Stories of Phantom Ranch in the 70's, before permits were required for camping and the water treatment plant was constructed. How did they manage compost and human waste? What was it like to live and work there? This conversation was recorded on January 1, 2000, during the Phantom Ranch Millennium Gathering.
Wayne Ranney and George Marsic
January 1, 2000, Phantom Ranch, Grand Canyon
Interview Conducted by Michael Quinn Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection for: Department of Interior National Park Service, Grand Canyon National Park
Marsic: My name is George Marsic and I worked down here in Phantom Ranch from 1974 to 1975.
Quinn: This is January 1, 2000.
Marsic: And now here I am back at January 1, 2000, and it's raining, and there's snow on Zoroaster and life is beautiful. One of my fond recollections is being down here, and now I'm here twenty-five years later. But one of the people that was down here was Roy Starkey. Since we're in Roy's old shed here, I think of a Roy Starkey story. And I think back to me meeting Roy and thinking, "Here I am now living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and here Roy has been living here for umpteen years." So I asked him how he got here, and goes, "Well, [I] started off as USGS, working for them." And he'd come down here checking on the sediment loads in the Colorado River, and he'd be taking his cart across and everything else. And so one day Roy said, "You want to go out on the cart?" I go, "Sure." And so here we go down out there, and we climb up there and we get into his cart, and then he starts pulling us across the river. And here we are above the river and I'm just looking ________ and going, "Here I am suspended above the Colorado River _________ sediment loads," and I'm looking up at this beauty around me and just going, "Wow." And from Roy, as it turns up, what happened at the USGS was that they installed -at least for the flow gauges -they had satellite feed, and so part of Roy's job was actually lost. But at the time, he had become such a part of the canyon here that what they found was that he couldn't be down there, because all that he was needed was once a month to come down for the sediment log -so he got a job here at Phantom Ranch, and ended up being here for the rest of the time. It just shows that the canyon, if the canyon likes you, it'll keep you here.
Ranney: Actually, Roy was an inspiration to all of us because we were NEW at the Grand Canyon, and here was a guy that had been here fifteen years, and of course he was a legend and an icon. We figured, "Wow! fifteen years inside the Grand Canyon! There's a bright future for us!" (laughter)
Marsic: Exactly. Little did we know that for sure we'd still ___________.
Ranney: Here it is now, we've all been associated with the Grand Canyon longer than he was when we met him, and THAT'S an incredible thought.
Marsic: Yeah. You know, from just coming down here and doing the hike down here, and also end up working on the South Rim, working down here, becoming a hiking guide in the Grand Canyon, becoming a river guide, and then going on from there, but still sort of coming back to the center of the vortex.
Ranney: Well, my name is Wayne Ranney, and I started at Phantom Ranch on October 6, 1975, as a volunteer ranger at the ranch. And George Marsic was one of the very first people I remember meeting at this place, and of course it all went downhill from there with George. But I came at a very interesting time. They had just sent Mark Sinclair, who was the SCA ranger that summer of '75 at Phantom Ranch, another volunteer. They just gave him a seasonal job at Indian Gardens. And I was walking through on a four-day backpack as a tourist from North Rim to South Rim, and ended up getting the position that Mark had as a volunteer down here. And I can remember Pete Nichols, who was in charge of the whole Inner Canyon thing apologizing to me because the only volunteer job he could offer me was at Phantom Ranch.
Quinn: And he said there was no food allowance?
Ranney: Yeah, he said, "Another thing, I can't give you any money for food." And they usually gave their volunteers five dollars a day as a food allowance, but he didn't even have THAT money. And I thought about if for about two seconds and said, "You bet!" (laughter) And he gave me a brown shirt and a radio and he said, "Okay, get on the trail." And I looked at him and I said, "Listen, I gotta go back to California and quit my job and get my clothes." I don't know if he thought he'd ever see me again, but after a week I came back, and October 6, I walked down the Bright Angel Trail and came to Phantom Ranch. That was the first place I lived in Arizona, and I've been a resident of Arizona for twenty-five years. But what was nice about MY first experience with Phantom Ranch was that Phil Hecker, who had been the Phantom Ranch ranger for four years, and did a very good job down here and provided some continuity to the Park Service scene, through this very interesting transition when the Grand Canyon was wide open, without permits, and there were trash cans down here, Phil Hecker spanned this time of the 1972, on that Easter Sunday when apparently they had a thousand campers show up at Bright Angel Campground -Phil Hecker spanned that time of the wide open Phantom Ranch, Park Service-wise, to this permitted campground that only allowed seventy-five people a night. And I enjoyed working with Phil, and him telling me what at that time seemed to me to be very OLD stories -they were three years old at that time. He was getting burnt out on the ranch, and would ride his horse out as often as possible, and leave me, as a young twenty-one-year-old volunteer, as the only Park Service person at Phantom Ranch for nights and nights at a time, sometimes weeks at a time.
Quinn: So what did you do by yourself if there was a medical emergency?
Ranney: We didn't have medical emergencies in those days -people were more responsible for themselves. I can remember one time, what we today call a homeless person -in those days we called them bums -came down to Phantom Ranch in the middle of winter because he heard there were palm trees at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. This was a guy who came down with a bag over his shoulder, with his few little clothes in it, and one of these scruffy beards and no teeth and he just showed up down here. We ended up sending him back out. There really weren't any medicals. We didn't carry guns in those days, we didn't have medical training, and imagine a volunteer person who's not even a seasonal, not even able to wear a badge, as basically THE LAW down at Phantom Ranch for a good portion of that winter of 1975-1976.
Quinn: Did you take up office in the ranger station there?
Ranney: That was another great thing: Phil Hecker being of the generation HE was, he wanted to be in the NEW ranger station, which in those days we called The Pink House.
Marsic: That's right, The Pink House.
Ranney: That was the original USGS building, where Roy Starkey had his sediment study thing, but eventually that came over into Park Service control, and they turned the Park Service into what they then started calling the Phantom Ranger Station. And Phil said, "Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna live here, and you have to go live at the River Ranger Station." The River Ranger Station was the BEST place to live in the whole area, because I had a view of Zoroaster, I was at the Colorado River, and it was the perfect thing. Phil was happy living in the Phantom Station, he let me live in the River Ranger Station, I had it all to myself for those, I guess it was five months that winter.
Quinn: So what did you do, like on a typical day? What interaction did you have with the campers?
Ranney: Okay, first of all greet Zoroaster in the morning, right out the window where the bed was in the River Ranger Station; go into the campground in the morning and just start picking up trash. Phil did not pick up cigarette butts as part of his job description, and I found [that] almost like meditation, picking up these cigarette butts. And I must have picked up 10,000 cigarette butts from a series of years prior to this, when people were just throwing cigarette butts and leaving them in the campground. For a good five months, I was picking up cigarette butts. One morning I found a matchbook from a dry cleaners that I worked at in California. A good friend of mine owned this dry cleaners and gave me this work while I was going to my first years of college, and I found this matchbook for Town Cleaners in Claremont, California, and I stapled it to a piece of paper and I mailed it to Don Eckleberg [phonetic spelling], and all I put on it was "Don, advertising pays! Found at the bottom of the Grand Canyon." (laughter) No fucking joke! That's when the whole karma thing started for me in the Grand Canyon. I'm just looking and I'm going, "There's TOO much connection going on here." And a lot of REALLY good things happened. I mean, that changed my life that one winter, and I eventually got hired as the seasonal ranger for Cottonwood at the Bicentennial summer, and was the Lower Gorge ranger in 1977 and then came back to Phantom on trail crew in 1978. That's sort of a short summary of that FIRST phase of my Grand Canyon experience.
Marsic: One of the things, when you mentioned trash -we talked about this earlier -my first day down working here at Phantom Ranch. . . . Well, I got in here just -the night before was on November 1, 1974. I had been bartending up at the Bright Angel Lodge for Halloween night. So I hiked down here and just came down here at sunset. I was rushing to get here to the lodge and get here for dinner, naturally. The smell of food, oh! from a long way up the trail. So I get down here and it's dark now, and get a chance to meet everybody and have dinner and get settled into the bunkhouse. The next morning my job was morning lodge, and so I'd have to get up about 5:30 and it was still dark. So I get up, get all my stuff together, and come over to the lodge, and I start working, getting the kitchen set up. The cook was there at that time, a kid named Chris, who to get himself motivated for cooking and getting the meal out, put on Led Zeplin full blast. (laughter) So that was my introduction to work. So I'm working, and we fed all these people, I'm still in the kitchen dealing with my stuff, and eventually it becomes light out, and so now I'm starting to deal with garbage. I'd finished all the dishes. And at that time for garbage we had wet garbage that had to be frozen so it could be packed out on a mule, in burlap bags. And then we had cans that had to be smashed outside. And then we got our burnables. We had a little incinerator out behind the lodge, and so the first thing I did, I figured, well, I need to have a cigarette smoke, and so I'll do the incinerator first. So I went and got my burnables together. I step out of the lodge and walk back to the incinerator and I get everything going, I'm done dealing with my work and stuff, so I got the incinerator going and put my stuff in there, and here's all the smoke going up into Grand Canyon, back then perfectly legal and authorized by the Park Service -you know, it's still the old days. And so then I sat down, I'm still sort of looking down, and I pull out my cigarettes and I light up a cigarette and I take a puff, I put my head up, and I'm on a rock right next to the Bright Angel Creek I see this about three-pound trout jump out of the water. I look up and I'm seeing the South Rim, start looking around, and I go, "I died. I died. I MUST have died. I'm living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon!" (laughter) And gone to heaven. And that's it. Later on that day I go, "That was a figment of my imagination, with that trout." So about three o'clock I finished up morning lodge and I get my fishing pole out, because I've got to go back to this hole and see what happens. One cast -nothing. Second cast, BA-DOOM! But I was wrong, it wasn't a three-pounder -it was 4½ pounds. (laughter) I gutted it right there, I ended up bringing it into the lodge. I washed it down, I took butter -put aluminum foil down -took butter, rice, lemons, assorted seasonings, wrapped it up, stuck it on the tray, turned on the oven, stuck it in. The tail was still flapping. And then I waited a half-hour, sat outside _________. "This is just a dream!" (laughter)
Ranney: Fish really were bigger back in the seventies.
Quinn: Before it got too well-known.
Ranney: Yeah, before it got well-known. It was just long enough after Glen Canyon Dam that it was perfect trout habitat. So that was another magical moment. It wasn't too soon after the dam, and it wasn't too long after it got discovered. I mean, it was COMMON for George, Wayne Pye [phonetic spelling] was a ranger down here, he loved to fish but never ate them. These guys would go down there and catch thirty-six-inch trout that weighed five and six pounds!
Marsic: The twenty-eight-inchers were basically four- to six-pounders. Thirty-six-incher that I had was 9½ pounds. But I have seen fifteen-pounders taken out of here. And of course that was more towards the mouth of the creek. Up here, it seemed like -it was basically we were catching like six-, seven-, eight-pounders.
Ranney: Twenty-one-inch browns, __________.
?: These are not fish stories.
Marsic: These are not fish stories.
Quinn: Were these fish introduced when _____ dam _______.
Marsic: Yeah, they WERE introduced.
Ranney: They actually used to have a trout hatchery -no, they used to bring trout down -this is long before OUR time -in these milk crates, and they used to stock Bright Angel Creek. And so the trout were actually introduced in the twenties. They're not native to the Grand Canyon, if I'm not mistaken. So there was a population of them, but of course when they built the dam, the trout could utilize the river and this klondofera [phonetic spelling], which is a little shrimp that grows on the algae, when the algae started to grow up because of the lack of sediment, the klondofera were growing on it, and the trout had this incredible protein source. And it took about that thirteen years when they closed the gates of Glen Canyon Dam, by the time we arrived in the mid-seventies, that this resource of trout developed into this. . . . It wasn't world class then, but it WAS world class in terms of what we were getting -literally thirty-six-inch trout. Pink meat.
Marsic: What it was, the trout ended up, because it was basically grown trout, it ended up a combination between cutthroat and rainbow, and that's sort of what the mix that came out, and the hybrid that came out here.
Ranney: The eighteen-inchers were the best-tasting. You could catch bigger fish, and they really looked good and they made a nice trophy, but the eighteen-inchers were absolute heaven.
Marsic: Yeah. And one of the things, too -and you still have it right now -very seldom do you have like a German brown down here, although I've caught some big German browns down here in the old days. But there was a steady population up on towards the Flowing Springs pump house, that has a standing German brown population. I don't know how good it is still right now.
Ranney: There's been a lot of floods since 1993.
Marsic: Yeah. I'll bet you the more closer you get to the pump house, there's still probably some still up in there.
Quinn: Did you ever catch any of the native fish, like a squawfish or the humpback chubs?
Marsic: No, because this water's too cold. Your humpback chub population was strictly around the Little Colorado River.
Ranney: By that time they had ______________.
Marsic: Oh, yeah, they were totally impacted. The humpback chub needs a warmer water source.
Ranney: I never heard of anybody catching one.
Ranney: And people did a lot of fishing. Do you remember Wayne Pye?
Marsic: Yeah, sure I remember Wayne. That's a different story that we won't go into right now.
Ranney: Well, he ended up being with [Deb?]. _________ manager here, and then he packed stuff in. He packed _________.
Marsic: He was a ranger too.
Ranney: He was Phil's sort of relief man. Phil would go out for days off, and Wayne Pye was here.
Marsic: Wayne was a good guy except. . . . Well, we won't go into this, but something happened to Wayne that he went off the wrong track. But the fishing here was just world class at one time, just amazing.
Quinn: So how did the word start to get out?
Marsic: Oh, stupidity. Well, not stupidity. It was to the point where those of us who were down here, once we'd catch a fish and bring it back up to the ranch, it was to the point where everybody else saw that, and then they're telling their brothers and their uncles about all of a sudden the great trout fishing down here. And so then from there the word spread. And then hikers would start coming down here strictly to fish.
Ranney: We really did live in a period -and I remember it changing from when it was a local phenomenon, to just in a matter of a few years it came to be at Lee's Ferry a well-known place that you could drive to the Colorado River, the only place between there and Hoover Dam, really, and catch these. . . .
Ranney: The giants. And we sort of spanned that period of when it was a local phenomenon where people were just catching them out on river trips, or here at Phantom Ranch, and then the word spread, and it started to get writ[ten] up in magazines. I can remember I was talking in 1978 and 1979, "Have you heard about Lee's Ferry?"
Ranney: It was really AMAZING to us.
Marsic: The people -see, the thing that the normal tourist could get to just with a car was up at Lee's Ferry. And they were pulling out twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-, sixteen-pounders, and I think the biggest one out of there was twenty pounds. This one guy heard about out of Phantom Ranch that was about fifteen-some pounds.
Ranney: Topping had that one that was dressed out and hung in the Trail Guides up at the train depot. That big trophy that was like a thirty-six-incher that came from Phantom.
Marsic: Right. But a thirty-six-incher -I had one thirty-five-inch and it was 9½ [pounds]. It's just that they got fatter. The trout normally, I guess they go up to maybe thirty-six inches when they're old people, but in their twenties they're not that fat. And these, like you said, we're eating, [they're called dow furnace scuds?] and they were just getting fat. But then people would start being able to hike in, and so you started getting more and more people into hiking and also fishing, that your true fly fisherman would start coming down here and just. . . .
Ranney: There was a period of time when there were a lot of fishermen coming down to Bright Angel Campground and to the ranch. And that doesn't happen so much anymore. You see an occasional fisherman, but not like we were talking, late seventies, early eighties, after we both moved away from here. I was still coming down [and hiking].
Quinn: So what's left now, typically?
Ranney: We were coming down to the reunion yesterday, and we saw a girl walking back from the river with one trout that was a good thirteen inches, and she had one trout, and I asked her, "Creek or the river?" and she said, "River -the creek's got nothin' in it." And after this big flood just this past July 14, the creek has totally changed its bed, it's filled with gravel, there are not very many deep holes in the creek right now, and so I don't think that today, January 1, 2000, there is very much GOOD trout habitat in Bright Angel Creek. It'll change when the next flood comes through, but they're catching them out of the river now. And again, this was a twelve-to thirteen-incher, and that's probably a good catch for these days.
Marsic: Basically what happened, it got fished out.
Ranney: It's come back a little bit, George.
Marsic: And it's been coming back because the amount of use, the amount of impact caused by fisherman has been decreased, naturally, with the supply going down. So it's giving the young ones time to start growing again. It's a cycle that happens.
Quinn(?): We're always talking about how Bob Topping would fish, and he would put on a show that was almost ridiculous to watch, the way he would dance around, and he would hook the fish and run with the fish for a quarter mile down the creek.
Ranney: Yes! Remember that?! I'd forgotten totally about that.
Marsic: Well, topping, you know, we'd sometimes try and outdo each other. Him and I used to both like to fish. But what Topping would do was -and this was part of his trolling the campground -there's this one spot that was undercut and had riprap right across from the campground -guaranteed fish -I mean, one cast, guaranteed fish. And these fish were four-, five-, six-pounders. And so you'd always hit that one spot. If nothing else hit, you always went there, but we didn't really like fishing right at the campground, because there's people there. But Topping, on the other hand, if he saw that the female-to-male ratio was abundant at the campground, what he would do is, he'd go over there and he'd hook them on, and he'd make sure that the audience was set up and ready, and so instead of spending ten minutes, just maybe within ten yards up or down from the hole, and catching your fish, Topping would set his drag just right so that he would end up hooking the fish -he'd leave the barb on it to make sure it was hooked good -and so then he'd play this fish all the way from the top of the campground, down to the bottom, with it jumping.
Ranney: Sometimes ___________.
Marsic: He'd pop it a little bit so it'd surface to get the ooos and ahs from the audience, and then he'd work it back up. And then if the ladies happened to be right next to the stream, [like Mike was saying?], pull the fish in RIGHT at their feet.
Quinn: Mike, did somebody remind you of that, or were you aware of that when?
Marsic: These are Topping stories.
Quinn: I know, but I had totally forgotten.
?: Yeah, but somebody had mentioned it.
Ranney: There'd be times when he'd be fishing the mouth, and he'd run with his fish all the way down to the Silver Bridge, and then come back up with it, and he was a WILD man, hopping over the rocks and doing the _____ thing.
Marsic: Oh, I was doing THAT, but actually that was for real. That was for real, that was not for show. The show was put on RIGHT next to the campground. I ended up, I went to the mouth of the creek one time and I cast out and I hooked this one fish at the mouth, and it took off and headed straight for the middle of the river and downstream. That was ME that was hopping out also, and I was all along the whole river. I was heading towards this little bay in there between the creek and the Silver Bridge. So I was in there, and I finally hauled this thing in. And so I'm right in by this little bay. I pulled in about a seven-pounder. So that was cast number one. So I put it on the stringer and I'm right there, so I figured what the heck, I'll just throw one cast. So I make a cast out, and all of a sudden, BA-DOOM! I hit. So this one's taking me about halfway from the bay down to the Silver Bridge. So I finally pulled that one in, it's about, oh, a six-pounder. So I get that one out and I put THAT on the stringer. Now I go, well, I think I'll hit the mouth of the creek again. So I go up, instead of crossing the creek again to the other side, I [decided] I'll [cast] from this side, and then boom, one cast, nothing. The next cast I spent about a half hour. Now I'm in the middle of the bay, out on the rocks, trying to pull this thing in, because it's out in the middle of the current. And I'm there and I'm fighting it, and unbeknownst to me, I'm on these rocks and unbeknownst to me, the river's coming up. (chuckles) And I'm getting cold, because I'm into my knees and above. But NOW, it's up to my waist, and there's a little bit of current to my right, between where I'm at and the other shore. These guys were on the other side of the shore, and I've got this fish on there, they're all looking at me, and I go, "You guys, just in case, get ready, 'cause I might be swimmin' here pretty soon."
Ranney: Yeah, in those days the river did come up quick because of the way they were running the dam.
Marsic: Very quick, yeah. And so I sort of wade across, and the current's pushing me and I'm just sort of fighting the current. I grabbed the fish on the other end of the line, and I finally pull THAT thing in. So after this whole long battle, I've got a 9½-pounder, about a 7½-pounder, and a 6-pounder, so I've got over 20 pounds of fish on the stringer and I go, "I've had it, this is enough exercise." So I hiked back up to the ranch. At this time, it's beer hall at the ranch. Any normal person would just go into the lodge, into the back and clean their fish and whatnot. You know, Topping and I used to like to do one thing, and that is, ah, you got a stringer of fish like that, you walk right through beer hall, and just nonchalantly like, "__________ thing," and went back in the kitchen and all you hear are ooos, ahs, and people running up to you. And by this time, by the time that they've reacted, you're already through the kitchen door and in the back, and there's people pounding on the door demanding to know what the hell happened. And then you go back out and people are buying you beers! (laughs) It was great.
?: Just the good old days.
Quinn: Are you going now?
Ranney: You know, I think it's good to give people who might be interested in this in the future, about what things were like when I saw Phantom Ranch -and when I say Phantom Ranch, I mean metropolitan Phantom Ranch. I was a Park Service employee, so Phantom Ranch for me was everything from the mouth of Bright Angel Creek up here to the resort. I use [the term] Phantom Ranch in the larger sense, and not just the resort. But in 1975, there WAS no sewage treatment plant at Phantom Ranch, and they had a very interesting way that people would get rid of their waste. We had the blue goo toilets, and in Bright Angel Campground there was two blue goo toilets that people would go and do their bodily functions. And there was so much use during the busy times of the year in Bright Angel Campground that we would have to clean those blue goo toilets about every other day. And the way the blue goo works is that you do your thing in the toilet, and then this blue chemical sort of gets rid of the odor and kind of takes care of some of the nasty stuff. And you go BEHIND the blue goo toilet, and you pull a little cock that comes out, and everything goes from the holding tank of the toilet into this burlap bag. And all of the blue goo and all the liquid seeps into the delta of Bright Angel Campground, and the solids are left behind in the burlap bag. After they sit in the burlap bag for about forty-eight hours, we go down into this little hole behind the toilet, get the burlap bag and put it into a holding tank near the River Ranger Station, and then the packers pack it out.
Quinn: So the liquid seeps through the burlap?
Ranney: Exactly. The liquid seeps through the burlap, goes into the [Lockey?] Delta, and we had a great name for this -we were herding turds. And the reason is, because occasionally when you pulled the cock on the blue goo toilet to let it drain into the burlap bag, somebody would invariably put trash that they didn't want to carry out of the Grand Canyon into the blue goo toilet -an empty tuna can, a hiking boot -anything you can think of, we found inside these. And we would have to stick our hand into the holding tank and get whatever it was that was blocking the pipe. And we were herding turds. We had a stick and we would see something down there, we'd try to get it out with the stick. Otherwise we'd put a little doctor's glove on. It was very, very unsanitary conditions.
Quinn: Did you have to get shots or anything?
Ranney: No. I mean, this was all before OSHA or anything. I mean, this was really raw kind of stuff. This was Grand Canyon just coming out of its pioneer period, so to speak, and JUST starting to wake up to the industrial tourism, industrial backpacking. Like I say, when I started, the permit system at the Bright Angel Campground had only been in effect for three years.
Quinn: Were there a lot of people that were violating that, coming down anyway?
Ranney: Yes. We still had a lot of people. The word was not out to everybody. We still had people that would just show up, because the Grand Canyon had a long history of free and liberal camping. We still had people that would show up thinking that was it. I can remember one night a group of Mexicans from Mexico City wandered into Bright Angel Campground with Coleman stoves in their hands, and whole chickens that had been dead and feathered, but whole chickens they were going to boil up in a pot. No permits, not even the right gear, people just straggling in after dark, at Bright Angel Campground. This kind of stuff happened all the time. And most of our energy was directed towards getting people to understand that the Grand Canyon had some regulations. The majority of people that came down DID get the free permits, but we oftentimes had to deal with people who were just crashing, so to speak.
Quinn: Did you have talks at certain times, or you went from campsite to campsite?
Ranney: Went from campsite to campsite. I really enjoyed campground duty. It was a chance for me to interact with people. I had already had an interest in geology, and I would try to talk to people about geology. But the main reason for me to go into the campground was to check on people's permits and let them know about the regulations that were relatively new in those days. A typical day for me would be campground duty in the morning, and then trail patrol before lunch, come back to lunch and have lunch with either Wayne Pye or Phil Hecker and take a nap after lunch, and then maybe some campground duty, more trash pickup, or patrol a trail. Sometimes we rowed up to Roaring Springs to change the chlorine for the trans-canyon pipeline, because Bruce Aiken [phonetic spelling] was not there in the wintertime, and there was a chlorine tank that had to be changed so that the chlorine could get injected into the water system. In those days there were very little law enforcement problems, and very little medical problems, and so there was more rangering, more rangering. And when I look at the rangers today in 1999, 2000, whatever it is now, they are definitely well better trained than we were. We had no training at all, we were just given a radio, given a shirt, and [told], "Get on down there." Most of the stuff that WE did was out on the trail. Of course I didn't work at Phantom Ranch as a ranger in the summertime -I was at Cottonwood in 1976, and there was a lot less problems at Cottonwood. I think they did have medicals in those days, but not to the extent they do now.
Quinn: Were campfires permitted in the different sites at that time?
Ranney: No, that was also something that was outlawed after Easter of 1972. And I used to run into people with campfires not infrequently, maybe as much as once a week, if they were camped between here and Cottonwood, which by then was illegal as well. It was not unusual, and in the times that I backpacked with museum groups, in the last fifteen or twenty years, you NEVER see fires in the Grand Canyon anymore. It's just known that the Grand Canyon is a fire-free zone. But in those days, people had dogs. I mean, you NEVER see a dog in the Grand Canyon now. It's just well-known that dogs are not allowed in the Grand Canyon. But back then, that regulation was only three years old, and it was not uncommon for people to make it with their dogs all the way down to Phantom Ranch and not have a ranger see them on the way. It was very interesting.
Quinn: Transitional time.
Ranney: It was a transitional time. Of course we didn't know it at the time. I figured that was what it was like ALL the time, but it was a transitional time.
Quinn: So then getting back to the sewage treatment there, can you describe that emergency that happened and your response to it?
Ranney: Yeah. Again, I was here at a time when the sewage was getting to be a real problem because of the increased use of Phantom Ranch and the campground. The blue goo toilets would oftentimes get clogged or overflow, but also, the sewage septic system, which had the septic tank near the Fred Harvey mule corral, was beginning to overflow, and there was black water that was making a lake near the Fred Harvey mule corral.
Quinn: And this was feeding down from the resort, from the ranch?
Ranney: Yeah, there's a pipeline that goes from all the toilets here at Phantom Ranch, and went to his septic holding tank. I think most people know how a septic system works, where the liquid is supposed to go down, and bacteria eats away at the solids. There was SO much material going into this septic system that it was overloaded, and the liquids and SOME solids were floating up above this tank, and filling in the marsh area that had been the creekbed prior to the 1966 flood -right near the Fred Harvey mule corral. And of course in those days that was not an ecological disaster, it was just something that was happening. "Hey, we've got some sewage that's kind of building up through the years here." So in 1978 the Park Service decided they needed to haul out a lot of the liquids and solids from this overflowing tank. So they hired a BLM helicopter from Idaho at $650 an hour to come down with a slurry bucket that they used to put slurry on fires. We were to pump liquids and solids into the slurry bucket and fly them out to the South Rim to the sewage treatment plant on the South Rim. I was working on the trail crew in 1978, so they gave us a day or two off from trail duty to come work at this. And just below the Park Service bunkhouse, which is where this septic tank was, all the people on the trail crew got together with some maintenance people from the rim to begin the operation. And we put this pump onto the septic system and began to pump raw sewage into this big slurry bucket that a giant helicopter had dropped off at Phantom Ranch. And this was a wild thing in itself, with people holding this big hose, and raw sewage being squirted out of it, and people getting splashed with it as it went into the bucket -a literal circus of activity with the trail crew and people from the rim. I remember Victor Watahomogie [phonetic spelling] was down here, a classic Indian Gardens ranger from the early and mid seventies. And it was a REAL kind of a circus atmosphere. It turned out that each trip to fill the bucket, to fly the bucket up to the sewage treatment plant, and have the helicopter come back, took about thirty to forty-five minutes. And at $650 an hour, the Park Service was not interested in getting that small amount of liquid out at that time. So what they did, they had an assistant chief of maintenance who had just transferred into the Park Service from the private sector, in charge of this on the ground at Phantom Ranch, and he realized that they were not going to get very much of this black water out to the sewage treatment plant for their money. So he looked around -and I'll never forget -he looked around and he said, "Okay, from now on, every other flight and bucket is going to go up there." And he pointed up to Utah Flats. And to him, he was just pointing to some desert area in the middle of the Grand Canyon that he had no feeling about, and he said, "What we'll do is, we'll take every other load to THAT place, and every other load to the South Rim so it will have the appearance that we are sling-loading the sewage out." And I immediately went right up to him, I LOVE the Grand Canyon, and I especially love Utah Flats because of all the great times we had up there. And in my rebellious kind of way I went up to this assistant chief of maintenance and I said, "You can't dump raw sewage on Utah Flats! That's where we go for our time off!" And he put his face right in mine. I was just a young punk kid. He put his face right in mine and he said, "Nobody will find out about this, because nobody will say anything." And it was really sort of the beginning of the end for my Park Service career, for just challenging somebody of authority. But as you can imagine, dumping raw sewage inside the Grand Canyon, even in those days, was an absolute no-no. And I'll never forget that shortly after that whole scene -which did become well-known in the Grand Canyon -the superintendent at the time, Merle Stitt, called me into his office, to have a meeting with me to make SURE that in my madness and huff about this whole thing, that I would not go outside the park with this information, like to the Sierra Club or to some other thing. And he immediately called me up to his office and wanted to reassure me that he was handling this situation from HIS particular perch, and that I did not need to involve myself with this, and was really making it known that he didn't want me to go elsewhere with this story, because I think had it gotten out, that would have been a big black eye. You can imagine in the media, what would have happened to Grand Canyon National Park at the time.
Quinn: So you respected his request?
Ranney: Well, yes, I did. And it wasn't so much that I was respecting his request as that I was just so young and unaware of how I should handle myself in situations like these, that whatever he said to me did hit me and intimidate me enough that I didn't say anything. But later that same season there were other things that caused me to have controversy with the Park Service. I was the head of a trail crew in 1978, and one of my trail crew members had a great desire to jump off of the Kaibab Ridge. And of course being the rebellious soul that I was, I didn't tell him, "No, you can't jump off the Kaibab Ridge. It's illegal and dangerous," what I said to him was, "Let's make sure you do it SAFE." So we went to Roy Starkey and we got one of his little torpedoes that he used to drop into the Colorado River to measure the velocity and river flow of the river, and measured the deepest part of the river, and figured out where the best place was that Ron could jump off the bridge, and sure enough, one day in May of 1978 he climbed out onto it. We had Dan Southers from the ranch who came down and was a professional photographer, and Brad Jones and I were at the side of the river with a life jacket. I mean, we really -you know, to us this was not a dangerous thing. We knew that the river was fourteen feet deep there, because we measured it, and it was NOT a bad thing, it really wasn't. Ron was young, and he probably wouldn't do it again, but he did it, and Dan Southers took the photograph. Don Weir [phonetic spelling] who was the manager of Phantom Ranch at that time was just riding out on a mule at that moment, and saw him leap off the bridge, and as soon as he hit the water, we could hear his little mule party up there yell out a big scream, and within three hours after they topped out at the rim, the word spread like wildfire that somebody had jumped off the Black Bridge. It spread so fast that the very next day when we flew up to the top of the Redwall to do our trail work, who should be walking down the trail, out of a helicopter, but the superintendent, Merle Stitt, and the chief of maintenance, Joe Miller. They walked right up to me and said, "What can you tell us about somebody jumping off the Black Bridge yesterday?" And just to see somebody of their stature on the Kaibab Trail was enough to instill fear in the biggest rebel you can imagine. And then for them to approach me -because the word had gotten out -and just a whole series of things happened to me PERSONALLY and my relationship with the Park Service that caused things to go downhill. But I realized as the years went on that the Park Service and my introduction to Grand Canyon through the Park Service was just the way that I was to be INTRODUCED to this place. And I have still kept connections with it as a river runner, as a teacher at Northern Arizona University, and now as a guide with the Museum of Northern Arizona. None of those people who played into this whole scene of dumping shit on the Utah Flats and being upset about Ron Goden [phonetic spelling] jumping off the bridge, none of those people are associated with the Grand Canyon anymore. But I'm happy to say that I still am.
Quinn: Where were you standing when Ron jumped?
Ranney: I was standing on the north bank of the river, and the deepest spot -we went all across the Black Bridge with the torpedo, measuring -and in those days the deepest spot was very close to the north bank of the river, just perhaps fifty feet offshore, maybe not even that much -well, fifty feet offshore. And we were standing there with this life jacket. We were ready to throw the life jacket to him, and go into the water. It was just above the big eddy where the boats pull in now.
Quinn: Did he go in feet first?
Ranney: He went in feet first. He didn't dive off or anything. What he did is, he climbed over the chain link fence that's on the Kaibab Bridge, and he shimmied down one of the little guy wires and was hanging from the bottom guy wire on the upstream side, and just hanging there. And you could see him hyperventilating as he was hanging down from the bridge, and looking straight out into space upstream on the Colorado River, and. . . . Actually, I remember now, I was up on the bridge with him when he climbed out, and he was thinking about not doing it. When it got close to the point that he was going to jump off the bridge, he actually had a few seconds where he was rethinking it. And I was on the bridge with him, and Brad Jones was at the bottom with the life jacket, and Dan Southers was down there taking the photograph, and I was with Ron on the bridge. I watched him go from up above. No, I couldn't have done that, because I'm not in the picture. But I was up there with him when he went out. When he was sitting on the bridge, I was with him, and then I went down real quick with Brad on the water, and I was going to be there to help with the rescue if we needed it. THAT'S what it was.
Quinn: So when he went in, was he under for several seconds?
Ranney: No, he came right up. What WAS interesting, we measured it at sixty feet of free fall, and sixty feet is just about the point where a human body is starting to fall over into the horizontal position as they fall through free air. And as he went down, he fell straight, like a pencil, towards the water, but as he got closer and closer to the water, his upper body and his arms started to go forward, as he was putting his arms around in circles to maintain his balance. And he was just getting to that point where he was going to go over into a full body flop into the water. He was wearing tennis shoes, and that was a good thing, because he hit pretty hard.
Quinn: Oh, he hit the bottom of the river?
Ranney: No, no, he didn't hit the BOTTOM of the river, but he hit the surface of the river, and at sixty feet, you're going fast enough where that does feel pretty hard on you. So fortunately he did have his shoes on, and he told me when he got out he was just at the point where he was starting to fall over. His arms were going around in circles pretty fast as he went down, and you could see that his head was starting to lean down over it. And there was just this incredible feeling of euphoria when he'd done it. I mean, we heard the yell from Don Weir's group up on the trail, and Brad and Dan and I were down there congratulating him, and patting him on the back and talking about it.
Quinn: Did you pull him out of the river, or he was able to swim?
Ranney: Oh, he swam over. He never even touched the bottom. You know if you go from that high, I imagine you go about ten feet down. We had measured it, it was fourteen feet.
Quinn: Had Don Weir been clued-in about what you were going to attempt?
Ranney: He must have known a little something, but it wasn't widely distributed around. We didn't have a huge crowd from the ranch that came to watch it. He did it about ten or eleven in the morning, and I don't know how it was that we got time off to do that, but we must have had a project here at the ranch that day that allowed us to do that. Of course I'll agree it is a no-no, they do have a regulation you're not supposed to jump off the bridge. I've heard stories before I came in Grand Canyon of people who DID jump off the bridge and lost their life. I don't know if they're true or not. But Ron wanted to do it, and we did it in a safe way. Might not have been the Park Service way, but we did it the safe way, we made sure. I just spoke to Ron within the last year. He's living in Fort Collins. I know that was a big event for him. I just hiked down one of Dan Souther's photographs of that leap, and I'm donating it to the Phantom Ranch archives. I had it in my collection, and I decided it needs to be here. And there's a picture that Dan Southers took on that May day of Ron going off, and it's a pretty good shot of him falling through free air.
Quinn: For ME, the person that ends up working at Phantom Ranch, whether it be for NPS or the ranch itself, seems to have some special traits -it's not just the average employee on the rim that is happy here, or would fit in here. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit about a general picture of the employee down here, or what they have in common.
Ranney: Well, I can try to do that. That's a BIG, big topic, to try to capture the essence of all these different and wonderful personalities that are here. But if I were to try to do that, I think one of the first words that comes to mind of a Phantom Ranch personality would be iconoclastic. And what I mean is, somebody who's a little bit different than the norm; somebody who can make their own way. ONE thing that this place WILL do for you, it will instill confidence in your life and in yourself. I've often thought that if you ever had people that were just coming out of high school, had a lack of self confidence, you could put them down in the bottom of the Grand Canyon working for Phantom Ranch, and just the people that they would be associated with, they would automatically have a positive orientation towards life and towards the world because most of your off time at Phantom Ranch is spent communing with the Grand Canyon -and I mean that by running up to Ribbon Falls or running up to Utah Flats, or going up the Clear Creek Trail, or anything at all that you want to talk about that. The Phantom Ranch personality is very outgoing, it's very rebellious, and it's very, very much fun-loving. People here -Cindy Burns said it best yesterday, she said, "No one has ever accused Phantom Ranchers of not knowing how to have a good time." And it's absolutely true. The smiles you see on people's faces, and the positive things that come out of people's mouths, about anything that they do. "I went down to Roy's Beach." "How was Roy's Beach today?" "Oh, it was fabulous! I laid out in the sun and got a great tan and a couple of river trips came by." Everything is always oriented towards the positive, and I think that was one thing that I took with me FROM this place, is the positive nature of anything you do, every moment of the day. This morning, I mean, what are we now, eleven hours into the new millennium and Phantom Ranch has already had a tenth of an inch of rain? Everybody's talking positive about THAT. And here this snow that we're looking up at the rim at, and the rain that's coming down has sort of limited us as to how much time we can spend outdoors, and yet everybody is just talking about how great it is that it's raining. And that to me sort of captures a lot of the spirit of Phantom Ranch. It doesn't matter if it's raining. Hey, we need the rain, we love the rain, the smell of the Grand Canyon with the rain. That's what I think the Phantom Ranch personality is. It's positive, it's outgoing, and it's slightly rebellious.
