Steck: . . . I always thought that Robert was less concerned about his bod than
I was about mine, so that he would do things that I would NOT do, in terms of friction above a fall, or a potential
fall.
Maybe this is as good a time as any to talk about Robert to some extent. He is one of the people that I met through
my interest in Grand Canyon.
Quinn: How did you first meet him?
Steck: Through our mutual friend, John Shunny [phonetic], who worked the same place I did. He knew of my interest
in the Grand Canyon, and then he had met Robert. Robert was an illegal alien from Germany. When he came to the
United States at eighteen, he traveled around to the parks, and when he got to Grand Canyon, he knew that was where
he was going to spend the rest of his life. He was a carpenter, [a] very GOOD carpenter. [He] has done some work
on this house. He would work as a carpenter in the winter, and then he would spend the other six months in the
Grand Canyon, just wandering around, poking his nose here and there, and found some nice routes in the process.
The most useful one to me was a low-level route from Kanab Creek downstream to Tuckup, on those Muav ledges. You
can make what would be a four-day route if you were on the Esplanade where you would worry where your next water
was coming from, into an easy [route], still four days, but you're by the river every night. As I mentioned, that's
something that I like.
So he explored, and in 1980, I guess it was, he had the idea that he was going to hike from one end of the Canyon
to the other. My friend Adair Peterson [said], "Well, you don't really know all that much about the Grand
Canyon at the moment, and water is going to be a problem when you take a long trip like that. You really should
spend a little more time exploring." So he did. Instead of doing his trip in 1981 like he had planned, he
agreed to postpone it to 1982. Unfortunately for him, somebody else hiked the north side in 1981 so that Robert
wasn't able to be the first person to do that. That bothered the hell out of him, and he really hated Adair for
having dissuaded him from his original plan. But trying to cheer him up I said, "Well, you know, Robert, you
can come with us in 1982 and hike the north side. Then you can cross over and hike back up the other side. You'll
be, I'm sure, the first person that would ever have hiked BOTH sides of the Canyon." Nah, he was inconsolable,
and he wasn't about to take any comfort from that suggestion.
But about four months later, he said something like, "You know, I just had this really neat idea about hiking
BOTH sides of the (chuckles) Canyon. I want to do that." He never realized, I think, that it was a suggestion
that I'd made to him. It's always much better to think of these things yourself. So that's what he did. He started
in July of 1982. There's some horse-type canyons in the Upper Green. There's Horseshoe and Horse and Horse Thief,
and I think it was Horseshoe. He started there, and he hiked down the remaining length of the Green, then hiked
the north side of Cataract, and the north side of Lake Powell. [He] met us in early September, so that would be
July, August, to September, that would have been two months. Then we hiked together down to Lake Mead, ending there
around Thanksgiving of 1982. Then in March of 1983 he started at about Columbine Falls, a little further downlake
than that, and hiked up the south side of the Grand Canyon, the south side of Lake Powell, the south side of Cataract
Canyon and hiked up to Moab, getting there around Labor Day of 1983. That was the year of the flood where they
almost lost Glen Canyon Dam, and he had some problems with that high water, too, in terms of eradicating some of
the route he was going to use.
So he ends then around Labor Day of 1983. Somewhere in that timeframe his father died, and that was part of his
reason for doing these hikes, I think, because he was trying to impress his father. His father didn't think much
of Robert. He'd been a good student, and then suddenly he was a poor student. We think it was because he had a
problem with dyslexia. He couldn't even read German very well. It just was a problem. But he was a very good draftsman
and could make beautiful things. But his father was always down on him for not being able to do anything, so Robert
was going to do this great hike and show his father that he could accomplish something that other people thought
was important, had some value. But his father died, so Shunny and I debated whether to tell Robert this or not.
We ultimately decided not to, that it might affect the completion of his hike.
Quinn: To tell him while he was on the hike.
Steck: Yeah. I met him upstream of Hite, put in at Hite and went up to Dark Canyon. He was going to
be coming down Dart Canyon, so we met him there and brought him fresh fruits and vegetables and beer, and had a
reunion of sorts. After a couple of days, he went on his way. So he finishes then in September of 1983, and by
March of 1984, he was dead. He had killed himself. [Jubilee?] killed himself on a Monday. The body wasn't found
until a Wednesday.
But the previous Saturday, I had a party at his house for him. He was going to describe a new adventure that he
had planned. He was going to climb some number of peaks in the Canyon. And in the process of that, let's say sixty
just to make up a number, climb sixty peaks and go through the Redwall eighty-seven times (chuckles). It does sound
kind of silly to have your compulsion take hold of you that way so that that becomes a worthy goal. He presented
this to us, and I think he was hoping to get some financial support to buy food and stuff. But we didn't take all
that kindly to his great plan. Hiking both sides, that seemed to have a little more to it than climbing all these
peaks and going through the Redwall some number of times. So that may have discouraged him.
But at that party, John Shunny asked Robert if he'd read his mother's letter yet. Apparently Robert had told him
that the letter had come, but he didn't want to read it. He had not read the letter, or so he said. Then when we
went through his things, after the suicide, the letter was open. Also there was a letter from his brother that
he had opened. Both of these were asking him to come home: the mother saying that the house needed work [and] a
lot of carpentry to be done, and the brother, who played bass, I think, in a country and western band in Hamburg,
was just angry because Robert was off in the United States having these wonderful good times while whatever-his-name
was, Heinrich, was home having to slave around the old homestead and do all the things that his mother wanted him
to do.
So those two letters together, if Robert indeed had read them, might have pushed him over the edge because he had
no aversion to going home if he could come back. But being an illegal alien, he had been told by some lawyers that
if he left the country, he would not be able to come back. So the thought of NOT being able to come back to the
Grand Canyon, and wanting to go home, an irreconcilable conflict, perhaps. He drove up into the mountains here
and hooked a hose to his tailpipe and had a quart of margaritas and left the world.
I say also that he was compulsive in some senses. Among his stuff were a lot of shoeboxes full of receipts for
groceries, for sleeping bags, for this, that, boots, whatever, he saved all these receipts. I don't know why. Perhaps
he could write it off, you know, if he wrote a book about something. Or, I don't know, it was just part of his
psyche. But true to his nature then, in his pockets when the body was found were the receipts for the duct tape
and the hose with which he had killed himself.
So there's Robert. His name, as I knew him as, was Robert Benson, which was the name he got off a tombstone in
Milwaukee or some such place, was the name of a kid about his age. He had made himself a Social Security number
which he used to pay his taxes. But the IRS didn't like his Social Security number and kept writing him to check
it because somehow it didn't conform to some plan about what Social Security numbers are supposed to say. So that
was the name I knew him by, but his real name was Eschka, E-S-C-H-K-A, Robert Eschka. Robert was right. So we have
sort of a permission, when I write about Robert, when Shunny does, we have permission from the family to call him
Robert Benson Eschka, so the Americans who knew him as "Benson" will still know who it is we are talking
of.
Quinn: There's a route that you described that Robert found to avoid the Tapeats Narrows near the creek there,
a dry land way to pass from the Tapeats Cave arm down to the trail. Did you ever do this route yourself?
Steck: No.
Quinn: Do you know which level it is, exactly?
Steck: Let's see, to be more precise about where we are: I guess he didn't maybe like water all that much, because
when the Narrows appear and you're going to have to wade, he figured he didn't WANT to wade so he left us at the
upper part of the Narrows. Mattox and I just waded on through. He did not come down to the trail, but he came back
down to the creek, just after the Narrows. So it was just those Narrows where you have to wade that he found a
way to avoid. Now as to what level he was on, we couldn't see him, but rocks that he knocked loose, we had to take
shelter from those. We could talk to him, and maybe sometimes we'd have to kind of shout, but he was always within
hailing distance. It was not a direct up, over, and down. It was kind of up, over, maybe with a bypass, and then
level, and then another bypass, and maybe down for a bypass. I sort of had the impression when it was all over
that maybe the next time he'd wade.
Quinn: Oh, okay, so it wasn't easy by any means.
Steck: It wasn't easy. It was one of these crumbly things that maybe he would risk his bod doing, but I wouldn't
do that to mine. Somewhere in there, something fell out and splashed into the river. I thought it was a rock, but
then I noticed it was a pair of gloves. I managed to get one glove before the other one got washed away. But I
wouldn't recommend anybody doing that.
Quinn: Okay. They wanted clarification to see if this was feasible or if it was just a one-time thing sort of deal.
Steck: It was a one-time thing, although there are times when you might want to go through there when the water's
so high that you CAN'T wade. Then what do you do? It might be worth looking at. It's certainly a very short stretch
of creek.
Quinn: What made you specialize in the North Rim routes? Did you hike all the major southern trails?
Steck: Still haven't done all of them. It'd have to be, I think, because that's where the water is. If you list
the tributaries that come from the north, there are many more than come from the south. So you have places like
Tapeats Creek, Deer Creek, Kanab, and Clear Creek.
Quinn: Have you been on any of the Great Thumb routes? Did you get out there?
Steck: We were supposed to do that the spring of the year that Robert died. He had a permit to do that. The Havasupai
Indians are sort of like the Japanese, I understand, that they hate to say no to your face. So when Robert would
go to their tribal council meetings, they'd give him permission to do something, and then he'd get home and find
a letter from the council saying, "No, that was a mistake. He's NOT allowed to do what they said he could
do." So what he planned to do for this hike, which involved some trespass, he was not going to admit that
he'd ever gotten the letter canceling the oral permit. So what would have happened, I guess, was that they would
never have known we were there anyway. Of course he did it, in a sense, because on his upstream route he was on
the Redwall, I think, certainly when he turned into Beaver Canyon at the Havasupai. Then he left it on . . . oh,
I'd better not say. If it's important, his journal, I've [photocopied] a copy of the journal for both his upstream
and downstream trips and put it in the [Museum] Collection and in the BRO [Backcountry Ranger Office]. |
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