Prez Blurb

Perhaps some of you will recall running your first trip in the Canyon, the excitement of pushing off at Lees Ferry, the exhilaration of making it through Paria Rapid, thinking to yourself, “ This is great, I’m a Grand Canyon Boatman!,” and the sobering first look at House Rock, or Unkar, or Hance, thinking to yourself, “What the hell was I thinking?”
Some combination of those feelings is what it feels like to write one’s first column as president of Grand Canyon River Guides. In order to get a feel for what was required, I made the mistake of reading a number of old boatman’s quarterly reviews, and before those, The News. Bad move! I gained a new appreciation for the amount of work (and writing) that has been done before. Some time, if you get snowed in, or you are moving old books from one storage unit to another, take an hour or two to go through some old bqrs. What an amazing adventure gcrg is, and what luck to be around it while history is made.
Hopefully by the time you read this, the Colorado River Management Plan will be out in draft form, with a preferred alternative identified. The gcrg board and officers will be reviewing and commenting on the draft. I can not emphasize too strongly how important it is for each and every member of gcrg to also comment individually on the proposed plan. Even if you agree completely with the preferred alternative as it is written, you should still comment to that effect. No matter what the preferred alternative is, many people will criticize it and ask for it to be changed, and it would be a shame if the Park came up with your dream plan and it got changed because you didn’t speak up for it.

The new plan may affect how much work there is for guides in the Canyon, who you can work for, how you can work, and how often you can go on private trips. I hope there is something in that list to get each one of you fired up enough to write or email your comments to the National Park Service.
Gcrg continues to participate in the Adaptive Management Process, whereby a group of interested parties makes recommendations to the Secretary of the Interior on how the Bureau of Reclamation should operate Glen Canyon Dam. I was able to attend the Technical Work Group meeting in October as an alternate for our representative Matt Kaplinski. We are at the table with the tribes, the water and power interests, the federal agencies, and the other recreational and environmental interests. We don’t always get all we want for the Canyon, but we get more than if we didn’t participate. At least that was the way I saw it.
I’m writing this in the beginning of November, thinking of another summer season gone by, and I am reminded of the words of a boatman from 150 years ago:
We were rowing homeward to find some autumnal work to do, and help on the revolution of the seasons.

—Henry Thoreau
“A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”
I hope you all have found some good Fall or Winter work, to help on the “revolution of the seasons.”

John O