of us -and he's like, "Okay, we're gonna take turns bein' the captain." (

Elliott: Uh-huh.) So we all did that, and that was great. That was really cool, it worked out really great, and I'm thinkin', "Gee, this is really cool for Bill to be doin' this." I thought it was all Bill, that was just something that he liked to do, give everybody a turn and stuff. And I had this great day with him -we all did on the paddleboat, we all loved it. And I just kind of went away from that thinkin', "Well, this is a really cool thing that Bill's figured out to do." Never making the connection! But then I think about you, and here you are runnin' the company, and here you are tellin' me about your Outward Bound experience twenty-five years ago (both chuckle) where you're doin' this thing with your dad. That was one of the things you did, is make everybody be the captain.

Elliott: In the first hour on the river, all six paddlers all had to be a captain for ten minutes, give or take five minutes or so. But here's the interesting thing. Let's slow down and take a minute here, Lew. Yes I did that twenty-five years ago in Outward Bound, and yes Bill Karls did it twenty-five years later on the GTS that you just came off of this spring. Here is an interesting point: I didn't teach Bill Karls that.

Steiger: You didn't?!

Elliott: No, no, that's not written down in a paddle instruction manual someplace. Maybe that, in some circuitous fashion, got from me to somebody else to somebody else to somebody else and eventually landed in Bill Karls' lap, but the fact of the matter is, Bill Karls realized -perhaps even on his own -that that was a good thing to do. He maybe even discovered that that was a good thing to do. Maybe he didn't hear it from somebody else, maybe he just discovered it because he's a neat guy and he's pretty astute. Maybe. Or, maybe he heard it from somebody else, but like that Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, it had to hit a core of truth for him, and then he could embrace it and say, "Yes, this works for me too. And we talked about unguiding, we talked about getting out of the way of the customers having a great trip in the Grand Canyon. There's maybe even a notion of unmanaging and getting out of the guides' way of putting on a good trip -my getting out of Bill Karls' way of discovering a great way to run a paddleboat, and doing it because it made sense to him. I gave him permission. I didn't say, "Bill, I give you permission" -I gave him permission because of what our company culture is.

Steiger: "You guys go down there and run the best trips you possibly can."

Elliott: You got it.

Steiger: "You figure it out."

Elliott: In a way, yeah. Steiger: Interesting. I think these ideas do filter down, though. I think you can look back to people who are long gone, oldtimers, senior guides in various companies who trained us all and stuff, whose impact is still being felt by guys who they never even met, because they started out when they're young, and you're trained by.... You know, you pick up all these ideas from whoever's startin' you out. (

Elliott: Yeah.) Interesting, though. But I'm [heading us off?].

Elliott: We're also gonna maybe run out of time here, Lew. We maybe need to, on some of these, quote, "philosophical issues," wrap it up, for now at least, as far as the outfitting or guiding history of Rob Elliott. Did you want to also take some time today to talk about, to move from some of these ideas into the current and upcoming and deepening battle between commercial and noncommercial?

Steiger: Yeah. Yeah, I think we definitely want to address that, and I guess we've about covered most of the stuff. The one thing we're lacking in detail, I think, was we didn't really emphasize the shift from the snouts to the paddles.

Elliott: Well, because it wasn't snouts to paddles. It was snouts to little boats, which was an accident of hydrology in early 1977 when we couldn't get -we didn't figure we could get snouts through the Grand Canyon in twelve days on three thousand cubic feet per second of water, and we had to have smaller boats.

Steiger: And then it was the company comes together.

Elliott: So that's when we began switching over to small oar boats, was in 1977. But we still row some snouts in the Grand Canyon. I think 1996, or 1997 may be our last year for rowing snouts in the Grand Canyon. And so it still took twenty years (chuckles) to move completely from twenty-two-foot snout boats over to only eighteen-foot small oar boats for AZRA. So some of these things change slowly.

Steiger: Why is it you want to move completely away from it?

Elliott: It's mostly with.... We held onto snouts as long as we did partly because of this belief in diversity, program diversity, and being able to provide people motor trips, snout trips, small oar trips, paddle trips, and we even dabbled in dories for two years in the late seventies. I think it was 1978, 1979 we had a "dory option," like we have a paddle option. We had one dory boat going along with our small oar trips, which Jessica dubbed those trips "the traditional oar trips," back in the late seventies. We didn't stick with dories after our two-year experiment, but.... I'm eddied out. Help me get back, Lew.

Steiger: Ummmm.... It was Why get rid of the snouts altogether?

Elliott: We held onto them as long as we did because of the diversity of experience, because, hey, they were a cruiser boat, they're the first self-bailing boat, and they provided that sense of security for people who were afraid. So we hung onto the snouts. Why have we gotten rid of them? We've gotten rid of them because they travel at a different pace down the river -especially on windy days. And we also got rid of them as our guide pool has gotten older and older. (both chuckle) They are body-breakers. I mean, they are tough to row. I'm not sure you can row a snout year after year after year after year without hurtin' yourself. I rowed snouts all through the seventies myself, and at the time I weighed 145 pounds and I was able to figure it out and how to do it. But I was lucky, I didn't hurt myself. (laughs)

Steiger: I rowed snouts with Sanderson -none of us knew beans about it ______. Then I find out how to do snout runs... [as a boatman on an ARTA trip] like a couple years later, and I look back at the runs that we were doin' with Sanderson. (laughs) We didn't know anything ______.

Elliott: Well, some of the great challenges of any craft in the Grand Canyon is How do you row a snout into the mouth of Matkatamiba, [this is Nancy Brian's spelling, see River to Rim, A guide to place names along the Colorado River in Grand Canyon from Lake Powell to Lake Mead (Tr.)] or Havasu Creek at twenty-eight thousand cubic feet per second? I mean, this is one of those athletic things where you just go, "Dammit, I'm gonna figure out how to do this." And that's when, in the seventies, we first really perfected the reverse ferry technique for entering an eddy, where we actually rowed faster than the current, with our stern pointed downstream, to charge through that eddy fence and pivot around into the mouth of Matkatamiba or Havasu. And we learned how to take the inherent weight (chuckles) of this snout, of this huge boat, and go How can we use that weight to our advantage? Well, we gotta develop momentum here, like twelve strokes out momentum, to bust through the eddy fence and make the eddy. Or we learned how to use their weight in terms of tracking. That's how even a small person like me could learn to sort of stand up on the oars, pushing downstream, and keep out of the huge eddies, because you just didn't want to get your snout caught in an eddy and go around three times. You were not only gonna be way behind, you were gonna be thrashed by the time you got to lunch, so learnin' how to track those suckers and keep their momentum movin' downstream and deflecting off the face of the eddy fence and out in the main current was also another skill. So you can do snouts, but it was, I think, a whole different level of skill.

Steiger: Yeah. Well, I just remembered the difference about gettin' on the -it was then ARTA.... It was like, after doin' that Sanderson trip______. It was like, "God, these guys really know how to do this!" (laughter)

Elliott: Yeah. So they had their place in the history, and I have no regrets for doin' snouts as long as we did. So there we are.

Steiger: Well, I guess we should wrap this.... As far as time goes, we'd better get movin'.

Elliott: I'm okay, I got another hour.

Steiger: Well, I guess we need to -is this the time? We really do need to look ahead. It's funny that we keep talking about this as a great battle, the upcoming battle -the Outward Bound thing or whatever. I wish we could all view it as an opportunity. (laughter) Can't we think of a more positive buzz word?

Elliott: Well, it is an opportunity. I mean, all conflict also provides us with challenges. So like, what are the challenges here? When I say "here," what are the challenges that the Rod Nashes and the Bo Shelbys of the world are thrusting upon us? And one of the big challenges they're thrusting upon us, Lew, is to look inward, to look at what is it we're doing, and why are we down here sort of thing. I mean, the prospectus that we just went through in terms of renewing our contracts in the Grand Canyon also provided that challenge. That prospectus asked us to look at "goal congruency" we call it at AZRA. Goal congruency from the small to the big is when your and my personal or professional goals are congruent with the goals of the organization that we work for. The next step out is when the goals of that organization are congruent with the goals and objectives of the Colorado River Management Plan, or the next layer out from that, the mission of the National Park Service. I guess you could get even further out from that and say congruent with natural law or goals and objectives, in a spiritual context, of why we're down here on this earth. So you can look at goal congruency through all of this. And what is happening with this "controversy," if you will, between the commercial and the noncommercial sectors in the Grand Canyon, it is forcing us to reevaluate and to look at What are we doing down here? and what could we be doing different or better or in another way or whatever? That's how I take it. So I think it is an opportunity.

Steiger: (inaudible)

Elliott: But then that automatically puts us in a defensive posture. (tape turned off and on)

Steiger: We're rollin' here. Well, I wondered what are his points that need a response, that need to be challenged?

Elliott: Oh, I think a bunch. And did we get the reintroduction here on tape? (pause) The readers of the Boatman's Quarterly Review have had an opportunity now to be exposed to your interview with Rod Nash and some of Rod's thinking about the commercial/ noncommercial issue. And he had a lot of material there, and there's a whole lot of material that he had that was beyond what was published in the Boatman's Quarterly Review, and when you go back far enough, there's a whole bunch of material contained in a life-long study by Rod Nash, beginning with his early seminal work in the sixties on Wilderness and the American Mind, which we both have read, and which is pretty amazing stuff.

Steiger: Most people haven't, I have to say. Reading that book made me look at Rod in a whole different.... Elliott: Well, I read it, but it was a long, long time ago. I read it in the sixties....

Steiger: When it was really hot.

Elliott: When it was hot, and when I was in college, and when my mind was just exploding with the promises of the world, and with ideas with what's going on in the world. But when we go back to the Rod Nash interview in the Boatman's Quarterly Review, and I've tried to simplify What exactly is the Rod Nash thesis? And it begins with the Grand Canyon is wilderness. And if you want to quibble over wilderness, then Rod Nash is gonna say, "It epitomizes wilderness values." The second point is that -it takes a bit of a leap here -but that self-discovery is the most appropriate use of wilderness. His third point is that a noncommercial trip is the best way to get there -meaning to get into that self-discovery, by doin' it on your own. And that therefore, the noncommercial rafting experience in the Grand Canyon is the most appropriate use of the resource, of the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. I mean, that's kind of the thesis. Is that a fair characterization? Perhaps an oversimplification, but is that a fair characterization of Rod Nash's view?

Steiger: It's a little bit of a simplification, but I think the average reader who reads that interview with Rod would just about be forced to draw those conclusions.

Elliott: Yeah. Sure it's an oversimplification, but let's use that as a point of beginning: the Grand Canyon is wilderness, self-discovery is the most appropriate use of wilderness, the noncommercial experience is the best way to get that self- discovery, and that therefore, noncommercial use in the Grand Canyon is the most appropriate use. And let's take a look at some of that. You've already challenged Rod in the interview, "I'm not at all certain that this is wilderness." And if you're sitting on a lonely beach someplace in February down in the Grand Canyon, and there's no trips coming by for a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, and you haven't seen anyone for two or three days, it's wilderness. The solo trip I took hiking down the Tanner Trail and down along the river to the Hance Trail and out Grandview for four days in January of, oh, 1986 I think it was, was a wilderness trip. There's just no question about it, there's immense wilderness in the Grand Canyon. But the point that you made, Lew, was that how can you call it a wilderness experience where the moment you're in trouble, or something goes amiss, all you have to do is just hang out and wait an hour and you got all the help you need, just about, floatin' along right behind you.

Steiger: Or flyin' overhead.

Elliott: Or flyin' overhead, or whatever. It's like, "Wait," you know. So we could certainly quibble over Is it wilderness? Or to what degree does it epitomize wilderness values? Or to what degree is it not wilderness? One of the most scary things about this wilderness debate is Wilderness with a capital "W" -meaning Wilderness as a matter of policy in Washington, D.C.; Wilderness as a matter of the U.S. Forest Service Research Station in Wisconsin defining it as no more than three contacts with other human beings in the course of a day. Well, that's a bigger wilderness than I was thinking wilderness. Well, so maybe we need to leave for a moment or get out of the wilderness discussion and move into the Is self-discovery the most appropriate use of a place with the wilderness values that is reflected in an experience on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon? I've thought and thought about that one, and as much of what I've said in my oral history interview shows, yeah, I'm a big believer that self-discovery has got to be one of the most important uses of wilderness, or one of the most important experiences down there. But let's go into the third premise in my characterization of the Rod Nash thesis, and that's that noncommercial is the best way to get there. Because I come from a background of thirty years of guiding and outfitting in the Grand Canyon, having only taken a private trip down there once, and honestly believe that this notion of self-discovery is way possible on almost any style of trip down in the Grand Canyon. It can certainly be supported and enhanced with some types of trips over another type of trip, with consuming a whole lot of alcohol versus not consuming very much alcohol. But that has very little to do with the commercial/noncommercial debate, or even the oar/motor debate, but rather a state of mind. And I think one of the problems I had with the Rod Nash view here is that he would like to paint everything in kind of black and white tones: he'd like to suggest that almost every noncommercial trip in the Grand Canyon is chock full of self-discovery at every turn, or that most commercial trips in the Grand Canyon have very little self-discovery, because you're not doin' it on your own, you're not sortin' it out for yourself. Even though he doesn't put it that way, Lew, he doesn't say it that way, I think he believes that at some level. And I think that's an outrageous premise, that is just flat-out not true. I am quite confident there are all sorts of noncommercial experiences in the Grand Canyon that don't support a high level of personal discovery or self-discovery. And from my own personal experience in the Grand Canyon, I can announce that there are many, many commercial trips in the Grand Canyon where self-discovery is happening every day with most of the people on the trip. So I really challenge that notion. One thing that the Park Service I think believes in down there -and this is certainly borne out in the contract renewal process that we just went through last year -they believe in the value of the diversity of experience. And of all- of the top twenty values in my life, Lew, diversity and the strength of diversity is one of the most fundamental. That's true certainly in an ecosystem, that you have more strength with more diversity. It's very true, I think, in business. And that's one reason that we have run a great diversity of program types in the Grand Canyon, because there was strength to move with markets. It's certainly very true in asset allocation in investing our profit-sharing plan assets, with diversity in our asset allocation we minimize risk. And it's certainly true in personnel management, and we have many different kinds of people that guide our rafts through the Grand Canyon. Well, and the diversity of ideas and being open to different points of view and different perspectives I think is fundamental to _____ the survival of our society too, and certainly the survival of a democracy. And I'm not suggesting that the Grand Canyon experience should be arrived at democratically -don't get me wrong. But I think that there is a need for actually broadening the user profile on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, than narrowing it. And in the Rod Nash thesis I see a narrowing of the use pattern to an able-bodied elite, when I think just the opposite is- we need to protect a broadening of user profile down there. For example, the outfitters, through some of their own work and commitments in the Grand Canyon, and also because they've been prompted and stimulated by the Park Service, are increasingly opening the opportunities for persons with disabilities to experience the Grand Canyon on a raft trip. And this is broadening the user profile. And I think we need to look at some challenges here. And that's the first one, is How can we broaden -not narrow -the user profile? Because it is a rather elite experience. It's either the able-bodied elite or the wealthy elite that gets to go down there. So certainly one other question is, Should we be creating opportunities for people to experience the Grand Canyon who are economically disadvantaged?

Steiger: Yeah, that's my little.... But is the criteria, "Gees, you're broke and you're down-and-out: well here, go have a raft trip"? (laughs)

Elliott: I don't know. I've only just begun to think about this, and that's what I say, Lew, when I say that I feel myself on the edge of, again, changing my focus within this industry, within this business in some way. You know, it's no longer just how to run a company or how to run motor trips or how to run oar trips or how to run paddle trips or how to get involved in the environment or how to invest money. I think I would love to work with you and Rod Nash and the guides and other outfitters on taking a really good, hard look at some of these questions, at some of these challenges, that are coming to us because of the updating of the Colorado River Management Plan.

Steiger: My little fantasy -I don't know how we do it -I would love to leave behind some kind of mechanism that's supported by the commercial sector where you run around and there's some little way, you wave a wand and pick people who've like, done a really good thing, (laughs) somewhere out there, but who wouldn't get to go down the Grand Canyon. You just say, "Okay, so and so, you've done good, now you can have a river trip in the Grand Canyon." But how do you work it out, how do you administer it?

Elliott: I don't know how you administer that, I don't know how you sort it out. You know, I'm regarded as pretty liberal by most of my colleagues, but I gotta admit, Lew, that there's a big part of me that believes in a very big way, of the potential for creativity of private enterprise, and that we always have to look at these things in terms of not just some government agency putting another mechanism on us, putting another regulation on us that says, "Oh yeah, 'X' percent of your allocation will go toward scholarship programs so that people who are economically disadvantaged can enjoy this experience." No, that's nuts. I could never countenance that. So we have to look at the creativity of.... I mean, it's gonna be some combination of -if this even needs to happen, if people even agree that it needs to happen - it's gonna be some combination of the private sector, the outfitters looking at it creatively and the National Park Service looking at it.

Steiger: Well, you know, I think we are doin' it. You know one thing that comes up for me, in terms of that, in the commercial sector, you look at What are the keys to the Grand Canyon, how do you get in? Well, Rod Nash would say you could buy your way in, or you could prepare and go down yourself. Well, my experience has been, one of the things is, there's a lot of companies who have these free crew spots, like you guys have. Every guide gets to take a guest a year. So in a very informal way, we are providing access to people who just work their way down on a trip. Elliott: That's true. And there may be an opportunity for taking some of these assistants' spots -because we don't view them as guests -we view our customers as our guests. But where we take these assistant spots, where they're working their way down the trip. And you could call it a scholarship thing where you work your way down the trip. Let me take a moment to look at a real case example that just happened September 8, 1995, where four outfitters, which included AZRA, Western, OARS, and Grand Canyon Expeditions, ran a collaborative access trip, we called it. It was a twelve- day trip in the Grand Canyon that had oar boats and motorboats and it had an upper-half group that left at Phantom Ranch, and a lower-half group that went in at Phantom Ranch, and the logistics of exchanging at Phantom Ranch were supported by the Fred Harvey Company in terms of the mule wranglers -worked with us to get persons with disabilities in and out of the Grand Canyon for the exchange on that trip. Well, the upper half of that trip was a program called River Rampage, that AZRA has worked on for about three years now, that we do on the San Juan River. And that was the first one we did in the Grand Canyon, was with this group of three other outfitters. River Rampage is a program that was created by the City of Phoenix Parks, Recreation, and Library Department -a couple of great gals down there named Ann and Carol. They came up with this idea of matching up youth at risk with youth with disabilities -kind of like partnering them. (

Steiger: Wow.) I mean, think about it, Lew! Some guy who lives in a neighborhood where maybe his cousin was killed in a drive-by shooting is out in the Grand Canyon on a river trip having to help make that experience workable for someone else approximately his own age who has a pretty serious disability. Think about it.

Steiger: That's wild.

Elliott: That's a pretty wild notion. Well, four outfitters (

Steiger: They did it. That's what you guys....) did that trip in the fall of 1995. And credit where credit is due, goes straight to AZRA's operations manager, Allan House. We were contacted by the City of Phoenix and way late -we'd already sold ninety-nine percent of our user days -and Allan said, "Hey, let's do this as a collaborative trip with other outfitters and we'll find enough user days between us." I swear Allan put ten percent of all his management energies of 1995 into that single program, just quietly behind the scenes, makin' it work.

Steiger: Yeah!

Elliott: Well, that's one of the challenges, is how to broaden the user profile in Grand Canyon -not narrow it. And we'll be coming back to that challenge month after month throughout this dialogue with the updating of the Colorado River Management Plan. But let's go back to some of the themes of my interview that you and I and others have been discussing here, and that's the challenge of How do we create more opportunity for discovery for everybody on commercially-outfitted trips in the Grand Canyon? Boy, that's a big one, and I don't know if we want to tackle that one today, but I'm just putting that on the table as one of the big challenges that I think we all have to look at it. I'd also like to put on the table at this time that I think/believe that it has relatively little to do with the mode of transport. I also think it has relatively or less to do than what Rod Nash would make us to believe, with commercial and noncommercial. I think that the opportunity for personal discovery is out there for a broad spectrum of the public. I've been in contact with a couple from England named Peter and Sylvia who are in their late fifties who came with AZRA on a Grand Canyon trip last year, and Peter has completely turned around how he's managing his company because of his experience in the Grand Canyon. And Peter and Sylvia together have turned around what they want to do with the rest of their lives because of their experience in the Grand Canyon. And this kind of impact on people's lives happens all the time. So it's like, "Okay, how can we do a little bit more of that? What [are] the key ingredients?" Certainly attitudes of the guides are a key ingredient. And in this context I think the role of Grand Canyon River Guides as a professional association is an absolutely pivotal role in the evolution of standards and thinking among commercial river guides in the Grand Canyon. I think you guys do a great job as provocateurs through the Boatman's Quarterly Review, to keep us all looking at this stuff and thinking about this stuff. So I think that's one thing right there. A second thing is if it's not commercial/ noncommercial, if it's not motors and oars, then what are the key ingredients? Just like you were caught saying in your interview with Rod Nash, that you're gonna get (

Steiger: Lynched.) lynched for some of these comments, you know I'm gonna get lynched for some of these comments too. But I'm willing to go out and stake my relationships with my colleagues on this point, that the key ingredient is time. (pause) And that the Grand Canyon was made by these incredible erosional forces, but with just a generous allocation of time. And in a certain sense, we do the people a disservice, I think, to provide them opportunities, in a way, unknowingly, to them, from their perspective, to shorten their trips. You know, whether to go through in five and a quarter days to the helicopter pad at Whitmore, or to hike out of the Grand Canyon at day six and kind of cut off or disrupt the journey through the Canyon at that point. Or to come in for three days below Whitmore -whatever it happens to be -I know that's the market, and we're reacting to the market. But we have to create enough time to just experience the place. And of all the different ways that AZRA guides over the years have enhanced this opportunity for self-discovery, the number one way certainly has been participation, to let people row through 36 Mile or (

Steiger: Kwagunt.) (Elliott chuckles) Kwagunt. Or, you know, teach people how to paddle. Or encourage them -don't send them away when they come with an offer to help in the kitchen. Participation is certainly a key ingredient. And right up there with participation -and perhaps even more of a key ingredient, is the opportunity for quiet, the opportunity for solitude, the opportunity for silence. And that takes time. AZRA was the contractor for a Bureau of Reclamation trip with the Commissioner of BoR at the time, Dan Beard that went out as a motor trip April 11, 1994. And we had a whole bunch of different people on it, including Ferrell al Sekacacu [phonetic spelling] -the chairman of the Hopi Tribe. Superintendent Arnberger was on the trip, his second week on the job. John Leshy, the head solicitor for the Department of Interior, and some key figures from the private sector in the water and power communities were on this trip. And we went five days to Phantom and talked all about the management of Glen Canyon Dam and the future. But especially we were talking about the future of water policy management in the West. It was a great trip. It was a bunch of heavyweights talking about some heavy issues. And what were the two things that many of the trip members came back to me and said "thank you" for?, and "that was a really important part of my trip"? When from Nankoweap to the Little Colorado River we said, "We've been talking so much, let's just do no talking. It'll just be quiet, just be silence. Let's not talk." This is on a motor trip, so what we did is, we turned off the motor as much as we could between Kwagunt and the LCR, and just drifted. Every once in a while we'd have to yank on the motor a little bit to get us back in the main current, and then shut it off. And that was a high point of their experience on a motor trip. The second high point of their experience was playing like kids in the Little Colorado River and making trains, putting our life jackets on upside down and making trains to float through the little riffle on the Little Colorado River there. And I have a big picture of all these water and power heavyweights going on their little train with their life jackets on like diapers, bein' like kids. Those are the two things that they told me was so important about their trip.

Steiger: So you made them shut up, and you guys just basically floated all the way down there, from Nankoweap?

Elliott: Yeah, and that's a very common thing that I can't take a whole lot of credit for. It's just kind of hiring the right people and giving them permission to do this kind of thing. I mean, I learned this from our guides as much as I have any responsibility for teaching it to them. And I was on a trip once several years ago, and David Edwards, one of AZRA's great trip leaders, not only said are we gonna have no talking this morning, but he started off with some wonderful inspirational readings from Native Americans and poets about the value of silence in our lives. And then we pushed off on a silent float. And yeah, it's chancy to do stuff like that, I suppose. But hey, the people are lookin' to us ... for permission, as we said, to do these things. I mean, we have a pretty incredible latitude to get away with doing some of these things. And they're just going to believe us, because we're Grand Canyon guides or something. But there's an outfitter responsibility here too. And the point that I want to make back on that Bureau of Reclamation trip was that we could only just float with the current from Kwagunt to the Little Colorado, because we had enough time to do that. We had structured enough time on the trip to allow the guides to create that experience. And I think that's an essential part of what we're doin' down there, is makin' sure we have enough time. (big sigh)

Steiger: That's pretty gutsy. Now you've done it.

Elliott: (laughs) Oh I know, now they're gonna go, "I knew I couldn't trust Elliott all along!"

Steiger: Well, that's really well-said, though. I mean, I think you're puttin' your finger on it. I don't think it's like more time is better, but you gotta have enough time.

Elliott: Yeah. It's not "more time is better." You have to have enough time. And enough time for what? Enough time for solitude, enough time for personal discovery, enough time to manipulate our trip schedules so that we can reduce conflicts over campsites; to manipulate trip schedules so that we can fall behind a wave of trips that we sense is right in front of us by a day or a half a day, or keep ahead of a wave of trips that we know is right behind us; enough time so that we can catch Elves Chasm or Blacktail or Fern Glen with nobody else there. And I'm fine with hittin' the LCR or Deer Creek or Havasu with seven or eight or nine other trips. I know it's a drag, it would be so fun to arrive at Deer Creek and have it all to yourself -but that's a little selfish, really. As long as we can provide the people with some opportunities for solitude where it's just our trip -once a day? -every two out of three days? -or whenever, but so that they can have that time there, that opportunity for solitude.

Steiger: Yeah, I tell ya', busy season, I've run trips where all I asked for was for it to be just once on the trip. (

Elliott: Yeah.) And it's when you don't find that, it's those trips that drive me up the wall.

Elliott: But it's slowing down and taking enough time for all of those values that we've been talkin' about here, Lew, that also brings us back to the influence of Bo Shelby on some of my thinking in the last twenty years, and that's this opportunity to allow the brain to shift from it's predominant left-brain functioning back in the civilized world, over more to the right brain, more into receptivity. And what do we become receptive to? Yes, we become receptive to this incredible place on the planet that we have come to know and love as the Grand Canyon. But more than that, to where we become receptive to our own deepest values, our own deepest memories of being playful as a kid, or our own potential of what we want to do with the rest of our lives. We can start to look at all those things because we've allowed ourselves to move over into that receptive frame of mind, and then.... [Min. 8.8-8.9 blank]

Steiger: Okay, this is original DAT master number four of the oral history interview with Rob Elliott for River Runners Oral History Project. This is Lew Steiger, we're in Flagstaff on 5/14/96. Once again, this is tape number four of four at this point. And we were talking about.... Wait, just let me make sure this tape.... Okay, so we're rollin'.

Elliott: ... to where the people become -try to just pick it up with people becoming receptive to their own deepest values, their own greatest potential in their lives. And how do they get that? They get that because they're ready for it, but we enhance that opportunity for personal discovery by allowing enough time, and mostly to allow enough time for solitude. And that has, in my view, very little to do with motors and oars, and very little to do with commercial and noncommercial. That can happen when guides put the ingredients together because they're sensitive to the possibilities of the richest, fullest experience they can provide their guests in the Grand Canyon.

Steiger: That's pretty darned strong.

Elliott: There's something else, before I forget. And for the transcriber, bear with me -I'm gonna give you a little excerpt to go back to putting in at least an hour ago in relation to what was happening with AZRA, especially AZRA management in the mid-eighties. This would have been with the laying down of the AZRA goals and the creation of the profit-sharing plan and the Boatman Advisory Committee. Go back and pick it up with the advisory committee, because we only touched on that as a title, we never said anything about that. And if there is any one thing that is essential to AZRA's company culture, that began a decade or more ago, it was the creation and nurturing of AZRA's advisory committee. What it is, is it's a group of four guides who are generally senior guides at AZRA, but anybody can run for this position. It's a position that people are elected to by their peers, so as soon as they have run four or more trips in the Grand Canyon, then they can nominate themselves to be on the advisory committee, and then everyone who runs four or more trips in the Canyon in a season votes, I believe in July, for their peers to represent them on the advisory committee. The function of the advisory committee is to represent all of the guides' interests, but more importantly represent the guides' perspective in how to better accomplish the AZRA goals -whether that is in program structure or equipment needs, or altering the hiring or training standards just a little bit among the guides. But what it comes down to is this is where the guides make input to AZRA management on how better to achieve the AZRA goals -just that simple. And it provides that opportunity for AZRA management to sit down four times a year, and it's a paid position, ten dollars an hour, I believe, to sit down for about a day and a half three or four times a year, to talk through all this stuff. And the chairman of the advisory committee is AZRA's field personnel manager, Cameron Stavely. And Cam does a great job chairing all these meetings. But it's one of the management tools that I'm most proud of at AZRA. End of excerpt, add-on, or whatever you want to call it. Time to take stock of where we are, Lew. Steiger: I'm gonna have to take a break. There's one other idea to run by you. The word "permission" has come up a lot, giving people permission. (

Elliott: Yeah.) Something I've done that's useful -especially in the nineties -another word is "responsibility." If you can orient a trip, like when you're just startin' out, if you can somehow get it in people's minds that it's also their responsibility -you know, the trip -and I don't know quite how to say it, but the idea that they will get out of the trip what they put into it, so that they're not just supposed to just be there and receive. You know what I'm sayin'? (

Elliott: Uh-huh.) That's another concept that I think Rod is reacting.... You know, Rod's complaint is that we have moved away from that kind of natural evolution over the last thirty years -the business as a whole. And that seems to me that we kind of need to turn the corner on that and move back a little bit toward that. And it also follows from that, that goes along with all the health code requirements, and the little stuff that we're runnin' into now, we seem to have thrust upon us the mandate from government: we have to absolutely take care of every possible little thing.

Elliott: Yeah, that whole area of personal responsibility -Rod Nash frequently referred to how horrible it will be when we have to glove "up" to slice the cheese at lunch. Yeah, I think what you're talking about is allowing people the personal responsibility that they chose to come on this river trip, and that people, in a certain respect, have.... I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

Steiger: I'm not either. Let's just stop. I don't know how to [plug?] it. I just think it's one of the tools that we have, is to somehow set people up with the notion that they're gonna get out of this trip what they put into it, that it really is their trip to make of it what they will. (

Elliott: Yup.) Somehow that's a good idea to work in there in the beginning. [Let's take a break.] (tape turned off and on)

Steiger: Of course ______talk about anybody besides Wesley.

Steiger: Yeah, well, I mean, do you have the time to deal with this? because we can always reschedule.

Elliott: I do.

Steiger: Well, let's just talk about great guides.

Elliott: Boy, this is gonna be off the cuff, but that's that way. Do you have a little piece of paper? I just want to.... (

Steiger: Yeah.) Because kind of the great guides and why. Now it's this list of.... This is a bit of a problem, because we start....

Steiger: It's like who are you gonna leave out and [so on].

Elliott: Exactly, you got it. It's tough. It's almost like focus on, you know, why are.... (aside about tape) Okay, the way we got to this point was while we were on that little break there was just talking about the fact that the evolution of any person's history is not in a vacuum, it's not just completely on their own -it's with a whole lot of other really formative people that have either inspired them or helped them along the way. And my own humble recommendation, Lew, in this oral history project, is that every time your interviewing an outfitter -but perhaps another guide or something too - is like....

Steiger: That's a great recommendation.

Elliott: Is who in your twenty years, thirty years or whatever, are some of the truly influential guides, or the guides that you thought were some of the greatest you ever ran into?

Steiger: I haven't ever asked that. Elliott: But just as importantly, why? What was it about them? So that's the question. And this partly came because of the oral history interview you did recently with Wesley Smith. But even if you hadn't told me that, the very first person I would have told you about was Wesley Smith. I don't know if Wesley gave you any of this, but he was hired by Lou Elliott out of a gas station. He was a tire jockey and my dad was short a couple of swampers. "Wanna go on a river trip?" in Williams, Arizona, or Flagstaff. He can give you the history on that better than I can. But it's just like from there on it was just incredible. But another great guide that influenced me tremendously was a guy named Howard Hemphill [phonetic spelling]. He was a grocery bagger at the IGA Food Store in Grants Pass when my father hired him. And I kind of go, "Well, why were these great guides, why were they influential?" In Howard Hemphill's case, I would say he was influential because as a young guide when I was around seventeen, I watched him row through Grave Creek Rapids on the Rogue River, and I swear that he only stroked on the oars maybe three times. So he was an influential guide just from the pure form of technique, of being able to say How can you do more with less? How can you work with the river so perfectly that you only have to stroke it here and there, and you and the river come out the other end that way. Well, Howard Hemphill was certainly one of the most influential people with me. Let's jump back to Wesley. Why is Wesley one of the truly great guides that I have ever encountered in my life? It would be humility, it would be diversity, and spirituality. Humility because Wesley knew always, from the beginning, that he wasn't making the experience for the people. He was figuring out what they were ready for, what they were looking for, but mostly what they were ready for, and helping make that happen in a really quiet sort of way. There's a great quotation from Lao Tsu, from the fifth century before Christ, and it's, "The definition of a great leader is when at the end of the journey the people say 'we did this ourselves". To me, Wesley epitomized that perspective of, the people having their trip in the Grand Canyon, and his allowing that to happen. But he allowed it to happen partly through his humility. He allowed it to happen because of all the people I've ever known, Wesley gives value to every person: no matter how old they were, no matter what their gender is, no matter what their experience is, no matter what their political views are, no matter how "evolved" they are, or how high their consciousness is, or how struggling they are in their life. It doesn't matter. Everyone that Wesley spends time with is of equal value. And because of that, the people love him, and just.... My favorite quality in people is when they are authentic. Lew, people are most comfortable and easy to be around when they don't have judgements, and when they are so comfortable with themselves in their own ... weaknesses, their own foibles as human beings, they are closer than you or I -certainly closer than I -to not having judgements. And Wesley is that kind of person. Wesley has a spiritual connection with the Grand Canyon. (aside about making everything present tense)

Elliott: This thing about everybody having value in the world reminds me of a great story about Martha Clark too, who I also count as one of the truly great guides that I've ever known and experienced in the Grand Canyon. Martha and I and four other guides were in the Grand Canyon -this would have been Saddle Canyon, April 27, 1985, and it was a ... discovery trip, I guess. It was a trip of people who wanted to come down and experience the Grand Canyon for fourteen days with no interchangers, and also experience some Native American ritual. So there was a wonderful woman along on the trip who was a Lakota Sioux. Her name is Marilyn Youngbird. And there was another guy on the trip, Charles Lawrence, that was running the trip, and I forget his name too. He was a wanna-be Native American -he was really Anglo. And around the campfire at Upper Saddle Canyon he said, "I think it's so exciting that we're all down here together on this incredible journey to go through the Grand Canyon and discover some of the Native American rituals and be together on such a special experience." And then he started talking down all of the other trips, and he started talking down motor trips, and he started talking down all the people that came down and just drank a whole lot of beer and got inebriated in this incredible sacred place of the Grand Canyon, et cetera. And as he was talking along this vein, Martha Clark stood up and kind of put her hand up in the air and said, "Wait just a minute, Charles, that's not right at all. Yes, we're special, and this is a special trip, and this is a special opportunity for all of us, but I've done a lot of guiding in the Grand Canyon, and every trip I've been on is special, and every person that comes through the Grand Canyon is special. And every trip down here is special. And that's just how I look at it, and you're not gonna change my mind." It was just such a neat sort of blurting out and challenging this notion, this kind of elitism sort of notion. And that is one of the things I think that makes someone like a Wesley Smith or a Martha Clark or a David Edwards.... I almost hate to mention guides, because as soon as we start mentioning them, we're gonna leave out a whole bunch that are also this way.

Steiger: Suzanne Jordan.

Elliott: (chuckles) Suzanne Jordan. One of the most wonderful things about Suzanne Jordan -I know I spoke of her a little bit earlier -was that yes, she just went off and followed her dream, followed her bliss and became a guide in the Grand Canyon, but if you ever had a line-up of people from all walks of life in, say, a New York subway and you took a person on the street and said, "Okay, see those ten people lined up against that wall over there?" and you said, "Okay, pick out which one is the river guide." It wouldn't be Suzanne Jordan, and yet she was one of the truly great river guides I have ever known. We were at the mouth of Havasu Creek in this tremendous flash flood. It was raining lightly and I was up under a ledge. I was meditating -back when I meditated -and I heard this "ka-thwap!" like a rifle shot, and it was the "D" rings being ripped off the fronts of the rafts, down inside the mouth of Havasu Creek as this frothy, muddy flood of about five or six vertical feet was just whippin' at those rafts, and throwin' 'em out the mouth of Havasu. We had two trips, so we had ten rafts there. And so I jumped up and ran down the trail and went down the ledges down to where all the guides are, and there's all this commotion, and Dave Edwards is standing on a raft that's starting to drift out into the main current, and he says, "It's a body!" And he jumps on this woman that doesn't have a life jacket, and I say to myself, "Wait, why was someone on a raft without a life jacket?!" And this person had been washed downstream from the last ford up inside the mouth of Havasu. I look over just in time to see Suzanne Jordan grab a rope, a throw bag that we had hung up at the tie-in spot just in case we needed a throw bag there -certainly wasn't policy at the time, and thank God it's not policy, it's just the right thing to do. And she grabs this throw bag and whips it out to Edwards as he's going out in the main current holding onto this woman without the life jacket that had been swept down through the Narrows and underneath the rafts, and pulls them to shore. As soon as Edwards is pulled into the shore like a pendulum, there's about five or six people down there grabbing them. What does Suzanne do? She goes, "I'm not needed here anymore." She immediately looks up and asks, "Where's the next need?" And I see her kind of squat down and just start to gun it, and she just runs off the ledges, and leaps off one of the muav ledges and lands on her belly on the side of a raft. There's four rafts all takin' off down the river by themselves without anybody in 'em. "I should maybe be on those rafts," she figured. (laughter) (

Steiger: Wow!) So there she was, and she floated on downstream and she started rowing one of the rafts to try to get the whole flotilla to shore. And she couldn't row four rafts full of water from the flash flood. And she finally pulls in about two miles downstream on the left, and she runs ashore with a rope and puts it through a little eye of the rock and cinches it off and stops the whole flotilla from going downstream. But she's not the person you would pick out as the river guide from the lineup.

Steiger: Great story!

Elliott: She was incredible. She was terrific. That's enough guide stories for now.

Steiger: Okay. (tape turned off) [Transcriptionist's note: What follows is extremely faint, and sounds as if it may have been recorded while standing out in the driveway as Lew is about to depart.]

Elliott: Who says that the noncommercial participant rowing his or her raft first time in the Grand Canyon, having only rowed a total of a hundred miles on a river ever before, who is pushing the envelope of experience, and hanging it all out there and discovering incredible insights about themselves in the Grand Canyon -who says that that experience has any more value than the lady coming on a trip -a commercial trip, let's say -from Chicago who's a hundred pounds overweight, and something about her experience in the Grand Canyon put her in a frame of mind to go back home and get out of that abusive relationship she's been in for the last twenty years and decide, "I'm enough, and I'm gonna lose eighty pounds and I'm gonna get a whole new grip on my life." Who says that that lady from Chicago is having any less valid an experience in the Grand Canyon than the person rowing it themselves for the first time?"

Steiger: Okay.

Elliott: That was a run-on sentence, I believe. [chuckles]

Steiger: Yeah.

[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE B; and end of interview]