Tom Moody

I went to the Grand Canyon once on a family vacation in 1958. Otherwise, I really didn’t have a lot to do with the Canyon and the Colorado River, other than living in Arizona. I guess just growing up in Arizona gives one a certain amount of appreciation for water, the Colorado River, and use of our river systems and development that you get in any other western state, but maybe not so much in the East.
I first went down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon in 1969. My mom, Gwen Moody, dragged the entire family down the river. We went down on a Hatch River Expeditions trip…. I didn’t go willingly, although I wasn’t against it. It was the year I graduated from high school…. Three, single, thirty-three foot pontoons. The boatmen were Dennis Massey, Steve Amos, and Fred Burke. I guess it’s safe enough to say that I had a great time. In fact, the swamper’s name was John Thibedeau [phonetic spelling], I still remember him. He played the guitar—he added one extra string to the guitar, to make it sound a little distinctive. Basically, I just threw-in with John Thibedeau, and I was a second swamper for the trip. I just ran around scrubbing pots and doing whatever I could. That was just my natural reaction to it. The next year Fred and Carol Burke, along with a number of other people who happened to be on the same trip, that same Hatch trip, started Arizona River Runners. And, I got a chance to get a job with Arizona River Runners.
Steiger: Wow. So, how old were you on that first trip then?
Moody: Seventeen. I worked for Arizona River Runners for five years, 1970 through 1974, I guess, those five seasons. It was pretty easy then to move up in the ranks, and so I had my own boat the first year, and I led my first trip the beginning of my second year; it was not uncommon in those days for you to be the youngest person on the trip and also leading the trip. [I] progressed through that…and worked for Dick McCallum for Grand Canyon Youth Expeditions (later Expeditions) for probably the next ten years on and off. At the same time, I went to Africa in 1976 and began working for Sobek Expeditions on trips around the world, and that led to another direction.
In the late 1970s Ross Garrison, Terry Collier, and myself—started a little adventure travel company that did sailing trips in Hawaii and river trips in central Utah and hiking trips. That was called Gypsy Wind Expeditions. I started another little company called Plateau Trails in the late 1970s that is still alive, which was also meant to just be a little adventure travel company. It never really amounted to much, but it’s been a good vehicle.
By 1983, in Alaska, I decided to try something else, and so I bought a commercial fishing permit for salmon, and worked up there for ten years during the summertimes. In 1983 also…Brian Dierker and Mike Yard and I put in a proposal to the Bureau of Reclamation to run the river logistics portion for science trips for Glen Canyon Environmental Studies I, which started in 1984, and went to 1987.
And then where? Then I guess the next thing in the river running, was the beginning of gcrg, which must have been in 1988, or somewhere about that time. And then, actually being the president of gcrg, after Kenton [Grua], and that led to more involvement in advocacy for rivers and subsequent work with Grand Canyon Trust and on other river issues; and probably led to changes. I went back to school, and got a civil engineering degree and now a lot of my work isn’t to do with commercial river running, but it’s work with either advocacy towards rivers or technical engineering approaches to river assessment and restoration. That’s part of my life, according to the Colorado River.
* * *
Steiger: Let’s just go back to that very first trip. You said they had to drag you down the river.
Moody: Well, I just mean that, it wasn’t my idea, I didn’t lobby hard with my mom to go down the river. She’s the one that made the arrangements. It was a charter trip put together by several families that my mom and dad knew, but we didn’t know them really closely. The Hayes family, he was the Chief Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, that family; and I don’t even think I can remember all of the families that were on that particular trip. There were about thirty people on the trip….
Steiger: So, there were two outside rigs, without tubes, and then a boat with side tubes. (Moody: That’s right.) Do you remember, did you stay on just one boat the whole time?
Moody: No, we moved around. I remember we camped at the standard Hatch places. We camped at House Rock the first night, Nankoweap the second night, Cardenas the third night, Lower Bass the fourth night, I don’t remember where we stayed the fifth night, I don’t remember that one. The sixth night we stayed at 185 Mile camp, which used to be very heavily used and then just basically never got used—big beach there. And then we camped at Diamond Creek, so we’d get out early the next morning.
Steiger: Do you remember doing much hiking?
Moody: No, no. Wasn’t much hiking. I mean, we went to Elves Chasm and we went to Deer Creek, and we went to the Little Colorado.
Steiger: Do you remember seeing other people?
Moody: No, I don’t remember seeing any other people. At Lee’s Ferry, we were the only ones. Ted Hatch flew down. When a three-boat trip left Lee’s Ferry, it was like a big deal. Ted flew down, Ted helped push the boat out, and collect checks.
Steiger: And get the money, yeah! (laughter)
Moody: There were several families on the trip who ultimately became stockholders in Arizona River Runners, and the idea, at least as I understand it, was hatched on that trip.… I got along very well with Fred and Carol, they were very good to me and they appreciated the way I worked the year before—unbeknownst to myself—and so I was able to get a position.
Steiger: Based on that one trip. So for you, at the end of that trip, you thought this is something you’d want to pursue.
Moody: “This is something I want to do,” yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I had no idea that they were going to start a company.
Steiger: And somehow you ended up back there the next summer.
Moody: Yeah. The next summer of 1970 we lived at Lee’s Ferry. Fred was the usgs man at Lee’s Ferry and we lived in the house up on the hill, the western house, across from John and Sue Chapman who were the Park rangers there. The warehouse was down in one of the little stone buildings down near the ferry.
Steiger: When you say “we,” that means the whole Arizona River Runner crew?
Moody: The Arizona River Runner crew wasn’t very much. It was Fred and Carol and myself.
Steiger: That was the company?
Moody: Well, it was really the company—and Bruce Hayes, who was the son of Judge Hayes and his wife, on the trip before, he had run some trips, I guess for Hatch, you know the year before. And he ran the first ARR trip and it went out in May, and it was full of crisis. They lost an entire, brand new Mercury outboard when he backed out of Havasu and went down the rocky left side.... Of course, all the equipment was new. Moki Mac and the Quist brothers supplied the frames and rubber, so Moki Mac had stock in the company.
Steiger: In exchange for that they got....
Moody: Stock, right.
Steiger: Wow, pretty good deal for Moki Mac.
Moody: Yeah, as it turned out, it was a very good investment. The first ARR trip that went down was full of catastrophes, and they lost a brand new engine; ripped boats in Crystal, I think; and anyway, it was lucky that it got off. In fact, we actually picked it up, and on the way back from that trip the truck caught on fire while we were driving on Route 66. So, that was really the ill-fated trip, unfortunately, but it got better after that.
Steiger: And when the truck caught on fire, it burned up a bunch of equipment?
Moody: It burned up some equipment. We unhooked the trailer and threw engines and stuff out of the back of the truck, and put out the fire so the truck didn’t burn up.
Steiger: So you weren’t on that trip?
Moody: I wasn’t on the first trip, I was on the second trip. The second trip was a single boat run by Don Neff. I have to say I idolized Neff and worked every minute I could. We hiked a lot but I can remember collapsing by the trail I was so tired. We stopped at places like Buck Farm and Specter Chasm to go for hikes. These were not commonly hiked at that time. In fact I don’t know whether I’ve been back to Specter Chasm since. Neff gave me the exploring bug.
The next trip was a one-boat trip with Steve Amos and myself, and I think we had like four passengers. I remember that trip because we probably camped at almost all the same places. We camped at House Rock though, for sure. And, we didn’t get the boat pushed off early enough in the morning; and so we didn’t leave that beach until 3:00 in the afternoon when the water came up again because that boat was totally beached.
Steiger: It was a big beach then too, wasn’t it?
Moody: Big beach, yeah. You could hardly see the water from behind the boat. (laughter) It was a really big beach.
Steiger: It was a big beach, and the fluctuations were a lot more extreme than they are now.
Moody: They were pretty darn extreme. A lot more extreme than they are today, that’s for sure. Anyway, we just ran that trip, and that was the second trip, and that was my first trip.
Why I say that it was basically Fred, Carol, and myself is because a variety of boatmen were hired to do the few trips—Steve Amos did two trips that year, Clair Quist did a couple trips, Bob Quist did a trip, Bruce Hayes did a trip, and Don Neff did a trip—so I was the only one that did probably more than two trips that whole year—I did six trips that year.
Steiger: And you were swampin’ all of those, or you got a boat?
Moody: I had my own boat by August. On the fourth trip I had my own boat.
Steiger: So you swamped three trips and then it was okay. (Moody: Right.) And that was the rule, was you had to have three trips.
Moody: Minimum of three trips, which was also the maximum too, (chuckles) generally. And now you have to have six trips before you have your own boat. Second trip with Steve Amos. Third trip was with Clair Quist, and Joe Baker (son of Pearl Baker) from Green River was also on that trip. It was a trip that had a lot of friends of Clair’s from Green River, so I don’t know how that was actually chartered, or whether it was a Moki Mac trip that Arizona River Runners ran, or what the deal was. But, Clair did that trip, that was a one-boat trip. Then I think I did a trip or two with Moki, with Bob Quist. And then I did another trip when I had my own boat behind Bruce Hayes, which was an adventurous trip too, but we made it. Finally Don Neff asked me to swamp a Grand Canyon Expeditions trip that same year, that August.
Steiger: So, you were seeing every kind of water level. It was extreme fluctuations.
Moody: Yeah, and also you had low water in the spring, and high water in the summer. This was not really early in the spring. I didn’t start until late May, or something, because I was going to college and I got out of college and came up and went to work. Then I went to college that fall too, so I didn’t really see the off season. But, it was generally pretty high water, big fluctuations, but not really a big problem.
I remember the first time I went through a hole. It was swamping for Neff. The back end of the boat went through the hole in Crystal. There was a big sweeping hole and I remember the ride. It didn’t hurt anything, shook things up a bit, but it wasn’t a sharp hole. I just plain missed the cut…. I had no clue on how hard you had to push. (laughs)
The trip that I had my own boat, I couldn’t even remember where Elves Chasm was, but that’s the way that goes. It was a real rainy trip. For some reason, I made the serious mistake of getting in the lead, and we were supposed to stop at Olo Canyon. I missed Olo, completely, never even saw it (Steiger: Oh boy.) and went on down. Gay Stavely of Canyoneers was camped at the Ledges, which is the only other camp that anybody really knew of or used in those days in that section of the river, and we went by Havasu and camped below. Fortunately Havasu was pouring red, that was the only saving grace, it was a very, very rainy monsoon season and Havasu was just pouring red. So, it wasn’t exactly Shangri La that day, anyway. Still Bruce Hayes, the lead boatman, was mad. I learned a very valuable lesson that day; don’t get too big for your britches.
Steiger: So, it wasn’t a total faux pas. (Moody: Felt like it.)
Moody: I remembered better, not so much that first year, but in subsequent years, like the second year, 1971, which wouldn’t have been that much different, and I was more aware of what was going on…
Our rigs were inside rigs with basket frames, no floors in the boats and side tubes. So, they were pretty much state-of-the-art at the time. They were basket frames, twenty horse-powered Mercury outboard engines with pointed-end side tubes on ‘em, the Sanderson style. Except the boats had two frames: front frame and rear frame and the hard front end, which I think made a big difference in flipping over. (Steiger: In stability, yeah.) No hard front frames rafts ever flipped over, I don’t think—or at least didn’t until 1983.
It was pretty adventurous from a boatman’s point of view. There was sort of a standard procedure, but it was pretty limited on what you did. You stopped at certain stops, and you camped at the same camps all the time.
…It was just enough, really, to get the boats on the water and get ‘em down the river—you know, was really the bigger thing. And so, therefore it was a different kind of adventure. It was definitely an adventure just to get it done. There werre lots of examples of boats that didn’t make it, or people that didn’t get out on time, or you know crisis or accidents. I think [people’s] expectations were different. Arizona River Runners had very good food. Fred and Carol made sure that it wasn’t what they had experienced at Hatch. We cooked over open fires and we carried a little shovel with a toilet paper roll on it—that was the extent of it. We built fires on the sand and cooked entirely over fires. We had dutch ovens and it was just the standard procedure. I don’t remember seeing a lot of other boats on the river on any of those trips. We did see other boats, almost certainly. I don’t remember runnin’ over anybody. That was the great expansion in river… in total numbers of use at that particular time. There’s a big difference in 1971 from 1970, and a big difference in 1969, it doubled almost every year from 1965 on.
Steiger: Every single year?
Moody: Every year. It got big fast.
Steiger: And, why was that? I wonder what accounts for that? Just that it was so much fun?
Moody: You know, that’s an interesting question that ought to be put in the light of sort of a national thing. But, as far as Grand Canyon was concerned, I think.... Bobby Kennedy and his family went down in 1966, and I think there were big stories in Life magazine about it, and then I think between that and the Powell trip, where National Geographic had stories about it, that those were things that coincided with a society that had, for the first time, disposable income and a bit of an itch to go beyond just driving your car around on a vacation. And so it seemed to catch on. Maybe there was some river running in other places, but I think that to a large extent Grand Canyon was the first sort of big, big thing. And especially to grow at that rate.
Steiger: What did it cost, do you remember?
Moody: The number I remember is $330 for eight
days.
Steiger: Three hundred and thirty bucks. So, when they run a trip with four people, you’re talking $1,300.
Moody: I’m not sure it made money.
Steiger: It didn’t?
Moody: It wouldn’t necessarily have made money. The important thing was to make sure the trips got off. You know.
Steiger: If you scheduled the trip, you had to go.
Moody: You produced the trip—not that you made money on every trip. I doubt that Arizona River Runners made money the first year. That would be pretty astounding. They just did whatever they could to be a viable company. And then building a reputation and getting the logistics down so that you’d make money later on, which they certainly did, I’m sure they did. Which I know they did.
… I was fortunate to be able to do trips with Clair Quist and Bob Quist, and Steve Amos and Don Neff. You know, all right off the bat. So I got a really broad education, exposure to different ways of doing things. All of those people were all really good boatmen, and they all had a different way of doin’ things. Maybe I didn’t get into ruts that way. Maybe I had a lot of things to choose from. Because it wasn’t very long before I was on my own. (laughs)
* * *
Steiger: I wonder if you should just give a little thumbnail description of some of of those guys? Do you feel like doing that? Neff, Bob, Dave....
Moody: Don Neff was a wrestling coach in Salt Lake City. He grew up in Mexican Hat, Utah. His family ran the Mexican Hat Trading Post. They knew Norm Nevills and he worked for Mexican Hat Expeditions. I don’t know if he worked for Norm Nevills or for the Rigg brothers, or what era. But he ran those sadirons down through the San Juan and also through Glen Canyon. And, then [he] worked for the Grand Canyon Expeditions, and Ron Smith in Grand Canyon. He liked Fred, and Fred liked him, and so he came over to do a trip just to help arr out, and have a good time. He was a classic character, a young, short, blocky guy with a great way with people. All the ladies were always swooning over him, I don’t think he ever so much as thought of taking advantage of that, other than he just enjoyed being.... (Steiger laughs) Yeah, pawed. That’s the truth. He could get anybody to do his work for him. In some ways he seemed lazy, but it was just a game that he played. I’m sure that he felt that it was important, and I would agree, that you get as much participation as possible. So he would always have lots of people doing things to help out, helping out on the crew, and that was a good thing. I did the arr trip with him that first year, and then later on that year he invited me to come over and swamp—again, because I just ran myself ragged from first light to the last light doing whatever I could to serve my gods, my boatmen gods, which was the way I looked at ‘em. I think that was healthy. I went over and did a two-boat trip with he and John Sorweite [phonetic spelling]. But, anyway, that’s who Don Neff was, and Don Neff ran trips for quite a long time after that for Dick McCallum. A pretty interesting character, and left quite a swath behind him. There were lots of people who learned to run the river from Don Neff. That’s not inconsequential, so, he lives on in the Colorado River even if he doesn’t run trips down there anymore.
Bob and Clair Quist are two of three brothers—their other brother is Richard—the Quist brothers. Their father was in partnership with Moki Mac. Their father ran a lot of Boy Scout trips through Glen Canyon with Moki Mac, which was Moki Mac Ellison, I think. So, they were brought into the river business, or the river trip community experience really early on. They had their own little company, which was started by their dad called Moki Mac Expeditions. It was sort of an offshoot of what they were doing with the Boy Scouts. There were, as always, very few professional guides. Clair was an auto mechanic. (Steiger: Clair Quist was.) Yeah, he worked on foreign cars, he worked on British imports, Jaguars, and things like that. He was a great mechanic. Then he’d come down and do this in the summertime. His brother, Bob, was doing some kind of odd jobs. Clair was the first one, I believe, to be really a boatman, and he’s the one that somebody said, “Here Clair, we need this trip done.” And he said, “I can’t do the trip, but here’s my brother Bob’s telephone number, call him.” This kind of deal. They were very different people. Clair had a big grizzly beard, and a really kind of gruff demeanor—he’s a sweetheart despite all his outward projection. He was, again, a big strong guy, rough guy. Bob was more of happy-go-lucky: same kind of build, but clean-shaven and lighter hair, and round face and kind of a happy-go-lucky, easy- goin’ guy. Two very different people.
Who else was it? Who else in that first year? Steve Amos. Steve Amos was in engineering college at University of Utah, Salt Lake. He grew up in Phoenix, and knew some of the people who started arr, and knew Fred and Carol because he’d been on Hatch trips with them, and got along very well. He was a very good boatman, but he was only looking at it as a summer job while he was going to school. Then he was going to graduate and go on and do other things, which is ultimately what he did. Very shortly after that, he just disappeared off the commercial river running scene. I think he came back and did a private trip down there, but I don’t think I have seen him since.
Steiger: Dave Mackay?
Moody: Well, Dave Mackay. If you were to look at the genesis of river running in Grand Canyon, you’d find it’s kind of like a family tree. You’ll find lots of different sprouts coming from each of the branches, each of the nodes. One of the nodes was Jack Currey, and lots of guides worked for Jack Currey, and then subsequently went off and sometimes got their own companies, and Dave Mackay was one of those…. I don’t have any idea how he got started with Currey. But, he ran J-rigs for Currey, and ran lots of them. Somehow, again, he got to where he knew and liked Fred and Carol, and came over and did a trip for them. He had a break in his schedule. One of the commonalities among all those guides that I happened to run with, was they all took great pride in how well they ran the boat. That was very important to ‘em, and they all had great expertise in how they ran. They took that very seriously, and worked very hard at it. So, I got exposed to people… whose big goal was how well you ran the boat.
* * *
Moody: The thing that has been special for me throughout all of my time in commercial river running business or in that community, has been the sort of special groups of people who would happen to collect at one time or another. I’ve gone through three that I can think of. One of them was arr and that group of people. Then later on it was with Expeditions and the group of people there, and then also with Sobek Expeditions. I had three periods where I was working with crew over a period of time that just turned out to be, you know, magic in the interactions of all those. And the first one was arr. A lot of that had to do with Fred and Carol, because they created a very special environment there, very much a family environment. We all ate together at their table. Then, Fred hired a cook and we still ate together. We were still a family. That was a very unique.... We were in a very remote place, we only had a radio-phone that was connected to the Jimmy (gmc) truck horn, and so in the middle of the evening all of a sudden the truck horn would take off, or you’re leaning against the front of the truck while you’re rigging a boat or taking a break; and all of a sudden the horn would go off and scare the daylights out of you. So, we were in a remote place. There was no tv, there was not really any radio reception, and there was no telephones, and so that actually helped to make it a more special experience.
Steiger: Yeah, when that horn would honk you’d have to run out. They were booking trips off of that phone, off of the mobile truck phone.
Moody: That was the company truck phone.
Steiger: That was pretty hilarious.
Moody: So, that made the place special. But, none of those situations that I just talked about there ever lasted forever. We did expect them at the time to probably last forever, but in reality, looking back on it, there’s no expectation that they should have lasted, or could ever have lasted forever. But, each one of ‘em, they went through phases, and people grew and situations changed, and that’s what happened at ARR the first time. It came as quite a shock to me to be part of it. But, you know, I grew and I got interested in other kinds of river running… I got interested in the dories, and I got interested in Martin Litton, and in rowing down the river. That’s just the direction that I needed to go. I was tired of running motorized trips I think.
Steiger: How come?
Moody: Just because I needed to do something different. I think we ran the very best motorized trips there ever have been. I mean, there may be ones that are equal, but I don’t think there’s ever been any that were better than that. So, I think we did a great job. And, I think that the operation was great and the situation was great, but it was just that I wanted to do something different. I wanted to row, and I had looked at it that I was a part of Arizona River Runners, and so I wanted Arizona River Runners to row. It’s true also that I had a lot of say, I was [by this time] middle management is what we were called at the time, Peter and myself. I had stock in the company because we had been given the opportunity to buy stock in the company which was a very nice thing. We didn’t appreciate it—we took advantage of it, but I don’t think we appreciated it until later.
Steiger: How generous it really was.
Moody: How generous it really was. And, what Fred and Carol were trying to do was make us as much, and the company, as much a part of us as possible. That’s very laudable. What happened was, from my point of view, that I wanted us to do rowing trips as well. And, there was not as much money to be made in rowing trips. I don’t think Fred and Carol for a minute ever wanted to make as much money as possible, but they had a great debt, big debt, and they had a lot of stockholders that they felt they needed to answer to, so that they needed to make that money. And it didn’t make any sense to them to upset the cart, and go rowing.
Steiger: Yeah, things were just goin’ good, they’d just built the thing up. It was rollin’ along pretty well.
Moody: So, unfortunately that didn’t really work out very well. We were not able to ever sit down and talk about what it really was. And instead we just kind of grew further and further apart. We became two camps, which should never have happened, but it did. And it kind of tore a lot of things apart. And in the end, at the end of the season in 1974 I had a meeting with Fred and Carol. It had actually gone from the point where we almost lived together, to where we only really spoke when we had meetings, set up meetings, where we would sit down and talk, which is a long ways apart—an indication, looking back on it, of where we both were. And we had a meeting, and during that meeting, as I understood later, they were going to tell me that I wasn’t going to be asked back. But at the meeting I also told them that I wasn’t going to come back.
Steiger: So, it was kind of a mutual thing.
Moody: It was a pretty mutual thing. We didn’t talk about it ahead of time, but it was pretty mutual.
* * *
So, I didn’t come back to Arizona River Runners in 1975. Instead I ran a few trips for Dick McCallum. Don Neff was working for McCallum then, and I’d seen him on the river and talked to him and met Dick McCallum and called him up and started working for him—which was the right thing for me to do.
Steiger: So, were you runnin’ one of those triple-rigs in the beginning?
Moody: Yeah, I ran triple-rigs, exactly, with Dan Dierker on the other oar.
Steiger: Yeah, and this is were they had three Green Rivers— these are eighteen-foot, pretty good rafts—tied together.
Moody: Right, with everything, fourteen people and all the gear for twelve days.
Steiger: Pretty wild way to go down the river.
Moody: We had like, ten-foot oars on each end…. You just grabbed on to ‘em and.... (Steiger: Flailed?) You did your best. Yeah, and I started running with Dan Dierker and Brian Dierker and I rowed the other triple-rig with Dan Dierker.
Steiger: So, it would be Brian and Don on one triple-rig, and you and Dan on the other?
Moody: No, just one triple-rig.
Steiger: One triple-rig was a trip.
Moody: Never ran more than one triple-rig on trips I was on. We would run another boat—usually one of the big snout rigs that Brian would run, one of the youth rigs which were single, aluminum frame, that had four oar stations, a sweep oar, and four passengers—kids. Usually the youth would be on those and there would be a sweep oar on the John Wesley Powell rigs that the boatman would have. They were a very interesting rig. (Steiger: Cool!) Somewhat scary, early on, because you’d have to run House Rock, for instance, on the first day, with a crew that didn’t have a clue as to how serious this really was. (laughs)
Steiger: How badly they really wanted to get those strokes in right.
Moody: Exactly, how really important it was for them to do well.
Steiger: Brian talked about that like he was just pleading with people, you know.
Moody: “This is really important, guys.” And House Rock was a lot worse rapid in those days. The hole was really hard, and it used to be a really devastating hole for those triple-rigs, because you would never miss them. You’d almost always hit that [hole], and the rear boatman would then get “crack-the-whipped,” and you’d lose your rear boatman on a regular basis. So, it was just really a tough thing.
Steiger: What would happen, would it get sucked under?
Moody: No, it would just get snapped like a whip. The rig itself always came through the hole, they were very stable rigs. They were tied underneath so they couldn’t pancake, which is what Georgie’s had done a few times. So, they were really stable. I mean, it would be amazing for anyone to ever flip, and I don’t think they ever did—gcye [never] did. But, they go through like a snake, and so the first boat would go through, and then the middle boat would go through, and then that one would go through, and when it came out it would just whip like that, crack-the-whip. Just like the old outside rigs, where they’d put a buckin strap, they’d hang on.... The outside rigs were the same way: when they’d go through a hole, they get whipped and sent flyin’. In fact, Fred used to put a buckin strap over his legs when he’d go through the rapids to stay on. That was an old cowboy rodeo trick.
Steiger: But then equipment kind of evolved there at Grand Canyon Youth?
Moody: Yeah, well maybe I had some influence on that, or they were just ready to change; but we did change then to snout rigs. So they were two 22-foot snouts with a steel frame between ‘em and a front platform that we would carry six people on. And those were a big improvement, because at least you had both oars in your hand. But they were hardly light.
Steiger: You might not have as much power…
Moody: The snouts probably had as much power, because the triple rigs were so heavy, that even with two people you just only had so much. But, you know, even with the triple rigs you could maneuver, you got really good at it. There was a skill level to it, get good at it and you’d stay in the current when you needed to, and you’d be able to make runs. You had to work really closely with the other guy, as you might imagine. And the other guy basically held your fate in their hands.
Steiger: The one that was the downstream one.
Moody: Well, both. I mean, both. At different times, either one of them, you know. We could go at length over the techniques for the triple-rig of how you need to do it, but if both boatmen didn’t do it right, you know, one or both would suffer. Lava Falls was an especially critical—every rapid had a different way, of course, a different thing that went on with the triple-rigs. Lava was especially difficult because there was no choice. You ran the right side, and there was not a lot any of us could do with the right side in those days—we just ran the right side. The boats were so heavy and low that they didn’t rise up when they hit a wave, they just went right through it. So, the first boatman when you dropped through the slick by the ledge and hit the “V” wave, the front person just shipped his oar and got down as low as they could, because the wall of water that would come across would just sweep across that boat, through the middle boat, to the outside boat, and you’d have to have everybody hanging on really, really tight. And it would fill all the boats to the brim with water. Then the whole boat would turn 180 degrees, so then the back boat would be always the one that took the lower hole.
Steiger: Wow! It would always spin.
Moody: Always spin, 180 degrees. And it almost always would spin another 180 degrees when it went through that lower hole and come back out right again. But the problem was, (Steiger: Then you’d be totally full of water.) they’d be logged with so much water, and the Green Rivers had very baggy bottoms, big bottoms in ‘em—loose bottoms—and we had trouble with losing people out of the boat. We were never gonna flip over, there was never any feeling you were gonna to flip over. So, it was confusing as to why we would have people in the water after the Lava run, until we realized that they let go because they thought the boat was sinking. (Steiger laughs) And, so you’d have to tell them, “It’s not going to sink, even though there’s more water inside than there is outside.”
Steiger: Well, God, you know, if you had swimmers out there, I guess it’d be pretty hard to go get ‘em with your boat full of water. (Moody: Well, you sure didn’t go get ‘em.) They had to swim back to you.
Moody: Yeah, they had to come to you, but you were an easy target. No, then you had to row like the bejeezus to get away from Lower Lava—really, really hard. And bailing like mad.
Steiger: Everybody bailing, yeah. Pretty wild.
Moody: Yeah, it worked. But the snout rigs were a big treat, because then we each had our own boat, which is where we all wanted to be. We all really wanted to each have our own Green Rivers, single boats, because that was the ultimate, was to be able to have four people in your boat, each person to have a boat of realistic size. Slowly, the economics caught up with it.
Steiger: That crew was also pretty hot. That was you, and the Dierker boys, and Mike Yard, (Moody: McCallum.) Mac and then Dugald Bremner....
Moody: Yeah, Dugald Bremner arrived a couple of years later. Dugald was kind of the late seventies or something—1979 or 1980 or something like that. [The crew] was Brian Dierker, and Dan Dierker, you know, both Flagstaff boys, friends of McCallum, students of McCallum. Dick was a counselor at the high school, and an educator, and adopted these two boys, especially Brian.. And Mike Yard, who was a childhood buddy of Brian’s, also a Flagstaff boy, their family has been in Flagstaff for quite some time, and their fathers were both doctors. Brian had worked for McCallum since he was probably in diapers—they’d all gone down the river. Perhaps Mike hadn’t, but Brian and Dan had both gone down on the first youth expedition trip in 1970.
That was one of the trips that we saw—on my very first trip with Neff; the first youth boat and Dick McCallum. And I remember Don Neff got his old friend, Dick McCallum, to crawl underneath our arr motor rig and patch a hole that Don had put in it in Grapevine. It just gives you an idea of the strength of Don Neff that he was able to convince his buddy to crawl in the wet sand underneath the motor rig at Phantom and patch the hole for Don so he didn’t have to do it. (Steiger laughs) And Dick was perfectly happy to. That was the beauty of Don Neff, he could get you to do all kinds of stuff for him, but you didn’t resent it. We were just happy as the dickens to do it for him.
Steiger: Oh my gosh.
Moody: I had a funny story with Don. These guys were gods to me—I mean, I looked up to them and they could do no wrong. I just wanted to do anything I could for them, anything. And Don liked to drink. A lot of people like to drink on the river today—but then, they really did, and there wasn’t such a prohibition for it, and Don used to like to drink on occasion. The last night of probably the first trip I ever did with him, which would have been my second trip ever, or something—first or second trip—we were at Granite Park underneath the big tree, the big willow tree at Granite Park. Everybody had gone to bed and our campfire was right there by the boats, and the water is high and there is only one boat, one big motor rig parked against that tree. And the water had come up, it comes up in the evening there after you’ve parked, and so it’s sloshing up, high water. And Don had gone to sleep—or passed out— by the fire. Everybody else had gone to bed. So, it was just me and this one other guy, I can’t even place his face, but he was on the trip too, a passenger. Don always slept on the boat—in fact, all these boatmen always slept on the boat. You just always slept on the boat. I still like to sleep on the boat. I mean, it’s just ingrained. In the motor rigs you always slept on the boat. Don was just laying there in his shorts on the beach, and I thought what I should do for him, for my hero, is like get him up on the boat, put him to bed. But he weighed about 160 pounds, he was just solid. He was like five-foot four and 160 pounds, he was just square, and he was limp. And, we grabbed him and lifted him up—two of us, one on his arms and one on his legs—and we tried to swing him up on this snout rig, which is three-and-a-half or four feet above where we’re standing. (Steiger laughs) And we didn’t quite make it. (Steiger: Oh no!) And, we hit the boat, and the boat went out about three or four feet and we couldn’t hold him anymore (laughter) and we dropped him into the water. The water is about four feet deep right there, so he woke up from being passed out, in the ice-cold water over his head. And of course, as soon as we let him go, he dropped in the water and the boat hit the end of its line and came back over the top of him. So, he immediately, like the athlete he was, he just immediately [went] “boing!” You know, every muscle was tense and he just tried to come right out of the water, but there was boat right above him and he just ran right smack into the boat and went back down again.
I was appalled. I had done the worst possible thing! I might as well have thrown myself in the river, because I had done this to the person that I cared the most [for], and respected in the whole world. Anyway, he came up sputtering and cussing a little bit, and just wondering what in the world were we trying to do, et cetera, and crawled off into his sleeping bag. And the good news is, the next morning he didn’t seem to—oh, I’m sure he remembered it, but he didn’t seem to have any hard feelings, (Steiger: Oh my God.) for what we tried to do. There was a couple of times—once when I missed the camp at Olo, and the second time when I threw Don Neff in the river—two times when I could have changed my entire river future, if that had gone bad. Two “faux pas” that I was lucky to get away with. I tried to remember those, so that when other people did stupid things around me, I was able to forgive them as people had forgiven me.
* * *
Eliminate the numerous, nonessential roads that Moody: I ran Tatshenshini River trips for Sobek Expeditions beginning in 1977, the first year there. I went to Ethiopia in 1976, and then went to Alaska and made Alaska trips up through—1983 was the first year that I fished, and I still ran a Tatshenshini trip. But, then that was a different reason to go to Alaska. So I only ran spring and fall trips for McCallum. I ran ‘em every spring and every fall, all those trips, which worked out great for me. Then in 1980 I decided to stay down here, I didn’t go to Alaska, and we did thirteen trips that year. That was a really big year, great year. Big year, from starting in March and going through the end of October, early November.
Steiger: That was kind of a big water year too, huh? Was that a high water year?
Moody: It was the year the dam filled, 1980. (Steiger: That was the first fill.) In late June, early July, it went to 45,000 cfs, which was big for us, we’d never seen that. Water went to the back of Redwall Cavern—not very deep, but it went back there.
Steiger: Was it 1980 or 1981? When was it that they began to rewind the turbines in the dam? That was somewhere right around there. Maybe they’d already done it by then.
Moody: No. No, it was probably 1981. They were planning to do it.

Steiger: And that was when there was all this talk about, “Okay, now we’re really gonna have peaking power,” and all that.
Moody: Yeah, well you know, this is all evolution, and one of the most powerful forces is what lives in people’s minds. We’d sit down there through all the seventies, and we’d look at Glen Canyon dam, and we read Aldo Leopold and we read Ed Abbey and we read… (Steiger: Rod Nash?) Rod Nash, yeah. We believed that the Colorado River should run free. We read David Brower, we knew about the fights. We’d stop at Marble Canyon dam site and talk about the importance of the fights there. But, you know what? At least for myself, I had the feeling that Glen Canyon Dam was a lost cause. It was the way it was. In general we saw current operations was the way it was always going to operate, because we had lost that battle—or Brower had or whoever. No, we had lost that battle. That was just the way it was. And so we could rant and rave about it, and we could imagine in the evenings over beers what it would be like for the dam to go and for the wave to come down and how high would it be? And would you want to hide on your boat?, and how big of a boat you’d want, and all those sorts of things, which we did. But, we never thought, really, that it would happen. And then when the reservoir filled and the dam spilled that first time the Bureau decided that it was time to overhaul the turbines, and while they were at it they would just rewind ‘em a bit more and get a little more power out of ‘em—something kind of broke the enchanted spell. Something about, if you can make ‘em more so this way, then why can’t you make it less so this way? That maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. And then the Bureau of Reclamation had some public meetings, very cursory public meetings, because (Steiger: They were required to.) the National Environmental Policy Act was in place in 1969, so they did have to. But they didn’t expect it to be anything. I remember one of them was in Flagstaff High School, and I still remember sitting through that and listening to—they had two microphones for public comments, and the place was packed. There were four or five Bureau of Reclamation people sitting down on the stage, and people went up, one after another, to go to the microphones to ask pointed questions about what was going on, and what was this, and why was that. The Reclamation people were doing the “slow down” tactic, stalling tactic. They’d slowly sit down, and then somebody would ask a follow-up question and then they’d say, “Oh, can you take that, Bill?” and Bill would slowly stand up from his seat and walk over to the microphone and say a little somethin’ and then turn and slowly walk back to his seat. The person would go, “Well, what do you mean? What about this?” And they’d slowly stand back up and walk back up. It was interesting. They were not pleased to be there. It took hours…. But I think that was the beginning of, sort of the realization by the public—by the river running public in particular—that things didn’t have to be that way.
Steiger: So, they had these little hearings and they basically went for the ultimate stall, which was they said, “Well, we’ll study all these things.”
Moody: “We’ll study them.” Exactly.
Steiger: “And we’ll have Glen Canyon Environmental Studies....”
Moody: Right, very carefully named Glen Canyon, not Grand Canyon, so it would have a lot less impact. Yup, very little funding, and they’re gonna drop a young biologist to run the program, and it’s certain to fail. No other chance. That’s the genesis of gces-1.
Steiger: And the plan was, “We’ll just send this kid, Dave Wegner, out there.”
Moody: Right, and “let him flail for a year, and wrap it up.” gces-1 was tasked with studying the way Glen Canyon Dam was then being operated and was specifically restricted from making recommendations on other operations. Designed to accomplish nothing.
Steiger: “And when nobody’s looking we’ll fade away into the night.”
Moody: “It’ll die out, it’ll die out.” But of course it didn’t actually work out that way.
Steiger: Well, so what did happen? And what was your part in that, I mean, how did that go? How did Humphrey Summit...? Didn’t you guys get the contract?
Moody: Well, I think that what happened is that it succeeded in spite of itself. It succeeded for a number of reasons. It succeeded, one, because the public wasn’t really ready to let it die, the public collectively. Individuals weren’t really ready for it to die. They weren’t just going to let it go away. So that gave some foundation for others to be more actively involved in making it a success. Dave Wegner came on and started doing the best he could. And unfortunately for the Bureau of Reclamation, it turned out that he was extremely hard-headed and tenacious, and actually kind of thrived on a lack of support; you know, fighting the good fight and the uphill battles.
There were scientific river trips planned and there was to be a contract to do the river logistics. They had planned very limited science. Ten trips over three years.
Steiger: That was it. That was gces-1.
Moody: There was a bid that went out for a contract to run river logistics for the Arizona Department of Game and Fish that was going to do the fishery studies, because they were going to do a little bit of sand studies and a little bit of fishery studies, and that would be good. And it was ten trips over three years. Steve Carothers saw that opportunity, and urged Brian Dierker and Mike Yard and myself to bid on it. There were several outfitters who also bid on it, including Fred Burke and Arizona River Runners, who had been doing some trips, science trips, and sort of saw how that worked into that company. They saw it before most everybody else did, which is typical of Fred. There was another private entity, but otherwise it was outfitters. And lo and behold, Humphrey Summit Associates, which was what our little company ended up being called, won the contract. It was immediately challenged by Arizona River Runners, on the basis that the commercial outfitters had the right to run commercial trips down there, and nobody else had the right to bid on those except those concessionaires. And that didn’t prevail. So, it turned out in the end to be about sixty-five trips over the next three years, not ten trips…. It was a lot of trips.
I think that we can get into Humphrey Summit and what all that entails, but as a prelude to it, I think that that involvement was crucial, because the guides that worked on those trips cared very much about the resource and helped to bridge, sort of, any barriers between scientists and the resource….
The other thing I think is really critical was the fact that this was a little paria, this little research project was a paria. Everyone knew what the Bureau of Reclamation had in mind. It was no secret. (Steiger: It was gonna be a rubber stamp deal.) Well, they had a specific charge not to make any recommendations for changes in operations. “You can learn anything you want, but you will not come up with any recommendations for any operational changes.” They pretty much drew the line, you know. “You can muck around all you want, but just don’t mess with the status quo.” So, in the end, if you look at gces-1, they don’t actually recommend changes. It gets a lot stronger of course. One outcome of the fact of the general knowledge of what this project was supposed to be, is that no big-name scientist would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Nobody would touch it. They’re not going to be associated with a failure. It wasn’t going to go anywhere. So, as a result of that, there was an opening for a lot of other scientists. You know, younger, hungrier scientists—the Bryan Browns, the Susan Andersons, Jack Schmidts—who didn’t have long credentials, but were good thinking people, who were more open perhaps, to falling in love with the resource—dedicated to the resource, [rather] than sort of a career track or the scientific community. And, I think the outcome of that is that we got a lot better science, with less money and politics. We got very good science—let’s not hammer away at other scientists, but I’d say we got very good, dedicated scientific work in gces-1.
Steiger: What was your first impression of Wegner? Did you have any expectations about him?
Moody: He was a scared scattered rabbit. He had no office or anything. The guy was just driving around in his car. I think we tried to protect him, and in turn, he, at other times protected us. No, he was a skinny little guy moving ninety miles an hour—it’s not that much different than he is today. (chuckles) You know, he really had to hit the ground running, and he didn’t really know what to expect— none of us did—the way the political environment was swirling around. Or where this thing should go, or how he was supposed to make it go. I guess “scattered” is what I’d say, but I don’t mean that with any disrespect whatsoever. I think that’s what he needed to be at that particular moment, to figure it out. I think there were just decisions made on a day-to-day basis for quite a long time.
We did end up doing ten trips that one summer. We had six trips in a two-month period. That fall, we had some serious cash flow problems for Humphrey Summit, because we got paid thirty days after the trip was over, and since we had six trips in a two-month period we had to front six trips’ worth of guides’ pay, food, the whole nine yards. That came as quite a bit of a surprise to the little guides that had had a hard time keeping their checkbooks balanced up until that point. To guides that were used to living off their tips. (Steiger: All of a sudden here was....) Yeah, we went to the bank and got a loan for $100,000.00. Well, that was an experience. And you know, to see it coming, it was a fast time for us, like it was for everybody. But, Wegner just kept piling on the trips—which was great!
Steiger: So, how did Wegner evolve? Or how did the situation evolve from your perspective?
Moody: Well, it was always changing. Sometimes he’d be available and sometimes untrackable…It just was moving so rapidly, and Wegner, you know, got his feet more on the ground, but you know, it was constantly shifting ground…I think part of what happened during that, Wegner learned a lot and grew a lot and became a lot more self-assured and powerful, an influential person. Steve Carothers, who was always on top of it, continued to grow. I think that we did as well. And that sort of showed in what’s gone on since then, in everybody’s lives, including your own. It came at an opportune time maybe, for people to grow. There were a lot of people involved who had been in the river business, say, for fifteen years. And so they were actually very ready for some river-associated, but different growth experience besides just running ten trips, you know? I think, I don’t know, that would be my observation.
Steiger: I wonder, what were the key questions that surfaced?
Moody: Scientific questions?
Steiger: Yeah, and some of the key pieces of information, or is it germane to get into them?
Moody: Well, that’s a tough one, and maybe Wegner could say that. But, you know what? There was never enough time for it to be strategic. First of all, it was expanding what resources to look at—from the fish, which was just tributary sampling, no main stem sampling. It was with a backpack shocker in the tribs [i.e., tributaries]. I don’t even think they even knew why they were gonna sample it. Two, the sediment. I’m not sure if they had a very clear idea, other than understanding how the system works, kind of thing, you know? It ended up birds were a big aspect, and the vegetation turned out [to be a big aspect], but they weren’t at the beginning. But, another thing happened, Mother Nature picked a very interesting time to get rambunctious. (Steiger: To rear her magnificent head.) When the floods hit in 1983, the charge of Glen Canyon Environmental Studies One was to examine fluctuating flows, the impacts of fluctuating flow operations on the downstream environment. “But don’t make recommendations for changes.” And so, it was a problem, because through much of 1983-1987 there were no fluctuating flows. See, 1984 was the first year of science. (Steiger: Yeah.) There were no fluctuating flows. And of course there were a lot of people’s logistics and plans invested in going down there and studying it.
I think there were two things that really made gces-1 work: One, is it really cemented in people’s minds that Glen Canyon Dam really didn’t control the Colorado River in the manner that we thought it did. The Colorado River still had quite a bit to say about it, so maybe we did too. And, the second one was, it really blew apart the tidy little, “We’re gonna look at this and this and this, and nothing else,” game plan that had been developed. Because the gauging stations and cables were down there the usgs took [fluctuating flow] sediment measurements at 45,000 cfs, constant. They had to take measurements of something.... The water came up and trips were at Lee’s Ferry, and they said, “Do we go? Or don’t we go?” It was like, “Gotta go! We’re planned to go.” It’s not fluctuating flows. So, I think it really pried open the nice little box that had been planned for it. Maybe it would have been pried open anyway—I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it had a big, dramatic impact on the whole scheme of things right there.
Steiger: I remember that subsequent to 1983, somewhere in there we became really alarmed about just the beach erosion. And in a selfish way, you might say, on the commercial side, I remember people kind of started squawkin’ about, “Well, these beaches are eroding really rapidly now.” I mean, first it was this hypothetical thing that we would tell people, “Someday the beaches will be gone.” And then it was like, “Holy moly! we could conceivably flush all the sand out of here! within our lifetimes, within the course of our careers.” I remember that got the guiding sector kind of galvanized.
Moody: And then as the scientists started uncovering things—once they opened up Pandora’s box and they started bringing it out, then people made, you know, hypotheses, and ideas were forwarded for discussion and what not, which had never been brought out before. And they had fertile ground, they landed in fertile ground—people were ready to try to understand that better and to have a basic change in the paradigm for the canyon.
Steiger: And what were some of those ideas, or what were the key ones?
Moody: Well, one, the sand. You eventually will erode all the sand away from the canyon.
Steiger: If there’s “X” amount of sediment going out every year and none coming in.
Moody: Right! Just stop and think, and you go, “You’re gonna lose everything there is.” It turns out today we understand a little bit better, and that may not be the case. But, that was what we knew, and the way we understood it then, and it was an alarm. We also began to understand the changes that had taken place since then. That helped to galvanize people, you had something else to choose from. You had another view, another landscape from which to make a choice.… Then that just was, again, fertile ground for discussion or concern. As I remember, the real political uproar didn’t really happen until the end of gces-1. That ended in 1986. It ended, and it had a report in 1987.
Steiger: So, what happened there? Somewhere in there things got heated up, and what were the things?
Moody: Well, partly it came up with some very concrete conclusions.
Steiger: It said, “Well, actually fluctuating flows....”
Moody: Are bad. And high, uncontrolled, clearwater releases are bad, and that the dam does have impacts on the downstream. Maybe there was a little more to it, but those were the essential ones, I think. And then it was dropped, nothing happened. The Bureau of Reclamation didn’t take action on it, Congress didn’t take action on it, Department of Interior didn’t take action on it, nobody took action on it. The only thing that was going to drive it on was politics, was public outcry, and so people took gces-1 and started shaping a political advocacy campaign out of it.
Steiger: How did that transpire? Were you on that trip with Jack Schmidt? (Moody: Yeah.) The Middlebury College kids? (Moody: Uh-huh.) Dan said that Jack Schmidt had a profound influence on everybody’s thought process. That the germ of the Grand Canyon Protection Act came from something that he said on this trip that didn’t have anything to do with science. Do you recall anything like that?
Moody: Well, yeah, I have a copy of what we called the “Beach Bill.” We used to sit around at night, and Jack and I used to talk about these things, we became good friends and we used to talk about the politics of it all the time. That was actually the beginning of probably 1988 or so, and this was the time of trying to figure out, well, we couldn’t seem to get anybody to take any action on what gces-1’s recommendations were or conclusions were. And so, we bandied around a Beach Bill. We thought we could just introduce a bill that would just simply say stop losing sand.... There was just so much waffling everywhere, that nobody could agree on—of course that was part of the strategy—agree on what should be done, or what should we do. The idea was we would just introduce a bill that would be very straightforward and say there will be a certain amount of sand that will always be there. It was over a ten-year running average.
Steiger: Now, you guys believed that there were operational options that were doable that could bring that about?
Moody: Well, this was a little bit like the Clean Air Act, see? You set standards. We didn’t care how they got met, it really wasn’t up to us. I think we did have some wording there about using natural processes, so that we didn’t have sand pumping— you know, just pump sand on these big barges out of the bottom of the river up onto beaches. (Steiger: Oh, and riprap ‘em and like that.) Yeah. So, I think that we tried to have something there, but it just simply said that this average volume in area of sand will remain constant by reach-to-reach on a ten-year rolling average. And it was up to the Bureau of Reclamation and others to make sure it happened. I’m sure we had ideas for how that would happen. But it didn’t matter, you do whatever you needed to do in order to meet the standards. You could look at floods, could look at sedimentation, look at changes in the dam operations—whatever it took. That was the idea.
Steiger: So, then what did happen?
Moody: Well, our bill hardly made it out of the Canyon. I don’t see any way it was the genesis for the Grand Canyon Protection Act but it made us feel good. I was in Washington when the Grand Canyon Protection Act was released by Congressman George Miller in its first draft form. I was there to testify. We went there to testify before the House Interior Committee on National Parks.
Steiger: Now, things really snowballed there, didn’t they? There was gces, and then all of a sudden that was completed, (Moody: Uh-huh.) and then nothing much happened.
Moody: No, there was like three years before gces-2 started.
* * *
I’m not sure exactly how gces-2 started in its first little formative state. But my guess is it was a consequence of the political pressure that was being applied. The political pressure was pretty high, and the Grand Canyon Protection Act was introduced by George Miller at the same time we were back testifying before the Senate, Mo Udall’s Interior Committee. There was George Miller and Bruce Vento, both Democrats. The Democrats obviously controlled the House of Representatives in those days, and it was their committee. They had subcommittees on National Parks; Vento was the chairman, and Miller was the chairman of the one on water, I guess it was. Water resources. So the subcommittees of the Interior, committees of the House of Representatives. But, while we were back there, Dan Beard, who worked for George Miller, largely wrote the Grand Canyon Protection Act. He was later to become the Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, which I think is pretty ironic, that in that short a period of time—he went from writing legislation to modify traditional reclamation operations to Reclamation Commissioner .
Steiger: Who appointed him?
Moody: Babbitt—Clinton.
Steiger: So, he became commissioner in 1995?
Moody: In 1995. So, in five years or so, you go from writing a bill ... (Steiger: That flies in the face of everything the Bureau of Reclamation stands for.)
Moody: ... to being the Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. That is some indication of how fast the paradigm on Reclamation, and in particular Glen Canyon Dam, shifted.
Steiger: It’ll be pretty interesting to see if it swings back now with the Clinton administration in so much trouble.
Moody: We’ll see. I don’t think so, myself.
Steiger: I remember where Grand Canyon River Guides was concerned.... there was some kind of spring meeting where Babbitt came and really did light a fire under everybody. He came and spoke here in Flagstaff. (Moody: First gts.) Were you there? Do you remember him talkin’? I missed it.
Moody: Yeah. Bruce Babbitt attended the first gts sponsored by gcrg. It was in Flagstaff and he spoke. I think his basic message was you all have a lot of experience in the Canyon, you have a voice, you can make a difference. And then the gcrg directors had a meeting with him, too.
Steiger: What was that like? Did he say good stuff? How was the meeting?
Moody: Well, he did. He was very supportive.
Steiger: He was about to run for president, wasn’t he?
Moody: Right. He was just very supportive, for doing the right thing and getting involved and having a voice and making yourself heard. That’s about as much concrete stuff as I can remember. But I remember that he was just very pro on it. Very supportive of the whole thing.
Steiger: Yeah, and then the guides kind of raced out there and started generating all this mail, kind of right away. (Moody: Yeah.) That’s what I recall.
Moody: Before that time there was some concern. Before the Grand Canyon Protection Act gave us all something to sort of galvanize around and put pressure on. (Steiger: Something safe!) And that did a lot. But before that time, there were lots of potential deals to be cut in order to, you know, help take the political pressure off incorporating changes into Glen Canyon Dam. One of them was to just raise the minimum flows released from the dam from 1,000 cfs to 5,000 or 8,000 cfs. This is one you were aware of.
Steiger: Yeah, all they wanted to do is raise the low. (Moody: Raise the low.) (Steiger laughs) And we were like, “Bullshit!”
Moody: Some of our friends were involved in that, or other organizations. And I think they meant well, they just didn’t have really a clue of what the full range was, and they were trying to work the political things behind the scenes. But, I think that was an important thing for Grand Canyon River Guides to come in at that time. And, I think Kenton was really a main voice at that time; that it’s not just a matter here of raising the minimums up ‘til we can get our boats through.
…And, then the Grand Canyon Protection Act was introduced. We tried to pass it in 1988 and 1989 and 1990. It had to slowly build its way up. It was the impetus for gces-2.
…gces-2 I think was in place, and then the Environmental Impact Statement was put in motion, and then gces-2 became the instrument to do science for that eis.
* * *
Moody: I actually did make a conscious decision, at a point, after I had been living a pretty free-form life on the Colorado River; and then I’d worked overseas for Sobek and in Alaska; and I didn’t really feel like I had much roots. I’d taken a lot from things I’d done, and I hadn’t really taken time to give much back. And so, one of the conscious decisions I made was to dedicate some time to giving something back to the Grand Canyon, in particular. And that was at the right time for me to do something, so that’s part of at least my frame of mind at the time. I probably was more tenacious at that moment on Grand Canyon issues than I would have been at some other time, or maybe than other people were at the same time, I don’t know. It was really a synergy of lots of things happening at the same time. You know, I was fortunate to be a part of it. I mean, I’m glad you were there. Dan Dierker, Brad Dimock, Kenton Grua. It was the Bob Melvilles and Kenton Gruas on the river that were constantly generating letters and keeping that fire alive. So, everybody had a little part to play.
Steiger: Well, and the people we took down really responded with a bang. (Moody: They did!) I mean, I think there was a point where I had heard that we generated more mail on a single issue than Congress had ever gotten. I don’t know who said that (Moody: It might have been!), but I find that hard to believe actually… But we did generate a lot of mail. It actually worked. The law, after three tries, it finally got passed. Was it right on the eve of the election?
Moody: It was on the eve of the 1992 election, I remember it was Halloween night. We were out here having our fall guides meeting and party, our Halloween party for the fall gcrg meeting in Flagstaff…. Snowy, cold night—kind of snowy. Ed Norton [Grand Canyon Trust] called us out there and told us, which was really nice of him. Yeah, it got passed. We put a lot of pressure on—it would have been signed that night—it passed earlier, but there was a question about whether Bush would veto it or not. He didn’t do it, he signed it.
* * *
Steiger: I wonder if you had to sum it up, if it would even be possible? I mean, what were the most important things you learned out of that, you know? Did you learn lessons that could be applied elsewhere for the next eis in the next place?
Moody: Well, here. There are a couple of things that I learned or were reinforced really strong. The first one, and the most important to me is, there’s nothing that you can’t do. That you can make your voice heard. I mean, we went from just a bunch of rag-tag boatmen—I mean, I think we should have thought more highly of ourselves, but that’s really what we thought we were, and that’s really where we were in terms of status, if you just step back and look at us in 1980. We were not a viable political force. We turned out bein’ that way. So, in this democracy, for all of its weird faults, there is always that potential for doing the right thing, and being heard, and making a difference. A small, focused group of people who have a logical, coherent, and clear viewpoint can make a tremendous difference. That’s in sort of the big picture. And in the smaller picture is that dams and things like that are not a permanent part of our landscape. We’ve gone a long ways, tremendous distance in the last fifteen years at Glen Canyon and in western water reclamation as a whole. Tremendous change in paradigm, shift of paradigm…. We went from business as usual: maximizing power generation and water storage, to encompassing environmental, social, cultural, aesthetic values. And not only in just name, but in reality. From never spilling water out of a dam, to spilling water simply for the downstream resources. Wasting good water. That’s going to have ramifications. It, in itself, has ramifications because it happened. Also, because there are individuals all over this country and in other countries who now look at floods, artificial floods, as a potential means in management. People from Brazil were just up here. People from China have been over here. (Steiger: Looking at this.) Yeah, as well as other dams and facilities in the United States. I mean, spills is just one factor of it, okay? But, they’re now looked on as a viable alternative. They were not a viable alternative.
Steiger: Now, isn’t it true in China that they have dams that have been around for a lot longer than any that we have here in this country, and that they deal with the sediment issue better? Somebody was telling me that they have this technology where they have these big gates on the bottoms of these dams so they can move the sediment through. Do you know anything about that?
Moody: Well, I don’t know precisely. But, I know that there are other methods. But, they’re not for dams like this. When Hoover Dam was built, it was the biggest thing ever built. Glen Canyon was near the biggest thing ever built. The dams you’re talking about that open the gates at the bottom do not store 25 million acre-feet of water. Well, for one thing, the wedge of sediments is a hundred miles upstream. There is no sediment at the base of the dam. It’s a hundred miles upstream, so it wouldn’t do you any good anyway. You’d have to drain the whole damn lake. But there are other ways it could be. They have siphon systems in Northern Italy, in small, high-sediment streams, small dams where they siphon the sediment that’s against the dam over the top, periodically. So, there are other ways, but not for dams this size. We didn’t know how disruptive dams of this size are to the whole river system and to themselves until we built them. We are only beginning to realize it now. I wouldn’t want anyone to get me wrong, in that. We’ve come a tremendously long ways in adaptive management, it’s a good way to go right now, but it’s not the end—it’s not the final solution to conservation and restoration of the Colorado River. The ultimate solution has to be to remove the dams, to find a replacement for the positive benefits of the dams for society, and remove them so that we can have the other benefits that they don’t allow.
Steiger: Now, why is it that you have to have that removal?
Moody: Because that is not a restored river ecosystem with those dams in there. The river is cold and clear, you can’t have the migration of the native fishes. The native fishes are dying out. The hydrology is not the same. The temperature is not the same. The fauna is not the same. The flora is not the same. Nothing is the same. It’s an artificial system. So if you want to restore it to the natural processes—it doesn’t have to look exactly the same as it did in 1890—but to restore those natural processes, you can’t do it with the dams. Maybe you can do it with low dams, I don’t know. You can’t do it with high dams, you can’t do it with high dams.
Steiger: Low dams, just because the water would be warmer?
Moody: It’s less of an impact, right. I mean, you could do things like you’re talking about. Flush sediment through. You could drain it without having such a big hole in the ground. Also, look at the canyons that are lost. The lower part of Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon, you can’t inundate the river and call it restored either. If you care about the restoration of the natural system, whatever that means, however you want to define it, there is no way that Glen Canyon Dam can fit into that definition. You’re kiddin’ yourself. Or you can talk about a naturalized system, which has been presented by Carothers and Brown, but I don’t buy it myself. You know, it doesn’t work for me. That’s not a value for me.
Steiger: That was in the book that those guys wrote?
Moody: Yeah, the Grand Canyon is now a naturalized system. And, so you can manage it for it’s naturalized state—and you could. And in some ways that’s what we are doing right this second, but is that our end goal? No, not for me it isn’t. Not for environmental conservation it isn’t. For some people, it can be. That’s where I came from. But I think that part of what’s happened at Glen Canyon is it has changed people’s thinking in a fairly fundamental way. We no longer look at dams and structures like Glen Canyon as permanent features of the landscape. That is immensely powerful, and that’s why Glen Canyon Institute exists, is because of that change in paradigm. We just don’t think it is. People think you’re crazy if you say you’re gonna take out Glen Canyon [Dam], but they used to think you were even crazier when you said that, and one of these days they’re not gonna think you’re crazy, they’re gonna think you’re the sanest person around; and that’s when a change will take place.
…All high dams are doomed from the start. They collect sediments until they’re of no use. In many cases the sediments are toxic and become an expensive problem themselves. We can debate whether the life of Powell is 75 years or 700 years but the fact is every day the benefits of the reservoir decrease a little and the eventual costs increase a little. There will come a time when it simply makes more sense to decommission than operate.
We’ll find a better way to do it. The Southwest is not going to dry up, it’s simply gonna figure a better way to do it. And anyone who doesn’t think there’s a better way to produce power and manage water than the way we’re doin’ it now, is missing the boat. We’ve always found a better way to do it. Believe me, there are better ways than high dams, I’m sure there are! I don’t know exactly what they are, that’s to be figured out.
Steiger: I’m just wondering why the distinction, why high dams, as opposed, you know....
Moody: Well, small dams, they have less of an impact to a system. All I’m saying is there may be a way that we can find out to live with low dams, but I’m pretty convinced that we can’t find a way to live with high dams. That’s all. I leave the door open for low dams. I’m an engineer, I’m not really one that says, “Everybody has to leave the western United States for us to get this together.” I don’t think that’s realistic, and besides I’m gonna stay here. (laughter) Me and you. (Steiger: Yeah.) I guess I’m leaving the door open that if we can find ways for low dams, we’re gonna find alternatives to water storage, usage, and power. Maybe they’ll involve low dams, maybe they’ll involve no dams, and the river can just run free. That would be great! But maybe not. Probably it’ll be some mixture of the two. So I’m not ruling out low dams. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying low dams are good, or they’re all right. They are less damaging. They are less damaging.
Steiger: I wonder if we do nothing, if we just keep running the dam like we’re running—so the big problems are just that it eventually—the biggest one is that the lake silts up finally. Is that what you think it is?
Moody: Well, the question being, “What if we don’t do anything?” I think I have to rephrase the question, because I don’t think that’s viable as it is. We will continue to make changes to the operations of Glen Canyon Dam, because our society values are changing. You know, you’ve got to look at trends out there, and we do. But we have the tendency—because trends are unknowns—we have the tendency to believe those trends that we like, and not believe those trends we don’t like. For instance, we like to believe the trend for the explosion of growth in population in Southern Nevada that is now at a million-and-a-half people is going to keep on going, until it’s eventually, whatever, 30 million people. Well, it may not happen. There are many factors that will play into that. But whether it does or not, the trend in this society is toward greater appreciation and higher values over our lost riparian resources, okay? Our rivers and streams and all of our environmental resources. And as population increases and wild places shrink, I think that it’s reasonable to expect that those are going to become greater concerns, not lesser concerns. So, there are changes in values in society, and that’s what we’re seeing here. And I think there’ll be increasing pressure. If something’s not done at Glen Canyon, there’ll be just increasing pressure to make changes which will lower the benefits of water and power that the dam was first predicated on, and we will have a realization of increasing costs to other values that weren’t factored into the equation of Glen Canyon Dam. And then the [specific?] question. So that’s how I’d rephrase the question. I don’t think we have a chance of doing nothing. It isn’t going to stand still. The question is, “How will it change?” Or “What will individual components look like?” If the question was, “Well, what about Page? How do we convince Page that Lake Powell is no longer viable?” You can’t now, but the picture will certainly change. Recreation is a big component to these lakes now, and it wasn’t a component 20 years ago, although that was part of their selling pitch for the dam. I don’t think anyone really believed that it would be as big as it is now, or foresaw that. So, it is big. It’s likely to get bigger here in the short term. I suggest that there will be changes, very reasonable changes in society that would have profound impacts on something like recreation at Lake Powell, and one of them would be a significant escalation, a tripling of the price of gas, or quadrupling the price of gas—say 4.00 a gallon. Not an increase out of reason, but simply up to where it is [in] the rest of the world, its real cost. We’re not insulated from that, because we import 80 percent of our gas, so we’re not insulated from prices of gas. Well, if the price of gas is that much more, there’s going to be a lot less long traveling, high petroleum use in recreation. And, a lot of people in Page will start putting their money somewhere else, because that’s the wise thing to do. It’ll make the newspaper stories and all, but it won’t be a conspiracy. It will just be a hard fact of life, and people will make adjustments.
Steiger: Another thing you questioned was the ability of ‘em to keep that lake full.
Moody: Well, the other side of the coin is, “What’s the value of the product they have to sell?” And, this is the golden age of houseboats. They have a brimming full blue lake against a slick rock background. One of the interesting things I remember of the Glen Canyon project was a study presented by a renowned hydrologist on the future of Lake Powell. He simply said that it was more likely that the reservoir will go dry than have another 1983 spill. If we go to a drought period, like others we’ve had this century, if the Upper Basin were to actually utilize the water that it has a legal right to, you’re going to find Lake Powell dry more often than you’re going to find it spilling. And a Lake Powell that has a smelly 300-foot bathtub ring, and you’ve gotta drive a mile from Wahweap Lodge to get to the water, is not going to be nearly the recreational extravaganza that it is right this second. It’s so easy for us to look at what we see now, and just project it ahead as if the world doesn’t ever change. But it will change up there just as what we saw at Glen Canyon Dam and its operations have changed. It will change. So I guess what I see for Page is over time—and it shouldn’t happen in a five-year period, or there’s gonna be a lot of people hurt really badly—but over some period of time, the value of that product there is going to decrease and the cost of utilizing that product is going increase. And the combination of those two things is gonna be just like everywhere else in this country where things have changed, you know. Cincinnati’s not what it once was, railroads are not what they once were. Things are going to change. People will adapt to it, and the world will be very different thirty years from now than it is today. (laughs) Amen!
Steiger: Boy, you can’t even imagine, can you?
Moody: What was it like thirty years ago? I mean, it was 1968, okay? We were just itching to get on this bandwagon.
Steiger: Yeah, you were just fixin’ to go down the river.
Moody: And the whole world will look a lot different from 1968.
Steiger: I’d like to think that we could turn the corner away from this ... direction we’ve been going in, just in terms of development and growth, et cetera. But, I don’t know, it’s interesting in the river community, you know, geez the outfitters are beside themselves because in Grand Canyon River Guides there was a letter written recently that had the word “wilderness” in it. (Moody: Yeah.) People are just so threatened by that. (Moody: Yeah.) And a lot of guides too—I’d say the sentiment among the ranks of working guides seems to be—seems to be—kind of four-square against wilderness legislation, which is ironic.
Moody: The Wilderness Act has come to become a symbol in a polarized viewpoint that is really hard to reconcile. But, I don’t think that it’s the same thing. I would think of that as a signal of the lessening of a commitment toward environmental protection. I think it has certain connotations to people on both sides that creates very strong emotions, beyond what the reality of it is. As far as environmental, I am very involved now in stream restoration, in looking at ways to restore streams and riparian areas, from an engineering/techno standpoint. And I think there is more potential there, and there will be more potential over the next thirty years for people putting resources and time and commitment into that, than we’ve ever seen. And it will be because they care about it, because they want to do it. Not because they have to because the epa makes ‘em, but because they want to. But we’ll have to find ways that isn’t one side wins and one side loses. It’s kind of incumbent upon us to find this solution. The solution has to not have bloody losers. That’s part of the wilderness problem, is that each side thinks of themselves as bloodied victims on one side of that battle. As long as that exists, that’s very intractable. (Steiger: Yeah.) I think there is tremendous potential, and we’ll find better ways to do things. I don’t mean to be too optimistic, it’s not without its hard times.
Steiger: Well, it will be interesting, this whole turn of the millennium, to see if we can squeak through there.
Moody: I think we’ll learn to do things better. And part of doing better is not just making more money, it is doing it better. It’s not pure yet, and maybe it never will be, I don’t know. But it’s better. As long as it keeps getting better....
Steiger: Okay.
Moody: Rah! rah! (Steiger laughs) Sis boom bah!
Steiger: Okay, we’ll stop this right here, don’t you think?
Moody: Sounds good!