Sierra Club has long had trips in the Grand Canyon, and particularly Deer Creek
and Tapeats Creek and maybe Kanab. I thought they ought to expand their horizons a little and go other places in
the Canyon, besides just those old war horses. So I wrote them a letter to that effect, and I got a letter back
telling me ALL the stuff I'd have to do to get permission to lead a Sierra Club trip anywhere. That kind of teed
me off. So I said, "Okay, never mind, I don't need to lead Sierra Club trips." But then later, through
a friend, Bert Fingerhut got in touch with me. He leads Sierra Club trips. He's a bona fide leader. So through
this friend, he thought perhaps I could be a guide and guide people to other places in the Canyon, and this I did.
Over a period of years, I took them several places, one of which was around Powell Plateau. This particular incident
that you're referring to about the boot--our first night on the rim, up at Swamp Point, it rained off and on through
the night, and then the next day it seemed pretty good. We started off down the Saddle Canyon. Everything was wet
from the rain the night before, so it didn't take a minute but all your clothes were wet. So you finally get down
to the bottom there, the upper end of Tapeats Creek - some other canyon comes in there, whose name escapes me --
anyway, you've completed your descent, and the next day you'll go on down to Crazy Jug and down to Tapeats Camps.
By now it's getting dark up at Swamp Point, rain dark and storm dark, and I find myself a little place in case
it rains under an overhang that I'd slept in many times before.
[It's] getting darker, and around maybe 7:30 or so, off in the distance you can hear what you might think is wind
blowing, but there's no wind. It's also getting louder, until it begins to sound maybe like a train way off in
the distance. We recognize it as a flash flood coming down Saddle Canyon. Huh, that's kind of interesting. Where
my camp was, Saddle Canyon had come down and made a turn, and I was camped up here, out of the Saddle drainage,
but in the drainage from this other canyon. I could hear it coming down Saddle, and I didn't think then about,
"Well, if it's coming down there, why isn't it maybe coming down this other canyon too? How big a rainstorm
was it? Well, maybe it's not all that big because it may have been up near the Saddle and the bulk of it's going
down the other side." Your mind is creating, or my mind anyway, was creating all kinds of reasons why this
flash flood was no big deal.
So I get all organized in my sleeping system under my overhang, and it's dark, maybe 9:00 by now, and somebody
yells, "Here comes the water!" I think, "Hey, that's going to be neat, I want to watch this!"
So I get up and put on my sneakers and take two steps and I'm knee-deep in water. My first thought was, "Where'd
this come from?!" It was supposed to be coming down Saddle Canyon. But there was so much water, and the drainage
was kind of constricted there, that it kind of went up and around, just to have more room to maneuver. It was that
up-and-around water that got me. I had my pack up on a rock that was maybe two feet above the drainage, and the
drainage up by my head was about two feet above where I was sleeping. So my pack was up about four feet from down
here. I had my sweat pants on, so I'm working my way up this knee-deep water trying to get to where there isn't
any water, and that didn't take long. But I cut off my sweats because they were just so wet and they'd take a long
time to dry, and somebody lent me some plastic to sleep on.
The question is, though, where IS everybody? I think we were a party of nine, something like that. We eventually
all communicated one way or another and found that there wasn't anybody missing. As a matter of fact, the only
person that lost anything of substance was I. I lost my sleeping bag and my pad and my ground cloth and a lot of
clothes, and spoons and cups, and stuff like that, and my boots and my walking stick. Now you have a problem if
you're trying to hike in the Grand Canyon in your socks. So I wondered during the night whether my pack was even
there. It turned out that it was. It was high enough up that it didn't get washed away. But what do we do? I wasn't
the leader, I was Glorious Guide. I had certain responsibilities to the group, they paid something like $500 for
this trip, not to be taken lightly.
I had my sneakers, so I figured I could try walking with my sneakers, but I have trouble without a walking stick.
But it turns out that there are a certain subset of Sierra Clubbers that like to use TWO walking sticks. They figure
by rapid motion, sort of like cross country skiing, that you're going to go faster. So one of those kind gentlemen
lent me one of his walking sticks. So I was going along and doing pretty well, still quite a bit of water in the
normally-dry creek. Before we even started, I found a lot of stuff -the cups, for example, and the spoon. The heavy
things seemed to settle out of the debris flow pretty quickly. And I found my socks and found my shirt, groundcloth
and my pad.
Quinn: But not the boots?
Steck: But not the boots. (laughs) No. So we finally start off. Then I found my sleeping bag, shredded, a little
bit of it sticking up out of the sand and the rest is who-knows-where. Operating on the theory that something doesn't
become your trash unless you touch it, I didn't touch it, I left the sleeping bag where it lay. Then shortly after
that I found my jacket, my fuzzy Patagonia jacket that weighed about thirty pounds wet, and all the seams were
full of sand. I finally dried it. Somebody agreed to carry it, wrung it out and then carried it until we made a
camp. Then I could put it out and try to dry it, and cut some of the seams and let the dirt out. For about a week
I was banging it in the evening on a rock, and a little cloud of silt would appear.
But no boots. Finally, Gary found one of my boots. I put it on. I had to wash the sand out, took the sand out,
and wore [it] until [it] dried, and I was fine. [I had] one sneaker and one boot for the rest of the hike. It was
the left boot, and I just arranged to take most of the stresses on my left leg. Years later, I think it was Bil
Vandergraff and Dave Trevino, found the other boot along the creek there somewhere. They didn't know to whom it
belonged they said, otherwise they would have had it bronzed and sent back to me. So they said they left it on
a rock there someplace along Tapeats Creek. I went back this summer to look for it and never found it. As a matter
of fact, there were probably ten people making two trips down to the Narrows and back up, and not a single eye
spotted that boot.
Then a little later, Gary also found my walking stick. It was jammed into the boulders about four feet above the
current flow of water. He tried to pull it out, and it wouldn't budge, it was so firmly wedged into the rocks.
I thought, when he told me about that, and it occurred to him too, that like Excalibur, the only person that would
be able to remove that walking stick (chuckles) would be I, and then I'd just effortlessly remove it from its prison.
So with my walking stick and one boot and one sneaker and my Patagonia jacket . . . my sleeping bag was a problem,
but Gary Ladd lent me the liner of his, and that was warm enough to do the trick. So that's the boot story. I still
have the left boot. I'm waiting for the right boot to be returned, but I'll probably never get it back. Are there
any other stories there? |
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