The River Journals of Norman D. Nevills
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Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 2005 High, Wide, and Handsome: The River Journals of Norman D. Nevills Roy Webb Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Natural Resources and Conservation Commons Recommended Citation Webb, Roy, "High, Wide, and Handsome: The River Journals of Norman D. Nevills" (2005). All USU Press Publications. 153. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/153 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. High, Wide, and Handsome High, Wide, and Handsome The River Journals of Norman D. Nevills Edited by Roy Webb With a foreword by Brad Dimock Utah State University Press Logan, Utah Copyright © 2005 Utah State University Press All rights reserved Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322–7800 www.usu.edu/usupress All photographs courtesy of the Special Collections Department, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City Cover design by Brad Dimock Manufactured in the United States of America by Sheridan Books Printed on acid-free, recycled paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nevills, Norman D., 1908-1949. High, wide, and handsome : the river journals of Norman D. Nev- ills / edited by Roy Webb ; with a foreword by Brad Dimock. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87421-602-8 (case-bound : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-87421-603-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. White-water canoeing--West (U.S.) 2. Rivers--West (U.S.) 3. Nev- ills, Norman D.--Diaries. I. Webb, Roy. II. Title. GV776.W3N48 2005 797.122’092--dc22 2004029562 Contents Foreword vii Introduction 1 1938: Cataract and Grand Canyons, June 20 to August 116 1940: Green River Through the Grand Canyon, June 17 to August 22 61 1941: Grand Canyon, July 14 to August 595 1942: Grand Canyon, July 12 to August 7 119 1946: Salmon River, July 11 to August 3, Snake River, August 4 to August 17 154 1947: Green River, June 16 to July 5, Grand Canyon, July 10 to August 5 186 1948: Grand Canyon, July 11 to August 5 216 1949: Green River, June 19 to July 3 Grand Canyon, July 12 to July 31 238 Coda 251 A Note on the Sources 255 Notes 261 Index 303 v for Sarah, river girl Foreword On September 19, 1949, Norman Davies Nevills was at the top of his runway and the top of his game. He adjusted his twin-pitch propeller for climb, pushed the throttle of his new high-powered engine to full and accelerated down the crude gravel incline toward the gulch that separated him from his tiny settlement of Mexican Hat, Utah. His wife, Doris—beautiful, devoted mother of their two young daughters—sat beside him. They planned to land in Grand Junction in two hours. Doris would catch a fl ight to the West Coast; Norman would return to Mexican Hat and attend to his burgeoning river business. Life was good. In the last two decades, Nevills had invented the commercial river business—the idea of taking passengers down extreme whitewater may have occurred to others, but Nevills made it real. Beginning in the 1930s he carried explorers, then tourists down the rollicking San Juan. In 1938 he began trips on the Colorado through Cataract and Grand Canyons, navigating America’s biggest whitewater for pay. Although he scaled back to solely San Juan trips for three years during World War II, Nevills pushed his business hard, by reaching for publicity wherever and whenever he could, trying new rivers—the upper Green, Idaho’s Salmon and Snake—and always making bigger and better plans for the future. By 1949 he had spawned his own competition. Friend Harry Aleson had teamed up with disgruntled former passenger Charles Larabee to siphon off Glen Canyon business. Former boatman Don Harris was running private river trips with Bert Loper and would soon begin commercial operations with passenger-turned-partner Jack Brennan. Boatman Kent Frost had guided a group of Salt Lake City Boy Scouts and Scout leaders through Glen Canyon, some of whom would spawn several new river companies in years to come. Former boatman and devoted booster Dock Marston had broken off and begun powerboating rapid rivers and, for reasons unclear, disparaging Nevills to anyone who would listen. But Nevills was a good hundred paces ahead of any of them in terms of reputation, momentum, experience, and publicity. No one before him had ever made more than two transits of Grand Canyon. Nevills had logged seven. He was called the Fast Water Man. Detractors criticized Nevills’s boating as being too conservative. But to be honest, conservative boatmen in those days ran fl at water. Even showing vii viii High, Wide, and Handsome up on a whitewater river bordered on insanity in most minds. To do it successfully was almost unheard of. Most river expeditions that preceded Nevills were rife with wrecks, fl ips, and worse. Yet Nevills never fl ipped a boat, never lost a passenger, and never aborted a trip. Conservative, perhaps, but a conservative wild man—fl irting with the edge of possibility, but poised to pull things back into control at a moment’s notice. *** Nevills hit take-off speed and eased back on the stick. The clattering and bouncing along the runway quieted once the plane rose from the earth. A broad, jagged gulch opened up ahead and below. Airborne again, he began a low, banked turn over the Nevills Lodge, preparing to buzz a farewell before climbing out toward Blanding and up over the high country toward Colorado. A kaleidoscope of colored, bent, desert stone rotated beneath them. Lord, did that man love to fl y. He could not drive by an airport without stopping to rent a plane for a quick zoom around the terrain. Nevills bought his fi rst plane in 1946 and quickly mastered the art of fl ying. Some called him reckless, but by a crop duster’s standards, he knew his craft and fl ew it bravely, cleanly, and well. He worked as a bush pilot for geologists—dropping into likely spots in the desert and then clearing enough of a runway to take off again. That is edgy work, and it takes a sure and quick hand on the control stick. Yet in all his cavalier moves he only banged things up once, snapping a prop on a bad desert landing due to, he claimed, a lack of concentration from a bulging bladder. The plane itself was unharmed. Today, bush pilots in Alaska and Idaho fl y like Nevills did. They have to. And they are very, very good. But pilots and boatmen operate near the edge, and there is a reason it is called the edge. Things happen out there with little margin. On the river it can end up in a boat wreck or a fl ip, though rarely much worse. Water is soft and slow and almost always forgiving. It’s different in an airplane. Things can happen way too fast, and gravity is relentless. Pilots practice stalls, simulated power failures at altitude, and power-off landings to be ready for ill fortune. But there is one situation practicing pilots cannot duplicate, and it is one of the worst things that can happen: a power failure immediately after takeoff. The plane has barely enough speed to fl y, is scarcely above the ground, and the runway is never close enough. There are few options and no time. That day, it happened. The Cherry II’s souped-up engine sputtered and quit. Some later spoke of a known fuel problem, of Nevills’s recklessness, of the inevitability of disaster. They said every pilot knows you can’t get back to the runway in this case; simple physics—dictates that you have to land somewhere else. But not one of them really knows what happened. Not one of them was at the stick that day. Nevills had a fraction of a second to pick a Foreword ix likely place to set it down. He made his decision and tried to hold enough altitude to clear the cliff edge as he headed for the end of the runway. That’s when all his good fortune, good luck, and fi ne skills came to an end. He was three feet too low. The Cherry II exploded on impact. The river world was shocked, his family devastated. Three boatmen, Frank Wright, Jim Rigg, and his younger brother, Bob, picked up what remained of Nevills Expedition. They renamed it Mexican Hat Expeditions and ran trips into the 1960s. By then, his daughter, Joan, was married, and she and her husband, Gaylord Staveley, had taken over the company. But the river business had changed. *** On July 30, 1947, Nevills sat along the Colorado at Diamond Creek and wrote, “This will never be a ‘milk run,’ it will always be a trip fi lled with unexpected thrills, surprises, some hardships, and above all, a feeling of having pitted oneself against dangerous and trying conditions—and winning out.” What he could not foresee was the introduction of far more economical infl atable boats—boats that never had to be lined, that could carry more people per boatman, that could bounce off rocks and cliffs with impunity, that could take the biggest waves in Grand Canyon head- on. Nor could he predict the large, motorized rafts that took anywhere from a dozen to twenty or more passengers through the Canyon in a week.