Steck: I volunteered in a variety of capacities at the Canyon.
Quinn: That was after you retired from Sandia?
Steck: Oh, even before.
Quinn: During the summertime?
Steck: Oh, just when I was going there, "Is there anything I can do?" kind of thing. This one particular
task I was given was to survey the campsites at Bass Camp, up along Shinumo Creek. I was supposed to take the dimensions
of all the places where people had thrown down their sleeping bag and get an estimate of soil density. I was supposed
to have some special little probe that you'd stick into the ground, but I didn't have one of those, so I stuck
my walking stick into the ground, and tried to do it with uniform intensity that I could duplicate, maybe correlate
with what I should have been using. I took pictures of these things.
Quinn: What year was this, about?
Steck: Sometime in the eighties. I know that a large amount of the creekbank had disappeared because I'd been there
a short time before - in 1982, it would have been, I guess - and large amounts of that area that we built (whispers)
a fire on, an illegal fire. My brother's friends are not known for their adherence to what they're SUPPOSED to
be doing, and they like to have fires to roast their steaks on and that kind of thing. I'm not quite forceful enough
to prevent their depredations.
As a matter of fact, one time we were going down Indian Hollow as part of a loop that takes you from Kanab Creek
over to Tapeats Creek, and making camp there in the Supai in the drainage of Indian Hollow, and all of a sudden
one of Allen's friends is building a fire. "What are you doing?" This was subsequent to other things
that they'd done, so I felt I could yell at them. "What are you doing? You can't build a fire there!"
He says, "Oh, yes I can." "No, you can't build fires in the park!" He said, "If you notice,
I am not IN the park." I hadn't paid that much attention but subsequent investigation revealed that the boundary
of the park went down the middle of the drainage so by building (laughs) his fire off on one side, he literally
was not in the park. He was on the National Forest and could build his fire. So anyway, the part that they built
the fire on, on Shinumo Creek, was gone, that big segment that would have been several hundred square feet was
washed away.
How'd I get sidetracked onto that?! Oh, volunteering! That was one of the things I was doing, I was volunteering
there at Bass Camp. I also volunteered in writing computer programs for the Backcountry Office. And what else?
At least one other thing, but it escapes me at the moment. Oh, yeah, trail! For this loop hike around Walhalla
Plateau, I wanted to use what's called the Old Bright Angel Trail to take me from the river, from Phantom Ranch,
back up to the rim, near Greenland Lake. So to do that most conveniently, I wanted to go up the Old Bright Angel
Trail, that would save several miles. Unfortunately, the Old Bright Angel Trail was considerably overgrown. So
I was afraid if I wrote about it, people wouldn't be able to find it.
So I volunteered to clear the trail. Over four years, I did various parts of it. I never did do the whole thing,
but I started at the top and worked down one year to the bottom of the Coconino, and then another year from there
on down into the Hermit and the top of the Supai. Then I got tired of that and worked from the bottom up and got
up through the top of the Redwall. Well, in that Redwall part, I was pruning the trail that goes from opposite
the Ranger Station near Roaring Springs, up Bright Angel Creek where it's now left the North Kaibab Trail, and
there was an agave that was at the bottom of a climby place that was probably ten feet high, dirt. I felt that
it was kind of dangerous for kids coming down there. They could slip and sort of slide down that thing and slide
into the agave. So I took my little pruning shears and I clipped off the points of the agave so it wouldn't hurt
anybody if they fell into it. I went on about my business and I got a little farther up the trail, and I was trying
to find a place to camp, and in moving around, I slipped and put my hand out and put it into an agave, and it went
into my left hand and broke off. I could still see the butt end of it. If I'd had my wits about me, I would have
realized that I keep a pair of pliers in my cook kit to help with things, recalcitrant stoves and that kind of
thing. But I didn't think of it. I tried to use the tweezers on my Swiss Army knife, to pull whiskers out, but
it wasn't strong enough. So I packed up my stuff and headed back to Bruce's [Aiken] at Roaring Springs. As I was
coming down that place that I mentioned, I slipped there too. I couldn't bend my hand. That was EXTREMELY painful.
But I could do that, and that didn't hurt particularly. So I took my pruning shears and put them along my hand
and taped my hand to the pruning shears. As I slipped on this thing where I'd pruned the agave before, my hand
went down again, suddenly, and it drove that thing farther in, so it was no longer visible from the skin.
So I get back to Bruce's, and Mary [Aiken] is an EMT. I ask her if she would excavate in there and try and find
the end of it and see if she could get it out. Well, she dug around a little but was too afraid of hurting me,
and there wasn't anything to use for anesthetic, except gin, I guess. So being a volunteer helped a lot there because
a helicopter came in with some stuff for the cabin, for the [Cottonwood] Ranger Station, and there was room for
me on the way out. As a volunteer, I was apparently entitled to space in an emergency like this. So I flew out
and went to the clinic up there on the North Rim. Joe Quiroz's wife, Cheryl, excavated. She
gave me an anesthetic and she cut and dug and she couldn't find anything. So all I knew was that it was VERY PAINFUL,
but no evidence of a spine. So I came home and went to an orthopedic surgeon, and he looked and he couldn't find
anything.
Quinn: Was it swelling more, or . . . ?
Steck: No, it just hurt. There was no infection. As a matter of fact, agave spines I think are supposed to have
some kind of little poison on them that would kill bacterial things anyway. [The orthopedic surgeon] didn't want
to operate on me, but I should have suggested double or nothing, that might have made him a little more anxious
to do this, but I had an operation. I didn't know this but to get a bloodless field when they begin to cut, they
start wrapping a stretchy tape around your arm and up your arm to the shoulder, so your arm looks about the size
-oh, a good deal smaller than that. As the blood is all squeezed out (chuckles) there's not much arm left. The
body is ninety percent water. Well, my arm must be more than ninety percent water. Then they get it all up there,
get all the blood out, then they put a tourniquet on, and then they can take this band off. So now you got an armful
that doesn't have any blood in it anymore, and then you can cut, and he did, and couldn't find anything. So I'm
kind of curious about this. "You know, before gangrene sets in, how long do you have before you're going to
need blood there again?" "Oh, about twenty minutes." So I'm watching the clock, and as twenty minutes
approaches, he's beginning to think about quitting. I said, (groaning) "Oh, it's there, you gotta find it!"
And he found it! It was about almost three-quarters of an inch of cactus [agave] spine that had gone in there,
and it had gone into a tendon or something, so that's why I couldn't do that (makes a motion with his hand).
Then later, I was back at the Canyon, I liked to go and make my rounds, and Butch Wilson was the ranger that I
was dealing with this trail business. Their exact titles, . . . maybe he was the canyon [district] ranger, that
sounds good. And Rick Mossman was like the backcountry subdistrict ranger, something like that. Anyway, I went
in to see Butch and showed him my scar, my agave scar. He said, "You know, you realize that I've had a complaint
about you." "Complaint?!" (laughs) I thought he was kidding. It was somewhere around April Fools
Day, I thought possibly he may have been pulling my leg. He said, "Yeah, let me find it." So he rummages
around on his desk and he finds this letter from some irate agave lover who had come down the old Bright Angel
Trail and found that somebody had cut all the points off, thus rendering it defenseless from the depredations of
deer and maybe even other rodents [that] would eat them for their water content. I find it hard to take that letter
seriously, but you'd have to take them seriously. I don't know whether it generated a reply from the superintendent
or not, but anyway, my previous efforts as a volunteer on trail building had not met with uniform appreciation.
Butch said, "Well, next time you reach a thing like that, just take the whole thing out and throw it over
the side." So, I guess I did do one more year's worth of pruning before I gave up.
Quinn: Did you have to carry all your tools with you, backpack them in or could you leave them?
Steck: I had a key. I think it was number 180, that gave me access to a shed at Cottonwood that had the tools in
it. But the person who loaned me the key didn't want to separate it from the keychain. It had maybe fifty other
keys on it. So during the time that I had that collection of keys (chuckles) I felt a certain power, like I was
monarch of all I surveyed. I'm sure that I could have gotten into the Cottonwood cabin and slept there amongst
the scorpions. I still remember the feeling of power that I had with that key. But I had to carry it from there.
Then working from the top down, I guess they were my tools up there. I stayed in the bunkhouse, though. It was
in November. And it's interesting, I never got anybody to help me twice. Somebody would always volunteer, but never
twice. After we'd worked hard all day and I'd taken my shower and Don Peterson was taking his, somebody knocked
at the door of the trail crew bunkhouse, and I answered it and there's this young guy there saying that he had
some friends among the trail crew and he wondered if any of them were there. I said, "Well, this is it."
(laughs) He looked at me and he said, "You've got to be kidding!" He couldn't imagine anyone so old and
decrepit being considered trail crew.
Quinn: The time the flash flood took your boot away, was that VIP [Volunteer In Parks] work too?
Steck: No, that was with the Sierra Club. (laughs) White Hunter, you know. Let me go back... |
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