Les Jones

I began running rivers when I was eleven years old, I guess. I got my dad to move his ranch to the river bottoms on the Missouri River and I walked to school a half-mile to the river, and rowed across three hundred yards of the Missouri, leadin' my horse behind me, and went on two miles to the schoolhouse. In the wintertime it'd be frozen, and spring and fall you were rowin' through the ice floes or staying at the neighbor's ranch across the river a week or two.
From there, I went to the University at Bozeman and a lot of engineering work back in Minneapolis and Manhattan and various places, and came back west in 1953 when my father died, with the express purpose of building boats and running rivers. My cousin Don Hatch, and Bus Hatch, came to see me one time, and they got me involved, with my brother-in-law, running through Dinosaur with the Sierra Club to oppose the Dinosaur Dam that was in the works. That dam, incidentally, the Bureau of Reclamation were kicked out, so to speak, from Dinosaur and immediately took advantage of an opening to build a dam on Lake Powell, as we now call it, drowning out Glen Canyon. And the Sierra Club was resting on its laurels, so before they knew it, the dam was in the works.
From there…I ran solo on Cataract, and before that, however, I'd noticed that when I'd run with the Sierra Club the rapids all kind of ran together as a blur, and I couldn't remember the details well enough, and I didn't have identification points. So I started my scroll maps—I didn't like the wind on the U.S. Geological maps, so I started building my scroll maps. And other people liked them, so during the years I sold about 20,000 scroll maps of the different western rivers.
My first run was alone, was Cataract. I ran solo from Moab to Hite in two days. And my mother and sister picked me up. I had a partner going to run with me the same fall—that was August of 1953. Thanksgiving of 1953, I came to run the Grand Canyon. My partner didn't show up, so I soloed the Grand Canyon to Marble at that time, down to Bright Angel. I cached my boat on the roof of a shed there and came back in April to finish the run, fixed a few holes the squirrels had eaten in my boat deck, went on through to Bedrock where I met Bus Hatch as I'd planned, because Don Hatch and I had designed the first big pontoon, commercially, to run the Grand Canyon. And Don Harris and I figured that Bedrock would be the biggest hazard for it, for the oars, they would have a difficult time pulling through fast enough to miss the point of the rock, off that shallow beach. And sure enough, they sunk the boat on the head of the rock, and I came up in my boat and gave the rope to the passengers, and we pulled it, and the bottom split out. The boat popped to the surface, Smuss Allen jumped in, went to the bottom of the the river [through the split-floored boat], came up surprised, rowed it into shore and after a couple of hours of fishing for sleeping bags and things, I patched the boat up with my patching gear, and they ran it on through Lava Falls and everything in great shape. The boat was in service for twenty years afterwards.
Other than that, I ran a lot of western rivers later, and sold a lot of maps. Practically everything was solo, because it was difficult in those days to find somebody to run with.
Do you have any questions?
Was your first trip ever in 1953, that solo trip through Cataract? Or had you run earlier with your cousins?
Well, I ran boats on the Sierra Club trip. I ran a ten-man down to Split Mountain and talked Bus into lettin' me run one of these big pontoons with Smuss Allen, and Don Hatch was on the shore above Moonshine Rapids, giving everybody directions, and everybody was lookin' at Don Hatch, except me, and I was lookin' at that big rock comin' up, and I said, “Smuss, we're going to run over that cotton pickin' rock.” Everybody knows House Rock and Moonshine. I said, “Straighten the cotton pickin' boat up!” And we straightened it up and ignored Don on the shore and went right over the rock. There were two twins, kids, in the front end, and my brother-in-law was up there in the front end. As we went over, I figured, well, I was facin' downstream, and so I sunk the oars in my guts and brought 'em under the power of the water flow in order to punch through the back wave. We punched through, alright, but I broke one of the three-inch oars, and Bus gave me a rimmin' for that. So I decided I'd run my own, so I ran down through Cataract then. But my brother-in-law caught those two twins—they got thrown way up in the air and he caught 'em when they came down, one in each arm —he kept 'em from goin' overboard.
So Bus' business was just kind of takin' off then, huh?
Yeah, he rimmed me good for breakin' his oar. He said, “You should never put an oar in on a falls…” If I hadn't put that oar in, we'd still be in the hole. Put 'em both in, one of 'em busted.
This is a digression, but when you said Manhattan, was that New York City? You were an engineer there?
Yeah. In the Metropolitan Life Building, up on the top floor, right under the pyramid, right by the Flatiron Building.
That's a long ways from the Canyon!
Yeah, New York's a good place to visit, but not to live in.
Well, back to Dinosaur, what was the deal there? Hardly anybody knew about rivers, and then all of a sudden this fight kind of geared up.
The controversy over the dam helped get the whole recreation aspect of river running going. And then I pointed my maps in that direction, toward conservation, naturally. And there was always conservation notices on every map I sent out. So that and the Sierra Club kind of helped get everything off the ground. Then everybody else took over…it was the publicity of the national controversy over Dinosaur that really got the recreation business into the river running field.
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Your maps really are important. John Cross, Jr. said, “I ran all these rivers down here, and it was just me and Les Jones.” And there were a lot of people like that…it wasn't that you were there with them, but you were there with them in the form of your map. I'm curious to hear a little bit about how you'd go about making those maps: just kind of what they were like and what work you had to do, to do it, just to get 'em straight and get 'em done.
The outline of the maps was taken either from aerial photographs and drawn artfully, or traced directly from the contour maps of the U.S. Geological Survey, putting the river end-to-end, instead of cut up in segments like the usgs did, and putting the north arrow to suit the map, instead of trying to keep everything oriented to the top of the paper. So I could line the river out on a seven-inch scroll strip and then take it from one end to the other, without having to run off the scroll, and make as long a sections as I could of river, before I bent it. And then putting a profile of the river usually above it, and sometimes below it, wherever it fit best. So the fellows that bought my maps used to say, “Well, I just ran the profile.” They'd go so many miles and hit another rapid. There it was on the profile, so they quite often didn't even bother to look so much at the plan as the profile. But I think the fun of running the rivers is to see the plan too, and see how the river bends and where the side canyons are, and all that kind of thing. So anyway, that's the way the maps are built. I admire the patience of everybody while we had to put them on paper, for lack of mylar. Then we put them on mylar, and that doubled the price, because it's much more expensive, but it's the only way to go. So I'm looking for a new way to put them on mylar with a Xerox-type operation, but I haven't found it yet, successfully, so that the maps will be more permanent and not subject to light so much.
That's the story of the maps, essentially. They're available today, but I have never advertised them, because I plan on being away for a couple of years, and don't want people hangin' fire for a map. But when I get back, I'll probably make it more public.
Where are you going?
Well, they keep begging me to go on a mission for the lds Church, so my wife and I probably will.
When you were makin' the maps, did you do most of the field work solo? Was it on those solo trips?
Most of 'em were solos, yes. I did make a map or two from the direct information of guides on the rivers that was made available to me, like the Rogue River. A guide up there—Glen Wooldridge , it was thirty years ago—gave me the information to make that map. Did a very good job of it, so that's been available. But I've never had a chance to get to Oregon, down in that region, to run it. But practically all the others I've run solo on my own.
Was that how come you started kayaking? I understand you've built some really interesting boats, and am curious about how you came to design them.
Well, the reason for those boats was my first boat that I bought was a canoe, built like all canoes, with ribs and long thin pieces of wood, and canvas over the outside. I armored it with aluminum and ran the Grand Canyon. But canoes, even Grumman canoes, which I did run for a number of years, right down the Salmon, are, if they get pinned, too much of a freight train for one man to move. So I designed a boat that wouldn't be, and that was an aluminum 19 inch beam, 17 foot long kayak, with which I ran the Grand Canyon with Ulrich Martens. And I built four of those type boats—the others were 16 feet long.
The races over at Salida, I met Ulrich. He won the race there, and gave me a ride back from the end of the race to Salida town, and I thought that was very kind of him. Then I met him when I was with Walter Kirschbaum over in Carbondale. I wanted Walter to run the Grand Canyon with me in 1963, and he couldn't. Ulrich was there, and he said, “I'd like to.” So Ulrich and his black labrador dog and his old car came with me and we ran the Grand Canyon. He wanted to take the labrador with him. He said, “Oh, he can run along the shore, you know.” These German people come over here and think there's a little town every so often along the way where you can buy some beer, and your dog can run along the shore. I said, “No way, Ulrich.” [We took the dog] over to Williams, and we found a family to keep him there. Ulrich did an excellent job of running through the Canyon with me. His glass kayak and my aluminum, we ran on 1,000 second-feet, the record low water, which the dam held back for us. We ran everything but four or five rapids…. It was October of 1963.
So Ulrich Martens and Walter Kirschbaum—and you—you guys are like pioneer kayakers.
I'm not sure, Walter may have, the year before that, ran through. Don Hatch supported it. Certainly Ulrich's run with his kayak was the first unsupported, and one of the only unsupported kayak runs through. He was on his own and I was on my own. We didn't have any support boats.
What kind of stuff did you take with you for camping gear?
Oh, I took heads of cabbage and wheat that I soaked up, and beans that we cooked up. One time the beans went bad, and I was throwin' 'em away. Ulrich said, “Don't throw those beans away! I like a little alcohol!” I gave him the beans, he got a little high. (laughs)
How long was that trip? How many days was it?
Longer than I remembered. I told Ulrich, “We went through there”—this is about twenty years later—“took us about a week.” And he said, “No way! Nineteen days.” I said, “Ulrich, you're crazy!” I looked back in my photo record, and Ulrich was right, it took us 19 days. We didn't try to run too fast, we just enjoyed the Canyon. We could have got through a couple days sooner, but nevertheless, it's all waterfalls, and everything was up and we had rapids where no rapids ever were before,
so it did take time.
Yeah, 1,000 cfs, must've been a million rocks and a million drops…
But it was very beautiful. I mean, the most beautiful and memorable trip I've made, because so many beautiful rock formations were exposed, like in Hance. We come to Hance…. Well, at Unkar first, there was a five-foot fall all the way across the foot of the river, foot of the rapid. And at Hance, we came to Hance and there was nothing but a forest of great big huge rocks, so high that we couldn't see over them. We'd walk around among 'em, you know, and it was strange, entirely strange. Ulrich went over and went through the right side of the rapid and I went through the left side of the rapid, just a little water trickling here and there for our boat to run in. I come up to one rock at the head of the rapid, it was grated just like honeycomb cheese with hard white honeycombs just as sharp as a razor on the edge. If a boater ever got in contact with that thing, he'd lose some hide. But it was fantastic, walking through Hance. I'd never seen anything like it. Lava was a little bit like it, but not much. Lava was paved on the left side with a smooth sidewalk, right over top of the big waterfall on the left side—that was all paved over. We camped at Havasu also, and there was no outwash there—it was all bare bedrock, no sand whatsoever. We camped there, however, the bedrock had ledges we could camp on.
I guess you didn't see anybody else that whole trip.
No, we never ran into anyone—a true wilderness run.
Your boat—did you row? Did you have oarlocks?
Had out-rigged oarlocks, just exactly like a rowing shell.
So how'd that work?
It worked great. I did have a repair job at Serpentine. I picked up a nail out of a board at Serpentine and did a repair job. A rivet or a bolt came loose and got lost, and so I riveted that nail in, and it worked because it went down to the end of the Canyon. Ulrich hitchhiked out with a float-plane from the bat cave, and they had that seven-mile cable across the Canyon yet, running bat guano out on that cable. I towed Ulrich's boat down to Pierces Ferry, and this great big swampy mud bank, I had to cross, to get into the lake, to get across to Pierces Ferry—floating mud and everything. I got into it towing Ulrich's boat, and pulling both boats past me, and finally I said, “No way.” So I got in and pulled the oars and I made one foot, bending the oars so far they almost broke. And so for three hundred yards, I made one foot to the stroke, standing right up out of my seat to pull those oars. And the next day Ulrich came up and looked down there, he said, “What made that big track out there? It looks like a big old gooney bird walking along.” I said, “That was me rowing across the mud, Ulrich.” He said, “I don't believe it!” But the oarlocks worked, they were solid.
Did you take a lot of movies of that trip? Or of all your trips?.

Ulrich took thirty-fives [35 millimeter photographs], and I had a big four-by-five camera I packed in my boat, Graphlex, a new one. And I took a number of slides of it too, but naturally Ulrich could out-photo me. Every time there was action, he was right there at the right time at the right moment with the right stuff to get camera work done, and he had a magnificent set of slides. And I got my copy and that doctor in Berkeley got them and never gave them back to me, and Ulrich got his wet. I've got a few left, I showed the guys on the trip here…. I had [the doctor's] name until I tried recently to call him, and he's long since probably died or something. But total loss, total wipe-out: we both lost our film. And such fine photography! He was the greatest.
How did you come to put a…. You used to mount a camera on your helmet. How did that…
Obviously, every riverman's problem is his camera and what to do about it. I just figured, well, I'd get it out of the way and use the only tool I had, so I wouldn't be bothered with my hands, and put a trigger in my mouth with a water-proof cover for the camera, which was a movie camera at the time. And it worked fine, I got beautiful shots through…. I know they were good, through Badger and Soap and House Rock. I lost it at House Rock. I got good film at House Rock, and that last thing bumped me, and it went out…. I lost my balance, and somehow it got down over my face and I shoved it off. I was (chuckles) in action, you know. And I thought, well the thing would float, it didn't float. I mean, it probably floated, but it was floating so low I couldn't see it in the muddy water.
So all that film that you had shot was lost too?
Gone…. I came in the next spring to Phantom and went on down with a new outfit.
Still with the camera right on your helmet?
Yeah. And I made an excellent series. I lost some of it in the lower end by my own foolishness, but I got about a full reel of the lower canyon. So I told Bob [Webb] that I'd give him my can with the original and he could do everything he needed to do with it, and then mail it back to me.
So after that trip in 1961, had you come down there since then? When's the last time you came down here?

The first trip was 1953, the second trip was 1961. I think it was 1961, not 1962, but I'm not certain of that. Anyway, it was Ron Smith and Larry Allen down at Bright Angel. And then my brother-in-law Klaus Axeman from Bright Angel down to Lake Mead, Pierces Ferry. And that was on 2,500 second-feet. Dock Marston came in, in 1962, I think it was, the year just before I ran in 1963. He ran on 2,500 cfs trip with sportyaks. Ulrich Martins, as I mentioned, came in, in October of 1963 and ran on 1,000 second-feet of water. Then there was another trip with geologists: Foos from back East in 1966, with Ron Smith with big rafts.
Is this [the '94 Oldtimers Trip] your first time back since 1966?
This is my first time back. Nobody could have talked me into running it again except for the work that [Bob Webb] wanted to do, cause I wanted to remember like it used to be. I've enjoyed this run so much that I don't think it's lost that much. There's, in fact, a gain in seeing other people enjoy it so much…. The other thing that I decided to do, once I got into the Canyon was to make a continuous photo record of the Canyon from one end to the other with thirty-five mil [millimeter] film. Unfortunately, from Horn to Bass my camera didn't roll a roll of film through—my fault—but I'll have to come back and get that, in order to complete the set. But I think it'll be a good set, and it'll be valuable for research and other purposes. I'm going to talk to Ted and Bob about the best way to set that film up, as you and I have already discussed.
How has this place changed since 1953, 1961, to now? When it comes to the work at hand, how has it changed in the time that you've known it, and what's stayed the same?
The biggest change is obvious: There are all these boats on the river. And the campsites are heavily used. But I haven't found that too negative. These big walls are never going to change, essentially. The biggest geologic change has been debris flows, and that's a natural thing, has occurred before and it'll occur again, and it'll be swept out and it'll be swept in. So other than that, the Canyon is still just as great an adventure as it ever was. I encourage people to come see it. They won't be the first, but it'll be the first time they see it, and that's the main thing.
Were the beaches different, back there in the fifties and early sixties? Were they different in size and were there as many tamarisk trees? Is that very noticeable? Or does it seem to be pretty much the same?
As far as I can tell, there's more debris washing into the river, than like Bob said this morning, “than the river can take out.” And the debris seems to be building up. But we need the river to be in here to wash the beaches clean to keep the tamarisks back, so there will continue to be camping spots in the Canyon. That's the main thing that I see right at the moment. The debris is coming in faster than the river can handle it anymore. It probably used to be able to come closer to handling the debris coming in, than it is now, due to the dam. And we need more high flows to wash the tamarisks out and keep them back off the beaches far enough so we have beaches for camping.
Are the sandy beaches about the same size as they were?
Well, no, I'd say that due to the debris flow, there's more rock in, and less sand. And there's less sand, also, mainly due to tamarisk taking over, like they do at Unkar and a couple of other places I've seen. That's going to be, I think—the tamarisks taking over beaches—is going to be one of the biggest problems.
Do you see any difference in the Bureau of Reclamation then and now?
Yes, I just hear that there's a difference, that they're much more…. They recognize, I think, that they have to listen to the voice of the people, back then people were ignored, back in the fifties and sixties, until we got their attention. I think this is a healthy thing for the Bureau of Reclamation and for the people, so we can work together to do what we have to do for energy, but at the same time, have our cake and eat it in places like this, through good, cooperative planning.
Now back to that Hatch trip: What was Smuss Allen like? And would you just tell us a little bit more about that trip? Because I know you have these pictures of these guys stamped on Bedrock and that's kind of historically…
Yeah, I had some pretty good black-and-whites that I gave to Bob. Smuss was at one time the Mayor of Springville, out of Provo. Like I mentioned, he ran Bedrock with me and probably due to poor old Don's signalling us from shore, we went right over the bedrock, which we were tryin' to miss. But he came down with us and ran the boat that didn't quite make it around that rock, around the beach ahead of the rock, and there was more room at the time than there is now, but the water was shallower out there further too, so I'm a little split on just exactly what his chances were. I suppose they were fifty-fifty to get by there, and he came up short. He pinned it right on the nose of the rock, and it sunk, probably just went down slow and then slipped under, and washed out a lot of stuff and a lot of dudes, and they all went up on the point of the rock, standing there. And Bus and I realized what had happened, so we landed on the lower end of the rock, and I ran back up on the rock's nose and went down in the boat and got rope and pulled it up and gave it to the passengers, and they pulled the boat up. And as I mentioned, it split, and Smuss jumped on the boat and come up from the river bottom with a surprised look on his face and rowed it into shore and I sewed it up that night. One tube was a little flat, and the bottom had been split out, but we fixed it and ran Lava Falls and the rest of the Canyon just fine. But Bedrock remains today, in the opinion of the boatmen that we've talked to, as well as Don Harris and my identification of where they were going to have trouble with that trip…. it remains the one single real hazard in the Canyon. The rest of the rapids will get you, but they'll sweep you out without…usually without more than maybe a bang or two on the boat. But Bedrock will wipe you out.
Yeah that's my least favorite rapid too. I hate that place. There was one story about, Brad was telling me this one, I don't know if you want to get into this or not…up to you. Brad was telling me you told him one that just had him rolling on the floor, about your [glass] eye.
Well I parted company with [the real one] in an explosion when I was 15 and…so about fifty years ago… I'll just be brief. Got lost in the spud patch and we said a prayer that night and my wife found it way down under the spuds on a leaf the next morning. So that's the faith-promoting story. Next time I left it on a coffee table and the dog 'et it. I poured the dog full of peroxide and pretty soon it burped in the bathtub and there was the eyeball on top of the burp looking right up at me. So the third time was the final one. I had a root canal done by a dentist and he wasn't a root canal expert. So he drilled down through the root and said “I can't get that stuff out from below there so I'll give you some antibiotics for it…caused such a ruckus it shrunk the eye socket. After that I said forget it. I'll use a patch. Forget the artificial.
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There's something I think I'd like to mention in front of the group sometime. I'll just really brief it here: In this canyon we've cut down by draining inland seas and cutting a new channel through here to the sea, or deepening it or robbing it or whatever. But we know there was a lot of water running through here at that time, and that's what cut the canyon. Right now it's accreting material in the bottom instead of cutting, so to speak. There's an analogy we can draw from a river up north that I'd like to bring in in order to help visualize what was really happening here. I think it will. The Frazier River, Alan Neal and I ran with a 17 foot Grumman canoe with oars and a paddle. We started just below Prince George and ran through the Cascade Range. The first thing I want to mention: it was running about 300,000 second-feet. It had a one foot to the mile gradient…. This is the first thing you need to realize: Size gets it away from friction, and speed increases. The second thing is, the depth and the volume. When we went through the Cascade Range, we made like 110–120 miles a day, because of that velocity…. So that's the type of thing to get an idea of volumetric flow, it was running about 15 miles an hour through the Cascades and about ten miles through the Caribou. And it run up to 700,000 second-feet. Now the McKenzie runs a million second-feet, the Mississippi runs more than that. But you can visualize, probably if it was around 700,000 or thereabouts in second-feet going through this Grand Canyon Gorge, in a manner just like we see going through these rivers up there now, for however many years it took to stabilize and drain those lakes and change the weather pattern from a very wet one to a dry desert one like we see now. That was the cutting mechanism of the Grand Canyon. When you get that much water cutting through this more narrow chasm in the Grand Canyon, it has tremendous cutting power, and that's what cut the Grand Canyon through all those years…. It would be much more violent, but in some ways, it'd flow a little easier. But down there on the bottom, it'd really be cutting. And the velocity through here at five-foot-to-the-mile drop would be great enough to be a tremendous cutting mechanism.
Do you reckon it'll ever get that way again?
I'd like to be around to see it!
I think it will eventually. I think you'd have to stop water from wanting to get to the ocean, to stop this process here. It might be 200–300 years or so but…. I don't see how we can move that much silt that's going into those lakes now, as much as there is…
Geologically speaking, that'd go in a blink. In man-time speaking, it's forever.
Remembering it like it used to be, what are the best parts of that memory?
Wilderness feeling. But you can run it in the wintertime now and get that. So I don't think that's lost entirely.
I wonder what it is about the wilderness that's so appealing.
I think you feel like you're alone with your Maker. If you have less outside influence disturbing you, you can commune with whatever the powers be that formed all this, a little bit better. But they set it up right, that's the main thing. Anybody can come down here and find a time when they're alone if they really want to, and prepare themselves for it.
Just one last word, and then I know you guys want to fold up here, and that is that when I ran the Canyon first—and I want this to be an example—I'd never seen it, but I knew every rapid in it from one end to the other, by heart, and everything about the Canyon. You don't have to know it quite that well, but you should do the best you can to know what you're getting into, before you get into it. And you should have your equipment in such condition that whether you come out or not, that equipment is going to come out okay. Then you don't have to worry about your equipment—all you've got to worry about is yourself. Then make sure that you're in pretty good condition. After that, not before, you got the license to run the Canyon—or wherever else, or to climb the mountain, or whatever you want to do. Be prepared, in other words.
You said you knew the Canyon by heart? How'd you know that? You did a lot of homework before you came?
Well, I made the maps. I had an advantage over other people because I memorized from the maps too. But I would have done it anyway, to a certain extent, whether I had the maps or not.
So you'd get the usgs maps before you came down here, and just lay 'em all right out.
I made my scroll map before I came. That was the 1923 trip, the contours that I used, [the Birdseye] expedition.
That was the one that they surveyed—not aerial photos or any of that?
They were made and taken only as the contours that would go to the head of whatever dams they were proposing. So they'd propose a dam and draw the contours to that level. That's why they're really skinny in here. They only go up these walls a few feet right in this section. See the few skinny little lines out there? I probably should go back in and take the other contour maps and plot in a few more contours. But I don't know whether it'd add or subtract, so I haven't done it yet. Most of the Canyon, the contours are quite high.