Oral history interview with Don Briggs, part 1 [with transcript], February 5, 2003.

              DON BRIGGS INTERVIEW NAU.OH.53.84A
River Runners Oral History Project
[BEGIN TAPE I]
This is the River Runners Oral History Project. This is Lew Steiger talking to Don Briggs in Mill Valley, California, and it's February 5, 2003.
Steiger: For starters, the way I usually start these things is if you can just give me kind of a thumbnail sketch of your family history—just cause that tends to put your experiences in perspective... brothers and sisters, the circumstances with your parents; where you were bom; where'd you grow up? How did all that go?
Briggs: Yeah, well, that's kinda what I had on my list here.
Steiger: What a coincidence (laughs)!
Briggs: Yeah. But on my note, I sort of grew up fishing at the headwaters of the Colorado in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, where I grew up. And I grew up in a suburb of Denver. Wheat Ridge. Wheat Ridge, Colorado. And we were known as the Wheat Ridge Farmers. You can imagine how much ridicule I had from that from neighboring towns. Because the symbol on the uniforms and stuff was a farmer... was a farmer with a straw hat and a hayseed in his mouth (laughs).
Steiger: This is your high school. ..
Briggs: That was the high school. Yeah. I'm getting ahead of myself here. I was bom in 1940. I can remember bits and pieces of World War 11. I remember getting in trouble sticking the gas rationing stamps on the underside of the cupboard (laughs). (Both laugh)
Steiger: You just found them and .. .
Briggs: Well, you know, I was playing with them. I'd lick 'em and stick 'em on the underside of the cabinets. I used to lay up on the kitchen counter and look under the ¬listen to radio, cause of course there was no TV in those days. I had one sister two years older than I was. My father left when I was six years old. and so I don't remember a whole lot before that but I kinda remember that day. Coming home from school and finding my mother crying, and I didn't quite understand it. But grade school was fairly uneventful up until I started, well, you don't want to know what I did in junior high.
Steiger: Well if its germane.... We don't need all the details. But just kind of a sketch of, like, wfhat did your dad do for a living? He wasn't a farmer, was he?
Briggs: My dad in World War 11 worked at the ordinance plant, which is where the federal center is in Denver now. And he was there making bullets and ammunition. That's why he did not become a soldier. Because somebody had to make the bullets. And he eventually became an auto mechanic for basically the rest of his life. Which, come to think of it, I think he was about 63, which is how old I am, when he died (laughs). So anyway, I never really knew him. I can get to that story later.
Steiger: Uh-huh. I guess that was pretty tough on your mom.
Briggs: Yeah my mother pretty much never got over... [
Steiger: Was she working too?]
Briggs: She was working as a bookkeeper and she was making about a dollar an hour. So she raised two kids on a dollar an hour. After school I'd walk about a half a mile up to my grandmother's house and then wait until my mother picked us up on the way home from work. And so I spent a lot of time with my grandparents in the summer, and they had a small track farm. I never knew exactly what they did for money, but they had fields and fresh vegetables and all sorts of stuff. They had an old horse named Duke. And of course I used to go out and chase the horse and try to get on the horse. I remember one time we had a tree house up there, part way up this piece of land. And I was harassing the horse one day, and all of a sudden the horse tamed and started running towards me. And I turned around and I ran as hard as I could, and I can hear that horse coming, and I knew that horse was gonna run over me. And I get to the tree house, and the steps were kinda on the other side. They were just sticks up there. And I started going up that treehouse and I fell back on my back and figured I was a gonner. But the horse was just going to the bam. It ran on by me. (Both laugh). And I was there, the wind totally knocked outa me. And there were pigs. And we chased the pigs. And my grandmother was possibly the only true Christian I ever knew. She was very forgiving. My grandfather was as I remember a rasty old guy. He drank a lot. I used to remember listening to baseball games with him in the summer. And being that it was in Colorado, the games that would be broadcast were usually games from New York - like the Dodgers games. And so I was a Dodger fan for a while until there was this new player, Willie Mays, who started playing for the Giants. And at that point I kinda switched to being a Giants fan. So I spent a lot of time with my aunt and uncle. We would go on vacations together. My mother and my sister and myself and my aunt and my uncle would go on camping trips and fishing trips. And one time he brought a brand new 1950 Ford convertible. And they had a daughter that was about four or five years older than I was. So the six of us - it must have been in 1951 or 52, and my mother said well, you know, if you can earn $15 we'll go to California. So I pulled weeds and did all sorts of things to earn $15, and I took it pretty seriously. I don't think if I only woulda made $14 she woulda said we're not gomia go, but (laughing) I wasn't smart enough to figure that out. So my cousin, this older - their daughter, was going with a guy who was in the Navy in San Diego, so we drove all the way to San Diego with six people (laughs). In this 1950s convertible, you know, with the little tiny trunk. ! have no idea how we did it. But we drove to San Diego and saw the ocean for the first time. Drove back through Las Vegas. My uncle liked to gamble. And he was a pretty incredible character. And I often think that I got my sense of humor from him. Because when I would go off to like boy scout camp, I'd always have to go over and see Uncle Mason, and he would go through his little bag of tricks and
send me off to camp with all these practical joke things. (Laughs and Lew laughs). You know, fake wooden radios that would look like a radio and it says, "Speak into the button and push the button and it'll talk back to you." Except there was a needle that comes out from the button when you push it. So (laughs) you poke a hole in your thumb. (Both laugh). And then he had this thing like a telescope. It said, you know, put it up against your eye and see the naked girl. And you'd look in there and you couldn't see anything, but you had some stove black in there, so by the time you turned this thing around you had a black eye. And, you know, a squirting flower ~ I mean the guy had (both laugh) everything. He worked for the Union Pacific Railroad I think. And he was probably as close to a dad as I had. He'd take me down and I'd pretend I was driving the locomotive in the switchyards, that was kinda fun. On my father's side, he had a brother and two sisters. And his brother, his name was Harold, lived on a farm in Nebraska. So once every summer for usually two or three weeks my sister and I would go out to spend time-on the farm. And their son was nine days older than I was. And then my sister was two years older than his sister. And the four of us really used to get into a lot of trouble on the farm there. But I remember my mother would take us down to Union Station in Denver and we were going to go on the Denver Zephyr, And she would pack us a lunch, I can remember the only time she'd always pack the same thing. It would be like cream cheese, date and walnut sandwiches. I don't know why I remember that except that's the only time she ever made it was when we got on the train. And she would go down and she would find a conductor and hand us off to the conductor and say, "Can you see these two kids get off in Hastings, Nebraska?" Oh yeah. I mean we were like ten years old (laughs). You couldn't do that now. But my uncle was - it was unbelievable. He's actually in the who's who of Nebraska farming. And he actually grew up -- he was bom, and with the exception of a couple of years when he was off doing something in the war, I don't think he went overseas - he lived his entire life within about a one mile radius. He was born on one farm and eventually moved about a mile away onto another one. And he spent his entire life there.
Steiger: How old did he get to be?
Briggs: He's still alive. He must be eighty-eight.
Steiger: Okay!
Briggs: And he was farming up until three or four years ago. It was totally great. And we'd get in trouble. We'd climb up the windmill, which we weren't supposed to do. We'd chase the pigs in the heat of the day and make'em lose weight (both laugh). Jump in the com crib. I mean it was really totally great.
Steiger: When your mom said you had to make fifteen bucks, what was up with that? Did everybody have to pitch in fifteen bucks?
Briggs: Well, she was trying to teach us financial responsibility.
Steiger: It wasn't that you needed fifteen more dollars to go or that's what it cost for gas, or any of that?
Briggs: No, she was trying to make us earn some money, which was a good thing. I have a little Brownie camera I took on that trip. We went to the San Diego Zoo. I remember the Salt River Canyon.
Steiger: So you were already interested in photography.
Briggs: Well, not really (laughs).
Steiger: On yeah?
Briggs: Well, you know, everybody has a camera. I was an athlete in high school ! primarily played basketball. In junior high I played some football. My basketball coach wanted me to be more aggressive, so he happened to be the football coach and he decided that it might make me tougher if I played football. So I started playing football my junior year, you know, because he talked me into it. And it was not a whole lot of fun. I was a 165-pound tackle.
Steiger: Oh my.
Briggs: 6'4". (Laughs) And it was a fairly small school. When I graduated there were I guess 200 seniors, so it wasn't the biggest school in the state. But it was less than probably 800 kids or less. But I didn't enjoy that that much. I mean in Denver, Colorado, we'd start in the summer, a week before school starts. And it's still hot there. I mean it's ninety degrees plus. And the two coaches were ex-marines (laughs), and they had us running wind sprints and stuff in ninety degrees. And they loved it when you'd ran hard enough that you'd have to puke. It was terrible.
Steiger: They thought that was a good thing.
Briggs: (Laughs). And we did it! That's what's amazing. So then I don't know why I decided to play when I was a senior, but about half way through -I had started playing end when I was a senior because somewhere I ran track, and so I would run quarter miles and sometimes ran on the quarter mile on the mile relay team. And there were two other, ends — I wasn't the starting end - and the three of us were quarter-miters on the mile .relay team. And we were all about the .same height-6'2" to 6'4" and pretty slim. Which was kinda handy, though, because, the coaches had this drill, they called it Red Dog or something, and they'd throw the football out in the middle of the field and you'd have to run and try and get it. And if they thought that you were doggin' it they made you run laps. Well, .even though we had uniforms on we would rather ran laps cause we were used to running the quarter (both laugh) than get the shit kicked out of us by (laughs) Red Dog. So I. actually, started catching a few passes in games and stuff. We played games at night. I wore-glasses and in those days they didn't have contact lenses. So I played. without my glasses. Well, I couldn't see too well. They used to have those brown, footballs with the white rings around them, and I. could sort of see. those white rings coming through the sky. And I remember one time I caught a pass and somebody decked. me from behind, and from then on I started running the wrong route so they wouldn't throw it to me (both laugh). So I didn't play a whole lot more until about half-way. through the season they had me play defensive end, and I really enjoyed that. Because you had a responsibility, to turn the play in, and you weren't there in the middle where everybody was getting totally trashed. And I actually really liked it. But, you
know, that was like for about four games. But i played basketball. At 6'4" I was the second tallest guy i n the conference. . . .
Steiger: Come in handy. Briggss: But I was the captain. And all-conference. And held a rebounding record for years.
Steiger: All-conference! In the state of Colorado.
Briggs: Well, no, we had our own conference, which was all the suburbs of Denver, Colorado,
Steiger: I mean who would know that you were a star basketball player? You were the captain of the team. All for one and one for all! (Pause so that Lew can change the battery) OK. So now we're back rolling. We're talking about basketball.
Briggs: One time somebody got the bright idea to play a pre-season game against Emanuel High School in Denver, which is the next level up and the highest level of athletics in high school. And Emanuel High School was the all black school on that side of town. And so we went over there, and we were just all kinda dumb kids from the all white school, all white suburbs. And we go in there and we're watchin' them warm up and thinking you know, this isn't gonna be too bad. You know, I'm taller than most of these guys. (Laughs) And every single one of them could out jump me of course. Proving beyond a shadow of doubt that white men can't jump. It was a small gymnasium with just some folding grandstands that come out, maybe only six rows. And the seat would come right to edge of the out-of-bounds line. To take the ball out of bounds you actually had to have your foot up against the bench. And nobody from our school went to wjatch us play. So it was all full of these Emanuel supporters. And you'd take the ball out and somebody'd say, "Hey, white boy, we're gonna get your ass!" (Both laugh) So, I meae, it was pretty intimidating. We got beat pretty bad and were glad to get outta there except somebody'd stolen the battery out of the coach's car (both laugh). Oh well. As it turns out I had a summer job in that same neighborhood when I was going through college and did fine.
Steiger: So you went from high school to college,
Briggs: I played baseball also.
Steiger: So you got a scholarship?
Briggs: I was offered two scholarships to a couple of small schools. One of them was an all boys Catholic school, and I wasn't Catholic, and I certainly didn't want to go to a school where there were no girls, so that wasn't even an option. The second one was Western State College, which was in Crested Butte. You know, where the temperature never gets about zero (laughs) for six months outta the year. And I figured Aww, you know, if those guys are interested maybe I can do OK up at Colorado State University up in Fort Collins. But I didn't even come close.
Steiger: Oh yeah? Brlggs; Yeah, didn't come close to getting on the team. Which was OK. I was a little disappointed, but I was having a pretty good time being away from home, and I stayed
pretty focused until I didn't make the basketball team. And then I started carousing a bit (laughs). We had such a good time.
Steiger: So you went to Colorado State. Brlggs: Went to Colorado State University, but tried out for the basketball team and didn't make it.
Steiger: Forewent the scholarships? Didn't get a scholarship.
Briggs: No, no,
Steiger: What were you going to be when you grew up? Were you thinking along those lines?
Briggs: I never knew.
Steiger: Were you worried about it?
Briggs: I had no idea what I was gonna do.
Steiger: So this would have been .. .
Briggs: 1958. And Colorado University was in transition from being the Colorado A&M, which is Agricultural and Mechanical School to a fall university. And so it was really a great time to be there because it was a pretty friendly place arid there were only 4,000 students when I started. By the time I graduated there were 8,000. And now there's like 25,000. There's more people in the school now than was in the entire town when I went to school But I started playing intramural sports with the biggest anti-fraternity organization on campus. They had fraternities but people really didn't care one way or the other. But we got hooked up with the Hawa11an Club. A bunch of Hawa11ans were there studying agriculture. And these guys were great. They had everything from.. Eddy Okishi was this little Japanese guy and then they had a handful of Samoans (laughs), and all hybrids in between. In the intramural football team, we played with nine. And I played end on that and defensive back, I was the only guy on the intramural football team that weighed under 200 pounds. (Laughs)
Steiger: Oh my god.
Briggs: And we used to have to play the Christian Youth Leage, the Baptist Youth League, and like that. It was pretty brutal. And they were out there to have fun. But generally speaking we would win. The three years I was there we won the independent championship and then we played the fraternity championship, and they played on the real football field at night under lights and we won. We beat the fraternities every time. So I didn't know -I was just taking general education - didn't know what I wanted to do. Was having a good time, though. I won't go into any of the details, but I was kind of the last of the panty-raid, beer drinking crowd. There were no drugs in college. There was a rumor that this guy Manny Lawrence, who was a basketball player from White Plains, New York, had smoked marijuana at one point in his life. That was the rumor (laughs) going around.
Steiger: Neither confirmed nor denied by Manny.
Briggs: No. I mean we didn't know him. But, you know, that's as close as we got to drags. And I graduated in '62 I guess or '63. So, not knowing what I wanted to do, I was pretty good at engineering or mathematics, so I started taking those kinds of classes until I got to the point that I had to study, and then I quit taking them. I think I took at least two quarters of calculus. And I had an advisor, but then the advisor quit. And I never got assigned another advisor, so I would go in and plan my own schedule. So, I just kinda took what I wanted, but somewhere along the line, when I was about half-way through my junior year and I didn't really have a major... so I wasn't going to get a degree unless I got in gear,.. so they had this one program there that was half engineering and half business. And I'd already had most of the engineering. So I went ahead and got a degree in that. It was called Industrial Construction Management. Which was like small construction. A lot of civil engineering and business. I had no idea what you'd be qualified for, but I never knew what I wanted to do when I grew up anyway. However, at one point in time, one of my roommates, I think in my sophomore year, was the son of an Episcopalian minister from Ei Paso, Texas. His name was Tex. And he was a wildman. A preacher's son. Man, he had more girls than - he just had that charm. So one day Tex and I - he didn't know what he wanted to do either - so we went over to the administration building to take an aptitude test. And it was one of those tests where you answer about 400 questions. Would you rather do A, B, C or D? And you go through and you answer all those questions, and you have no idea where it's going. But we left and went down and had a few beers and went back to get the results. And they didn't tell you what you should be, but it told you, generally speaking, "You should get a job that has these characteristics." And I'll never forget this. It said that I should do something outdoors, something mechanical and something creative. And I'm looking at that and thinking, "Jeez. Thanks a lot." And totally forgot about it until years later. I was in the Grand Canyon. It was the second year I was a motor boatman. And I was having to fix an outboard motor at night in the rain, and that day I'd taken some really great photographs. I was feeling really good about my photography at that point. And all of a sudden I remember that aptitude test (Steiger laughs), which was about fifteen years earlier, or ten. And I said, "Owwh, so that's what they were talking about." I mean that was a close call, because I ended up being a highway engineer.
Steiger: Oh, that's what you mustered out as? A highway engineer?
Briggs: Well, I got out of college and I didn't really want to have a real job. So... oh yeah, this is a scam. I actually got a scholarship for my fourth year in college. Actually it was for good grades. I don't know how I ever did that. But I got this scholarship, which wasn't a whole lot, and I had to go an extra quarter to get enough credits to graduate. Which means I was gonna finish up at Christmas, And so I didn't know what to do, so I signed up to go to graduate school in business. And jeez, I coulda been an MBA, And so I had this scholarship. So I had tuition plus some money. So I registered for the winter quarter. And after about three weeks I hadn't been to any classes. So I was down talking to a friend of mine. I had gone to high school with him, and Ms father was my Little League baseball coach, one of them. So we were down drinking a few beers. In Colorado in those days you could drink when you are eighteen. 3.2 beer. Which is pretty weak. You just had to drink more, though. I mean (laughs) it was kind of a totally stupid thing. And I said, "Bill, I don't think I'm going to make it in graduate school. I haven't been to a class yet," And so he said, "Well, you know my dad runs the Hocklinhoff (sp??) up at Winter
Park" which is a ski area. He said, "Why don't you go up there and work for my dad?" And I go, "Awwh, well jeez that. . ." He says, "Yeah, well Lud Cafton's up there." And I go, "Well I don't know," And he says, "Well let me go call him." So he went off to the phone and called his dad up at the ski lodge and said, "Do you remember Don?" And he says, "Yeah, send him on up." And I couldn't ski. I didn't know how to ski. Grew up in Colorado and don't know how to ski. So I dropped out of school. I went to the administration building and got a tuition refund on the scholarship money (laughs), and went to be a ski bum (both laugh). Oh dear. And, you know, I never did learn how to ski. There was a big cold spell up there. It was zero. And I washed dishes and waited tables and would ski during the day. And it was zero degrees. It was really crunchy. And there was no snow and there were rocks. And so a couple of people read that Mammouth Lakes, California just got § feet of new snow in one storm. So we all quit our jobs and drove out to California (both laugh). Got jobs there.
Steiger: This is like 1964,
Briggs: This is '63.
Steiger: So Vietnam, were you even thinkin' about that?
Briggs: We were gettin' there. We were gettin' there. So I met this guy named David Beck, and it was getting to be the end of the season, and he was coming back to the Bay Area, He was from El Sobrante. And so I hitched a ride with him and it was the first time I'd been in the Bay Area. And there was all the San Francisco thing, and this is 1963 in about March or early April And he had me listen to, he said, "You gotta hear this singer." It was Joan Baez. It was the first time I ever heard Joan Baez. And he took us into San Francisco and we went to the Hungry Eye, which was a famous club, and we heard John Coltrane. It was a great introduction to the Bay Area. And he was going back to ski. J stayed with him four or five days and he took me to Reno and dropped me out on the outskirts of Reno and I hitchhiked back to Colorado. And stopped in Fort Collins where I checked out of school and hung out for a few days. And still didn't know what I was going to do. Well my mother by this time was kind of wondering what was going to happen to me.
Steiger: Obviously all that good training that she gave you in making money was seemingly for naught.
Briggs: Yeah, well, I still didn't know what the hell I wanted to do. So I had started going out with this woman when I was a sophomore ! guess, and I guess I sorta fell in love. I'm not so sure. But after we graduated from college we sort of parted ways but sort of stayed in touch. And when I went off to ski bum, she went off and became a Pan American stewardess. And then, to make a long story short, I bought this Austin Healy 3000, which was a great car, I was working at a freight dock unloading trucks on the night shift. And I took some time off and drove this Austin Healy straight to San Francisco, in less than 24 hours. Then got together with her, and then we decided to get married. So we went back to Colorado, got married, and then we moved back to San Francisco. This was late '63 and early '64. And I got a job driving for United Parcel I was managing the apartment building that we lived in up on Nob Hill, so we got free rent. She was flying on Pan Am and making pretty decent money. And then I got a job driving a United
Parcel track. Talk about some good stories on the hills of San Francisco, I was driving this truck, after driving the Austin Healy. So anyway, we saved some money and ended up flying around the world for $126.
Steiger: Oh my god.
Briggs: Each, Which was basically the tax or 10%, The around the world tickets in those days were like $I,300- So we flew west, I sold the Austin Healy and bought a Volkswagen Beetle, a brand new one, waiting in Frankfort, Germany. And we flew west, Hawa11, Japan and what do you do when you go to Japan? Buy a camera. Cause it's cheap. And we had been using this little Canon Range Finder camera, I don't know whether it was hers or mine. But I went there and you could buy, you know, single lens reflex for like $125. I still have them. This is from 1964 and they still work. I use them in the Grand Canyon. Stelger: You bought a couple of them?
Briggs: About two of 'em. And then we traveled another four months around the world. ending up in Europe and wandering around Europe for 3 months all over the place. And came home and stared at these photographs, and looking back on it, almost from the beginning I took pretty good photographs. For whatever reason. It was like magic. All of a sudden there it was. Well I know why. I didn't find this out until about two years ago for sure. I always joked about having dyslexia. Because I wrote with my left hand. I played sports with my right hand. And I was a little confused. My hand-writing was horrible. Well as it turns out, two, three years ago I was diagnosed with pretty severe ADD along with dyslexia.
Steiger: Now what's ADD?
Briggs: Attention Deficit Disorder. I started to find this out early on. I mean it was a fifteen year struggle of me trying to find out why my brain wasn't working right. But we all knew that. (Both laugh). The people I worked with at the Grand Canyon knew it. With the exception of Melville, I was the last one to get ready every day because I was so disorganized. Just couldn't get it together to tie my load down, so I was always last. Except if I was on a trip with Melville, and then I was second to last. (Both laugh).
Steiger: Thank god for Melville. That's me and Kenton. Me and Kenton got along so good 'cause I was always slower than him.
Briggs: And I'm sure Bob had ADD. But anyway it's good news/bad news because it turns out that kids that have these learning disabilities compensate by becoming visual. I'm a visual thinker. And that's the only explanation that I can come up with about why I can take good pictures. I mean I had absolutely no training. And like I say from the beginning I just started taking some pretty good ones. And then I started working in the Grand Canyon and just with that incredible change of consciousness... Of, you know, of quitting being a highway engineer, at which I was totally miserable. I didn't even know? how miserable I wjas. And just that whole getting to the Grand Canyon, my consciousness just leaped. You know, along with (both laugh) the fact that I had ¬toward the end of my highway career I started hanging out in the park with those hippy types. And so at the age of about 29 or 30 I decided I wanted to be a hippy.
Steiger: (Laughing) ''Guess what, mom!"
Briggs: (Laughs) And, you know, to do things that hippies do, and those always raise your consciousness a little bit. But it brought to the end my highway engineering career kinda by choice.
Steiger: Kinda by choice?
Briggs: Well, let me backtrack. Let me see. Now we're starting to get into it.
Steiger: So how'd you get to the Grand Canyon?
Briggs: OK, I got back from Europe and finally had to get a real job, and I ended up interviewing for (Steiger laughs) interviewing with various people and because of the construction component people didn't really know - they really liked the program, but they couldn't quite figure out where I would fit. So I got an offer for a job with the Celanese corporation, which is a synthetic fiber manufacturing company in Columbus, Ohio. And I said, jeez, I don't want to live in Ohio. Oh, and at one time I interviewed with IBM. (Steiger laughs), I think I was living in San Francisco then. I interviewed with Bechtel. I probably coulda had that job. But the funniest one was Wheat Ridge is on the west side of Denver, and the Coors plant is up in Golden, so it's not that far away. In fact I got my boy scout bicycling badge by riding up to the Coors plant and back in one day, or something. It was probably 15 or 18 miles. And they had their own construction division because they wrere expanding so much and so quickly and because Coors liked to have control over everything. So they had a brewing division and a construction division and some other Defense divisions that actually did ceramics. They built nose cones for rockets, having nothing to do with beer.
Steiger: Coors.
Briggs: Coors. My brother-in-law worked there. So I go up and I take the test. And man, as it turns out, there's the regular applications and then you start taking these tests. And I figured out later that they were personality profile tests. And they were going to try and sort out - because you know Coors was a pretty right wing bunch of guys- and so they wanted to sort out who was who in the beginning. So there was just all these tests ¬it went on and on. And I was so tired of it. And the last questions - they were all pretty much multiple choice type deals. And on the last one it said, "What statement or saying might depict your philosophy of life?" I don't know what they were looking for. "A stitch in time saves nine," or "A penny earned is a penny saved," or something like that. Or is it the other way around. I told you I had dyslexia (laughs). So the night before I'd been out with some of my friends and we'd been drinking a little 3.2 beer. I was in the bathroom relieving myself and I looked up on the wall, and I saw this thing which I thought was pretty cool. And that's what I wrote down. And it said, "There's very little difference between a rut and grave. It's just a matter of inches." (Laughs). And I wrote that down, partly because I was tired of taking the tests and partly because I couldn't think of anything else to write down and I'd. seen it the night before and I thought it was pretty cool Well, I never heard from them. (Both laugh). Saved again.
Steiger: Yeah.
Briggs: So I took the job of being a highway engineer because first of all they couldn't move me out of Colorado, because it was the State of Colorado. And you immediately got three weeks vacation to start. So it was kind of a no-brainer, even though I didn't really want to be a highway engineer. But I went to work, and they were doing this special study and I was put in charge of that. And I was the only one in this room of probably thirty or forty people that had a college education and so I got promoted as quickly as they could because it's a state job and you could work half speed and be going twice as fast as everybody else. And I've always figured I should work for my money. So they were promoting me up through the ranks. And about the same time I was doing a lot of backpacking and fishing.
Steiger: Wife still flying for Pan Am?
Briggs: No, she had to quit in order to do this flying around the world trip. So we both moved back to Colorado, And her college degree was in education. So she taught French and English.
Steiger: It's funny that they would give you the deal, but they wouldn't let you keep your job.
Briggs: No, the tickets were good for only thirty days when you quit from Pan Am. So that was the bad news. So we had to get from San Francisco to Frankfurt, Germany, which is were the car was, in thirty days. So like I say we went to Japan, Hong Kong, Bangkok, New Delhi. A plane actually landed in Tehran. And then we went to Jordan and hung out in Jordan. That's in the days when you couldn't go into Israel. You could walk up to the gate, but you couldn't go into Israel Because if you went in and they stamped your passport in Israel, Jordan wouldn't let you back in. So you couldn't go to Israel. And that was kinda where the old historic part of town was - the dome of the rock. And it was very, very interesting. That was 1964. Then, from there, we went to Beirut. And it was an incredibly beautiful city, And because we had these massive discounts at the Intercontinental Hotels which were owned by Pan Am, so we could stay there for practically nothing... so we were staying in the Intercontinental Hotel in Beirut. It was one of the tallest buildings there. I remember when that war was going on, when they were fighting over the city, instead of trying to get the high ground like they do out in the open, they would try and get the biggest building. But they just blew the smithereens out of that town. It was so beautiful, and it's not there anymore. I guess it's sorta there. But then we went to Istanbul. Anyway, back to being a highway engineer. We had been doing backpacking and fishing, and we joined the Sierra Club (we're starting to get into it now!), this was 1966, and the battle over the Grand Canyon dams was going on. We were actually getting people to sign cards and send them in to the Sierra Club.
Steiger: To stop the dams in the Grand Canyon?
Briggs: Having never been to the Grand Canyon.
Steiger: What possessed you to do such a thing as that?
Briggs: Well, just because we were conservationists.
Steiger: Seemed like that would be the right thing.
Briggs: Yeah, I mean I don't know. But we somehow got hooked up with the Sierra Club, and we were getting people to write letters and stuff like that. And so my wife said -I got to hand it to her, I mean I wouldn't be sitting here without her I guess - she said we should go to the Grand Canyon. Because we're trying to save it. So I said oh, jeez, that's a good idea. And we were backpackers, what the hell. We'll go walk at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. So we loaded up our stuff and drove out there. This is in - when 20 we got there it was June (both laugh), 1966, The hottest time of the year. And we get loaded up, and we start down the Bright Angel Trail, And the lower Bright Angel Trail was closed because they were putting the water line in. This is ancient history,
Steiger: Oh yeah.
Briggs: But rather than go down the Kaibab, we looked at the map and thought, oh, you can go down here and you can just cross over on the Tonto trail.
Steiger: To the Kaibab.
Briggs: To the Kaibab and down. Well, we got a late start and, you know, by the time we're (laughs) it's like high noon and we're trudging across the Tonto Plateau. And that's the longest 3 miles on the face of the earth. The Tonto between the Bright Angel and Kaibab, I only did it that one time. And so we get over there and we finally start heading down, getting closer, and my feet are starting to develop blisters. And I knew I should stop and change socks, but man, I just wanted to be at the bottom, so I didn't stop.
So we finally get down to the bottom, and I don't even think you had to have reservations for that campground in those days. Just go down there to the Bright Angel, and of course the creek had not been flooded. The swimming pool was there. You know, it opened to anybody who was camping as well as people in the cabins. So we went there and jumped into the swimming pool. And my feet were totally trashed. And we were planning to walk out the next day, but it became clear that I couldn't do it because of my feet. And we only had enough food for one night. But we decided we had to stay an extra day to let my feet rest up. So we had to scrounge through garbage cans and beg from people to get food for another day. Well, I think when we crossed the bridge, I think I looked down and I saw these great big rubber things down there. And I kinda thought hmmm, I've heard about this. River running, or something like that. Didn't think too much about it. The extra day we stayed there we were there hanging out at the pool with other hikers who were totally burned out, and then all of a sudden this group of people would come up, maybe twenty people, would come up and they'd be laughing and they'd look pretty fresh so they obviously had not hiked. And they'd jump in the pool. And we got to talking to a couple of them, and they had been on a river trip and the boat stopped and they could hike up and go swimming. And so we talked to these people, and they were saying, ''Oh God, this is the greatest thing I've ever done. You've gotta do it. You've gotta do it." So I got the name of the company, and I can't remember which came first, but there were two different groups that came in that day, and one of them was Western and the other one was ART A, eventually to become AZRA. And so that winter I wrote off to the two different companies, and we decided the next summer to go with
ARTA because of their conservation bent. In their brochures in those days, they were .. . well, they started running trips for the Sierra Club5 and they were highly connected with the Sierra Club, so it was obvious we were gonna go with ARTA because of that connection. So... we're startin' to get close here, aren't we?
Steiger: Yeah.
Briggs: So the next summer, we go down. And over the winter my wife's mother died, and her father was a pretty cool guy. He was a cattleman. He sold and bought cattle. He was raised in Oklahoma. And he knew cows. And he ate steak three times a day. And of course he liked me because I like steak. And boy he knew how to cook steak. He also got me drinking ginger ale and Haig & Haig or whatever that stuff is. But anyway, he was a good guy, so we convinced him to go down on this Grand Canyon trip with us. And he had a big old air-conditioned Buick, and he drove us down to Arizona, And we get up to Marble Canyon the night before the trip's gonna leave. And there's that little stone thing at Marble Canyon- that little stone cottage that's out there all by itself with the little flagstone porches on it. They used to call it the Honeymoon Cottage. You know, it's out there between Canyon on the south side. Well we stayed in that little place, and her father stayed someplace else. I mean it was pretty cool. So the next morning we get up and we go over to have breakfast, and we're the only ones in Marble Canyon Lodge, And there was not a lot going on in those days. So we're sitting there having breakfast, and these five guys come walking in. You know, and they've all got sun tans and kinda blond hair, and I figured they looked like surfer types. And I'll never forget this. At this point I was 27 years old. And I looked at these guys, arid they were laughing and yucking it up. And I thought jeez, I said, some rich people from California have sent their kids on this river trip to screw up my trip. (Both laugh). I'll never forget that. And it ends up being the boatmen. And none other than Rob Elliott.. .
Steiger: Is the leader.
Briggs: Was the head boatman. He was 23 at the time. And I don't think any of the rest of them were over 20. The head cook was 16. (Laughs) And they were all just these punk kids. And I didn't know what to expect, but I figured old grizzled river guides, I guess, like we are now. So,I really do - I'm going to have to backtrack a little bit. But I'm going to continue on here. I had been doing a lot of rock climbing as well as backpacking, and so I immediately fell in with the river guides.
Steiger: You got over your . . .
Briggs: Oh yeah, I mean, what are you gonna do?
Steiger: How did the realization dawn on you that these were actually the crew? Do you remember that?
Briggs: Well, I think we probably had breakfast and got in the car and drove down to the ferry. And of course it was a dirt road in those days. And, you know, the little place between the tamarisk was only probably about thirty or forty feet wide. You could only put in one or two boats at a time. Cause nobody was doing it then. At that time . .,
Steiger: You mean the ramp didn't exist?
Briggs: The ramp didn't exist. There was just a dirt road and yeah--at that point in time, I can remember Elliott saying, and that was in 1967, there'd only been about 3,000 people that'd gone down. I think that's what he said. And we did an entire eight-day motor trip and never saw a soul.
Steiger: Oh, it was a motor trip.
Briggs: It was a motor trip, yeah. ARTA didn't row until '71.
Steiger: How many boats?
Briggs: Two. So we get down to Badger, and it was 1967, and I think the water was pretty low... they were filling the dam,
Steiger: So you got down to Badger.
Briggs: So we get down to Badger, and the other boat - the water was pretty low. I actually have home movies of some of this. And the first boat gets too far right. And, as I recall, he was really far right.
Steiger: Was that Rob?
Briggs: No, it was the other boatman, And the boat gets stuck on a rock at the top. And I was on Elliott's boat. And we go down through, and he pulls over at the bottom and I can't remember exactly what happened but they ended up -I remember somebody going upstream a ways and swimming down -jumping in the river and swimming down to get on the other boat to help get it off the rock. And whoever it was missed the boat (laughs)!
Steiger: Oh no!
Briggs: And went down through the rocks (laughs) on the right side of Badger, low water,
Steiger: Did they have a line on him - they didn't have a line on him or anything?
Briggs: No, I don't know. I mean, jeez, you know.
Steiger: Yeah.
Briggs: It was pretty - you know, I'm thinking my God, my river trip is over. The boat's stuck. The guide's gonna drown. This is it. The first two hours and it's over (both laugh). But somehow they get it off and we keep going. And it was all part of this great adventure, you know?
Steiger: That's a pretty good start to it It got your attention.
Briggs: (Laughs) But, you know, the water was pretty low, but it was warm. It was clear, but it was warm. Because .. .
Steiger: Because it was low.
Briggs: Because the lake wasn't that deep. I mean I'm talkin5 warm. You could hop out in your life jacket and float for half an hour it was so warm.
Steiger: So this guy that was swimmin' out there, it wasn't like he was
Briggs: No. And, you know, the trip was just completely wonderful in terms of being out there and I mean I guess there was nothing major happened on the trip other than I kinda fell in with all the guys, you know. Doin' all the silly things that guys do. You know, running around. Rock-leaping. Leaping gorges. Doing all the stuff that, cause, you know, I was 27 years old and I was in great shape and I'd been rock climbing and all that. So, the trip ends. And we get in the car. I think they must have had the car shuttled -I can't remember where we took out, whether it was Pearce's or South Cove. Yeah, we went all the way through. But we were going back home. I was going back home to continue to be the highway engineer. And I'll never forget this either. I was lying in the back seat of that car. We used to take turns sleeping back there. My father-in-law loved to drive. He would drive thousands of miles every week, all over Colorado, Oklahoma, selling, buying cows or whatever he did. So he loved to drive, so he did all the driving and he would drive forever. So I remember lying in the back seat going back to Colorado to be a highway engineer and thinking to myself about what a wonderful trip it was and why didn't I do something like that when I was young? It was exactly the thought I had. I was gonna go back and be a highway engineer. My life was gonna go on. But why didn't I do something like that when I was young? I was 27. And I guess over the hill So, I get back to Colorado, and of course I had grown a beard during that 8 days or 10 days or whatever it was. And I just couldn't bring myself to shave it off. And I kinda wanted to brag about my trip. So I went to work on Monday with my beard. You know, c'mon it was like ten days. It was like barely a stubble. And my boss comes out and he says, "You can stay, but the beard's gotta go." And, you know, I didn't think too much about it. It thought it was a little weird. But, you know, I was planning to shave it off anyway. And I think I shaved the beard off-I might have left the moustache on. Anyway, within the next year or so I started- by now the hippy thing was really getting going - and styles in general, the hair was getting longer. So I grew a moustache and let my sideburns come down a little ways, and I started getting these looks from my boss. And my hair got a little bit longer, but it was never below the collar. Never, ever, I can't grow hair that long, ! tried. So, this ended up being kind of a big deal. Maybe - I'm gonna back up a little bit, because you mentioned Vietnam. By the time I got out of school, Vietnam was heating up. In fact I remember reading about the Gulf of Tonkin when we were in London, with my wife in 1964. I can't remember whether I had to get school deferments, but if I did, it was really simple. No, wait, Gulf of Tonkin was '64, right?
Steiger: Something like that.
Briggs: Anyway, as time went by and Vietnam heated up, as it turns out, I belonged to the largest draft board in the state of Colorado, Because it was in Jefferson County, which is on the west side of Denver. And so the whole county had its own draft board. And it was more
populated - Denver had four draft boards. But because of that I think there were more people in Jefferson County than in any one of the draft boards in Denver. Not only that, there were probably more married people and fewer poor people in Jefferson County. Anyway, Kennedy, before he was assassinated- no, wait a minute. I'm getting a little bit messed up here. Anyway, for a while they would not take married men. It was not a written rale, but it was like a policy that they were gonna draft all the single guys before they started taking married guys. So that kept me out for a while. But that finally came to an end. And in January of 1967,I got my notice to go take the physical. And so I went and took the physical and passed It on January 20, 1967.
Steiger: Now this is, you'd already been on the river.
Briggs: I had not been on the river. That's why I'm backtracking. Just a little bit Just so ! don't forget it. I mean It's really not that important. So every month they would send out the call-up, and you could go and you could find out If you were gonna be called up. Well by this time there was no way you could get in the National Guard. Those were all filled up. There was no way you could even join-I guess I could have joined the Navy or something like that. And of course I never considered protesting. I wasn't that smart. I was gonna be a good boy and go.
Steiger: You weren't morally opposed?
Briggs: I wasn't even thinking about it. J was pretty unconscious. Even though I was starting to get more conscious. Well, not yet.
Steiger: Well, you were in an environment where ..
Briggs: I tried to smoke marijuana a couple of tiroes but J couldn't do it, because I never smoked. But anyway, no, it never occurred to me to protest. I mean this Is in Colorado when - we're talkin' '67, and all this stuff was going on in California you could read about, but that's like those guys over there, it's not us. So every month I just had to wait to see if I would be called. And finally, my birthday is on April 28th , and I wasn't called. So on April 28th, I turned 27 years old, and that's when they consider you to be untrainable. So I got out because I was too old. Close call. Very close call. You know, I was too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. But then, now we leap forward to the end of the river trip. And my hair starts growing long and pretty soon I'm starting to get a little more consciousness. You know, hanging out with all these hippies in the park and such. And going to a few war protests on the Cambodia thing. There was a huge protest in Denver, I got some great photographs of it too. The cops with the shields and all the whole - and my boss kept telling me to get my hair cut. And my hair was never that long. And so I'd usually go home and trim it. It wasn't that big a deal. Even though I was starting to get a little upset about the fact that, you know, c'mon it's not even long. Forget it, you now? Well then, my marriage started becoming a little bit rocky, and I was not that happy being a highway engineer, I really didn't know how unhappy I was. But anyway, the long and short of it is they eventually fired me.
Steiger: For?
Briggs: For having long hair. And I basically said well you can't really do that to people. But they did it. And so I ended up getting this attorney and we decided to fight this thing. Because we couldn't figure out how they could- first of all, you can't legally do that. But they didn't check that out until they fired me. They checked it out after... they talked to their attorneys after they fired me. And I remember some friend that I had at the Highway Department overheard some guy talking to the attorney- "Yeah, but you can't fire somebody because they have long hair." So we went into this hearing, and we couldn't figure out what they were gonna do because they had all my . . .
Steiger: So you're not like smoking dope. You're not- it's not like you're not performing well?
Briggs: No!
Steiger: The whole thing is they fired you because the guy got tired of asking you to cut your hair?
Briggs: Yeah, and I wouldn't cut it.,
Steiger: Oh, you refused?
Briggs: Well, it wasn't long.
Steiger: You were just trimming it a little tiny bit.
Briggs: You know, the thing said, ".. .unable to perform his duties because of his personal appearance." Or something like that. Some bogus things. So we went in there and we had all these merit ratings, where everything single thing, because this guy was promoting me to eventually take over his job. He was personally grooming me for his job. Because he had his eye on a job that was higher up, and he was gonna build his own little kingdom there. And I was good at what I did there. ! didn't like it. But he turned on me. Just because of long hair. It was totally absurd. So anyway, they came in there and they tried to prove that I was incompetent. And they tried to deny that they would fire me because of my personal appearance, even though my attorney read the notice that said I was fired: "Mr. Briggs is unable to perform his duties because of his personal appearance." And he said, "And you are saying that you did not fire him because of his personal appearance?" And they said, "No, we're firing him because he's incompetent." "But," he said, "well, yeah, but look at all these merit ratings. He has excellent merit ratings for all these years. How could he be incompetent?" "Well. . .." and they danced around the issue because they knew they couldn't legally do it. Well, we one, by two of three. These were commissioners. And still one of them thought that they proved that they could - because, you know, he obviously didn't like long hair either. But it was obvious! couldn't go back and work for the same guy. So they gave me another job, but they sent nie out to Eastern Colorado, about 200 miles from home. And they were paying me professional engineering wages for sitting in a track by myself counting cement trucks on an interstate project. You sit there all day and you count cement tracks. You write down the number and what time they went by,
Steiger: Oh my god.
Briggs: Oh god, it was just gruelling. However -I would go home on the weekends and I'd call my attorney and I'd say, "You know, I didn't win. I'm out here on a job that I don't even like, I didn't win. We gotta go back and tell 'em that." And he said, "Don," he says, "how far do you wanna take this?" I had already told him I was probably gonna quit. I said, "Yeah, but you know I can't let'em do this." So he said, "OK, if you wanna stick it out, I'll do the rest of the attorney work for free." So he went back and said, "You know, this amounts to harassment of Mr. Briggs because of yah-ta-yah-ta-yah-ta. Because he's not doing professional engineering work and he's 200 miles from home. That's not right." So I ended up having to work out there for about 3 weeks. But it was kind of in the winter and it snowed one day and we couldn't work. So I'd thrown my camera in the car, just as a matter of habit, and I had the whole day off in Burlington, Colorado. This little town of about 5,000 people. Nuthin' to do. So I actually had just a little bit of a smoke and drove around town and went to the museum, which was a pile of buffalo bones and that was it (laughs). Then I went for a drive, and the sun had come out and the snow was melting, and it was so beautiful. So I went driving around to take pictures. And I got out to take the first one, and I realized that I only had 13 shots left on this role of film, and I didn't put extra film in the camera. I guess it never occurred to me to go into town and find any, but what it did is it gave me this incredible lesson in being selective. I'd stop and see a photograph and "Do you wanna take one of 13 shots here?" Eaawh, I don't think so. So I learned to be so selective on that day, I'll never forget it.
From then on, man, by the time I got to the Grand Canyon I could- out of a role of 36, I'd have 30 good shots. Just a matter of practice.
Steiger: Cause you wouldn't push the button...
Briggs: Wouldn't push the button unless I had It right. Of course with film you didn't push the button unless you had it right cause it's so goddamn expensive (laughs).
Steiger: Yeah.
Briggs: So they had to give me another job, and so I was on a survey crew In the foothills of Denver walking around through the trees, surveying. Which was still not necessarily professional, but at least I was close to home. About this same time - now let me see, what was the sequence here? My wife and I split up and she moved to Japan and became a hostess. And it was a pretty brutal separation because... jest took her out to an airplane and put her on the airplane and that was It. I didn't see her for a year and a half. It's not the easiest way to end a relationship. But It was a good thing. She was not a very nice person. However she did get me to go to the Grand Canyon. So I was actually living with a friend, and he was a Juvenile Court, not a full judge, but kind of like a referee. He worked for the Supreme Court of Colorado in the Juvenile Division. And he was the one that really started -I mean he was a very liberal kinda guy. On the very first Earth Day which was about 1970, we got up in the morning and smoked a little weed and I rode my bicycle to the Highway Department...
Steiger: Wait a minute. This guy was a Juvenile .. .
Briggs: He was an attorney, but he worked for the Supreme Court of Colorado as a juvenile judge, kind of not as a full-fledged, or maybe he was a full-fledged judge. He was in Juvenile Court.
Steiger: But wasn't above smokin' a little dope every now and then,
Briggs: Oh no!
Steiger: This was back when It was gonna be legal any second,
Briggs: 1970. Oh man, we used to have great times together. Oh, I could tell you a story, but I'm not gonna tell that one. But, you know, he walked to worked because It was only a mile and a half. And on Earth Day you weren't supposed to drive your cars, right? So I was about 5 miles, so I rode my bicycle to the Highway Department, and by the time I got there I realized that maybe this wasn't such a good idea. I had to hide In the back of file cabinets and pretend I was looking for something, and I was observing what was really going on there. And it became quite clear that I didn't want to be there. And then this thing happened with me being fired. So they gave me this other job and I worked for a couple of months In the spring of '71. I have to backtrack again. My wife was teaching French, and there was this guy in her high school who was a mountain climber, a rock climber. As it turns out a fairly well-known rock climber. Not quite like Chouinard (??) but close. Layton (??) Core (??) and George Hurley (??) you can read about In the books, and then Bill Forrest (??) was this guy's name, and he has a lot of first ascents around various places. And so I started climbing with him on the weekends. And he lived not too far from us, and he was going to have a party one night. And he said, "I'm gonna have a surprise at the party for you." This must have been '68 or '69,I can't remember. So I didn't think to much about it. So I go to this party and who walks in the door but Rob Elliott. Rob Elliott, by total coincidence moved across the street from this guy I was climbing with.
Steiger: That was your surprise?
Briggs: That was my surprise. Because he had talked to Elliott, and they had put it together and Elliott had said "Don't tell him until I see him at the party, or something. So Elliott shows up at this party. And we get to talking, and I go on and on about how great that trip was and so forth and so on. And he says, "Well," you know, "you gotta go and work for us." And I go "aww." I mean I really didn't pay that much attention to it right away. And what had happened, he was also in the process of getting drafted for Vietnam. And so he became a conscientious objector. And so to fulfill his community service, he moved to Colorado to set up the rafting program for Colorado Outward Bound. Tough job, right?
Steiger: Yeah. Dirty job, but somebody had to do it.
Briggs: And because Outward Bound was climbing and ail of that, it was natural that he would meet somebody in the climbing community in Denver, Colorado, which is why he moved into this house across the street from where Bill was. So it was sort of a coincidence and sort of not.
Steiger: But you didn't immediately embrace the idea?
Briggs: No, I did not immediately. I was probably still in the middle of, I don't know, I can't remember the exact sequence, whether I'd split up with my wife or what. Because I always thought it would be a good thing, but I was into climbing. And so when I quit being a Highway Engineer, I was gonna go to Nepal, and I wasn't going to climb Mount Everest, but I was gonna to go look at it. That's what I wanted to do. I think I even had the plane ticket. But anyway, there was a big party in the spring of '71 in the park with ail my hippy friends. And we had a very high volley ball game and we laughed a lot, and then we went out for Chinese food. I think we set the world's record for eating Chinese food. And I woke up the next morning and I think we'd had probably a few beers - this was my going away party to go to Nepal. And I woke up the next morning and I'm goin' "Hmm, I'm not so sure I want to go to Nepal," But I'm thinking, "Jeez," you know, "I'm gonna look like a fool if I don't go," So I'd had this idea that maybe when I came back from Nepal, maybe I would call Elliott, So I just roiled over in bed and called Oakland. And I mean this is how close it was. By then Rob was back in Oakland. He'd finished his conscientious objector work, I guess, so he was back in Oakland. And if he hadn't've been in the Oakland office that day. I probably woulda hung up and gone to Nepal But he was there in the office, because he was helping ran ARTA - it was ARTA then ¬American River Touring Association. And so I said, "Rob, remember you offered me that job working in the Grand Canyon?" He says, "Yeah," I said, "Well, how about it?" He says, "Sure, but you're gonna have to wait a couple months." Cause it was like in April or something. "You're gonna have to wait a couple months until the season starts," So I said well that's fine. He says "OK, well I'll send you the stuff. Stay in touch." It was that easy.
Steiger: That was it.
Briggs: To get a job in those days.
Steiger: Why didn't you want to go to Nepal all of a sudden, not to make too long of a story of it.
Briggs: I don't know. Maybe I had a hangover (laughs), No,! figured out! had to come up with something good to tell my friends. So I then go up and see my friends and say, "Hey," you know, "I'm not gonna go to Nepal because I've been offered this job working in the Grand Canyon." And they'd say, "That's even cooler. Hey!" (Both laugh) So! kind of covered my tracks on that little piece of business. So I had a coupla months off, arid one summer I didn't work when they had fired me and they ended up having to pay me back pay. And I'd been saving my money. And when I quit the Highway Department they had - another good news/bad news story - they had their own retirement program. Which means that you didn't pay into Social Security; you paid into their retirement program. So I quit and took my money out. Got about three grand.
Steiger: So you were . ..
Briggs: Oh man, it was 1971. I was rich. Of course now that it's 2002, and I now qualify for Social Security, it turns out that the only real job I ever had in my life was being a Highway Engineer, and I didn't pay into Social Security.
Steiger: Oh no.
Briggs: (Laughs) But I get a little. Kind of the minimum. But, the other side of that is that if you qualify for Social Security and you have a minor child, that child gets 50% also of what you get. So - now we're gettin' ahead of ourselves.
Steiger: Yeah. Now that job - you fought 'em and they just gave you another job on the surveying crew?
Briggs: Yeah, which was at least in the Denver area.
Steiger: So you were ...?
Briggs: And I was satisfied.
Steiger: OK.
Briggs: I just didn't want to sit out there counting cement tracks.
Steiger: So you were still workin' for them, but you were gonna go to Nepal, and so when you decided to work for Rob ,. .
Briggs: No I worked for them and finally quit. It was winter. I didn't wait to go anywhere in the winter.
Steiger: Mm-hmrn.
Briggs: And then I was having a hard time quitting. Making the break with the financial security, you know, what the hell am I gonna do?
Steiger: 'Cause it paid OK and all that.
Briggs: Well it was something. If I quit I wasn't gonna get anything. So it took me a while. And then in January they sent me to this school, this material lab, and you were out walking around the snow surveying, you know, and I was learning all about concrete stuff and it was kind of interesting. And I got the best score in the entire class and walked in the next day and told the guy I was gonna quit. I thought (laughing) he was gonna flip out. Except that he was pretty cool. I told him what I was gonna do, and he said, "You know, that sounds like a good idea." I told himI was gonna go to Nepal.
Steiger: Now this isn't the same guy .. .
Briggs: No, it was a different guy
Steiger: . . . that didn't like your haircut.
Briggs: No.
Steiger: Yeah.
Briggs: He thought it was a little strange that I would .. .
Steiger: Fight so hard to get.. .
Briggs: Yeah. And then walk away from it. But it was all a matter of principle. And maybe if I hadn't been so unhappy doin' it, maybe I wouldn't of done that. But it was a happy ending. So I was going with a woman who. at this point (laughs), was working as a Pan Am ticket agent in Denver. So I went off with her and we flew the route from, well Pan Am didn't fly into Denver, but we went someplace and got on Pan Am and flew down to Central America. And the plane lands in every capitol of every country. So we would just get off and hang out for two or three days in, you know, Mexico City, El Salvador. We didn't get off in Managua, but we got off in San Jose, Costa Rica, and we went to Panama. And then she had to go back to work, so she flew back and then I took another couple of weeks coming back the same way, landing in different places. So it was another great adventure. I ended up in Acapulco, Mexico. This was back in the days when it was at least moderately safe to be involved in smoking a little bit of Mexico. Maybe it wasn't safe, but we didn't know the difference.
Steiger: Yeah.
Briggs: And I actually met up with my ex-wife and her sister there.
Steiger: Oh my god.
Briggs: .. . in the meantime. And hung out with them for a while.
Steiger: She was back from Japan.
Briggs: She was back from Japan and living with her sister. And they ended up going down there, and it was just a coincidence. They were down there and I sent a letter through American Express. You know how you do that? Because they didn't know I was coming down there. And then I did all this stuff to there and back, and I go into American Express to see if there was a letter there, if they answered, and they didn't. So that was it, Well, I'm standing there and they come walking in the door! So we hung out for a while... . So where are we?
Steiger: Well it's time to go to work for Rob, I guess. You know, I'm gonna throw you one too. How was he on that first trip? You know, you had that first impression, and you don't have to get into this if you don't want to, but you said at first it was like, oh, this is just the children of some rich people. How did he end up doing, and how did the people .
Briggs: Oh, you know how it is when you're a guide.
Steiger: You can do no wrong.
Briggs: You can do no wrong. And Rob was fine. I don't remember that much. I just remember the Canyon being so incredible.
Steiger: Uh-huh.
Briggs: So overpowering,
Steiger: It wasn't like the guides were so awesome, it was just like the trip was so awesome,
Briggs: Yeah, well, you know, the guides were all wearing cut off jeans and Chuck Taylors (??) and . . .
Steiger: Yeah,
Briggs: They were just guys doing outdoor stuff.
Steiger: Yeah, right.
Briggs: Basically some guys from Orinda high school, friends of the family's sons, working for the summer. And Jimmy Elliott, Rob's brother, drove the truck. He had a little Dodge Power Wagon. So it was jusl this great adventure. It's pretty funny. I took regular eight or super eight home movies. It was regular eight. '67. A funky old Kodak regular eight. And I could show you these movies that I took. Except they're totally boring. (Both laugh) And after being a river guide and showing up at reunions where trips would have a reunion, people here in the Bay Area all get together and have a party and everybody looks at their slides and their movies and so forth and so on. And they always liked to have the guides come by. And I've seen people's home movies, and everybody including myself kind of takes the same home movies on your first trip, A lot of walls that all look the same, and nothing else (both laugh), I mean there were other things, but like walls after wall after wall because sometimes, you know, when I finally was down there for a while, it's just such an incredibly powerful place. I mean it took me two or three years before I started looking at the plants. 'Cause, you know, everything is so big. But these home movies are awful Walls and more walls. I do have a shot in there of Rob Elliott. He had the motor up in the morning, and he was taking the warm water coming out from the exhaust and trying to shave with it (laughs), which is actually a pretty good idea.
Steiger: He's runnin....
Briggs: Runnin' the motor, and then the . . .
Steiger: The water pump . ..
Briggs: Yeah, and then the water comin' out would be warm, 'cause it was cooling the engine, and he wjas shaving with that. (Laughs) And I had shots of them pounding out a propeller where they hit a rock (laughs).
Steiger: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Briggs: And we had terrible food if J remember right. Did we ran short a dinner because something got wet, or was that another trip? But it was all great fun, you know. Everybody has to pitch In. It might have been a trip I was where the food went bad and we had to eat popcorn for dinner.
Steiger: So you're back from flying to Mexico, and you're gettln5 ready to go to work.
Briggs: For AZRA
Steiger: For AZRA. Or ARTA.
Briggs: ARTA.
Steiger: 'Cause It was still ARTA, wasn't it.
Briggs: Yeah, so, in the meantime, somewhere along the line because I missed my Austin Healy, I bought a 1959 Porsche. It was just a little coupe with the 75 horse motor In it. And so then I hopped In that car and I drove down to Flagstaff. To go work.
Steiger: OK.
Briggs: Oh, and I get this literature from ARTA about all the regulations. And I was a little paranoid over long hair even though my hair was still not very long. I didn't have a beard. But the regulations were "no long hair." I'm goin' "Oh jeez," you know. "I'm gonna show up at the ARTA warehouse ... " And as I remember, it was out at the potato bam on the east side of town. I remember going to that KG A Campground? That's over kinda by...
Steiger: Yeah.
Briggs: Canyoneers (??) I went over there and I went into the restroom and I got my hair all wet and combed It down as flat and as back, to make it look like my hair was as short as it could possibly be. So I go to the potato barn to sign in for work, and who's the first person I run into? Bruce Simbala. I don't know if you remember Bruce . , .
Steiger: Oh yeah.
Briggs: But he had the hair down to his shoulders, and he looked like the Cowardly Lion. A big mane. And I'm going, "Hmm, I guess long hair is not gonna be a problem." And it sorta wasn't. I mean it was something that came down as a dress code from Rob's dad.
Steiger: From Lou (??).
Briggs: .. . who was trying to control it, but didn't have much of a control. So I can't remember - Rob wasn't there. I was supposed to look for Alan Wilson. And so I meet Alan. I'm supposed to work with Alan on the trip. They call him Crazy Alan.
Steiger: Crazy Alan.
Briggs: Crazy Alan Wilson.
Steiger: So this is 19 . . .
Briggs: ... '71.
Steiger: Yeah.
Briggs: June.
Steiger: Mm-hmm.
Briggs: The season's getting cranked up. So Alan says, "OK, come with me." So I'm just following him around. And we go to this red pick-up track. And there's these legs coming out from under it. And Alan says something to this guy, he must have said Mike. And this voice comes out from underneath. And I said, "Michael?" And I go over there and I look underneath, and it's Michael Castelli (??), the guy who was sixteen years old and the head cook on the trip that I'd done four years earlier, and he was back working as a motor boatman. He's now the guy who is the Macintosh consultant for a dot com.
Steiger: Oh my gosh.
Briggs: That guy, remember I told you about him?
Steiger: For a dot com, that's .. .
Briggs: Well for some big firm. He's the Mac guy. They've got two tech guys, one Mac one PC. He's the Mac guy. I mean he knows every thing there is to know ...
Steiger: So they had a 16-year-old head cook? How did that happen?
Briggs: Oh no, wait a minute. He was 17 or 18 maybe. Alan Dubner (??) was 16 years old and the head cook. Dubner eventually married Rob Elliott's sister,
Steiger: What are the qualifications for a head cook, for cryin' out loud, that a 16-year¬old gets to do it?
Briggs: I guess that you didn't know how to ran a boat. (laughs)
Steiger: So you're the head cook. You've got to open all the cans. (Both laugh)
Briggs: Yeah, I mean they eventually did away with that classification.
Steiger: Well I don't know. They've still kind of got it
Briggs: Well they have the head cook that just buys the food. I didn't know what the head cook did. He's the guy that unloads the food at night. I guess that's the same as it is now.
Steiger: Yeah.
Briggs: So I meet Alan, and we go off to El Rancho. He has to pick up a few things for the trip. And, you know, I'm not the fastest guy in the world, and I'm havin' a hard time keepin' up with this guy in the aisles of El Rancho. I'm just not walking that fast. The first time I noticed it. I going, "Jeez, this guy's really in a hurry." But he did walk fast. And . . . uh, maybe we should stop for a second
Steiger: So we are rollin'.
Briggs: So I set off to work my first trip in the Grand Canyon as an assistant to Alan Wilson.
Steiger: Oh yeah? you were goin' through the supermarket, and he was goin' really fast.
Briggs: Yeah, he just went everywhere fast. And the second boatman was Richard Neilson. And he was also - it was like he was on speed. And they would hit the deck at the evening and start cooking dinner and doin' everything at a very high speed. And I'm thinking, "Oh, jeez, that's what you're supposed to do." But looking back on it, Alan was kinda naturally that way. Richard was too. But they kinda liked to put on a little show of efficiency, how fast they could get things done, I guess. So I tried to keep up with them, thinking that's what you're supposed to do. And it was in June, and it was hot. And I was in good shape and everything, but these guys wore me down. By the time we got to Havasu , or somewhere earlier in the trip I remember washing the last pot and pan, and falling asleep in the sand, right there (laughs), I was so tired.
Steiger: Yeah. This is like a two boat motor trip and there's three crew.
Briggs: There's four of us actually.
Steiger: Four crew. Two boats.
Briggs: And we get down to Havasu and we parked the boats down below in those days. And I climbed off and I tied off the boat. And climbed under a ledge there right where the boat was tied, and I slept. Didn't even go up into Havasu (laughs), I was so tired.
Steiger: Didn't know what you were missing. But you'd been there before, huh?
Briggs: Once, in '67, But I eventually learned to, or you get used to it after a while, but I learned that not everybody goes as fast as those two guys. I did a single boat trip with Michael Casselli -I did a couple of them, And it was just fifteen people, which is pretty nice, and Michael was a little more laid back than those two guys. But I remember going down (laughs) the left side of Unkar, and we got stuck on those rocks down below, on the left?
Steiger: Oh man!
Briggs: Single boat motor trip.
Steiger: Oooh!
Briggs: I'm goin .. .
Steiger: Going for the big ride and then didn't get back - got pushed over, or somethin'. Lost the motor? Or how did -just didn't know.
Briggs: Can't remember. Maybe didn't make the cut, lost the motor, or whatever. But Michael was pretty imperturbable. He just started moving the 15 people around on different parts of the boat, and we eventually worked it off. You know, just shifting the weight. It was actually pretty easy. It didn't appear like it was gonnabe easy. But I think we put a rip in the boat. I think we had to stop at Phantom and patch like a 15-inch rip at 115 degrees,
Steiger: Oh, I bet that patch worked really good! (laughs)
Briggs: So I was learning lots of lessons early on in that first year. And of course ARTA had no area manager as such. And some guy down at Meadview was supposed to maintain the engines, the motors, but I don't think he ever did. And we had 25 horse Johnsons and 18 inch - we called them "Elvinroods" (laughs). Elvinroods, And they weren't maintained very well. And so I learned how to work on motors. I'd never touched an outboard motor in my life when I got in that boat. And, you know, I was more interested in hanging out in the Canyon than learning how to run the boats anyway. When I called Elliott, I said listen, I just want to hang out in the Canyon for a summer, figure out what I'm gonna do. I just wanna wash the pots and pans. I don't want to learn how to ran the boats. And so that's what I did. I was just hanging out and starting to take photographs as much as I could. So I worked five motor trips. And the motor trip cycle, which would ran on a two week cycle, because it was an 8-day trip - there's more time in between than on a motor, which is two days... So I had a coupla days, and I used to go up to the rim and go watch the Kolb movie. And that's when Emery (??) was still around and you could go up and shake his hand and talk to him. And that was pretty cool. I don't know how many times I did that.
Steiger: So you guys weren't in Williams. You were right there at East Flag, huh?
Briggs: East Flag, yeah. Right off of Leupp Road?
Steiger: Yeah.
Briggs: Off of that road. It was an old potato barn. And did not have much maintenance. In those first few years we only operated because the boatmen wanted to run the trips, and the trips only got off because the boatmen were pretty ingenious. Nobody wanted to be the trip that didn't make it. So (laughs), we had all these incredible things. Okay, let me slow down a bit. After working five trips, Alan Wilson was gonna do a private trip. A 22-day private trip, and he invited me to go. And it was kind of like an opportunity to do more hiking and all of that. So somewhere around the first of August, I guess I'd already done five motor trips. And I guess I talked to
Elliott and said, "Listen, I really want to go on this private trip with Alan." And he said, "That's fine." And I figured I would never work for them again.
Steiger: They still had work goin' on?
Briggs: I guess.
Steiger: Yeah, uh-huh.
Briggs: But, you know, as It turns out he was just being accommodating. I guess he understood, and I guess people had done it before. (
Steiger: Uh-huh)
Briggs: I didn't think too much about it. I wanted to go on a long trip. Well Alan had (laughs) seen the snout boat somewhere, and got hold of some snouts, two snouts, because this was a couple years before people started rowing snouts down there. And he was from Gold Beach, Oregon. And so the only thing he knew about was motor frames. And the motor frame fits in the pontoon, which is roughly three feet by three feet by three feet. So he phoned in some dimensions to his brother and had two basic motor boxes made.
Steiger: Gotta change tape.
Briggs: OK.