Echoes From the Canyon

2026 marks 100 years of National Park Service Interpretation at Grand Canyon National Park. In honor of this anniversary, here's Louis Schellbach's introductory geology talk. Throughout his talk, he references geologic details once viewed through a series of mounted binoculars on the parapet at Yavapai Observation Station (now Yavapai Geology Museum). Schellbach served as the park's Chief Naturalist from 1941–1957.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Now, I might begin by telling you that we believe you came to enjoy yourselves and not to be educated. But we do believe that if you know what you are looking at, you will enjoy yourself just that much more. So this station then, is a government operated station built by the National Park Service primarily for your benefit.

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Now, you come to Grand Canyon. You do not have much time. You do, of course, appreciate its rock sculpture and its color out there, but really, there is a lot more behind that canyon than just its rock sculpture and its color. So this station then has been built as a mechanism for you to use to interpret what you see out there.

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Now, on the parapet here is this battery of high powered binoculars. Now, each and every one is fixed and fastened upon a particular spot in the canyon that has a story to tell. You cannot move these telescopes. And then beneath each telescope is a small exhibit box in which there are specimens that have been brought up from the spot on which the telescope is focused, so that you can see them close at hand.

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In other words, saving you the time of walking down there. However, should you doubt any of the specimens in the cases here or inside, I'll tell you. You can reach any of those spots by trail, down below, and see the story in the rocks yourselves. However though, we fellows will tell you that the Bright Angel Trail from the rim to the river is only seven miles long.

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To be accurate seven and 8/10 miles. Yet in the same breath, we will warn you that should you go down there, under your own power, turn about and climb out. Oh, you will swear it's 77 miles back. (laughter) You try it sometime. Now, you do not look through these telescopes with the thought of getting a wonderful view. No, they are not there for that purpose.

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They are there to act as pointers, to point out the spot in the canyon.

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Now, the object is to look at that spot through the telescope. See the place in nature. See its relation to the rest of the formations. Then look at the specimens in the box. Read the labels. Put two and two together as you go along this parapet. And by the time you've reached number 15 Telescope, you should have a good comprehensive idea of what that canyon stands for.

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For they are the facts. You hook the facts together. Now, I took over 75 years of scientific research to wrest these stories from the rocks of Grand Canyon. Place it up there in that manner, so that you can get it in 20 minutes. If you will think on what you see. In other words, we want you to have the joy of discovering for yourselves.

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We point out the fact, you reason on it. However, though once a day this time of the year, the man on duty here has to hook up these telescopes for you, to give you a Grand Canyon story. And today, of course, that duty happens to be mine, as well as my pleasure. But I always maintain that despite the long years of experience.

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And I've been here over 22 years, and I happen to be park naturalist too, that despite those long years of experience, for me to give you a Grand Canyon story in the short time and allotted, seems a tremendous task. Oh, it's a terrific story, to try to compress it, into the short time they expect us to give it.

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We have, however, broken it down into four main phases, so that we might present it easily, and so that you might grasp it easily. Now, the first phase answers your question; what happened? Did the earth crack open? Did glaciers cut it? What made that terrific gorge out there? The second great phase is Earth's history and Earth's building, as exposed to view in those canyon walls.

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The third great phase is the record of life, through the ages, as found in the form of fossils in the canyon formations. And the fourth great phase is the canyon today, now, as it influences living things. Now you people keep those four main phases in mind as we progress, see? Number one, then, what made it? Number one telescope

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there points to the river three miles away from you in an airline. And of course, you are not a bit impressed with the river. No, I don't blame you. It looks like a muddy, insignificant little creek down there, doesn't it? But, oh, how you are fooled. You're seeing that river three miles away. And at that particular spot, the river is over 300 ft wide.

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And you know how long a city block is. And it's low water now, too. By the way; she will cover those white banks down there when the floods come down. And that little creek down there happens to be one of the world's most dangerous rivers. Now, no fooling. You see, other rivers have been servants to man. Highways of commerce, trade, communication.

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But not to the Colorado River. Now, what happens to be the second longest river in the United States? It is over 2000 miles in length. And that little creek down there has one dangerous rapid for every day in the year. Now, that's 365 cataloged dangerous rapids. Oh, she has a lot more than that. But those are the dangerous ones.

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And that little creek down there cuts 26 distinct canyons. 26 of them. 19 of which are major canyons. While Grand Canyon out here, of course, is the largest and the most spectacular of them all. The final major canyon it passes through on its way to the Gulf of California is Black Canyon. And in Black Canyon today is located Hoover Dam.

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And from up here, three miles away, you can see the river is muddy. Oh, it's very, very muddy. So muddy, in fact, that we fellows say, "it's too thick to drink and too thin to plow." And that's literally true. For listen, by any point in this canyon, and this canyon is 217 miles long, one canyon, by any point in it

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that river is carrying an average of a half a million tons of earth every 24 hours. Now, can you people grasp a half a million tons? Think of it in terms of five ton trucks, and you might get an idea of how muddy that river is. Now that, of course, happens to be just the average flow. Well, she carries much more than that in times of flood.

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The record was September 13th, 1927, when one flood came through that canyon, and when that river carried 27,600,000 tons. By any point in the canyon, in 24 hours time. Now that's more than a million tons an hour. Literally moving land. You see, that river is growing through this canyon at a speed of from two and a half to 12 miles an hour, depending on the flood waters.

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It has a drop of nine feet to the mile, and this canyon is 217 miles long. And because of that speed, the river cannot drop that load in this canyon. Oh, it must carry it outward. And only, of course when the river reached sea level at the Gulf of California, there the river slowed up, and there it was able to drop its burden,

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and there it dropped It. There it built its delta many, many miles an extent and many thousands of feet deep. There that river, by the way, was building rock formations for the future, just as some of the rock formations out there, in the canyon walls, was built in the past by ancient muddy rivers. Now, I've just given you the explanation of the river because in my estimation, that is vitally, vitally important.

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Oh, you must know something about that river, because that river cut this canyon. Now, how might I explain it to you briefly, un-technically and without hair splitting? Oh, I might attempt it in this manner. There are five great eras in Earth's history. Only five. No need for me becoming scientific, is there? And telling you they are

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the Archaeozoic, Proterozoic, Paleozoic. Mesozoic and Cenozoic, see? Those are just scientific names. Now you people think of them as five chapters in Earth's history. In other words, the history of the Earth written in five chapters. We are living in the fifth chapter. It is the present, still going on. Now visualize this; sometime after the close of the fourth chapter, the Mesozoic,

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the land in this entire region out here, was comparatively low above sea level, not as high as it is now. And through that low land there meandered a lazy, slow, sluggish, dying, moving river on its way to the sea. Now that was the Colorado River, and geologists tell us this is a young canyon out here, a young canyon just several million years old.

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Oh, that's young, before I'm through, you'll be surprised. And then the land in this region slowly started to rise to dome-up, oh, so slowly. You just couldn't measure it. Any human being's lifetime. In fact, it may still be rising right here. But we don't live long enough to measure that rise and that slow rising of the land enabled the river to maintain its original course.

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You see, if the land would have come up quickly, it would have blocked that river out there, and the river would have had to flow around the base of this gigantic dome, which is Grand Canyon, or it will look flat to you out there, I know. But it isn't. You must come uphill from, no matter what direction, to come to Grand Canyon.

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Well, now the river and the canyon is not doing that. Cutting and flowing around the base of the dome. It is part way up and around the dome, proving the slow rising of the land. And as the land came upward, it did something else, it gave speed to that lazy river. And speed, of course spells power. Now, the material that that river was given to carry in the form of sand, silt, gravel, boulders, they became the tools that that power used.

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And as the land came upward, the river ground and pounded and abraded and scoured and cut down through it faster, as it hit the softer layers of rock; slower as it hit the harder, until out there today, she is a mile below the rims. But don't lose sight of the fact I told you this started after the close of the fourth chapter of earth's history.

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You now are working on the completion of the third chapter. The fourth was once above our heads. Here almost again as high as that canyon is deep. Hence that river has cut through almost two miles of Earth's crust, exposing to view, all of Earth's history in this region. For the river down below there, is cutting through ancient black rocks.

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All the oldest rocks known to man. Wherever they are found on the face of the earth, they are number one. Number one in the scheme of things out there, no rocks any older beneath those rocks, in the bottom of this canyon where they go down, down to the magma layer, the molten rock layer upon which the Earth's crust rests.

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So you see, then, as you people stand here and look out with just a little bit of inspiration, you suddenly begin to realize that you are doing more, oh, much more than just looking. You're looking back through the ages. Now that's how the river cut the canyon. But at no time was that river as wide as from this rim to that north rim over there, ten miles away.

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No, the river probably was not much wider than it is today. It cut a narrow and straight canyon downward. But other forces are at work, eating away the canyon walls on the sides. Gravitation pulls down the loose particles, the trees growing along the edges of the cliffs, out here, their roots get into cracks of rocks, pry off pieces down they fall. Water getting into the cracks of rock in the wintertime and freezing.

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Now, you people know what freezing water will do. Cliffs snap off and down they fall. Now eventually they get into the river in one form or another. And that river flowing so fast through this canyon cannot drop that load here. Oh, one 20 minute rainfall in this region will remove more land than an entire season's rainfall in a more vegetated region.

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You notice out there afterwards the plants do not grow close together. Land wears away very, very rapidly here. That's what is widening Grand Canyon. And number two telescope. They're pointing to bent and twisted rock. Proof of land movements. Mother nature, in the beginning, puts the rock layers down horizontal: sea bottoms, lake bottoms, river deltas. Windblown sands. Stress and strains in the Earth's crust.

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break them. Slipped them by each other. See that point over there? Hopi Point is 180 ft higher than this point, where the Earth's crust snapped and slipped 180 ft, right straight across Grand Canyon, making that side canyon over there. Oh, notice that white band or cliff below the rim opposite you over there. Now keep your eyes on that white band.

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Now follow it to your right. Way at the head of that side canyon over there, where the rim is higher on the left then on the right. Right opposite you, drop below the rim to the white band, right where the snow is. Notice the white bands that way, instead of being that way, it's that way. Making the famous Bright Angel Fault.

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Or these movements will bend the rock layers or it will over thrust them, or it will break the Earth's crust into blobs, and it will tilt the blacks up into mountain ranges. So when you see rock layers tilted or bent, you know there's been crustal movement at that place. However, though, to you know, since I've been on the job here, I found that that's mighty hard for most people to believe that land moves.

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The Spaniard, you know, called it Terra Firma Farm land. You and I think of everlasting rocks and everlasting mountains. And there is no such thing as mountain ranges where a way to complete level plains, rocks disintegrate into sands and silts and gravels and mud are redeposited recently defied re thrust up into mountain ranges again to be again re worn down.

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And as I always say in my later moments, the land she do move, she do that just because we don't see it move in our own lifetime. We don't believe it moves, you see. But if you live in an earthquake country, you know she moves up. Nobody in California today.

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Actually get a rise out of people from California, especially the fellows from Berkeley in they say, oh, California. We don't call them right quakes. We call them adjustments there. And.

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I have to make people laugh just a little bit. You ought to be up here looking at yourself. See this little.

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Do you ever stop to think we're the only animals that can laugh? Let us know what we're laughing about, Sure. You might as well take advantage of it and prove right. Here we are, 7073ft above sea level, right here. We are literally on the top of a mountain. Yet this afternoon, if you people will look carefully in the rocks at your feet outside.

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You will see sea shells in the rocks, which will prove to you that you are now walking on what was once the bottom of an ancient sea. Yet you are on the top of a mountain. The land came upward in this region, and when you're in the bottom of this canyon, climbing up the trails, you will pass through seven separate, distinct layers of limestone, which will prove to you that this region has been above and below seas at least seven times.

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That's not counting on my little rock once above my head. Or you know I found so many people believe that seas come up over the land. You know, that's not so. We measure from sea level. It is the land that rises and falls. So then, fact number one, the river, its speed, its carrying power is force aided by fact.

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Number two, the uplift of the region made Grand Canyon. Now, of course, it all happened very recently. Two. Let's start at the beginning of things. Before the river and before the canyon was here. Let's take up Earth's history as exposed to view. And number three telescope. The approach to the ancient black rocks in the bottom of this canyon.

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And what you see down there is the base or roots of what was once a mighty mountain range in this region. We mountain range over six miles high. And we think of Mount Everest in Asia today. And those rocks were under that mountain range so far. And we're subjected to such terrific pressure and pressure, you know, generates heat so that those rocks down there are no more, no more, as they once were, or they are completely changed or a little particles floating up on it to resist that pressure and heat.

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They are known as change rock, metamorphic rock that geologists call them. And during the ages, that mountain range wore to a complete level playing. And the land in this region slowly slipped beneath an ancient freshwater sea. Completing chapter one the off years owing. Now, when the land came out of that ancient sea, it had another layer on it.

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The second chapter of life's history, seen through number four. Telescope there. And that layer of rock is also very, very old. But strange to say, it was not subjected to its greatest pressure and heat as the first rock. Hence, it still retains its original character as sands and silts and gravels and mud. And the land was low above sea level.

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And then terrific stresses and strains in this region broke the entire region up into gigantic great blocks, and then tilted those blocks up on end, making a second range of Black Mountains in this region. And during the ages, that mountain range wore off to almost a complete level plain. And again, the land slowly slipped beneath an ancient sea.

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Completing chapter two with appropriate what was going. Now, can you people grasp that two mighty mountain ranges in this region completely wearing away? And we think of everlasting rocks and everlasting mountains. Oh, we build monuments to our heroes. Tombstones to our dead. Three, four, five, 600 years from now. And you can't read them. You see, the trouble always is with us.

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Always. We are attempting to measure in our threescore and ten. And it just can't be done. Who? Listen. Number five. Telescope here. Points to the greatest single geological story in the entire canyon. For at this spot, the third chapter of its history, the Paleozoic rests smack on the first chapter of the Zoe. The second chapter in between or profile of Zoe.

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A mountain range of over 12,000ft has been worn completely away at this spot, leaving not a trace of meaning an absence of 500 million years. One spot in the canyon. In other words, it took 500 million years for the second geological here to form. Come up on the sea, be thrust into a mighty mountain range, and then to where?

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Completely away at this spot, leaving not a trace of scientists from all over the world come to Grand Canyon just to see this. Not the scenery out there, but this the Great Unconformity, as it is called. In other words, there you have an island, the first chapter of rocks sticking through the second chapter, upon which the third chapter formed.

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Oh, there's a sample of that rock on the bench there by the window. And the bottom part of it is brown. Chapter one the Office or Zoe? The upper part of it is gray. Chapter three The Paleozoic. Now, afterwards, you people take your finger. You take your finger. Place it where the two meet on that rock and spend an absence of 500 million years.

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Right. With your finger. That's enough to make anybody put on the brakes, And then, from the great green platform, 3200ft down to the top of the rim on which we now walk is all of the third chapter. And during the third chapter, there were many, many changes in this region. Halfway up the canyon, up there, you see that sheer red cliff or wall?

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We looked down at it here, by the way, and that cliff wall down there is over 555ft in height or thickness. There are caves and overhangs in that layer of rock, so large that you can tuck the Washington Monument in out of the rain, and that one layer of rock alone. Now, that was once the great oozy mud on the bottom of an ancient sea.

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It has no hardened turn to stone and is known as limestone. Seen through this telescope here. Now, when the land came out of that ancient sea, with that layer on it, it again was low above sea level. And then ancient rivers carrying mud, just like the Colorado River is carrying mud today. They dropped there much in this region, or it became a flood plain region.

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And it built up that series of little red cliffs and slopes above the sheer red wall to beneath that great white band or cliffs below the rim. Now that's all made of hardened river muds known as shales and the Great White Band, or cliff below the rim, running the entire length of the canyon out there tells us that the wind, the wind blew for ages in this region and blew sand until we had a condition here.

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Much like the Great Libyan or Great Sahara Desert of Africa, or it was a land of windblown sand dunes and practically not much else. And it rested on an ancient sea that lie to the northwest of us. And again, the land in this region slowly slip beneath that ancient sea, and the waves and the currents in the sea lapped off the tops of the sand dunes and spread the sand out into that great white band on the bottom of itself.

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It became the bottom of a sea. It has no heart and turned to stone, and is known as sandstone. And in that cliff today, by the way, you can still see the ancient sand dune lines, the long windward slopes, and the short leaf slopes bearing planes that geologists call them. Now, while that sand rested on the bottom of that sea, things living and dying in the sea settled to the bottom, on top of the sand, and built up another layer of great organic mud, which now was hardened, turned to stone, and is the limestone on which you and I now walk on the rims of Grand Canyon.

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Completing chapter three, the Paleozoic scene, through this telescope here. Now, how do you people begin to get an idea of land building and wearing away? Now, chapter four. The Mesozoic was once above our heads here. But because this is high land, land ways away from the high parts and has been worn off the top of Grand Canyon.

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But all around us, in the low parts, we still have it. Number 11 telescope. They approach to see the mountain 28 miles away. That low up flat table and peeking above the scallop ridge in the distance on the right. That is a remnant of the fourth chapter of its history. It has a gravel cap on the top of it, preventing it from eroding away rapidly.

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And you people on the bus this afternoon, when you get to Desert View at the tower, you will see it very close at hand. And you will also, by the way, be looking out over the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest and the rocks of the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest on the rocks of the fourth geological era, which once extended this way up and over our heads.

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Zion National Park in southern Utah, its canyon is caught in the rocks of the fourth chapter. Now the fifth chapter, which is the present, is not forming here. Land is wearing away. But as I stand here and I look to the west, I see a blue mountain range against the sky. The Trumble Range, 85 miles away, or Pine Mountain Range, that mountain ranges of the fifth and present chapter of Earth history.

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It is recently it volcanic Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah. Each canyon is cut in the rocks of the fifth chapter. And when you people get to Desert View this afternoon at the tower, you will be able to look south of us. And 50 miles south of us you will see another blue mountain range with snow capped peaks.

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The San Francisco Range at Flagstaff and Williams. And that mountain range is also of the fifth and present chapter of Earth's history. It was recent. It is volcanic, in fact, is rather an interesting highlight for you to carry away with you. Some of that activity south of us between Flagstaff and Grand Canyon here, has been so recent that beneath the volcanic ash layers of Sunset Crater, we have found Indian house ruins buried.

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And in digging out those house ruins, we found some of the roof beams. The roof beams were still preserved, and in cutting the roof beams across and sandpaper in the ends of them, there were the tree rings in the beams. And the tree rings gave up this secret. The tree rings told us that the Indians had cut those beams to build their house in 1046 A.D., and some of that action has taken place since the time of Christ.

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All of its history in the Grand Canyon region. Exposed to your view. And as I always say, show me another spot like you. You can do it. So here then, as nowhere else, Mother Nature literally opened up her history book of Earth's history for you and me to read all chapter upon chapter, paragraph upon paragraph, and illustrated with the life that once lived in those dim, distant past ages in the form of fossils.

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All right, let us take up life through the ages and download those ancient black rocks in the bottom of this canyon. No life. No life was ever found in those rocks. Wherever they are found on the face of the earth, no life was ever found in them. It is not believed that life ever existed at that time. However, if it did exist, it would have been completely destroyed due to the terrific pressure and heat to which those rocks have been subjected.

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But in the beginning, layers of the second chapter of life's history. Number seven telescope. Here they you see the first traces of living things entering Earth's picture. Oh, a little single celled, plant like life known as algae. You people know it is the green scum on ponds today. All that, all the living in that ancient sea consisted of tiny globules of jelly and living together in colonies.

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It made a jelly fied mass which caught the lime in the water and built up limestone reefs. And then you come up to the beginning layers of the third chapter of life's history. Number eight telescope here and there. Now, lo and behold, you find the first traces of animal life entering the picture. All the little crab like creature known as a trail of bite.

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And, you know, I think that's interesting, Plants come first, Animals that live on plants afterwards. You couldn't put them around the other way, could you? Think it over. And then as you come up those canyon walls, layer by layer, higher and higher, all you see life becoming higher and higher and more and more complicated. Preserved in the rocks in the form of fossils.

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Oh, you're coming a little higher. And now you're finding two fish. You come a little higher. And now, for the first time, you are finding land plants, ferns and cones, ancestors to alpine trees. Before that, all life in water. Now life is leading water, coming up on land. You come a little higher to those layers of hardened river muds out there.

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And there you find the tracks of those creatures that lived in water and on land. Amphibians that call you see where they left the water, climbed up on the muddy banks, left their tracks in the mud, which now is hardened and turned to stone. Oh, there's some excellent examples of those tracks built in the wall right there next to the opening and on the bench over there.

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And then? And then you come up to the fourth chapter of Earth's history, which once covered our heads and which is the Painted Desert to the east of us. It is also represented by the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. The purpose of the Argentine and their. Oh, you find those gigantic lizards known as dinosaurs, creatures weighing many, many tons in weight, consuming thousands of pounds of food a day.

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Oh, having enormous tails and little heads in front. In fact, I've even heard it said they used over 90% of their brain to wag their tail. Yeah, and didn't have sense enough to live today. Now, here's where I get the kick out of it. I don't know whether you people will or not. There are only five chapters in Earth's history.

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That's all the is. There isn't any more. We just now briefly came up through all four of them. And not a warm blooded animal has made its appearance on the face of the earth. All cold blooded creatures. It's only in the fifth. And that's the present that warm blooded animals appear. It is known as the Age of Mammals.

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And now listen. The present sentence now being written. Geologically speaking, we man first enters its picture. Oh, we are the youngest of living things. And you know, I sometimes wonder if any of my listeners subconsciously, of course, have an inflated ego and.

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Or a superiority complex, whether they will lose that and become humble when they grasp the story that Grand Canyon has to tell. Who? Listen. I told you this was a young canyon out here just several million years old. And there is the Great Unconformity, an absence of 500 million years in the ancient black rocks in the bottom of this canyon by radioactive disintegration of metals is 1,500,000,000 years old.

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Now, Cro-Magnon man, the first true man in the man that you and I would recognize as a man. So he had a chin. He had a chin. The fellows before that did not have a chin. Yes. Even though the chin was the first thing was civilized. Come to think of it, he's been sticking around ever since to and then he was rather good looking, according to our standards, taller than we were.

00;38;21;22 - 00;38;49;14

He made those wonderful drawings in the caves of France and Spain. The scientist called him Homo sapiens man. The wise or wise man. Now, he added, respected between 25 and 40,000 years ago. And as you people stand on the rim of Grand Canyon and look out over it and then think, think of your threescore and ten. Do you get what I mean?

00;38;49;17 - 00;39;12;25

I mean, you suddenly begin to realize that our lives just like the click of a camera, shut up. In the scheme of things, up there. And as I always say, I'm sure your resolve to live by the wayside as you travel through life. Oh you bet. Think it over before it's too late. You can do that. Maybe it is too late with this atom bomb.

00;39;12;25 - 00;39;45;16

I wonder what you intend on then. The canyon is another story. It's 217 miles long, has an average width of ten miles, and is a mile in depth. Can you visualize it? What does it mean? It means it's a barrier. Before that canyon was cut, the smaller creatures intermingled. They were the same species. But when the canyon was cut, those corner on the North rim, across the canyon over there found themselves separated from their brethren on this side.

00;39;45;19 - 00;40;13;04

They over there found themselves 1000 to 2000ft higher than their brethren on this side. A changing environment over there. They had to adapt themselves to it or die. Until today, they have changed the squirrel on the North Rim. Of course, the canyon over there has a pure white tail and black belly pods. That squirrel on this side has a great tail and white belly pods.

00;40;13;06 - 00;40;38;11

The stripes on the chipmunks back have changed. The porcupines. The pack rats. The puppet gophers. The reptiles. They no longer could cross Grand Canyon. It became a barrier. Not a physical barrier, but a climatic barrier. The ocean is a barrier to us today. Right opposite the station. On the top. Over there. If you look carefully, you see the hotel Grand Canyon Lodge, just ten miles away.

00;40;38;13 - 00;41;06;17

Now you want to go there in your automobile. Do you know what you must do? Travel each 25 miles to desert you, then 32 miles to the trading post of Cameron Cross. The Painted Desert sacred, the Echo Cliffs. Of course, this river at Navajo Bridge and Marble Canyon scraped off a million cliffs. Of course. House Rock Valley. Go through the Kaibab Forest and you will have traveled 215 miles in your automobile to reach that spot.

00;41;06;23 - 00;41;30;24

Just ten miles away. She went to bury the canyon. All you can cross here on your back. But it takes you two days. You have to spend the night at Phantom Ranch in the bottom of the canyon. And then you wonder whether you ever get over it or not. To to leave an impression one way or the other.

00;41;30;27 - 00;41;56;19

Then the canyon has another story. It's a mile in depth, 50 miles south of us on the San Francisco Peaks, the highest peaks in Arizona, 12,655ft in height. Now, what does that mean? It means just this. That of the seven climatic life zones of the world, there are only seven from the equator to the poles. Six of them are represented right here in the Grand Canyon region.

00;41;56;22 - 00;42;16;22

The only one missing is the humid tropical zone of the equator. We have all the rest down in the palm of this canyon. It is always hot, as a rule, 20 to 30 degrees hotter than this rim, 30 to 30 5 to 40 degrees hotter than the North Rim. Across the canyon, on the North Rim, across the canyon over there.

00;42;16;29 - 00;42;54;28

We have over 210 inches of snow in the wintertime. They're snowed in for months out of the year. The Ranger's patrol on skis and snowshoes. While on this rim, we only have 96in of snow. And in between, down in the bottom of the canyon, it never snows right within a radius of ten miles. Oh, I might qualify that statement by telling you that if it happens to be an exceptionally cold winter's night and snow falls, you might find a little powdered snow on that great green platform 3200ft down.

00;42;55;01 - 00;43;18;13

But by 9:00 in the morning, it's all gone. So for ordinary people, we should never snows in the bottom of the canyon. Very, very rarely do they have frost at Phantom Ranch. They broke pomegranates down there. Hence, the plants and animals that live at the bottom of this canyon are not the plants and animals you find living on this rim or that rim over there.

00;43;18;16 - 00;43;39;01

They are the plants and animals of that dry, hot, arid region of Sonora, Mexico. They are the cat claw, the mesquite, the number one yucca, the saltbush, the tropical walnut lizard, the pink rattlesnake. You don't find them on the. Why last forest you see on the top over there is not the forest you are driving through or walking through on this side.

00;43;39;03 - 00;44;04;08

That forest over there is a forest of Canada for spruce and quaking aspen. Now listen. It's only 14 miles by trail from the bottom of the canyon to the top of the North Rim. Yet, if you wish to travel through those climatic life zones at sea level, you would have to travel from central Mexico to southern Canada to pass through them.

00;44;04;11 - 00;44;33;17

Where? Here you can do it by 14 miles of trail. And if that doesn't satisfy you, just 30 miles south of the rim, the foothills of the Frisco Peaks, you go up into those foothills and there you get a hot zone and life zone, just like the Hudson Bay region of Canada. Go up into the San Francisco Peaks of Flagstaff, 50 miles south of us, above timberline, and there you get an Arctic alpine zone, just like the Arctic Circle, right within a radius of 50 miles.

00;44;33;19 - 00;44;56;29

Now, the facts of those two stories are shown in the end, two telescopes there and the end two cases inside. So you see, there are stories behind Grand Canyon. Get some of those stories before you go away. Then when you sit by your fireside, you'll remember Grand Canyon. You can't shake it off because you're going to get thoughts or concepts here you would not ordinarily get anywhere else.

00;44;57;06 - 00;45;19;07

You may have five left, 1 or 2 with you, have I? Did you get that feeling of duration, timelessness of time, mountains where in a way season a year seven different times or you'll get others. Now each one of these is the fact you people reason on these facts. Hook up together and check that story I just told you.

00;45;19;09 - 00;45;38;26

Now you're in one of your national parks, and your national parks have been set aside so that there shall always be a bit of wilderness in these United States, not only for us, but for our children and our children's children yet to come. And you know, we need the wilderness. The good old book admonishes us to go out into the wilderness.

00;45;38;28 - 00;46;04;27

The prophets went out into the wilderness. So we fellows say to you, come on out into your wilderness, and we believe you will get the strength of the mountains, and your cares and your worries will fall from you like the leaves from the trees. And you will go home re-created, not recreated. Thank you.

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.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW

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.

Ranney: There could be.

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.

Marsic: No.

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. . . .

Marsic: Giants.

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?"

Marsic: Oh, sure.

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. . . .

?: Clean it out.

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.

Ranney: It was.

?: Just the good old days.

Quinn: Are you going now?

?: Yeah.

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.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

The very first episode of the brand new Echoes from the Canyon Radio Hour shares the tall tales, disappearances, folklore, and unbelievable mysteries found at the Grand Canyon. Developed by park rangers using first-hand accounts and primary documents, human history comes alive in this new series. Mysteries abound in the Grand Canyon!

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Introduction: The human history at the Grand Canyon is as varied and unique as the canyon itself. From ancient First Peoples, to Spanish Conquistadors, to a modern assortment of oddballs, dreamers, and entrepreneurs. These are their stories. This...is Echoes from the Canyon.

Segment One: Inspired by exciting tales of recent river trips, young newlyweds Glen and Bessie Hyde fantasized about the rapids of the Colorado River during a summer of tending family fields in Idaho. Soon after harvest was stored for the year, they made their way to Green River, Utah to gather supplies and build their vessel, a flat-bottomed sweep scow. On October 20th, 1928, they began their journey, launching on the river they would never leave…

I was planning to join my son and Bessie. I should have been with them. They say I should stop searching, but I can’t. I know the possibility of finding them alive is not good, but there might be a chance, I know my boy. Even though he and Bessie only know the canyon through books and maps I know Glen can survive in any environment. I taught him how. It was just the two of us for so long, ever since my Mary left us when Glen was thirteen. He didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth. We are survivors. We do what we need to do.

It has been 702 days since they were last seen and 690 days since Bessie’s last journal entry, but I cannot stop searching. Searching for the only answer as to what happened, what accident could have occurred. It had to be an accident. Some say they might have purposefully hiked out and started new lives. Glen wouldn’t do that, he would not just walk away from me, from his farm, from his family. And he would not leave Bessie if she could not make it. He loves her so. You can tell she loves him just as much. You can see it in her eyes. No. It was an accident. It had to be an accident. All their supplies were still on the boat. Bessie’s journal, Glen’s rifle, their money, their hiking and camping supplies, their food, all left on the scow. There was no sign of trouble, just the two of them missing. They had all they needed to survive and planned to stay near the water if anything went awry.

When his letter arrived about his accident in Marble Canyon, I wondered how Bessie was doing on the trip. It would have shook me up to see Glen being thrown from the scow while going through a rapid, after getting knocked in the chin with the sweep. And then to see him struggle to get back on the boat after being underwater and tossed through the rushing water. Not the type of Honeymoon most girls would agree too. Bessie is different though. She is tough and eager for adventure.

I didn’t wait. They wrote me over and over that the worst water was behind them, but I never believed it. I never stopped fearing for them. I should have been there. I wished with all that I am that I would hear from my boy by December 11th, but, when I didn’t, I realized I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t wait. I was on my way to Las Vegas the next day.

I feel like I have searched everywhere and nowhere. I am thankful for so many folks who have helped me. I wish I could be on every search… on every ground search, on every plane, on every river trip. I have nothing left. I want to search every side canyon and ravine, but the money’s gone. This depression is hitting the country hard. Glen’s insurance money is gone. I have already mortgaged my farm, I have drained accounts. I have done things I am not proud of. I have nothing left except my will. I know that my boy and sweet Bessie have passed. I just cannot stop trying to find them, I NEED to know what happened!

I believe I know where it happened now. I thought for so long that the water was calm in that part of the river, no matter what anyone said. That rapid was worse than I ever knew. Ellsworth has helped me understand this. I am a man who accepts what comes my way, but, in this case, I wish so many things had gone differently. I wish they had accepted the life preservers Emery had offered them when they stopped at the village on the south rim. I wish there had been more water when they ran the river. I wish we had checked what was on the other end of the scow line before Emery had cut it. That line was stuck tight to something below the waves.

Despite it all, I have been planning a fourth search, this time by water. I want to give those side canyons to the north, too rugged to reach by foot, a closer look. When I sleep, I search for them, every night. Until I have the means again, dreams will have to do. As I sit in this cabin on Glen’s property, I am accompanied by sweet Bessie’s final words and poems, and I still have what Nelson brought me from their last camp. A few dry lima beans. A can just like any I have in the larder here on the farm. The only difference is I know my son and his sweet wife touched them. *p* It is the closest I may ever get to my boy.

Rollin Hyde never made it back to Grand Canyon to continue the search for his son. He continued out his days on his and Glen’s farm in Idaho. In 1945, Rollin passed away at the age of 86, fifteen years after his last search. He never found out what happened to his son and Bessie. The honeymooner’s disappearance on the Colorado River is still one of the greatest mysteries of Grand Canyon history.

Interlude One: Mermaid Doll Oh! Momma dear, please come! My dolly must be drown, When I put her on the creek, She sunk without a sound.

Wee Betty’s eyes filled with tears, Where could poor dolly be? Perhaps she’d turned to a mermaid, and drifted out to sea.

Segment Two: Grand Canyon National park like most places in the Southwest has many farfetched stories and exaggerations. Many of these tales are as tall as the canyon’s walls. Between the miners, rangers and mule wranglers it can be difficult to tell when truth gets in the way of a good story. However out of all the locations within the canyon Phantom Ranch seems to be the setting of many plots.

Found at the bottom of Grand Canyon by the Colorado River Phantom Ranch is considered an oasis by backpackers and mule riders with an abundance of shade, creeks, with lodging and lemonade for sale. Despite its long history there remains many unanswered questions about the ranch. During my time as a at Phantom I heard accounts by others that I found hard to believe.

Ranchers and Mule wranglers told me the old bunkhouse at Phantom Ranch is known to be haunted. It’s said a female mule wrangler was surprised when she was a ghost of a mule packer standing inside the bunkhouse of where he died of natural causes. She also said was more concerning to know she would sleep in the same bed he died in.

Many hikers and campers in the campground say they have seen shadows walking past them, sometimes wearing clothes from a different time, like suits and ankle length skirts from the 1950s, while others dressed as hikers ask only for water. Others have heard the crunch of heavy boots on gravel without seeing the source noise. I do not know if I believe these stories but there are parts of Phantom that remain unexplained.

One that remains is how Phantom acquired its name. The Ranch itself was named by its architect and designer Mary Jane Elizabeth Colter. The story goes that the Ranch’s owners as well as Colter’s employer the Fred Harvey Company wanted to name the lodge Roosevelt Chalet. Named after President Theodore Roosevelt who visited the area about 8 years before. Apparently, Colter said that Roosevelt had too many places already named after him and demanded the name be Phantom Ranch after the nearby Phantom Canyon.

The origin of Phantom Canyon is harder to place. It is not known who or when Phantom was given its name or what name it had before. There are several explanations but nothing beyond theories and guesswork. Debe Branning wrote this about Phantom Canyon in Grand Canyon Ghost Stories.

“There is much speculation to why the word Phantom became associated with the area. Phantom Ranch was said to be named after Phantom Creek which appears to be hidden from view like a phantom. Legends tells us that prospectors called it Phantom because of the eerie misted filled the air on cold mornings deep in the canyon. Perhaps it seems like a ghost because of the elusive oasis tucked away in the folds of Phantom fault cannot be seen from the rim. Others proclaimed is named after the ominous Phantom Rock. This formation stands about 2 miles north of the ranch along North Kaibab trail it is a rocky projection that since along the trail and resemble a dark cloaked phantom.”

It may be hard to know of sure how Phantom Canyon received it’s name but hike through its narrows during the right or wrong time it’s easy to see that Phantom is a fitting one. On cold mornings there can be a fog, or smoke drifting through the quiet canyon. During the Summer Monsoon season, hiking up the creek can turn from a relaxing swimming hole to a tragic misstep. A few minutes after stepping off trail into the water is how quickly the canyon turns into a narrow channel, and the sky into a thin blue line. It would be nearly impossible to see any sign of a storm approaching. The only warning of a flash flood in the canyon would a slow rumble like a thunder that doesn’t stop but only grows louder. Visitors caught in a flash flood within Phantom Canyon are often swept away. In July 1997 one visitor was caught in a flood and was tossed a half mile downstream before he was able to self-rescue. He escaped but others are often not as fortunate.

The person who named Phantom Canyon will probably never be known. We will never know why or for what reason Phantom was the world that came to their mind, and why that name that has stuck for over a hundred years. It is one side canyon amongst hundreds of others within the National Park. If one canyon can hold this many stories and unanswered questions, one can only imagine what other canyons can tell.

Interlude Two: Community: Howdy, William Bass here. I started Bass Camp in 1884 and it has become home to quite the community of visitors. Often, they come for a week and stay for a month. I’ve shared my home with the like of Zane Grey, John Muir, Thomas Moran, and even Henry Ford. I’m a member of a larger community of prospectors along the rim, but also have grown close to my neighbors the Havasupai who helped me locate local springs and in turn I’ve given them seeds, and championed efforts to build a school and post office in Havasu Canyon. There are a lot of great people in this great place, so come on out and let me introduce you to them all. I’m William Bass, and we’ll leave the lantern lit for ya.

Segment Three: On May 24, 1869 John Wesley Powell left Green River Station, Wyoming Territory, with nine men in four wooden boats with the intention of running the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, the last unexplored area in the west. On August 30, 1869, Powell floated out of the Grand Canyon with five men and two boats, having achieved his goal. What happened to the four men who started the trip but did not finish it? Frank Goodman, an Englishman who was roaming the American West in search of “experience” found it when he signed on to Powell's expedition. He nearly drowned in early June at Disaster Falls when his boat sank taking all his gear and clothing with it, along with a third of the supplies of the expedition. By early July Goodman had had enough; his nerves were shot. On July 5 he walked away from the expedition and back to civilization. Powell and eight men continued on.

The men endured hardship after hardship. They ran dangerous rapids. They lined, that is, they walked along the shore holding onto lines attached to the boat as it floated through the rapid, or portaged, that is, carried, the boats along the shore to be relaunched below the rapid. They were thrown overboard and had to swim for their lives. What food they had left spoiled. They suffered through 100-degree heat and flash floods. By mid-August they were fighting with one another at every turn. On August 27 they arrived at what was to be named Separation Rapid, one of the worst yet. After scouting from both shores the men determined that they could neither line nor portage around it and had no choice but to run it.

Three men, however, had reached their limit: Oramel Howland, his brother, Seneca, and William Dunn.

They decided to hike out of the Canyon and walk overland to one of the Mormon settlements they knew to be in the area, rather than to commit certain suicide by running the rapid. On the morning of August 28 Powell and the remaining five men boarded two of the boats (leaving one behind) and successfully ran the rapid. Dunn and the Howlands, having watched the boats make it to safety below, turned away and climbed out of the Canyon.

One week later as Powell and his brother Walter were travelling through St. George, Utah, on their way to Salt Lake City, he asked for news about the three men who had left the river on August 28 and travelled overland. The first news of their fate arrived in St. George by telegram on September 7, a few days after Powell's inquiry. It stated that three white men were killed by Shivwits Paiutes in retaliation for killing a girl. The telegram had no indication of who sent it or where it was sent from. When Powell heard this news he strongly disagreed with the notion that his men would kill an innocent girl. Several days later a dispatch was received by Powell in Salt Lake City stating that a Southern Mormon elder had discovered the bodies, but there is no mention of what he did with the bodies. By the end of the month the story had changed: the three men did not molest the girl, rather they were killed by an enraged Shivwits whose friends had been killed by miners on the other side of the Colorado River. The story continues with the claim that the Shivwits burned all the papers possessed by the three men. The papers were presumably the duplicate records of the expedition the men were carrying.

The story changes once again in a November letter written by one Joseph Johnson, a resident of St. George, when it is reported that the men raped the girl before killing her and that once they had been murdered their bodies were left to the wolves. This story is immediately discounted and Johnson states that the Paiutes killed the white men for what they had. Now the motive is robbery. Johnson changes his story in December when he writes that the men were killed by a band of Shivwits who were seeking revenge for one Shivwits Paiute who was killed by miners across the Colorado River. The final known written account, penned by the aforementioned Southern Mormon elder, Erastus Snow, on December 9, states that he sent out a search party in response to Powell's inquiry in early September (although he failed to mention this in his September dispatch to Salt Lake City).

The search party returned with the news that some Paiutes had killed three white men about 100 miles southeast of St. George, not because they had provoked the Paiutes, but in retaliation for some miners who had killed some Paiutes and ravished their girls on the other side of the Colorado River. The following summer Powell returned to the area to plan another river trip and met with the Shivwits to try to get some answers. A Mormon guide named Jacob Hamblin translated the exchange. The Shivwits admitted to the killing but now it was one girl who was killed by miners in a drunken brawl and Powell's men happened along at the wrong time and were killed in revenge.

So, what really happened? No bodies have ever been found, although one of the original expedition members, William Hawkins, stated a few months before he died in 1919, that he had found and buried the bodies in the Shivwits Mountains below Kanab Wash, a statement that has never been verified. None of the men's possessions have been found, although Jack Sumner claimed to have seen the silver watch he gave to Oramel Howland to give to his sister, in the possession of a drunken carouser. Their papers, possessions, and bodies disappeared, seemingly into thin air. All we have are changing stories and unconfirmed theories. Were they killed by Paiutes or by Mormons, who thought the men were federal agents sent to harass them, and who then blamed the Paiutes when they realized their mistake? Why did the story keep changing? Did Jacob Hamblin give a faithful translation of the Shivwits confession to the murders?

If the Paiutes did admit to killing the white men why were they not charged and punished?

All we have are unanswered questions. If somebody finds a pile of bones one day on the Shivwits Plateau, and DNA analysis proves they belong to Oramel Howland, Seneca Howland, and William Dunn, maybe then we will know what happened to the three men who hiked out of Separation Canyon on August 28, 1869 and were never seen again.

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Segment Four: Now, if you read the hist’ry books, or talk to anyone who knows anythin’ about the history o’the Grand Canyon, they’ll prob’ly all tell you that Major John Wesley Powell was the first man to run the Colorado River through Grand Canyon, on his expedition in 1869. But if you really start diggin’, an’ you talk to real down-to-earth western frontier folk, miners and prospectors like me’self, or folks who live at the Grand Canyon or who run the Colorado River, you might hear the name of another fella: James White.

Now, James White was pulled outta the Colorado River in Callville, Arizona Territory, which is about 60 mile down the river from the Grand Wash Cliffs at the western end o’the Grand Canyon, in early September 1967. He was floatin’ on a raft made o’ logs tied together, if you can believe it. Half naked and on death’s very doorstep, he was, starvin’ and covered with sores and cuts and bruises, his hair an’ skin bleached from the sun, barely showin’ any sign o’ life. Bunch o’ folks pulled him out o’ the river, wonderin’ where on God’s green Earth he coulda come from. Ain’t nobody usually come DOWN the river to Callville, ‘cept a group o’ Mormons earlier that year in the spring, led by a fella named Jacob Hamblin. And they sure didn’t look like this fella after that trip.

The whole region upriver o’ the Grand Wash Cliffs, for a thousan’ mile, was still marked “unexplored” on maps in those days. No one really knew what was there, ‘cept tales of a gigantic canyon the likes o’ which no one ever saw, with walls soarin’ thousands o’ feet high on either side o’ the river. But by the looks of ‘im, this fella White may well have gone through there, so naturally, the folks in Callville were pretty keen on hearin’ his tale. Turns out, he’d been prospectin’ for gold with two other fellas over in Colorado Territory in the San Juan Mountains about a month before, workin’ their way from the San Juan River up north towards the Grand, when a band of Indians jumped ‘em. Leader o’ the group, fella by the name o’ Captain Baker, was shot an’ killed right off the bat, but White an’ the other fella, George Strole, managed to escape with their horses down a side canyon and reach the river. Which river they reached, well, Mr. White wasn’t so sure o’ that; Captain Baker’d been leadin’ ‘em, ya see, and he knew the country better’n they did. And runnin’ from the Indians as they were, what river i’twas prob’ly weren’t so important to ‘em at the time.

Anywho, under cover o’ dark, they took some supplies from their horses and some ropes, tied together a bunch o’ driftwood into a raft, and shoved off on the river to get away from the Indians what killed Cap’n Baker. After ‘bout four days on the river, Strole was washed off the raft in a rapid and drowned. After that, White tied himself to the raft with a length o’ rope, so’s he could pull he’self back to it anytime he was washed off. An’ it’s a good thing he did, too, ‘cause after that, he was runnin’ rapids one right after another, bein’ washed off his raft three or four times a day. No food, neither, seein’ as how the provisions they’d grabbed from the horses were washed away when George Strole drowned, so he had t’ scrounge for whatever he could find along the way, which weren’t much. At least two weeks on the river like that, he reckoned, though I imagine that keepin’ track o’ the days wasn’t much on his mind, so it may have been longer. After seven straight days with no food, White ran into some Indians who traded him part of a dog for one o’ his pistols. I s’ppose that after that long on the river with nothin’ to eat, even the hindquarters of a dog would seem like a feast.

After White was hauled outta the river in Callville, and he crawled back from the brink o’ death enough to tell his story best as he could ‘member it, the news traveled fast. Lots o’ folks in those days were real interested in hearin’ tell of what the “Big Canyon” of the Colorado was all about. One gentleman by the name o’ General William Palmer, who was headin’ up a survey for the railroad, heard about Mr. White’s adventure, so he sent a man to talk to ‘im an’ write down as much as he could ‘member ‘bout his trip down the river. Now, this feller, Dr. Charles Parry, was a learned man, some sort of scientist or other, so he took real careful notes and asked lotsa questions ‘bout Mr. White’s trip: where’d he start from, how long he was on the river, how many rapids did he run, how high were the canyon walls, and so on and so forth. An’ Mr. White did the best he could to recollect, but considerin’ the condition he was in, nearly dyin’ every single day, starvin’ and whatnot, he weren’t exactly in the frame o’ mind to be takin’ much note o’ such things.

Now, Mr. White wasn’t much for writin’, and he rather wanted to put the whole affair behind ‘im, so it mostly fell to others to write down and tell his story. An’ his tale ended up bein’ written down half a dozen different ways by different people, so what really happened ended up a bit jumbled in the end. Mr. White did write a letter to his brother back in Wisconsin, though, ‘bout three weeks after bein’ fished outta the river, recountin’ his adventures as best he could. An’ puttin’ aside the “official” report by Dr. Parry for the railroad survey, and the newspaper articles which started poppin’ up all over the country, I’d say Mr. White’s own words prob’ly tell the story best, an’ I just happen to have a copy o’ that letter with me here today:

Dear Brother, It has been some time since I have heard from you. I got no answer from the last letter that I wrote, for I left soon after I wrote. I went prospecting with Captain Baker and George Strole in the San Juan Mountains. We found very good prospects, but nothing that would pay. Then we started down [to]* the San Juan River. We traveled down about two hundred miles. Then we crossed over on [to the]* Colorado and camped. We laid over one day. We found out that we could not travel down the river, and our horses had sore feet, and we had made up our minds to turn back when we were attacked by fifteen or twenty Ute Indians. They killed Baker, and George Strole and myself took four ropes from our horses and an ax, ten pounds of flour, and our guns. We had fifteen miles to walk to the Colorado. We got to the river just at night. We built a raft that night. We got it built about ten o’clock. We sailed all that night.

We had good sailing for three days, and the fourth day George Strole was washed off the raft and drowned. That left me alone. I thought it would be my time next. I then pulled off my boots and pants. I then tied a rope to my waist. I went over falls from ten to fif-teen feet high. My raft would tip over three and four times a day. The third day we lost our flour, and seven days I had nothing to eat [but my] rawhide knife cover. The eighth or ninth day I got some mesquite beans. On the thirteenth day, [I met] a party of friendly Indians. They would not give me [anything] to eat, so I gave my pistols for the hind parts of a dog. I ate one for supper and the other for breakfast. On the fourteenth day, I arrived at Callville, where I was taken care of by James Ferry. I was ten days without pants or boots or hat. I was sun-burnt so I could hardly walk. The Indians took seven head of horses from us. Josh, I can’t write you half I underwent. I saw the hardest time that any man ever did in the world, but thank God, I got through safely. I am well again, and I hope these lines will find you all well. I send my best respects to all. Josh, answer this when you get it. Direct your letter to Callville, Arizona.

Now, to a simple prospector and man o’ the west such as me’self, Mr. White’s words ring true and honest. But it didn’t take long for folks to start tryin’ to tear him down. Just two years later, in 1969, Major Powell finished his famous expedition down through the Big Canyon o’ the Colorado, or Grand Canyon as he started callin’ it, an’ right away he an’ his men started sayin’ there was no way that one man on a raft coulda made that trip. An’ after Powell’s second expedition a few years later, he got real famous real quick, what with his book an’ all. Major Powell and some o’ his men took the time to write everythin’ down, and he had lotsa food an’ supplies, so he could stop all the time in the canyon, draw pictures, make maps, an ‘ take measurements with his fancy science ‘quiment an all. Mr. White couldn’t do none o’ that. An’ Major Powell insisted on portagin’ around or linin’ his boats through every rapid he could, to the point where even his own men were gettin’ fed up, ‘cause they thought they could run most o’ those rapids just fine. So it took Powell and his men way longer to get through that canyon than it prob’ly should have, and most o’ those rapids prob’ly weren’t nearly as tough as he made ‘em out to be. But after Powell turned into a big shot back east in Washington, most folks forgot about poor ol’ James White.

Thing is, that was just fine with him. Ya see, Mr. White just wanted t’ferget about the whole thing and move on with ‘is life. Like most of us prospectors and frontiersmen out west, Mr. White was a simple man, not much book learnin’, tryin’ to make his way in the world. He worked odd jobs here and there, moved around a lot, lived off the land, even did a stint in the Army durin’ the Civil War, though he never saw any combat. And from time to time, like so many of us, he tried his hand at prospectin’ for gold, hopin’ to get lucky and strike it rich, a dream that never really panned out for most of us. He certainly never wanted to end up floatin’ down a river on a raft for weeks and nearly dyin’ in the process; not that he even really knew that the Grand Canyon o’ the Colorado even existed at the time, much less that he could get famous by passin’ through it! But fancy, important folks like Major Powell, well, they always make a big deal about who was “first” to do somethin’, so naturally, Mr. White’s trip through Grand Canyon would rub them the wrong way.

A few years down the road, another feller by the name o’ Richard Stanton made an even bigger fuss outta White’s story. He led the second successful expedition down the Colorado through Grand Canyon, ya see, and I s’ppose bein’ second was pretty important to ‘im, ‘cause he spent years tearin’ apart the diff’rent accounts o’ White’s trip, tryin’ to prove there was no way he coulda done what people said he did. Now, there’s no doubt a’tall that White ended up in Callville on a raft lookin’ like death itself, but Stanton tried to say that he’d actually put inta the river up at the Grand Wash Cliffs, meanin’ he’d only been on the river sixty miles. There ain’t even really any rapids along that stretch, and Jacob Hamblin an’ his boys had made that trip just a few months before in two days! An’ they certainly didn’t almost die in the process. Stanton tried t’say that Cap’n Baker had led them from the San Juan River aaaallllllll the way over to the Grand Wash Cliffs before they were attacked by the Indians, which woulda taken them WEEKS, and that jus’ don’ make no sense a’tall. White an’ Strole may not have known for sure where they were, but Cap’n Baker sure did.

So lots o’ folks o’er the years have tried to say that there’s no way James White coulda done what he said he did, though really, it twasn’t really ever him that said what he did at all. He didn’t even know WHAT he’d done, ‘till other folks like General Palmer and Dr. Parry told ‘im. An’ he certainly never tried to make no money off it, nor claim any fame or glory, neither. But even so, big shots like Powell and Stanton poked holes in his story, said his distances and times weren’t right, that the river was too wild for ‘im to survive such a journey, and so on. Some folks even went so far as to call him a LIAR, said he made the whole thing up. Now, why White’d make up such a story about a canyon he didn’t even really know existed, and how he ended up almost dead on a raft in Callville if he made the whole thing up, none o’ that makes sense to me a’tall. Seems t’me that things prob’ly went down ‘bout how he said they did, and in runnin’ for his life and almos’ dyin’ o’ starvation or drownin’ in the rapids, he jus’ jumbled up some details along the way. And even so, he still managed to get lotsa things right ‘bout the canyon, things no one shoulda known at the time. General Palmer even got Major Powell to admit as much when they happened t’meet right after Powell’s first expedition; Palmer went through the report Parry’d written line by line, talkin’ ‘bout how high White’d said the canyon walls were, how wide the river was, the high water mark on th’ canyon walls, and even though Powell kept on sayin’ “Yeah, that’s true” or “Well, that sounds about right”, he still swore up an’ down he was first through the canyon and there weren’t no way that White coulda made his trip the way he’d recollected it.

Point bein’, lotsa folks have had lots t’ say ‘bout White’s story o’er the years, a lot more than White himself ever really had to say ‘bout it. An’ we may never know for sure what really happened, or whether White was really the first person through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. Not that it ever really seemed to matter all that much to White himself, mind you. But to those folks who say that White’s trip as he told it is “impossible”, I’d say that Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a Colorado River runner he’self, said it best:

“To those who say that such a voyage could not be made on a raft, I answer that men in desperate circumstances have accomplished more dangerous feats than running Colorado River rapids on a raft, although I would never, in my weakest moments, venture such a trip. To those who say that White is wrong on certain points, I say to imagine yourself starved, cold, and scared as hell in the middle of the Colorado River on a raft, and then ask yourself whether you would give a tinker’s damn about the scenery or details of it. I repeat that nothing yet has been brought forward to make me accept anyone other than White as the first through here.”

Credits/Outro: Echoes from the Canyon was produced by Park Rangers at Grand Canyon National Park including: Tarryn Bartkus, Luke Bowman, Christina Caparelli, Jeremy Childs, Joe Dawson, Joel Kane, Ty Karlovetz, Nettie Klingler, Rader Lane, Bryan Maul, Brendan Oates, Greg Rasanen, Ann Scott, Tish Tacket, David Whitebread, and John Wishart. We hope you can join us for the next episode. Until then, happy trails and stay safe!