Our very first trip [in 1949] when we went down Glen Canyon, there were just two other companions with me. One was a young lady geologist, Doris Blackman. And another was a draftsman by the name of Ken Gardner. We all worked in the USGS offices in Grand Junction where the Uranium exploration program was being carried out. We came down in Ken Gardner's home made car, made out of various pieces and parts of other vehicles. We called it the Gardner-Mobile. In fact there was a Gardner car— he actually had hubcaps that said Gardner on them. [laughs] And drove very slowly down North Wash and in those days didn't have much of a road. Camped over night in the wash, and ended up down at Hite at the ferry that was run by Chaffin— which was an interesting thing in itself, that old ferry. We got down there and we got there fairly early in the day. So we had these two dinky little river boats from Sears Roebuck that we tied end to end. And Gardner was going to go along behind in the one boat, cause he only had one hand— he had sawed off his hand in a sawmill as a young man. He'd made his own hook and he could paddle that with a kayak paddle. With his hand and his hook. Doris and I were going to paddle up front, and that's the way we were going to go down this river. Well, Doris and I had paddled around a little on the Gunnison River. We had a pretty good idea how to do it. But we had never put these boats together and paddled with Gardner. We put the boats together and said “Well, let's take a little spin out in the river, out by the Ferry.” And we dang near didn't make it back to shore. Because we were not coordinated. Well we knew... Doris and I knew, a few hundred yards down the river and we'd get coordinated all right. But it scared the daylights out of Gardner, because his density was actually greater than water and he couldn't swim a stroke. And he was deathly afraid of the water. So there we were, trying to persuade Ken that it was ok to go. And we went to bed that night thinking “Well, the river trip is over. Because Gardner isn't going to go with us.”

We woke up the next morning and here comes a row boat, down the river. Turned out there had been a party that camped at the mouth of North Wash about five miles upstream that night, unbeknownst to us. This fellow pulls in at the Ferry to talk to Chaffin, and we go out to find out who it is. And it's Bert Loper. Turns out he is leading a whole troop of boy scouts- about fifty boy scouts -coming down the river. They weren't there yet. They were coming behind him. When Gardner found out who it was and we learned what he was going to do, we persuaded Ken that if we got the boats packed up and got ahead of Loper, that he would be safe. So that's what we did. [laughs] We packed up and got out there on the river ahead of Loper and the boy scouts. And that's how we got launched on the river. We pretty much stayed ahead of Loper until we got down to Rainbow Bottom, at the mouth of Aztec Creek, where you used to hike up to Rainbow Bridge. We were hiking up then and we had a pretty good visit with Loper there. Then we learned that his plans were to join his friends at Lee's Ferry, and continue on down the Grand at that time.

* * *

Were you running a boat? […on the 1968 Powell re-photography trip through Grand Canyon]

Sure, running my own boat. In fact I had George Andermann with me. He and I jointly owned this boat for years, and boated together. Yeah, we looked over Lava, it looked pretty scary—not having run it before. In fact a couple of guys lined their boats down—elected not to run. And I was glad they did. Bruce Julian, who had actually flipped one of the boats up at Soap Creek, knew a good line through Lava. And he ran it perfectly. We watched him go and I thought I could hit that line too. But it was very hard to see that exact spot upstream as you know. Don't know exactly where to go and it drops off so fast. I missed it by about four or five feet. It dropped right into a hole. Got trapped in this hole, boat just stopped. I lost Andermann instantly, he hung on with all his might onto the rowing frame, he just peeled right off into the rapid. There I was, and the boat was just slamming around and all my bags that I had tied down carefully were starting to come lose. The oars were flailing around at that point. I thought I better get out of this boat before I got pinned in it. I just worried that if it flipped over I might get stuck in the boat. So I got out. And just about that time the boat popped out of the hole. Boat never did flip over. It went over the big wave down at the bottom. Stayed upright all the way and I went through in my life preserver. Which is a non-recommended way to run Lava.

* * *

What turned you toward astronomy?

I got into astronomy through the back door. I was interested in the idea of going to the moon. In fact this idea came to me rather suddenly in 1948, shortly after I joined the Geological Survey. I had been a student at Cal Tech and was familiar with the development of rockets that had been going on at the jet propulsion laboratory... and that they were flying these rockets as upper stages on the captured German V-2s. I just got to thinking about that. “You know, they're going to go to the moon in my professional lifetime. They are going to send human beings to the moon.” I made up my mind right then and there that I was going to be standing at the head of the line when the time came for scientists to be chosen as lunar explorers.
This was ten years before NASA was founded. I just, simply took those turns in the road that I thought would lead me to being the best prepared field geologist to go study the moon. I had an opportunity to go study Meteor Crater, Arizona. I had been working on Volcanic Craters at the Hopi Buttes. Which in fact have forms that are rather similar to some of the smaller lunar craters. I thought I ought to be working on impact craters as well, so I did seize that opportunity. Having worked on an impact crater the first question a geologist asks is, “Well, how often does this kind of thing happen? What is out there? What kind of bullets are out there that hit the earth that make craters?” I immediately made it my business to find out what was known about earth-crossing asteroids at the time. There wasn't a lot. In fact there were about eight of them known at the time I worked out at Meteor Crater. In fact, most of them had been lost. Only a few of them had well determined orbits. In the meantime the lunar program did come along. As it turned out, I didn't become an astronaut because my adrenal cortex failed just a couple years before scientists were chosen. I ended up chairing the National Academy's ad hoc selection committee instead of being one of the guys standing in line.

* * *

It's hard to fathom all that stuff going on out there. Just to think about... trying to figure out what's going on as far as out there as Jupiter. Did your comet really make a big bang when it hit? [Refers to the Shoemaker-Levy Comet (named after its discoverers) which collided with Jupiter in July of 1994.]

The comet did its thing at Jupiter. All these years, you know I've kind of had a daydream... it would sure be fun to see a real impact in my lifetime. They are rare enough that the odds of that weren't very high. Of course I rather imagined, maybe, it'd be a small asteroid that would hit the earth maybe deep in the outback of Australia where nobody would get hurt, and I'd rush over and map the crater. If I'd really thought about it I would've realized that if I were going to see any impact of a comet or an asteroid during my lifetime, the most likely case would be Jupiter. Because the frequency of impact on Jupiter exceeds the frequency on any other planet. Partly because it's bigger. It has a very large gravitational field of influence. So it focuses the flux of comets onto it.
But I hadn't really gone through that calculation. This was really a daydream. So it was a matter of extraordinary good fortune that we actually discovered a comet in 1993, in March. First of all it was broken up. It had gotten so close to Jupiter, it had been pulled apart in Jupiter's gravitational field. Then we learned, with further tracking by many observatories around the world, that this object was in orbit around Jupiter. And finally it became clear it was going to actually hit Jupiter when it came back to its closest approach to Jupiter. That was all just an incredible series of surprises. Then of course, we're trying to figure out, “Well, what's really going to happen?” Many people worked on this problem. There was a wide range of opinions. Some people said “Oh, we're not going to see anything at all. Those comets are going to disappear without a trace.” I was pretty sure we were going to see some results that we could resolve with the telescope. In fact with colleagues, we obtained calculations of the plume that's produced by the hot fireball generated by the impact- how high it would rise, how long it would take, how far it would spread out. Those calculations were finished only about a week before the first impact. It would've been sooner but we had trouble getting the funding to do the work. [laughs] Finally National Science Foundation decided, well, I'd been co-discoverer of the comet... it was kind of a shame if they didn't give us a little funding to work on it too. So we finally got our calculations done late. But I was absolutely delighted because the first nucleus that hit Jupiter produced a plume that we could see on the edge of the planet. With a Hubble Space Telescope. It was very close to the plume that we'd calculated. So, at that point I knew we were going to really see something!

* * *

I used to be really kinda proud of being a boatman and living down here and being tapped into all this cosmic awareness that you get, just from contemplating the canyon and the amount of time that's involved here. But it wasn't until I took some astronomers down that it really jerked my head up, to think of these people who are looking way, way out there. Where does boating fit into a life as varied as yours? Where do this river and river running fit in?

The world's a tremendously interesting place. There are so many interesting problems. But for me, I really cut my professional geological teeth on the Colorado Plateau. It's been my geological backyard for forty five years. And it's a geologist's paradise. There is no other way to describe it. Rocks are exposed here in a way that, you just rarely find anywhere else in the world; a tremendous variety of things to work on; and fantastic scenery to go with it. So it's an old love that keeps tugging me back. While I may have my head off in the stars somewhere or the planets and comets, moons, asteroids. It's important to come back and bang on rocks. I still consider myself a rock-knocking geologist. Fact, I'm still doing regular field work in Australia, mapping impact craters there. Coming back to the canyon country and especially the Grand Canyon is just sort of a rejuvenation, gets your geological juices flowing again. There are a whole series of problems down here that have not been solved. I look at them as I go down, and a couple of them I've actually started to work on. But I've got so many irons in the fire, it's hard to finish them.

Lew Steiger