P.T. Reilly

P.T. Reilly is a name most casual Grand Canyon boaters do not recognize. But Pat Reilly stood tall in the era between the early expeditions and the upswing of modern commercial boating. Pat and his lifelong love Susie ran the Canyon from the late ’40s thru the early ’60s, and came back for two finale trips in the early ’80s. Reilly began rowing with Nevills, went on to design a new generation of hard-hulled boats, run the highest water ever run in Grand Canyon, and become one of the area’s great historians. His history of Lees Ferry was published three years after Reilly’s 1996 death. Five years later Susie rejoined her high school sweetheart.
Between 1993 and 1995, Lew Steiger, Karen Underhill, and Richard Quartaroli logged some 95,000 words of conversation with P.T., with occasional interjections from Susie. What follows is a combined, pared, and edited Life of Reilly.
Brad Dimock
Steiger: You mentioned that you came from “pioneer stock…”
Reilly: Well my grandfather, Houston Bevers, was one of the early cattlemen of Palo Pinto County, Texas. I was born in Texas. He drove several herds to Kansas. I guess I come by it naturally.
Steiger: Was your dad in the cow business too?
Reilly: No, he wasn’t. No, he was kind of an inventor. He developed vegetable presses. You wouldn’t know what those were, but it takes the knowledge of a general machinist. I worked with him for a while on it.
Steiger: So that must have been why you moved from Texas to California?
Reilly: No, my mother brought me from Texas to California when I was three months old—I never knew about it. I grew up in California, except for a year up in Idaho. We had a ranch on the Clearwater River—a hundred and sixty acres on the Clearwater—and I learned how to handle an axe and cut down big timber and hunt, fish.
Steiger: What was your degree in school? What did you take your education in?
Reilly: (laughs) Well, it’ll kill you—Literature. Geology was my first one—then I kind of shied away from it.
Steiger: But you played sports in college?
Reilly: Yeah, football and track. I’m a tennis champ and handball champ.
Suzie went to ucla and she graduated in the summer of 1930. I stayed out a year. A friend of mine and I worked in a mine up near Placerville on the American River. Then I started my freshman class in college the same year Suzie started her freshman class at ucla.
Steiger: And you guys got married in 1937.
Reilly: New Year’s Eve.
•••
Reilly: Unless you lived through the Great Depression, you had no idea what it was like. You couldn’t get a job—there were no jobs available. I joined the United States General Land Office in August of 1936, and I worked my way up and was a surveyor for them until I quit them in July of 1940. Then I could see the war coming on. Not being a dummy, I relied on my old tool-making experience and went to work as a toolmaker at Lockheed. And then pretty quickly I was put in supervision, and I spent a quarter of a century in supervision at Lockheed.
Steiger: And they must have geared up in an enormous way.
Reilly: Oh, they geared up to beat hell! When I joined them they were still making the Model 10 and the Model 12 and the Lodestar.
Steiger: You’re talking about “coming from pioneer stock.” I was wondering if that affected you in your river-running career?
Reilly: No, it just set me up. I guess it made me able to handle it. What really got me into my river-running career was, in 1946 my mother gave me a subscription to Desert Magazine. About the second or third issue I saw an ad for Norman Nevills. I’d been working at Lockheed in the Tooling Division and I worked nine months without a day off—ten hours a day on five days and eight hours on Saturday and Sunday—and I was beat. I told Suzie, “Let’s take this damn trip.”
We went, and I was real antsy to get at the oars and it happened that Norm had a problem with oarsmen. He had a fellow named George Wing, this “scat-back” from byu and later a professional player for the Salt Lake Sea Gulls. It happened to be George Wing’s first trip as a boatman, and I could tell he didn’t know beans about handling oars. He was our boatman—Suzie and I were in his boat. I started ragging him right off the bat to let me handle the oars. And finally he gave in to me, and Norm saw how I handled them. At the end of the trip (chuckles) he offered me a job! And I said, “You mean to say you’ll pay me to take a vacation like this?!” And he said, “Sure!” I said, “Hell yes! You’ve got your boy!”
Steiger: What were some of the circumstances of that one?
Reilly: Well Norm was running from Mexican Hat down the San Juan and we went a hundred and thirteen miles down the San Juan and seventy-eight miles down the Colorado to Lees Ferry and took the boats out. I got my hands on the oars, oh, I think the second or third day. We had a “death march” through Paiute Farms. I think we were out of the boats more than we were in them, for three days. If you hadn’t run the San Juan in the early days, I tell you, you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. The river was all spread out. We took off, and the God damned Norm told me that May 1st was the best day. Well he was lying right through his teeth! Soon as we got off the river, the river rose to 4,500-second feet—and we had less than 1,000. And you know what the San Juan would be at 1,000 second feet, natural water. It was a death march.
Well Norm offered me a job of boating for him when he saw I could handle a boat by our experience in 1947. So in 1948 Frank Wright and I—who was a Mormon from Blanding—started out with Norm, together.
Steiger: And right down the Grand Canyon?
Reilly: No, we started out running… Oh, we had run maybe two or three San Juans, and then do the Grand Canyon. But in 1949, I think I got… I forget how much time I got off from Lockheed, but by that time I was getting a reputation for—they gave me what I wanted, in other words. And I think I took two months off. And we ran two or three San Juans, then we went up to Green River, Wyoming, and ran down to Jensen, Utah. Then we took the boats out and went down to Lees Ferry and went down to Hemingway Harbor—on August 1. Frank Wright, Jim Rigg, Norm Nevills, and I were the four boatmen. We had four boats.
Steiger: At that time, you could still count the number of people that had been down the Grand Canyon, couldn’t you?
Reilly: Oh, hell, yeah! I’ve got a complete list in here. I’m 105 or 106. Jim Rigg and I had made our first trip together, and we share 105–106.
Steiger: So, that was your first trip through the Grand?
Reilly: 1949 was my first trip through Grand Canyon.
Steiger: When you got there to the put-in on that first trip, do you remember what kind of flow you had that year?
Reilly: We had high water. We took off in about 45,000 second feet. Norm wasn’t a high-water man. If he’d have had the means, he would have laid over a week or so.
Steiger: Just to let it drop down a little bit?
Reilly: Let it drop down. He was a low-water man. And I was tickled to death.
Steiger: I wonder what it felt like, just setting out, just pushing off from the Ferry and heading on down there?
Reilly: Well, there was nothing to it. I was lucky that Norm knew some of my interests, because he put Eddie McKee in my boat. He used to be Naturalist Chief Ranger at Grand Canyon. He’s investigated the little horses, the pygmy horses, when the agent spread all the baloney about the midget horses, you know. I learned more geologic knowledge from Eddie then I did in a whole year in college geology. Because the people teaching the course just didn’t know—it was all theory. When Eddie, reached down and picked a fossil up or he reached over got a piece of hematite, he’d give you the whole history of the thing. I just wouldn’t of missed Eddie McKee for anything. He and I corresponded. Eddie was a great guy. My kind of guy.
Steiger: So that one was about 45,000. And how many days was that trip?
Reilly: Nevills’s normal take-off day was July 12. He took three weeks. He had to squeeze it in two or three weeks, because many of his people had three weeks’ vacation.
Steiger: When I think of 40,000, man, to us, in this day and age, 40,000, we call that high.
Reilly: Well you call that high because you’ve never experienced anything else!
Steiger: What was the normal camping routine on a trip like that?
Reilly: Frank and I handled the kitchen. Frank and I got along swell on the cooking and the camp chores. He was an old Mormon “do-it-all-er” and a very good man. Frank was just a good boatman. He wasn’t afraid of anything. Frank would run the rapids as they came up, and just think nothing of it. I thought Frank was one of the best boatmen that Norm ever had. Frank was A-OK. … and Jim Rigg did the dish washing. Jim Rigg owned the flying service at Grand Junction.
Steiger: Was he a pretty good boatman?
Reilly: Oh Jim was a good boatman. We were all good boatman. Jim was pretty good at anything he tried. He joined in 1949. He’d never rowed with Norm before 1949.
Suzie: Bob Rigg was a fine…
Reilly: Bob was a fine boatman!
Suzie: He said he was uneasy every time he’d get out on that tongue, and before it dropped down, he talked about being a member of the “Cottonmouth Club”. But he was expert, he really was.
Steiger: Did you stop and scout a lot of stuff?
Reilly: No.
Steiger: Did you have troubles with the boats turning over or anything like that?
Reilly: No. Never flipped a one.
Steiger: Did Nevills always go in front and everything?
Reilly: We had our positions. Norm ran first, Jim Rigg ran second, Frank Wright ran third, and I ran fourth.
Steiger: And that was that?
Reilly: That was that. We always held those positions.
Steiger: Why did you guys line Lava Falls?
Reilly: Lava Falls was usually lined. They didn’t get there at the right stage of water to where they could run it. You’re getting into something that’s a little bit over your head. The reason I’m saying that is that Lava Falls was probably—Bob Webb will back me up on this. I proved to him by my pictures, Lava Falls has probably changed more than any rapid on the river.
Oh, it’s changed to beat hell! You wouldn’t believe the changes! In the late forties, Lava was unbelievable. I’ve got some movie footage at Lava Falls, you wouldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t see how a fish could get through there.
Steiger: What was it like? Why was it so hard?
Reilly: Well, a big comber over to the right was a monster. It was higher than the ceiling. And the waves, at that stage of water, the waves in all the other parts were just tremendous. You couldn’t possibly stick a sixteen-foot boat through there and expect not to get spilled…unless you had a boat down below for a pickup. And Lower Lava was booming at the same time. But then about 1953 or 1954, there was a hell of a flood down Prospect Wash, and I mean a big one. You know Prospect Wash spills over the rim. And it washed cinders into the rapid and filled up the rapid that you wouldn’t believe. It made it a lot easier to run—especially if you wanted to make a sneak traverse down the left-hand side and then cut over in back of the big comber. Well before they had this big flood, Prospect Wash, it was, I’d say roughly twice to three times as bad.
Steiger: So, when you lined it, did you line it down the left side?
Reilly: Yeah.
Steiger: And that was quite a production to do that?
Reilly: Oh, it was hard work! We unloaded the boats, took the boats down empty. I did it differently from the way Norm did it. He had one line on the aft end of the boat and they just got a bunch of guys down to pull the boat down, lift it over the rocks through bull strength and awkwardness. And I had two lines on the aft end of my boats.
Steiger: How many Nevills trips do you figure you ran?
Reilly: Gee, I never have counted them up. Of course the post-war program at Lockheed was rather austere. Some years I’d get more time off than others. I guess that I would do at least two San Juans and a Grand Canyon. I know one year, in 1950, Jim Rigg sent one of his Bonanzas up to Boulder City to pick up Suzie and me. He let us off at the Grand Canyon and we walked down the trail and met the boats and I did the second half. Suzie went along.
Steiger: You did several Mexican Hat trips when the Rigg Brothers and Frank Wright had it?
Reilly: Well, I rowed for them in 1950 and 1951 and 1952. And then in 1953 I put my own first party through. I got the boats from my friends up in Green River, Wyoming. And then I built my own two boats in 1954. And Steve Fulmer came out from Muncie, Indiana and ran with me so I had a three-boat party. I got all the passengers.
I tried to guess the peak, and I tried to be on the river during the peak. In 1957 I ran the highest water ever run—127,000 second-feet.
Steiger: What was it that got you out there on the peaks of those flows?
Reilly: Well, Norm always set his take-off date on July 12. He didn’t care about what the flow was, the snowpack, he set it July 12, and he based his advertising on that, and that was it. Well, I thought that was the wrong way to do it. I took the Water Resources, contacted them and got their publications, and got the snow depth and water content forecasts, and I gauged my take-off date by the peak. In 1957 I hit it right on the nose! Two days after I took off, the river peaked at 127,000 second-feet, and we were down at Harding.
Steiger: Now why did you want to catch the peak?
Reilly: Well, all these other blokes had done it at low water, and I knew what to expect at low water, and I wanted something better than low water—and I got it!
Susie: I don’t think you chose to run on water quite that high.
Reilly: I didn’t care how high it was.
Susie: Didn’t you?
Reilly: If it had been 150,000, I’d have done the same thing.
Steiger: So what did it feel like to be out there on that kind of water?
Reilly: Oh, no different. You’ve got almost 127,000—you’ve got about 126,000 over by that Boulder Narrows, which is in that picture covered by by water. That hull—my boat’s seventeen feet long. You could drop my boat in that big hole… That’s the one where the oil drums went in—sometimes we’d see them bob up a couple of hundred yards downstream, some of them we never did see bob up. We saw big logs go into that hole. Sometimes they’d bob up two or three hundred yards downstream, sometimes we never did see them.
Steiger: Was it hard to miss that thing?
Reilly: No, nothing to it! I rowed my boats… I tied my boats up just below this big rock to the right and we climbed up the talus and went out on the talus and studied it.
My most impressive time on that high water was at Nankoweap, when I saw that whirlpool and that log turned on end. I’d seen the river was way up in the creek bottom, and then I saw this God-awful hole, and as I watched it, this log got closer and closer. It got into the rim of the whirlpool and it stood on end and the damned thing kept on circling and it was drawn down deep. I never saw anything like that. I’ve seen Nankoweap at low water, and I’ve seen it at high water. And I can never figure out how that whirlpool, that God-damned log, got sucked on in. It was at least fifteen feet long, and it swirled and went down out of sight, and I never did see it come up.
Then I encountered that rapid going upstream, right over close to the shore. It had waves in it three or four feet, on the Nankoweap side. I gauged it at four. Going upstream and it had waves and they were breaking. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. I’m careful about who I tell that to now, because a dude with no experience, they wouldn’t know what I’m talking about.
Steiger: I’m trying to grasp 127,000.
Reilly: Well all you’ve got to do is look at Boulder Narrows.
Steiger: Was anybody else down there then?
Reilly: No, I was the only one in the Canyon. Frank Wright and Jim Rigg came down about two weeks after I went through.
Steiger: But was it dropping then?
Reilly: Oh yeah, you’re not going to hold a flow like that for a long period of time.
Underhill: Could you hear the rocks moving? On the bottom?
Reilly: Oh, you hear the rumble all the time. In high water, we could hear the rumble. The rumble was most pronounced when I was at Elves Chasm in fifty-eight. I think there was about seventy thousand flowing and you could listen, the rocks were actually rumbling.
Steiger: So it was high. Yeah, I’ve heard stories that that was a pretty scary spot right down there. [points at photo]
Reilly: Oh, that spot? In my view, Granite Narrows, just above the big cave—you know where the cave is—that at high water is probably the most dangerous point in the river. You wouldn’t believe the cross-currents in there. You’d have to see it to believe it. And unless you see it at high water, you couldn’t believe it! I couldn’t believe it, and I have probably had more experience than anybody on the river today. But if I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. I’ll tell you one thing: At high water, you see things you never suspect you’ll see at low water.
Steiger: At that point in time, what did you think of this plan of going down on the peak? (laughs)
Reilly: Oh, I didn’t regret a bit of it! I thought it was great. The problems are different, and you have to compensate for the difference in problems. That was where I developed the idea—and I think it’s a good one—that you have a different technique for different stages of water, from the low to the high. I’ll tell you one thing: you sure don’t run low water like you do high! (laughs)
The thing that surprised me in the high-water trip: we were going down to the twenties there—24-1/2 Mile Rapid, that was a lollapalooza! I think if I’d have stopped and looked that over, I wouldn’t have had the guts to run it, but we piled into it wide open. I had Susie, and I’ve never taken any chances with her, but I swear to God, some of those waves were twelve, fifteen feet high, and I’d be just full of ’em. The usual character of that rapid was completely gone. Just didn’t resemble the old 24-1/2 Mile at all. And it was continued down through 25 Mile. We piled right down through the middle of it, and when I came out, I thought, “Well, I was lucky that time.” Because I’m an old skin diver, and being in the water doesn’t bother me a damned bit, but Susie never did any of that stuff. And I would do something dirty if she got dumped overboard.
Steiger: Well, to me the thing that I notice about 40,000 is that you get these boils and whirlpools. When I think of 127,000—did you get stuff to come up and chase you?
Reilly: No, they don’t chase you—they’re moving. I notice in one of the high water years—I forget which one it was, but down in the Granite Gorge, we saw several of these moving whirlpools. I think the biggest one was about four feet across, and it was a real funnel and it was ringed. And it was maybe four or five feet deep. They would appear and swirl like hell, and then they’d peter out. But I ran one—I even forget what year it was—down around 222 or someplace down in there. I piled into a rapid—of course I was kind of an idiot, I liked to go right down the middle of everything—and I piled into this rapid, went right down and a hell of a whirlpool grabbed me and pulled my boat down to where the water was just about to come over the edge, the gunwale, into the cockpit, and then it released. And I blinked and wondered, “What in the hell is going on?!” I looked back and I couldn’t see anything. In 1957, in a high-water year, I think it took me an hour and fifteen minutes to go from Hance down to Bright Angel, and we pulled up—the beach was almost covered—and we pulled the boats up and they were awash and we tied them up to a mesquite tree or something. I got pictures of that. And then we left it there for the season. We came back the next year and ran them down.
Steiger: Okay, 1957, you guys went through on 127,000 and you stopped at Phantom and chained the boats up there on the beach so nobody could get ’em?
Reilly: Well, two reasons: one, to keep ’em from being washed away; and another one, to keep the dudes from foolin’ around with ’em.
Steiger: Yeah. And when you got to Phantom, it was about 120,000 or somewhere in there?
Reilly: It was between 120,000 and 115,000.
Steiger: And you guys were just thinkin’, “Hey, this is a little too high to go on through,” at that point?
Reilly: Well, the lack of campgrounds is what got me. All the campgrounds, there wasn’t a bit of sand in the Canyon. You can’t conceive of the Canyon being that way.
Steiger: With no sand?
Reilly: No sand at all. There was just nothing down there. Nothing—get up in the rocks and kick a couple of ’em around to where you can be half-way comfortable. 1958 had high water also. That’s when the river hit 103,000–104,000.
•••
It’s a pity we never got to the 1958 trip in these interviews. Reilly and gang hiked in to Phantom, retrieved and loaded their boats, and headed downriver on flows close to 100,000. At Lava they were confronted with the option of either running a rapid so huge they thought they might flip all three at once, or casting off the boats and giving up. The chose the latter, hiked out and caught a ride to Lake Mead. They found the “Susie R” off Sandy Point and Georgie towed in the “Flavell”, but Steve Fulmer’s “Gem” was not found for years, until it finally turned up in a driftwood pile on the lake. The 1959 trip ended in an equally bizarre fashion. We’ll get to that in a minute…
•••
Underhill: What is your opinion of Powell’s wide hulled boat?
Reilly: Stinking! Awful! That man was a scientist, and if he had a brain in his head, after he got through the Green River, he would have built new boats. He pushed them through Grand Canyon and he had a fine crew. But I don’t see how he ever got as far as he did, to be honest with you. Powell had keel boats, Stanton had keel boats. Hell, if there’s anyplace in the world you don’t want a keel boat, it’s in the Grand Canyon!
Steiger: I’m wondering what you were thinking that led to the Flavell and the Susie R., and to the subsequent boats, because that was a huge leap. What is it that a boat has to do?
Reilly: I guess my own boat evolved by studying history. I realized that Flavell, and Galloway put their boats down bow first. Of course I’d been brought up with Nevills. I think Nevills great contribution to river running was breadth of beam. If you stop and think there’d never been a boat made by anybody that had a beam that Nevills had. He had the first wide beam boats. But this old blunt stern, Nevills himself told me, don’t ever put anything out in the corner of these boats. Keep everything to the center and in the middle, all you can. I thought, “Why does the damn fool have his square corners out there anyway? What do they do, they don’t do anything. “ I figured that Nevills’s boat would run better bow first then it would stern first.
Steiger: Well the cataract boats, you usually went stern first then?
Reilly: No, always went stern first. I’ve got pictures of me in rapids bow first, but it didn’t amount to anything. It depends on the flow and your knowledge of the Canyon and the rapid.
Suzie: They were so broad, and so wide open.
Reilly: That blunt stern gave you nothing.
Suzie: Couldn’t spin, when you wanted to twirl. Pull away from a wall, and they were so awkward.

Reilly: The sadiron boat is a lousy boat. I could see the defects in the boat by rowing the damn thing! You couldn’t maneuver Norm’s boats. They weren’t anywhere close to being as maneuverable as my double-enders. It was an evolutionary boat.
Steiger: I guess you sort of helped contribute to that.
Reilly: Well I contributed most of it! I built the first double-ender. Once I got down there, I saw the problem, and I saw that nobody had built a boat to counter the problem, to answer the problem. And I thought I could do it! The problem was building a better boat to take on the rapids. The old Nevills sadirons were a pain in the neck! They were no damned good.
I was influenced, I think, quite a bit by Flavell. Of course Flavell took an open dory down, you know. I wanted a pointed bow to enter the waves, and boy did it make a difference! That’s why they’re pointed at both ends—do away with these stupid corners! My first job was to get all the passengers inside the boat. Get them off the deck, like sitting on the coiled rope like Nevills had. I couldn’t understand why Frank and Jim didn’t redesign those lousy boats. They didn’t, they built a new set of them just like the old ones. I guess they were infatuated with Norm. So, they went their way and I went mine.
I kept the wide beam and I increased the air-proof compartments. A number of them. And I got them so each one of them were individually sealed. I put sealed bottles like you have a plastic bottle of Clorox and put the lid on real tight. So, it wasn’t just empty space, it was all full of added buoyancy. In other words I was taking up room for water. See, I built my boats in 1954. The Suzie R. was the first one, and the Flavell was the second. Both of them had fiberglass hulls, pointed at both ends, but they were totally different inside. I know the Suzie R. had, I think, twenty-five different air compartments, individually sealed.
Incidentally the fellow who did my lettering, was Harper Goff. He was Disney artist. I thought that was pretty nice. A Disney artist, of Harper’s magnitude, doing the lettering on my boats. Oh, he advised a color change too. I went all over east Los Angeles getting Aztec Red and Beryl Green—white’s easy. I bowed to him because color was his life. I went out and got the shades and painted it. Hand painted it. It was a very good boat except that no two, I never built two boats the same. Every one was refined from the previous one.
My boats, my double-ender, with all the compartments in them, were the biggest improvement in Colorado River boating that’s ever been made. They’re a forerunner of Martin’s dories today.
Steiger: When it comes to actual boat building, how did you go about, when you sat down and built your first boat?
Reilly: Well, I made a female mold. I used this one-eighth inch Philippine mahogany plywood, four-by-eight-foot sheets, and I made me a female mold. Then I used plaster and filled in where I wanted curves, instead of sharp corners, and filled that in. And that’s what that boat that you saw there, how that was made, my first two boats. The Suzie R. and the Flavell were both made in those molds.
Steiger: So it didn’t break your heart there wasn’t any kind of an aesthetic disagreement between, say, fiberglass and just a purely wood boat?
Reilly: No, I didn’t have any aesthetic feelings about either one. I finally came to the conclusion by trial and error that fiberglass wasn’t what it was cracked up to be: It was too darn brittle. It got punctured real easy. Both chines, both my fiberglass boats were punctured on both beams within about twenty inches of the bow and stern. And it had been patched and patched and patched, and had patches on top of patches. By that time the patches weren’t even sticking very well. That’s why I was coddling them. So I scuttled ’em in 1959 at Pipe Creek. Filled ’em full of rocks and took a mineral hammer and punched holes in ’em and shoved ’em out in the current—goodbye. Boy, I took pictures of them as they took off downstream. They were getting lower and lower in the water. It was sad. But it was the best thing for them. They served their day.
We sent Joe up the trail and he got the pack train down to pack our stuff out the next day, and they did. And I walked up. And so we didn’t have any boats.
Steiger: It seemed like you were kind of disgusted with the whole affair.
Reilly: No, I was disgusted with fiberglass. I knew that fiberglass wouldn’t stand up in the Grand Canyon. And I didn’t really know one way or the other if I was ever going to build more boats or not, but if I did, they weren’t going to be fiberglass. And I wanted to perpetuate my design, sort of like you see in the little model there. But they were going to be wooden dories.
•••
Underhill: Did you ever have any mishaps in the canyon?
Reilly: If I thought I would have a mishap I, ran solo. I’ve dumped twice. I dumped with Joe. From just plain damn fool carelessness. That’s all my fault. In 24-1/2 Mile. Well, I was busy looking for this spot—I knew I was awful close to where Stanton had photographed the spot where Hansbrough and Richards were drowned. And I had my eye on that cliff and Joe Szep and I—he was my passenger—we piled into the rapids, and I had my attention riveted on the historical phase and not on what I should have had my attention on—the business at hand. And a big old lateral comes up and breaks right toward the tongue. Well I saw that thing, but it didn’t register—I was interested in something else, interested in the spot I was aiming for. And this big lateral got me. Anyway, we dumped. I’ve been a skin diver and swimmer a good part of my life—and I was going to hang onto the boat come hell or high water, and I yelled to Joe—I thought he was in the eddy—I said, “Joe, catch the eddy and make shore and come down with the other boat.” But when I got opposite the wall where Hansbrough and Richards met their end, a hell of a side current caught me and it straightened my legs out. I was hanging down on the right side of the boat, which is upside down. And they straightened my legs out, and it was going to pull my shorts off, and I spread my legs, kept my shorts from being pulled off, and I hung onto the boat. I stayed with it through 25 Mile and Cave Springs, and landed on the left-hand bank. I think I’d been in the water for maybe a couple of miles, but I stayed with the boat and saved it. And when they came down we turned the boat over and I bailed her out and then the only thing was lost oars. We found an oar floating around in an eddy. I think we never did find one of the oars, but I got by. I always traveled with two spares.
Underhill: What was your other flip? What was your other upset?
Reilly: My other Upset was…
Susie: In Upset.
Reilly: Upset. Upset Rapid.That was calculated. That was one of the four or five rapids that I might spill in. I ran the first boat of course, I knew I’d have to make a sharp swing to the right to get past that hole. I didn’t cut it quite close enough. It’s my own fault. Nobody’s fault but mine. Most of my spills have been my own fault.
Underhill: What was Crystal like in those days?
Reilly: Crystal wasn’t anything before the big flood hit, but it was the longest rapid in the river—it was a mile long. It dropped quite a bit. Used to be a nice little stream, about twenty feet wide. Clear water coming down, cottonwood trees. Didn’t have that big fan there. It was just a plain old ordinary cut bank. Little bit of a sand bar. We just piled-into it wide open. But after the flood washed those big boulders down and ran the fan out there, good God, no.
Steiger: How did you get started wandering around and wanting to go up the side canyons and stuff like that?
Reilly: Well, it just seemed to me to be the natural thing to do. It seemed to me to be a bunch of damned foolishness to take the trouble to go through Grand Canyon by river and not see what’s up the tributaries.
Suzie: Did you tell how you discovered the Bridge? Keyhole? That’s an interesting story.
Reilly: Oh, the Keyhole. Well, Martin is a good pilot, and Martin and Dock Marston and another chap and I were four of us in a Cessna, and I was following the Sinyala Fault. Martin always put the plane right where I asked him to, and we were following—I was taking pictures and we were off to the side so I could photograph Sinyala Fault. It crosses the river at 138-Mile Rapid—that’s what causes the rapid. And I took all these pictures and we never saw anything—none of us in the plane. And when we got the pictures back, I was sitting in my living room in Studio City, California, and I looked at a picture I’d taken, and God damn, I saw a big old opening. That’s were I discovered Keyhole Bridge—sitting in the living room in my home in Studio City, and discovered it that way.
And our next river trip was made a day after the two planes crashed opposite Little Colorado. This was late in August. And we hiked up to Keyhole, and there were three of us. Steve Fulmer started out, but there was Martin, Bill McGill and I. And the three of us got up there—Fulmer didn’t make it. And I got the discovery photo in there, and plus a photo I took from the ground to verify it.
•••
Steiger: I wanted to talk about Glen Canyon Dam.
Reilly: Well, you can’t very well mix politics with your natural desires—the two just don’t go together. See, the politicians are going to do what they want to do regardless of how you feel about it. I hated to see Glen Canyon Dam go in. At the same time, so God damn many dudes were coming in, and they were going through hell bent for election and didn’t know what they were doing or what they were seeing and never got away from the river. That part didn’t rub me very well either.
Steiger: So with Glen Canyon Dam, what did you think of that when you saw that one coming?
Reilly: What the hell could you think about it?! The decision was made back in Washington. A single guy had no say. River runners are not politicians. We weren’t politically slanted toward keeping track of what was going on in Washington. That’s the sad truth. I know I wasn’t. I’d just begun to get interested in the political end of it. I was really into it for the Marble and Bridge Canyon Dams.
Steiger: Do you remember the first time you ever met Martin Litton?
Reilly: Martin was a feature writer for the Los Angeles Times. That’s how he got interested in the River. He wrote a feature going out with Riffey at Tuweap, and went out to Lava Falls and photographed that. And I don’t know whether he got ahold of me, or how he learned about me, or I got ahold of him. But anyway, we got together and as soon as I learned he had rowed crew at ucla, I perked up a little bit. Good boatmen were always scarce and hard to get. So in 1955 he and Esther went as my passengers. And Martin had had a pack trip up in the Sierras. The mule or horse or whatever he was on threw him and he sprained his shoulder and he had it in a sling. I got pictures of him in the sling in that year. Down about a mile below Upset on the right, I had a favorite camping spot—I forget whether there was water coming down there—anyway, it was a nice sandy place. I don’t think any of the modern dudes ever have noticed it, but I usually camped there. I asked Martin what he thought of it, and Martin said, “It’s fantastic. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.” And I said, “There’s nothing like it in the entire rest of the world.” By that time I had known that he had rowed crew at ucla, and I asked if he thought he could do it, and he said, “Yeah, I think I could do it.” This was 1955 that we had that conversation. So in 1956 I took Martin as a boatman.
Steiger: You guys started something that’s still going on today.
Reilly: Yeah! Well I introduced the dories to the river, and Martin had his finger in it. Anyway, Martin ran with me as a passenger. He and Esther went as passengers in 1955, he rowed as a boatman with me in 1956.
He got the itch again in 1962. That’s when the big wigs at Sunset magazine wanted to go down. We got Bill Lane and Frank Chambers and three or four others. And then he ran with me in 1964. So Martin has made five trips with me. I say I broke him in on the river.
Steiger: Would you say that you guys got along pretty good?
Reilly: Oh, we got along swell!
Steiger: Did Martin do a lot of work and stuff? He seems to be…
Reilly: Well, only on his boat. But on the 1962 trip, most of the people were his. Martin got it, and in fact those people his. Frank Chambers and Bill Lane and all that Menlo Park bunch, Martin got. Frank Chambers was a big man in the financial world.
Steiger: Moving on to the 1962 and 1964 trips, those were a huge deal in the history of the river. Did you guys think that Marble and Bridge Canyon dams were going to be built then?
Reilly: We knew they were going to fight for ’em. Martin was torn between two driving forces: he was dead set against the Redwood expansion in Northern California; and he was dead set against the dams in Grand Canyon—Bridge and the one in Marble. So he took Bill Lane, the publisher and owner of Sunset magazine, and Frank Chambers, the banker, and Jack Best, Phil Hyde and his wife, and several others. That was in 1964.
And we knew the Sierra Club had promised to resist it strongly. And you might say the Sierra Club—Dave Brower, I can’t say enough for Dave Brower.
Steiger: But I’m curious, because I had the impression that the 1962 trip was about politics—that Martin calls up and says, “P. T. we gotta run this trip, because we’re gonna go to war against these dams. “
Reilly: Martin’s the one that said “How about another trip through the Grand Canyon?” “Martin, we don’t have boats. We have to build boats.” And he said he got these guys that are just real antsy to go. I guess they had seen some of Martin’s movies and they wanted to go, and Martin wanted to know if I’d put a party together and take them down. So I got commitments out of them.
He said, “Well, hell, if you’ll get a hull, I will. We’ll get this guy up in Rogue River. I can get him to build us hulls, and we can both finish the interior to suit ourselves. “ I said, “Okay, you’re on. “ So I had a real hot tooling program with Lockheed at the time. I think I was working ten hours a day, five days a week, and eight hours on Saturdays and Sundays. And I said, “Okay, we’ll do it.” And that’s when Martin got this guy on Rogue River to build our hulls, and he brought mine down to me. And then he and I finished our hulls. We had to put all the interior in: the hatches and the compartments and everything, and we had to deck it over. There were no decks on it—just a plain, open dory is what it was. So we got those built and that’s why Martin’s boat and my boat were different. I’d come home every night, and I’d work out in my patio until ten o’clock on my boat. And we got our boats built. I named that Susie Too. That’s the one that exhibited at the South Rim. Martin put it there. And we had my boat trailer, of course, and we saw each other’s results when we got to Lees Ferry. And we took the boats down.
Well, the boat turned out to be real good, real fine. I was quite happy with it. I didn’t think it was going to be too much when I first started out, but after I’d been at the oars for five minutes, I thought, “Hey, we got somethin’ here!” So every mile I ran the thing, I liked it better. In fact, I think the dory that we had then—not talking about payload—they were the best boats to appear on the river, up to now. See, Martin’s gone overboard a little bit. He’s gone for greater payload.
In 1964 Dave Brower got me to lead the party through. Martin and I both had our cataract boats. We had a smaller boat called Lucky Pierre. (laughs) So-called because it was always in the middle. (laughs) We had a guy that was supposed to be a mountaineering guide on the Sierras. And Martin—we were desperate, we couldn’t get a man for this other boat—and Martin finally got him, and we took him on, and he spilled three times. I rescued him all three times and his passengers.
Steiger: Well, when you started on that trip, did you actually think you were going to whip these guys? Did you actually think that you were going to stop these dams from being built?
Reilly: It hadn’t gotten that far yet. We weren’t that involved with the dams yet. It was to more or less get what photographic evidence we could, and get everything we could to support the fight that we knew was coming up in Washington.
Susie: Martin was an official with the Sierra Club, so he was deeply into it.
Reilly: Yeah, Martin was on the board.
Susie: He was rabid on the subject.
Steiger: Well, he was, I know. We kinda give him a lot of credit for…
Reilly: Well, you can’t give him too much. If it hadn’t been for Martin’s get-up and go, that thing never would have gotten off the ground.
Underhill: Well, let’s talk about the 1964 trip. And how you were able to go on that.
Reilly: Well, 1964 was frankly to gather the material to build Francois Leydet’s book, Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon, to combat the Bridge Canyon and Marble Canyon Dams. Francois was a passenger, and he was an ex-newspaperman from San Francisco. And he and his wife Patience, she ran the upper half. Martin had a pretty high powered bunch together. He had Frank Chambers get me a leave, a six months leave…as much as I wanted. I just took six months. Arranged everything. I took them down and knowing the Canyon like I did, I tried to hit the best spots at the best times. You know, most photogenic and things that would illustrate the points. In essence it ‘s what allowed this book to be made.
Steiger: It’s easy to look back in retrospect and see that as being a very significant trip—which it was. I think my perception of that is that that book ended up making a big difference.
Reilly: Oh, I think the book is when the whole vote in favor of us. Congress was undecided, and when we put a copy of Francois’ book on every congressman’s and senator’s desk, they thumbed through that thing, and boy, the vote was overwhelming against it.
Steiger: At the time that you were on the trip you got the word that they were going to turn off the water and stuff, and you guys should abandon the trip.
Reilly: We knew the water was going down. We were pulled in, we had a camp made a little bit below Whitmore. There was a good campground there. We had our wood all together and the fireplace all made, and everything, and suddenly this airplane comes buzzing up the canyon. And once it spotted us where we were, the head ranger wrote us a note .
Underhill: (reading note) “P.T. Reilly river party: The gates at Glen Canyon Dam were closed yesterday morning, May 11. The river flow has been cut to 1,000 cubic feet per second. It is important that you leave the river by Whitmore Canyon. If you agree, three of you wave something white the next time we pass. Others remain away from the three and remain quiet. If you concur by waving, we will notify persons on your permit to meet you at the end of the Whitmore Canyon Road. (signed) James W. Packard, Chief Park Ranger.”
Reilly: That stuffed shirt!
Underhill: (still reading) “If you receive this note and do not wish to leave the river, one person should stand alone and wave something white.”
Steiger: So you had to decide instantly!
Reilly: Oh, we decided right off the bat, hell no we weren’t going to let those henhouse bastards run us off of the river! Martin had a white shirt. He tore that white shirt off and he waded out in the river up to his crotch, and when that thing came back down the river, Martin was out there waving (chuckles) the God-damned white shirt.
The ranger didn’t have the brains of a pissant, and the pilot had thoughtfully put on the flow at Glen Canyon and at Grand Canyon. So with those two figures I could evaluate how fast the river was falling. That’s why I broke camp, got the stuff loaded back on the boats and we took off like a bunch of striped-butted apes and got down. This was about four o’clock when we got that. We rowed like hell ‘til it was dark, and we camped up in the rocks, little bits of sand. We made about twelve, fifteen miles that night. I think we had a cold dinner. Don’t even think we made a fire.We got up at daylight the next morning, and we rowed from there down to Separation Canyon. I think we rowed fifty miles, just about even. When you’re rowing fifty miles, you’re doing something.
Reilly: My last trip that I led was in 1964. I sold Martin my dories and my outfit in 1965.
Underhill: Why did you stop running the Colorado River in 1964?
Reilly: I recognized I was getting too old. Ten years before that I would have piled into a rapid and run it and thought nothing of it. I got to looking at the thing and thought maybe I better line this son of a gun. I got more cautious and I didn’t have the physical strength that I used to have. I used to be strong as a bull. But as you get older you don’t have that young-man strength anymore. And there’s no use in pretending I did and getting in trouble. Just damn foolishness.
Steiger: I know the last trip you actually made you weren’t leading it, but I know that you went down in the mid-seventies or at some point there. Was it the eighties?
Reilly: Yeah, 1984. And my only baloney trip was in 1982, with John Hoffman.
Underhill: What do you think were the most important factors to consider, as you were preparing for a pre-dam trip? What kinds of things did you think about in terms of your planning?
Reilly: Well, it was my vacation. I thought the trip had been grossly magnified…as to how hazardous the rapids were and everything. And I figured it’s useless to seek out the most ferocious water in the west and then to line it. I was more objective about it. I lost a couple, three hundred dollars on every trip. It didn’t bother me a bit! It was my vacation. And I was willing to spend that if I could get a compatible group of people together, have a good trip. That was all I was after.
Underhill: Do you think today that it’s the commercial element that motivates people?
Reilly: Oh, it’s all commercial! Good gosh! They wouldn’t be riding the baloney boats down there if they weren’t commercial. They take a payload, dump them, and go back for another payload. Ring the cash register.
On the whole, the commercial aspect is what deadened me. Might as well, been pumping gas or something. To me, if it could of been a prolonged and a sensitive thing, just for the enjoyment of the episode, it would of hit me swell. But anything you make money on, I’m not going to go. I knew it was totally different, and I was teed off, of course, when I saw… I think I counted twelve or thirteen baloney rigs that they had at Hance waiting for the water to come up. Well that was something that was totally foreign to me, and I thought, “Oh, Christ, that I should live to see this day!” But I did.
Brad Dimock