Calling All Georgie Stories

Many years have past since Georgie handed over her leopard print flag for me to fly in her honor in hopes of keeping her spirit alive in Grand Canyon. It has been an honor to fly it on my motor rig and to have it draped on my row rig for every trip since her passing. My trips have been full of Georgie stories of my own and occasionally someone would tell me of a story they had.
It has come to me as I start to write my own experiences down that we need to gather up as many stories about Georgie as we can and it is my hope to include them in my book about the personal relationship and experiences that I had with Georgie. I hope to include a chapter or two of the many stories that I receive.
It is like everything else in the written word of Grand Canyon river experience. Many of the legends and story tellers are moving on and if we don’t capture these stories they will be lost. I feel personally responsible for many things regarding Georgie—mostly because of the relationship that we shared and for the continuing personal obligation that I need to tell our story and hers on a more personal level.
In gathering these stories I hope to have that opportunity in sharing many aspects of Georgie. I have heard so many great stories of encounters and witnessing her that I only wish I could remember the specifics., I have many of my own I can only imagine what is out there over so many years.
The stories you send in will be read and possibly published in a portion of my book. If so, I will contact you. They can be funny, sad, or just plain “Georgie” stories as we know her and experienced her—only as she could be.
So, I am asking for anyone who would like to join me in bringing as many stories together about her. They can be short or long—no limits—and you can submit as many as you would like.
You can email them to riogeorgie92@aol.com or send the snail mail to:
Teresa Yates Matheson
2270 E. Hubbard Ave.
Salt Lake City, ut 84108
Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you. See you on the river next summer.
Teresa Yates Matheson

Who Killed the Grand Canyon Dams?

Byron E. Pearson’s new analysis of the Grand Canyon dam battles will turn a few heads. In this revisionist account, he points out in elaborate detail that although the Sierra Club and its allies created a nationwide furor over the mere thought of damming Grand Canyon, public opinion then, as now, is often only tenuously connected to political process. (Witness today’s overwhelming congressional endorsement of the war on Iraq in spite of huge public trepidation.) In Still the Wild River Runs: Congress, the Sierra Club, and the fight to save Grand Canyon, Pearson details the intricate moves of congressmen, senators, water and power moguls, and Stewart Udall, the zealous Secretary of the Interior, as they tried to push a gargantuan version of the Central Arizona Project through congress. The bill included not only the Grand Canyon dams (a high dam at Bridge Canyon, backing a reservoir into Grand Canyon as far as Deer Creek, and the Marble Canyon Dam, which would have made Lees Ferry a marina), but hints of diverting a portion of the Columbia River to Arizona to quench the insatiable Southwest.
In 1965 and 1966, as Arizona struggled to gain the support of Colorado, California, and the Pacific Northwest to push through the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, the Sierra Club and other organizations waged a national public relations war, culminating in David Brower’s famous newspaper ads: “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” The Internal Revenue Service promptly pulled the Sierra Club’s tax exempt status, creating an even greater national uproar and tens of thousands of additional letters to Congress.
But Pearson points out that in spite of this, and in spite of detailed testimony to Congress showing the utter economic fallacy of the dams, Udall and the Arizona delegation pushed merrily ahead. When the bill went to Congress, Udall was confident of more than enough votes to pass the bill. It was months later that the bill died in the rules committee of the House, killed by political intrigue from one Northcutt Ely, a California water strategist, who simply did not want Arizona to claim its share of water—a share that California had long been helping itself to.
In the following two years, Udall and senior Arizona Senator Carl Hayden, then in his 48th and final year in the Senate, realized they would both be out of power soon, and rushed through a more pragmatic, scaled-back, damless Central Arizona Project. Whether the pragmatism of removing the dams was in any way influenced by public opinion is unclear. Pearson says no. Yet the public awarded full honors for the defeat to the Sierra Club, launching it to the forefront of environmental activist groups of the day.
Just what would have happened had Ely not suffocated the original bill is unclear. Senator John Saylor of Pennsylvania, the bill’s most vocal adversary in the House, had agreed to a bill including a low Bridge Canyon Dam. Hayden was confident of passing it in the Senate. But Lyndon Johnson would still have to have signed it, and Ladybird, whose preservationist confidant Sharon Francis was very anti-dam, may well have talked him out of it. We’ll never know.
It is a complex and disheartening tale. It shows in baffling detail how public opinion is ignored, even scorned, by the dealmakers and power brokers that run the government. It’s all about pork and backscratching, committees and seniority. Thankfully, many laws have passed since that time to give the public and conservation organizations some, if only a tiny bit, more leverage with the lawmakers. (Laws the current regime is bent on repealing.)
Warning: don’t read this when you are tired or distracted. The words are big, the sentences long, and the plot insanely complex.
Brad Dimock