Steiger: So how about just a quick big picture overview of your entire river-running career? (laughter)
Henderson: Well, I guess it starts out back in…my father was a contractor in Vernal; some of the carpenters that worked for him were early Grand Canyon river guides. Back in the fifties and the sixties, river guides didn’t have that much work, because there weren’t that many trips, so most of the guides needed other employment, and a lot of ’em worked for my dad; so as a kid, I sat around the job sites and listened to those guys tell their stories about Grand Canyon, Cataract Canyon, the Green River and the Yampa. Hatch was one of the earliest river companies around. A lot of the early guides were from Vernal. So I grew up in that environment. Also, according to my Uncle, Chuck Henderson, he was with Bus Hatch on his first river trip.
Steiger: On his first river trip ever?
Henderson: Bus and Chuck were close friends in Vernal. Chuck just passed away a couple of years ago—and a few years before he died, he told me a story over dinner that I had never heard before. He told me that in the mid-to latter thirties somewhere, a guy showed up in Vernal, he had come down the river in a boat he’d built in Green River, Wyoming. He was going to retrace Powell’s trip, basically, all the way down through to California. Some rich guy from the East had hired him to build the boat, and be his boatman on the expedition.
But then at the last minute the guy didn’t show up… Chuck couldn’t remember what the guy’s name was, but he said he recalled that he was from Mexican Hat. So the guy shows up at Chuck’s gas station in Vernal, looking for work because he’s broke and needed to earn some money to buy food so he can get back on his boat and row on home to Mexican Hat…Chuck owned the old rock gas station in the middle of town. So anyway, Chuck gave him some work, he liked the kid, and was amazed by his story, so they went out to check out his boat, and decided it looked like fun. In the end, Chuck and Bus Hatch and one of the Swains I think… somehow they got together and bought the boat from him.
Steiger: Bought the boat from him and said, “You can just go home?”
Henderson: No they gave him a ride I think, down to Book Cliffs somewhere. I think there was a train then that went from a mine there over to Grand Junction, where he could catch a ride and get home. Anyway, it was kind of a wild story, and Chuck didn’t remember all the details, but that was kind of the basis of it. He said that he thought it was in the thirties sometime.
Steiger: There was that story about Bus Hatch and Frank Swain and Parley Galloway—them getting the plans from Parley Galloway. Did you ever hear that story? Well, Parley was in jail for nonsupport and said he’d build ’em these boats, but then he skipped out on ’em as soon as they let him go. And they named those boats What Next?, Don’t Know, and Who Cares? But I wonder if this was before that, or after that? Must have been before that, if they had to buy this boat from this guy.
Henderson: Yeah, I’ve heard that story, too. Brad Dimock and I talked a bit about it, and we tried to figure it out. This is just the story Chuck told Dad and I over dinner one night. After Brad and I talked about it, a couple of years later, I got really curious, and I went back and asked Chuck, “You remember that story you told me?” He said, “Well, kinda sounds familiar,” but by then he couldn’t remember anything of it anymore. Then within a year or two, Chuck didn’t remember much of anything.
Steiger: Alzheimer’s? (Henderson: Yes.) Oh, man.
Henderson: Yeah. So I never got to get any more of the details out of it, but that is my recollection of that dinnertime story about Chuck. The reason I tell it, is because it’s a bit of river runnin’ family history. My dad and one of his close friends, Russ Cottle, just after the war bought ten ten-man rafts, for $100 or $200. I mean, they were twenty, 25 bucks apiece. They ran river trips, and the family rule was you couldn’t go until you were twelve. So I had to wait ’til I was twelve years old before I could get off on any river trips with ’em. But then I started runnin’ the Green River. Then, the day after I graduated from high school, I got a job with the Forest Service to patrol the Green River below Flaming Gorge Reservoir, from Flaming Gorge Dam, down to Little Hole, and Brown’s Park. I got that job because Cecil Massey—you may remember Dennis Massey?
Steiger: I remember hearin’ of him, I never met him.
Henderson: Cecil Massey is Dennis’ dad; and Cecil was the foreman on most of my dad’s construction jobs, so I knew Cecil really well. Cecil and Glade Ross were close friends, because Glade Ross was one of the early Grand Canyon guides for Hatch too. Glade Ross was in charge of the river program for the Forest Service up there. So Cecil and Glade helped me get that job in 1969. So I worked with those guys, working on the Green River for a while, and then got a chance to go row a Hatch trip through Lodore late in that summer, and decided that was the better way to go. So the next year I went to work for Hatch, and worked on the Green and the Yampa, and then towards the end of that first season, I guess it would have been 1970, I think…I went down to do my first trip in the Grand Canyon. It was a garbage pick-up trip. It was one of those trips at the end of the season, where Hatch put on a couple of boats, Whitewater put on a boat, and arta put on a boat, and the Sierra Club provided the manpower. We just ran the boats. I was runnin’ with Rodney Paulsen. I was his swamper. Russell Sullivan, Dave Burkson [phonetic], and Moldy [Dave Moulton] were on the other Hatch boat. But that first day, when we pulled into the bat caves at Marble Canyon, it was the end of the season, and everybody was there. The first person I met was Pat Conley. We pulled up, Pat Conley crawled out from under a boat he was patchin’. And within a few hours, I met Whale, I met Skip Jones, I met Rich Bangs, Tim Means, Breck O’Neill, Pete Resnick. Everybody was there, ’cause it was the end of the season, and they were gettin’ the gear ready to put away. A bunch of other people. If I thought about it a few minutes, I’d probably remember a few more of the people that were there that first day. I think back on that now, and think about what a cast of characters it was. Bryce Mackey was there too. Yeah, it was a pretty wild first day. We hung out a few days, gettin’ the trip together, and then set off. The Whitewater boat was run by John Foster. The arta boat was run by—I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was on…that arta boat that flipped in Lava, the one that was on the cover of Life magazine…I can’t remember the guy’s name. I remember his claim to fame was that if you looked at that picture, he’s the guy that you see bailin’ off the boat. Anyway, he was on that boat. That was a great trip, we had a great time. That’s the start of my career. And then I came back up to Vernal. I wanted Ted to let me come down and just run the Grand Canyon, but he said he wanted me to stay up and run Lodore and Yampa for a bit longer. So I said, “Well, I’m gonna have to go find my own way down the Grand Canyon, ’cause I’m spoiled now.” That’s when I came down. I think that’s probably when I met you, too, because I came in and landed at Vermilion Cliffs and hung out at vc. And then Fred Burke, of Arizona River Runners, gave me a trip in the spring, and I just freelanced the next few years. I worked for Fred, and ran some trips for Hatch, ran some trips for Whitewater. I think I ran twelve trips that first season, just freelancin’ motor trips…Bill Gloeckler took me under his wing and got me some trips. Yeah, it was just a great time. That was sort of my start. I did that for a while, I had a 650 Triumph motorcycle, and ended up at Fort Lee Co. living down at Lees Ferry for a while. Then I ended up goin’ up to work for Dave Kloepfer when he bought Harris Boat Trips, and worked for him for a few years, and still did a few trips for other companies at the time, too. Then started rowing, did some oars trips and Wilderness World trips. Worked a bunch of Wilderness World trips with Jimmy Hendrick and Tom Olsen and that gang, and had a great time runnin’ those trips.
But in 1973 Rich Bangs called me and asked me if I wanted to go run the Omo with him in Ethiopia. He had the idea that he wanted to start a river company and run trips in Africa. So it took me about two and a half seconds to say yes to that proposition, and so I ended up going’ over and doing the Omo and the Awash and the Gaba that first year in 1973. We had a wild time there. They’d been over the year before and done one Omo trip, but now they wanted to go back and do it with clients and start this company.
Steiger: So they started in ’72, doin’ that?
Henderson: Might have all been in the same year, early in the year, and then later in the year. I can’t remember exactly when the first trip was, time-wise. Anyway, I think that was ’73 that we went over and did those trips. And that was the start of Sobek, really. We went back the next few years and continued to run the Omo and explore other trips, and expanded out. I went to New Zealand the next year, in ’74, to explore rivers there, and ran a dozen rivers in New Zealand, and had a great time pokin’ around there. Then went to Alaska in ’76 and explored the Tatshenshini. Stan Boor and myself, and Rich Bangs, some other friends, got together and did that trip, and fell in love with the area. And that’s sort of what guided my life after that a lot, ’cause that’s where I sort of ended up settlin’ into. For a lot of years, I would spend just a couple of months, two and a half, three months, in Alaska, and then the rest of the time would be down runnin’ the Bio Bio in Chile, or some other trips. Guided some of Sobek’s other trips in Hawaii. We did the Alas exploratory in Sumatra. Sobek was just such a great venue to get to explore a lot of places in the world. It opened a lot of doors for travel, and it was a real amazing lifestyle that I’m sure we all thought would continue and grow. But it lasted a decade or fifteen years or so, and then it kind of died out. In the beginning, the model was that the same core crew would move around the world and run all the different trips. But gradually, as it got bigger, they settled on individual crews that stayed in places, so they didn’t ship us around so much. That kind of traveling guide lifestyle dwindled out a bit. I’m sure somebody’s still doin’ it somewhere, but not nearly to the extent we had it…There’s boating everywhere now. But instead of just being Sobek, now there’s Australian companies and companies from all over the world. Every place has their own companies.
Steiger: And companies can just book a local trip, a local crew, and not have to fund the travel.
Henderson: Yeah, they don’t have to pay to send us around anymore. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons why they probably never made any money in the beginning. It makes sense. But it was great for us. (chuckles) We had the lifestyle. Those early exploratory days, they were wild times. I look back and look at that film that we made on the Omo in 1973. I look at it now and I think, “God, no wonder they didn’t take us seriously—we were just a bunch of hippie kids!” (laughs)
Steiger: Yeah, those were wild. I want to go back and talk about a bunch of this stuff, but movin’ along with the big résumé, big picture, so Sobek, there was the early glory days in Grand Canyon, and then fifteen years spent travelin’ the world for Sobek, basically. (Henderson: Uh-huh.) And then what happened?
Henderson: Well, gradually the operation that I started in Alaska for Sobek…I managed the operation for Sobek in Alaska for a long time. But I started a little river company up in Haines, Chilkat Guides. It sort of began as a social experiment for an ailing town where the logging mills had closed down. The people there were in a dilemma as to what to do, and I said I thought that adventure tourism would be a great thing for Haines. Nobody believed it, and so I started this company, just to show people that it could be an economic avenue for the town. I bought a boat and hired a guide, and then I went out on the Tatshenshini all summer, and I’d come back between trips and find out how they did. I think the first year we took 25 people down the river, or something like that on the Chilkat River, just doin’ day trips on the Chilkat. And then the next year we took fifty people, and actually ended up buyin’ a truck to run it, so we didn’t have to, like, borrow a truck…One-boat, one-guide, one-day trip. It was just a summer gig.
Steiger: And the customers were people that were just passin’ through?
Henderson: Yeah. And then after a few years we started gettin’ some…small cruise ships started landing at Haines. I convinced them that they ought to sell my raft trip. That kind of launched us into another realm of things, to start dealin’ with the cruise ships. The cruise line business grew exponentially over the next few years, and I was able to convince the cruise lines—they were very skeptical at first, because they sort of thought, “Well, we just take the elderly, and they’re not really—our clientele’s not really into rafting.” I convinced them that they would be, and it was a great success. They found out that their elderly clients and everybody else on board really loved it.
Steiger: They were dyin’ to get off that boat by the time they got up there.
Henderson: Exactly. Now, if you can get your trip sold onboard, it’s a big deal. There’s hundreds of adventure offerings on these ships nowadays in Alaska. We grew from that first year of takin’ 25 people, to this year we took over 45,000 people on trips.
Steiger: Forty-five thousand?! Chilkat Guides?
Henderson: Yeah.
Steiger: Holy moly.

* * *

Steiger: So, back to Grand Canyon…I remember you whippin’ around—I had forgot about your motorcycle. That was a pretty glorious time there. That was like ’72—or you started in ’70? That trash trip was… (Henderson: Seems to me like that trash trip was the last trip of 1970.) And those were outside rigs, still? Floors in ’em and all that stuff? You guys had to bail those things?
Henderson: Yeah, my first trips with Hatch were all on those outside rigs. I’m not sure, but I think that Dave Leseberg and I might have run the last tail-draggers down the river. That was kind of a wild deal, because Hatch had pretty much shifted everything to the inside rigs, cut the floors out. He had a few tail-draggers just hangin’ around at the bat caves there, at Marble Canyon, just in case. Right at the end of the season, he had a trip that was scheduled to pick up the passengers at Phantom Ranch. The guides had loaded up and taken off in the morning, and then about noon, the passengers showed up at Lees Ferry. So Ted was like, “Oh! Well, hold on.” And he realized, I guess, it was his mistake. So he jumped in his plane and flew over the trip, they were just above House Rock, and dropped ’em a note, said, “Hold the horses! Stay where you are!” So then they rigged up three outside rigs—three?—four?—I think there were four outside rigs. I think it was a four-boat trip—I think it was forty passengers. Might have been more than that. There might have been like sixty passengers, I don’t know. It was a big trip. Anyway, he ran these four outside rigs down, and they caught up to them and transferred everybody onto the boats with the food and the gear and guides, and then they just tied those four boats up, above House Rock, and just left ’em, figured, “Well, we’ll deal with those later.” I can’t remember if they hiked out, or if they rode on down to Phantom with ’em. But anyway, for some reason, these boats are tied up there. Well, Ted had fired Dave Leseberg already. I think Dave was over in Boulder City. Wasn’t he from Boulder City? (Steiger: Is he Earl Leseberg’s kid?) Yeah. He was a wild man. But anyway, Ted needed somebody to run these boats out, and he decided we could go down and roll up two of the boats, and put ’em inside two of the other boats, and two guides could run ’em out. I was just freelancin’, so he said, “Here’s a trip for you.” So he’s lookin’ for somebody else, and there wasn’t anybody else around, so he called Leseberg and said, “Okay, Leseberg, I’ve got one more trip for ya’, but this is your last trip!” (laughter) (Steiger: Maybe he shouldn’t have told him that!) Maybe he shouldn’t have said that, ’cause…Leseberg showed up with his brother’s fiancé as a swamper. We hitched a ride down with one of Hatch’s trips headed down, and we got down there and the guides that were on the trip helped us roll up two of the boats, and we loaded one onto each of the other boats, and they went on downstream, and Leseberg and I headed downstream, runnin’ those two boats. It was a bit of a disaster on Leseberg’s boat. (laughter) He ripped the floor out right away. I’m sure…he says it wasn’t intentional, but I know that he really wanted to get rid of all those floors. (laughter) He cut the floor out of his right away. I continued to run mine as it was. (Steiger: So it’s just you on that boat by yourself?) I was all by myself on the boat…Yeah, I was trying to make nice clean dry runs, and doing pretty good. We started out with a spare motor each. Dave busted his first engine in Hance or somewhere, and put on his spare. We made it down to Upset. Dave hit his engine and busted the lower unit on his second engine, makin’ a turnaround run in Upset. So we pulled over down at the bottom. I caught up to him and hooked onto him and pulled over. We were pulled over. There’s a real small camp right below Upset on the left at the time, and I think it’s kinda gone now.
Steiger: Upset Hotel. You need a rubber boat. It’s rocky there.
Henderson: And we were tied up there, tryin’ to figure out—I was basically givin’ him my spare engine. We heard an airplane comin’ up the canyon. It sounded like it was low. We watched for a minute, and sure enough, around the corner, ten feet off the water, comes an airplane, twin-engine airplane.
Steiger: Dave’s dad?
Henderson: Dave’s brother. (laughter) And he’s like ten feet off the deck and he buzzes us.
Steiger: What’s he’s doin’?
Henderson: Comin’ to buzz us. We had his fiancé on board.
Steiger: Keep an eye on things there, yeah.
Henderson: He comes and buzzes us. I mean, you know how deep and narrow the canyon is. And he’s ten feet off the water, right below Upset. In a twin-engine plane. “Rrrrrrr,” comes right over the top of us. We hit the deck. I mean, it’s scary to have a plane fly over you that low right there. We were laughin’ about it, and Dave goes, “He’ll be back.” Sure enough, a few minutes later, here he comes back, and buzzes us again, down, and disappears around the corner!
…Those outside rigs were exciting. You held onto a bucking strap that ran underneath your leg, and tucked your toe under another strap, and you held on. Every time you’d go up over a big wave or into a hole—you’re the last man on crack-the-whip…You could barely see over the load. That’s why we did a lot of turnaround runs…The first time I ran a boat myself, I was runnin’ one of those. I ran Jim Ernst’s boat out from Phantom Ranch. He hiked out. It was my second trip down there in the canyon. Jim Ernst was the guide, he said, “Okay, you’re runnin’ this out, I’m hikin’ out.” We had about six or seven boats. Jimmy Hall was along, and he’d run a few more trips than me, but not very many. So he was the senior guide, kind of the nominal leader on the thing. We left Phantom Ranch, and the water was really low—really low. We got down to Horn Creek, and Amil Quayle was there. He was one of the greats—he was a Western River guide. A really good boatman. He was just ready to pull out as we pulled in, and we stopped and talked. He was shakin’ his head, goin’ “Oh, it looks bad.” He tried to make a right-to-left run and swamped his engine right at the top and just drifted sideways right up against that big rock at the bottom on the right…He had that big “J-rig” wrapped on that rock. It was an ugly scene. It was really pinned up against there. The water was pushin’ like it was tryin’ to tip it over. (Steiger: And now there wasn’t any right sneak in there anymore either.) Well, we had to get him off first. We had to get him out of there somehow. Luckily, there was a whole bunch of us. We had no passengers, just a whole bunch of guides. And so we were all down there pushin’ and pullin’ and tuggin’ and scratchin’ our heads and our butts. We finally can’t figure out what to do, and we’re all just kinda standin’ there lookin’ at it, standin’ on the rock. And all off a sudden, this big surge comes up, and just picks the boat up and washes it off, all by itself. We had nothin’ to do with it. Just all of a sudden the river decided it was time to let it go, you know. So he was off and down, sittin’ in the eddy at the bottom. And so we started comin’ down through one at a time. The first couple of our boats that went through—again, just these little outside rigs. There were a few inside rigs—but being a first year guide, I got to run an outside rig there. So anyway, the first couple of boats made it through, got a bit hammered but they made it through and didn’t tip over and didn’t break anything. I came down through, and the first big wave hit me and just took me right off the back of the boat and into the water. It was all green and bubbles. I popped up and I was right next to the engine. Luckily, the engine had died, because I was right next to it. I remember grabbin’ ahold of it and climbin’ right up on the engine. Just as I got back up…I was just goin’ into the big hole. Just as I get up onto it, my boat just plunges into that big hole and just flipped me, threw me forward about twenty feet up the boat. I landed up in the duffel pile up in the middle. (laughs)
But the other thing is, we didn’t run motors through all those rapids. We had rowin’ frames on ’em. In Crystal and Upset and Lava, those boats had two rowin’ frames on ’em. You’d help each other out and double up and get one guy on each rowin’ frame, and we’d row the boats through. So we’d just make sneak runs and run ’em down the side, prop the engines up. That’s how we got through those. It wasn’t ’til shortly after I got there that guys started figurin’ out that you could do these turn-around runs where you’d come down and sort of back through those slots in Crystal and Upset, and even in Lava. Even Lava was a turn-around run when I first started. They were exciting. There were exciting runs in those days. We broke our share of engines and props.
Steiger: Hatch had this reputation when I started. It was like, “Oh, those Hatch guys are all really good.” It was sort of like, “They know how to go backwards.” Now, after talking to some of these guys, you realize, those old Hatch boats weren’t all that great to hit stuff in.” (laughter) So therefore…(Henderson: You could flip those little boats. No side tubes on a 33-foot—not much wider than a rowin’ rig.) No, and even takin’ a big hit you could feel it, you would suffer. So you didn’t really want to…
Henderson: Especially backwards. You were the first one into the hole! When you missed that turnaround run in Crystal, and you backed into—the old Crystal—you backed into that hole, it wasn’t pleasant. (Steiger: Did that happen to you?) No, but I watched it happen to a few. Actually it did happen to me once, but I wasn’t runnin’ the boat—I was with Whale. I was actually doin’ a hike, and I wanted to catch a ride. I’d hiked down into Hermit, and I wanted to hike out from Havasu. Whale was on a trip, and he said, “I’ll give you a ride down.” So Whale was givin’ me a ride from Hermit down to Havasu. He had this rig—it was called the bobtail rig. It was an inside rig, but, the back round of the 33-foot had been ripped out. So they just sewed ’em off—they were just bobtailed. That back was just open. Whale thought that was a cool rig and he liked that. So Whale volunteered to run it. I think he was involved in rippin’ the end of the boat out, and there mighta been a little bit of guilt on his part to make it seem like it was okay, you know. I forget exactly. It had gotten ripped out when the boat was wrapped on a rock, and they got a line tied clear around the whole back doughnut. Then they tied the rope to another boat and then they got a run at it, and they were gonna yank ’em off the rock. (laughter) (Steiger: Got a little too big of a run.) Got enough momentum, all it did was just rip the whole…So that became the bobtail rig.
Well, on this trip I was ridin’ with Whale, he came down and made the turn, but didn’t get the ferry angle, and backed right into the big hole in Crystal—at a big stage, too. It was one of the closest times to flippin’ I ever did in a motor rig. I just remember hangin’ on and just droppin’ down into that hole and just…I mean, it was a mountain of water, and you’re just backin’ under that mountain, and you drop into it. It seems like we were fifty-feet underwater, just gettin’ hammered there. The boat came up, turned sideways, and somehow we got out, we didn’t tip over. But it was a spooky ride. That was the only time I backed through one of those big holes, I think. (Steiger: Did Whale bluff his way through it?) Oh, yeah, you know Whale, he just laughed it off and shrugged his shoulders. Happens to the best of us. That old hole at Crystal, though, that was a monster. I got into that hole a couple of times.

* * *

Henderson: My first rowing trip in the canyon was in an old army ten-man. We did a thirty-day private trip in a ten-man, two ten-mans. It was me and Bill Gloeckler—me and a girlfriend, and Bill and Georgia. Bill and Georgia hiked out at Havasu, and Mark Jensen came in and rowed that boat out. That was Mark’s first rowing experience, really. We pulled out of Havasu in the dark. We left Havasu about ten o’clock at night in the dark. (Steiger: What was the theory on that?) Henderson: It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. (laughter) There were a bunch of us in the mouth of Havasu. Pete Resnick was there, and Breck…I think they were on a private trip, too. Yeah, ’cause Breck pulled out with us, too. I think Mark and I and Breck all pulled out of there in the dark…They might have actually been, technically, a training trip.
Steiger: And how was that? How’d that go, learnin’ how to row?
Henderson: Well, it worked out fine. We went down a little ways and Breck pulled over onto a sandbar to camp, he and his girlfriend. Then Mark and I continued a ways, until Mark’s girlfriend was too freaked out, and so they pulled over. But we went on down, and I rowed right down to…went on down to the top of Lava and pulled in right at the top of Lava, on the right-hand side and slept. Got up in the morning and waited and waited and waited for Mark to show up. I was sittin’ there on the bank, watchin’ upstream, and I saw him finally come around the corner, up a half-mile above the rapid—you know where you first come around the corner. You come around the corner and you first hear the rapid, you know. I see Mark stand up, and I can tell he’s heard the rapid. This is his first trip. (Steiger: First trip ever?) Henderson: In the canyon. But he’s heard the stories. No, I take it back, it was his second trip. He’d done a training trip with Dave Kloepfer on a motor rig, so he knew what was coming up, but he hadn’t rowed yet. This is his first foray in rowing. So he pulls right over to the left side, soon as he hears it. He’s a half-mile up there. I’m wavin’ my arm for him to come down. I see him walkin’ down the bank, he comes down and he yells across, “Can I make it over before the rapid?” (laughter) So he gets in his boat, and he rows straight across the river, then rows along the bank comin’ down. (laughter) He gets down there, and we walk down. Well, when he first gets there, I’m ready to go. I’ve been ready to go for an hour or two. So I said, “Well, are you ready? Let’s go for it.” He goes, “Aren’t we gonna look at it?!” I told him, “What do you want to look at it for? It’ll just scare you.” (laughter) He said, “No, no, I gotta look at it, I gotta look at it.” I said, “Okay, it’s not gonna make any difference.”
And so we walked up and stood there on the right side and looked at it. And I said, “Okay, you come around here, and we’re just gonna go down the right side here. It’s just a karma check. You got good karma today, you’ll come out right-side up. And if you’ve done anything bad, maybe you’ll come out upside down.” So we looked at it for an hour or so, until we were both ready to throw up. And we went up and jumped in our boats and rowed right down the right side. Tiny little tubes in the ten-man, you know…You gotta fill ’em up right away. You just submarine ’em into the “V” wave, and you’re just completely full. You come out, you’re standin’ up in ’em, chest deep in water, floatin’ in your lifejacket. Yeah, we both made it through just fine and partied at the bottom, but that was quite the adventure for Mark, I’m sure. He started at Havasu, so really, that was his first rapid that he rowed. (laughter)

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Steiger: Well, Sobek I guess is a whole ’nother chapter, but it is part of all this deal, too. I know you could talk about that for days, everything that’s happened there. I mean, you’ve seen the whole world through doin’ that, haven’t you?
Henderson: Well, nobody’s seen the whole world, but a lot of the world…Like we were talking about before, it was such a golden era for river guiding—not only having somebody pay us to cruise around the world, to see the world, but we were exploring. Those early Ethiopia trips and stuff, man, we were out there. You know, you were with us. (Steiger: I remember vividly when Slade and Yost flipped on that trip, we’re puttin’ the pieces back together from that, and it’s like, “Oh shit! We lost all the lunch and four dinners!” It was like day four of an eighteen-day trip that should have been 25-days, on account of the water. I remember right then you were like, “Okay, time to start fishin’!” (laughter) “Guess we’d better catch some fish here.”) Yeah. And then catchin’ that electric catfish. That was so funny. Whenever I think about you, I always remember that catfish thing. That was such a wild experience for me to pull that fish up out of the water and get knocked right on my butt. Just stunned. I had no idea such a thing existed. But yeah, catchin’ all those fish, it was not a matter of want, it was a matter of necessity. We wouldn’t have made it without all those fish. We caught and ate fish every day…And, you know, it really taught me a lot about human nature—watching how people deal with crisis and challenges and emergencies. Watchin’ boats get bitten by hippos! My boat was the first boat to get bitten by a hippo on that very first trip that I did on the Omo. Up to that point, we thought the hippos were just big, timid, run-from-you creatures. But all of a sudden we discovered that they were pretty vicious. The hippo that grabbed my boat, he shook our boat like a dog shakin’ a rag. We were lucky we could hang onto the boat. I mean, it was such violent shaking, he was throwing the boat around. I’m sitting’ in the middle, and he’s got his big ol’ jaws clamped onto the boat, right at the oar lock. And the oar lock is holding’ up one of his gums, so I can see into his teeth. I could reach out and touch him on the nose. Mean-lookin’ eyes, You could hear the air escaping’ and the boat startin’ to deflate around us. Then you could see the hippo was done shaking us, and he was trying to get away, but his teeth were stuck in the material of the raft because those boats were Vladimir’s first early…the Holcomb boats. Yeah, these were new Holcomb boats to start out with. (Steiger: Which they didn’t hold air all that good, right?) They didn’t because just before that trip, we’d done the Gaba River and lost them all, and then retrieved them. When we lost ’em on the Gaba, they had gotten all pinned on one rock, and just shook in the force of the water for a week before we got ’em out. And then we patched ’em all up and went down the Omo with ’em. So they already didn’t hold air. But now mine really didn’t hold air. (Steiger: Those were hard to patch, too.) Well, we used every bit of glue and patchin’ material that we had, to put my boat back together. A week or ten days later when John Yost’s boat got bitten by a hippo, by the second bite we had no glue and no patchin’ material, no way to repair it. So we just had to abandon that boat because it was toast. (Steiger: Because that was the end of the patch kit.) Yeah. (Steiger: So what did that teach you about people in crises?)
Henderson: Well, it was just interesting to see how good guides rise to the occasion. When times get tougher, the good guides and good people just react better. Instead of freezing up or panicking, they deal with situations in the way that they have to be dealt with. Like on the trip you were on, when the two boats flipped and you’ve got all these people in the water, and you’ve got the ones that are just, “Take me, Jesus.” Just floatin’ away, not participating in their own rescue, let alone anybody else’s rescue—just giving it up. I wouldn’t be alive today if that was the way I treated it, I’m sure. There were plenty of times, like on that Gaba trip, when we lost all the boats and everything.
Steiger: How’d you lose ’em?
Henderson: The Gaba was the first trip we did, before the Omo. We went up to the steep mountain river—small, ragin’, whitewater river. We scouted what we could, this first big drop. But because it was the first big drop, nobody really wanted to portage the first rapid. Lookin’ back on it, we certainly should have. It was a wild little chute comin’ into it that wound through this narrow little gorge, and then poured over a waterfall into a big trough between the pour-over and the face of a big giant boulder, and then there was a wall on the other side of the channel. You could see a route, and if you were in the center, you’d make it; but if you were too far left, you’d flip into the wall on the left; and if you’re too far right, you fell between the pour-over and this big rock wall, the side of a giant boulder. So out of three boats, one went left and flipped; and one went down the center and stayed right-side up, but got hung up on a log jam at the bottom; and my boat went too far right, over the waterfall, and I flipped. We lost both the boats that flipped—just disappeared downstream in this fast water. Of course everybody was just struggling’ to get out. Just to survive. I was underwater for a long time. I didn’t think I was ever gonna come out. Finally when I did pop up, I was right at the top of a big wave in the tail waves. I could see that I was gonna either go under that log jam and the boat that was hung up there, or I was gonna be on top of that boat, one or the other. And just as I’m comin’ up to the boat, Jim Slade happened to turn around…he saw me, he just reached around to point and to say, “There’s Bart.” I crawled right up his arm and into the boat. So I was into the boat next to him, before anybody even saw me comin’. But my boat had already long since gone downstream, while I was just washing’ around in the hole. We regrouped and gathered almost everybody up, but we’d lost one. Angus McCloud, we never did find him.
So then we had only one boat, so not everyone could go on downstream. I had a severely sprained ankle. Everybody that was beat up was not very likely to go on. We chose the strongest to go on, really. So four guys went on downstream to try and locate Angus and find the boats. They only made it about another mile and a half or two miles downstream, until they flipped that boat too and lost it. Then they hiked out, too. So we all hiked out and regrouped back at a little village a few miles up the road from where we’d started. A week later, we got a plane to fly down over the river, a mission plane that was in Ethiopia at the time, to fly over the river to see if they could spot Angus. They didn’t spot Angus, but they spotted the boats, all hung up in the same spot. So we cut a little trail down to ’em and got ’em off the rocks and brought ’em back to Addis Ababa and patched up what we could, and had one more boat that was comin’ over to join us for the Omo, ’cause we needed four boats for the Omo. So we had one good boat. (Steiger: So the Omo, you had a trip sold.) Right. (Steiger: And the Gaba, you were doin’ the scout trip.) Exploratory, yeah, right.
Steiger: So you didn’t really have a choice of—you had to do this trip anyway. (Henderson: Yeah.) Was it hard to go out again for you, after somethin’ like that?
Henderson: Ah, no. Not really. It was exciting. It was all in the challenge then. I mean, it was scary, anytime you set off on somethin’ you haven’t done before. But Rich and John had been down the Omo once by then, and we knew it was doable. We knew there were some big rapids on it and stuff, but we’d deal with it. It was exciting, all new to me, and still pretty new to them. They remembered some of the things, but 300 and some odd miles of river, you don’t remember it all by seein’ it one time, and seein’ it at a different water level. So yeah, it was just explorin’ and gettin’ off and explorin’ the side canyons and the waterfalls, and learnin’ to deal with all the crocodiles and hippos and the wildlife and the snakes and everything; the diseases; and then the people—just the whole social interaction with the people down there.
In their first trip, they really hadn’t seen many people, because they were there at a time when the people were not at the river. So our trip was really the first time when we really encountered the people for the first time. So that whole interaction with the people on that first Omo trip was a first for them and for us. I mean, their first reaction was usually to run, when they’d see us comin’ down the river.
Steiger: God, I remember, I’ll never forget seein’ those guys and bein’ all scared. “Oh, look, they’ve got guns!” Then you get up close and you realize they’re these old World War II rifles and the barrels are jammed with mud, and they don’t have any bullets. Thank God!
Henderson: Yeah, the intimidation factor is half of it. From a distance you don’t know if the gun works or whether it doesn’t, so it’s effective. It protects ’em just in an intimidation way. Yeah, those were exciting days and exciting trips.
Steiger: Really exciting.
Henderson: And the same thing…we started runnin’ the Bio Bio, just like in the early days of the Grand Canyon, it takes a while to sort out all the runs and the rapids, and figure ’em all out, how’s the best way to navigate the rapids. So all these rivers that we pioneered, you know, we were figurin’ all those runs out. A lot of it was school of hard knocks, and a lot of it was just gettin’ in there with the right guy with the right pair of eyes to look at it in a different way. We’d kind of settle into runnin’ things one way, and then some new guy, Brad Dimock or somebody’d show up, and say, “Well, how about this other way here?,” you know. Gradually you sort out the best way to run things, and to rig things, and not just run the rapids, but runnin’ the whole trips. So it was an exciting era to be part of. Certainly the golden age of it was right then, the beginning.
Steiger: So it was Africa for you, and then Alaska was next?
Henderson: For me, it was Africa first, and then New Zealand, and then Alaska, and then South America, and then…(Steiger: Which was the Bio Bio?) Just the Bio Bio for me, but they did some other trips down there—Sobek did—that I wasn’t involved in.
Steiger: Did you do the Zambezi? Did you get in on that?
Henderson: I got in on the Zambezi and the Takazay. The Takazay was the latest one we did, just a few years back. But the Kilembero and Rufiji in Tanzania, that was another exciting early-day trip, that Stan Boor and Conrad [Hirsch] pioneered first. And then I did several of the early trips there. That river had even more hippos and crocodiles, it was in the middle of the Selous Game Reserve—a lot more wildlife and a lot more hippos. I mean, probably ten times the number of hippos and crocodiles that the Omo had. So, it was just a matter of survival, learning to survive the hippos and the crocs. For a long time, I don’t think we had a trip down that river that didn’t get a hippo bite. I mean, virtually every trip down got a hippo bite eventually. It was just so many hippos that that’s what you did all day long, was dodge hippos all day…I can remember at least twice havin’ hippos come up underneath my boat on the Kilembero. Basically, you’re standin’ on the hippo’s back. I mean, when he comes up under your boat, you’ve got that sixteenth of an inch of floor rubber between you and the hippo—that’s not much. You’re basically standin’ on his back, and his head swivels out of the water, he tries to bite the boat. I remember twice havin’ scratches on the boat from their teeth. The angle that they’re trying to bite, they couldn’t quite get ahold of the boat…But we watched a couple of boats gettin’ the bite and gettin’ shook around. And since it’d happened to me on the Omo, I knew what they were goin’ through. It’s always spooky.
Crocodiles, big crocodiles. I had one trip where we had just finished a long portage on the Kilembero. We had a portage that would take us three days to get around this big waterfall on that river . We’d just finished the last carry, and it was just getting dark, and I went down to this little trough of water that was—you’d think it’s got to be a safe place, it’s in the middle of a waterfall, the exit goes out in the middle of a waterfall, and just a little long trough of water, and I’d bathed in it before. I thought that’s the one safe place. “I need a bath. I don’t care if it is almost dark.” Just as I jumped into the water, my feet hit the bottom, and at the same time my feet hit the bottom, this trough of water I’m jumpin’ into just erupts. This crocodile is laying in the bottom of this trough, and I must have landed right in front of his nose, because he was goin’ for the river, and he hit me in the back of the legs, basically knocked my legs out from under me. But the trough was just wide enough that I could kind of hang onto the side. And this crocodile is twelve, thirteen, fourteen feet long—a huge crocodile—is goin’ out between my legs…Oh, he’s in a panic. But water’s flyin’ everywhere, my feet are hittin’ him, my legs are hittin’ him, and his tail comes through, his tail’s whackin’ at me, and he’s just swimmin’ with the tail, not tryin’ to hit me with it I don’t think, but he’s hittin’ me with it and the whole thing is over in two seconds. Such an adrenaline rush! In the end I was just kind of sittin’ there, spread-eagled over the top of this trough, a foot and a hand on each side. Took hours for the adrenaline to come down. So they were exciting times, learnin’ about that stuff.
Steiger: Yeah, it’s amazing that so many—I mean, statistically, there’s probably most of those turned out pretty good. You don’t see as many people hurt or killed as somebody might expect, I think.
Henderson: Yeah. I mean, when I look back on ’em, I’m amazed at how well we did.
Steiger: I guess there was that guy, Lou Greenwald, now, he got lost before that. Was he lost before you got there?
Henderson: Oh, no, Lou was with us on our very first, on the Gaba trip. Lou was on my boat when we flipped on the Gaba. It was me and Gary Mercado and Lou Greenwald on my boat when we flipped. Lou was part of those early days. He was on that first Omo trip too. And then he was drowned on the Blue Nile. Blue Nile was a killer. I never did do the Blue Nile…Bad rapids, bad people, a lot of fatalities from gunshots, and the shifta, the banditos that live along there.
Steiger: But they still do trips every now and again.
Henderson: Well, they just did. Imax Theater, the exploration that Rich Bangs and Pasquale Skitoru—they just did a trip where they went all the way to the Mediterranean Ocean, from Lake Tanna all the way down to the Mediterranean Ocean, the whole thing.

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Steiger: Your website is great. [homepage.mac.com/rbartelow/] You’ve really got some great pictures there. I hope someday you’ll do a book or something like that.
Henderson: You know, the one thing I’d like to participate in would be a collaborative effort with some of the other guides—especially some of the other Sobek guides—to put together our stories, along with photographs of the early Sobek days.
Steiger: That should be done, because like you say, that was unique.
Henderson: Yeah, and you know, if we wait very long, there won’t be enough of us left to do it. (chuckles)
Steiger: Yeah. Or we won’t remember, except for selective…“Remember that time that you guys flipped those boats??” “Nah!”
Henderson: “I don’t remember that!” (laughter) “I don’t remember it that way, anyway.” I’m sure even today, it’d be fun to get together and tell the stories and just have everybody tell it from how they remember it.
Steiger: Yeah. Well, everybody sees it different, that’s for sure.
Henderson: And everybody’ll remember it different, ’cause everybody’s told the stories in a different way over the years. And you know, in the telling, pretty soon it’s the telling that you remember, not the actual happening.
Steiger: Oh, yeah, if you revise it enough. Definitely smooth it out.
Henderson: That’s one of the great parts about guiding, is learning to tell stories, isn’t it? (chuckles)
Steiger: Oh yeah!…Well, actually, it’s part tellin’ stories, and then part hearin’ ’em. That’s half the fun for me—and not just about river runnin’. I mean, I love hearin’ the stories of everybody. You think about all of the people, for me, that I’ve gotten to come in contact with—just amazing characters.
Henderson: Yeah, phenomenal. That’s been such an incredibly valuable part of my life, being a guide. I remember thinking early on in my career that everybody knows somethin’ I don’t know. Every person on this planet knows a bunch of things I don’t know. I’ve always enjoyed that aspect of guiding, just meeting new people and different guides and the great personalities that we’ve guided with over the years, the clients that we’ve managed to take. I mean, just brilliant people that we’ve come across—people that are just classic humans on the planet that come through our lives, through our guiding business.
Steiger: Yeah, early on in the game I decided, “You know what? It’s not my function to judge anybody. I’m just gonna carry you down the river.” That made it a lot easier for me. “I’m gonna carry you down the river and take an interest in your story, and you can tell me whatever it is you want to.”
So now you’re an outfitter and you started this little company that started with one boat in a broke little town up there, that needed resurrection, and you tell me at the front of this deal that you guys took 45,000 people down on some kind of adventure last year. Perspective-wise, what did that do to you, havin’ to be the “Ted Hatch of Alaska”? What’s that like?
Henderson: Oh, it’s been a great learning experience for me. I didn’t know anything about business to speak of. It’s just somethin’ like learnin’ a new river. Learnin’ how to run a business, how the whole process works, of dealing with permits and governments and concession contracts, and contracts with cruise lines, and hiring, and all the laws you have to know about. It gives you a huge appreciation for the people that we worked for back when we were just kids on the river, havin’ a great time, and not a care in the world. I certainly have a much greater appreciation now for what they did for us, what Fred and Ted and Don Harris and Ken Sleight and Tony Sparks and all those guys that we worked for—George Wendt and Vladimir—what they did to make it possible for us to have the life and the career and the great times we had. We definitely didn’t appreciate enough about what they did for us. That’s the one thing that I realize now is that I owe a huge debt to those guys, because they did great things for us, that we never realized, just by creating the business that we were privileged to get the fun part of—and in the background and stuff, makin’ sure that it all worked, dealin’ with the different government agencies that were out there. That’s certainly not the fun part of the business, that the guiding part is…It’s been a great thing for me, because guiding is a lifestyle job that you can’t—it’s difficult to get far enough ahead to really make a nest egg for your retirement and your older years when you’re not going to be able to guide anymore—not going to want to, whatever.
Steiger: I think it’s more “not going to be able to,” in my experience. I just go back and forth between, “I can’t afford to do this anymore,” and “Nope, I don’t care. I don’t want to give it up yet.” (laughs) (Henderson: Yeah, exactly.) Because there’s nothing else that’s this much fun.
Henderson: Exactly. I don’t feel like I’m ready to give it up. Guiding is still in my blood, and it’s still something I want to do. I hope that I can do it as long as I’m alive. I look at Georgie…and Martin Litton—people that it was a big part of their lives. And I just hope that that’s how I can be, too.
Steiger: So Haines, when you started this thing, you had some loggers and some fishermen up there, and that was about the size of it?
Henderson: Uh-huh. The logging mill shut down and there was a public meeting in town one day about the future of Haines, where it should go. I stood up and said, “Well, I think there’s great potential in guiding and river trips and wilderness adventure, and it’s worth gettin’ into. It’s a business you can develop.” Somebody stood up and said, “We don’t care what you think! You don’t live here in the winter, so we don’t care what you think.” It just kinda made me mad, because they didn’t care. This guy said, “You’re from California, we don’t care.” Kinda made me mad, because I’ve never lived in California in my life.” So I…just kind of out of a commitment to show ’em that it was possible, is what got me started. Now it just kinda grew on its own despite me, for a long time, until it finally got to a size where I really couldn’t ignore it anymore. (chuckles)… Chilkat Guides is the largest employer in town.
Steiger: Well, I’ve got about five more minutes of tape here, and then I’ll stop torturing you. I mean, I could listen to you all day, I really could. I ended up talkin’ to Vladimir and Kyle and those guys, and we ran ten hours of tape.
Henderson: Yeah. Was Jimmy [Hendrick] there with Vladimir? I ran into Jimmy on a trip on the North Slope, up on the Kongakut last year—not this past summer, but the summer before. He and Robby Pitagora were on a trip. It was just great fun to run into him out there. We sat down and talked about the old Wilderness World days, ’cause he and I, he was guidin’ for ’em the same time I was, and I remember runnin’ a lot of trips with Jimmy. (Steiger: Oh man, what a character.) And Whale. It was Jimmy and Whale and me and Tom Olsen…Floyd Stevens. (Steiger: That was a sweet company, great system.) Ronn Hayes was still guidin’ and running trips. Bobby Jensen was there in those days. (Steiger: So many chapters, it’s like each company has its own little chapters.) Oh, yeah. And I started runnin’ a lot of trips for oars. For quite a few years I ran most of my trips for oars, runnin’ with that whole crew: Big Bruce…Slade and Skip Horner and…Oh, who else was on that? Terry Brian, Sam Street. When I first started, Sam was runnin’ the thing. (Steiger: And then he became Sam West.) Sam West, yeah. And, you know, the Harris boat trip era, runnin’ with Dave Kloepfer. That was a whole era in itself, too. And then the small one-boat trips. Harris Boat Trips. That was a great company, great guy to work for. It was mostly me and Stan Hollister and Dave Kloepfer—that was kind of the company. And then when Harris Boat Trips sold, then I went over and started to work for Ken Sleight, and worked with Ken in his last few years of runnin’ the Grand Canyon before he turned it over to his son. (Steiger: Boy, you really got around!) Yeah. So I was runnin’ with him, I was runnin’ with Kim Crumbo. Yeah, and workin’ with you guys at arr in the beginning, livin’ down at Lees Ferry and Vermilion Cliffs. Talk about a cast of characters! I mean, holy moly! (Steiger: Oh, Vermilion Cliffs was great!) Yeah. Ross and Pete and Breck…(Steiger: Moody.) And Moody. Rich Bangs would filter through there once in a while. Basically it was a hub for everybody, all the companies. Vermilion Cliffs was where it was happenin’ in those days.
Steiger: Yeah. Well, Bledsoe lived there, and Joe Tonsmeier, and Kloepfer, Al Harris, Claire Quist—everybody. Oh, man, those were really good days.
Henderson: Yeah, for sure. Then we got the whole Upper Colorado scene with the Cataract Canyon days, too, that we haven’t even talked about. I spent a lot of time up there, too. In fact, I almost bought half of Sidewinder Expeditions…I had it all lined up to buy half of that company, and then I decided, no, Alaska was the place to be. That was the frontier. That’s the great thing about bein’ in Alaska for me is that it’s the frontier. It is. When I arrived there…I mean, Sobek and Chilkat Guides are the first raft companies in Alaska. We were the first ones in. So it’s just been neat to be on the pioneering front with Sobek first in Africa, and all around the world where we were, and also in Alaska, and just following that through, to the maturity that it is now. I mean, taking Chilkat Guides from nothing, to taking 45,000–55,000 people a year, has just been a fascinating trip. But again, it’s the frontier out there. It’s only your own imagination that holds you back, you know. As long as you’ve got your imagination active and the dream and the drive, you can make it on the frontier. It’s a little harder in the city, but you can make it on the frontier.
Steiger: How much more frontier do we have left out there?
Henderson: There’s always a frontier. There’s always a frontier—it’s just a matter of findin’ out where it is, and havin’ the balls to go find it. Not only to go find it, but to go live in it. There’s still plenty. There’s frontiers that’ll last our lifetimes.
Steiger: Oh, yeah?
Henderson: And I plan to live a long time.
Steiger: Yeah!
Henderson: At least a thousand. (laughter)
Steiger: Yeah, that’d be handy, wouldn’t it?