In Reference to “Prez Blurb—crmp update” by Drifter Smith in bqr 18:1

Drifter,
he division you continue to support and cause between various user groups is as amazing as it is well hidden in your rhetoric in the “Prez Blurb” (bqr, Spring, 2005). How can it be that a person who wants to continue “celebrating the unique spirit of the river community....” can also try to divide it with such disingenuous barbs as you have? Is gcrg really on higher moral ground? Does gcrg really believe it sees the big picture and nobody else does? Is the attempt to find a common negotiated solution really a swamp? If the representatives of a volunteer group aren’t self-appointed, then who should appoint them? And what’s with all the “quotation marks” that lead the reader to trivialize perfectly good concepts? From my reading of the joint comments of the four agreeing parties (gcpba, gcroa, aw, and gcrra) I didn’t get any sense of them trying to assert “authority” (your quotation marks) over a final plan any more than gcrg tried to assert its authority with 39 pages of its own comments. That’s the public planning process, Sir. It is not a battle of them versus us. If you would join the process you would be more likely to be effective than if carping from the shadows.
There is a big picture that gcrg doesn’t acknowledge –equal rights. A stakeholder group, not one of mine, recently mentioned secretly, too late, and also from the shadows, the big picture. Unfortunately none of us read the mind of that group nor divined which comments would suit its directors, so that group paints all of us black, even gcrg. And black may be an appropriate color. We didn’t offer to close the canyon to visitation; we didn’t offer any of our own allocation to people who don’t want to be on commercially outfitted trips; we didn’t support equal rights. Equal rights is a far bigger issue than canyon protection; in fact, resource protection is a subset of equal rights, specifically, the next generation cannot enjoy the canyon if we don’t give them a chance to use it or if we trash the place by hosing through a horde of people. And while gcrg is justifiably proud of their goal of protecting the resource, a goal shared by most if not all stakeholder groups, gcrg has missed the big picture.
If the big picture of equal rights were our focus right now we could indeed celebrate the unique spirit of the River Community, not just the community of guides, outfitters, and customers. Unfortunately, to do so we would have to wring some of the gcrg rhetoric out of our laundry so we can move ahead a bit cleaner. I really hope that some day we guides can give up the idea that we own some sort of magical experience that only we can truly develop, enhance, and impart. We don’t own “the best possible river experience.” We provide only one of many possible best experiences. But with your empty rhetoric, delivered too late to influence the planning, the best that gcrg has managed for now is to continue the divisive message of the last four decades. That message is that guides on professional trips are better than other river users.
I am calling on my fellow guides to stop poisoning the well. Start treating all others in the river community as neighbors you’d like to enjoy. All the river advocates deserve our respect and not our subtle or overt calumny. After all, who was it that brought the great preponderance of those resource-damaging people down the canyon, anyway? It was you and I, not any of the smaller players. And now we rail at our little brothers for ruining the resource? Get serious.

David Yeamans
crmp commenter

In Reference to “Lake What-a-hugee?” by Jon Hirsh in bqr 17:4

I recently discovered an article by Jon Hirsh on a landslide by Fossil Rapid in the bqr. I am a graduate student at the University of Missouri—Rolla. I enjoyed reading the article on “Lake What-a-hugee” and think he has something here. I am researching similar events throughout the canyon and it seems landslide damming is FAR more common than anyone previously realized. The real classics are around Deer Creek. There is the old buried channel of the river at mile 135 and the huge Deer Creek Slide just downstream. It seems that the Deer Creek Slide dammed the river, filled up with sediments, and then broke catastrophically, leaving significant debris terraces downstream. Anyways, check out some of my research at www.umr.edu/~rogersda/cp_megalandslides

Conor Watkins