Harvey Butchart

Harvey Butchart was considered to be the most prolific hiker in modern day Grand Canyon history. He published three excellent guidebooks—“Grand Canyon Treks I, II, and III”—that generously shared his experiences with thousands of others.
In “Grand Canyon Treks III,” Dr. Butchart’s publisher, Walt Wheelock, describes meeting him for the first time on the nau campus in 1961 and making an offhand comment that resulted in Dr. Butchart scaling the building which housed the Math Department in his business suit and street shoes, just to see if it really was possible. He was that kind of a guy.
On March 26, 1995 we interviewed Dr. Butchart at the spring river guides meeting held at the Hatch warehouse near Cliff Dwellers Lodge. He was meticulous, honest to a fault, and brutal with himself when it came to setting the record straight.
Buchart: I went to Eureka College—Eureka, Illinois, a little college, about the smallest they ever come—then went to the University of Illinois for my Ph.D. in mathematics for four years. After that I taught for twelve years in the Middle West in four colleges—Indianapolis; Enid, Oklahoma; Fulton, Missouri; and Grinnell, Iowa—before coming to Flagstaff, Arizona for thirty-one years of teaching there. I was Chairman of the [Math] Department for 22 years, and then was a professor teaching there until 1976 when I retired and went to Sun City with my wife.
I kept on hiking. I started hiking rather soon after coming to Arizona, since I had already begun to climb mountains from the middle west going to Colorado for vacations. And then when I saw the Grand Canyon, I thought, “What a place for a real hike!” I began taking on hikes in the Grand Canyon, first as sponsor of the hiking club in the college, and then, after twelve years of that, I was replaced by another person and I began hiking on my own, to explore the remote areas especially. Anything that I heard about and could easily see, I would enjoy finding out more. I would hike alone and with other people, specifically Allyn Curaton, a student. He and I hiked a great many places together. Then I did about fifty percent of my hiking solo.
Lew Steiger: It’s said that you’ve hiked more miles down there than anybody.
Butchart: Well, that’s possible, because although there are three people now that I know: Tim Oldman, Bob Packard, and Ken Walters [phonetic spellings], who have climbed many more peaks than I have, and they’ve been over a good deal of the Grand Canyon on foot… they perhaps haven’t spent as many days in the Canyon, and I have hiked some places several times, and they may have done it all when they took one hike to the area. So I think I’m still ahead of them in mileage, as well as time spent hiking. The estimate I give is an average of twelve miles a day, which comes out to about 12,000 miles in the Canyon.
Steiger: Why is it that you spent so much time down there?
Butchart: Well, I just like the place. An assistant editor of the Appalachian Mountain Club Journal asked me that, and I began to think it over. I thought, “Well, I could be more specific if I wanted to be more academic about thinking the thing through. I would put it this way: I hike anywhere for physical fitness and then in the Grand Canyon as well as [other] national parks, I enjoy the scenery and, in the Grand Canyon, especially, not everything is known. I hike for scientific curiosity about what’s over the next ridge and whether there’s any waterfalls or Indian ruins or anything that might be a bit unusual; fossil footprints, for instance. I look for things like that. So that’s the scientific part of it, scientific curiosity.
Then I usually say, “Well, I get a kick out of it. It’s an adventure, there’s always a certain amount of hazard to it—spraining an ankle in a loose slip on a rock, and you could be in serious trouble.” I was hiking with other people that could help me out or go for help about fifty percent of the time. But in the other fifty percent, when I was by myself, I figure I was a little more conscious of danger and more careful than I was when I was with other people. It turned out that I hurt myself just once when I was solo. I fell on my canteen and broke a rib. Other times I also broke ribs when I was hiking with other people, three times. Then the two worst accidents I had were with other people, one of them I was jumping and landing on my heels incorrectly, not on the balls of my feet. I broke my heel bones and tore cartilages and was inconvenienced by the pain for about three or four months. Well, the other time I was with somebody, I took a long step to try to get up to a rock that was under an overhang, and my Kelty pack, which I shouldn’t have been carrying, I should have had a small day pack, caught on the rock above me and threw me backwards off my balance. I had a cliff only about fifteen feet downslope away from me where I would really take the fatal fall. Naturally, with a reflex action I threw out my arms to keep from rolling, and when my left hand went between two rocks and the weight came on it, it broke my left wrist pretty badly. It was stiff for more than a year. So I had some danger. So that was…the fact that I could overcome them most of the time and keep on going was adventure.
And then I enjoyed other people’s company, that being the sixth, I guess the sixth category. Maybe the seventh was just the contrary of that, it was to keep ahead of the competition and know more about the Canyon than anybody else. (chuckles) Build up my self-esteem a little bit, I guess. Anyway, that would be the analysis of why I wanted to go to the Canyon.
Steiger: I’ve heard a couple of stories. I guess you’ve had a lot of pretty close calls down there too.
Butchart: Well, the closest call, I guess, maybe wasn’t even an accident. It was getting upside down with Jumar ascenders around my ankles and being suspended upside down in cold weather and facing the chance of hypothermia and death before the next morning in the middle of December. That time, it was just darned foolishness on my part. I’d rappelled down successfully, only I had a rope that was gold line and not the braided sort. Anyway, it twisted me and spun me as I was going down. There was 25 feet of the cliff I would be against the wall, but the other 55 feet was out from the wall, it was an overhang. And I began to spin and began to feel a little bit groggy, almost nauseated, from the spinning and being dizzy. So I closed my eyes and put my rope through the carabiners that I was using for the rappel and got down there safely. Then I did my project for the day of walking down Saddle Canyon to the rim of the Redwall and looking down at Marble Canyon. Then I came back up to the rope—it was in the Coconino—I started up the rope, and I began to twist. I thought, “Gee, I’ll be slow getting up, and I’ll be sick maybe before I get to that place where the rope will be against the wall.” So I thought I could work faster if I didn’t have this belly strap on that keeps the Jumar slings up against your body. I took it off and got up about nine feet, and then my feet got away from me, whipped up by my chin, the height of my face, and I was hanging by the handle grips as long as I could, but my fingers gave out, and I flipped upside down, backwards. And if I’d been a little lower, I probably would have hit my head on a rock that was sticking out of the ground down there. Might have been killed by that blow, or at least sent into a coma. But if I’d been just another foot higher, I would have been helpless, because I couldn’t touch the ground and do anything for myself. But I was at the right height to get my fingers in the soil and pull my way…. Likewise, if the lines had been flat right there, I couldn’t have done anything except stayed there until I died. But as it was, the bank was fairly steep, like a 45 degree angle, and dirt, and I could get my fingers in the dirt and bring myself up to a little tree, that— if I hadn’t found any tree or bush that I could get my left arm around, I would have been helpless. There were about four or five things that, if they hadn’t been just as they were, I could have been dead by morning, and nobody knew where I was going. My wife knew I was going to be on the north side of the river, and that was the closest I had told anybody where I was going. So as it was, though, I got my left arm around this little tree and rolled over, stomach up, and lunged up towards my shoes. If I had tied them in a double knot, I would have been helpless, but I hadn’t tied them in a double knot, it was just a plain bow knot, and I could just barely reach the shoe string and jerk and it didn’t always come through right, but after about forty minutes of trying, I got my one shoe off, first untying the knot by a jerk, and then loosing the shoe around where it was laced. Finally I got it off and got one foot on the ground. Then after that it was fairly easy to get the other foot out of the sling and put on my shoes and start walking. The only way I knew for sure of getting back to the car north of Saddle Mountain was to go south to the Nankoweap Trail along the rim of the Redwall. So I first had to go down towards the river where I’d been early in the day and walk towards Little Nankoweap, and then by the time I got to the river the second time that day, it was getting dark. I had to walk in the dark. Let’s see, I had a moon until about 11:30 that night. And I got into Little Nankoweap and walked up the Redwall rim there. If I’d known what I knew later on, I would have saved myself about five hours, but as it was, I kept on the rim of the Redwall and had to change routes a couple of times at the head wall of that arm of Little Nankoweap, but finally got over to Nankoweap Trail on Tilted Mesa, where the sun rose. I had been walking all night with water until I drank my last about midnight. And then I was short of water. But it was cold, I could take quite a little time without water. I lay down in the sun and took a nap, maybe a half-hour or so, started walking on the trail. As luck would have it, when I came to Marion Point, or even with it—when you’re on the trail, you’re above Marion Point—I found three plastic water bottles partially full. So I had plenty of water. Then I could eat the rest of the lunch that I had left over from the day before. I had to use just a little bit of my lunch that I hadn’t needed at noon. I think I passed up dinnertime at night and went ’til the next morning until about ten o’clock I finished some sandwiches that I had there, and maybe some cookies, and kept on plodding away, very slow, because of my exhaustion, and got back to the car about 2:25 the second day when I’d started about seven-fifteen the first day. So I had had a narrow squeak that time, although I wasn’t hurt, except for the binding of the Jumar slings around my insteps. It was paining me to walk for a while, but nothing was broken, and it just took a little bit of breaking in, to get walking alright again. And so I survived that one, but that was the nearest one, one that I don’t ever want to repeat.
Steiger: You couldn’t get back out of Saddle, so you decided…. you couldn’t reach the Jumars?
Butchart: I could have reached the Jumars, but I thought, “Well, if I am still alive after having that kind of fiasco…” I didn’t have much taste for trying again on the rope. I was just sort of semi-panicked about using that rope anymore. Thinking it over, “Monday morning quarterbacking,” I could have tied the rope to a bush so it wouldn’t twist. If it wouldn’t have twisted, I believe I would have gone up the rope with the Jumar ascenders. I didn’t think that thing through very well. And then I was pretty exhausted after getting to the car after about 28 hours or so of walking. I went to Cliff Dwellers Lodge here and tried to phone my wife, saying I was okay, and would come back after I’d taken a good long nap. We got in touch, and that’s what we did. I was really sleepy. I was sort of hallucinating as I drove north out of House Rock Valley. I saw something ahead, and I thought it was a hitchhiker. When I got there, it was only one of these little warnings that there’s a culvert on that side. So that’s the way I was, pretty well shot.
Steiger: Was there a reason that you didn’t tell her specifically where you were going?
Butchart: No, I guess I was just always cocky about playing it safe enough. I always thought I could manage myself and didn’t need any rescues.
Steiger: Had you made up your mind that where you were going was Saddle Canyon?
Butchart: Yeah, I knew I was going there, I’d been there, let’s see, two or three times before. One time I was there with a rope with the intention of going down and my partner, a student, talked me out of it. He said he didn’t want any. And it was a long rappel and rather challenging-looking. It took a little bit of daring to go down there. But later on I wanted to fill in the route from Lees Ferry to—well, eventually, to Grand Wash Cliffs, but mainly to Kanab Canyon. I just needed a piece here and a piece there. I got a friend to go out with me, down to a place I tied the rope before, and I rappelled down that 85 foot rappel and then went from there upstream on the level of, let’s see, I guess I got down to the Redwall that time. Anyway, I filled in and came out the place that we’d already noticed in Buck Farm Canyon from Saddle Canyon. So I went down that rappel twice. The second time I didn’t need to come up it, I came out a different way. And if I had known what I knew later, I wouldn’t have needed to come up the rope at all, I would have been up on the level and been back to the car before it got dark if I’d had as much knowledge of the area as I learned later. I would have been much better off. But I did this when I was 61 years old, in that jam with the Jumar ascenders, and I found the other things out later on. So you see, I did keep on learning things about the Canyon until I was about 75 years old, and especially in that area, before I quit and went to the west end of the Grand Canyon.
Steiger: Do you have a favorite route, a favorite hike that you’ve ever done?
Butchart: Well, I think the hike that I would call my favorite would be the one that took me the longest to find. That was the Enfilade Point route [described in Grand Canyon Treks III]. It involved several things, and…discovered a little here and a little there, and finally all put it together. It took me about ten years of trying, off and on, of course—I didn’t do it to the exclusion of anything else. But I went at it several times, including breaking the heels and having to get well again from that. It was about ten years after I first tried it, until I found it altogether.
Steiger: Where does that come from, the fascination to find a new route, to find a place that hasn’t been before? What drives you there?
Butchart: Oh, I don’t know, it’s just innate in some people, I guess—get a kick out of seeing something new. The researchers in mathematics get a kick out of what they say is new, and so do practically all scientists, looking for something new. And many other people too—kayaking. I call some of it, though, that’s really dangerous—like Mt. Everest, that they say has cost about one-third of all the people that have made a serious try for the top have been killed or died of exposure—I don’t call that good clean fun. I think they could let that alone and be happier, and so on. There are other things that are more work than they should…just because they give you a charge of being ahead of somebody else, I guess. But I like to see something like, oh, rattlesnakes… anything that is surprising a little bit. And so I enjoy the scenery, maybe not as much as I did at first. I remember a little anecdote that—I was carrying a fairly large looking pack up from Bright Angel campgrounds up the South Kaibab Trail and a woman on a horse in a horse party came by and said the usual thing, “Well, was it worth it?” And I said, “Oh, I guess so.” But I thought it over later, what my answer should have been to give a little bit more charge to my reply would be, “Oh, I guess it was better the first 25 times.” (chuckles)
* * *
Buchart: Practically every route I’ve found, I would find that the Indians knew about it. I don’t know if you count mescal pits where if you’re in the neighborhood of a route and you come on an Indian ruin or a mescal pit, you’re pretty sure that the Indians knew about that route. I don’t think there was much that they left out in 150 years of occupation in the Grand Canyon—they knew everything that was possible.
Steiger: What’s that say about— here’s an entirely different culture that came and went? Do you think that’ll happen with this culture here?
Butchart: Well, that’s hard to say. I doubt if the present population of the usa will be extinct…. I think it probably came as close to disaster with the atom bomb and the Cold War twenty years ago as it ever will come. I don’t think that the atom bomb will ever extinguish all mammal life—probably leave the cockroaches alone, but it might hurt the rest of mammal life if they had an atomic war, for instance. But that may be the only thing that could make a real disaster of wiping out this culture that we’re in now.
Steiger: Do you have any notions on what it was that did the Indians in?
Butchart: No, just that life got harder for them. They weren’t getting as good crops as they had, and I don’t know now if they were suffering from malnutrition and hunger and starvation, how far would they get? Usually the scientists tell you that they went to places like the Verde Valley or the Rio Grande Valley and so on and got to farming better places. But those places were already occupied by other Indians. Well, I don’t know the answer to why the Indians left, but some people say it was hostile tribes coming in and taking their lands away by killing them.
Steiger: I don’t know if I buy that, just because—you know, you see all these high places and people say those were defensive. But what doesn’t make sense to me is there’s such good views, and also, it’d be so easy to just wait you out if you were out there holed up where you couldn’t get water.
Butchart: I think they figured that maybe they had a few pots of water, and the attackers didn’t know where the next water was, and had to give up the siege after a day or two. But I think there are places that are definitely explained only for defensive purposes and not for continuous living. For instance, right down here by Cliff Dwellers Lodge there’s a promontory that sticks out and widens out at the end, but there’s a neck that’s only about twenty feet wide, and there’s a rock wall on that neck, crossing the neck. The only thing I can see, it wouldn’t be a corral for their domestic stock or anything, I think it was probably defensive from Indian attack. There isn’t any good way to get up on that promontory except for at that neck. And I can think of ruins in the Grand Canyon too that are on isolated sort of sky islands. And they have ramparts facing the mainland, but nothing on the outside, nothing on the side toward the canyon. So I think they were preparing to hold off attackers from shooting arrows from behind the wall.
* * *
Steiger: Did you know Emery Kolb?
Butchart: Yeah, I visited with Emery about four or five times, and maybe 45 minutes of conversation each time. At least once I was in to ask for his help. He gave it to me quickly, and easily as well. I was reading a passage in G.W. James’ book about a certain panel of Indian pictographs under an overhang. I had looked for them. He used landmarks that are no longer there, about a camp at some point, kind of a Fred Harvey facility that they’ve torn down since then. The location didn’t give me much help. And I went in there and used oh, several, two, three, four attempts at finding this panel of pictographs. Then I went in to Emery Kolb. As luck would have it, I talked to his Supai Indian janitor first, and the janitor told me about a place where there were pictographs above the Bright Angel Trail, down near the first water station, which was right, I found them later. But I talked to Emery about it, and I said that didn’t seem right for what James was talking about, because it was supposed to be close under the rim. Emery told me right away where to look for them. And they were there alright. Emery Kolb hadn’t visited them for a long time. He thought they would probably be wiped out by vandals, but they weren’t, they were in pretty good shape.
Steiger: So he knew what he was talking about.
Butchart: Yeah, he did that time. A couple of other times, he wasn’t so sure of his information. For instance, he didn’t remember the exact people who went with him up on top of Shiva Temple to beat the scientific party from New York City to the top. And he gave me the wrong list of his companions. I was sure that they were wrong in the end, because this Grand Canyon Pioneer Society that likes these old pictures turned up a picture of the group that had gone up Shiva Temple, and it wasn’t the same. It had Emery in it, but it didn’t have the right people that Emery had told me were with him. So I knew then that Emery didn’t get everything straight in his mind, because it was forty, at least 39 years or so since he had done it. And he could be forgiven for expecting a little bit of shaky memory after that long a time.
Steiger: Sometimes I kind of envy the Kolb brothers.
Butchart: Yeah. Sure, I used to think that too, and then it turned out that there were more places that hadn’t been found yet in the Grand Canyon…I mean, I had a chance to do more than Emery had done in his time. Of course he had a health breakdown shortly before I went to Arizona in 1945, so he was busy hiking not longer than from 1902 or 1903, up until about 1940. And then that span of time didn’t beat the amount of time I had in the Canyon, and I had more vacation periods and freedom to hike than Emery did. So I figured on the basis of that, I’d probably done more than Emery in the hiking line. He had done some other things that I hadn’t done, like going to Alaska and photographing in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes after the big eruption. And he’d gone East and had a lecture series about the Grand Canyon, also about Alaska, I believe. So he and I didn’t exactly try to outdo each other, because we weren’t doing the same thing.
Steiger: Do you think the opportunity is still…do you think there’s a bunch of stuff still out there that nobody’s been to?
Butchart: Yes, I believe there is. I don’t know for sure how much more there is, but there’s quite a little bit, I’m pretty sure. For instance, the place in the Bridge of Sighs, up at Mile 35.5 or so in Marble Canyon, just in the last few years a young man, Bob Dawson, was looking for condor bones with a companion. They had found some more besides those in Stanton’s Cave, and they were looking for more, then when they came to this area, Bridge of Sighs—the name was given by the Kolb brothers after their 1911 trip—they saw Steck’s, maybe you read this in George Steck’s second guide book…they found poles sticking out of the wall, some actual rock construction in the wall there, and poles sticking through. And so they figured there was something worth doing. They came back from above, where another man had told me there was a route down off the rim, and I had passed it on to some other people, and they came in from above like that, and they came down and entered a cave that was higher than the bridge itself. They got into a chamber and in the middle of this chamber—now I’m just talking this from what I read, and I may be getting it a little bit wrong myself—maybe you’d better look in the Loop Hikes #2 by George Steck for this account. They found a place where there’s a hole in the middle of the floor, and it was such a tight squeeze that they had to hold their arms above their heads to get through. It went down a little bit of a curve, sort of a spiral, and then they had to sort of drop down onto the floor below them. That business, dropping down, maybe they had dropped a pebble and found out how far down it was. But two or three of them went down there, and they got out to see daylight through this wall that they had seen, and they found a crack in the rocks that led down to the water’s edge. I released two or three of them, and I don’t know how many now have climbed down through that area and gone down to the river. And there’s an Indian ruin on the other side of the river, although the river isn’t easily crossed there; it’s fairly swift. Well, for instance, that wasn’t known until just three or four years ago, and I’m sure there are places, especially in the west part of the Grand Canyon, that haven’t been climbed, certainly, and probably haven’t even been walked around in—valleys that nobody has entered, or at least not recently. Indians have been there, I believe…in 150 years of occupation, they got everywhere. But I don’t think the Indians climbed all the summits. There are some that have cairns on them before my time, but I counted up my first ascents a few days ago, and listed them and I got 26 that had no cairns on them. So I would consider them as first ascents.
Steiger: 26! You said earlier you’d walked probably about 12,000 miles. If you could just give a brief summary of your…
Butchart: There were two other things that I kept track of…. One of the lists I’ve kept track of was the number of summits climbed, named high points in the Canyon. I climbed 83 before I gave out. Of course Oldman, Packard, and Walters have climbed over 130. Well anyway, there are two other lists that I kept track of—kept track of the number of places I’ve been through the Redwall formation, which is usually regarded as tough, and not very many ways through, but I’ve found 164 before I quit. Then also I kept track of the number of places that I reached the river bank independent of each other, and it came to 116. So those three things: 83 summits, 164 Redwall routes, and 116 ways down to the river.
Steiger: Boy, that’s something!
Butchart: Counting ways that I left the rim, it would be over 140. But they converge and make one place down to the water.
Steiger: And that’s over how many years?
Butchart: I kept busy for about 41 years.
Steiger: And that’s over 12,000 miles?
Butchart: Yeah, I had written up my logs, accounts of the trips soon after I came home, since 1959. Before that I tried to remember what I’d done and wrote some little summaries about mostly just where and how many days it took and so on, and then added up the number of days that I’d really put into my logs, into the records, and it was over a thousand—about 1,025. Then I thought over trying to get a fair estimate of my mileage per day, and I think I probably averaged about twelve miles a day, making 12,000 miles of hiking in the Canyon.
Steiger: How many total trips?
Butchart: Well, my longest trips were about six-and-a-half days, and typically a Grand Canyon hike for me about would be a weekender, say leave home Friday afternoon and come back Sunday evening. Of those 1,025 days, then I think would account for about half that many separate trips. Many trips were just overnighters, and quite a few just one-day trips. So if you wanted a number on the number of trips, that’s something I haven’t kept track of, but I would estimate it to be maybe five hundred separate trips.
Steiger: Richard Quartaroli told me that you’ve been all the way from Badger to Bass Camp on an air mattress.

Butchart: That’s right. Also, you must remember, I get out above the rapid and walk the boulder bars and get in below the rapid and paddle away. But once in a while I was upset. If I was upset, I would get my arms over the middle of the air mattress and put it under my chest, going out sideways, and I was very stable that way, and my head would be a foot above water. I went through Sockdolager and Grapevine with that technique.
Steiger: You’re kidding! On an air mattress?!
Butchart: Yeah. I had only a day pack on those two. I went down to Hance Rapid and came out at the Suspension Bridge. And that time I had a companion too, who did it very well, no panic or nothing unusual except that we were about an hour later than we had estimated. We got in a snafu about car service to get home that night. But that was about the first really serious floating I did in the Canyon, was from Hance Rapid down to the Suspension Bridge at the Kaibab Trail.
Steiger: My God! Now wait a minute, did you have a life jacket on?
Butchart: No life jacket.
Steiger: You just did it on an air mattress.
Butchart: Yeah, that’s right.
Steiger: And a day pack.
Butchart: Yeah. I had clothes in the day pack and lunch. That’s all.
Steiger: So did everything in the day pack get wet?
Butchart: No, I had a system of putting a plastic sheet inside a backpack and folding it over on top, and if it got off my shoulder and into the water, it’d just float along. The pack itself would get wet, but the contents wouldn’t.
Steiger: That’s amazing! Now, was that before the dam, before the water was cold?
Butchart: Yeah, before the water was cold, that’s true. And not in spring, like Daggett and Beer in April. The Grand Canyon water was darned cold where they went. But ours was comfortable after ten o’clock in the morning and before four o’clock in the evening. But when I went from Badger Creek to the Tanner Trail, that was the longest one stretch for six days out. So that time I had a spare mattress with me, and blew it up and lay on top of two air mattresses, keeping a pretty good balance, that’s a little hard to keep from turning over with two mattresses under you.
Steiger: Okay, wait a minute, I gotta get this straight. So you went for a six-day trip, hiked in at Badger, you went to Tanner. So you had your bed and all your food.
Butchart: Yeah, in fact, I was loaded for more than that. I was loaded for twelve days. I abandoned some of my food before I came out, because it was weighing me down.
Steiger: So you just floated down, and you’d get out at the rapids and walk around.
Butchart: Yeah. Get a good campsite for the night, and it worked out real well.
Steiger: Did you use flippers or anything?
Butchart: No, no flippers. I was keeping my feet pretty well up on the mattress and pointing my toes to save any drag, and using my hands to paddle.
Steiger: And how old were you when you were doing that?
Butchart: Let’s see, that was in 1956, so I was 59 years old, and the next year I would have been sixty.
Steiger: That’s just unbelievable. Now 1956, wasn’t that pretty high water? Or was it? Was it about average water?
Butchart: It was late in the summer, end of August and early September. No, let’s see, the longest trip was in late July, and it was fairly warm water, although I did appreciate keeping a little drier, out of the water, before ten o’clock in the morning and after four in the evening. And so I spent Monday on that trip walking up Kwagunt Canyon, and I chafed my ankles. I would have gone further, I guess, if I hadn’t gotten some raw spots on my feet and legs.
Steiger: That just blows me away. And nobody else was down there, either. Did you see any other boat parties or anything?
Butchart: No boat parties…
Here Dr. Butchart paused for a long moment, then went on.
And by the way…my wife doesn’t like me to bring this up, but I guess it’s only fair. In 1954 I experimented with the air mattress. That was when I was going through Sockdolager, in 1954. Then in 1955, a young man who had hiked with me more than anyone else for four years, reacted to my [adventures]. I kept in correspondence with him. He was excited about going through the Canyon with me on an air mattress. I didn’t realize that he was conditioned to panic in water. It’s kind of a long story, probably longer than I ought to take time for…. If you have five more minutes of time…
Steiger: Yeah, we’ve got time. We’ve got all the time we need.
Butchart: I’ll tell you about this trip that resulted in…. This had to do with Boyd Moore, who was my companion in hiking, mostly around Sedona and also a lot in the Grand Canyon. He and I were closer friends than I’ve ever been with anyone else, I guess. When we heard about Goldwater’s discovery of the bridge now called Kolb Bridge, we wanted to go down and see it. We also wanted to use our air mattress idea and see the Canyon from the water. He was enthusiastic in thinking about it ahead of time, but when it came down to it, it wasn’t a bit smart. Well anyway, we went up to Point Imperial and got hiking away from there with a third man that wanted to photograph Kolb Bridge. This was before…. Let’s see, it was after the trip that Goldwater went in there by helicopter and took some pictures that got published in Arizona Highways. Well, we went in from above and went down the Nankoweap Trail. We missed the Nankoweap Trail and the place where it goes off to the saddle. In fact, I can’t imagine how poor we were at trying to find that place, although we had found the way off the higher country down to the saddle alright. We went on the Hermit’s Trail out to the east end of Saddle Mountain and had to spend the night without any water—we’d run out. We got down the next morning by finding a way we could help each other with passing the packs and got down to the Tilted Mesa and then down to Nankoweap Creek. It was that same day, I believe, that we got down to Nankoweap Creek. The second day we went up to the Kolb Bridge and took pictures and even measured it with a string that I had carried along for that purpose. Then we headed for the river. We got down near the river and spent that night camping there. The next day we were planning to go down the Colorado and cross before we got to the place where the National Park was on both sides of the river. And we thought we were avoiding violation of rules by doing that, if we got across the river before we got to the Little Colorado. Well, we tried out our air mattress idea in the water above Kwagunt Creek and he seemed to get along pretty well and I did alright, although this was a different situation from how we had done Sockdolager before, because that was in low water and this was in high water in the end of May with 35,000 cubic feet per second, so there’s a lot of current. It was running at ten to fifteen miles an hour, I guess. We came to a place where I said, “Well, I can see a current that will carry me pretty well past the middle of the river. I’ll go
his arms around one end of the mattress, and locked his ankles around the other end in a hammer lock, and he was lying on the underside of the mattress with his nose about an inch above water. But before I caught up with him in that eddy on the left side of the river, the current swirled him across into a still bigger eddy on the right side. Incidentally, it was very close to where the twa plane crashed after colliding with the United plane the next year, in 1956. This was in 1955. I got over to where he was circulating in the eddy across on the right bank, in a place about as big as three tennis courts, and I got to him, and we couldn’t get him rightside up on top of his mattress without disengaging the knapsack that he had on his back. We slipped it off and let it go and he got up on top of his mattress with my help, then we tried to get to the bank. And for some reason, the water was coming up from underneath the bank at both ends and the side of the big eddy. We tried and tried, over an hour I think, and couldn’t make it to shore. He had hung on my feet for a while, but I couldn’t paddle for both of us very well. He outweighed me quite a lot. He was about 170 and I was about 130. And so I couldn’t make much progress. He let go and I thought, “Well, if I could get to shore, maybe I could throw him a line and get him to shore.” But I couldn’t get ashore by myself. We proceeded that way. I was not panicked exactly, but I was sort of stalled in thinking the situation over. And I could have come to better decisions than I made, but while I was trying to get to shore, keeping on trying, he was caught by the middle of the river current and taken on downstream, and I was separated from him quite a little way at that time.
As soon as I came around to the middle of the river, I paddled away and got out of that eddy and followed him down. The last thing I saw of him, he had tipped over again, and he had done the same thing, without holding onto the middle of the mattress and letting it go out to the sides, as I had been instructing him and trying to train him in that, he reacted…just absolutely panicked. So I followed him down, but it got to be clear dark and I couldn’t see nearly as far as he was away from me, and I figured it wouldn’t do me much good to try to follow him down. When the noise of the Lava Creek Rapid began to sound, I worked my way over to the left bank, and where there was a quiet stretch of water there, there wasn’t a troublesome eddy the way the others were. I had no trouble at all in making my landing. I can reproach myself, blame myself for not staying with him within touching distance all the in here and you wait ’til you see that I’m across before you come.” And so we did that. I carried some of his weight in my pack too, so that he would have a lighter load, because he wasn’t as experienced in water as I was. So I went down and I couldn’t get across. The current changed its course and carried me back near the side on the right bank, where I’d come from, but out of sight of Boyd, and I was deflating my air mattress and going to carry it back and we’d do something else besides cross the river. But just as I was about ready to walk, here I saw him in the middle of the river, coming downstream lickety-split. And so I got ready to go as soon as I could, and I went after him. I might not have ever seen him again, but he got caught in a big eddy and was swirling around slowly when I caught up with him, below the mouth of the Little Colorado. He had panicked and he had grabbed the air mattress with time. If I had stayed there, I might have pulled us both over towards that shore in the distance we travelled down the river before we got to Lava Creek. But I had to spend a night of eating what I could to make up my strength for the next day, and felt pretty sick on the climb out. I watched along the bank to see if I could see anything that would be significant, and I didn’t. I went out and gave the alarm. The Park Service started a search along the banks for about a week, but they didn’t find anything. So he was gone.
Steiger: Never found him?
Butchart: Never found him, even a trace, except for one thing: the knapsack that he slipped off and dropped into the deep water of this eddy turned up on shore at Unkar Rapid. And P.T. Reilly, he found it. He didn’t think much of it. He didn’t want to bother with it, and so he threw it away. And Georgie White came along and she brought it up to the Park Service Visitors Center and donated it to anybody that wanted it, and she got credit for having found his knapsack. But there was no trace of a body. I was sick for a week in bed over that, emotionally, and depressed for six months about that experience…. Yeah, it’s one of the tragedies of the Grand Canyon. And it was all because he was so panicked. I didn’t realize how important that was. He had a scare with water when he was three years old and had never recovered. Although he had learned to swim, he didn’t swim very well.
Steiger: Now you guys put in above the Little Colorado?
Butchart: Yes, quite a little way, about a mile upstream from the Little Colorado mouth.
Steiger: So below Sixty Mile.
Butchart: Yeah, that was about right.
Steiger: And probably that next little riffle, and then just below that.
Butchart: Yeah, we thought we could get across before we got to the Little Colorado. And we did make it, both of us, alive, to about a mile-and-a-half below the Little Colorado.
Steiger: Yeah, those eddies down there are something. I know that beach. I bet I know the big eddy that you’re talking about, right where the crash was. Yeah, that’s a hell of an eddy in high water.
Butchart: Yeah, that’s the truth.
Steiger: You said, “when we swam Sockdolager.” That was you and somebody else?
Butchart: Somebody else, yeah. Yeah, I don’t know whether he would have accepted the chance to go down there; I don’t think he would have. And he shouldn’t have agreed to go with me, and I shouldn’t have invited him. We had trips with each other on Lake Mead, for instance; I had a homemade boat that I took along there and we had a camping trip on Lake Mead. [Boyd] told me before the last day that he had a tendency to panic in water. He said, “Remember, when we were on Lake Mead you went swimming in the
evening and I didn’t. I didn’t like it.”
Steiger: Oh boy.
Butchart: Yeah, he said something else that really kind of burns into my consciousness every now and then, that when we were short of water, in getting down to Nankoweap Creek the wrong day, we missed our trail and didn’t get there that night for camping. He said, “Well, we’re in this thing together,” and he shared his last drink with me. I think of that remark, “We’re in this together,” and it turned out that I didn’t stay with him, and take whatever was coming to him. I didn’t share. That is something on my conscience.
Steiger: Well, I don’t know that it should be.
Butchart: They had said when they came out in the paper that the Park Service and authorities said, “There’s no crime committed,” but that doesn’t mean exactly everything was honorable. That’s true.
Steiger: I think it’s a lot easier to…. I think when these things are going on, I think sometimes things happen so fast that you don’t…
Butchart: A lot of people have gotten into jams have made the wrong decisions. I’ve read about people in the desert where their car breaks down, and they make the wrong decision about which way to walk and all that.
Steiger: Well, I think it’s real easy to see it all clearly after the fact. After time to reflect you can make up your mind, but when things are happening, a lot of times you don’t have time…. I don’t think you should blame yourself for something like that.
Butchart: Well, I don’t blame myself completely, but I can certainly wish that things were different.
Steiger: Well, I’ve got a bunch of things like that too. Thanks for telling that, that’s an amazing story.
Butchart: Well, let’s see, if you have any questions, I’ll keep still for a while while you think ’em up.
Steiger: This trip down to Sockdolager, that was low water and that was fine?
Butchart: Yeah, that was low water.
Steiger: Well, now, did you swim all those other rapids too?
Butchart: No, not exactly. I think Sockdolager and Grapevine were about the only ones.
Steiger: You can’t hardly walk around those, can you?
Butchart: That’s right. We tried to walk a little way, and wet tennis shoes were really bad on the polished-water-schist and granite. We were safer in the water. But there was one other place that my companion—I was going ahead and sort of giving the orders, and I landed with the expectation of walking past this rapid, and probably he saw that he was going to disobey—he wasn’t going to be the second mate and let me be the captain. He went down the middle of the river and took on a thing that was a drop about the size of this reflector here, pretty steep, about a 45 degree angle, and went over there with only about two feet of water to cushion him, and I don’t think he scraped, and he went over in good shape. He gave me a cheerful yell when he was going over. So he was safe in the water, he felt at home, and he did it in fine shape. But he walked out so badly. He gave me the impression that he was in good hiking condition too, when I took him on, and he was slow getting up the Kaibab Trail, practically six hours. I thought four hours, four-and-a-half, should be enough for us to get out on.
Steiger: What did you walk the Kaibab Trail in, in your best shape?
Butchart: When I was in my best shape, I had two trips that I count. One time was only with a canteen and lunch, and I did it in two hours and fifty minutes, not fifteen, but fifty. And another time with a pack weighing about eighteen or nineteen pounds, I came up from the campground to the head of the Kaibab in three hours and eight minutes. That was my best, and many times slower, and in my last ten years of my hiking, I was taking a long time.
Steiger: Boy. Well, I wonder what we’re forgetting? I feel like I’m not doing a very good job here. Usually when I do these things I’ll pack up all this stuff and then be driving away and something will come, “Gee, maybe we should have covered this or that.”
Butchart: That’s what they always say. You do a speech three times: one time when you’re thinking about what you’re going to say, one time when you say it, and the next day you think what you should have said.
Steiger: Yeah, that’s about it…. How many river trips did you do?
Butchart: Oh, two. I was just ready to pay my money and go, but Buzz Belknap put me in the River Runner’s Guide, and a little paragraph and picture, so Ken Sleight thought that—he liked to take a guest along each year, and he decided I would be his guest that year. I was quite willing to agree, and in 1970 I went through the Grand Canyon down to Diamond Creek with Ken Sleight. And then in, let’s see, about four years ago now, it would be about 1991, I’m not sure, particularly, why Cam Staveley invited me to go, but he and George Bain apparently were pretty good friends, and George Bain sort of sponsored me, and Cam Staveley invited me to go along as his guest down the same way, so two times through the Grand Canyon to Diamond Creek. Then I’ve boated in my own boat up from Lake Mead up to about, well, within about four miles of Diamond Creek.
Steiger: How do you compare the experience of going in a boat [to] hiking? And this is just for the river runners collection.
Butchart: Well, I figured that I’m not too proud to accept airplane service, boating service, and then I figured that hiking is really what I look back on as more credit, more satisfaction. And when I found places in Lake Powell that you get into hinterlands and you work your way around, and if you get smart enough, you can find the way the Indians formed their route by cutting steps in the rock. I was fascinated by that kind of thing too.
Steiger: By tracing the old Indian routes.
Butchart: Yeah, that’s right.
Steiger: Do you think they had…? Sometimes I look at them and I think they must have had a better time than we do.
Butchart: (chuckles) I don’t know, over the coffee hour at the college, we sometimes broach the question, “Do you think there was a golden age, or is it now?” One of the men I was talking to over coffee was saying he thought it was his grandparents’ days (laughs); they were better than ours, for some reason. I guess mainly the crime situation wasn’t as bad.
Steiger: What do you think?
Butchart: Well, I imagine that I would probably just as soon live now as any other time in the world’s history.
Steiger: How come?
Butchart: Well, the neat things you can do for vacations and sharing with other people and so on, and tennis courts and TVs. (laughs) I play a lot of chess and of course you’ve had chess for maybe two thousand years. It’s still going strong.
Steiger: Well, it’s funny, you know, you look at geologic time and it’s hard to think of how many different…. I don’t know. I guess there weren’t that many people around here before the Indians and stuff.
Butchart: You know, the Indians had a day when there were a lot more of them than there were when the white men came. They’d reached a peak and then something got them way down. The Museum of Northern Arizona had places where they estimated the number of population in the area of the Salt River Valley or whatever, and the Indians around 1400 or 1200 were much more numerous than they were when the white man showed up in this country.
Steiger: That’s what makes me wonder, I guess, just about us. I guess we’re pretty…more fixed. I don’t know what we’d do with all the numbers—for sure a lot more people now…. Has that bothered you to see all these people coming, to see the extra population in the Canyon?
Butchart: Actually, that’s another thing. Some people don’t like to look at a piece of scenery, like looking at the Grand Canyon, with anyone else around. But I’m not bothered that way, I’m tolerant (chuckles) of other people. I like to have other people enjoy it with me, as well as by myself. Although it is a little thrill to being out by yourself.
I was writing a letter to Joe Hall who is the expert
Harvey - Apache Plume background 10-18-69.
Photo by P.T. Reilly, NAU.PH.97.46.165.23
on the Kaibab squirrel, and I used the phrase, “the grand lonesome feeling,” or something like that. But I was thinking about a young hiker, Jim Sears [phonetic spelling], who, by the way, was the steady boyfriend of Ellen Tibbetts who lives in Flagstaff now, for four years of college. He was approached by, indirectly from me, a man in California, Phil Porter wanted to write a detailed tote book for the Sierra Club of hiking routes. And it’s going to be much more detailed than anything I’ve written. Anyway, he said he had a card file of these possible hikes, and said do I know any hikers that could give me their favorite hikes? So I gave him a list of about five people, including George Billingsley and this Jim Sears and Jorgen Visback [phonetic spelling] and maybe a couple of others, and Jim Sears’ response to him was rather interesting. The others sent him some help, but Jim Sears says, “I don’t like to see people in the Canyon when I’m hiking, and I don’t even like to see their footprints, so I’m not going to tell you anything.” (laughs) So there are different viewpoints about that question that you just raised about the number of people in the Canyon.
Steiger: Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do
about it. That’s a tough one.
Butchart: Well, it’s true that I have switched, after it became very annoying in the main part of the Grand Canyon that everybody visits—they had so many rules and regulations. You had to have a permit on your backpack or you get really jumped on, and fined maybe. And so I transferred my interest to the western end where there aren’t any rangers looking out for you…or jumping at you. I sometimes think—and I don’t want to take it literally—but Kipling wrote one time, “Ship me somewhere east of Suez where the best is like the worst, and there ain’t no ten commandments and a man can raise a thirst.” I didn’t go for the last part, but—I guess you might say I got thirsty and drank my canteen water; but Kipling wasn’t exactly talking about that.

Lew Steiger