was born in Riverside, California—native Californian. My parents were native Californians. I was the oldest male in my family, one of ten children, second born. I have six sisters, and then the last three were brothers—all of whom now work for me on the river. (chuckles) Pretty ironic.
I lived with my parents until I was about sixteen, and then I moved in with my grandmother, ‘cause she was alone, she was a widow. It gave me an opportunity to get out of the house. . . she needed somebody to kind of look after her. So it was good for both of us. I lived with her for about five years.
Eventually I went to college. I was workin’ for my dad at A to Z Printing, which was a printing company that his dad had started in Riverside in 1909 or something like that. I was goin’ to school, workin’ for my dad, and that’s when I met Bill Belknap. He came in one day and wanted a Colorado River map printed. I was runnin’ some of the offset presses and we ran his Colorado River guide, so I got to see first-hand the Colorado River via a river map. The first year he printed it, my cousin, O’C, had just gotten back from Vietnam—1969 or 1970. So he was kinda lookin’ for somethin’ to do, and Bill offered him an opportunity to go down the river in 1970.
A funny story—O’C ended up spendin’ the summer on the river with Grand Canyon Expeditions. He called me back after a couple of trips, said how cool it was, and it was really exciting, I had to do it. So I figured, “Well, I’ll go get me a raft and I’ll go do it!” (laughter) I went down to the local surplus store and bought this $49 raft. It might have been $29, I can’t remember… yellow, just little plastic oars and stuff. I was ready! (laughter) I called him up one time, I told him I’d gotten myself a raft and I was comin’ out. He goes, (flatly) “Take the raft back.” (laughter) (excitedly) “No, man, I’m comin’! Really, I’m comin’ down to do it!” (flatly) “Take the raft back.” (laughter) Okay, so I took the raft back.
You know, he came back and told me all kinds of stories that fall. And then Bill came to the print shop and we were reprinting his guide book. We did that every year for a number of years.
Lew Steiger: You mean, you just did a year’s worth at a time?
Regan Dale: Uh-huh. This was a brand new thing.
Steiger: He didn’t want to get in too deep.
RD: No. At the time, he was partners with Grand Canyon Expeditions (gce)—he and Ron Smith were partners, and they were operating out of Salt Lake City, driving to the Grand Canyon for every trip… So I asked Bill if I could go down the river with him. He goes, “Sure. You come up to Kanab, Utah, and we’ll give you a river trip or somethin’, give you an opportunity.” I said, “Great!” About two weeks later, I quit school, quit work, packed up—I had a backpack, and was gonna hitchhike to Kanab from Riverside. I had, I can’t remember who it was, give me a ride to the on-ramp for the freeway, and I’m sittin’ there hitchhikin’—in the spring of 1971, like in March. This car pulls up, and it was full of five or six black guys. They go, “Hop in!” I’m goin’, “Where you goin’?” They said, “Wherever you wanna go!” I don’t know about this. (laughter) “I don’t think so.” They go, “You got any money? Got any drugs?” I’m goin’, “No, I don’t think so. I’m not gettin’ in that car with you,” and I started walkin’ away. They were just gonna roll me. (Steiger: Yeah.) They were gonna take me out in the desert and take everything I had and bury me somewhere. So I was pretty lucky I didn’t get in that car. And after that I went, “Shit, I’m not hitchhikin’. This is crazy!” I went back and got a bus ticket to St. George, and pulled into St. George about 7 a.m. It was like an all-night bus ride. Pulled into St. George and asked ‘em, “Where’s Kanab?” They said, “Well, you got a little ways to go yet.” I started hitchhikin’ out of St. George and hitchhiked over to Hurricane, and then spent about half a day on that Hurricane Hill, you know, sittin’ there, waitin’. Finally somebody gave me a ride to Colorado City.
Steiger: Now, you probably looked pretty clean-cut and everything, huh? I’m tryin’ to just place the times.
RD: I can’t remember. No, I probably had long hair and a beard. Yeah. So finally I got to Fredonia, and then I got another ride to Kanab. It was probably four o’clock in the afternoon by the time I got to Kanab. I’m walkin’ through town, and the local sheriff pulls up, wants to know what I’m doin’, where I’m goin’. You know, checked me out thoroughly. Wanted to see my i.d. I thought he was gonna go through my pack. That wouldn’t have surprised me. But I kept tellin’ him I was just goin’ up here to Grand Canyon Expeditions, they had offered me a job. So he kind of escorted me up there. They had just bought the building, the warehouse. I walked in and Dean Waterman was there, O’C was there. Dean said he’d give me a job, and I spent the next… Well, the first three or four weeks, we built the bunkhouse: put the siding on the bunkhouse and put in windows and doors, just labor.
Steiger: You did a pretty nice job!
RD: Yeah, it’s held up well. They had their office in there also, in part of it. They gave us a room. I don’t think there was any heat, but it was springtime.
Then we started workin’ on the main warehouse: putting siding on it. It had mostly been sided, but there were big holes, and we put up doors, filled-in trenches, took out old plumbing. For the first couple of months, that’s all we did, was work on the warehouse, tryin’ to enclose it.
Steiger: Didn’t see any of the river at all?
RD: Un-uh. Then I started buildin’ fiberglass coolers, and I did that for a couple of months. So it was probably May before I got on the river. The first trip I went down was with Rick Petrillo and Pete Gibbs. I’m not sure what ever happened to Rick. He had a lot of back problems, and eventually he went to work in Idaho, and that’s kind of where I lost him… I did about five trips that summer, and they needed somebody to go up and run Cataract—run triple-rigs in Cataract.
Steiger: After you’d done five Grand Canyon trips?
RD: Yeah.
Steiger: Were you just swampin’ or were you runnin’ a boat?
RD: Well, Rick would let me run as much as he thought I could. He taught me a lot, actually. I drew maps, and I had my own little map that I tried to keep track of with notes and stuff. It takes a long time to learn the river, you know, so any little aid that you could use… The boats were very similar to what they are now. It’s amazing how progressive Ron Smith and Dean Waterman were. I mean, they’ve modified them a little bit, but they were pretty much just like they are today. They used those coolers that I built in 1971 until about 1990— almost twenty years—those big, red, polyester resin coolers—huge, heavy, very heavy; and red food boxes. Pretty amazing. Anyway, we used those for many years.
Well, anyway, so then I went up and ran Cataract with Mark Smith and Foxy and a couple other guys—I can’t really remember their names. But they put me on back oar, ‘cause you didn’t need quite as much experience on the back oar of a triple-rig. And we set off down Cataract. I’d never run Cataract, and I was back oar on this triple rig. We just went down there and just got hammered, you know, by the Big Drops.
Steiger: Well, by that time, it must not have been huge water.
RD: No, it was down. I think the highest that I ran that spring was probably about 30,000, 35,000—pretty big. We got thumped good in Satan’s Gut. I remember gettin’ trashed. But we made it. It was pretty amazing. Those boats were pretty forgiving in a lot of ways, in that they kind of snaked through. We didn’t really need to be all that precise.
Then I did about, oh, five or six Cat trips, and then went back down to Grand Canyon and did a couple trips in the fall—one in a triple-rig with Rick Petrillo and George Billingsley, the geologist, works for USGS now.
The triple rig trip, George was runnin’ back oar, and Petrillo was runnin’ front oar. O’C was runnin’ a motor rig for support. This was in September or October, I can’t remember. We went down and I was ridin’ in the triple-rig, just kinda ridin’ along. I didn’t really have any duties. We went right over the left horn in Horn Creek in low water, and the back boat just kinda went (boom!) like that, and just snapped up. Well, this gal sittin’ right next to me, she was this frail lady, probably about 110-120 pounds. Just as we dropped over the rock there and into the hole behind the rock, it was so violent that she broke both bones in her forearm—the radius and the ulna. Serious. And she was right next to me. So we splinted her up and went down to Monument, and George was gonna hike out and get help.
It was pretty funny, because we’re sittin’ around, and I kept watchin’, he’s just kicked back real casual. “George, when are you leavin’?” He goes, “Oh, I’m gonna leave after dinner.” So here it is, we ate dinner and it’s gettin’ dark, and pretty soon it’s pitch black, and George decides well now he’s gonna hike out. I’m lookin’ at this guy goin’, “What is he, some kind of superman or somethin’”? But he preferred to hike out in the dark. He was an interesting guy.
Steiger: I guess he’s a pretty experienced hiker.
RD: Yeah, he’d done lots and lots of hiking, and he knew the route, and he wasn’t worried at all about gettin’ to the rim. Probably only took him three or four hours.
Steiger: So he already knew this woman, it was gonna be tomorrow morning before they got in....
RD: Yeah, it was gonna be in the morning. This was before we had radios, you know. . . So he starts hikin’, and we all go to sleep and wake up in the morning, and (shoop, shoop, shoop, shoop) here comes the helicopter, and George is in it with the Park Service. But when he went out, he found out his grandmother had died.
So then, they didn’t have a back oar, but then I was there, and I had done back oar in Cataract all summer, so they figured “Perfect!”
Steiger: “You can do it.”
RD: I can do it. Funny story was that he got to the rim probably about three or four in the morning, and he’s walkin’ from Hermit’s Rest back to the village, because he doesn’t want to wake anybody up at Hermit’s Rest, ‘cause he’s afraid he might get shot. There’s a bunch of people sleepin’ in their cars and stuff, but he’s, “Naw, I’m not wakin’ anybody up.” So he’s walkin’ to the village and he falls asleep, walks off the road and runs into a tree and knocks himself out. (laughter) Wakes up, and he’s sittin’ there at the base of the tree, you know, with a big ol’ bump on his head. It was pretty funny.
So we go down the next day, and we’re runnin’ Hermit, Petrillo wants to cheat it. He doesn’t want to run down the middle. So we try to get left of it. Of course we don’t get left of it, we go right down into that hole on the left side, just crashes—just trashes us. So then he’s a little bit shaken. Of course this was the first time he’d ever run a triple-rig. He’d been down the canyon quite a few times and had a lot of experience, but had never run a triple-rig, and he’s front oar on this thing. I should have been the front oar.
Steiger: Because you knew more about it.
RD: I knew more about techniques and triple-rigs. He was always over-pullin’ me. You know, he’d start pullin’ way before me, and then I couldn’t catch up with him.
Steiger: ‘Cause the downstream oar could always outrun the upstream oar.
RD: Exactly. And it didn’t matter how hard I pulled, I could never catch up with him.
Steiger: So you were the one that was hangin’ out there. (laughs)
RD: Yeah, exactly.
Steiger: And he was in next to shore.
RD: Yeah. And a lot of times we’d just spin. You know, he’d catch the eddy, and then the boat would spin and pretty soon I’d be front oar and he’d be back oar, and then we’d just kinda cartwheel downriver.
We got to Crystal, and this was when Crystal was still pretty nasty, when it still had both holes. Fortunately, it wasn’t very high water. It was probably only about maybe 10,000 or less. It was either September or October. We go down and run the old hole on the left side. Of course he overpulls me and we spin and we go down there. It takes the front boat and folds it over on the middle boat. I’m in the back boat. There were probably five or six people in the boat. O’C’s parents, his dad was on the trip, and I think his brother was on the trip. Now they’re all in the middle boat… Maybe his dad was on the motor rig, and it was just Little Eben that was in the triple-rig—I can’t remember exactly. But I jumped up and I tried to lift it up, and just barely could get enough of a grab to get ‘em out. They helped me, and we pushed it over, and got it right side up again—the front boat—just as we went down and got hung up on the rock pile.
Steiger: Oh, my God, on the island. Oh, no!
RD: We were there for fifteen minutes, just kinda draped over some rocks in this triple-rig. And one guy in the boat had gotten a pretty good laceration in his head from the whole ordeal. But they made passengers a lot tougher then, it wasn’t a big deal. We patched him up and he went on. Anymore, you’d fly somebody out with a head injury. But it was quite the experience.
So the next summer, I had my own thirty-seven, and Kenton and I ran together most of the season. I think I did nine or ten trips that year. That was in 1972. Toward the fall of that year, Martin Litton chartered a boat from gce. He had rented the north warehouse from Ron Smith for their operation for that summer, and over the course of that year I got to know Jeff Clayton and Bill Bodie and Curt Chang and Wally Rist and John Blaustein, ‘cause they were in and out of there, and so were we.
Anyway, they needed somebody to run this charter. It was toward the end of the season also. So I told ‘em I’d do it. So Martin and Curtis, Ronn Hayes, Martin’s secretary, and three guys from Hollywood—we set out to do a seven-day trip through the canyon. They were scoutin’ for a movie. Martin wanted to impress ‘em, so he had a Yampa that we rolled up and took along with us, and in certain sections of the river, he was gonna blow it up and put these guys from Hollywood in it.
Steiger: Show ‘em what it was like from a little boat.
RD: Yeah. Another funny story was that we got down to Lava Chuar—Lava Canyon there—and that was when there was a big lateral comin’ off the right shore there, about halfway through the rapid. Curt hollers down to ‘em, “Run right, Martin, run right!” He was thinkin’ that he’d go down there and just have a big ride. Well, Martin flips this Yampa with these guys in it.
Steiger: So that got their attention! (laughter)
RD: So then I had to gather ‘em up, pull ‘em back in, and then Martin’s boat goes down and goes around the island there at Espejo, around the left side. Well, I’d never been down there, so I didn’t go down there after it. I just went around the bottom and waited and waited and waited. Finally it came out. We probably waited twenty minutes. I was thinkin’, “Well, it probably got hung up somewhere for a short period.” And then we rolled it up. I said, “That’s it, Martin, we’re not playin’ in the Yampa anymore,” ‘cause we had to make tracks. It was a seven-day trip or somethin’ like that. And that was the reason why he had chartered the rig from....
Steiger: These guys didn’t have time, they had to just blast through real fast and see what was goin’ on.
RD: Yeah, check it out. We got down to Crystal, and these guys wanted to run the biggest wave in the canyon, which was the left side in Crystal, both those holes. They wanted to see what it was like in the big boat, ‘cause they wanted to strap on a five-ton generator on the front of one of these boats, and they wanted to see if they could take it. So I told ‘em I’d run it. But I’m comin’ down… I look down there and see those two holes and I go, “Oh, shit, man, I can’t do that.” So I run right, and they’re goin’, “What’s the deal here?” I’m goin’, “Man, we’re out here, by ourselves, and those are big, big, waves and we’re not goin’ in ‘em. That’s it. If you want a big ride, I’ll give you the right in Lava or somethin’.” But I wasn’t about to run those holes in Crystal by myself. You know? They were huge.
So we got on down there and made it without any incident. At the end of the trip, Martin asked me if I would be interested in workin’ for him. I said, “Yeah, I’d love to row dories.” He said, “Well, give me a call this winter, we’ll talk about it.” So sometime during that winter I got a call, and it was Ronn Hayes and Martin—they were on two phones and they were callin’ me. They both wanted me to go to work for ‘em.
Steiger: For different companies: Ronn Hayes had Wilderness World. (RD: Yeah.) But they’re callin’ you at the same time?
RD: Yeah.
Steiger: They were arguin’ over it.
RD: Yeah, as to who I was gonna work for. And finally I decided that I wanted to row dories more than I wanted to row rafts, so I went to work for Martin.

***

The Dale dynasty is well known on the river. As river families go, the Dales are both distinguished and distinctive, encompassing not just the immediate family of Regan and his wife, Ote, but Regan’s brothers and cousin O’C, and their families too. (There’s a gene or something… they’re all great boaters and excellent guides.)
Regan Dale is the manager now of OARS/Grand Canyon Dories. Before that he was known as an uncannily good boatman—I’ve watched him pull out from the beach at Granite Falls when we were doing a left sneak that half of us couldn’t even find once we got out there ourselves; take four strokes out from shore at the top of the eddy, stop rowing, and float clear down into the slot without taking another stroke. He’s an equally good photographer. This interview took place in November, 1998.

***

The first trip I did with Martin that spring, we were still in the warehouse on the north side of gce. It was Bill Bodie and John Blaustein and I and Curtis and Martin. That was the beginning. I led every trip after that for the next ten years. I led one set of trips, and Wally Rist led the other. At some point, right after that first trip, we moved to Hurricane. Martin asked me after that trip if there was anybody else I knew that would be good for his operation. I told him, yeah, I knew somebody that would love to do this—Kenton Grua. He goes, “Well, call him up, tell him to come on over here,” ‘cause we needed some more guides, we needed some people. He went from four trips in 1972 to twelve trips in 1973. He needed qualified guides who could row, and I’d run with Kenton, so he and I were friends. He was excited to do it and came right over and got right on the river, runnin’ dories.
Steiger: How was that little transition?
RD: Oh, I remember gettin’ in the dory the first time we were runnin’ down through the Paria, and it was just so cool, it was the best. I knew right away, before I’d gone two miles. Oh, yeah, they were just painted plywood. I mean, every year you’d sand the paint down and paint ‘em, and they’d soak up water. For the first week, you’d have water just gushin’ in. Pretty soon they’d swell and close off. But it was a ritual. Everything would be wet in the hatches, and you’d just get used to bailin’ ‘em. It was part of it.
Steiger: And no bilge pumps, no sponges.
RD: No, just plastic containers to throw the water back out. Big rocket boxes, lots of ammo cans, everything was in an ammo can. We might have fifteen, twenty ammo cans—twenty mils—in your boat, just ‘cause they had to put everything in twenty mils. I mean, you’d have twenty mils layin’ on their sides, back up under the seats.
Steiger: Plus there was no baggage boat, huh?
RD: No.

Steiger: So you had to get everything in there.
RD: But we didn’t carry—you didn’t have toilets, you didn’t have stoves, you didn’t have water jugs, you didn’t have tables, tents, you didn’t have—I mean, it was fire pans....
Steiger: A couple of kitchen bags.
RD: Yeah. For about a year we didn’t have tables, and finally I started takin’ tables because I said, “This is stupid! Why can’t we have tables?” Oh, it wasn’t the wilderness experience to have a table! I said, “Well, bull, we’re gonna start carryin’ tables. We’re gonna make it easy.” ‘Cause you’d be eatin’ food off the ground. You’d serve lunch off the tarp on the ground.
Steiger: Full of sand, yeah. (chuckles) But yet, did you always have cooks?
RD: We always had cooks. Anne Marie Gretch, Sabine, Kenly, Carol Starling—those were some of the early dory cooks…. Tom Gallagher. Sharkey came in the door one day, wanted to do river trips. He did about three, and all of a sudden he had his own dory. I think at some point we started taking rafts. I can’t remember exactly when it happened.
Steiger: Was that for carryin’ out the human waste? Was that when it started? It was before that?
RD: Yeah, we were buryin’ it initially, and we were takin’ porta-potties. Initially it was up in the rocks, far away from camp.
Steiger: In the cracks!
RD: Yeah, it was an adventure. (chuckles) “Burn your toilet paper.”… There were a few times where we had big fires from people burnin’ toilet paper. We’d have to all get buckets and carry ‘em up and put the fire out. I remember a couple of really big fires. (chuckles) Lower Lava one time. Martin had a big fire goin’.
Steiger: Just to back up a little bit, before we drive off from your earliest days. You said you were goin’ to college in the winter. What did you study in school?
RD: Initially I was studying psychology, and then I changed my major to philosophy, and then I changed it again to anthropology, and then eventually I settled on physical education.
Steiger: Ah-ha. But you’re thinkin’ like this might....
RD: I wasn’t thinkin’. I was just goin’ to school.
Steiger: When you went to the river, when did you start thinkin’ in terms of: this was somethin’ you were gonna do for a long time?
RD: Oh, I never thought about that. It was more just fun, a fun thing to do in the summer. Nobody ever thought that they’d do that for a living, for a livelihood. It was more of a hobby. We were makin’, I don’t know, $5,000-$6,000 a year, at the most.
Steiger: Yeah, but you’d have it at the end of the season, was the thing, which wasn’t that bad.
RD: I had no expenses, ‘cause I lived in a truck. Usually, for the first three or four years, I drove to Salt Lake, parked my truck, and bought a season pass at Alta and just skied all winter.

Steiger: Do you remember much about your very first experience on the water?
RD: I remember the first time I saw Lava Falls. You know, I had heard a lot about Lava Falls.
Steiger: From O’C?
RD: Yeah. So the first year he was runnin’, I hiked in at Lava.
Steiger: Just to go see that?
RD: Just to go see Lava. I can’t even remember how I found it. I think I wandered out there, and somehow found my way down to it and sat down there and looked at it. I was kind of....
Steiger: This was after you’d taken the little boat back. (chuckles)
RD: Yeah. I was kinda thinkin’ it was gonna be this big waterfall, and it turned out to be just this little waterfall, so I was kinda thinkin’, “Well, shit, this isn’t much.” And then I watched a couple Hatch boats come through, and they were rowin’. They had the tail-draggers and they pulled their motor and rowed down the left. But one of ‘em went right into the ledge hole, sideways. Yeah. I remember vividly. They got thumped pretty good, but they washed out the bottom. Those were the only boats I’d seen, so I figured all the boats were like that. It was no big deal. But I can’t remember the first trip I did.
Steiger: Just that it was a cool thing, but nothing really sank in?
RD: Unt-uh. I remember… At some point I remember meetin’ Ote. She was on a private trip with Pete Gibbs and Bego, and they were climbin’ that granite spire just below Grapevine, a big chunk of granite that comes down, below Grapevine on the right. Next time you come down there—big ol’ thing, big wall of granite, sheer wall, comes right out of the river and goes up about 700-800 feet. And they were climbin’ that on a private trip, just a couple of rowboats. Then we had ‘em in for dinner below Deer Creek, and that was the first time I met her.

I remember the first trip I did in a dory, I hit a rock pullin’ out at Havasu. Didn’t quite make it far enough across, and hit those rocks right at the top of the rock pile, put a big hole in the Makaha. Second trip I did, I went down and got stuck in the corner pocket [at Lava Falls] for a couple minutes. Uh-huh, and did some damage there. So I was havin’ a tough go the first couple of trips. The third trip I did, I finally made it through Lava, and I was pretty excited. Martin has some footage of me jumpin’ up and down on the deck of the Makaha. Pretty funny. I was pretty excited. Finally made it without hittin’ anything.
Steiger: Did Martin go on most of those early trips?
RD: He went on, yeah, a couple, right in the first two or three, and then he got too busy.
Steiger: Doin’ other stuff? Not so much with the company, but environmental battles or whatever?
RD: Right. And he lived in California. He’d fly back and forth. A funny story was that he used to buy bread at the day-old bakery in Palo Alto and load his plane up with bread and fly it out and put it on the trip. It was already two or three days old, and we’d start off with it.
Steiger: To go for twenty-two days!
RD: Yeah.
Steiger: ‘Cause he got a deal on it. (chuckles)
RD: Uh-huh, he had a great deal on it. And then we bought Schaefer’s. Schaefer was the beer that we carried. It was pretty funny, ‘cause the slogan on the side of the can was, “It’s the beer to drink if you’re havin’ more than one,” or somethin’ like that. If you’re gonna drink more than one beer, have a Schaefer, ‘cause after that, you didn’t notice how bad it was. (laughter) He was buyin’ six-packs for ninety-nine cents or somethin’. So between bread and Schaefer’s he always had his plane full of stuff that he brought out. We’d pick him up at the airport in Hurricane and we’d have to bring the van to load up.
Steiger: You’d think it would cost more just to fly out there than it would… Well, maybe he was comin’ out anyway.
RD: Yeah. But it was just the classic Martin Litton. Schaefer beer.
Steiger: What did you think about all the environmental stuff? Were you aware of that?
RD: Oh, yeah. Everybody felt really proud of the man for what he had accomplished. He was still very involved in fighting to save the Redwoods and trying to keep a powerplant out of Diablo Canyon. We were all really proud to work for Martin, ‘cause he was tryin’ to do some good stuff.
Steiger: Well, as far as techniques go in the early days, how’d all that evolve?
RD: You know what was interesting was there was really nobody that really knew anything. Martin was probably in his fifties, so he was past his prime, almost.
Steiger: Well, and he had just learned from P. T..... It was all upstream ferry, huh?
RD: Oh, yeah.
Steiger: Which those guys had picked up from rowin’ those Cataract boats, which wouldn’t track?
RD: Yeah, so we had to figure things out ourselves—the “Powelling” and ferry angles and all that—that kind of evolved over time. I don’t think there was anybody that really actually showed us how to do that. We just learned the best way to move ‘em was to use the water. It was all trial and error. We used to call it the school of hard knocks, because very seldom would you go on a trip where you didn’t smash a boat or two. I mean, it was part of it. Golden trips were unheard of. It was pretty standard to hit somethin’, somewhere. In the early seventies, we had the lower flows, too. 1977, the whole issue of Rainbow Bridge came to light, and they closed the river and nobody was runnin’. We decided we wanted to go see what it looked like at 1,000 cfs. So O’C and I, and Rudi and Kenton, and it might have been Dale DeLlamas, decided to.... We took three Selways… Oh, it was Richie Turner—no, Gary Call—one of those guys. Took three Selways and two kayaks. I had just bought a Selway from Ron Smith. (Steiger: Boy, those are nice boats.) Yeah, they were. I decided I wanted to have a little bathtub to play in. So it was kinda brand new. We took those down, and there wasn’t anybody on the river. The water was warm, ‘cause there was no flow, and it was the middle of summer. We had a great time. Stopped and looked at all the rapids, took pictures of ‘em all, which someday will probably be interesting to go back… I’ve got ‘em stored somewhere. I got some really fun pictures of Hance, Crystal, and Lava… We did portage twice: Little Ruby and Lava. Wannabe Ruby. The whole river funnelled down and dropped right onto a rock, right in the middle of the river, so there was no way we were gonna… Un-uh. You know the rock that makes the hole in Crystal? I remember pullin’ in behind it, in my Selway—we ran left of it…
Steiger: Wasn’t it kind of a flat, gray rock or somethin’? (RD: Uh-huh.) Not like you’d expect it to have been.
RD: Un-uh. We ran left of it, ‘cause that was where the water went, and I pulled in behind it, parked, and climbed up on it, and it was like six feet out of the water. I’m standin’ on it goin’, “Wow, this is wild.” Horn Creek, we went down the far right side. Far right, as far right as you could get.
Steiger: Which is a pretty big ride.
RD: Oh, it was huge! It was a funnel down between these rocks, and drop-offs and waves and holes. It was wild. It was a wild ride. We went left at Bedrock. That was the only place there was any water. And it was calm water, goin’ around the left side. No biggie. Floated around the left side. Pretty interesting. At Lava, all the rocks that make the ledge were sticking out of the water. It’s like three or four rocks. Big rocks kinda like the rocks that make the domer in the left side of the V-Wave. There’s about three of ‘em up on top there. And there was still a slot. You could actually see where the slot was.
Steiger: In the rocks.
RD: Yeah. And we chose to portage our boats. I think somebody kayaked it. I can’t remember who—it might have been O’C or Gary Cll. Other than that, it was pretty interesting. It was really fun. It was just mostly a boating trip, we didn’t do any hiking on that. We just wanted to see the river at low water.

***

Steiger: I know there’s been a billion adventures. A lot of years there, like you say, where you were runnin’ down the right in Lava, and it’s like every time you get there…
RD: There was one time we got there, and Kenton was on another trip one day ahead of me. We pull in there and walk up to scout, and looked down, and here’s the Niagara sittin’ in the corner pocket, upside down. Just sittin’ there, nobody around. Didn’t see anybody.
Steiger: Oh, man!
RD: Suddenly Kenton shows up where we’re scoutin’, and he goes, “Any ideas?” (laughter) “What do you mean?” He goes, “Let’s get that boat out of there.” “Well, let us run first, and then we’ll talk about it.” So we ran through. Then we came back up, and there was no way, it was wedged big time.
Steiger: This was a metal boat, though? (RD: Yeah.) Not wood?
RD: Yeah. It was dead sideways in the slot, with the deck out. So I finally talked Kenton into just leavin’ it, ‘cause there’s really nothin’ we can do. We couldn’t pull it out. And I didn’t want anybody gettin’ hurt. So Kenton, bein’ the determined guy that he is, gets his hatchet, and starts cuttin’ his way in through the bottom of the boat. He’s out there with this hatchet, whalin’ on this aluminum boat, (Steiger: He’s gonna get that stuff out of there!) tryin’ to get into it. I’m with him, and the water’s comin’ up— it’s late in the day, it’s about six o’clock at night, the water’s comin’ up and it’s gettin’ dark, I’m tryin’ to pull him off this boat. He’s goin’, “No, no, just a few more minutes. I’ll get this out of there.” He’s cut a hole in it, and he’s reachin’ in and pullin’ out stuff. Finally I said, “Kenton, we’re outta here,” and grabbed him and pulled him away. We eventually left it. It went underwater that night, and the next morning we were downstream.
Kenton and the Cold Chisel Gang hiked back in at Lava with come-alongs and cables and bolts and winches and all the stuff they needed, and they winched it out and took it to Lower Lava and choppered it to Tuweap, where they put it on a trailer and eventually took it to the recycling center in Las Vegas.
Steiger: But it wasn’t gonna be a boat anymore after that.
RD: No, it was pretty well tweaked. It was bent up, bad. Lots of stories like that.

***

There’s a ton of history here, and many more stories— bad ass days galore with the dories at Lava Falls; a heroic rescue by Ote of a very large client there; and many epic days that Regan had in a host of places… the Imax movie; the flood of ’83; the sinking of the Lava Cliff; Hollywood trips; crazy plane rides… triumph, tragedy, and no small dose of hilarity— all of which we’re gonna have to forego in order to celebrate another, more resonant note. When asked what was his most memorable trip, RD answered without hesitation: the 40-day trip that he and Ote did back in the late seventies, before they got married. We talked to Ote in 2004 when RD was nowhere around and she said the same thing: that was the one—her most memorable trip too.

***

Back then all you had to do was call up and tell the Park that you wanted to go, and it was no big deal. It was a training trip. Most of our trips were training back then. For some reason, we decided—this was before we got married, though.
Steiger: Good idea! (laughs)
RD: That’s where you really find out if you’re compatible… Well, that fall we started livin’ together, after our season. I had this 1947 Ford bread truck that I lived in. It was an old Wonder Bread truck, and I traveled all over the West in it. So Ote started livin’ with me. We hiked in at Nankoweap in the fall, spent a week down there fishin’ and hangin’ out. Boy, there were some big fish at Nankoweap in the early seventies! This was probably 1977, 1978. And then we decided to do a trip that next year, just the two of us. We each had a Selway, and put on in mid-February, ‘cause we were gonna take a couple of months. We were in no hurry.
Steiger: Open-ended departure. You left and then it was an open-ended take-out? You’d just figure that out somehow?
RD: Yeah. We didn’t even do a shuttle. I think we hiked out. What we did is, we hiked out at Phantom and resupplied ourselves. Then we hiked out at Lower Lava, stashed our boats. Rolled ‘em up, put ‘em under a big tarp high enough for the river, and hiked out at Lava. I’m tryin’ to think… Oh, we hiked to Riffey’s [former NPS Ranger, stationed at Toroweap], and then Riffey gave us a ride to Kanab. That was where my truck was. Then we went to a training seminar at the South Rim—Guides Training Seminar.
Steiger: Wow, that must have been one of the first ones of those.
RD: Yeah, it was, at the Albright Center. That was where Ernie Kunstle drew the gun and fired his gun in the classroom, just to scare… Had some blanks or somethin’. People were so shook up they got up and walked out. It was really out there. So then we went from there to Southern California, picked up [Regan’s brothers] Peter and Roger and Tim, drove back out to Toroweap, and hiked back in, blew up our boats, and went down river.
Steiger: With all those boys? (laughs)
RD: Yeah.
Steiger: On those Selways.
RD: Yeah. And took ‘em on their first river trip.
Steiger: So the total trip was probably two months or somethin’ like that.
RD: I think it was like forty-two days or forty-three days.
Steiger: You guys must have done a lot of hikin’.
RD: We did a lot of hikin’. Yeah, there were many places where we’d spend three or four days. It was really a wet spring, it was really beautiful. I mean, it probably rained twenty, twenty-five days out of forty. It was really wet. We both flipped in Hermit.
Steiger: How’d that work?
RD: We had just figured out flip lines.
Steiger: Just like, you mean a few days before?
RD: Well, no, I mean....
Steiger: In the dories?
RD: Yeah. Initially, everybody thought if you put a line on your boat you’re just askin’ for trouble. You’re gonna flip for sure [if] you put a flip line on there.
Steiger: Oh, you mean just like it would jinx you? (RD: Yeah.) Not so much that it would be too much drag, or....
RD: No, no, it was just....
Steiger: That’s a negative attitude! (laughs)
RD: Yeah. And we thought, “Well, this is the only way to go.” Initially we had a lot of damage to the boats, they’d tip over.
Steiger: You’d have to push ‘em into shore before you could right ‘em.
RD: Push ‘em into shore, and that’s where most of the damage happened—was just gettin’ ‘em to the shore. As you were gettin’ close to shore, that’s when you’d hit the rocks. Finally we decided there had to be a better way. I don’t remember how it all started, but I remember Kenton and I started usin’ ‘em, runnin’ a line underneath.
Steiger: Sayin’, “To hell with this, we’re gonna right these out in the deep water.”
RD: Yeah, get these right side up right away. So we were usin’ ‘em on our Selways, too, ‘cause they’re just a little eleven-foot boat with twelve-inch tubes. They’re little, like a bathtub. Turned out that we both flipped in Hermit. We were right behind each other. Ote had a huge ride in Granite, where she’d just gotten pummelled, and was full of water and kinda got beat up a little bit, got washed out of her boat. Didn’t flip, but she was kinda shaken a little bit. So we decided we’d run Hermit. She didn’t want to look at it, she just wanted to run it wide open. ‘Cause she knew if she looked at it, she’d get scared. It was probably about 15,000, 16,000. It’s crankin’. This is like in March. Nobody else down there. We had full wetsuits and helmets. Both of us were pretty well outfitted. Booties, full wetsuits and helmets, and so we were ready for whatever happened. Turned out that we both flipped, boom! boom!, within two or three seconds of each other in the fifth wave. It was just too big for our little boats, and it flipped us both. So I crawled up on the bottom of my boat and turned around, and there was Ote, she’d crawled up on the bottom of hers. And we started laughin’. But we were about thirty feet apart. We tried to right our boats, each one of us.
Couldn’t do it by ourselves. So she reached under her boat and got one of her oars out and used it as a paddle and paddled down to where I was, and then we righted my boat, climbed in it, rowed back over to her boat, climbed on it, righted it, climbed back in it, rowed back over to my boat. And all this time we’re floatin’ downstream. So we pulled in at Schist Camp and said, “That’s it! Camp for the night. No more.” (laughter)
That night at Schist Camp it stormed to beat the band. We had thunder and lightning and rock falls. We’re camped out, and every once in a while we’d stick our head out to see if the river had come up, and our boats were still there… We didn’t have anything else happen on the trip. We got to Lava and we were runnin’ the slot in Lava.
Steiger: Oh, my God, ‘cause it was 15,000 or somethin’?
RD: Yeah, in our Selways, and we’re thinking “We’d better ride with each other in case we flip.”
Steiger: Yeah, good idea.
RD: And then we go down and look at it, and Ote goes, “I don’t want to ride through here twice!” “Okay, let’s just do it.” Run it together. We both had good runs in the slot. Boy, talk about a big ride in a little boat!
Steiger: So were you guys engaged when you went? Or did you decide to get married on that trip?
RD: No. Probably sometime that spring Ote told me she was pregnant, and I said, “Well, let’s get married. What the hell.” So we set a date for October. This was sometime in the spring. So that fall we got married out at Toroweap.

Note: This oral history project is made possible by a grant from the Arizona Humanities Council (ahc). The results of this project do ot necessarily represent the view of ahc or the National Endowment for the Humanities.