Running the Wild Colorado
The Ties That Bind the Grand Canyon River Rafting Community
Written for the Grand Canyon Conservancy by Jennifer Curnutt
Photo courtesy of Western River Expeditions
My grandfather was a true adventurer in every sense of the word. His explorations earned him a membership in the Adventurer’s Club back in the 1960s, an honor bestowed upon him after a fateful encounter with a man named Jack Currey. In 1962, Jack called with a proposal my grandfather jumped at – a chance to navigate WWII pontoon boats down El Sumidero Canyon, a stretch of the treacherous Rio Grijalva River in Mexico that drops 2,000 feet, a feat where all prior attempts led crews to either turn back or perish into its depths.
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El Sumidero Expedition 1962
Fenstermaker Falls, El Sumidero, 1962
Little did they know that trip, documented in papers around the country and in Time Magazine’s January 1963 issue, would be the big break Jack’s company Western River Expeditions (WRE) needed. The notoriety and fame of the trip pushed WRE into the forefront of river running for decades to come, especially the Colorado River through Grand Canyon National Park.
Orange County Register, December 1, 1962, Vol. 83 - Image of my grandparents
“The last unexplored and rapid filled channel of foaming white water in Central America may yield its secrets to photographer Richard A. Preston, a Santa Ana ophthalmologist, this week when he and a 12-man American exploration party challenge the unchartered river…”
Photo: Dr. Richard A. Preston who will act as official photographer on U.S. expedition exploring previously impassible and unexplored Mexican Marian. The white water gorge has defied conquest since discovery in 1519.
Many members of the river rafting community today can trace their roots and origins back to Jack and WRE much like the estuaries and streams all leading back to the winding shores of the Colorado through the National Park. It’s a community rich in history with an adventurous spirit to get outdoors and off grid full of interconnections like deep roots winding through generations of family and friends.
People had been running the Colorado through Grand Canyon for decades, including John Wesley Powell who made the first descent in 1869 with only one arm, and Hatch River Expeditions who’d been running it since the 1920s. However, nobody was doing it commercially through the National Park.
In the early 1960s, Jack, along with others like Hatch and Canyoneers Inc., helped pioneer commercial rafting in the Grand Canyon facilitating ties with government agencies like the National Park Service who did not always see eye to eye with them.
In fact, it was quite a tumultuous time between outfitters and NPS who seemed to be at odds over providing river running services to the public through the Park. However, Jack had a way of diminishing the animosity that helped the outfitters succeed pushing WRE into the forefront, becoming one of the largest licensed outfitters for the Park.
In talking to veterans of the Colorado about their memories of running the rapids through the Park, I could feel the nostalgia, a tangible wistful affection for the past. In the early days, a man named Paul Thevenin who ran El Sumidero with Jack and my grandfather went to work as a guide for WRE, and later a manager.
He put numerous runs down the Colorado under his belt, at least 60 of which were through the Grand Canyon. One of Paul’s most memorable trips was a run through Lava Falls. The frame ripped off the boat leaving him to continue down the river afloat while the tourists continued down sitting on boxes and the broken frame before ending up taking a dip in the frigid water. “Boats today just don’t flip like they used to,” Paul told me almost as if this truly disappointed him.
Paul also explained how back in the day, nobody cared about floating through calm waters. It was always a huge push to get from one rapid to the next as quickly as possible.
So, Jack came to him with an idea to throw a motor on the back so they could speed past those sections. The legendary Georgie White, an extraordinary woman in her own right who had taken more commercial passengers down the River than anyone else at the time, was doing it. So, why couldn’t they? The outcome, according to Paul, was that it was one of the smoothest trips he could recall albeit a great deal of it was spent completely upside down! They even tried it with passengers once. Jack and Paul successfully took three boats down alone while the tourists waited on the banks of the river. It was going so smoothly that he gave in to protests from ashore begging Paul to let them go down with him on his last run. Paul piled on more people than he normally would and let’s just say, “sometimes your passengers go for a swim!”
In addition to WRE, Paul also spent time working for White Water River Expeditions which was later sold and absorbed by Grand Canyon Expeditions, extending the ties of the community further. Even Paul’s two sons could not resist the call of the Colorado – Fred now owns Arizona Raft Adventures (AzRA) and Art continues Paul’s legacy working for Grand Canyon Expeditions. This makes perfect sense seeing how Paul started taking the boys down the Colorado from the time they could walk, both of them running tourists through Grand Canyon as swampers at age 7 when they could barely read or write yet.
In 1978, Jack retired and WRE was sold to three men – Lynn Keller, a boatman and office manager for WRE whose son Trent manages the Grand Canyon outfit of WRE today; Larry Lake who wrote Alaska travel guides and whose son Brandon Lake is now marketing director for WRE; and Bill George who’d been running rivers in Moab and whose daughter Tiffany George is a WRE boatman, and son-in-law Brian Merrill is its CEO.
Another historic company running the Grand Canyon called CRATE, the Colorado River & Trail Expeditions, also traces ties back to Jack. David Mackay, the original owner of CRATE, started running rivers with WRE in 1965 alongside Jack who he’d met at the Deseret Gym in Salt Lake City playing handball. One of CRATE’s very first customers was Playboy Magazine. David recalls a photo shoot on the river with playmate Sharon Clark who he described as a really “neat and intelligent girl… you know those girls weren’t idiots” like some think. Just imagine all the oarsmen who must have volunteered to work on their day off to accommodate that particular customer!
Today, Jack’s daughter Bonnie still works for CRATE along with David’s son proving once again that many children and grandchildren of these industry pioneers still run the companies today making the community one big interconnected family.
Nowadays, runs down the Colorado through the National Park are a little different. It’s not so much the old west of the 1960s. Outfitters taking passengers through Grand Canyon National Park on expeditions must be authorized concessionaries of the park with the proper permits. There are currently 16 of them. Despite the more restrictive nature of things, the free spirit of the Colorado still runs deep in the veins of those who continue to run it.
Special thanks to Western River Expeditions for the use of some of the photographs in this article.
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