Gloeckler and Winter

   What possessed Henry to get into the business?

   Well, Hank had already run rivers with Jack Curry. A particular fella named Paul Thevenin was the boatman for Curry up in Idaho ... and it just really stirred him, and he wanted to get somethin' going. I think he ran in probably 1964, and then again in 1965, and by that next year he was ready to run rivers. And Henry was not, by any means, an old guy. At the time he was twenty-one himself, so he was all fired up about it, "I'm gonna be a riverman and be in business all at the same time!" (laughs) So that's what got him going. He got himself a little chicken coop there in Turlock, California, and that was the warehouse. Truck that wouldn't run, just like everybody else's, and some basket boats, and called it a river company. But he came around, he did okay for himself, from meager beginnings. (pause) Bruce's turn.

   Winter: That first trip I ran a boat, which was my fourth trip, we'd sit back there with the River Guide, keep lookin' through it, and I remember standin' up one time and tellin' somebody, "Well, hold on, here comes Ruby," and we motor, and we motor and motor, and pretty soon one of the passengers who had a guidebook said, "You know, I think we went through that about twenty minutes ago." (laughter) I also remember I had heard just enough about geology to be dangerous (laughter) and we got down there below the Little Colorado and I'd heard them talk about the great unconformity-this happened to be a geology group-and I stood up on this trip and said, "You know, this is a special area. This is called the great unconformity," and somebody asked the dreaded question, "Why do they call it that?" and I told them, "Well, it was because this is the only part of the canyon where it widens out like this and you can see from rim to rim, and it's like twelve miles apart. It's different, it's an unconformity, a difference." (laughter) Well, nobody said anything, but they all had this blank stare. We got to camp that night and one of the ladies on the trip who had been at the geology classes came up to me and said, "You know, Bruce, I don't think you really want to tell that too often," (laughter) and proceeded to tell the true story.

   Bill Gloeckler, Bruce Winter. As outfitters, they're a boatman's dream. Great to work for, kind of like big brothers: real boatmen who learned it all the hard way but hung in there, worked at it ferociously, paid attention, and in the end got extremely good at it.
   Their company today, ARR, may be a textbook example of American industry at its best. Big, but lean and mean too. Efficient as hell, but constantly humorous, constantly human. The money has been rolling in for a couple, three years now, but an amazing amount of it has rolled right back out- poured relentlessly into wages, benefits, better equipment, resource management trips, special population trips, training trips, quiet motor research, Wilderness First Responder courses, and an unbelievably slick system for getting river trips on and off the water (from "labor's" perspective). You look at the overall setup today and it's a little scary, just how slick it really is. Look again, at where these guys started thirty years ago, and it becomes something else altogether...

   Winter: I grew up in Phoenix, and 1970 our family took a commercial trip with Sanderson. I just graduated from college that year and we did an eight-day trip down to Diamond Creek. I got to know the guide, Larry Zurker, pretty well on the trip, and he called me about a month later and asked if I'd like to come back and swamp. I said, "Yeah! I'd love to!" So I went back and ran my second trip as a swamper for Sanderson that summer, and it was an interesting trip. It was all stewardesses from TWA. (chuckles) I remember that. (laughter)

   Gloeckler: Funny you remembered that!

   Winter: And I said to Larry, is this a normal trip? (laughter) It wasn't, but it still seemed like a good thing to do. So I'd kind of set my mind to try and get a job doing it. That was the end of the summer and the opportunity came up to go to Europe. I had a couple of friends who'd saved up their money and were just going to go hitchhike around. This was the seventies and everybody was doing Europe on five dollars a day. And we tried to do Europe on two-and-a-half dollars a day, instead of the five dollars a day, which you actually could do. (laughter) You really could. And the funny part is, actually that's where I met Bill, in Innsbruck, Austria, in the train station. Went into the train station to get a map to find the youth hostel, and one of the guys started talking to Bill and found out he was from Arizona, and up came the river, and pretty soon Bill got us a place to stay at a little hotel there, a little frau rented us a little place.

   Gloeckler: In a home there.

   Winter: We spent a month there. We got student tickets and all the things, and we learned how to ski. And it was cheap. It was cheap: we'd ride the trolley up there for fifteen cents and get a student ski pass for pretty much nothing and go skiing every day. And ended up, we were leavin' there and Bill said, "Sure, I'll go," and so he joined on with us and we traveled for three or four more months through Yugoslavia and Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece.
   Came back to the States that May and tried to get hired on somewhere, and the only thing I could do is, I got a trip with Canyoneers. Gaylord put me on the river for one trip, and I never really got hired on until the next summer. Bill talked to Henry, got me a job full-time in the summer of 1972. Got up there the first trip out they needed a boatman. Well, I had three trips: one as a passenger and two as a swamper, and had driven the motor at least twenty-thirty minutes, total. (laughter)

   Gloeckler: So he was an expert!

   Winter: Right, I was qualified! (laughter) I met the Park Service minimum. (laughter) And actually, Henry was smart enough to put Stan Jantz, who had one trip, but had worked in Idaho, put him on the boat too and said, "Well, between the two of you, I think you can make it down." (laughter) And we actually did.

   Gloeckler: It was fun to watch.

   Winter: That was a wild trip-it was very low water, if I remember right.

   Gloeckler: Very low. (chuckles)

   Winter: And we'd trade off running rapids. I'd run one, he'd run the next one. I think I remember especially, we got to Hance and it was so low, we stood on the shore and Bill talked to us about-well, it was impossible to run, we'd never make it through. (laughter) But he was gonna try, and if he makes it, Bruce, you come next.
   We had this great plan. We'd come in this spot, then I knew to go left and right and left and right, and I had this all planned out in my mind after standing on the beach for two hours, looking at this thing. Bill went through and ran this great run, and we went back to the boat and I was scared to death. In fact, it was the first time I'd ever noticed that syndrome when you look at the water for a long time, and then you finally look away, the walls are moving in the canyon. And I was so scared I thought that was because I was ready to pass out-the canyon was kind of movin.' (laughter) So I got on the boat and came in far right, tried to go left, hit the first hole sideways. It threw me down on the floorboard. And we were so inexperienced, we were runnin' six-gallon Johnson cans. We had three of 'em tied together on each side, and we had tied a rope to the frame, and then through all the Johnson cans and tied it on the last can-but we hadn't tied it back down to the frame. So it threw me on the floor and all six of these Johnson cans bopped up in the air and landed on me. Stan ran back and was trying to take the Johnson cans off to get me up, and I still had my hand up in the air, throttling, thinking, "Okay, now if I just go left fifty feet and then right." We made the worst run in the world, but that was my fourth trip, and that kind of started me out. Actually, that also was the year that Bill and gosh, who were all the guys that went and started Relco?

   Gloeckler: John Foster, Dennis Prescott, Rick Hilsammer.

   Winter: Yeah, they were all working for Henry and that was the year they were all leaving to go start their own thing. So it moved me from the bottom of the list to the top of the list almost instantaneously. My fourth trip was that trip, and my sixth trip I had two people following me down-I was the lead boatman. With them all gone, Henry went, "Well, you've got five trips, you're my lead guy now." (laughter)

   Gloeckler: That's right. That season, they had actually left. I got left as the sacrifice to Henry, because everybody else was leaving, and we didn't have a lot of trips with Relco, we were just gettin' that goin'. We'd just built the equipment, made the investment, and were goin' for it, moving to Flagstaff and all that... But one of the more interesting parts of that season was that that was the year the Park Service had decided they were going to use the amount of use each company went through the canyon with as a base . . .

   Winter: That was the year.

   Gloeckler: Right. . . . for their user days. And they were going to cut 'em off there. So some of the trips that we had to pull off that year-it was a fairly impressive season. I remember twelve-day trips, sold out at $125 a head, probably. Inexpensive, just get a lot of people and let's go down there. And of course we only had one set of equipment (laughter) and one truck. So if it was a twelve-day, and then the next one was a ten-day and it had to be on that next day, you just. . . . We did a lot of this, actually, back-to-back. We would get to Pierce's and we would de-rig and we'd throw it on a truck and we'd drive all night, and we'd rig in the early morning hours and we'd leave that day. We had a lot of college/university groups.

   Winter: A lot of university groups-geology groups. And they were getting credit for this course. 

   Gloeckler: Sonoma, University of Las Vegas, Nevada. . . . Reno.

   Winter: In fact, I can think of ... three-fourths of the trips I ran that summer were college groups. 

   Gloeckler: They were. When you ran a trip that was made up of individuals signing up, then it would be back to a six-day to Diamond. You know, it would be crankin' through there. And he'd throw those in the middle. But we were back-to-back-to-back-to-back. There was just no gettin' off the river. Which, you know, of course for a river guy, that's a good thing-you like that river time.

   The thing about Henry Falany and the heydey of Whitewater Expeditions was, everything old Hank did was BIG, and that included the boats. Which were huge. As were the frames, and the boxes, and the motors, all of it... double-tough, double-big, double-heavy. You could have put out to sea in those boats, and they did too, later on down in Belize. But back in Grand Canyon, not only was it true that, fully loaded, they were just about the trickiest, scariest things on Earth to run when the water got low, also, every time you rigged and de-rigged em, sad but true, you had to manually levitate each individual item in and out of the truck.
   Actually, they manually levitated crazy stuff all through that canyon. They backpacked lower units down the north Kaibab more than once, during the dog-days of low water; one time a slight oversight in the rig-out caused them to send two guys on a twilight run to Phantom Ranch and up the trail, where next morning they packed down an entire trip's worth of frozen meat (for sixty) purchased under emergency conditions from Babbitt's grocery store in the dead of night.

   Winter: I think Bill probably remembers the trip- there were times when it was impossible to make it back in time. I mean, it was just logistically impossible. We had a trip where we arrived at Lee's Ferry to rig at four in the afternoon, and the people had been there-it was a college group-the people had been there since about eleven. And by the time we got rigged, it was absolutely pitch dark. Henry drove down in his truck and said, "Well, if you don't shove off, they'll ask for a day's worth of money back. I'll drive down to. . . ."

   Gloeckler: "So you're leavin' tonight!" (laughter)

   Winter: "I'll drive down to the Paria and I'll turn my lights on and you pull down there and we'll camp at the Paria." And at that time, the Paria beach was huge. I mean, it was a huge sand beach, lots bigger than it is now. And we did a night watch where you'd be up for an hour, and then at two o'clock you'd wake the next guy, and he'd go from two to three, and you'd wake the next guy. And Robin Falany went to sleep on about the two to three watch, and we woke up in the morning a hundred feet or more from the water. There was no way we could get the boats back in. That was when they still had the trailers and a little store there at Lee's Ferry. In fact, I walked back up and had lunch at the store.

   Gloeckler: Still had the restaurant there. You could set and have breakfast or lunch or whatever, which we did.

   Winter: Yeah. So our second day, we had lunch at the store there. I think all the trips that launched that day were going by us, so somewhere about three, three-thirty, we got back in the water and we went down to Soap Creek, (Gloeckler: Uh-huh) and we knew the water was goin' down, so we did another night watch, and don't blame that one on Robin, but somebody fell asleep again. We woke up in the morning, all the boats just draped over rocks. And we said, "We've got to dismantle 'em and get 'em in the water." I think we got back in the water-it was lunchtime or later on our third day and we were at Soap Creek. (laughter)

   Gloeckler: It was a rough start.

   Winter: But that was not that unusual that summer.

   Gloeckler: No, it was not. That was the typical summer. I think one of the best ones was pullin' in about two, three a.m. from a solid de-rig and drive around there, and then-riggin'-just reachin' a point where people were fallin' all over themselves. They used to have those little mobile units that were like a motel where you could get a room right there at the Ferry. For some reason, Henry had sprung for that, and we knew we had a room. Finally at one point I said, "Let's go sleep for two hours and then we'll come back and finish this" and then the people will be there. So we all did, and there was about six of us. And Bruce and I were the guides, so we got a bed and everybody else was on the floor. Not too much time went by and everybody was sleepin'. All of a sudden (chuckles) Bruce is layin' over there, jumps up off the bed and goes, "The boats! The boats! We gotta get to the boats! The boats are floatin' away!" And everybody on the floor jumps up and gets into it, thinkin' "Okay we gotta get to the boats!" but we're in a motel room, the boats are on the beach, they're not goin' anywhere, they're not rigged yet. (laughs) So that was a pretty restful night. Bag that idea of sleepin'! We just went and did the work, and sure enough, people showed up and away we went. That's all I can really remember of that season. It was just keep rolling and get 'em down there. And it was fun too, to look back on it.

   Winter: Yeah, it was a wild season, because it definitely ... it was, it was just constant. You got off at the end, and like Bill said, you drove all night.

   Gloeckler: Absolutely, and it kind of fit Henry's mold up to that point. Because Henry had permits all over. Even by 1967, we were haulin' between California, Idaho, and Utah: By 1968, between those three and Arizona. You had one truck and you had a load of equipment, and you would just haul from state-to-state. Henry would line up trips accordingly. That was the way a lot of companies were building up then, and it made sense.

   Winter: The trips were different, too, I think, because the expectations of the people were so different. They still thought they were taking their lives in their own hands. (Gloeckler: And they were.) (laughter) And they were! They thought, actually, if they came off unhurt, it was successful. 

   Gloeckler: It was an adventure travel business. They weren't "tourists," per se. They knew a little bit about it-they were fearful for what they were gettin' into, and they should have been. (Winter: Yeah.) But it's changed a heck of a lot from that.

   So it was pretty adventurous, huh?

   Gloeckler: Well sure! You know, you're still in high school, you don't know nuthin'. You're thrown out there on a river with a bunch of people and going', "Uh-oh," and the equipment was (Winter: Oh, Lord.) Oh, everything would break. You know? I mean everything. It was just those days. Everybody had to go through that. That was part of the deal then. (Winter: No water.) No water. (Winter: 15,000 was. . . .) Actually, they were still filling the lake, so they didn't give you a lot. We used to talk about 3,000 cfs and I think that's pretty fair. I think it was down there. (chuckles) A lot of big rocks in that river!

   Winter: Oh yeah, if somebody talked about 15,000, that was scary, (Gloeckler: Yeah.) because none of us. . . . That was too much water.

   Winter: The Whitewater equipment at that time was-I mean, it was absolutely the best we could do, the best probably that Henry could do. (Gloeckler: That's honest, yeah.) But it was pretty poor equipment, and we spent a lot of time patchin' and repairin' motors and also, like you said, we had a lot of big trips, and you'd be out there the fifth day and somebody'd walk up to you, and you'd go, "Are they on our trip?" (Gloeckler: Are you with us?) (laughter) And when you had sixty, seventy people, you hadn't even seen 'em all. And it was hard to guide trips like that when you had five people following you. You were kind of a traffic director, trying to always count and make sure there was still five boats back there.

   Gloeckler: You were constantly looking back, wondering "What now?" basically.
   I guarantee, we never thought of it as a grind, though. The road was probably the hardest part, of course. But we never really thought about it. I don't think any of the guys. . . . Dennis Prescott was a guy that I kind of grew up with in this business, and he doesn't know what a grind is, that guy. (chuckles) Wouldn't know one if he saw one. He's just always had that attitude. His thing I always loved about him is we'd be still working at about one a.m., trying to get somethin' done, he'd say, "Oh, we'll be alright in the morning." And sure enough, everything was okay in the morning. Another day, the sun came up, you moved on. And he was real good at that. We did some serious stuff together, he and I, pullin' off some trips for Henry. But I don't think either of us ever regretted it or thought of it as a grind. It just was, you always looked forward to it. I guess that's really the thing. You always look forward to that next river trip, and that's what that was, hauling around. You get off one, and heck, you're anxious to get to the next one.

   By the time the boys-Gloeckler, Prescott, and Foster, etc. were Henry's age when he'd started, they were itching to go it alone too; and somehow they wormed things around to where they sort of had themselves a little company, called Relco. It was actually a subcontractual arrangement that would cause them untold grief later on, but they didn't know that yet and for several years there, ignorance was bliss and life was sweet.

   Winter: I was never one of the partners. I came over after I worked for Whitewater a while, which was a good, like I said earlier, it was a good deal, because when they all left, I kind of went to the top right away. And I enjoyed working for Whitewater. I think, if I remember the reason I left, it was all over payroll, over how much I got paid. At one time I got paid by the trip. . . . 

   Gloeckler: Well, that would be the same reason everyone else left. (laughter)

   Winter: And since I'd do an eight-day, Sunday to Sunday, and then I'd come back and do a six-day, Monday to Saturday, I was pretty much. . . . I'd get off the river one day, and start the next day, or a couple of times we would get off the river and fly back. They'd take us up to Peach Springs and we'd fly back and start the trip that day. And in fact, kind of a funny story, Paul Thevenin who was the warehouse manager at the time had the gift for gab, and he didn't know how long it would take us or when we'd get in, so ... (laughter) He would do the orientation and it could be anywhere from a half-hour to two hours, plus. We'd land up at Marble Canyon, and there'd be a car waiting for us. We'd jump in the car and drive down, park the car and walk down the ramp, and when he saw us coming down the ramp, he'd wrap up his orientation and turn and say, "Here are your boatmen. This is your lead boatman, and here's your other boatman, and I think we're ready to go. Let's pack up." (laughter)

   Gloeckler: He was good!

   Winter: And it was! I don't think people knew whether they got the half-hour or the two-hour version. (laughter) ...So anyway, [after Henry decided to pay by the month] I talked to Bill and went over. And I just worked for Relco. I was just a guide. In fact, they had, I think, an eight-day trip-a nine-day trip.

   Gloeckler: We had a nine-day.

   Winter: And nobody wanted to do the nine-day trip. You guys did the seven-day trip. 

   Gloeckler: Our mainstay, for the duration, really, was the eight days to Diamond. That was the thing that most of us ran year-in/year-out. Then they started experimenting with different settings, and some were seven, some were nine. They stuck with the eight-day, and most of us liked that-that schedule was real nice, eight days to Diamond, and it worked out real well... Running a business, early on in those days, it was tough. You were trying to make ends meet too. It's hard for anybody startin' out. But we changed up the rig some. I looked at the Relco years as the years of really kind of comin' around to interpretation and hiking being much more the focus of the trips rather than, "Let's just get us all outta here alive," you know, kind of a thing. (laughter) And so we really pushed that a lot ourselves. We changed the rigs around and lightened 'em up -something that fit our needs a little better, trying to design 'em to exactly the warehouse and the truck and what-not that we had. You do some things operationally that you can, but we were pretty limited on funds, so there's only so much you can do. Our main focus was to run a trip that was well interpreted, and just hike their butts off-you know, show people this place. And that's what I relish the most about those years.

   Winter: You know, one of the most fun things we did [in those old Whitewater years] that you could never do now with passengers, but I remember being-it was either the best part of the trip or the worst -we would get down below Separation, or sometimes even above Separation, and we'd pull over and have dinner and repack the boats, and we always had at least four boats, so we tied two boats together, and then we'd tie the bow lines together, so you'd have kind of two boats and a hundred feet away you'd have two more. We'd shove out, and one set would be the party boat, and the other set would be ... (laughter)
   The ones that just wanted to go to bed!

   Gloeckler: Go to bed and sleep-as if they could! (laughter)

   Winter: Really, a hundred feet away wasn't enough. You couldn't go to sleep on the other one. So the people on the party boat thought it was the best part of the trip, and the people on the sleeping boat thought it was the worst part. And we'd kind of pinball down the river, all night long. And if you got stuck in an eddy, pretty soon the other boats would float by and the tow line would tighten up and you'd get pulled out. I can remember one night we were comin' down to Separation, and the lake was pretty low, and the rapid actually had started to appear a little bit. There was somebody camped there, had come upstream, and was camped there, and it was a pitch-black night and they couldn't see anything and they could hear this singing and yelling and everything coming down the river. And the guy ran out to the beach and he was waving a lantern yelling, "Rapid ahead, rapid ahead." And we floated up on the sandbar right near him, but we couldn't see him. It was still too dark. But you could hear our boats slide up on the rocks and get stuck. Pretty soon the other two boats went by, the line tightened, it pulled us off, away we went, and this poor guy was still swinging the lantern, yellin'. I don't think he even knew what went by. (laughter) He had no clue what had just floated by, but he was sure it was danger.

   Gloeckler: Oh, that was truly a treat. I dare you to do it nowadays.

   Winter: No, you couldn't, but it was a unique part of the adventure (Gloeckler: Very unique.) to float all night with your passengers out there, having a party.

   It was a hell of a party, for everybody down there those days. Relco was a sweet little company for awhile, small, low-key, clean and simple. But one day the hammer fell and the subcontract was over. After a serious round of drinking in the VC Bar, there was nothing to do but say goodbye to the river business and get up to face the new day.

   Gloeckler: It's over, I went back to school. It was twenty years, I had twenty years in, and I was thinkin', "Alright, well I guess maybe. . . ." I was rationalizing it, of course, and saying. . . . At that point, you know, I have children. I have a family and I needed to do something. (chuckles) Can't just sit around and worry about that. So I went back to school and still ran what was left of the business. I had boats up in Utah that we ran, and I had a bus that was left out of Relco that I ran. And it kept paying some bills until I could get through school. Thank God for Georgia-she went back to work and took care of the kids and we went through that about two-three year period, and then at the end of that, that was at the end of twenty years, I said, "Okay." I kind of felt like I'd rationalized it and I was going to walk away. "God it was great. It was wonderful runnin' all those years. Now I'm gonna have to go do something else." And that's right when Bruce and I hooked up, and had already been talking, but there wasn't something else out there, in terms, especially, of a Grand permit, or the means to do it, of course, which is (chuckles) a whole 'nother big part of the problem when you're a couple of guides and been travelin' around the world and skiing and boating and havin' a real good life, but you don't have a lot of money! And so you have to have somethin' else help you out there.

   Winter: We envisioned getting a San Juan maybe, or Cataract at our best hope, and (Gloeckler: Yeah, small-time.) just maybe doing it in the summer, staying with it, and seeing what developed. But I think we had both, at that point, decided that with families, we had to do something else, and I think we were pretty much out of the river business at that point-I was. 

   Gloeckler: I had already gotten an offer from the Flag School District, I was going to go to work. And I'd just finished up a season, in December I had gotten a job offer with the Flag School District, and by April we were back in the river business.
   Bruce had called and said, "Let's go down the San Juan." I said, "Great!" I had a couple of kayaks at the time. I said, "We'll just take the kayaks, go up there and run down there and see that." Because we hadn't done it yet, and thought, "Well, gosh, that's crazy, we should have done that by now." He said, "Okay!" Next phone call, "You know, I got a friend that wants to go along." I said, "Okay, well, we'll just get a raft." The next call (chuckles), "I got twenty-two friends that want to go run the San Juan."
   And I said, "Well, no problem, we'll get five boats and we'll go run this trip," which we did. And Bruce at the time was saying, "You know, San Juan permits are out there, and we ought to think about gettin' into the river business and doing some San Juan trips." And lo and behold, in getting to talk about it, somewhere, Bruce's brother-in-law, Ron Stegall, was talkin' with Bruce, and they got talkin' about the river business too, and thought, "Well, heck, that's a great idea." Bruce and I talked about it again, and it was a great idea, and it turns out that there were some canyon permits out there that were being talked about being sold, and Arizona River Runners was one of 'em. Bruce worked somethin' out there with Mr. Burke and eventually the three of us all sat down in Phoenix with the lawyers and I would say "hacked out" a deal. (laughter) (Winter: That's a good term.) Yeah, I think it is. And there we were, and here we are.

   I remember hearin'. . . That those first years were pretty hard.

   Gloeckler: I would call that first year, in particular, a rough transition. The sales were slow. They weren't pushin' it. The first couple of weeks then were pretty much hell on wheels for me, trying to figure out things. And having been in it twenty years at that point, I thought I knew everything, and of course I didn't know anything.

   Winter: We went up to Vermilion Cliffs about April and kind of walked in the door, and everybody else walked out. (laughter) And we had a river company.

   Gloeckler: It's all yours! (laughter) Yeah.

   Winter: I think the funniest thing about that is, while both of us had obviously been around it for a number of years at this point, and knew exactly-if we had Whitewater, we knew exactly what we would have done differently, but I don't think we really had any clue how much was involved running, actually, the company from start to finish, because our original plan was that Bill would teach school in the wintertime, and then he would just run the warehouse in the summertime, and that I would just do the marketing in the wintertime and then I'd have summers off. (laughter) So for Bill, he figured it was about a four-month job, and he'd teach school, and for me, I thought it was about three or four months, and then I'd have the summers off to add a couple of other things that I was trying to make a living doing at the time, and I could do those. So we thought it'd be a part-time job. (laughter)

   Gloeckler: Didn't work out like that, exactly.

   Nope, not exactly. Turned out to be pretty much full-time from there on. Bruce and his wife and infant daughter camped out in the two-room trailer that served as the office all that first season, working the phones practically around the clock. Gloeckler commuted from Flagstaff because Georgia'd gotten sick that year and couldn't leave the kids. It wasn't exactly fun for a couple years, but somehow they got through it. Meanwhile the old guard was changing everywhere you looked... Henry Falany had sold out and started himself a church back in California. Ron Smith sold. Sandersons sold. And Tony Sparks. And Martin Litton. About the time they got the original ARR under control, Tony Heaton found himself in a tight spot with the Cross's old company and Bruce went up there, and next thing you knew, ARR was a big company, running a lot of trips. And one by one, more of those old "what I'd do's" actually started happening. Little by little. The weird thing was, they kept on happening every single year. The boats now are as far apart from Henry's as Henry's were from Galloway's. They're more comfortable, safer, tougher, lighter, cleaner, quicker, and above all else quieter. They stay rigged all the time, and at the warehouse an ingeniously streamlined system assures that nobody lifts anything they don't have to all summer. The boatmen are treated like royalty, compared with old standards. Rooms and a restaurant dinner at the put-in. Big meal after the takeout and a sleeper car to ride home in; professional driver at the wheel who-company policy-got a good night's sleep halfway into the drive ... just a little thing Bruce and Bill have about driving. They're touchy about it in their old age. And touchy about other things too, like top wages, health care, pension plan, company bonus if they had a good year. And the same consideration applied to all their passengers, too. Don't bullshit 'em, be there early, treat 'em like you'd want somebody treating you.

   Winter: I think not only just us, but the changes, if you look back over the industry, there's been tremendous changes for everybody in ten years. I don't think it's one day you wake up and decide we're going to do this great plan-it's every day you wake up and say "How can I do this a little better? How can I do this a little easier?"

   Gloeckler: The hoops, there's just more of 'em. Some of 'em are bigger even. But the evolution, in many regards is a good thing, because it can allow the industry to grow, it can allow guides to do this for a lifetime and make it a profession. It allows you to put in those benefits, it allows you to build those systems ... and educate our own selves to the care and the need of the Canyon itself. One day you start thinkin' in terms of, "Hey, I ought to be involved in that, I ought to be doin' my share for the place too." Which is a give-back thing that really we all should be concerned about. Because we're there, we're causing that, so we need to be a part of mitigating it too.

   Is that why you guys started helping Crumbo out with his resource management trips?

   Gloeckler: Well yeah, that was just one of those great ideas whose time had come. But once we ran one, from the git-go on this, there was no question that this was a whole new look at an education to our own selves, now thirty years down the road thinkin,' "Now, for sure we know it all." Well, maybe not-maybe not again. It's an education, again. I was associated in the seventies with a lot of the Sierra Club trips, and a lot of the "clean-up" trips, as they called them, where you'd go down and you'd clean a beach. And you felt pretty wonderful about that, and they were good, they were fun. But that's not what this is. This is doing "bust ass" work to mitigate impact that is there because we are there, because there is a dam there, because there are species not indigenous in the plant world that are being introduced by various means, beyond everyone's control-and those things need to be addressed. Now it's taking care of archaeological sites, it's revegetation projects, it's beach stabilization, it's trail maintenance, and the list goes on. Those certainly are impacts that we can see and can educate ourselves about, and that we can, in fact, mitigate. So it was an easy one. And the Park was more than willing, and Crumbo was more than happy. Now that he's seeing the results and able to produce paper on them, I think it's starting to develop its own life. Everybody's contributing their dollars and boats and trucks. And we're happy the guides are donating their time. It's a wonderful trip, it's lots of fun, but it's bustin' your ass too, man. You get on a rock litter with Crumbo, you'll wonder why the heck did we allow him to choose the rock?! (laughter) That's the first thing you think of: Next time, I'm pickin' the rock, Crumbo.

   I have this theory about commercial trips. There's a lot of things that we can do, but the main thing is, if you can just get people out there, I mean, without making too big of a deal of it. (laughs) You know what I mean? (Winter: I agree 100 percent with that.) If you can just get 'em where they can make their own little connection. (Gloeckler: Their own, yeah.) But, you know, the funny thing is, watching the business kind of grow up. . . . You know, you look at how much a part of it the adventure was, in the olden days. And now, I mean, we are gettin' so good at it, (Winter: The equipment's so much better.) the equipment's a million times better, which makes it easier, but also, the training. We've actually learned more how to run the boats, we know the runs that work better. (Gloeckler: That's come light years, yeah.) And it's only natural that we would strive for that, and all the interpretation and all that stuff. But you wonder how you keep that other. Is there a point where you just smooth it out too much?

   Winter: I'll address that! We've debated this (Gloeckler: Yeah, we have.) many a time. Let's face it, I don't think you can go backwards. I don't know we'll ever tell our guides to run a rapid real poorly, just to see what happens! (laughter) So, you know, life changes, and it's a different world. I laugh about this, because Bill and I have debated it quite a bit, and it comes down to, especially when we get into equipment: should we provide a cot so people get off the sand and bugs don't crawl on 'em. Or should we just stay with sleeping on the ground? Should we put that pad where they sit? Or is that kind of too cushy? Should we let 'em rough it? And I don't think there's a good answer to it, but I think every company, as long as they keep addressing that question, which we are, then I think we'll be OK.

   Gloeckler: Let me just jump in on the answer of What's too far? Part of the connection is a little bit of the pain that goes along with the place. And I don't mean it to be painful, painful-I just mean that connection that says, "It's you and it's Mother Nature, and guess who wins in a fight?" You know, that's her lesson, that's her gift to us is to make us say, "Whew! Okay, you're the big guy (chuckles), we're humans and we need to respect you. We need to learn from you." And that kind of connection is something that may take us. . . . That may be backin' up. You know, I'm not talkin' about livin' in caves again, but it's that connection that takes us back there and says, "Ah, yeah, there was a primeval time back there that we grew up in too." And that's important for humans to realize. It's there, it's even biological in nature.

   Winter: We might not fit into the guidelines of the Wilderness Act, or what the Park Service believes is a wilderness experience, but I believe these people, for the most part, feel it is. You're taking people out there that- some of 'em have never even have slept in a sleeping bag. And for those people, I think they get more out of this trip in some ways, than the person who might even be what I'd call a hardened wilderness person. This person that's lived in Chicago all their life, never slept in a sleeping bag, goes out on this trip. I think if you give them that opportunity, they can come away with a ... They've gained more than someone who's done this a lot.

   Gloeckler: I would agree with that. I think they have more distance to travel there, and so therefore they have more to gain.

   Winter: And, looking back on the whole thing, it's easy to say, "We should have done this," or "things aren't changing fast enough; why didn't we think of that twenty years ago?" But it's an evolutionary process. Quiet motors became an interest of one of our guides ... Tom Vail took an interest in it. You know, he had some ideas and had actually met a passenger on a trip that worked for Johnson who had some ideas. We were at the stage where we were willing to commit some dollars to it, because we thought it was somethin' that could make a difference. But we looked at it not so much from a standpoint of ... that it's long overdue for the industry-I looked at it as "Hey, this would be nice if we could communicate with our passengers better." And it would just be nice for the boat itself, that it was quiet in the boat. And then the fact that it was quiet for other boats we were passin' was important, but, you know, our goal originally was to improve our own trip. Nothing happens overnight. We're not going to ever see anything that's ideal, but we can mitigate impacts, we can make a better trip, and we can constantly try to make that improvement. I think that's the commitment we've made, I really feel like that. We could have run this thing a different way and still be droppin' those boats out the back of Old Blue.

   Oh, absolutely, and not puttin' a dime into it, just run what you got, take the money and run.

   Gloeckler: Yeah, that's one approach.

   If you guys would have done that, that would have made this whole next little hump a lot easier. (laughter)

   Winter: Well, from some perspectives, yes.

   No, I mean everybody just gets fed up and goes "Yeah, hell, let's give this whole thing to the private guys." (laughter)

   Gloeckler: Yeah, that's the next one comin' up.

   It's weird how when we started in the commercial sector, all those people needed us. And I felt like ... there was no private sector. You were either a boatman or not, but the whole rest of the world needed the boatmen to get down the river, or they weren't even going to be there. 

   Gloeckler: That's true. Even the private sector then was boatmen who were doing private trips, more likely, than people who just decided one day, "That's it, I'm going down the Grand Canyon." You know, all of this question is a part of that changing world we've been living in, and the education that's been going on on rivers everywhere, and more people becoming better suited and better equipped to get on any river anywhere, and to take on that challenge. Of course we happen to be working in the one that has the most focus, politically and naturally so, because it's the Grand Canyon and everybody wants to be there. The place will have demand-no question about it. I think one of the truths that everybody has to face here is that the commercial sector demand cannot be met either. The demand is there. Everybody wants to have this experience. So what we have to do is realize that from both the private sector and the commercial sector, and then come up with something to work with within the parameters of the use ceiling that is there. And I don't think that's been addressed yet. I think maybe the private system is broken. Sure. Then if so, let's fix that first. Let's address it and let's talk about spreading the season. And that goes commercially and privately, as far as I'm concerned. If you think that double launches in June are a good thing, and you're a private boater, you might be wrong, you might need to rethink that. I'm not sure that's the best experience you can attain here. In fact, I am sure that if you go in April or November or October or any month like that, that you will probably enhance your experience. Part of the educational process is to say, "Well, if there's such a demand and the list is so long, then why are some people going every year, and two and three times a year, when the list continues to grow? What's the management process that's going on there that's allowing that to occur while you're feeling the pressure of this demand?" I just think there's areas to explore that might do several things: One, increase the value of the experience because you will have less people contacts-ultimately, that's what you're after. And two, what it will do, it will spread out impact on the canyon and hopefully programs that are in place and starting to be put in place, will help mitigate those in an easier fashion. And I think we all have to address it. I don't think it's just the privates, I think it's commercials too when you're talking congestion.
   We're involved with a trip now that we'll put on in spring of 1995. This is a cooperative effort between several different companies on a training trip basis, to get down there and interact between the guides of the different companies, to look at different campsites, look at different hike sites, and try to come to terms with this issue ourselves, and try to address it ourselves. It's one more of those things that's evolved. We're here, we're tryin' to deal with the answer, and it's gonna take some time to figure that out. But it's on the table, and now we're gonna have to come to terms with it.

   Well, one reason I'm really proud of the commercial sector is- like you say, we get those people out of the urban areas, those people that there's no way in hell they're goin' on their own-and, if you grow up in that environment or are living there, it's all "run, run, run; do, do, do." And so much of it, because of just the way life is these days, so much of it is just about ... Well, you keep score by how much money you got, how much stuff you got, and it's not like it's that blatant, but that's the message you're bombarded with every time you turn around. You gotta have this cool car or you're not cool, or this cool house or this whatever it is... and the neat thing about these trips is it makes people take a second look at all that hype.

   Gloeckler: (laughter) You must have seen our trucks when we pulled in. Oh, we've got cool cars!

   Yeah, you guys are driving little black Porsches? (laughter)

   Gloeckler: Not really! (laughter) Not quite. But they start!

   Winter: He's got a 1981-it's newer than mine!

   Gloeckler: Yup.

   Those were your trucks?! (uproarious laughter) Holy shit.

   Gloeckler: Exactly my point!

   Winter: I think if you really ... If we took the thought that how many people out there in this world want to go down the Grand Canyon-and I think it's a lot. I mean, it's a huge amount who have heard about the trips and want to go down the Grand Canyon. And then you say, "What percentage of those people have the expertise and equipment to go on their own?" And then say, "That's the breakdown that should be between the commercial and private," that it'd be a whole lot different even than it is now. (The other way?) The other way. And I'm not sayin' that's what it should be, but I think when we talk about demand, I think we have to say, "The commercial demand is the people out there that have heard about the canyon and want to go down at some point in their life, they feel this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, they want to do it sometime in their lifetime-that's basically who we're serving. And they don't have the equipment or the expertise to do it." Percentage-wise, that's a huge percentage compared to the people who have their own equipment and expertise.

   This flow chart you guys are lookin' at, or Sue's [Susan Cherry] chart, that you guys are workin' with-I'm really excited about the possibility. I think that's a really hip tool. If you didn't have any computers, how would you ever figure the thing out? I wonder if that could be applied to the private situation?

   Gloeckler: I think that it can. My feeling is that it can, and this is born of the feeling that even if the demand were the same for one side or the other, that certainly the right that's there to have this experience is equivalent on each side. And since it's a given that the demand is there, and that access will be limited, then the choices will be difficult either way. But we all have to play in that game. We all have to play by rules, and try to create rules that are as fair as possible for everyone to get that opportunity.

   Winter: I think given all the issues and how fast they're comin' at us nowadays, and how fast things are changin'... there's a lot of change going on, even in the Park Service itself. I think they feel it too. And the outfitters right now, as a group, given all these things comin' at 'em, have had to get involved and organized and know that they have to play a role, far more than they could have in years past. In the past, some of these issues came at you one at a time, and you just took 'em and sometimes you just said, "No, we're not gonna do it, we're gonna fight, fight, fight against that. That might have been the mentality at certain times. But I don't think it is any more. I think everybody's willing to look at the issues and say, you know, "Is it legitimate? And if it is, how legitimate? And if there is something, then what are we gonna do about it, and how can we play a role and help?" But the issues are comin' at us at lightening speed, and every time I think, "Gosh, we cleared one up," thinking it might ease up, there's two more that have appeared. Maybe that's just the wave of the future. Population pressures, you know, allocation pressures, it's a limited resource. And I think we're actually, overall-and I'm not just saying us, but I think all the companies-are really doing a good job right now in trying to deal with these issues in a way that's constructive.

   Gloeckler: Beautiful.

   Winter: I do, I really believe that.

   Gloeckler: Good ending. (all talking at once) We're not inviting them. We wish they'd stop, but. . . . (laughter) But I think they will keep coming.

   My whole idea was, well, we'll just do a little bit of good here, a few good works, and then sail off into the sunset.

   Winter: Happily ever after.

   Gloeckler: Yeah. (laughter) Yeah, I've been wishin' that too.

   Winter: Actually, I think we've ruled that out as an ending. We've looked at it like we're in for the long haul. That doesn't mean to say that, you know, there's not other people that could do this business, or there shouldn't be other people ... I'm not saying that, but we're in it for the long haul, which means that what we get out of it, and what we put into it, we're not looking for returns tomorrow or the next two, three years. We're trying to look at what's best for our company, what's best for the industry, and the Canyon, ten, twenty years from now. And if everybody takes that approach, hey, that's what the whole idea was founded on, somebody years ago said, "Hey, we've gotta protect this for future generations." If we take all these issues and look for the best thing for the long haul, we'll come up with the right solutions.

   Okay, sounds pretty good to me. One last question. When you guys were growing up, like when you were going to school and all that, what were you going to be when you grew up? Did you have any thoughts toward that?

   Gloeckler: Oh gosh, yes. The parents always have the biggest grand plan for their kids. I was going to be a doctor, they thought. Of course they didn't realize I was never going to make it to college! I don't know how they thought I was going to be that. Actually, I did eventually graduate (chuckles), but it wasn't quite the plan that everybody had in mind. But I'd never, really ... when I first ran the river, I loved it. I thought, "Shoot, I don't want to do anything else-this is it!" And I was only sixteen at the time and I never missed a season, and we're comin' up on thirty years, this one. And I feel very lucky to have made a choice like that early on.
   (long pause) And, who knows, maybe it's gonna work out? (laughter) It's possible.

Lew Steiger