In 1975

   A Prairie Home Companion hit the airwaves. Harvard scientists created the first artificial gene.The Viet Nam War ended.

   Nixon had resigned by then. Feature Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller in the White House, one picture in a remarkably photographic year. Visit any library. Seek out these things. You will find many faces not mentioned here, and other facts. Always not expected. So runs the journey.

   At the time, computers were about to become commonplace; almost until right now they had taken-up vast amounts of space and were programmed, individually, with the aid of flowcharts fed into them via punchcards. More photos: the Superdome was dedicated on August 1st. “Moon missions” were over; now it was Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz docking; Viking 1 headed for Mars. Think about that. Think about this: Little Stevie Wonder’s musical career being 12 years young in 1975. If that doesn’t work try the Rolling Stones: Exile On Main Street, and in particular, “Sweet Virginia.” Women, granted admission to military academies, immediately found themselves sanctioned by advertisers as capable of buying big ticket items, like cars and homes, all by themselves. Wow.

   It was the biggest box office year thus far in history. Among the offerings came Jaws, Godfather II and, with startling eroticism, Emmanuelle and Story of 0. Discotheques were the rage, the place to flash dance, so called because of the lighting, and to snort cocaine. Which Jimmy Hoffa never collected on; Jimmy “...took a long walk off a short pier.” More good news. Dillard won a Pulitzer for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, literacy requirements were abolished for voting rights, and Karen Anne Quinlin breathed on her own.

   On what was called ‘the down side’ a doctor’s strike hit New York—see The New Yorker on that one—and a bomb thundered through LaGuardia’s main terminal; 11 dead and 70 hurting was what Paul Harvey said. Exxon Corporation replaced General Motors as the nation’s, not the world’s, biggest money maker [see: bqr 7:4][& 8:1]. No kidding. Ten of Fortune’s top 20 companies manufactured oil and gasoline; a severe fuel shortage had parked cars in long gas station lines the summer before. Euell Gibbons, the guru of a new, supposedly healthy breakfast cereal, granola, died. So did Casey Stengel. And “Cannonball” Atterly. And Thornton Wilder. Turn the page.

   1975 reveals Grand Canyon as heretofore unknown. The Enlargement Act made it bigger. Most of South Rim Village was declared an historic district. None of this mattered. By now everything had changed. Everything. Immediately gone were 4,500,000,000 years of the past.

   Various charts show this clearly. River temperature, for instance, is demonstrated to stabilize behind Glen Canyon Dam at between 7°c and 12°c. The same chart presents yearly predam temperatures with a range between 2°c and 25°c. A separate diagram shows the Colorado’s seasonal fluctuations at times cold and wild and raging in flood; and then, later in the year, the water turning warm and wanting and, after that, to nothing at all. But now, because of Glen Canyon Dam, the river duplicated its yearly hydrograph daily, but on a much reduced level, with the Colorado’s main nutrient, silt, trapped behind the dam. And so the beaches were going. 

   Recreational whitewater use absolutely exploded between 1966 and 1975. In those 10 years 85,148 recorded users took to the Colorado; for more than a century of prior use only 3000 individuals had done so. In straight numbers, that is an increase of 2800%! Speaking of JW Powell, human impacts, and resource management, the ciphers meant that what used to take one hundred years now required less than 24-hours. Now it could be done in minutes.

   Use limitations, user days, had been structured to mirror 1972 levels, by nps, in 1973. That put the skids on commercial development and private access. The movie Deliverance, also a product of 1973, always gets the credit for inspiring the tremendous interest in whitewater boating during the decade. Don’t believe it. Before anybody even got to a theater nps had frozen use on the Colorado.

   You packed it in—You pack it out was a good idea whose time had not yet come, at least not for most ‘river people’: “...containerized waste should be carried, by boat if necessary, to an area not normally used for camping.[!] Waste shall not be buried in such areas as the Ledges, Mile 152-3. Burial shall be in a hole at least 2 feet deep, 6 feet above the normal high river fluctuation, at least 50 feet from the river bank and at least 200 feet from any area normally used for camping. It is recommended that toilet paper be kept separate and burned in the burial hole prior to dumping the toilet. During the day, (whenever the toilet is not set up) toilet paper should be carried back to the raft and placed with other refuse...”

   That generous offering from the cor, 9 pages total, with a Supplement to [Sec VI] “TRIP NOTIFICATION: PASSENGER-DAY COMPUTATIONS: The outfitter will provide as much advance notice as possible of scheduled and charter trip launch dates. This is particularly important if Monday launches are desired in light of the popularity of Monday launches and the 150-day-a-day launch limit.” Less is more.

   Yep. In our living memories, these are the good old days. You could dump the ashes from your new fire pan in the main current, if you could find wood to make a fire; there was not much of it left near campsites. Hatch and Western were the biggest companies. Georgie, the motorhead—you can argue motors if you want and a lot of people did at the time—pulled over in an eddy, quite possibly because she desired just that. Otherwise, enterprise was the word. As early as 1970 Gay Staveley had hauled his big boats inflated. The “butterfly boat” was first, four long tubes folded up and over each other, longitudinally, and tied semi inflated on the first of his homemade trailers, towed behind #1 Truck, a Ford F-500 that was brand new back then. The boat didn’t work. Off came the outriggers; they were rolled, tied, and grunted into the truckbed at Pierce’s Ferry, with a stop at Frenchy’s for breakfast, later, after everybody dug the trailer out of the mud... Sorry; I got turned around on that one.

   Private boaters didn’t fare well in the transition to allocated use. They were not there when the deal went down. The numbers show this well. They also indicate that not every private boater could go in 1975, or any year thereafter. But that is another story. 

Shane Murhpy