A friend of mine, Don Mattox, asked if I'd like to go with him on a trip to Thunder
River. That sounded like fun, so I said yes, and we went off to do that. It was before the Bill Hall Trail existed,
so we started at Indian Hollow. We'd never been there before. We didn't know too much about what to expect, although
I'd been told about a place called Pistol Springs that was out there on the trail, and that sounded good because
water was a problem. But I think Pistol Springs was a figment of some cartographer's imagination because there
was no such place that we found, not even a damp spot in any sand. So it was a long way, and we knew that there
was supposed to be a Thunder River, but we were worrying perhaps it was sort of like Pistol Springs, that it was
rather etherial or ephemeral or something. So when we got to the lip of Surprise Valley (panting) thirsty as all
get-out, and could then hear the roar of Thunder River. Our spirits lifted considerably. That would have been maybe
1966 or something like that. I remember we didn't have to get a permit to do that, and we could camp there by Thunder
River on that little knoll that sticks out a little bit. The next day when we got down to Tapeats Creek, there
was still a register there and picnic table. Don signed the register. I have almost a phobia about signing registers.
Quinn: Why is that?
Steck: Oh, it's like "Kilroy was here," it smacks too much of that to me.
Quinn: Oh, okay.
Steck: I like to sort of get in there and vanish and have nobody know I was ever there. Of course I've written
those damned books (both chuckle), so it kind of belies that, but at that time anyway, I did NOT sign the register.
We camped right there by the creek. The next morning, somebody was coming by and said, "Is there somebody
here named Don Mattox?" Don was kind of awake, almost, and said, "Yeah." "I remember reading
your paper about such-and-such in such-and-such a journal, and I wanted to talk to you about that." Don has
fame in chemistry and physics of thin films, and is the only person that I know personally who's had his picture
in Time magazine as the inventor or the developer of a process for plating -as I understand it -plating by bombarding
a metal surface with atoms of some special kind. If you want to gold plate something, you put the thing you want
plated in a field and shoot these gold atoms at it--splat, splat, splat--and they smear out over the landscape
and coat the thing with gold. Anyway, Don's fame enveloped him then, and caused him to be inconveniently awakened
that morning.
So there was Thunder River, and then we went back I guess the same way we came. But in the process, Don noticed
[that] Monument Point might have a route on it. So I think the next year we came there with his brother and sister-in-law
and actually went down what is now the Bill Hall Trail and back up that way. Later we've been up Monument Point
itself a couple of times, and that was fun, kind of scary though.
Quinn: Was there something about that area that enabled you to get a gestalt of the Grand Canyon, to feel more
comfortable with the whole . . . .
Steck: Well, in the sense that water is there, if you know that it's there, and can find it. That's what I liked
about Glen Canyon, was the river. You're traveling on the fool river and then you're going up these side canyons
that have water in them, so it was never a problem, except getting perhaps water that looked drinkable. But in
the Grand Canyon, on that first trip, we had a water problem, not a BAD water problem, but we really were happy
to hear Thunder River. It made me feel that it was a place that you didn't want to fool around with. It might not
be as much fun, unless you knew where the water was, or knew how your body adapted to the lack of water.
We began our plan, which went on for many years, where Don and I would take an exploratory trip in the fall and
an exploratory trip in the spring and then take our families on a trip in the summer. We had three kids, and Don
had one. We had another family join us, by the name of Kleyboecker, who was the physics teacher that the boys had
at the school they went to. They liked this kind of a trip, and they had two kids. We had to allow them to bring
friends. You couldn't do that now, but on one trip we had nineteen people! I guess there might have been six adults
and thirteen kids, and it was fun. We went down Kanab Creek that time.
Quinn: You were working full-time this whole . . . .
Steck: I was working full-time, but that was one of the nice things about Sandia Laboratories, where you got five
weeks vacation a year, plus holidays. That's just the vacation. So you could take a week's trip and exploratory
twice a year, that's two weeks, then a two-week trip in the summer, and still have a week left over. It worked
out very well.
Quinn: But in the heat of summer, bringing these big groups like that, was there any problems with that?
Steck: No, there was never a problem. It might seem odd, because you think of August as being so hot, but it was
a time when there were afternoon thunderstorms. It may not rain where you are, but there'd be clouds. You get into
canyons [and] of course there is shade. As a matter of fact, the first trip into Thunder River with the family,
there was a cloudburst at the edge of the Supai and there was just water everywhere. We took all the empty containers
that we had by that time, which there weren't too many, and filled them full of the water that was running off
the rocks and stored them for the return. It was made perhaps more dangerous from the lightning, because there
was a lot of that around. And then another thunderstorm came up while we were going across Surprise Valley. So
that party may have been the only one that has gone squish, squish, squish (laughs) across Surprise Valley. The
water might have been, you know, just running an inch deep over everything. Fascinating. We eventually got to Thunder
River, camped, and had a beautiful time the rest of the time. I don't think we had even a slight sprinkle after
that.
Quinn: At that time did you go back up to some of the caves that are back up (undecipherable) at the top.
Steck: Uh-huh, up in Tapeats Canyon, where Tapeats Creek comes out of. We found another one that it DIDN'T come
out of. I don't think I ever did get to the one where the water actually came out of. Then we went up the creek
a little farther to the Narrows and explored around there a little.
On another trip to that same area, one of our party got stung by a scorpion and she got to the point through the
night that she could hardly breathe, and I scared her by talking about . . . what do they call it when you? . .
. tracheotomy, doing a trache on her. That woke her up a little. But we had to almost slap her to remind her to
breathe. My wife travels with a rather large medical kit, which in this case included antivenin for rattlesnakes.
Because the antivenin has horse serum in it, you have to make a little test to see whether people are sensitive
to the horse serum because you might kill them with antiphilaxis. So in case they were, when you were testing them
for it, she had epinephrine. When Nancy got stung by this scorpion, we used up the epinephrin on her.
Some of our party went down to the river. We were camped at what I call Niagara Falls there on Tapeats Creek, a
horseshoe-shaped falls. If you're in a real hurry, you can get to the river, I think, in twenty minutes. The kid
that went down was in a hurry and there wasn't a doctor there, but there were two nurses, and Clair Quist was
there--Moki Mac [river trip company]. He came back up with these nurses. They assessed the situation and decided
that having given her the epinephrin was a good thing to have done, and that she probably was going to be okay,
and went back. The next day though, we had a helicopter come in and take Nancy away. That ranger who came was not
very sympathetic. He thought Nancy was trying to pull a fast one and just get a helicopter ride out of the Canyon.
So he was rather rude. (airplane, tape turned off) But anyway, once they got to the rim, Helen had to prod him
to get a ride over to the clinic. And once there, and once the doctors said, "Oh, you know," [they] said
to my wife, "you probably saved this lady's life," then the ranger was very cordial, almost effusive.
His paperwork problem had simplified considerably, and that showed.
But except for that one scorpion incident, well, my nephew got stung much later but without any effects such as
got Nancy. So that one bad scorpion sting. Oh, I sprained my ankle one time in the Tuckup, and another friend sprained
his ankle and kind of wrenched his back in a fall going down the Tilted Mesa Trail. And my son fell and cut himself
on some schist. That's about it. And that's thirty years of hiking. I estimate, say, two thousand person-days of
hiking experience has resulted in very few mishaps. (tape turned off)
So family hikes in the summer, and exploratories in the spring and the fall. It takes you, over a period of years,
into quite a few different places.
Quinn: Did you just hike the Canyon with the family in the summer, or did you go to the mountains too?
Steck: No, just the Canyon with these three families and assorted friends. I forgot to mention that my brother's
kids were involved in this too. It wasn't until much later that my brother himself became involved.
Quinn: Was he doing his climbing at this time?
Steck: Yeah, he had his own agenda. He had his books, Fifty Classic Climbs, and the Ascent books for the Sierra
Club, so he was very busy with those. I finally asked him if he'd like to go on a few of these. I guess it would
have been around 1980, and thinking about the connecting routes up toward Vishnu and that area, going from Phantom
up to Unkar, we did some explorations there and found out a fairly easy way to get from Vishnu Canyon to Unkar.
I sort of like the idea of being able to camp by the river every night, so I'm always looking for routes to the
river, as applies to the long hikes, to the traverses. For exploration, that wouldn't be necessary.
Quinn: Did you find the route between Vishnu Saddle and Unkar a fairly easy route, or were there some tough spots?
Steck: Well, from Vishnu to Asbestos, you can then get down to the river on these mining trails. Then we went upstream
from there, and there were two cuts in the schist in the neighborhood of Hance Rapid. The first one, the downstream
one, we tried and it didn't go; but the upstream one did, just upstream of the rapids. It gets you up onto the
Shinumo Quartzite which then slopes down and you can follow it easily back down to Unkar. But it's a steep shoot,
and the rock, while not real loose, you don't feel like you want to trust it too much. Robert, in coming down it,
Robert Benson [Eschka] thought it was a very difficult route. That surprised me, because he does EXTREMELY difficult
things. But that's just his view of it. |
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