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Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection Rob Elliot

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Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection Rob Elliot 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.
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