grew up in New York City. I was born on Manhattan Island. And I lived for eighteen years with the view out of my bedroom window of a brick wall. That was it. It was about ten feet away. I could look up, down, right or left and not see a single living thing. Not a leaf, not a weed, not a blade of grass—just the bricks. I was on the third floor of a seventeen-story apartment house. My father was a professor at New York University, downtown on Washington Square in Manhattan. And I looked at that brick wall. Because of that brick wall, I believe, I became a wilderness enthusiast and later a wilderness scholar, a wilderness management advocate, and a wilderness explorer.
Fortunately I had summers that got me out in the West, gave me a taste of the other world, and I began to live a kind of schizophrenic life: city and wilderness, balancing two environmental extremes. I was so immersed in the urban environment, that popping out of it in the summer was extraordinary for me.
When I was eight years old I went into the Grand Canyon, down the Bright Angel Trail on a mule with my father. I remember the trip very clearly. We rode down and had an orange at Garden Creek, and when I was down there last summer on a private river trip, I went to the same rock that I remember sitting on when I was eight years old. It hadn’t changed as much as I had! I went back to camp on the Coconino Plateau when I was eleven and twelve and walked across the Grand Canyon from North Rim to South, and the next year from South Rim to North. It was a mind-altering trip for a city kid. It opened my eyes to a lot of things.
I tried to stay in touch with wild country, and was able as a freshman at Harvard University in 1957, to find a job in Grand Teton National Park with Jackson Lake Lodge which just opened. And it was there that I began to run rivers. The lodge manager had a couple of surplus inflatable boats in a crate with military instructions still on them: how to mount machine guns on the tubes, land on the beachheads and storm Iwo Jima. This was, of course, the time when Georgie White began to run the Colorado. Nobody was running rivers—I think 135 people ran the Grand Canyon all year in 1957. So I went out and ran the Snake River through Jackson Hole which is now a very popular scenic float, run by tens of thousands of people every summer. The lodge manager said, “Anyone here know anything about boats?” I’d done some fishing and canoeing and I said, “I know a little.” And he said, “Why don’t you open these crates and see what we got in here and maybe we can figure out how to take our guests out on the river.” The rafts were twenty-two-foot bridge pontoons, I believe. We rigged ‘em up and started to do some exploratory runs on the Snake River. There were bridges, and I remember at those bridge abutments, there were about four or five of ‘em and you kinda had to get the boat straight to run between ‘em and that was a big scare. We eventually got to the point we were ready to take some guests out, and I recall walking through the hotel dining room saying “Anybody want to run a river?” And they said “What do you mean?” Remember, this was 1957.
Steiger:So, now... you’re a student at Harvard?
Nash: I’m a student at Harvard, escaping to the West in the summers.
Steiger:You’re how old?
Nash: Nineteen. So, that’s where I got started. Then I kinda put the rivers aside and got married and had a couple of kids, and earned a Ph.D. in history.
I graduated from Harvard in 1960, and began graduate studies in American cultural intellectual history at the University of Wisconsin. I completed my Ph.D. there in 1964. My dissertation was, in large part, Wilderness and The American Mind, a book that was published in 1967.
This was a fortuitous time for a book about wilderness to appear. The Wilderness Act, establishing the National Wilderness Preservation System, was passed in 1964. The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was 1968, the Grand Canyon dam battle was hot; the decision to ban dams in the Canyon was made in 1968. This was the height of 1960s environmentalism, and Wilderness and The American Mind just fitted right in. People turned to it for arguments to preserve wilderness.
Steiger:If you had to give a synopsis of the book…
Nash: The book is really a cultural history of the relationship of the American people to wilderness. I realized, soon after I started the book that I had to go way back into the European past—back to Christianity, back to the Old Testament, back to the Middle Ages to assess the intellectual baggage that came over to the New World with the first colonists. I began to tell that story of the relationship of the American culture to wilderness, and how it had changed over time. In a nutshell, what I discovered and documented in that book was that for years in this country wilderness had been hated, feared, avoided, transformed as much as possible, and as quickly as possible, into civilization. And it was really only after the ending of the frontier in 1890 that wilderness experienced a complete revolution in meaning. Instead of being something dark and terrible and formless and chaotic that you would avoid at all costs, wild country became a sanctuary, something to be coveted, a valuable part of American civilization. We directed our national energies to trampling and transforming the wilderness for the first couple hundred years of American existence—the whole pioneering business that your family was so intimately involved in. But at the end of the nineteenth century, people began to turn around, particularly people from urban environments. They began to say, “Wait a minute, now, you know, maybe there’s something of value here, something that we’re losing that we’d better think about before we go too far.” I was extremely interested in the period from the 1890s to the 1920s, the period from, say, John Muir and Yosemite National Park—1890—through Aldo Leopold and the dawning of ecological awareness. And so the book really details a massive change in ideas and takes the story right up to the almost unbelievable ending where wilderness has now become so popular that it’s in danger of being loved to death. That would have been absolutely incomprehensible to, say, Thoreau’s generation in the 1850s.
Steiger:So you kind of were involved as an activist in the dam battles and stuff like that? You edited a book....
Nash: American Environmentalism is what it’s called now—it’s an edited collection of documents concerning the American environmental movement. It’s heavy-duty scholarship, but yes, I was an activist too.
I tried to look as objectively as I could at wilderness. But at the same time as I was completing that book, I was aware of the threat to the Grand Canyon, and I jumped into that battle at the invitation of David Brower, and began to put in my two cents on what would be lost to American culture and character if we put dams in a place like the Grand. So I did become an activist, but I’ve tried to maintain a scholarly perspective. One of my more recent books is called The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics, which is a serious intellectual discussion of the origin of this somewhat amazing idea that nature has rights that humans should respect. That is, nature is a part of a community to which we belong, rather than a commodity we possess. Now this is an extraordinary idea that has a long lineage that I try to talk about as a historian. But I also have tried to support Dave Foreman and Earth First and the radical environmentalists today who are calling for recognition of the importance of wilderness that is nonanthropocentric, not based upon human needs but based upon ecological and ethical considerations. But I would like to think that my scholarship stands apart from my letters to the editor and my activist work.
People sometimes say I blend those two endeavors too closely. But I think anyone who is truly interested in a cause finds it very hard to make the distinction between being a scholar and being an activist. It’s very hard to just be a scholar and not get caught up in the drama and the pathos of the movement you are studying. I’ve always been an advocate of wilderness; scholarship was the weapon with which I fought.

In 1966 I ended up in the West again, this time working at the University of California Santa Barbara, as an assistant professor, and in 1967 I ran the Grand Canyon with Joe Munroe, Martin Litton, Elliot Porter, Francois Leydet and that generation of people. I caught the river fever, bought my own gear at army-navy surplus stores, made my own frame and started running on the Stanislaus in California and later all around the West. Frequently I came back to the Canyon, running both privately and commercially there
One thing I’d like to establish at the beginning of this interview, Lew, is that I have run about an equal number of private and commercial trips. I’m not just a private runner and I’m not entirely a commercial dude; I really have a foot in both camps. So a lot of the things I’m going to say as we talk about river issues are going to be based on that point of view. Don’t take me to be a mad dog privateer and don’t take me to be a hard core commercial guy. I have an understanding of and respect for both camps.

Steiger:I’m trying to put Grand Canyon in perspective, in terms of your overall river experience. So you started in Jackson Hole?
Nash: Yes, on the Snake River in the 1950s. I came to the Grand in the mid-1960s.
Steiger:So Grand was your next river experience after the Snake?
Nash: Yes, it was my next big-time river experience; I bought my own equipment and I started running with my children who were pretty young at that time and we went everywhere water flowed downhill. Back then there were no permits; you could just hop on, say, the Middle Fork of the Salmon and cruise right on down to Lewiston, four hundred and some miles. We used to do that regularly. Of course I kept coming back to the Grand, picking up some commercial trips with friends like Martin, Ron Smith, Ron Hayes, George Wendt and Dee Holladay on the upper rivers, and doing private trips. When I started out, there were no permits, you just drove down to the Ferry and put your boats on the water.
Permits weren’t required in the Grand until 1972. Well, let me correct that statement: There were permits required, but they were just basically pieces of paper you filled out at the Ferry. Quotas were not put in until 1972. In fact, the Grand Canyon, along with Mount Whitney in the Sierra, are the first places where quotas were instituted for wilderness management, where people began to think in terms of carrying capacity. This was a time when the ratio of commercial and private running was 92:8, ninety-two percent commercial to eight percent private—there were very, very few private people running at that time. The interesting point is that very rapidly after the Grand Canyon Dam fight, which called so much attention to the river, people began to crowd the place. You recall the coffee table books, the films, the movies. People realized this was one of the world’s great places.
Steiger:The Sierra Club trips.
Nash: Absolutely. And so in an ironical way, Lew, one of the prices we pay for defending an area is to call attention to it, and then it falls into the category of being loved to death. We saw a huge rise in visitation in the early seventies, and going on up through to the conditions we have today. I caught the early part of that rise, you might say the last of the old free days where you had a sense of what it was like for the explorers to just show up at a river and go down and not go through lotteries and hoops of the bureaucratic wilderness.
Steiger:So your first Grand Canyon trip was 1967?
Nash: Yes. Joe Munroe led that trip, we ran some with Martin and Elliot Porter and Francois Leydet who edited the beautiful Time and the River Flowing, the 1968 battle book for the Grand Canyon that Dave Brower published.
Steiger:That’s all the first trip? Martin was on that for a little bit?
Nash: We interacted with Martin’s trip, we rowed some with his dories. That was the time when Joe and Martin were still talking to each other, and both of them were fighting against the Grand Canyon dams.
Steiger:Now your book, Grand Canyon of the Living Colorado, was that that trip? Or this was later?
Nash: That was a book I did for Dave Brower and the Sierra Club a little bit later, and was really after the Grand Canyon Dam controversy, and the point of that book was to make a case for the enlargement of Grand Canyon National Park to include the entire Grand Canyon.
Steiger:Let’s just talk for a second about you and the Grand Canyon. What was your first impression? What was it like that first trip? Or was the big hit for you more the hike across, the two hikes that you’d done there before?
Nash: I think it was the backpacks when I was a kid. You know, you’re very impressionable at ten, eleven, twelve years of age. I can distinctly remember feelings and places from that trip. You know, it’s hard, as you get a little older, to remember stuff from that stage of your life. People show you pictures and you sort of say, “Oh yeah, I guess I was there.” But when you have your own independent recall of places like that, it’s really quite remarkable, and I do recall those trips extremely well. I recall the great silences, I recall the space, I recall what it was like for a young kid to contemplate rocks that were two billion years old. I began to have those kinds of thoughts which are unusual for kids, and kind of scary in a way. And it was because of those ideas and that approach that I read with so much interest Colin Fletcher’s The Man Who Walked Through Time, and subsequent interpretations of the vast, wild spaces of the Canyon.
And by the way, Lew, you know, I still am very attracted to the backpacking Canyon as opposed to the river Canyon. I think the difference, if I could draw an analogy, is between alpine skiing—which by the way, I also love to do—and cross-country skiing. When you’re doing downhill skiing, you’re riding lifts, you’re skiing with a lot of other people; it’s a social experience. But when you’re doing cross-country skiing, you’re out there just with the wilderness, making your tracks across those blank snowfields. And as you’ve documented in your wonderful film [Canyon Song], the backpacker’s Canyon is very different—it’s very solitary, there’s a lot of pain, there’s a lot of hardship, and there are a lot of satisfactions that, frankly, I don’t get on the river, even after fifty-odd trips. In your film, Ellie Tibbetts talks about coming to the river after you’ve made the descent from the rim. There’s nothing quite like that in running the river. So I do go back to those backpacking experiences and the solitude and the quiet and the rhythm of the rocks and the sense of time and space that Fletcher talks about so well. It’s hard, as you know, to find some of those values on a river trip when you’re in a social situation dealing with twenty or thirty people, and you’re leading hikes of twenty or thirty people up canyons. It’s very hard to be alone with twenty people.
Steiger:Okay, so your first private trip then is Joe Munroe. So we’re talking eight people or something like that?
Nash: I really forget how many there were—a handful. Martin had three or four boats on the river, we interacted with them at several times, and switched over and rowed in his boats. Then the next year, which was 1968, I organized a charter trip with Ron Smith, who was just getting into the business with Grand Canyon Expeditions. We put a full river trip together. I think the cost was something like six hundred dollars a head, and we took, I believe, eighteen people. There was a triple-rig, and Dick McCallum was there, running a motor rig. Donny Neff was involved on that trip, and Don was a wrestling coach at the time, and I remember we wrestled a couple of nights around the campfire, and he pinned my ass pretty quickly. He was a champion wrestler. I was paddling a little kayak at the time. It was after that trip that I bought my own boats and began to get into the running on my own.
Steiger:To doing it too.
Nash: Yeah, getting the sticks in your hand.
Steiger:It’s interesting to me that the first two trips you did, one was a private, one was a commercial. Were there differences, and if so, what were they?
Nash: That 1968 trip I did with Ron Smith was the only one for which I ever wrote a check and went along as a passenger. It was sort of unique in that all the people were my friends. It wasn’t like getting out of the bus and saying “Who are you?” I mean, everybody knew each other, and we had a good relationship with Ron and Sheila Smith. We didn’t have a sense of it being that much of a commercial deal. As I recall, I contributed about the same amount of money to Joe Munroe on his run the previous year. In other words, in this era private and commercial trips weren’t qualitatively different.
Steiger:The price went up, later, for commercial runs.
Nash: The price went up, and some other divergences began to occur. But in the late 1960s, it was a calm before the tourist storm. I went down the river and I was, of course, blown away by the experience, just like you.
I was a passenger on the first trips, but I did paddle a number of rapids in a kayak. And so I was always a “hands-on” kind of guy, always wanted to get in there and do it, rather than have someone do it for me. And so it was very natural to gravitate into getting my own boats. And I still see that impulse on the river trips that I do today, the commercial trips that you and I’ve done, for instance. You get a lot of folks on the river who are “doers” and really want to learn to row, and ask you about buying boats and getting permits and want to get out there. I think what we have to remember in the river community is that we’ve now had twenty years of commercial river-running, and in the course of that time, we’ve generated a huge clientele for rivers—not all of whom want to just write a check and jump on another commercial trip. After they’ve done one or two commercial trips, they want to get into it. They want to know the fear and the fun firsthand.
Steiger:Are you trying to say that the most fun is running the boats?
Nash: Well, let’s be honest about it; you have a very different relationship to the river when you’re running the boat. I think that over the last two decades we have created a big recreational industry, something that’s boomed up like surfing and like downhill skiing. And now we have many companies selling river equipment and frames—complete packages for the cost of about two Grand commercial trips. I look at these catalogues, and I just remember what it was like thirty-five years ago trying to get an outfit together by going to army-navy stores.
Steiger:So what are we to do? Are we to just say, “Whoops, okay, sorry, we’ve done our job too well, you don’t need us anymore, we’re going to get out of here?” I mean, we in the commercial sector. Is that what we have to do?
Nash: No, that’s of course too extreme. But I think there has to be some recognition that there are more and more people out there who are passionate about and qualified to run big-time whitewater. And that wasn’t the case back when I started in the 1960s. So I guess the point I’m making is that the presence of the guide and the guiding industry today is really less important than it was in those early days when there were relatively few people qualified to do and interested in major whitewater trips. Just pause to think for a moment that if you opened it up, private trips would now fill the entire Grand Canyon allocation—there are that many people out there stacked up, waiting to go down the river. That was not the case in the late 1960s. Remember, they took all private comers. And it was only eight percent private; that was an honest figure. Later management realized, “This isn’t right anymore,” and changed it to something like 70:30, and my feeling is—and I know it’ll be a controversial point—that it probably should change again in favor of the private sector.
Now, let me detail to you what I take to be four major changes or revolutions that explain this general popularity of wilderness right now—how we got to be where are:
First thing is the intellectual revolution, which I write about in Wilderness and The American Mind. Wilderness went from being an adversary, something that was feared and avoided and hated and conquered; to a sanctuary, a cathedral, a place people went of their own volition to find relief from an increasingly omnipresent, complex, and frustrating civilization. Huge change. And we saw it in America just within a century from, say, the late nineteenth century, end-of-the-frontier era, into the late twentieth century. And that really came to bear after World War II when aesthetic values, as opposed to utilitarian ones, dominated the conservation movement. The rise of wilderness appreciation was an intellectual revolution, something extraordinary in the history of ideas.
The second big thing that happened—and you know this too—was the equipment revolution. If we were still running in sadiron boats and the kind of stuff that Galloway and Nevills were using, we would not be taking the kind of numbers that we are, down the river and getting them through the way the modern river industry does. The equipment revolution extends not only to boats, particularly to the inflatable boats that really brought the big numbers into a place like the Grand Canyon, but it extends to such things that you might take for granted, as polypropylene, wetsuit booties, neoprene river packs, et cetera. The early guys didn’t have this kind of stuff, and the kind of clientele that you have now I don’t believe would have wrapped up in a wet wool blanket and slept on the rocks the way those early guys did. So the equipment revolution is important. And remember, most of this technology is post-World War II: nylons, plastics, aluminum, hypalon, things of that nature.
The third thing is the information revolution, the existence of maps and river guides. When I started out in the Grand, we had the Les Jones scroll map. You’d unroll it like toilet paper. He had these little personal notations, you know, on the side, little things that happened to him along the way. And these maps were about twenty-five feet long, you know, and it was always a pain to kind of keep them at the right spot and figure out where you were. And then we began to get newer kinds of maps and information about the river, such as done by my late friend, Bill Belknap. Some river maps now even have photographs and white lines going through them to show everybody the way to run rapids. There’s a classic one for the Middle Fork of the Salmon that I’ve seen people tape down to their frames. And so as they’re rowing down the rapid, they’re looking down here at a guide book on their seat and following the line. “Let’s see now, where’s this rock?” And here’s the white line going over here. “I gotta go left!” This, to me, is too much, but there’s no question that the information revolution—which, of course, also includes the rise of professional guides, which you have been detailing in some of these interviews—the whole rise of the professional guiding community makes it possible for a person to pick up a phone, put down a Visa card, and go down the Grand Canyon with a reasonable expectation of coming out the other end. Okay, that industry didn’t exist in the 1950s.
It rose, to fulfill the demand. That came from the intellectual revolution, the equipment was there, the information, and finally we have to look at the access revolution. Just within our lifetimes, access to places in the West—and I would not just say the Grand Canyon, but many other places—has changed phenomenally. Most of the roads around Moab and through Canyonlands, as Kent Frost and the oldtimers will tell you, were all dirt roads, and they were terrible and it took you three days to drive from Salt Lake down to Mexican Hat. And not only that, but air travel—the thing that allows someone to jump on a plane in New York, be in Las Vegas and the next morning jump on a bus and be at Lee’s Ferry, and get the trip in on a motor rig in six days and be back at the office. That simply was not done in the 1950s, you couldn’t do that. Those old prop planes took much longer, the road networks were much worse. So now the wilderness is kind of “open game” to people from anywhere. I’m waiting for the Japanese to “discover” the Grand Canyon river trip. This was just inconceivable only a generation ago.
So those are four factors. The intellectual revolution made it possible to sell wilderness as a vacation destination rather than an obstacle to civilization. Also, the equipment, information, and access are really important in explaining why we went from twenty-one people a year to twenty-one thousand people a year.
Steiger:And now here we are.
Nash: Now here we are, ready to bring river running into the next millennium. You’ve seen big changes happen before your eyes.
So my take on the allocation issue kind of goes like this: even though the corridor is not designated “Wilderness”—it is—and I follow Kim Crumbo’s ideas here, it is one of the premier wild places on the planet. It should be managed as wilderness until such time as Congress decides what to do with it. Now, if the Canyon backcountry is to be managed as wilderness, as I believe the government is mandated to do until a final decision is made, then it seems to me to behoove the managers to think a little bit about what wilderness is, and what kind of experience wilderness should generate. The word means “the place of wild beasts”; as opposed to civilization, wilderness is the uncontrolled. There should be an element of risk in wilderness; it’s a place where preparation, self-sufficiency, and self-reliance, should be emphasized. And I would almost argue that integral to the wilderness experience is an attempt to deal with things in a direct, personal manner. I think the highest wilderness values come from such self-sufficiency. Now on a guided trip people come through the Grand Canyon and they say, “Gosh, we had a good time.” Well, you can have a “good time” doing a lot of things that are not wilderness-dependent. What I argue is that the do-it-yourselfer is having more of a wilderness experience than the commercial passenger; that guides, like myself, are buffers between the client and the wilderness. In effect, the guide takes away some of the wilderness experience. So if you’re going to manage for wilderness values, you would do well to favor privates.
Steiger:I guess the only argument that I can marshal to that is not only is the Grand Canyon a great potential wilderness place—it’s just a great place. I guess it’s the most powerful place that I’ve ever run into, and it’s an incredibly dramatic link between the urban consciousness and the natural world, which is desperately needed in this day and age—that link. I think our culture is rushing headlong away from the natural world right now, and one argument I can see for the commercial sector is that the work we do is an opportunity to turn people’s thinking around. So if you make it a wilderness place and you have to have the “wilderness license,” you have to be competent to travel in there.... I wonder if it might not be more valuable for society to continue to bring down powerful people who aren’t equipped to go—just like twenty years ago, hardly anybody was equipped to go—to bring people who influence society into contact with this very profound experience of the natural world.
Nash: It’s a powerful argument, Lew. There’s no gainsaying the force of that argument, and the importance of exposing a lot of people to the Grand Canyon. Of course you and I know that you can’t expose unlimited numbers to the Canyon.
Steiger:No.
Nash: I mean, we are talking only about small numbers, and you and I know how really elitist and homogenous those numbers can tend to be on commercial river trips. In other words, maybe we’re not getting the people into the Canyon who need to be there. But maybe that leads us off onto a tangent.
Let me just go back again to that wilderness theory. As a professor I’ve always tried to get people into self-discovery. I don’t teach by telling people something.
Rather, get the light bulb to go off, let them discover. And I think that’s kind of consistent with what I’m talking about here. Sure, some private people will go in there and they’ll make some mistakes. I think those mistakes are precious. I think those mistakes are part of what wilderness ought to be about. I don’t like the “safari syndrome” very much, even though I’ve been a part of it. I don’t like the kind of menus we’re serving the people down there now. I don’t like the food service regulations. I don’t like the fact that nine-year-old girls are dumping cans on the tarp for me to smash and walking away to read their comic book.
Steiger:When you’re working on a commercial trip.
Nash: Yes. When my kids were on the river, they were participants. They learned how to do river stuff. And I’m just saying that as we tend more and more toward making commercial rivers trips into safaris where we have the hired hands and we have the “bwanas,” we are getting away from a wilderness experience. We’re getting into a resort experience. And I would challenge the commercial guiding industry to really think about their role in this safari or resort syndrome.
Steiger:Yeah. What do you think we can or should do about that?
Nash: I think at one point Dick McCallum did trips like this—you probably know better than I, Lew—but the trips that ...
Steiger:... encourage participation.
Nash: Yes. I like the paddle boat stuff, I think that’s good, getting the people in there. But I’d also like to see qualified people captaining those paddle boats—learning by doing. And I think the trips where people participated in sharing and making meals and doing the camp chores and doing some of the trip planning—doing the kind of stuff that we do as professional guides, would be tremendously helpful. I think to encourage that kind of a trip—remember the self-discovery idea—would be excellent, and would get us away a little bit from the resort and the safari syndrome, which isn’t a “bad” thing at all. Of course people get value out of it, and of course they—as you’ve said so well—have some changes in their attitude toward the natural world from that kind of experience. But I think they would have even more, if they had a more self-reliant attitude toward it.
Let me tell you a story that illustrates this. I call it “unguiding.” For a long while I took people up into Silver Grotto on trips, and we rigged the ropes, and we told them where to put their feet. You know the drill. “Now put your foot right here, Alice. That’s great, swing your leg up. Reach up, you got it. Now just one more step. There you go, nice going.” Okay, how many times have you said that, Lew? Alice gets up, she goes into Silver Grotto; she thinks it’s beautiful. Okay, back to the camp. One year, I guess I was busy, or I was tired, or something, and I just told a group of people, “There’s a canyon up here that’s kind of interesting. Why don’t you guys see if you can figure out how to get into it, and see what’s up there.” They took off. They were gone about two hours. I said, “Oh, shit, they may be hurt, I shouldn’t have done this. Liability! Insurance! Problems!” But they came back right about dark, and there was fire in their eyes, and they said, “We just saw The Temple of God!” And they told me about it. It was something they’d never forget. Now, I ask you to compare objectively those two experiences: one, you point every foothold and handhold out to them, help them across the pools, put a rope up if necessary, show them what’s up there, bring them back. Two, you send them up on their own, unguiding, letting them experience, self-discovery. This latter, I think, is more consistent with the wilderness experience. Sure it’s more risky, but the element of risk is a characterizing part of wilderness. Where are the outfitters, where are the guides, willing to take that kind of a risk as some of the Outward Bound programs and other outdoor leadership programs are starting to do?
Steiger:How do we fight off the liability? What do we do about that?
Nash: Well, that gets into a whole bunch of sicknesses in our society about not taking personal accountability for your own life. You recall the person who spilled hot coffee in their lap and sued the restaurant and won! Terrible! I say there are no guarantees; I say it’s worth it to expose people a little bit. I don’t think real gains or discoveries are made without a certain amount of risk. I’m willing to take those risks, you’re willing to take those risks. We take those risks all the time, you know, as human beings. I’m just saying, “Look at the benefits that come from risk-taking, and from letting people discover stuff for themselves; be open to guide from the back seat, be an unguide. Of course this involves a certain amount of ego suppression in the whole guiding profession. Sometimes less can be more; maybe it’s true of guiding.
Steiger:I think our challenge in the commercial sector, we’ve got to learn how to be a lot more transparent. We skim off the best stuff for ourselves.
Nash: Yeah, sure we do.
Steiger:We’re going to have to learn how to transcend that.
Nash: Parenthetically, isn’t the wonderful thing about teaching a child or anyone how to do something, when you finally let go? You ever teach a kid to ride a bike? It’s wonderful. You start out by running behind them and holding them up. They’re wobbly, and they’re a little scared, they’re making some mistakes, they’re going back and forth, but then they get a little more momentum. And you run and run, faster and faster, holding onto the seat, and finally they’re getting those pedals going, and they’re getting some momentum, and then the magic happens, they take off—and they’re on their own! And the smile, the feeling of satisfaction! We’re holding onto people’s seats too long in our wilderness areas; guides are being training wheels, not motivators for independence. Let ‘em off, let ‘em go. Maybe they fall, maybe they skin their knee, maybe they die. Anyway, think about that: learning to ride a bicycle, learning to ski. “Ski between my legs,” I tell my daughter. “Just ski right between my legs. I’ll make a little snowplow and you go down.” We go faster and faster, and finally I say, “Okay!” and I push her out and she’s on her own and she makes her first turn. She looks at me and there’s fire in her eyes. “I did it Daddy, I did it!” You ever get anybody on a commercial river trip saying, “I did it, Lew, I did it!”
Steiger:Yeah, we do.
Nash: You do?
Steiger:Yes. I do, and I think a lot of the best guides down there—I think we’re tapped into that.
Nash: When you get them to the point where they can....
Steiger:We’re not going to let them run Crystal. That’s the difference between your commercial and your private trip.
Nash: You don’t even let them run Kwagunt.
Steiger:No.
Nash: Fire in the eyes. I’m just saying there’s a time to take off the training wheels, let go of the bicycle seat. I think at this point in American history there are a lot of people who want to run rivers rather than be chauffeured down rivers—look at the Grand Canyon waiting list.
Steiger:(groans) I’m going to get lynched!
Nash: Nobody said this was going to be easy, Lew! Nobody said this wasn’t going to be controversial!

The next step, of course, is to get people into their own boats, but before that they face a waiting list—there are a whole line of people out there now who have “bicycles,” who know how to ride them, who’ve prepared for and invested in the opportunity to run the Grand. And where are they? They get behind a nineteen-year line!
Steiger:Let’s just get into that: the nineteen-year line. If my job is to represent the river guides, what I say to you when you tell me there’s a nineteen-year line, or even a ten-year line right now, I have to say, “That’s a misleading statistic.”
Nash: I agree, Lew. I’m just taking the numbers as they’ve been fed to me.
Steiger:My take on it—you know, I’ve been trying to figure that out. Are those numbers real?
Nash: They’re not real. You and I know they’re not real, but they do indicate a pent-up private demand of some large quantity.
Steiger:Because here’s what comes up for me, is, I swear to God, I can name you five different guys I know that do a private trip every single year.
Nash: I know. I know that, and I have managed to get a number of private permits, if you’re assiduous in calling in—I mean five times a day—you can get them. But I also know a lot of people who’ve been on that list for eight or nine years and are finally coming up for a permit.
Steiger:So what would you say? These guys who go every single year, should we not let them do that? Is that not fair for them to be able to do that?
Nash: They work the system to their advantage. Maybe one could also say that somebody shouldn’t write a check and do a commercial trip every year. I think my basic point is that it should be equally difficult to get on the river as a private user or as a commercial user. There should be an equality of difficulty, and right now there isn’t. Right now, you can write a check or call in a credit card number and book a trip on a commercial river trip with one phone call.
Steiger:And you can be motored down there in five or six days, too, which I know doesn’t jibe with your idea of what should be good.
Nash: It doesn’t; that’s the worst of the resort syndrome.
Steiger:If you read Wilderness and The American Mind, and then you read your statement that you sent in to Perspectives, [a yet to be published GCRG piece on river management issues—it’s still in the works] they’re totally in line with one another. To wit, you feel we should get motors off there, we should manage the thing as a wilderness, it should be a 50:50 private-commercial split.
What comes up for me right away—and I’m not kidding—if you just rearrange the percentage of the allocation and you keep the same user days, I think the place is going to be a zoo. I think one thing that we do pretty well in the commercial sector is move a lot of people through there with a minimal sociological impact. I mean, because we have the experience, we are actually able to find and to fill in the gaps, as opposed to jammin’ up. We’re getting better at that all the time.
Nash: You are, but I’d not agree that “movin’ people through” should be the criteria for evaluating Grand Canyon management policy. And let’s not discount the ability of good private trip leaders to do the same thing. There’s no reason that rational adults who are on private trips shouldn’t be able to do that as well. There’s no reason to believe that just because we increase the private quota, the Canyon is going to become a zoo.
Steiger:Well, I think you can start to work that stuff out with experience. I think some of the biggest jam-ups and unnecessary conflicts and tension come just from inexperience, you know, as a natural result of... just human nature, and people being new to the game.
Nash: Yes. I’ve been in the education business all my life; it’s a great cure.
Okay, how about education as a solution—just like we have education for drivers that permits us to drive safely with a lot of other cars on highways. Maybe we need more river education.
Steiger:Well, what I’m talking about is, I think about all those two-boat motor trips that go by when I’m on a dory trip. There’s thirty people, they just went by. You know, it’s Martin’s argument: When you take those numbers....
Nash: I know it, they’re not in your face.
Steiger:That’s the most painless way for them to rub up against me.
Nash: That’s right.
Steiger:Now instead, if you transform them into two six-boat private trips, and we’re all down there together, I have to wonder, are we not all going to lose out because we can’t get away from each other, because we’re more congested?
Nash: Lew, you make excellent points. Maybe the solution is to cut the total pie in half, drop back down to twelve thousand people a year down there instead of twenty-four, and then you can accommodate more of the slower-moving private trips. I just think we should begin to start taking a look at what’s right for Grand Canyon, what’s right for the Colorado, what’s the best possible experience down there, even if it’s going to be limited to fewer people, and not start looking at payrolls and not start looking at the so-called river “industry.” What the hell? This is a national park, it’s a World Heritage Site; it’s the only place in the temperate latitudes you can go 225 or 279 miles and not see a car! The highest use of the Grand Canyon is not to sustain a “River Industry,” in my opinion.
Its highest purpose is to be itself and to be, from a human standpoint, appreciated as one of the planet’s great—our increasingly rare—wildernesses. I don’t want to take a paycheck out of anybody’s hands, but I hate to think of the Grand Canyon management policy being driven by a concern to put a paycheck in [a boatman]’s mailbox.
I’m just talking about a reduction and a change, given changing circumstances, that’s all. You started out when it was 92:8. Then it changed to 70:30, but they increased the numbers, they increased the total pie.
Steiger:Which in my mind was a tragedy.
Nash: I agree it was an unfortunate thing; wildness lost a round.
Steiger:At that point in time. We’re talking politics and we’re talking compromise and all those things that are dirty words to you and Martin. You know, with the whole motor/rowing thing, the thing that broke my heart was, there was that big stir, and ultimately everybody got all pissed off. I mean, there was a big kind of black, cloudy period in there. Yeah, there was still the magnificent Grand Canyon, but there was a lot of bitterness down there.

Nash: Well, the motor/oars thing was a very sad political—got caught up in politics, and you know the sad story of how the Appropriations Bill was attached and so on and so forth. As a scholar, it just breaks my heart, because all the research, all the studies that had been done at public expense, suggested that it should be an oars-only experience, and then suddenly that was just overturned by one congressman. That story is pretty well documented. So the motors stayed and, for me, remain an inconsistency down there. But I’ve never really done a motor trip.
Steiger:See, my problem there is I grew up doing them.
Nash: I know you did, and you’re very good at it.
Steiger:I was good at it, and this is the hard part. The really hard part is, for me, with that one is.... You know I work for the dories, I’ve done some private trips, I’ve worked for just about everybody down there. Some of the best trips I ever did in my whole life, that I’m the most proud of, were those motor trips. I gave people a good experience, that was more along the lines of “go check it out.”
Nash: Good! The unguiding principle.
Steiger:Yeah, much more than it was, “Here, put your foot here, Alice,” and “wasn’t that good?”
But for me the really hard part is that I ran a bunch of those trips and I, to this day, am really proud of what happened on them.
Nash: And Lew, no one’s taking away that pride, and you shouldn’t have to surrender that pride, but we do have to recognize that sometimes policies need to be changed. I’m sure the engineer who built Hetch Hetchy Dam on the Tuolumne in California was proud of his work and went home and said, “I built a good dam!” But maybe as priorities change, a later generation comes and says, “This was the wrong thing to do right here. We need to take that dam out. We need to undo this policy.” There’s some things that ought to be changed in the interest of protecting what little and fragile wilderness we have, and cultivating a wilderness experience.
I think now there’s a huge mandate out there for keeping wild land as wild as possible. I just don’t think motors belong there any more than all-terrain vehicles or four-wheel drives belong on the John Muir Trail. It’s time to think things through again. Reconsider. We’re facing a new millennium in which wildness is going to be increasingly precious.
Steiger:We’ve got a new management plan coming up. We don’t know exactly when, but we know it’s about time for a brand new Colorado River Management Plan. A couple of things have been eatin’ on me: one of ‘em is, “Holy shit, the demand is never going to go down, even if you shift this to 50:50.”
Nash: There’s still going to be a huge lineup.
Steiger:There’s going to be a line. You know, at some point, if the world keeps going the way that it’s been, we’re gonna have a huge line. We have a very precious place that we’re going to have to deal with. It’s been an enormous gift for me to be there—for all of us—Grand Canyon.
Nash: Now let’s put that first. Let’s put Earth first, is what I say.
Steiger:So we got the Grand Canyon, and I think we all agree that it doesn’t belong to anybody. Like the Hopis say, “Nobody owns the land.”
Nash: Yes, it’s a humbling concept.
Steiger:Okay, so it doesn’t belong to anybody. Here it is, those of us who’ve been there for a while, we’re just lucky sons of bitches. We’re lucky enough that we got to be there. As you look down the road and see what’s happening with people, one of the big questions is, Okay, we realize everybody can’t go at once. So what is going to limit that demand? On the private side you have the wait. So to date, on the commercial side, what’s happened? The price has gone up. You say on the commercial sector it’s not fair, because all they have to do is write a check. Well something’s happened in the last twenty years.
Nash: The check’s gotten bigger.
Steiger:Yeah, you have to write a bigger check. You can go, but the check’s gotten a lot bigger.
Nash: Right.
Steiger:Now, if we carry that to its logical conclusion, even if you make it 50:50, somewhere down the line, you’re still going to have that ten-to-twenty-year wait, and the ones who can get right in are going to be writing a very big check.
Nash: A very big check. The numbers are going to go up, Lew, and it’s the same kind of controversy we will have with organ transplants. You remember the Mickey Mantle thing, “How come he gets the liver and I don’t?!” That kind of deal. I mean, people with money are going to.... And I don’t think that just being rich is the right criteria for admission to this special place.
Steiger:I don’t think so either.
Nash: You know what I think’s the right criteria? Preparation; lusting after it; preparing yourself and your equipment; studying the maps; learning about it; becoming qualified to run the river—I... that’s how I think the ticket should be paid. That’s the price of admission: learning the ropes, the way you did. Let that be the price of admission, not a Visa card.
Steiger:Well, what about Al, then?
Nash: Oh, gosh, Al and Dave—you always catch me on that.
Steiger:I know, I do, I’m tellin’ ya’.
Nash: And I love those guys, and maybe we can explain in the interview who these guys were and the role they played in the last trip that you and I did together. But I want a place for Al and Dave down there. I’m glad they got to do that trip.
Steiger:Al and Dave were these two brothers: Al was eighty-one and Dave was seventy-nine, and Rod and I had them on this trip. They came in on a dory trip that we did, and somehow managed to move all of us (chuckles) who were with them, as much as the Canyon moved them.
Nash: Exactly, well said.
Steiger:Somehow they made us feel that we were—I don’t know, somehow they appreciated.... They tapped right into it. Here were two guys who couldn’t go on their own, and yet for them the experience was so important, it meant everything to them. And just that fact alone validated me as a commercial guide who happened to carry them through some of the rapids. When I look at my identity as a guide....
Nash: Your basic point is great, but how many Als and Daves are there out there? I mean, should we open the Canyon up to....
Steiger:Hey, I’m telling you for me as a guide, I run into those kind of guys all the time. There’s Als and Daves, there’s young kids, middle-aged ladies... there’s all these people. There’s this entirely different segment. And we can debate as far as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin...
Nash: Lew, there has to be some criteria for admission. There has to be an admission ticket. What’s it going to be? What’s the admission ticket going to be to this special place? Is it going to be money? Is it going to be luck—as in a lottery? Is it going to be patience—wait out the list for twenty years? Is it going to be competence? Is it going to be passion? Is it going to be wilderness self-sufficiency skills? What’s it going to be? It’s got to be something.
Steiger:Which brings us back to Wilderness and The American Mind. What I remember about this last chapter is, you talked about it in the context of a millennium. You started in 980 [A.D.] and you said, “Could anybody wandering around in 980 have even imagined what was going to happen in one short millennium?” If we keep going the way we’re going, how are we going to manage the wilderness environment? And what struck me.... There’s a classic debate coming, and like so many of the world’s problems, we have a perfect little microcosm for it in the Grand Canyon. The debate that you laid out was two things we can do with the natural world: we can make it a garden, or we can leave it alone and have it be wild.
Nash: Yes, I expressed my fears for the total humanizing of the planet, the “Garden Earth.” It could be a wasteland, or it could be a garden, but either way it’s been affected by human beings. Even a lovely garden is affected, of course, by human beings. I’m a partisan of the wild. I believe in wildness. I think like Thoreau that in wildness there’s the preservation of the world. I think it’s important spiritually, I think it’s important ecologically, psychologically, historically. I’m afraid of the loss of wildness. I’m afraid of creating a world in which we have, you know, maybe a lot of sunshine and a lot of space and a lot of nice guided trips down the Grand Canyon, but there’s no more wildness, no more places to make mistakes; no more places to be scared; no more places to be self-reliant. Wildness: the uncontrolled, the untrammeled, the real world. I see it slipping away, everywhere, on every frontier. Wildness is disappearing from our planet—the loss of biodiversity is one index of it. Twenty-five thousand people in the Grand Canyon is another index of it. Think of that. In 1956, fifty-five people ran the Grand Canyon—all year! Now ...
Steiger:Last year we had twenty-five thousand.
Nash: There’s a lot of stuff with that quota. I mean, there were a lot of science trips, there were a lot of people up and down that river. You know, I had some real problems with some of that.
Steiger:Let me tell you, right now, we’re dealing with not just science: there’s the Coast Guard, there’s Coconino County Health Department. You name it, they all want to come, and it ain’t gonna get any better. Everybody wants to go there. So what was interesting to me about your Wilderness and The American Mind chapter is, you were talking about having a license to go. We keep these wild places and people have to earn the right to go.
For quite a while—maybe for fifteen years—I’ve been talking about the idea of a wilderness license. Just as we have a driver’s license to use public highways; people have to be qualified to drive a car or fly an airplane or to air their tanks for a scuba trip, I’ve been urging that we begin to think of wilderness not just as something we give away, but as something that you earn, something that you qualify for, make it a privilege in other words—not an entitlement. And I have been urging that a wilderness license be implemented that would not only test people for their skills at minimal impact camping, but possibly also for their understanding and knowledge of a certain place—sort of involve a preparatory schooling before they were “admitted to the cathedral,” you might say. We accept this as a norm, say in our public universities: you have to go to high school, you have to take a certain number of courses, you have to have a certain grade point average. Then you go to the University of Arizona, then you go to University of California. Remember, these are public institutions. So are national parks. I’m suggesting that it may be time to say—particularly in wilderness, particularly in backcountry—that it’s time to begin to make the admission ticket something based more on ability and more on training and education than just on wealth or luck.
Steiger:I gotta tell ya’, that’s a scary idea for a lot of people. I mean, it’s an amazing leap to make, back from that time when you first did those trips where all you did was show up.
Nash: I agree, but it’s a necessary compromise with numbers and with time—a necessary compromise. You don’t remember, but there was a time in this country when you could drive a car without a license—an eight-year-old could jump in and drive a car. When Henry Ford first made the Model “T,” there were no licenses, there were no driver’s licenses, there were no departments of motor vehicles—you had a car, you built a car, you bought a car, you stepped in, you drove it. It didn’t matter whether you were half-blind, whether you were totally incompetent, whether you were eight years old, you drove a car. Gradually we began to say, “You know, maybe some responsibility ought to be brought to this thing.” Maybe we ought to say if you want to use the public highways, you have to have a driver’s license. You’ve got one in your wallet, right?
Steiger:Yes, I do.
Nash: Yeah. What do you have to pass to get that?
Steiger:Oh, I had to take a test.
Nash: You had to take a test, you had to know what the yellow curb meant, the red curb meant, right? Besides doing a book test, you probably had to do a field test, didn’t you? You had to show the driving instructor that you could park and....
Steiger:[How do you sell] people the idea of another license? (whistles)
Nash: I know it. But the stake that we’re talking about is the protection of wilderness. Remember I’m not advocating licenses as though I want them; I’m saying this is something we have to face as a necessity in the new millennium. We owe it to the wilderness, we owe it to the creatures who live out there, we owe it to the other people who want to share that experience, to be qualified when we go out there, to have some qualifications, to have some savvy.
Steiger:It’s just, you know, the damned bureaucrats.
Nash: I know; they’re everywhere. But here’s the thing Lew: If we have more bureaucracy outside the wilderness, we can afford more freedom inside it. If we have more qualified people who go into wilderness, we can allow them to be freer inside. Do you understand that concept? We educate them and then we don’t have to police them as much, because they know how to behave, they know courtesy, they respect the community they are entering.
Steiger:I understand the concept—I’m not sure that I have faith in the reality of the process so much.
Nash: What I’m doing is groping for management tools for the new millennium.
Steiger:Well, the hard part, what’s bumming me out about tonight, is I keep throwing my strongest arguments at you (chuckles) and you keep sorta answering them!
Nash: Well, we’re talking about ‘em. Someone has to be out there on the extreme, if only to make other people appear reasonable.
Steiger:Is this what the future is going to be like? Are we heading toward a world where that’s what it’s going to come to? You gotta have a license to go outside and mess around out there somewhere were nobody else is, where it’s just you and the natural world?
Nash: Well, wilderness to me is not a place where “nobody” is—it’s a place where the bear people are, where the salmon people are, where the humpback chub people are, where the bighorn sheep people are. There are a lot of “people” out there. They have a right to their space, they have a right to people who’ll be courteous in their house, who have manners, who are housebroken, who understand that nature is a community to which we belong, not a commodity we possess. I’m not just worried about the impact of privates on commercials, or motorboats on rowing rigs—I’m worried about the impact of human beings on nature in general. And I would say that the wilderness license is as much directed as anything toward establishing a sense of courtesy toward other forms of life with which we share the planet. And for population—which I know is a strong concern of yours, Lew—as it doubles and triples or more in this next century, we will see less and less place for our nonhuman neighbors. I’m worried about them. Wilderness and parks are their sanctuary; places where we restrain ourselves; gestures of planetary modesty from a species that has been notable for its arrogance. The private permit and motor issues are trivial compared to this big picture.
What we need is a paradigm change. A paradigm is a world view. And what we need very desperately and very quickly is a paradigm change that will reorient our attitude toward the natural world. And if you follow what I’ve argued in The Rights of Nature, this will include the development of an environmental ethic. That would lead to the duty and responsibility to respect the rights of Nature just as we respect the rights of Jews or blacks or cowboys, or women, or gays, or river guides. So we are talking about a huge paradigm change, and we’re talking about cleaning up intellectual pollution before we can clean up the pollution on the land. We’ve inherited from Christianity a sense of dualism, a sense that nature is different from us and beneath us, and less than us, that nature is an object, that we are the only creatures created in God’s image. And we need to reorient that paradigm to recognize the fact that we are animals; that we don’t own but share this planet. I think one of the most important expressions of that point of view is wilderness. And the reason I may appear so radical in terms of my Grand Canyon policies, is that I think the Canyon is a great place to begin that kind of paradigm revolution. (pause) Heavy stuff.
Steiger:It’s really heavy.
Nash: Heavy stuff.
The book that we both recently read, The Celestine Prophecy, talked about the enormous change in values—you could say a paradigm change—that occurred when we replaced a basically religious or church-oriented view of the world with a scientific one in the Middle Ages. It was that time that we began to think that God didn’t plan everything, but maybe there were certain basic physical laws that controlled things; that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, but maybe just in a small left-field situation somewhere. Galileo, 1632, said we’re not the center of the universe, we’re way out there. And the Church tried to make him recant, you remember, but Galileo stuck to his guns.
That was a great moment. Galileo, and then Darwin with evolution in 1859, and then the ecologists like Aldo Leopold humbled humanity. Our egos emerged pretty badly scarred after all the image-of-God stuff. Wise people today understand that we are members in not masters of the life community. In the big scheme of things homo sapiens is pretty insignificant. And we should be modest toward nature, not arrogant and domineering. And isn’t Grand Canyon the best place to learn planetary modesty? So when I talk about tossing motors out, when I talk about reducing numbers and impact, I’m not just talking about a recreational experience, Lew, I’m talking about developing a reverential, respectful, and ethical relationship to the universe. Can’t we start in a place like Grand Canyon, where a lot of other good environmental things have begun? Why shouldn’t Grand Canyon River Guides lead the way in this paradigm revolution? After all, we walk in the best university in the world. If we can’t learn and teach humility in the Grand Canyon, I really do fear for the future.
Steiger:I’m going to be assassinated!
Nash: You’re gone, you’re through. You went and interviewed an environmental wacko!
Steiger:Oh my God…
Nash: But these are ideas of huge importance. Huge, huge. These are the biggest ideas of our time, Lew. These are the most important ideas on the agenda of society today.
Steiger:There’s no better stage. I submit this to you—here’s my argument for a commercial trip: There’s no better stage, right now, in this country, from which to preach. There’s no better “pulpit.”
Nash: “A bully pulpit,” as Theodore Roosevelt said.
Steiger:... from which to preach this message, than the Grand Canyon. And I submit to you that that’s the argument for the commercial sector.
Nash: Your point is strong, but, to play the devil’s advocate, then let’s open the river up to a hundred thousand a year, let’s take down every “Al and Dave” who show up. If a little is good, more is better—right?
Steiger:Somehow that isn’t exactly right.
Nash: Precisely. And that’s why back in 1972 the Park Service put the quotas in. Better to have a quality experience for a limited number. It’s the key idea in wilderness management. And it brings us back to allocation.
Steiger:I mean, I see people go down there—all kinds of people—regardless of whatever intellectual notions they do or don’t buy into along the way, they get charged up.
Nash: I’ve been on your trips and I’ve seen the magic that you are able to bring to them.
Steiger:Hey, the only magic I ever brought to the party as a guide was that I was smart enough to get out of the way, like you said.
Nash: Unguiding.
Steiger:I mean, my whole trick as a guide is not to explain all kinds of shit to people. My whole trick was just to ask them what was up with them.
Nash: Good.
Steiger:Okay.

Nash: If you’re going to manage an area as wilderness, it behooves you to favor the do-it-yourselfer, who I think has more of a wilderness experience than the commercially-guided client. Remember also that I’ve run about half my trips in the Grand as a commercial guide, enjoyed them, think I’ve added a lot to people, felt people had a good time. But I’m talking specifically, as a kind of a follow-up from my book Wilderness and The American Mind, about the concept of wilderness. And if the wilderness experience is important, if society judges that that’s something worth preserving and cultivating, then I think something needs to be said for increasing self-guided opportunities, self-discovery.
You see, Lew, I define wilderness as being unlike civilization. So my concern, both as a scholar and as a leader of wilderness trips and an advocate of wilderness, is to make wilderness and the wilderness experience as unlike civilization as possible. I think for society today that is where the value of wilderness resides.
Now, what I see is an unfortunate convergence of civilization into wilderness—a certain convergence, let’s say, of wilderness toward civilization. We see it on commercially-guided trips, in the guiding industry in general in this country. Case in point: rubber glove lunch service, applying restaurant standards to rivers, where I think people should accept certain risks, maybe even the risk of eating some food that may give them the runs once in a while. I regretted—although I understand the reasons for it, and so do you—I regretted the passing of wood fire cooking. I thought there was a tremendous amount of skill and nostalgia and fun, and it was unlike what the guests had at home. Now, you set up a river kitchen, and you know as well as I do, that it looks much like the kitchen these people have at home, and the food is probably better than they have at home. This whole emphasis on turning out four-star meals down there, and feeling that you sort of have to do that, because the price tag on the trips is so high. We’re catering to the rich and we’re giving them the kinds of stuff they expect to get in restaurants—and the rubber glove issue is a good symptom of that. I’m for making things simpler, I’m for making wilderness as unlike civilization as possible. I’m for using wilderness trips to teach the older wilderness skills—and those include guiding one’s self, and taking care of one’s self, learning how to do things one’s self instead of just watching a guide do them. Unlike yourself, that’s the way I came up. I came up from riding on a couple of commercial trips to becoming a private boater and then, when permits got tight, doing a bunch of commercial trips. I made myself pretty good at what I was doing. I got my own equipment together, I developed my skill level. Other people are doing that now—huge business out there, teaching boating, selling boats, renting gear.
Steiger:What I wonder about you is, why did you keep doing commercial trips?
Nash: Well, I kept doing commercial trips for several reasons: one of them was that it was hard to get private permits. Another one was that I enjoyed the camaraderie of the guides. I’ve had the great privilege of running with people like Kenton [Grua] and Regan [Dale] and yourself, and Pete Gross, and Ellie Tibbetts, and many others. That fellowship and that sense of working together as professionals with mutual respect and concern for each other is something that’s really very precious. You have to experience it, as you know, to be able to articulate it, or understand it. And that was something that I liked a great deal. And frankly, Lew, putting the private trip together and organizing a private trip and getting the food and the shuttle and all the stuff together is a major pain in the behind. It’s a lot easier just to drive up to Flagstaff, load my boat, go down to the river, the car’s at the other end, and there’s a check in the mail. There’s something to be said, frankly, for that kind of ease. But, as I’ve been saying, the strongest wilderness experience is on the private side.
There’s some aspects of the commercial trips that I didn’t enjoy: I didn’t like the numbers that we were building up to on some of my trips. I think the last trip you and I did was a six-boat trip with two baggage boats. I believe there were thirty-four people on the beach. I didn’t get the names figured out until Phantom, and then we had new names! When I’m down there, kneeling in the sand, at 110 degrees, dodging ants and smashing cans, and an eleven-year-old comes up and dumps a load of stuff on the tarp and says, “Take care of this,” I begin to think, “Is this really the right place for me? Is this really the kind of experience that I’m down here for?” I felt like I was a servant at a resort. It wasn’t that she did anything bad or impolite… No, she did what was expected—just like when you walk away from a dinner table in a restaurant, you don’t say, “Can I go out and do the dishes?” You just walk away from the table. It was expected. That’s the problem. We’re creating a group of people who go to the river and expect to be waited on, to be served hand and foot—and they are, they’re taken into a resort. The kind of treatment they get is more like a Club Med with day hikes than it is a wilderness expedition.
Steiger:Why did that evolve that way? How did we get to that point, I wonder?
Nash: For one thing, we have seen develop in American society an economy where we have people of more and more means who, frankly, want to be served, who don’t want to accept the risk, the work, the challenge, that goes into putting stuff together themselves. It’s just easy to thumb through a catalog, pick something out, send in the Visa card, and show up. Now, this isn’t entirely bad. But if you’re following my logic, I think something is really missing from that kind of scenario, and what is missing is a personal involvement with wilderness and the satisfactions of doing something yourself.
I regret the convergence of the wilderness experience toward the hotel or resort experience. And if you really want to get into that, you can look at the African safaris, and you could look at some Idaho river trips that are really big-buck numbers where crews set up tents and draw hot tubs for the people. There are some trips up on the Salmon River that are like that, where the boats go down in advance and set up the lawn chairs and the people just roll down and pour their martini and it’s no different at all than if they went to a resort hotel in Hawaii. I think something is unfortunate about that, particularly if you remember that on a permit river the safari-type trips are necessarily excluding people who would act more compatibly with wilderness.
I’m not saying “do away with commercial guiding,” I’m just saying be aware that there is a large and growing and increasingly restless and frustrated pool of people who have gotten all dressed up for a party with nowhere to go. And if you followed my logic earlier, it is these people who I think are having a more appropriate experience in a wilderness area, than somebody who’s on a safari, and is getting their food served with rubber gloves. (pause) Just my bias.
Steiger:Well, I think the classic answer from the commercial sector to that is, “Wait a minute, these private guys who have their own boats are an elite too, a bunch of yuppies, and really a very narrow segment of the population.” We’re supposed to represent the whole damned country, we’re supposed to be able to take all these people down there. But I agree, where our argument breaks down is if we have made it too much like a safari. I mean, if we can provide a kind of gateway experience...
Nash: “Gateway” implies to something on the other side.
Steiger:Yeah, well, if we get out of the way, we can put a lot of people in touch with Mother Nature who wouldn’t otherwise get there.
Nash: Do-it-yourself.
Steiger:Well, to me it’s not even doing it yourself.
Nash: The unguiding concept that we were talking about.
Steiger:Well, it’s funny. When I started, that’s what we did, that’s how we did hikes. I mean, as a matter of course. We just said, “Yeah, we’re at the Little Colorado here, we’re going to be here about three hours. You guys go on up there. There’s a rapid you can swim down. If you go way up, there’s some pools you can get in. Check it out. There’s a little house on the other side, go check it out.”
Nash: Yeah, that was the style: go up and find that Beamer cabin up the LCR But now it seems to me the tendency is, you just lead the people up and there’s a guide at the front and there’s a guide at the rear.
Steiger:We’re supposed to do that! I mean, to do it that other way is seen as being irresponsible by the National Park Service.
Nash: Well, that’s, I think, unfortunate. I recognize there are some people who need that kind of leading by the hand. But I think sometimes we overdo things. We overinterpret—we put so much emphasis on interpretation, we have training sessions, and the guides just keep on and on until eyes glaze over.
Steiger:For these people who have a very limited amount of time out there in the natural world, sometimes maybe we’re taking up too much of their time.
Nash: We may be taking up too much of their time; not letting them be alone with the Canyon.
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Steiger:I think, having been out there in some country that’s pretty remote, I don’t think Grand Canyon is anywhere close to being a wilderness. And I think it’s kind of artificial to pretend that it is. Grand Canyon, to me, is more like... it’s already a garden. It’s not wild anymore, it’s a park. I think there may be other places that are way more of a true wilderness.
The Grand Canyon, regardless of how high you make the walls around it, or whatever the rules are, if somebody gets hurt, they’re going to come get you in a helicopter. Or, wherever you are, practically, you’re going to turn around, and there’s gonna be somebody walking behind you, right away. You know, like the next day or the day after.
Nash: Right. Well, that’s because most of the stuff we do in the Canyon is pretty routinized. It’s not Harvey Butchart’s canyon, it’s not Colin Fletcher’s canyon.
Steiger:Well, for me, this isn’t a wilderness, it is a park. It’s a sublime place, but in my mind it’s already reached that “garden state,” just by virtue of all the attention that’s been focused on it. For me, when you talk about who gets to go, are these the people that have worked up and are qualified, or they get a license—I wonder if we want to seal it off, even that much. I keep coming around to, well, these people who are growing up in these urban environments, like we see right here [in San Francisco], or like in New York, or Detroit, or Chicago, or L.A.—I keep thinking of these young kids. I keep thinking of kids that have never seen dirt, that have never gotten out of that environment. I keep thinking how can we possibly clue them into the idea of the planet Earth, to any sense of the natural world? And I’d like to see the Grand Canyon used for more of that.
Nash: Okay, that’s a really excellent idea. I’ve thought about it a lot. But I remind you that we still have a numbers problem on the Grand, and that it’s not the only kind of place where you can teach a caring relationship with the Earth. We’re sitting right next to a little environmental education museum that has bats and bird houses, and urban kids come right out here to Coyote Point and learn that kind of stuff. You don’t have to go to the Sistine Chapel to become a Catholic, you don’t have to go to Jerusalem to learn something about Judaism. The Grand Canyon is, in my way of thinking, an ultimate place, and maybe it should be the end result of a process of learning, rather than a place where you take the neophyte. It’s just another perspective, another take on that. Maybe you should be up on the American River doing day trips and kind of working your way into something like the Grand Canyon.
Steiger:Just for my own curiosity, is there any real wilderness out there? Is it in Alaska? Is that’s where it’s at?
Nash: Well, Lew, you’ve been saying, “the Grand Canyon corridor isn’t wilderness.” I would urge you to not think of places as either wilderness or not wilderness. What I’d urge you to do is think of the presence and absence, to various degrees, of wilderness values—kind of like a shading in the rainbow, a color thing. So that even in the city it might be 90:10, ninety percent civilized, ten percent wilderness. Maybe in the Grand Canyon it’s twenty percent civilized, because of all the people and the choppers; eighty percent wilderness values, because of no cars for 225 miles and so forth. Wilderness is a state of mind. Perception varies with the perceiver. Grand Canyon may not be wilderness to you, but I guarantee you it is wilderness to a lot of your clients down there—unless you’ve created such a resort and safari syndrome that you’ve taken it away from them. But it depends on where you’re coming from. For you, it’s not. For me, I’d have to be frank and say I understand exactly what you’re saying. I’ve been in a lot wilder places than the Grand Canyon, but I don’t say, “The Grand Canyon isn’t wilderness.” I just say that wilderness values are a little less intense there than they might be for me on an uninhabited island in the Sea of Cortez or in the Brooks Range in Alaska. I’ve been to places like that where the hair stands up on the back of your neck, where nobody’s ever been. But I’m not prepared to just call those places wilderness and everything else “gardens.” There’s a mixture of values.
Steiger:I know to you the word means the natural world, left alone.
Nash: Uncontrolled. Undomesticated, uncivilized, a place of wild beasts—where the wild things are. And I recognize there are degrees of that. And you might say that wilderness for some people is going to go all the way down that degree scale, all the way down that spectrum to—I could imagine turning an inner-city kid loose in Coyote Point here, and he’d say, “Jesus, this is the wilderness! There are trees here! And there’s not pavement, and I’m walking on ground! And there are birds and squirrels around!” You know? Could be, for them, the wilderness. And who are you and I to go to them and say, “No, it isn’t wilderness,” because for them, it is. Just as someone says “this is beautiful,” are you and I to go to them and say, “No, that isn’t beautiful; no, that woman isn’t attractive; no, that song doesn’t appeal to you.” Let people exercise their individual tastes a little bit on wilderness. I think it’s terribly unfortunate if we start out as professional guides, in answer to someone’s question, say, “Nah, this trip isn’t going to be a wilderness trip.” You know, people say, “Are we going into wilderness, Lew?” You say, “Nah, this isn’t a wilderness. Too many people down here to be a wilderness.” I think that’s a very unfortunate attitude to start a trip off with—tell somebody that. I think the proper response to that question—and I’ve been asked that question a lot on commercially-guided trips—“Is this wilderness?” I say, “Look around and you tell me after five days if it’s wilderness. You tell me what you think. You go out and walk up a side canyon and make some discoveries.” And sometimes they’ll come back and say, “Well, I don’t think it’s so much wilderness when we’re out here with thirty-five people and you guys are preparing food with rubber gloves”—sorry to keep coming back to that—“But when I walk up the side canyon alone, when I walked up Fern Glen alone, or when I went up Blacktail and sat there by myself at the end of Blacktail, I really kind of felt that I was in wilderness.” And I would say, “Right on! Good for you!”

Nash: As we wrap up, I just want to add my two cents to the on-going and very important issue of increasing guide skills as interpreters. I know that’s something you’ve given a lot of concern to and are continuing to build.
I would just simply like to call attention to the opportunity of using a Grand Canyon trip as a chance to teach something about what I call the macro-environmental issues, the really big ones that concern the planet as a whole—to not just send people away with a knowledge of the great unconformity and some sense of whether the Hermit is above the Redwall and where Bessie Hyde’s boat was found. Instead, I think at times we need to lift our eyes a little bit above the rims, so to speak, and take cognizance of the really big patterns that are affecting not only the Grand Canyon, but every other place on the planet. And among those big issues I would list the population problem on the planet as a whole. I would like to think that people would come out from an immersion in one of our great national parks with a little sense of the importance of self-restraint as a species as it concerns population, as it concerns impact, as it concerns material growth. I think people should come out of a two-week immersion in the Canyon with a little sense of the meaning of sustainability as conservation biologists are talking about it now, a little sense of the importance of biological diversity, the endangered species issue—these kind of big problems on which the stability of our whole culture, our whole ecosystem really are hinging. In other words, we should address some issues that go outside of the Park and outside of the Canyon, and use the Canyon as a “pulpit,” you might say. You see, the way I look at it is that the human race is a lot like a cancer now on this planet. We’re very good at growth, like cancer. What happens when cancer grows and flourishes as we are growing and flourishing both in number and in impact is that the organism dies. The paradox of the parasite is it kills its host. You get it? If the parasite is really successful, it’s ironic, because it cuts its own throat. Because guess what? When somebody dies of cancer, the cancer dies too. Now, if the Earth is an organism, as many macro-ecologists think, and we humans are a kind of a cancer on the Earth, we may be succeeding as a species in terms of our growth, but what we’re really doing is cutting off the limb on which we’re standing. Because if the ecosystem collapses, guess who goes down too, and guess who goes down first? The people on the top of the pyramid who are balancing on that little cone up there. You know? So there needs to be some sense. One way to get into it might be—and I’m drawing here a bit on my cruising experience in the Sea of Cortez—is the problem of the oceans, seven-eighths of this planet. Jacques Cousteau and others have told us that the oceans are in big trouble. We’ve seen the headlines about fisheries collapsing, we’ve seen major changes going on in the ocean. I got a feeling, Lew, that stuff is unraveling like an old sweater, you know, and those first threads come out and it’s flopping in the wind. Or you’re driving a pickup truck and your tarp starts tearing a little bit, the next thing is, (whoosh) big-time shredding. And I see that kind of thing as potentially devastating to the ocean environment. Now, the Colorado River is heading toward the ocean, right? Except for 1983 and 1984, it doesn’t reach the ocean, it gets sucked up into irrigation canals, sent off to the Los Angeles sewer system—doesn’t reach the Sea of Cortez. There are massive changes going on because of that in the Gulf of California. The nutrients that came into the Gulf, just like the Nile brought nutrients into the Mediterranean, the Colorado is no longer bringing nutrients into the Sea of Cortez and it’s affecting the whole fishery there. The whole fishery in the Sea of Cortez is—and I don’t mean just productive fishery, but the whole marine ecosystem—is in big trouble in the Sea of Cortez, because the Colorado River has been so diverted that it doesn’t anymore bring those sediments and those nutrients into the head of the Gulf, which are then taken in and out by those big tides. So there’s just a little way to link-up the place where we are, to get people to think about bigger issues. The need is to think in terms of what’s coming down for the ecosystem in the next hundred, the next two hundred, the next five thousand years? A way to tie it in. So I would like to see guides occasionally be able to help their people lift their eyes a little bit over the rims to some of these big macro issues.
See, another cut at this, besides the cancer analogy, is to use the analogy of a checking account. I call it “deficit environmental financing.” We all know what deficit financing is—it’s when you run your credit cards up, right? You borrow more money than you have, and you get deeper and deeper in the hole, right? And you owe your grandfather and your mother and you owe this guy over here and the tire guy needs some money and the phone company’s two months overdue. Right? Typical existence. It’s called deficit financing of someone’s lifestyle. Deficit environmental financing is when we dip too deeply into the environment, to the energy availability on the planet, to nonrenewable resources, to the richness of the fabric of life on this planet. And we keep dipping-in and dipping-in, and enriching our lifestyle and increasing our numbers of our species at the expense of the future. We borrow from the future. We dig a deeper and deeper pit. And as long as we keep digging that pit we keep running up that debt. We’re losing three hundred species a year; adding ten thousand to the human population every hour. Most of these folks will never see the Grand Canyon, but, as a place to change the paradigm, it could be their salvation. This kind of thinking doesn’t have to dominate discussion on a river, but hey, we got a lot of time in between rapids, you know.

Lew Steiger