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| Deer Creek Falls, July 31, 1927, courtesy The Huntington Library |
July Grand Canyon River History Dates
July 1, 1951 – While on a Desolation-Gray river trip, Moulty Fulmer finds a small toy duck cut out of a piece of wood. He writes on it “Degree of River Travel and Study, July 1, 1951, By Order of the River Vice President.” In all solemnity and amidst the group’s uproarious laughter, Moulty gives his friend Otis “Dock” Marston the duck degree. Dock adds it to the river files and it’s in The Huntington Library today.
July 2, 1869 – Major John Wesley Powell and the rest of the crew were at the confluence of the Bear River (today’s Yampa) and the Green River.
July 3, 1960 - Late in the day, the four Turbocraft Jet 35’s were back in the water at Hemenway Harbor to start the uprun of Grand Canyon. Jon Hamilton and Dock Marston led the way from the harbor and out across the reservoir, disappearing into the cobalt blue immensity of water and barren mountains beyond. Ninety minutes and 35 miles later, the boats arrived at Temple Bar.
July 4, 1960 - In the evening light, Jon Hamilton, Guy Mannering, and Bill Belknap climbed into Wee Red and headed into the tailwaves of Lava Falls. They played around there for a while, Jon standing and looking at the rapid as the boat was knocked about in the pulsing waves. The rapid looked huge from below. The men said nothing, then Jon suddenly turned to Guy and Bill, his face aglow in the day’s last light, and said “What a magnificent piece of water.”
July 5, 1960 - Hamilton’s first foray into the rapid with Kiwi resulted in his being thoroughly repulsed. He returned to the beach below to pump out a load of water and offload fuel cans and cases of food. The crew had no choice but to portage gear, food, and fuel around the rapid. They rigged a canvas cover over the Turbocraft with an opening just big enough for the pilot to sit at the controls. Hamilton climbed into Kiwi again and after four more attempts, topped the rapid about 11:30 a.m.
July 6, 1954 – Grand Canyon Superintendent Patraw sent a letter to Georgie White citing provision “1.59 Boats. (a) No privately owned boat, canoe, raft or other floating craft shall be placed or operated upon the waters of any park or monument without a permit from the Superintendent, who shall have authority to revoke the permit and require the immediate removal of such craft upon the failure of the permittee to comply with the terms and conditions of the permit.” The Superintendent noted it “would be advisable, on your future river trips, to submit application well in advance of your arrival on park waters, so that there will be sufficient opportunity to consider your application and to issue the necessary permit, and to avoid a technical violation of the regulation quoted above.”
July 7, 1955 – The body of Dave Jensen washes up on shore at the foot of Hermit Rapid. Jensen may have been trying to swim to Phantom Ranch from the foot of the Tanner Trail to recover his impounded dory, the Deacon’s Dilemma. (See April 6, 1950 entry)
July 8, 1949 - Bert Loper complained of pain in his chest at lunch, yet he still refused to let Wayne Nichol assist with rowing. With Nichol riding on the deck, Loper’s Grand Canyon floated well ahead of their group. Nichol suddenly shouted to Bert a serious rapid roared just ahead. Bert kicked into gear for all he was worth and tried to pull the boat across the river from right to left just above 24.5 Mile Rapid. With the river flowing about 51,000cfs, he was unable to make it, squared up to enter the rapid, then slumped in his seat. Nichol would later explain the boat began to “yaw across the current on the third trough.” A river runner himself, Nichol knew this was wrong. Alarmed, he “looked over his shoulder and shouted ‘Bert, look to your oars.’” But Loper just sat motionless.
July 9, 1954 - The first motorized bridge pontoon to run Grand Canyon clears the Grand Wash Cliffs. Chuck Bolte and Earl Eaton left Aspen in a paddle boat 6 weeks earlier and transitioned to the pontoon at Glenwood Springs.
July 10, 1951 - As he stood on the beach at President Harding Rapid, Don Harris smelled a terrible odor and soon found the body of David Quigley. The Harris Brennan group dug the partially embedded body out of the sand and buried the young man above the highwater line. The group placed a marker of driftwood with an inscription reading “Discovered by Harris-Brennan river party, body presumed to be that of Boy Scout drowned in Glen Canyon about July 1, 1951.”
July 11, 1952 – On June 22, 1952, Bill and Fern Davis headed downstream from Green River, Utah, in their tiny rubber raft. They enjoyed side hikes in Labyrinth and Stillwater canyons. The couple’s 10-foot-long raft flipped in Cataract Canyon’s Big Drop III, but they recovered and arrived at Lees Ferry on July 11, setting a twenty-day speed record at that time. They also set a record for the traverse in the shortest boat.
July 12, 1952 – 58-year-old Dock Marston and the eight-year-old child Buzzy Belknap swim Paria Rapid using an air mattress for flotation on a flow near 29,000 cfs. From that moment forward they were friends for life.
July 13, 1949 – Dock Marston writes the following to Don Harris: “Dear Don, The news tells me that you have left Bert in The Canyon. That is where he wanted to be. If the paper be correct, you are to search for his body. I hope you do not find it. This to you – I consider your acceptance of the trip with Bert to be one of the bravest things that ever happened on the River. You could not help but know the prospect of tragedy but you went along to carry out an old man’s wish. His wish is now complete. You may have regrets but you should have none. You could have done no better. Had you not gone along, Bert would have gone anyway. We have been conditioned in our world to take death hard. If there be a hereafter, Bert is now in heaven and gotten there by the route he prayed for. Cheerio, Dock
July 14, 1949 – While Camped at President Harding Rapid, Jim Rigg discovers ten gallons of gasoline cached by Dock Marston and Ed Hudson four weeks earlier. Rigg and Norm pour five gallons onto a large driftwood pile adjacent to camp and place the second five gallon can of fuel in the middle of the pile. With a single match the heap goes up with a loud whump! The fire burns so bright and for so long that some of the crew shift downriver to sleep avoiding the glare.
July 15, 1923 – Frank Dodge sat in the lobby of a Flagstaff hotel when a nattily dressed man in rompers, wool knee stockings, and two-tone oxfords, with a cane walked in. He had printed circulars telling of his accomplishments. He was a misfit in the job as a boatman, but a very pleasant one. He hardly proved the skilled oarsman that his own writings would suggest. Who would write differently? Dodge liked Freeman from that meeting to this day.
July 16, 1947 - The Nevills group camps on river left above Lava Canyon Rapid. That afternoon, they inspect the remains of Seth Tanner’s mining works, nosing out a fifty-pound case of dynamite from 1924 and blasting caps, but no fuse. Norm carries a few handfuls of dynamite sticks to a sandbar by the river, gathers driftwood, puts the caps in the dynamite, and lights the whole pile on fire. The explosion “rocked the canyon when it went off” with the “Harvey cash register in view” at Desert View. Norm thought it worked so spectacularly that he repeats his fireworks by blasting all the remaining dynamite.
July 17, 1952 – NPS Director Conrad Wirth attempts to give a speech to the Vernal City Council and Chamber of Commerce. He is shouted down for saying river running is quite safe and a great way to see the Monument. The locals pointe out the river trip is “much too expensive for the common man.” They had a point about the pricing as local guides charge $55 for one person to make a day trip, almost $600 in today’s dollars.
July 18, 1889 - The men of the ill-fated Frank Brown river trip abandon the river and hike up Paradise (South) Canyon. At lunch, a storm brings water, mud, and rocks cascading into the canyon, and the men take shelter behind a leaning rock. Near the top they find a deer trail and reach the rim at 2:00 p.m., where they see much broken pottery.
July 19, 1934 – Seven men in four boats launch from Lee’s Ferry. The river flow is so extremely low, the trip is “dusty,” even though they have the rare experience of starting on a clear, green, but unfit to drink, river. Two days later, the river water becomes cloudy. The USGS reports only 1,530 cubic feet on the 19th. The following day the flow drops to 1,450 cubic feet per second.
July 20, 1938 - When the Clover Expedition reaches Phantom Ranch, Clover and Nevills hike to the South Rim. The next day, July 20, they participate in a radio broadcast with Superintendent Tillotson. Tillotson maintains command of the microphone, discouraging anyone contemplating a river trip. He ends by noting, “Mr. Nevills and his party certainly chose a most unusual and hazardous means of reaching the park and just as certainly I would not advise anyone to follow their example.”
July 21, 1950 – At 9:20 a.m. at 122.75 Mile, on the left at the head of Forster Rapid, Hudson’s Esmeralda II is sighted by the Wright-Rigg river trip. The Es rests six to ten feet above the river level and seventy feet back from the shore. On landing, the party scrambles over her seeking souvenirs, with the boatmen appropriating everything of value like hungry hogs at feeding time.
July 22, 1938 - At Horn Creek Rapid on 17,300 second feet, the watchers thought boatman Loren Bell was lost “and he sure as hell wasn’t idle.” The net result is a bent oarlock and Norm Nevills admittes he meant to have it welded. Bell demands the “two-bit rapid be called Corn Creek.” In Granite Falls, Nevills is off key through fumbling his oars in the waves he measured at twenty feet, while the holes along the right hand cliff measured five feet in diameter in his eyes. A spinning oar pins the unhappy boatman in his cockpit and cuts the skin from his knuckles, for the only recorded boating disharmony in their Grand Canyon suite.
July 23, 1955 – Frank Wright’s cataract boat Doris is pins in the fangs at 232 Mile Rapid. The boat is freed from the trap but needs repairs below. On the upside, Katie Lee plays her guitar and sings to the river runners at night as they sit around the campfire.
July 24, 1958 - Gaylord Staveley didn’t help his reputation in the summer of 1958 when he applies for an exclusive franchise to operate boat tours through Grand Canyon with both oars and power. The Park Service does not go along with the request, nor does the river community when they hear about it. Harry Aleson writes Dock that Staveley’s “effort at exclusive Dude carrying thru [sic] the Grand smacks of modern day youth, – mine, all mine – none on the platter for you. This could not happen. None of the old river boatmen would stand still for it. My father’s son would be the very last of the boatmen to consider such exclusiveness.”
July 25, 1952 - Jim Rigg and twenty-two-year-old Sue Seely climb into Jim’s Chris-Craft kit boat for a seamless run of Lava Falls Rapid. Sue is the second female to run the rapid in a motorized watercraft. Evie Mull was the first, having run the same rapid in the same boat with the same pilot two months earlier.
July 26, 1943 – 92-year-old Julius Stone dies in Santa Monica, California. Living a rags to riches life, Stone ran the Grand Canyon with three others in 1909. Dock Marston identified Stone as the 25th person to boat from Lees Ferry through the Grand Canyon.
July 27, 1951 – Chicago river runner Bill Davis writes an account of how he organized getting the Esmeralda II back into the Colorado River at Forster Rapid in 1950. Davis includes the account in a letter to Colorado River historian Dock Marston.
July 28, 1941 - Alexander “Zee” Grant and his foldboat Escalante are at the Phantom Ranch boat beach. Zee” is most likely America’s best foldboat pilot at the time. Originally planning to tackle Grand Canyon solo, he joins up with Norm Nevills, a budding commercial river trip operator. Grant and Nevills initially agree to conduct two different river trips in Grand Canyon but travel together “for mutual convenience.” The two trips quickly became one mutually supportive group.
July 29, 1957 – Dock Marston receives a metal name plate from one of the 1909 Stone boats sent to him by Ray Cogswell. Marston writes Cogswell “Believe me I am as tickled as a child with a new toy with the receiving of the boat name plate. I am adding it to the River Archives.” That name plate is still in the Marston Collection at The Huntington Library.
July 30, 1954 – River runner Katie Lee writes to Dock Marston about canyon names. She notes “what’ ever our present day clan has named it, the Indians had another long before ours anyway.”
July 31, 1927 – The Clyde Eddy river trip stops at Deer Creek Falls. A ten-foot-high barrier of river sand blocks most of the mouth of the creek between the Falls and Colorado River.
Ps... Yes, this post is a challenge to see if I can find a Colorado River Basin fact for every day of July... Done! If you like this sort of stuff you will enjoy reading the 4 book series Dock Marston: The Colorado River Historian Volume 1 on Amazon Kindle or get the book at Vishnu Temple Press.
