Quinn: This is September 3, 1995. We're with Mr. George Steck in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. Could you give us a little bit about your background leading up to when you first saw or hiked the Grand
Canyon?
Steck: Well, I was born and raised in the Bay Area of California, and two of my children were born in the same
hospital I was, Alta Bates in Berkeley. I went to high school there. That's kind of important, I guess. My father
was not a backpacker, but he liked the Yosemite High Sierra camps where you would go and stay in a tent or something
for a week or two, and he loved fishing. My brother and I went with him on a lot of occasions, and eventually he
would let us go on some backpacking excursions of our own, just a couple of days. But we did that for years and
years, so I was used to camping.
There was the war in there. I spent some time in there and never got any action, just too young. Just like my father
was just a little bit too young for World War I. I lucked out on World War II.
Then I decided that I was--well, I took a master's [degree] in physics at Cal Tech, and taught for a year at the
then agricultural college at Davis, University of California. Now it's just one of their campuses of the University
of California. Taught there, and then I went back to graduate school to get a Ph.D. in philosophy. I lasted just
about two weeks, and I just couldn't stand it. So I switched to something else that I had enjoyed as an undergraduate
and went into probability and statistics [and] eventually got a Ph.D. in statistics, although I had to back up
and start with a lot of undergraduate classes, which was fortunate in a way. There were three classes that first
day and in each one the professor announced a midterm for the following Friday, so I asked people to loan me notes.
And one nice young lady loaned me her notes for one of these classes, and as of a few days ago, we've been married
for forty-five years! (aside about moving microphone)
Let's see, I finished graduate school, then I took a job with Sandia National Laboratories in 1955, or at that
time it was Sandia Corporation, and moved from California to New Mexico. And as yet, I had not seen the Grand Canyon.
I had spent a lot of time in the High Sierra of California, but not anything in the Southwest really. So I joined
the New Mexico Mountain Club and the New Mexico Mountain Rescue Council. Of course I was already a member of the
Sierra Club, but they didn't have a chapter in New Mexico at the time.
Quinn: Did you join that when you were in California?
Steck: Yeah, I was about seventeen, I think, when I joined the Sierra Club. My grandfather had been a director,
an acquaintance of John Muir's, and a charter member of the Sierra Club, so I had sort of grown up with it. And
the first money that I earned as an apprentice seaman in the United States Navy, I put down on a life membership
in the Sierra Club. And (laughs) they don't make a lot of money out of me, because I don't know what the dues are
each year, but I don't have to pay them. But with those two outlets I did a lot of hiking and camping in New Mexico.
Then the Sierra Club had a hike, John Ritter led it, down the Tanner Trail and out Salt Trail, over between Christmas
and New Year's. And this would have been . . . well, the airplane crash there was over Chuar Butte, I think in
February, and this might have been either that Christmas [1956] or the following Christmas [1957]. So anyway, it
dates from that time. I remember along the trail there was bits of luggage and clothing. There were no body parts
that I noticed.
Quinn: And this was your very first hike, you were seeing all this wreckage?
Steck: I think so, yeah. I'm kind of mixed up in what is EXACTLY the first, because the New Mexico Mountain Club
also had a cross-Canyon hike. But that was in 1963, because it was the year of low water, and the flow through
the Canyon was about a thousand cfs [cubic feet per second]. I remember how exquisitely delightful it was there
where the Bright Angel Creek comes into the Colorado, because you have these huge forty to fifty feet high sand
dunes that you could kind of run down and jump down and tumble and go splash into this little stream down there.
I don't recall feeling any danger at all. It must have been some little rapid there, but it was inconsequential.
But that was beautiful. I remember that night I slept in a mortuary sack as a sleeping bag. It was hot, it was
in the summer, and it even came with a little tag to put on my big toe if that had been the use for it.
Quinn: Did everybody in the group have one of those?
Steck: No. One person had two, and he used one and he let me use the other. Body bag, they called it something
else, the name escapes me. But [the trip was] one of those deals where you've got two sets of people, one from
the north and one from the south, and they hike each to the other rim, and you HOPE that you remember to switch
car keys somewhere along the way. Since that was in 1963, and the airplane crash was in the later fifties, that
Ritter trip was probably my first one. Except for the fact that the water was never that low ever again, I don't
really remember there being much difference. I guess there was an extra bridge across the Colorado, because the
Silver Bridge I don't think existed then. So there's those beginning trips.
I took a trip with Georgie White on a raft through there. That was in 1957, because that was the year of the high
water.
Quinn: So the raft trip came first, [before] the hike?
Steck: It may have been the same year, but it would have been first by a few months, I guess. But that wasn't a
hike, except for a few little . . . . And I only went as far as Phantom. I would have hiked out at Phantom. But
the flow of the river was 150,000 cubic feet per second. It was ENORMOUS. Georgie hadn't ever seen it that high,
so the landmarks that she was using for this, that, or the other thing, just weren't there -like Redwall Cavern
was underwater, and she had planned to stop there, and she'd planned on stopping some other places. The water was
just so fast that we went right on by. We did stop at Nankoweap and climbed up to the granary. But it was supposed
to be a seven-day trip to Phantom, and I think we did it in three days.
One of the extraordinary things along on that trip was at the mouth of the Little Colorado. There was a sandbar
all the way across the mouth. It must have been several hundred yards lengthwise. In width, it was probably thirty
feet or so. I don't remember any water going through that sandbar, so all I can think of is that somehow it was
all draining through the sand, which might be possible if the flow was low. But the extraordinary thing was that
there was this enormous blue lake behind this sandbar dam. You dive in and try to swim down, you never could seem
to touch the bottom, so it might have been twenty feet deep. And it seemed much too far to ever try to swim to
the upstream end of it. It was just BIG. I've got it on film. I thought, "Oh, this is neat! I'll have to come
back." Of course it was never that way again that I've seen.
Quinn: Was she ever concerned on that trip?
Steck: Georgie White?
Quinn: About running certain areas in the high water? Did she ever portage, or did you just go for it?
Steck: Every rapid was either gone or greatly diminished in its ferocity, except Hance, which seemed to be MORE
ferocious. She spent quite a few hours looking at that and throwing logs in it to watch what happened to them.
There were two sets of boats, her three big ones tied together sideways with motors on them, and three ten-man
assault craft lashed together, side-to-side, and those had oars. Fred Eiseman [phonetic] and Ed Gooch [phonetic]
were the oarsmen. Somewhere in Marble Canyon -I'm backtracking a little -there were some ENORMOUS standing waves,
twenty, thirty, forty feet from trough to crest. They were just going every which way with no pattern to them.
It was in this stretch that the three big boats and the three little boats passed one another without ever seeing
one another. So if you can imagine what waves there were to make that happen!
It was in there, too, that a huge "Y" shaped log -the points of the "Y" may have been eight
to ten feet apart, and the whole length of the thing twelve to fifteen feet -came up onto our boat and punctured
one of the outside tubes so that poor Gooch was trying to row with his oarlock at water level, and it just didn't
work. We just drifted out of control in what appeared to be a raging stream, but really wasn't. It was sort of
a pussycat roaring kind of thing. But finally one of the passengers who had been on the . . . (tape turned off
while a visitor arrives). So we're drifting down the river on our punctured boat with one of the outside tubes
underwater or at water level, and what somebody finally did, one of the paying passengers took the rope in his
teeth, literally, dove in, and swam to shore dragging this rope behind him. When he got to shore, he had about
a second and about six feet of rope to wrap around a rock, and then we swung in and were able to make camp and
repair the boat. This guy had been on the . . . (airplane noise - tape turned off). So he swam to shore and got
us taken care of. He had been a member of the Indiana swim team.
Quinn: Convenient guy to have along!
Steck: (laughs) Yeah, it's like having a doctor or something. You never know what skill you're going to need. So
that was part of the unusual aspects of that year in the Grand Canyon, 1957, with that enormous flow. And Hance
was a major rapid. The big boats went through first, and then pulled in below so that we could take pictures of
the little boats going through. The wave action there was such that on at least one occasion, the little boats
disappeared from view, just because they were down in a trough when waves were cresting in between. But there was
no problem. It looked a great deal worse than it apparently was.
Quinn: Up until this time, you had done quite a bit of hiking and exploring different places?
Steck: Yeah, not in the Grand Canyon, though. But in New Mexico there's lots of hiking available. These mountains
just outside of town are just fine. They go up to almost 11,000 feet.
Quinn: And you had done that when you were in New Mexico?
Steck: Uh-huh.
Quinn: At this time in 1957, was there something special or something different about the Grand Canyon that really
got your attention?
Steck: It was BIG. And thinking of it in terms of that water flow, I wasn't sure I'd want to make another boat
trip down there. But it was kind of a wild, interesting place. It was so FAST though, three days to get to Phantom,
and then I hiked out. And my water balance was all wrong, my electrolyte balance was wrong, so I sort of almost
crawled out on my hands and knees, taking a hike at night. [I] would sleep for a little bit and then walk a little
bit until I was just so tired I couldn't move, and then I'd sleep a little more. I finally learned how to handle
that. I don't think it was sodium that was the problem, I was missing something else. I had diarrhea too, which
was upsetting my electrolytes.
It was shortly after that that I went on another Georgie White trip in Glen Canyon. I really developed much more
of an emotional response to Glen Canyon on that one trip than I did on the trip to the Grand Canyon, because you
could assimilate it more as a totality in your mind. It was just so much fun because I bought a boat, one of those
ten-man boats, and I ended up making six two-week trips through Glen Canyon in the time from when I first encountered
it to where it wasn't possible any longer.
Quinn: Was this an army surplus boat?
Steck: Uh-huh, navy assault landing craft, manually inflatable. It weighed 350 pounds with the floor and everything.
As I say, it held ten people, though. I remember the inflating instructions, "Your boat is properly inflated
when a 175-pound man, standing on the main tube, deflects it seven-sixteenths of an inch." I don't know how
you're ever going to determine proper inflation when the boat's on the water and it's all kind of moving around.
But it never popped. Eventually, I sold it. I gave it to my other son, Stanley, that you haven't met, who's a park
ranger currently at Denali National Park. I gave it to him because he had been in the River Subdistrict at Grand
Canyon for a bit, and was into running rivers. But he sold it to somebody else finally, and it's now gone from
my control.
Quinn: At that time, were you involved with the Sierra Club campaign to save Glen Canyon?
Steck: No, not Glen Canyon, because that was a done deal by the time I ever heard about it. But I did participate
and organized a trip to the Grand Canyon. I guess there was a meeting sponsored by the Reader's Digest and the
Sierra Club protesting the building of the Bridge Canyon Dam in Grand Canyon. The Park was then small enough so
they could say, "Well, [if] we build it at Bridge Canyon, it will only back up water into the National Park
three-quarters of a mile or something, so no big deal." But there was so much belated opposition to Glen Canyon,
that that kind of opposition then could get organized and fight this other dam, which was successfully fought.
But I'd known David Brower. He even spent a night in my basement here one time. But at that meeting, it was a friendly
meeting, so we thought. But then Mo Udall showed up and got things all stirred up, and he got poor David so aggravated
and unhappy that he cried, right there on the podium. I wasn't used to that. Anyway, I felt differently about Brower
after that, that he was IN OPPOSITION to things it seemed like more than he was FOR things. As a matter of fact,
when he left the Sierra Club, he organized that Friends of the Earth deal, whose acronym was FOE, F-O-E, which
makes me think even more that he was more against things than he was FOR things.
Well, let's see, we had the high water of 1957, the low water of 1963. When they finally began backing up the water
in the Powell Reservoir, Glen Canyon Reservoir, then the float trips that I'd been making through there were no
longer possible. So I switched my allegiance to the Grand Canyon. There'd been that one hike with Ritter. |
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