Oral history interview with Bruce Helin [includes transcript], September 16, 1998.

              Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection
Bruce Helin Interview
Interview number: 53.26
[BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A] 
This is the River Runners Oral History Project. This is Lew Steiger and I'm in Flagstaff at Bruce Helin's house. It's September 16, 1998. 
Steiger: Usually, the way we start is just to get a little résumé of your background and stuff before you got to the river: family background, where you were born, just a little bit about that, and then how you came to river running. 
Helin: Okay. I was born in Pasadena, California; grew up there until I was about thirteen or fourteen, then moved up to Camarillo for a few years, and went to UCSB, University of California, Santa Barbara. Did biology and physics there, got to know Rod Nash there. 
Steiger: Oh, really? 
Helin: Had him for a prof, yeah. 
Steiger: I'll be darned. 
Helin: Let's see, as far as on the river, starting was with my folks, Ron and Eleanor Helin. Oh, gosh, where to start? Basically, well, my folks were from Pasadena and both went to school locally. My mother went to Occidental, my father went to Cal Tech. . 
Helin: Basically, my mother graduated with a degree in geology, and my father was a mechanical engineer. My mother had me about two or three months after she graduated, and stayed with me until I started school. She went back to work when I was five or six, working with Gene Shoemaker out of Cal Tech. 
Steiger: Your mom did?! 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: No kiddin'! 
Helin: Yeah, here's a strange coincidence. It turns out -a sidelight -I did a trip earlier this year, and this fellow named Dugald Campbell was on it. He was kind of amazed because we knew how to pronounce Dugald -for obvious reasons, with Bremner. [We] got to talkin', and turns out his father was Ian Campbell, who is the professor at Cal Tech who did the 1939 trip, or whatever -the Carnegie-Cal Tech trip. ( 
Steiger: Wow!) 
Helin: It turns out he'd been a professor and my father's student advisor when he was at Cal Tech. All of a sudden these chips kinda fell into place. 
But anyway, yeah, my mom started looking at meteorites with Gene Shoemaker and Bruce Murray who started the first lunar laboratory there at Cal Tech. During that start-up she was doing some more classes in geology, and as part of one of those classes they did a San Juan River trip as the methodology.... 
Steiger: So she got introduced to river running by Gene Shoemaker? 
Helin: Yeah, Gene and Bob Sharp, and a bunch of folks out of Cal Tech, and some other folks who it turns out were mutual friends of George Wendt. 
Steiger: I'll be darned. 
Helin: So she did a San Juan trip. Oh, and Hugh and Sue Kieffer [phonetic spelling], a couple years later, came into that scene. We just sent Hugh on a private trip yesterday. 
Steiger: Kieffer? I know that name's really familiar. 
Helin: Sue Kieffer did the rapids studies with the Yogii [phonetic spelling]. 
Steiger: The hydrology? In 1983? 
Helin: Yeah. They've both lived here for a long time and done a number of trips. But let's see, where were we? Anyway, my mother did this geology field trip, and they used.... 
Steiger: You're an infant? 
Helin: Yeah, well, I would have been nine or ten, somethin' like that. And she had a ball just with this bunch, and they decided that, hey, this was a lot of fun just in itself even if they weren’t studying geology. So they stayed in touch and Bruce Julian was a fellow in this class. He was a mutual friend of George. Turns out they'd grown up very close to each other in the Pacific Palisades, so there was this connection. And George had one old boat which they'd borrowed for this field trip. 
Steiger: So George was already gettin' into it? 
Helin: Yeah, he had done -I think George actually did a passenger trip down to Phantom with Hatch in like the mid-sixties, something like that. 
Steiger: I remember he said that. In order to practice up, because they wanted to run the river. 
Helin: Right, exactly. So yeah, it was in mind, and [they] decided to do a Middle Fork trip first, Middle Fork of the Salmon. It was just these folks doin' it for fun, and my father and I joined probably a dozen or so people and George. I forget who-all was on that trip, but [we] did a Middle Fork trip, absolutely blind and clueless. Did it late August in the worst drought year in ten years. Nobody knew to check water levels or anything like that. 
Steiger: Just went out there? 
Helin: Just went out and did it. We were figurin' five days for the trip. It ended up taking us three days to get to Indian Creek. Broke every oar we had, and ended up taking about eight days, finally got enough food out of the Flying B Ranch to finish the trip. 
Steiger: You guys put in at Dagger Falls, and went right around the corner and immediately got hammered. 
Helin: Oh, just got hammered. We completely lost a boat to an undercut down in Haystack. Somebody parked in some fast water and left it, and it was gone when they came back, but the bow line was still there. One thing I remember distinctly is that nobody remembered to bring any silverware, so everything was eaten with fingers. You stuck your finger in the jam jar or the peanut butter. 
Steiger: 'Cause that's all.... 
Helin: That was all there was. Well, I was twelve or so, and it just stuck. 
Steiger: Now, wait. The bow line was there? 
Helin: Yeah, the boat was underwater. It was wrapped around this undercut rock. It blew a couple black bags out, and six or eight months later a ranger sent a black bag back to somebody whose name was in it. It was an old seven-man, and it just turns out it was just a perfect wrap underwater. The shreds were there for months____.... 
Steiger: Those are pretty tough boats. So the water came up? There was this boulder waitin' for it? Or they did wrap it? 
Helin: I saw it really, only the aftermath, of trying to cut the boat out. Basically, it was fast water, close to shore, and there was a big rock, maybe three or four feet offshore that had a good strong channel to the outside of it. And they just kind of stopped the boat up against that rock and tied off with the nose to shore and left to come back to check something out. Well, in the interim, whether there was just a surge, the water level really wasn't changing any at that point, but somehow the upstream tube had sucked and gone under. 
Steiger: And it rolled under the whole rock? 
Helin: Just rolled under, and it was this super undercut rock, and literally you could see just a little of the top of the tube underwater. And they went as far as just slicin' the whole thing open -one side and then the other, hopin' it would pull out one side or the other. It just was gone. Meanwhile, our boat was falling apart bad. I spent a lot of time standing in the back of George's boat, pumping.... 
Steiger: So you guys were in George's boat the whole time? 
Helin: Oh, we all switched around. It was no real regiment to it, but I'd spend a lot of time, and George would let me help fend off rocks and things like that. 
Steiger: I didn't mean to interrupt you there. You said you were standing in the back of his boat pumping. 
Helin: Oh, just I probably pumped the last ten or fifteen miles of the Middle Fork that first trip, just to keep the boat afloat, 'cause it was leakin' air so bad. But I just had a ball. We got down to the take-out and I found a rattlesnake under a table or something, and I always liked snakes, so the thing kinda clicked. 
Basically, months later, everybody had a great time, but at the end of that trip, everybody was about ready to shoot each other, and was covered with scabs and bruises from sliding over rocks and pushing off here and fending off there. It was just a fiasco trip, but the bottom line was that everybody had a great time. "Hey, we can do a lot better next time, now that we know kind of what we're doing." 
Steiger: "What we're up against," yeah. 
Helin: So it was, "Okay, let's do Grand Canyon next year!" (laughter) Fine. ( 
Steiger: Wow.) 
Helin: And there were those other influences. Of course Bob Sharp had done some trips, and there was some advice there. 
One of the crazy coincidences, George was an algebra teacher down at a junior high school in the Palisades, and it turns out that Ed Gooch was a print shop teacher at that same junior high school. We needed him to do the trip. The one requirement then that we had to work at to fulfill was that somebody on the trip had to have been down before. That was one of the park regs at that point. 
Steiger: For Grand Canyon? 
Helin: Yeah. And so George had been down partway, but he hadn't been down all the way. And so somehow, George found Ed at the school he was working at, and they were two rather different individuals, but we had a meeting with everybody. 
Steiger: Had Ed been down the other way? Or had Ed been down the whole way? 
Helin: Ed had been a boatman for Georgie in the mid-fifties. 
Steiger: So he'd been down a bunch of times. 
Helin: Yeah, he was the old sly dog boatman of his era. I forget, he worked for Georgie three or four years, had a lot of great stories. But he was interested in going down, again, with us. And so he was the ticket to get us on the water. 
Steiger: Gooch-Wendt Expeditions was born. 
Helin: Yeah, basically. That was 1967. And then we just did private trips in 1968 and 1969. Pretty soon people were carryin' passengers and all that. In 1970 they decided to start tryin' a commercial trip. And yeah, it was Gooch-Wendt Expeditions. The problem was everybody was always askin', "Where did Gooch go?" Also, Ed had the foresight to -he'd spent a lot of time out on the res[ervation]. Well, he came out to do Georgie trips, and became a trader in jewelry. It was a time when Indian jewelry was just booming in the California area, late sixties, early seventies. And so Ed still has a business, Indian Arts of California, or something like that. He saw that that was just all of a sudden going gangbusters, and he had all the right connections, so he bowed out, sold out his interest in the company, end of 1970, early 1971, something like that. . 
Steiger: Was it Navajo jewelry? Was he trading with Navajos? 
Helin: Yeah, primarily, but he was all over. Probably Zuni, Hopi. He apparently just always traveled around when he was out here. 
Steiger: Checked things out. 
Helin: Yeah. So he was the right guy in the right place with the right connections. 
Steiger: Well, that first Grand Canyon trip, how did that go? What do you remember the best about that? 
Helin: Basically, I think we had a great case of beginner's luck. 
Steiger: What kind of boats? 
Helin: It was basically called a ten-man life raft. It wasn't a basket boat; it was one step up from a basket boat and a step down from an assault boat. 
Steiger: From a ten-man assault boat? 
Helin: Yeah, exactly. 
Steiger: That was what I had. 
Helin: The assault boats? 
Steiger: My first boat was that. Those were bomber! 
Helin: Oh, those were great. I still have one of my first.... It's a turned-up end, which we called the snout at OARS. Of course, kind of a misnomer. But it was a ten-man assault boat with a kicked-up nose. I've still got it over in the shop. I used to row in the early seventies for OARS. But we had these ten-man rafts, the splash bumpers were just a little bit smaller than the main tubes -probably fourteen-, sixteen-inch main tubes, and big ol' bumpers. And we did a triple, because Gooch had always.... 
Steiger: That's what they did. 
Helin: That's what [Georgie] did. And we did run a single with it, just to try it, but we figured that the aircraft carrier was the safest way. We literally went down and bought two of the boats brand new from Pally's Surplus in Santa Monica for twenty-five dollars apiece. Took 'em to the home of a guy named Curt Quebler [phonetic spelling], who was a Porsche mechanic. He had a little back yard down in Santa Monica where we unloaded the boats, got back and pulled the string. You know, these are all set up with their CO2 cartridges. 
Steiger: To inflate 'em? 
Helin: Yeah, these were brand new surplus. So we popped those and spent the next couple days taking all the sunscreens and the rations and all the plumbing out of 'em, and trying to retrofit 'em somehow with a valve that we could inflate 'em with, with just a manual pump, instead of their CO2 stuff. Then somebody had the great idea of -oh, they'd seen some boats that were painted silver, because the black was hot. So they agreed that was a great idea. The only problem was that they just went down to the local hardware store, got some silver aluminum paint, and it was my job to paint these boats, which I did. Much to everybody's chagrin, about the second or third day, everybody realized that the boats were turning black again, and everybody was turning silver. It was hilarious. Yeah, they were just little life rafts, no frames or anything. At the metal shop at this Paul Revere Junior High School, they radiused a couple of pieces of flat -I think it was brass -and kind of folded up the ends and put a couple of bolts up through 'em. So you glued this piece of brass to the top of the tube, and you bolted on an oarlock holder, basically, and that was your frame. It was just glued onto each side of the tube. 
Steiger: So the theory was it was good to be flexible. 
Helin: Yeah. And hey, you got seats, why wouldn't you sit on the seat that's in the boat? That kind of thing. We have some old home movies that are pretty funny: everybody low riding, because of course they didn't hold air worth shit. And they had inflatable floors, but still solid floors underneath 'em -took us a while to figure out we should have thrown away to start out with. Kind of strange. 
But no, actually things went really smooth. I think Ed flipped. Ed was runnin' the single boat. Well, let's see, Bruce Julian, and George were primary boatmen on the triple. Everybody switched off, but they did most of the rapids. I think Ed flipped in House Rock. I think that was the first, "Oh, wow!" The triple, I remember spending a lot of time tying it up. They were thorough about having ties this way and that. There were a bunch of engineers along. 
Steiger: So everybody was gettin' into it. 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: It was "figure it out as you go." 
Helin: Oh, yeah. This was a true "blind leading the clueless." Ed was great, but.... (laughs) 
Steiger: Yeah, he'd learned everything he knew from Georgie. 
Helin: Yeah, exactly. (laughter) Sometimes it was a step forward, sometimes it was a step back, but it all worked. Crystal was the big scare. We were also on edge because of some news we got from the ranger at the Ferry. Shorty had died like a week before we launched, so there was kinda that little bit of a pall goin' on around that. 
Steiger: I guess people.... I never had any sense of what he was like until I read that article. Did you read that thing? 
Helin: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was a great article, well done. 
Steiger: So even though he was a Hatch boatman, word was out ______. 
Helin: Yeah, I think it'd come back to the ranger up there. I can't remember who the ranger was at that point. Yeah, but all went well. We went down and stopped at Phantom, got to know old Roy. Roy Starkey. He was the USGS guy down there for a long time, until they got automated gauges. My mother and a couple of people on the trip had been on or off with USGS, so they went in and he was the one source of gettin' a phone call out. He was very kind in the following years to let us use his phone. 
Probably the biggest ride we had was Crystal, and it was a half-year old or something at that point. We almost canceled the trip because of that, because we'd heard so many horror stories and people had talked about "there's no way to get through," or "you're gonna hafta portage it" and all this. There wasn't much reliable information I can remember. It was kinda, "Well, let's just give it a try." Got down there and I think we must have just basically gone down the left side. 
Steiger: What was the water runnin'? 
Helin: You know, we apparently were seeing.... I'd have to guess. My mother kept a journal on that trip. There was good water, probably ten to twenty, twenty-five, somewhere in there. I was right in the back boat, and we had to have just gone right on down the wall and through the hole. I was in the back of the triple, which is always just the whipper. 
Steiger: The wildest, yeah. 
Helin: I'm hangin' on, but the guy -it was Bruce and this fellow.... Oh, we had this insane way of holding an oarlock on. The guy in the back would have one or both hands on the oar.... You'd always run a.... On the triple, usually with an oar front and an oar back. And to try and hold the oar in, it was a full ring lock, it wasn't like an open lock. A ring around the oars, so nobody wanted to put a pin through the shaft to lock it in, because they figured they'd just really break a lot of oars that way, 'cause there's no way for it to pop out. So instead, since we had the extra bodies around, they tied a piece of string through the hole, and then the other end of that about, oh, four or five feet long, to a piece on the boat somewhere. So there'd be a guy rowing, but in through any of the rapids there'd be a guy facing him and keeping tension on this string with his finger. So he's holding on with one hand, and holding.... 
Steiger: Keeping tension to keep.... 
Helin: The oarlock down into this block we'd made. So it was kinda like a tensioned oarlock retainer. But if it had pulled up hard enough, it would just rip the string off his finger and it would let loose. But if he didn't have tension on it.... I mean, nobody knew what they were doin' rowin'-wise, so they had a tendency of poppin' the oar out of this thing all the time. Anyway, I remember.... 
Steiger: Were you the string guy? 
Helin: No, the only reason I was still in the boat was because I could hold on with both hands. We just get this great whip comin' over the top -there goes Bruce, and I think it was Dick Shay. (sproing!) flying out. And I ended up hauling 'em back in. But that was just the action of the rear boat comin' over one of those big waves. 
Steiger: And so you're like fifteen? No, you were younger than that. 
Helin: I think I was thirteen on that trip. Yeah, that was it. I was thirteen, I turned fourteen at Diamond Creek. George's birthday is a day later than mine, so we've always done doubles from about that point on for a good many years. His is the nineteenth of July. 
So, oh gosh, you know, we really did pretty darned well on that trip. And it was such high water that it was pretty forgiving. I remember at the very end, pulling into Diamond Creek, and what happened? Well, this flash flood came rolling through. The crazy learning experiences, they'd opted for doing the shuttle after the trip, and it figured it was gonna take two days. Of course we had arranged to have Pete Byers -you remember Pete at the Shell station? 
Steiger: Yeah, sure, you bet. He took care of Fred, too. He was like our man in Peach Springs. 
Helin: Well, that was exactly that. We met him for the first time.... 
Steiger: He took care of a lot of people. 
Helin: I'm sure he did, in that good old Dodge two-ton"he, Jesse and Johnny. One way or another, we made contact with Pete, and he brought one of the shuttles -just a, you know, mid-fifties truck or whatever -down to pick up a couple of people, and then they had to drive back around to Lee's and bring vehicles around. It just was.... I think it was literally two-and-a-half days. I think my birthday was the first. 
Steiger: You guys are at Diamond Creek? 
Helin: Well, we're at Diamond Creek. You know, July 18, my birthday, nice cool time of year. But it was fine, we just messed around there, and finally came through. Just the first of many dusty, bumpy Diamond Creek rides. I remember Mexican Hat had a bunch of boats stacked up there waiting for the road to get a little better to haul out a bunch of their old flatboats on some trailers there. 
Steiger: A bunch of the wood boats? 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: They were just gettin' off a trip? Wow. 
Helin: I don't know how long they'd been there, but they looked like somebody had just parked a trailer and was waitin' for another vehicle. Diamond Creek had flooded. We just barely got out, bouncin' all over the place. 
Steiger: So they were still runnin' their wood boats? 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: I'll be damned. 
Helin: I think it was under Mexican Hat, still. 
Steiger: Now, was that 1969? 
Helin: No, that was 1967. 
Steiger: So that was before. I'll be damned. I thought Gaylord had already gone.... 
Helin: I think that was 1970 or so. I have very fond memories of seeing Gaylord cruisin' down under the bridge with his steering wheel. I think that was the first season he had kind of taken it over or changed the name or whatever, but it seems like that was early seventies. 
Steiger: And he built a boat, he built a big motor rig that had a steering wheel on it. 
Helin: The remote jackass. Yeah, he was a proud papa that trip. 
Steiger: Did that thing make it through? 
Helin: Barely. He had a lot of problems. 
Steiger: A little too complicated. 
Helin: Yeah, it didn't quite have the.... It was a good idea. But also, tryin' to steer a boat that size from that perspective apparently was a real problem. 
Steiger: Was it up front? 
Helin: Yeah, about two-thirds, three-quarters of the way up front in the middle. 
Steiger: The front of the boat. So you didn't really.... 
Helin: Yeah, where are your oars? 
Steiger: Wow. I haven't talked to him yet. I need to. Pretty wild trip. So would that have been a painful private? (laughs) In terms of organization, I guess. 
Helin: Yeah, it was pretty good. Ma took over -after seeing the fiasco of the guys working with the food in the Middle Fork -Mom took over the food aspects. She's always been a great cook. I remember my bedroom was lined with grocery bags for about a week before the trip, of her setting up each of the meals and all that. She was very thorough. 
Steiger: Okay, she figured it out, "We're gonna bag this by the meal. We are not gonna...." 
Helin: For a long time, OARS basically ran on her meals from that first trip. 
Steiger: The way that she'd figured it out? 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: And she figured out to pack it by the meal. 
Helin: Yeah, we used to.... It's gone so many different ways. OARS, for the first -until we got into the aluminum boxes and all that -we used to pack a meal in one of the old hard black bags. That's just how we ran it. 
Steiger: Yeah, and that was it. 
Helin: Yeah. Back and forth, back and forth. 
Steiger: Like one of those medium ones? 
Helin: Exactly, one of the medium-sized guys, and each boat would have three or four 'em under your front seat, in the front of your whatever -assault or Green River. And of course each flip you usually lost one of 'em. 
Steiger: One of the food bags? 
Helin: Yeah, one of the food bags. (laughter) 'Cause they were always the worst ones, with everything falling off, and the straps tearing and all that. It was always good for a special "chef's surprise" a couple of times. 
Steiger: Yeah, it was like military gear, wasn't it? For water. 
Helin: Oh, God, that first trip everything.... The boats, the oars, the paddles, the life jackets, all the containers, all the soft black bags, waterproof bags. Ninety percent of it. I mean, at some point I think we even had some old rations along on trips for emergency food. "Just go down to the surplus store. They'll have it." 
Steiger: Boy, we've come a long way in thirty years. 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: Well, in your mind, you liked the Grand Canyon as much as the Middle Fork, huh? for doin' it. 
Helin: Oh, I guess more so. 
Steiger: So you're startin' to think this river runnin'.... 
Helin: Yeah. Oh, gosh, you know, if you're talkin' about at that age, I see. 
Steiger: Were you startin' to get interested in something that you'd really want to do? 
Helin: Oh, after the Grand Canyon. You know, I was catchin' fish, and yeah, I just had a ball. Basically I just did anything I could. My folks did that trip, and then they started wantin' to do other things. They'd done that for a year or two and had some fun, so it wasn't lookin' like there was gonna be another family vacation in that realm, so I just kind of pursued it. I just pestered the poor guys. Really, I've always respected them quite a bit because they actually were even willing to consider taking a thirteen-, fourteen-year-old kid along with 'em. 
Steiger: You were a big kid, though, weren't you? 
Helin: Oh, I was a big kid, and I could help 'em with stuff, and probably my saving grace or ability was that because I'd been raised in [the] kitchens [of] my mother and grandmothers who were good cooks, I could cook. And I've enjoyed it. These guys couldn't boil water, and they loved to eat. I basically would say, "Hey, I will cook every meal, I will wash every dish. Just let me come along." That basically worked. And then I'd spend most of the trips tryin' to talk 'em [into] lettin' me row their boats. Little steps. 
We went on through the sixties, and 1970 came around, and I think George wrote me a letter sayin' something about, "______ would I be interested in paying to go on a trip?" I'd been doin' trips, you know, just payin' costs of course. Would I want to take a trip and pay for it? It was kind of a weird deal. He was lookin' for anybody who would come along and pay for a trip. He wanted to try to start making money, and wanted to see if I wanted it, I guess, bad enough to come along as a passenger, or pseudo. I may have things twisted around a bit, but anyway, a couple of months later he came back and asked, "Hey, do you want to row a boat?" 
Steiger: This was like after you had declined ____. 
Helin: "What's this about?" George just came up with some funny thoughts, as we all know, over the years. 
Steiger: Well, run it up the flagpole. 
Helin: Yeah. But anyway, it just turned out that he actually got some bookings, and there was nobody around who knew what the hell it meant to be a boatman. There were very few people that didn't think he was totally nuts, and nobody had done it. He had people without boatmen. So finally I guess [he] came to the realization that I was a useable commodity. "Hey, wanna do a trip?" So this is 1970. So I got my own boat, did a couple of trips. I think one was a freebie and the other one I got paid ten dollars a day or something like that. I don't think the park noticed then, but a year or so later they got kinda uptight about my age. I was either sixteen or seventeen, but I was a big kid. One situation always stuck in my mind I got a big kick out of: I think it was my second trip that year. A real nice couple got on my boat, and we were rowin' ten-mans, I think, still at that point. Or we might have had a couple of assault boats, but mostly in ten-mans. And just headin' down to Badger and struck up a conversation, of course. It finally came down, "Gosh, how old are you?" (laughter) I was well aware we were stretching things, but I told 'em. They were very nice. The husband and wife quickly conversed rather quietly up front. We were comin' up to Badger, and of course we built it up, it's the first big rapid and all this. "Gosh, you know, can you pull over? We would really love to take pictures of everybody goin' through this rapid, and walk on around." (chuckles) They were being very nice about it, it was very clear what was going on, but they were very nice. "Oh, sure, no problem at all." I kind of pulled on ahead of everybody else and got 'em down there. Then they watched George and Ed, and I think there was a fellow named Tom in the other boat. And then I rowed through and got down and picked 'em up. They never got out of my boat for the rest of the trip. 
Steiger: But that's 'cause they watched everybody else go. Yeah. (laughter) 
Helin: But there was a lot of stuff like that. I used to wake up camp with M-80s. Of course, don't tell the park I said that. 
Steiger: Big firecrackers. 
Helin: Yeah. I thought they were great, until finally somebody got tired of 'em and popped one. He got into my ammo box and lit one off next to my head the next morning. I got the message. (laughter) 
But yeah, just started doing trips when I was in high school. It was just the greatest summertime deal. 
Steiger: On those first two trips, what was the equipment like then? You were sayin' it was still the ten-mans. It was the same stuff, huh? 
Helin: Oh, it was. 
Steiger: The ten-mans and the military surplus bags. 
Helin: Yeah. I had my first flip watching the guy in front of me. I was worried about the guy flipping in an assault boat. Only I did not realize that I was going in exactly the same place in a ten-man raft. He did a tube stand, and I flipped. What really pissed me off is it didn't have a name, or a name that we knew of at that point. And I still never really figured out whether it's an old name that we just didn't know about, or whether somebody gave it later -but Indian Dick. 
Steiger: Oh, yeah. 
Helin: 'Cause that was my first flip in 1970, there headin' down the right side. I was followin' a guy who'd done a trip. "Yeah, I think the run's over on the right." "Okay." 
Steiger: Right [over left?]. 
Helin: Right over that diagonal. Beautiful thing. Yeah, I think we started gettin' some Green Rivers from Ron Smith in like 1972 or 1973. 
Steiger: I remember. That was a ways down the road. I remember seein' you at Deer Creek with the big old felt hat, kind of a Hoss Cartwright hat. But that was Green Rivers by then. 
Helin: Yeah, that was Green Rivers. 
Steiger: I remember those boats. That was what I remember. I don't remember ever seein' you guys before in those early days. Did you have OARS written -or was it Gooch-Wendt still? 
Helin: No, it was OARS. I mean, it was a hodgepodge. I mean, you probably couldn't have told it from most of the privates at that point in time. 
Steiger: But how many privates were there, for cryin' out loud? 
Helin: Not very many. 
Steiger: I don't remember seein'.... All I remember was motorin' for ARR, then we got to do training trips, and you'd see a couple of rowin' trips, and we were the private trips. (laughs) 
Helin: Yeah, that is true. We used to run into -oh, I remember meetin' Francois Leydet down at Havasu one time, with a bunch of yahoos. Martin [Litton] was on it, a private trip they were doin'. Old Fred Eisman [phonetic spelling] _________. 
Steiger: Well, that trip with Francois Leydet, that was Time and the River Flowing. 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: That was for that book. 
Helin: Yeah. I remember seein' 'em at Havasu. I think it was the first time I'd seen dories. 
Steiger: Those wild boats. But those were all different. 
Helin: Yeah, exactly, it was the full menagerie. But Fred had a bunch of nice ones. You know, Fred.... What was it? Eisman used to work for Georgie? I think he was another ex-Georgie guy. 
Steiger: He must have been a smart guy. 
Helin: Fred. He had some beautiful dories. I remember runnin' into him a couple of times. But yeah, there weren't that many private trips, you're right. 
Steiger: I don't remember. I mean, I don't know, 'cause I was clueless anyway. But I do remember kind of recognizing everybody. And my first memories of OARS, my real distinct ones were actually of you and who else? Like Dave Shore and Terry. ( 
Helin: Sure.) 
Steiger: And those Green Rivers. And the load started on the top of the tubes and went up. That's what I remember. 
Helin: Exactly. Oh, God, you gotta have that cooler on top of that back deck. 
Steiger: Well, everything. The whole load was so much higher than it is now. 
Helin: Well, yeah. That's all Sam's fault, really -the coolers. 
Steiger: Well, we should go back. I don't want to leapfrog us too far out of sequence. 
Helin: Okay. Where are we? 
Steiger: Just those first couple of trips with all that hodgepodge of equipment. ( 
Helin: Gotcha.) 
Steiger: And then I guess the company just starting growing like they all did, huh? 
Helin: Yeah. We ran the same boats for two or three years. I forget, I think it was just that we were just starting some trips in Northern California and had to break down and get two or four of the Green Rivers in probably 1972 or 1973. But no, it was still, for those first several years.... You're doin' two-by-eight, two-by-ten frames. Oh, we had thole pins that I think were a foot-and-a-half tall. 
Steiger: Pinned oars? 
Helin: Pinned oars, drilled through pinned oars. 
Steiger: Drilled through the oar? 
Helin: Drilled through the oar to strap on a piece of tire. It took 'em a few years to figure out that that wouldn't work. 
Steiger: Did they break a lot there? 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: That was it. 
Helin: Yeah, exactly -especially after they had a year or two to rot. 
Steiger: When you were talkin' about holdin' the string in the triple-rig, was that string just tied to the oarlock? 
Helin: It was tied to the little hole in the bottom of the oarlock. 
Steiger: Right, and you were holding tension on that. 
Helin: Yeah. Yeah, that was a funny thing. See, we went the full kinda round-about. We did those closed -just full-ring oarlocks that you had to put on permanently. And we were usin' leathers. The wraps and all were latigo [phonetic spelling] leather, and the collars and all that. You're out there with your brass tacks and doin' all that. And then [we] went to, I think, open oarlocks for a year or two, and then somewhere George picked up a couple of these assault boats that somebody had used for river running, and they came with frames with these huge thole pins. Basically, I think it was the fact that you obviously [can] train somebody to row a boat much quicker with the pin than you can with an oarlock. And so [we] went to those and stayed with those for probably four or five years. I think it was Terry that finally just called bullshit on it. He got himself a set of oars and a pair of oarlocks and kind of bushed his frame back over to holding an oarlock. So [we] then went back to oarlocks at that point. There was just this back and forth for a number of years. 
Steiger: Was there kind of a revolving door crew [at OARS], or was there a core crew pretty soon? 
Helin: It was, I'd have to say, very core, very solid. Basically, George and Ed and Dave Shore and Tom Winchester and I and one or two others ran the majority of the trips for the first couple of years. Well, in 1972, Terry Brian and Skip came on. I took Terry's parents down in 1971, and apparently they went back and told Terry. He was just gettin' out of school. "Hey, go out and try this! There's a kid younger than you are rowin' a boat. You can probably even get a job." So Terry Brian and Skip Horner showed up. I think it was spring of 1972. And about that time, Ed and George stopped doing trips. There was another fellow named John Ganol [phonetic spelling], who was kinda the first -yeah, Ganol was the first person to lead a trip at OARS, or whatever it was called at that point -Grand Canyon trip, that wasn't George. 
Steiger: Ganol? 
Helin: John Ganol. (discussion of spelling) I saw him last at Shore's wedding. But anyway, Skip and Terry came in, and they were rowin' boats after their second or third trip. It was just trial by fire. And then it was Shore and I and Terry and Skip, and people like Slade and Klepinger [phonetic spelling] and Newsome Holmes [phonetic spelling] and all came in the next year. But basically, for a long time, for several years, up until, oh, 1976, 1977, a lot of the trips were some permutation of those, plus in 1974 I think Sam came over from Fort Lee Company -Sam West, Sam Street, however you care to -whichever moniker you want to.... 
Steiger: First he was Sam Street. Then he changed his name when he got to the Park Service. 
Helin: Yeah. Well, that's closer to his real name. But we'd seen Sammy -for a couple of years we had a schedule, we always ran into him at Deer Creek. And he was runnin' the first few Fort Lee trips, and Tony would have three or four people on a trip, and Sam with one of the huge boats. And Sam liked to cook. I think he'd done a roast turkey or something the night before, and we were on "C" rations or whatever, so whenever we'd see Sam, we figured it was good for a meal. And Sam was gettin' tired of the motor scene, and wanted to come over and do some rowin'. Sam introduced OARS to coolers. We never carried a cooler until Sam came over. 
Steiger: And said, "Just take a cooler." 
Helin: Yeah, "Just take a cooler." (laughter) So that was the great change there. That's when all of a sudden these huge coolers started appearing on the back of people's boats, way high. But yeah, strange little additions.... he also introduced dish soap and soap, period. We never used to take soap for kitchen or anything like that. We'd just clean everything in the sand. It works fine. Sam brought in soap. It's kinda scary. 
Steiger: Was it always just like one trip on the water, one set of equipment? Or was it gettin' so big that you had multiple crews? 
Helin: I've got a picture that I would hazard a guess it'd have been about 1976, somewhere around there plus or minus. I have a picture of the first mutual -oh, God, there's a story! (laughs) The first time OARS ever had two trips on the water at the same time. I think it was about 1976. I think we had eight Green Rivers by that point in time, then a couple extra boats for spares. We almost always had a training boat. That's one thing, that's been fun all along, is that almost every trip we've had, there've been some folks helpin' or learnin', so I got to meet a lot of people, or broke in a lot of people that way. (laughs) This very first double trip, it was Klepinger and Slade and Liz and a couple others on the "B" team trip. And then it was Shore and Skip and Terry and myself, I think, on the primary trip. You know how you always have to delineate, just like Dories -"A" team, "B" team, all this stuff -and fight over the equipment and all that -especially here, 'cause we didn't have it. 
Steiger: There was equipment number one that everybody was used to working with. ( 
Helin: Right.) 
Steiger: And then you had to put together set number two. 
Helin: Yeah. Well, "B" team was going out a day ahead of "A" team. They left Flagstaff with one vehicle, and we actually had to rent a vehicle for the second group and all that. George was there to make sure it was all gonna go okay. So we get up to Lee's Ferry.... 
[END TAPE 1, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B] 
Helin: You can imagine trying to set things up for two instead of one. That first-time disorganization. Some stuff we were picking up on our way through Flagstaff, other stuff that George, who was already up at Lee's Ferry, was supposed to have picked up. Total miscommunication. Turns out we got up there the evening after the first trip had launched, and it turns out they had taken all our bread and all the cheese, I think it was, for both trips. Oh, and the ridicule of B team was horrendous. We figured out that they had had to take off with, I think it was eight or ten 20-mils of bread, which of course is gonna seem obvious to anybody that knows what's going on, that's twice as much.... 
Steiger: _________ bread. 
Helin: Yeah, and a cooler full of cheese and all this stuff. So anyway, what are we gonna do? And the last thing George wants to do is drive to Page or someplace else and buy some more! And so I volunteer, "I'll go now. I'll go catch 'em, George." 
Steiger: (laughs) Oh, _________. 
Helin: And so I got to escape. I left about eleven o'clock that night, no moon, and soon [I] was really regretting, or reanalyzing my decision. But it ended up being just one of the most amazing nights. It was absolutely pitch black. The only way I knew I was getting close to shore is when a beaver would flap at me. Like a half-dozen times during the night, I'd have a beaver come up next to the boat and just slap and just about scare me out of the boat. I couldn't see anything, so it didn't really matter. 
Anyway, floatin' on down. We were still on high water, which I'd never seen. This was a Saturday's water, and we always launched on Sunday, so I'd never even been on the upper twenty miles with high water. So I took off at 25,000 that night. And I was worried about making miles, but all of a sudden I was watchin' the rim and it's just cruisin' by. "I'm makin' miles here! This is cruisin'." I remember very clearly comin' up on the brink of Badger, hearing it and not seeing it, not seeing it, not seeing it, and trying to judge where I was. And finally, just comin' over the edge where I could see a wave. The foam was white enough to be visible so I’d just follow the wave train. I’m just cruisin', and I'm startin' to try to look for this group. And the whole agreement is they're gonna send a plane over in the morning -somebody's flying in from Vegas -and look for me and circle around. There was a signal, if I'd caught 'em and got the food, or if I hadn't and they had to go shopping. So I'm just goin' down with a flashlight in my teeth, goin' by Badger, lookin' on both sides, seein' if they're there. Normally we'd go down a few miles. But I started lookin', and go down through Soap Creek, try to look over to the right at Soap Creek. I thought they wouldn't be stupid enough to camp there, because we all know when the water's gonna be super-low in the morning their boats will be fifty feet out of the water. But I tried to look and kept on going. It just started to get light when I got down to House Rock, and nobody was there. I went on down.... 
Steiger: You ran House Rock all by yourself? 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: Early morning. 
Helin: Yeah. And [I] went down.... 
Steiger: But it was still like 20,000 or something? 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: It hadn't dropped. 
Helin: I'd never seen it like that. "Well, shit, this is easy!" You know, we'd always done Sunday water, scratchy, 8,000 or 10,000 through. That was the first trip I ever saw anything other than that. But anyway, I think it was Fred I ran into on a Hatch boat. There used to be a camp at kind of 18 Mile, 17 -a couple of 'em actually. I pulled in just as he was gettin' out of his bag. "Oh, hi!" "Have you seen an OARS trip?" "Well, yeah, [we] passed 'em. They're somewhere up above ya'." "Oh, shit!" I figured they'd never have come down that far, but I just couldn't see 'em. So a plane comes over, I give 'em the negative. 
Steiger: And they were at Soap Creek? 
Helin: They were at Soap Creek, and they just had.... You know, they barely got to me that night, because they almost had to de-rig to get back to [the water]. But they didn't know. You know, just the classic, "Oh, no, they wouldn't camp there." And then it turned out that my crew went shopping. It all worked out fine because.... 
Steiger: They didn't have enough bread to begin with? 
Helin: We would not have had enough. It ended up, George had kind of been -it was a special group that we're doing the second trip for, and it turns out it was a gay charter. And that was our first experience with gay charters. A group from San Francisco, and George really wasn't into telling us about it, but here they are. A bunch of guys, and they ate like horses, so we ended up with double the stuff, and then we ended up going through it all. I'll never forget, just sittin' back, and here they come rollin' in, and the first thing that happened, I'm sittin' back with my one leg restin' over a knee, and this guy comes up and kind of grabs my toe, (in an effeminate voice), "How's it goin', big boy?" (laughter) It went on from there. 
Steiger: Oh, my God! 
Helin: We ended up doing a great trip. But yeah, that was the first OARS double -that's how it started. 
Steiger: How did George do it? ____________. 
Helin: Oh, God. 
Steiger: Were those all Green Rivers that you were rowin' then, still? 
Helin: Yeah, those were all Greens. 
Steiger: Still the same two-by-six frames. 
Helin: Yeah. I think we had a couple of Havasus. I've got a picture of that somewhere, because this was such a momentous.... We all rendezvoused at Red Wall Cavern for the massive, two OARS trips together, shot. Yeah, I think I remember a Havasu or two had just kind of joined the fleet. Vlado [Vladimir Kovalik] was playin' with his stuff [designing new boats]. 
Steiger: Yeah, those were cool boats at the time. 
Helin: Oh, God, the first ones they sent over, like for the Omo [phonetic spelling], those Holcombs [phonetic spelling], Holcomb Havasus. I don't think any of those ever made it back to the Grand, but those things that I forget who it was importing out of L.A., but it said, "Havasu II, Campways," in like foot-and-a-half lettering down the side of the boat, the first few batches. It was always kind of easy to spot. But yeah, that was the first of the heading toward the present-day eighteen-foot boat. They were the length, but they still had to grow about another foot before what they are today. 
Steiger: Pretty wild. Well, like on those early trips, what were the people like, and how did you view your responsibility to 'em? 
Helin: They were a wilder bunch when compared to the present day. Just more, at that point, say, twenty, twenty-five years ago, just much more of the adventurous -oh, people that were looking for -even though they didn't call it that at that point in time -but adventure travel. Just something off the beaten track. It was people who had done a lot of incredible things, had done a lot of traveling, had had pretty amazing lives, and had just always stayed real active. You know, it's the same group of people you're getting on the extreme Mountain Travel Sobek trips and all today. (tape change) 
Steiger: You were right in the middle of something. 
Helin: We were talking about the different.... We were getting together on that one trip, the double trip. 
Steiger: Oh, I know, we were talking about what the passengers were like and the expectations and all that stuff. I don't actually sense that they have changed. I guess they have. They were more adventurous back then, more like the ones that are doing the Sobek trips now, and like that. 
Helin: There has been some change. It isn't a huge change, but I think especially on the OARS trips, oar-powered trips, we get folks that are still a little more into experiencing things. I haven't run any commercial motor trips. I just would imagine that that's probably changed more than the rowing trips. 
Steiger: Actually, from running a bunch of them back then, you'd get people that would love being on a rowing trip. You get people that can do just fine. There's a lot of blue collar.... 
Helin: Gotcha. 
Steiger: More, actually. I mean, a lot of times on those trips you see people that, you know, I'd rather have the motor people on the dory trip (laughs) and vice versa. I'm not shittin' you. 
Helin: Gotcha. 
Steiger: But whatever. 
Helin: Like I said, it's nothin' night and day, but definitely some shades of gray. A lot of old acquaintances that I cherish keepin' contact with. 
Steiger: I want to just say I keep comin' back to equipment, because I think that you are responsible for some of the real big advances in equipment in this business, and I want to make sure that we get that story. Like I remember this evolution of the OARS equipment that was pretty astounding. We gotta not overlook how all that came about. 
But crew stories, the personalities. What were the dynamics there? Did you guys trade who got to be the leader and all those things? 
Helin: Yeah. We had Shore and Skip, Terry and I did a lot of trips together. And Sam a bit later, through probably the mid or late seventies. It was just the classic pieces of a puzzle. We were all very different. 
Steiger: But complemented each other. 
Helin: But we complemented each other. It was a great match-up and it was always.... Because we only did a few double trips, there's rarely openings for another crew. And what actually happened at OARS to take care of that -because obviously we had some experienced people that had come on just a year later or something, and they couldn't get a trip. They had kind of what they called the "roving crew." They'd go around and do, oh, San Juans and Cataracts and Rogues. 
Steiger: 'Cause George was tryin' to develop other stuff. 
Helin: Exactly. 
Steiger: He had this idea. 
Helin: To keep these guys.... You know, you'd kinda get tired.... 
Steiger: Wanted to expand, to diversify. 
Helin: Yeah. That was the days of doing a lot of half-day and one-day and one-night "Stans": Stanislaus trips and gettin' into the Tuolumne and tryin' on things like the Merced [phonetic spelling] and of course the American and all that. California was gettin' to be big time, but, you know, for people that wanted to get past the one-day scene.... Literally, it was a bus George would just send around, and he'd schedule the various trips, and the roving crew would just drive from launch to take-out, launch to take-out. And they would always come in and pinch hit when there was a second crew on the Grand. 
Steiger: But George started in Grand Canyon? 
Helin: Right. 
Steiger: So Grand Canyon was Crew Number One. 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: And from there you went and slowly got bigger. 
Helin: Yeah. We started first doin' Stanislaus trips probably in -my last couple of years at Santa Barbara -so it was like 1974, 1975. I used to commute from Santa Barbara to Angel's Camp for one-night Stans on the weekends during school. That didn't do much for my studies. But then the roving crew started, in the next couple of years, I think Rogue was one of the first ones, and San Juan. Yeah, George has just always been puttin' trips on in different places, while the crew on the Grand has always been kinda the backbone of it. 
Steiger: I didn't realize that first year, that that was where he started. I wondered sometimes, did he start in California? 
Helin: No. See, that was what really.... There was enough added business from the Stanislaus that that's when he made the jump of quitting teaching, moving out of Santa Monica, moving up to Angel's Camp, and doing it full-time. I think that was probably 1973 or 74, something like that -while Pam was still nursing. Yeah, that was the big step, and "Okay, we're really gonna make a business out of this." 
Steiger: "So let's get goin'." 
Helin: Yeah. And just expanded from there. 
Steiger: How did Liz get into the company? 
Helin: Oh! (laughs) Oh, gosh. Liz first showed up at OARS -we had what we called "the Dino." It had been built for the government as a traveling post office, I think it was in Montana. It was just like a bus -looked like a bus for the first three feet, and then was just an aluminum-sided truck the rest of the way down. It literally was a traveling post office, going from town to town, and George had picked it up on some great deal. (laughs) It was quite the vehicle, though unfortunately underpowered, and the wrong transmission for going up and down all the hills. It lasted a few years, but he put quite a bit of money into keepin' it goin'. Anyway, we were up finishing packing food one night at the Ferry, gettin' ready for a trip launchin' the next day, and this gal stuck her head in the door and just immediately started workin', just pitched right on in there -hardly a "Hi, how are you? What's your name." Just started chippin' in. Oh, started talkin' to George. You know, Liz has never been the shy type. Great, she got in there, helped, and all that. It ended up a trip or two later she came on as a swamper. I think that summer she had pretty much just kinda parked at Lee's Ferry and had done just that -tried to pitch in and help and one way or another get on a river trip. I think actually Bart gets credit for gettin' Liz downstream the first time. 
Steiger: She helped him out, and he took her down. 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: A Hatch trip? 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: I'll be darned. 
Helin: There had been a couple of teachers -I was a kid at the time -who had really pitched in and helped quite a bit on the early private trips. But Liz was definitely one of the first female guides that worked for OARS. 
Steiger: Yeah, here was a girl that wanted to do it. 
Helin: Exactly. And so [we] took her downstream, and she did a lot of good things. She did well. I won't say it was because it was a novelty, but just force of personality, probably as much as anything. She worked into doing trips on the roving crew, and occasionally would get down Grand Canyon. As time went on she did many full seasons. 
Slade started in, I think it was like 1973. I remember a classic training boat, if these names mean anything to you. Bruce Klepinger, Newsome Holmes, and Jim Slade were sharing a boat for a couple of trips. They were all jumping in at that the same time. Klepinger's gone on to do his own ______. He's got -oh, God, he'll shoot me -Ibex -yeah, Ibex Travel. He does personalized adventure travel, much the same as Skip does with his, basically setting up a schedule of trips around the world and leading them all personally. Doin' great with that. 
Steiger: Right there! 
Helin: But all in all, the personalities, it was like, I think, for any of the outfitters, there's a core group that you can mix and match, some people will come in and do great, and other ones, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with 'em, but it's just not the right fit. We definitely had a very solid core for a long time. 
And then it went the other way. I started doin' trips where I'd do four trips in a row and I’d have a different crew on each trip. You know, it just would roll through. 
Steiger: How'd that happen? Did George get more days? Was that when he bought Dories? 
Helin: That, and.... 
Steiger: Or was there somethin' before then? 
Helin: No. 
Steiger: Yeah, he must have got days. Did he get extra days along about 1980? You know, when they did the management plan and they doled out some other days? 
Helin: Yeah, 1980, 1981 there was some, and he had always gone gangbusters on the off season. I mean, he's done very well with that, for as much bad press about the way he went about it or whatever, he still won, he's got those days, and now he puts on a lot of off-season trips. 
Steiger: How did he go about it? I mean, all he did was he sold 'em, right? And nobody else was. 
Helin: It was a loophole, he found a little thing in that management plan, and Dick Marks didn’t like George’s interpretation of the rules. I think that was at least the case. But [he] basically took advantage of an opening that was available, and just capitalized on it big time, and by the time the Park realized what was goin' on, and they wanted it back.... 
Steiger: He was grandfathered in. 
Helin: Yeah, he was grandfathered in. Oh, they rode him hard for a while because of that. But no, it was more that the core crew was breaking up, that the core crew was [having] the twangs of legitimacy, or being real, or going out into the real world and having a real career because this was.... 
Steiger: Everybody was countin' on just bein' an OARS boatman for their thing. 
Helin: Everybody looked at it at that point, who thought about it, was, "Hey, I'm gonna be here for a couple of years; this is gonna be a real transient thing; this is simply a phase I'm going through"; all this. A lot of people in just whatever you want to call it, early-life crisis or whatever, "Hey, I gotta go back...." You know, a lot of people would came out of unfinished educations, or had got bummed out in careers or whatever, and just wanted to get out for a few years. And so a lot of that rollover happened in the late seventies, and by that point in time we'd been training lots of guides. Like I say, on every trip we'd have training boats with two or three people. ( 
Steiger: So there were guys around to do it.) 
Helin: We had a backlog, plus we had the California operation with a lot of people out there, so we had a lot of guides available. So for a while there I was the old stick-in-the-mud and just goin' through crews all summer. 
Steiger: You'd have to be leadin', but it was always a new and different crew. That's a hard job. 
Helin: Oh, it was. 
Steiger: It's that way now more. It seems like there's not that many.... I remember in the seventies, everybody, there was a core crew and you didn't see a lot of.... There was like the OARS crew, the WiWo [Wilderness World] crew. I mean, the motor trips you'd see, there were all these different pairs that would go, or whatever. There was more mix and match. Boy, to get a rowin' [seat?], man, that was really.... There was you and WiWo and Dories. 
Helin: And those Dory guides wouldn't talk to anybody. 
Steiger: Oh, yeah? (laughter) They wouldn't even talk to you guys?! 
Helin: And then there was Claire and all. Yeah, we had to chip on some ice cubes there, but yeah, kinda.... Things changed nicely. There wasn't a lot of inter-outfitter camaraderie early on -it seemed to be more competitive or whatever at that point in time. 
Steiger: Somewhere we got together, didn't we? I didn't feel that way with the boatmen. I never felt like we were competing. We didn't know each other all that well. 
Helin: Well, I think it may have been more just from ignorance, or not knowing each other, and people not being quite as forward as we are these days about it, coming and saying, "Hi! How are you? What's your name?" that kind of thing. I don't think there was a lot of communication between the outfitters at that point in time. I don't think there was an outfitters association early on. You know, once the park meetings up at Albright Training Center started.... Oh, God, who was I talking to? At Lars' wedding, I was talking to Nels about the first time I met Lars, it was 1976 up at the meeting where Ernie Cunsell [phonetic spelling] pulled the blank shot with the blood and the.... 
Steiger: Oh, and shot somebody. 
Helin: Yeah, shot somebody. And that was one of the first kind of guide meetings. 
Steiger: I missed that one. 
Helin: Oh, that was hilarious. I forget who the victim was. All I remember is Louise was just screaming, it was quite real -there was a bunch of really pissed off people. 
Steiger: He was teaching a first aid class? 
Helin: Doing a first aid class, talking about trauma, you know, open wounds or whatever. And God, who was it? I think it was a male AZRA guide, and they'd got together.... And Ernie already had his reputation at that point in time. This guide just starts mouthin' off to him in the front row, "You're full of it. (mutter, mutter, mutter)" [Ernie] is just wearin' his sidearm, as he always does, and he just whips out his gun and shoots the guy in the front row. And he's set up with a blood bag, so that all of a sudden it's just pumpin' blood out. 
Steiger: And it's like, "Oh, my God!" 
Helin: And it was a while before everybody realized it was a joke. It was very well done. 
Steiger: Everybody was aghast. 
Helin: Yeah, it was quite the little scene. 
Steiger: Ernie Cunsell was a park ranger who was an EMT. He worked in a helicopter. 
Helin: Right. 
Steiger: And when they first started gettin' the idea that they had to educate guides, he taught some courses, and he was actually pretty competent, he was a good guy. 
Helin: He's one of those personalities that rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but competency-wise, yeah, I dealt with him on several occasions with things on the river, and he was just right there. 
Steiger: He was fine. 
Helin: Yeah, he was a great guy to have around. 
Steiger: The good ol' days. I mean, those were the days when the helicopter cost $350 an hour. (
Helin: Right.) 
Steiger:Now it's, what, $2,000 or something, an hour? It's way up there. 
Helin: We never had a radio, always used signal mirrors and always lucked out. 
Steiger: Always got somebody when you needed 'em. 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: Okay, maybe we should talk about equipment. I remember the Green Rivers and the loads. I remember these boards that started on top of the tubes. I remember these real top-heavy loads and everything went up. And not just with you guys, but everybody -OARS especially. And I remember you as bein' the first.... I remember the equipment suddenly went through this -and it seemed like it was overnight -it went through this incredible evolution, and all of a sudden it was cool. 
Helin: In reality, it was probably about four years of changing. 
Steiger: How did all that go? 
Helin: It was simply a fact of what we had was so bad. I really enjoyed what I was doing, but I could just see a lot of ways that it could be done better. Probably a lot of the ideas were just from lookin' at other people's boats, or how the people would approach different situations or loads and that kind of thing. You know, we just went through this.... We talked about the plates that we used. That was our first frame, was gluing a plate onto the tube of a boat. The next step was the two-by-eights. And that really stayed with us 'til.... Let's see, we went up to Alaska in 1977. Basically, I think we started doin' Tatshensheni trips. They'd done an exploratory in 1976, and we went up and did some commercial trips in 1977, and we needed some frames that we could fly out, because of the Dry Bay fly out situation. I had been lookin' at it, I'm tryin' to talk George into various things, but you know, George is always -we'd get new equipment, but hey, basically, if it works, don't play with it, it's fine. And here I'm coming from.... 
Steiger: "Now I have to use this." 
Helin: Right, that, and I've got -my father's a mechanical engineer, and some of that rubbed off, and I did some physics and all that. "Hey, look, this could be a lot better; this could be a lot more user-friendly. It may cost a little bit, but hey, if we're gonna do this for a while, we're gonna spend so many months down here a year, well hell, I'll just do it for myself." Oh, I think George financed a couple of the less expensive things, but basically in the winter I'd take off and just play with something. But the first thing that really got us over.... No, actually, the first year in Alaska we had these little steel frames that we'd kinda break apart, but really more fell apart, so we could fly 'em out. They were extremely frustrating and very hard to use. That was the first year. So [I] came back, and I was helpin' manage California in the spring of 1978, something like that, and somebody had shown up, or George somehow had this -somebody was calling it a frame, but it was jut some pieces of tube with some fittings on. 
Steiger: Speed rail. 
Helin: Speed rail. And I'm going, "Gosh, some of this stuff looks pretty good!" But some of the stuff that they had done was just, "Well, this doesn't make any sense." We had the impetus of Alaska, "We don't wanna hafta mess with those steel frames this year. What can we do different?" So basically this was a [Gilbert?] erector set. I took things apart, and I was able to finally get a catalog of all the different pieces. Hey! The guy who had built the first one had an idea, but with a little more lookin', there were some better fittings that were more appropriate for certain uses and all this stuff. So, "Hey, I can put together a real simple little frame here that you can take down to a bunch of fittings and a couple pieces of pipe. This'll be great for Alaska!" So I did those, just the very simple ones, and I went, "Hey, well gosh, I can doll this up a little bit more, put in a couple more support bars, or make it bigger, and it might work out better on the Grand Canyon trips, it'll hold more." So I did a definitely Gilbert erector set -this is probably ten or fifteen fittings in it -frame, and used it for a season in Grand Canyon, and it worked out great, bein' able to move oarlocks around at angles and things like that. That was neat. 
Steiger: Adjustable oarlocks, yeah. 
Helin: Adjustable oarlocks. But one of the nice things about the wood frames was the fact you could walk on the wood. 
Steiger: Comfort _____. 
Helin: Just like you're talkin' about the boards across in the front. We had a front board in the old rig for a seat, and we'd stand up black bags underneath it, and then have a big old table board across the back, and that's where we'd put the cooler, or what we called our kitchen box, "Big Bertha." But we kept the thwarts in. We figured we needed 'em -I mean, I don't think it had really dawned on us early on to even take 'em out, 'cause we thought we needed 'em for flotation. But as the boats changed -like those Havasu IIs were the first -and they were probably only twenty-inch, but they were bigger than anything else -tubes. And it made the cross-tubes be a little less important. So I did that speed rail frame for a year, and hey, it was fine, but it was nice being able to have something flat to walk on. I've never been one with grace, poise, and elegance, and having a nice flat place to walk up and down your boat was a nice thing. So the next year, I made a steel one, because the aluminum one had been pretty expensive, and George would go for lettin' me build a steel one with some little wooden inset decks, very similar to what we're doin' right now. And that worked great, but there was painted wood, and steel that would rust. 
Steiger: You had to paint it every so often, uh-huh. 
Helin: McCallum, I think, had already done some aluminum diamond-plate frames. I can't remember, I think he had pulled like one thwart out of a boat or something at that point. 
I don't think there's that much original thought in the design -it's just taking things that I'd seen done before and kind of pullin' 'em all together and see if I could incorporate 'em. And it was, I think like 1980, I wanted to build an all aluminum frame but George wasn’t buying it. I guess my projections of the cost of doing the next step in aluminum was just more than he even wanted to think about. I was pretty thick into it at that point, and hey, I am doing this a lot, and hell, I might as well try and do something that I think will work a lot better. And it's been a process of a lot of thought. I think it was the winter of 1980 that I had made arrangements to get the demo boat from the year before through Jerry Sehigh at Avon, one of the new design Spirits, which seemed to have the right tube size and configuration for what I wanted to do, and it had removable thwarts. During the winter, I used to help a friend run a kind of a custom auto shop in the Ventura area, and he had a tube bender. And I started playin' with alloys and finding some tube that would bend and do what I needed, and went down and found a place in LA that would sell me some pieces of diamond plate and this kind of thing, and built it in the course of a winter. Then it turns out the folks across the way at this little industrial park made soft goods. They were early, oh, kind of like Tony and Ann Anderson’s Summit business, making backpacks, wallets, and things like that, out of the Cordura [phonetic spelling], and had industrial machines. So I had got to know those guys and talked them into making me a couple, quote, unquote, "drop bags," for this frame out of this good, heavy-duty material, in a couple of permutations. The first frame actually had two different types, just to try 'em. 
And so I think 1981 was the first season I had it out. Oh, God.... Well, I took both the thwarts out -that, I think was the main thing that threw everybody off. They'd always figured ( 
Steiger: You can't do that.) 
Helin: you can't do that, you're gonna sink, the boat's gonna squeeze together to be two feet wide. I had gone to the trouble of doing interior "D" rings and all this. It was pretty well bound together as anything. I went from one extreme to start out with, and just as the trips went by, kept playing with, eliminating certain things. "Hey, yeah, it's not that big a deal." (chuckles) It was great, you could walk around on it, it was really adjustable, it could work for anybody, but I think the biggest selling point was once the rest of the crew realized I'd already drank a beer or two by the time they got through untying all their black bags at camp and unloading their boats, I think that was the big leap. 
Steiger: So you made this one frame, and that was your frame? 
Helin: That was my frame, my boat. I figured I had.... It was one of those things, my next step, you know, I played around with everything I could. None of George's boats had thwarts that you could take out easily. They were all Green Rivers or Grand boats that had glued-in thwarts. I can't blame him, I wouldn't have felt good about cuttin' one of 'em out either, without knowin' how it was gonna work. So I had to go to a different boat to try it in a recoverable fashion, where if it was a completely horrible idea, I could put the thwarts back in and sell the boat. So, yeah, it just was, "Hey, I've got my own thing." I think George gave me a little bit for runnin' it. That was the thing, and then the folks really liked it. 
Steiger: After one trip, everybody wanted one. 
Helin: It was a couple of trips, but yeah. And the passengers loved it 'cause they had lots of places to lay out. Just a lot more comfortable and a lot easier for them to get around. But it was mainly the idea of -see, we used to tie on every black bag and ammo box. (
Steiger: Individually.) Everything with string. We were barely into straps at that point. Anywhere I could take a couple straps off and take twenty pieces of gear out, it was just, "Hey, this is easy!" And I also had done, with that first rig, a couple of the dry boxes, those aluminum-size boxes, and that was the other thing, "Hey, I've got all my stuff right here." The hilarious thing was my boat would be half empty and the crew would say "God damn it, carry your load!" I'd say, "Okay." I took everything out, and it turns out I had more than any of the loads they were carrying, but it only took up about half the room, just because of the configuration ( 
Steiger: 'Cause you had that much space.) 
Helin: and the boxes and all that. And that's really -I mean, that's when we started bringing down the kitchen sink on OARS trips, because all of a sudden, hey, we've got this huge increase of storage and room. It was pretty funny. I got called on it a couple of times. "Okay, well, you go ahead and add up what you've got on your boat, and come over and see what I got on this boat." "Oh." And just the fact that everybody could row it. You know, whether Joy was in the rowing seat, she could move things around, and she would be comfortable, and I could turn around in five minutes and row the same boat. And that was, I think, a big thing. Everybody could dial it in. 
Steiger: Yeah. There's a bunch of features. I remember always lovin', really keepin' an eye on just the rowin' scene from the back of my motorboat, and the dories, those were really cool. And then Wilderness World I thought was really neat. For a while there, I mean, they were doin' a variation. Vladimir [Kovalik], those guys had a really tricked-out set. But then all of a sudden, OARS like, kinda from behind (laughs) from the back of the pack, zoomed up there. And I remember all of a sudden, the company, they all had -somehow it was like Domars [phonetic spelling] had your frames, but with boards -wood, not diamond plate. 
Helin: Well, that was one of the hilarious things, it was classic George. I went ahead and did this, and everybody liked it, and George asked me how much it would cost to build more of 'em, and I gave him a price. It ends up the next year Mike Walker had joined us. I think it was early eighties at some point in time. And he might have had a season or two with us at that point, but anyway, Mike had gone and talked with Dean about helpin' him make the frames. 
Steiger: Dean Waterman. 
Helin: Yeah. It was just too much money for George, and he figured since he was hiring, had Mike just like Regan, workin' on the boats, well, hell, he'll just have Mike build the frames for him in the winter. And so Mike would have Dean cut up all the stuff. They had to do kind of segmented corners. That's where those old frames that you see at OARS come from. It's not a bend, it's two 45s [two 45-degree angles (Tr.)]. Dean would do all those for him, and I guess he welded some of the stuff up there, but Walker had some of it brought down here. So Walker made a bunch of frames. They wouldn't quite go for taking both thwarts out, so they took a rear thwart out and left the front thwart in, and then did wood decking around, just as a dollar-saver. And so they used those for a couple of years, until they realized that they really should have taken the front thwart out, instead of the rear thwart -but they really should have taken 'em both out anyway, 'cause it had proven that the two thwarts out worked. 
Steiger: No big deal. 
Helin: And it ended up, we gutted those frames a few years later and rebuilt them as having drop bags at both ends. So there was a progression there. It was AZRA, in 1983-1984, that was the first company that went, "Yeah, we want 'em!" That was.... 
Steiger: You mean you built a full set of frames for AZRA before OARS? 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: I'll be darned. 
Helin: George ran the permutations for two or three years before it finally was clear that now it was okay and they should have done.... But it was just, you know, little steps. 
Steiger: Penny wise, pound foolish. I mean, the thing about your frames is.... So what you got now is this kind of speed rail. It's a bent.... It's aluminum with these nice bent corners, and everything that needs to be adjustable is adjustable -the oarlocks and the cooler bars, and then the two drop bags. But it's all aluminum, and once you buy a frame, that's it. There's no maintenance whatsoever. 
Helin: Yes. It was very bad planning. 
Steiger: (laughs) You should have built some maintenance in? 
Helin: Yeah! Well, I finally figured out what I should have been doing all along, is after the frame was built, put a little hole in it, fill the interior with some kind of corrosive gas that would eat the frame apart from the inside after about five years or something like this. (Steiger laughs) AZRA's still running those frames. (
Steiger: Everybody is.) They've probably got frames with 200-300 trips on 'em, easy. Yeah. It's been fun to watch. You know, there's been some little tiny changes, and we've added a few things. Maybe the original will be found one of these days. My very first frame set, the one I built in 1980, we lost that in the flood at Diamond Creek washout in 1985, and it was the one frame that wasn't recovered, because.... 
Steiger: Your personal frame? 
Helin: My personal frame, because I had aluminum decks, and all the OARS frames had wooden decks. 
Steiger: And they all floated. 
Helin: They floated. And mine sank. So my frame set is somewhere, most likely downstream in the main channel, the very first set. 
Steiger: So you were on that trip with OARS, with that flood? 
Helin: Yeah, that was my trip. 
Steiger: Oh ho ho! We should hear that story! 
Helin: Well, yeah, definitely. My perspective is pretty boring, because I was leading it. We pulled in at Diamond Creek, and there was the AZRA trip there, and I think we were using the Hualapai buses at that point. 
Steiger: So you got on the bus with the people. 
[END TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A] 
Helin: Yeah, basically. The bottom end was flashed out, but we knew that the vehicles were up at the confluence with Peach Springs Wash, so basically we just gathered all the passengers and all the crew hiked out with me. Everybody was carrying all the passenger gear they possibly could, to get them out intact. I ended up goin' back into Flag with 'em, to take care of things at this end. Walker was there with the truck, and two or three other of the crew -Sam, and I forget who-all was on that--but they went back down to push the road in after we left, and I just had my passengers and went back to Flagstaff on the bus. So they went back down a couple of hours later, once the water had receded a bit with the truck, and.... Well, you've probably got other solid versions of the story, but.... 
Steiger: I haven't yet. Walker is the guy I've gotta talk to about that. 
Helin: Walker, or Sam West. I'm sure I've got it somewhere. But yeah, they were the primaries. 
Steiger: So these guys get in a truck and they're comin' out Diamond Creek with the O.U. [Outdoors Unlimited] trip, and the O.U. truck gets stuck, the OARS guys get out to help 'em, and this wall of water comes around the corner and washes both trucks into the river. 
Helin: Yeah, with all the incredible nuances of the OARS truck.... Well, the first thing.... (end of Master Tape 1) 
Steiger: Okay, this is Part Two, this is the River Runners Oral History Project. This is Lew Steiger. Part Two of an interview with Bruce Helin. It's September 16, 1998. 
So evolution of equipment. But in a nutshell, though, by hook or by crook, you did this thing where you were right in the middle of ratchetting the equipment up -what's the word I want? -a major level (laughs) in terms of performance. We went from havin' these real high-load boats that were much harder to row, high centers of gravity, and loads that were way looser, and a lot harder to get on and off the boat: to havin' frames that were bomber strong, that never needed any maintenance, and loads that were down really low and in the middle of the boats, and that you could carry a lot more stuff, and it was all.... 
Helin: All your beach equipment. 
Steiger: And the boats were suddenly way safer, and it was a huge deal. 
Helin: It was self-preservation. I was usually the biggest kid on the block.... 
Steiger: Let's see, so that's physics? That's part of it. 
Helin: Yeah, there's certainly some of that comes into play, but a lot of it's just engineering from my father, you know, building things with him. It's just it was one of those good combos of I had a little bit of background, and I'd been doin' trips for a while. I knew what worked and what didn't work, and had a direction I was working in. And yeah, there's very basic things like center of gravity, and the fulcrum for the oars, and just the physics involved. You know, optimizing body position and how you best are able to row a boat most effectively, most efficiently. I am as lazy as I possibly can be, and the whole idea was just based on making things as simple and easy as I could. And that, luckily, was a good premise. The simplicity, I think, was the main thing. It worked in with a lot of systems that people already had established, so they didn't have to change everything. 
Steiger: All they had to do was buy your frames. 
Helin: Yeah, and then they could still use a lot of their old equipment, because the frames worked with a bunch of different stuff, and just as normally is the case, simple is better. 
Steiger: Well, now, let's see, AZRA got a set of 'em, and then OARS did. (
Helin: Yeah.) Who else has gotten 'em, have you sold those frames to? 
Helin: Oh, [Ken] Sleight bought his initial ones from us. Claire [Quist] got some. They both have done some of their own since. Oh, Dave McKay, Tour West, O.U., various Wilderness Worlds, Can-Exes -basically everybody and the Park. 
Steiger: ARR? 
Helin: ARR. 
Steiger: Basically everybody. (laughs) 
Helin: Most everybody does. Real good news here recently, in fact Western is taking a set for his test drive as we speak. 
Steiger: Well, you know, how can you.... That's a hell of a design. 
Helin: It works. I just wish there was a bigger market! (laughs) 
Steiger: __________ in the third world. 
Helin: Yeah, _______. I keep beating my head against the wall, "What can I do to improve the design enough to a point where somebody will go out and buy another frame?" I haven't even come close yet. I mean, we keep adding permutations -whether it's tables or specialty boxes, accessories, sand stakes, that kind of thing -but yeah, it's worked, it's been a lot of fun, it's always fun to see the stuff go out on the water and bein' used. 
Steiger: Making all this equipment involved a lot of welding. Have you been into that, do you like doin' that? 
Helin: I wish I did. That's one of the things. I can row boats, but I can't weld for shit. It was always a frustration. Welding is an art, and it takes the right person to do it. And luckily I was around people that were capable of it, and I could do the designing and that kind of thing. 
Steiger: And get 'em to do it. 
Helin: Yeah. I'd be too embarrassed to send out a frame that I had welded. 
Steiger: I'll be darned, I didn't realize that. Yeah, that heliarc [phonetic spelling] stuff, that seems pretty.... 
Helin: Yeah, some people can just make 'em dance, and other people just make holes and puddles. Yeah, it's an art, and it's been fun. We've actually trained a lot of welders in the shop, from being completely non-welders, but just having a flair for it. So that's been fun. Haven't gone through a lot of employees, we've had a very stable bunch, but kind of that hand down from one to the other, somebody decides to move on, training somebody new, to building and actually the welding and all that. 
Steiger: Well, I don't know which way to go here, to go right into the story of PRO.... But there's something else we haven't talked about at all, and that's Sobek, which is the sister company to OARS, which was started by Rich Bangs and John Yost [phonetic spellings] and George Wendt, and that's a company that runs internationally, all over the place. And we've heard about it elsewhere. I was talkin' to Moody this morning, and he was talking about Sobek days, and that's a whole nother chapter. 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: I don't guess that had much influence on PRO, huh? But you did a lot of international boating. 
Helin: Yeah. No, PRO was mainly the offshoot of basically getting married and going, "Hey, I have to figure out some way to support a lifestyle." Obviously my guiding paychecks weren't gonna do that. It was, "Hey, we gotta do this if we're gonna have anything and try and make it." It was just frames to start out with. I'd been tinkerin' since the early seventies. I built a lot of the old OARS wood frames at Lee's Ferry by Coleman lantern -something that had blown off the trailer, or somebody broke one last trip, so he stopped in Flagstaff and got a couple pieces of wood and some bolts. No, I think it was like 1981 or 1982 before I even had any kind of brochure. I was just doing it out of a friend's shop. That was 1983 where [I] first started usin' the name Rapid Transit. I soon found somebody else was usin' that back East, so I just dropped that, and went with PRO. It was strictly frames. A fellow I'd worked with in California had a bender which was really the major investment. 
Steiger: So Professional River Outfitters was strictly building frames. 
Helin: Yeah. That's the way it started out. Strictly was fabrication. And I'd bought a used bender out here at a sheriff's auction. 
Steiger: I remember you had one in the basement here. 
Helin: That was that one. Some poor guy had gone out of business at an automotive shop, and there was a bender, and I went out and bid on it and got it. Yeah, I had to completely rebuild it, but got it workin' again. We just used our classic basement shop, and had a bender, and got a welder. Kevin Craig was our first employee, first welder. He'd worked down at Emilio Mayorga's [phonetic spelling] for a while. I built a lot of frames that were just break-down that I could just make myself. There was no welding involved, and those were a lot of the ones we used for Alaska and a lot of private boaters -they're real popular for that. That was an Avon PRO, kind of a classic set-up. 
Yeah, got serious about it in 1983 and went back to a show or two. Just got a call from, oh, I don't know if it was Rob or Jessica or who it was, but wanted to see some pictures of the set-up, so I went out to the OARS warehouse and set up a couple of Caligaris with my frames on 'em, tryin' to show the options, and sent 'em [i.e., pictures of the frames and set-ups (Tr.)] off. Sure enough, a couple of months later, I got an order for twenty or thirty sets. 
Steiger: From Rob? 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: So he was smart enough to see that that was a cool frame -he himself figured it out. 
Helin: Yeah. 
Steiger: Gotta give him credit for that. 
Helin: Yeah, definitely. I've got a couple of classic [pictures] over at the new office -got pictures of that AZRA order downstairs in the basement, the stacks and stacks of frames, just crankin' those out. That was basically a full winter's work that first year. 
It just followed on through, doin' a lot of stuff for Sobek. Built most of their frames. But then the various outfitters. George came back, and then finally started buyin' frames from us. Oh, John Vail was early on. Oh, and Diamond and Wilderness and all those guys are using all our stuff now. I think we built everybody's.... Dick was one of the last. I think Mark Sleight may still have some. 
Steiger: McCallum got some of your frames? 
Helin: Oh, yeah. You know, he was goin' to for years. We've talked frames for years, and he's always, "I'm gonna get some of yours. All the crew wants it." But he loved to weld, he loved to tinker with that stuff. I always get a kick.... "Well, I decided I'm gonna give this one more year." (laughter) ________ talk to you next year. But now that they've sold, the poor Can-Ex crew inherited the gear. I was up at the Ferry the other day puttin' in a science trip. The Expeditions truck shows up with a Canyon Expeditions trip in it, and they're handing down our frames that they've got a couple of -the PRO frames -and they're using the lift gate of the truck to lower Mack's frames down. 
Steiger: They've still got those? 
Helin: They're still using them. And I was leaning over the side of the truck, and I just started laughing. I said, "God, I love watching that future business," and their whole crew cracked up. They were just ready to throw 'em off the back of the truck somewhere. 
Steiger: Yeah, that is some future business, too. 
Helin: Yes, converting over. So yes, now we've made a very fairly complete market. It's been great, and it's fun to see it all getting used, and people enjoying it. It's been real satisfying. 
Steiger: What gave you the idea? How did you move from that to the idea of renting out to the painless private? It's a great idea, I gotta say. 
Helin: It was basically I started getting calls.... Hey, there's no two ways about it, the gear's expensive. The outfitters at that point would say, "Hey, okay, we understand it's worth it." The outfitters were slowly acquiescing at that point, and coming in with business. And there were a very, very few privates that would call. But all of a sudden I started getting calls about, "God, you know, I got a Grand Canyon trip comin' up this year. We hear you build really good equipment, or the equipment that we should have for the trip, but hey, I'm only gonna do this once, and I just can't really see usin' it anywhere else. Can't we rent it from you or something? Isn't there anything we can do besides having to buy this equipment?" And I just kept getting these calls from people with these private Grand Canyon trips, which I don't even know if they'd really been in my consciousness. We knew they were there, but it was just kind of a different world. 
Steiger: You didn't think of it, "Hey, here's an angle." They came to you. 
Helin: Right, they definitely came to me. The frames and the bigger boat, the eighteen-footer. " Hey, we understand that's the rig to have, but again, hey, we don't want an eighteen-footer when we're runnin' the Stanislaus or the Tuolumne or the Rogue or the Middle Fork or whatever. We want our little fourteens and sixteens or whatever." So there was just this clear thing that the Grand Canyon had a unique enough set of requirements (
Steiger: There was a niche.) 
Helin:for the equipment to do it properly, or to do it the best you could, or at least the best you could at the time. It was unique or different from what most people were set up for, for private boating. 
Steiger: But it made sense, you could set up a trip or two's worth of stuff. You'd only spent fifteen years learnin' what you needed. 
Helin: Right. It's the old thing, if you do it all the time, it's easy. If you're having to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch, it's a nightmare. It just rolled on from there. Okay, well, I picked up some Havasus. There was a slight misrun on some boats -I think it was for AZRA again. They were a little bit off specification, and I ended up, I could afford to buy a couple of these boats. I bought two the first year we did it, and just set 'em up and rented 'em out. They were gone, and people wanted more. Then they wanted to know where our business was located and where they could have their group met. For a long time I would always deliver the stuff to them. At one point I had gear stored in seven different locations: people's back yards, extra room in their garage, and this kind of thing. But people are goin', "God, here we are...." And everybody would come into town, and they'd usually go pick some poor supermarket's parking lot. 
Steiger: To put it all together. 
Helin: To put it all together. And they'd want us.... "God, I guess, well, rendezvous with us over here," or whatever. And here would be this menagerie, a dozen or so shopping carts all around with this food, and they're tryin' to pack somethin' over here, and put coolers together over there, and here we're comin' with a couple of boats. _____ "Okay, great, there's the boats. I sure wish somebody could do this food. I don't know how to pack food for fifteen people on fourteen days. This doesn't make any sense. Why can't somebody do this for us?!" And, "Oh, we got all these cars. How are we gonna get there? How are we gonna do this shuttle? God, it'd sure be a lot easier if somebody had a van or a bus or something like that." And we’d just go, "Well, yeah, that's a good idea." And the stopper, I think what we finally pressed on through, was that for a long time -well, since the first management plan -the park had made a fairly clear statement that there was to be no commercial involvement in a private trip. And I think everybody.... 
Steiger: Why?! 
Helin: The Park makes good use of their power of the pen. Basically, if they tell us something or put it in writing, we take it to heart, or we take it as being a serious statement, and one that they are able to back up, or in a position to make stick which we now know is not always the case. But anyway, there was that statement in the plan -and it's not verbatim by any means -but basically that there was not to be any commercial involvement. 
Steiger: The costs were gonna be shared equally. 
Helin: Yeah, costs were going to be shared equally, but the fact that it gave the definite impression that you weren't even supposed to use somebody to do your shuttle. And the idea of a rental boat or that kind of thing was a no-no -which didn't seem.... It just doesn't make any sense, because obviously you could rent a sleeping bag in Flagstaff and take it downstream. How are they justifying this?! 
And a certain friend, an individual who was up with the park at the time, I just said, "Hey, what's up with this? Is this something serious?" I don't need to mention any names here, but just, "Is this really what they mean?" And it was an individual who knew the river quite well and all. Hey, obviously a lot of these people are going out ill-equipped, don't have enough food, whatever, and we were rescuin' people a lot of times back then, the privates. 
Steiger: A lot of times. 
Helin: I said, "How can it be bad to offer these services?" Not even coming around to the fact that I don't think you can legally do this, but just saying, "We know that this could help some people." 
Steiger: And who does it hurt? 
Helin: Yeah, who does it hurt? So I kind of got a, "Hey, go ahead and give it a try," in that we're gonna affect one or two trips the next year or something like that. So we went ahead and started workin' on a menu, hired a guy to help me write a menu program, modify a program to do menu planning with, because that was gonna be one of the keys. Sure I can sit down and I can do a menu manually, it'd take me a couple of hours. 
Steiger: But you'd rather just punch in the number of people and have it do it for the whole trip. 
Helin: Yeah. Just clearly, if this thing was gonna go anywhere, that was a key thing to have. 
Steiger: So you just break down the portion sizes per person, you're gonna get this much, and that's what it is. 
Helin: Yeah, in a nutshell. It still is an ongoing process. It's amazing how we keep playing with it. 
Steiger: Yeah. And you're writing your own software to do that? 
Helin: Jim Hansen is, who we eventually got together with. Yeah, I basically told him what we needed to do, and then he translated that into computer-ese. Computer is another one of those things -I had to take keypunch and fortran when I was in school, but I still stay off computers. I don't have any urges there. 
So that came in, and we just started renting vehicles, renting vans from Budget, that kind of thing, and getting a few more boats. We did a number of trips and the revues were good from all sides. The rangers were very overt about letting the Rim know that the trips we're sending out were far better prepared than the average private trip. And also they even noticed a decline in the numbers on rescues and things like that, they never had to come in to save anybody because of gear problems [i.e., who had been outfitted by PRO (Tr.)] They're just goin', "Hey this is makin' our life easier, too. We're not havin' to deal with these rescue scenes or these nightmares." So I think it was basically just something they said to retain control of the options.... I don't know if "backed off" is the right word, or more that they just said, "this is okay." 
Steiger: I wouldn't do it any other way. I mean, my name's on the list, and when it comes up.... Oh, I might borrow some stuff from R.D. if I can. 
Helin: That's what's been so much fun about it, it is a good thing, and I want to go on one when I go, too. You know, we did that for that little trip, we got a bunch of the pards together for the Salt River trip, and we just had PRO set up the trip for us, and it was great! (laughter) It worked. It was crazy. Thank God everybody thought we were crazy for a long time. When we tried to explain what we were startin' to do, people would just kind of look at me and walk away. Unfortunately, probably a portion of it was the fact that I was I guess somehow lowering myself to dealing with the private trips. There was a lot of that early on. "What are you? A turncoat?" There was some strange stuff there. But it worked, and it helped everybody. Commercial trips didn't have to play around with messed-up privates any more. "Oh, gosh, yeah! We can actually borrow some stuff, because these guys have enough stuff!" Or whatever. You know, would have certain equipment. 
Steiger: Well, in some ways, it's interesting, 'cause the more paranoid among us would say, "Well, that's making us obsolete." (laughs) In a way, we're givin' all these people the tools to just do it. But I don't think that's unhealthy. 
Helin: No. And there's such a pool of people that want to do the trip, and who will never even think about rowing their own boat. It's a different crowd. There is a very big difference between today's commercial passenger on an outfitted trip, and a private boater. Just a very distinct difference. I think there's a big enough sea of potential customers for either direction. But it's really a different pool. 
Steiger: I don't know, sometimes you look these people over at the Ferry, and I wouldn't say necessarily the ones that are dealing with you, but some of these other sets of equipment and some of those people, it's like.... (whistles) I mean, I look at some of the ladies and stuff, and they're not that different from the ones that we got, I swear to God -the passengers. But then there's the guys that are runnin' the boats -they're definitely different. I mean, they're the guys that you had 'em on a commercial trip and they were great, and they helped out, and they were totally into it, and they've just taken the next step. 
Helin: Gotcha. What may happen, too, is that you see a lot of this on the private trips where people, they think they have sixteen people and all this, and then all of a sudden they have ten, and want to fill back up. I think you often times get groups that have a lot of people added at the last minute, just kind of friends of friends. 
Steiger: Right, out of the middle of nowhere. 
Helin: Out of the middle of nowhere, and really, really clueless. You know, like showing up at the Ferry with their Samsonite luggage and this kind of thing. So you get more extremes, I think, with the private trips, just from the nature of the beast. 
Steiger: Well, it's a pretty wild time. I don't know, I wonder. I mean, I have this theory that there's so many numbers, there's so many people goin' down there, that you wouldn't want it to all be private trips, because it would be the massive cluster fuck. I mean, I do have that sense. But it's interesting, with the CRMP. There's a lot of pressure on us to be better. (laughs) I mean, there's a lot of people lookin' at the commercial sector and goin', "Who needs you?!" (laughs) 
Helin: Nah. No, I've always done commercial boating, and I feel no threat whatsoever. Both will exist, and maybe some numbers will flip-flop back and forth a few percentages, but I don't have that sense of doom for anybody. It's a fixed commodity that we have to divvy up one way or another, but I don't see anybody bein' cut out of the loop anytime in the future. I kind of have, I guess, a foot in each door, and I just usually keep quiet, because basically anything I say will either be taken wrong by the outfitters or by the privates, and I'm involved in each side. 
Steiger: Well, it shouldn't be "them" against "us." It shouldn't be. I mean it is right now in certain circles, but.... Well, that's politics, I suppose. 
Helin: Yeah. I haven't gotten.... Well, I guess mainly because I've just figured I'm better off keepin' my mouth shut in the whole thing. Literally, if I show support for one side, the other side is gonna be pissed off. I look at 'em both as good friends, really, in many respects. 
Steiger: Yeah, absolutely. 
Helin: Riding the fence there. I don't think anybody had anything major to worry about. It amazes me how concerned some people are. The Park Service has never worked in big steps, you know, drastic action. They'd be hit so hard, so fast, with so many suits and stuff if they seriously changed anything. 
Steiger: Well, also, how broke is everything? 
Helin: Right. 
Steiger: That's what you have to ask yourself. And I don't think things are that broke. 
Helin: I think the only thing that's broke is the number of people on the waiting list, the private sector. I think there's a lot that can be done just to improve the efficiency of the system, and make use of what's there and allocated. 
Steiger: This idea of the reservation-based system -you know, when you're ready to go, you call 'em up -that was the outfitters' thing, they came up with that, and that has a ring to it, to me. And what it is, is there is no waiting list -or the waiting list starts with every year you start over and you take everybody that's ready. And after that, after those days are filled, then you start on your waiting list. You take everybody that's ready that year, and they put up their money and they want a date that year. But the trouble with goin' to that is what do you tell all these people that have already been on the waiting list for however many years. 
Helin: Yeah, you're gonna have a hell of a transition period. 
Steiger: Payin' in. So that's a tough one. But what else? I'm tryin' to think of some kind of smart question to ask you about PRO. I think it's cool. Like I said, I'm on the list, and when I decide to go, that would be the logical.... Because it is hard to get all the stuff, and once you've worked for a commercial outfit, you don't like -you want it to all be there. You get used to it. 
Helin: Yeah, you get used to it. 
Steiger: And it's nice to have, and when you go on a trip where it's not there, it's like, "Oh, God, this is kind of a pain in the butt, that we're havin' to eat this peanut butter with our fingers." (laughs) 
Helin: All that stuff. "Oh, that's what that box was for!" Yeah. That's what's been so much fun, that people do like it. I've never been a salesman. That's probably one of my weakest things.... 
Steiger: Well, the stuff sells itself, doesn't it? 
Helin: Yeah, that's the thing. It's probably taken a lot longer, and slower pace than it would have if I'd been out there wavin' a banner or doin' commercials or whatever about it, but it's just been great to see it grow. People come off, and they had a great time. It works. It works, and that's been a lot of fun to watch, and watch it grow. 
Steiger: Are you seein' the same people over and over and over again? 
Helin: Oh, yeah. Got a trip goin' out tomorrow, some folks who did a trip with us four years ago. We've got one guy who hasn't missed a season in ten years now. He usually picks up a cancellation in October or November. 
Steiger: How does he do that? 
Helin: He just has a whole bunch of friends. 
Steiger: That he calls in, and keeps callin'. 
Helin: Yeah, very organized. 
Steiger: "You vill call this number." 
Helin: Uh-huh. That's that thing. People who really want to get down there more often.... 
Steiger: They just keep callin'. 
Helin: They play the system: as any system has, there's weaknesses or ways of working it, and they're all on the up-and-up, and just persistence, mainly. There's people they can get on.... Look at Steve. Steve's out on -my last trip, he was out there alone with one of his Zodiacs. You know, he gets down every year -if not once, twice. So there's ways of doin' it, and it's just how hard core you are. 
Steiger: What this refers to is the private waiting list. There's a deal where you sign up, you get your name on a list, you have to pay up every year to keep on the list. But there's a high cancellation rate, and if you call in -they give out the cancellations first come, first served, pretty much throughout the year. And so as the cancellations come in, if you happen to call up just after a cancellation came in, then you can have that date, or a date that you were wanting, if there are dates that are open. I guess it's pretty date specific. 
Helin: It's date specific on that basis, yeah. You have the choice of this or these dates. 
Steiger: And that's it. And if you can get it together by then, you can go. And if not.... 
Helin: Exactly. 
Steiger: But the cancellation rate per year, 40 percent, that's a lot of trips. 
Helin: Yeah. And whether that's factoring in -you know, the permits are all written for sixteen people, but a lot of 'em go out with two or three or four. 
Steiger: So user days pile up. 
Helin: Yeah. Dan Dierker was sayin', just on a trip with the new super[intendent], he was saying like 30 percent or something like that, of the private user days are not used because of that -whether it's cancellation or just smaller trip sizes than what they were figurin' on. 
Steiger: You mean because it doesn't work out that there's sixteen on every trip? 
Helin: Right. 
Steiger: And that's the way that they allocated the dates. 
Helin: Yeah. I'm not exactly sure. That's something that I'm sure they're reevaluating. I think the allocations, the number of launches, is based on a sixteen-person trip. 
Steiger: Interesting. Okay, historically and cosmically and all that, what else do we need to say about PRO and all that? 
Helin: It just was a very, very slow progression, little steps -mainly by people prodding, saying, "God, could you do this?" or "We don't like to do this, or have to come down two days early to do this. Why can't you do this for us?" And mainly it was getting over the hurdle with the park. I think they were probably mostly gun shy of people getting involved and putting either guides on trips or acting as a true outfitter, selling commercial trips, and they'd had their problems with pirates and all that. I think that was probably their chief concern. We just made it clear that wasn't what we were into, and never had a problem. Basically, after a year or two of operation, they just said, "Hey, this is great, we love this. It makes our life easier and less hassles, less bad trips," or that kind of thing. It's worked out well, and just keeps growin' by mainly word of mouth. That's the hardest thing, is to get up the audience. This community, the river thing, is just so small that the jungle drums are about as thorough as anything. 
Steiger: Well, it's a pretty amazing business. I mean, the frames are really cool, and the equipment in general. When I think of the times -I've rented your box a couple of times, and some other stuff. It's really nice to be able to go and get good shit. (laughs) 
Helin: I like having things that work and that function, and the advantage [I] had over a lot of people that have to design things is I knew how things were used, and what kind of abuse they could expect. And that helped a lot. I was able to get things- It wasn't perfect the first time -well, it isn't perfect now -but get it close enough for that 99.9 percent of the time, it would do what it needs to. We even were able to recover and straighten the frame that sat out wrapped around Crystal for three or four days this last summer.... you see stuff like that, and that's what's probably the most satisfying, knowing ___________. 
Steiger: You guys just -this frame, you guys just bent it back straight and sent it on it's way. 
Helin: Yeah. I have yet to turn in a frame to recycling. ( 
Steiger: That you've made.) 
Helin: The only frame I know of -well, it was the one we lost at Diamond Creek, the very first one. I've never known another one of our aluminum frames to not still be in use. We've had some that have.... Oh, the red rock in Cystal hittin' 'em upside a couple of times gave us some parallelograms, but always recoverable. 
Steiger: What's amazing is when you think about how many sets of equipment have disintegrated into the dust. (laughs) 
Helin: Oh, yeah! The number is so finite -it's easily less than a thousand. 
Steiger: Of Grand Canyon craft. 
Helin: Right. And there's such a micro-market. But it's been fun in that respect, because nobody's really.... Well, there wasn't any point in anybody else really trying to jump in on it, 'cause there wasn't enough business. It was just more of a.... I don't know. 
Steiger: Okay, so that's that. Now, river stories. How you doin'? 
Helin: I'm pretty well peaking here. 
Steiger: Okay, if we're gonna wrap it up, I should just ask you a couple of stock questions. One is, what's been the best part of bein' in the business for you, if you had to look back? Is it guiding? What's it all come down to? 
Helin: For me, rowin' rapids, rowin' the boats, guiding, whatever you want to call it, but making little boats go through big whitewater. That's always been my first joy. Fairly cut and dried. 
Steiger: Pretty straightforward. 
Helin: It's always given me a lot of pleasure. 
Steiger: Even though PRO is a totally goin' concern, and everything's fine in that regard, you still run some OARS trips every year. 
Helin: Yeah. I've done three. I've done a research trip and a couple of rowin' trips, and I got another rowin' trip comin' up. I'd say, yeah, normally, in the last ten or fifteen years, I still have done four to a half-dozen trips a year, something like that. 
Steiger: And the worst, if you had to say. Is there a worst part of it? What's the down side of all this shit that we're doin' here? Or is there one? And I don't know if there is one or not. 
Helin: Oh, I guess probably the biggest hurdles I had to get over, just like with this interview, I'm not a real extrovert or a talker. And probably making myself lead trips, initially, when I was young was very painful, but I had to do it because of peer group pressure, and it was great, it was all good. That was probably the toughest part for me, is just the group scene. 
Steiger: Dealin' with all that stuff. 
Helin: Yeah, the public speaking aspects I've always been able to live without quite nicely. Anymore I just usually stay in the background and make suggestions to whoever is leading the trip. I retired from leading about ten years ago, and that's what I take pleasure in doing since then -offering free advice, with little jibes and arrows here and there. I’m sure I’ve been a TL’s nightmare on a number of occasions. But very little that hasn't been a lot of fun, and that's been the great thing, is there are so many different things that are fun, rolled into one vocation. I guess we can call it a vocation now, as opposed to what we always say was an avocation. 
Steiger: I guess it's a little bit of both. 
Helin: Yeah. But everything I've done has basically been to enable me to stay down there. It has all been tied into staying there. PRO, from the moment we started going that direction, the whole point was to create something that we could leave, walk away from for periods of time. You know, have people or systems in place so that it would take care of itself. 
Steiger: So that you could go down there -and other places too. 
Helin: Yeah. That's the best part that has worked. I still have to come back and put in my time, but I can very comfortably take off and leave for a trip here or there. Having the pool of people in the industry that you can trust with that kind of thing -there's a lot of pleasure there, a lot of great people to work with. 
Steiger: Well, a set-up that's smooth enough that there's not that many, that it works. 
Helin: Yeah. That is the big hump. You know there's still always.... Never say never. Shit's gonna happen. And then just finding the people that you're comfortable with their decisions in that situation, and dealing with something that's really your baby, or what you've been working on for years and years and years, and to have that trust and be feeling good about it, that's been very satisfying. 
Steiger: I guess shit happens all the time. You were telling me about the Diamond Creek incident, and just gettin' trips on and off the water. 
Helin: If I could have documented my phone calls from starting about Thursday afternoon 'til we first heard that it was out, through yesterday or so, I figured I got at least three diametrically opposed stories on about three different situations from different parties, all swearing up and down that what they were telling me was first-hand information. It is a real challenge. It was trying to make any sense out of this just total disarray of information that you're getting, all based around the Diamond Creek floods and all that. It was kind of [like] those horrible word problems you had to work on when you were in school. You know, "What's the right answer here? Is there a right answer?" or "What's the best answer?" And that'll always be, and everyone will deal with it differently. We have been very lucky to find some people that may not always make the same call, but there'll be a good reason why they made a call different from us, and it'll work in a different way. 
Steiger: But it'll work. 
Helin: It'll work. That's probably the biggest hump of getting over and leaving something, is realizing that hey, it's gonna go different than it would if you were there, but can you live with that? And the challenge has been getting it to a point that we could do that. 
Steiger: I guess I'd better slide out of here and leave you alone, but I want to leave the door open for another session. I don't know about just river stories, like there's all this stuff. 
Helin: Let me [give it some] thought. 
Steiger: Yeah, because I know you were there -like Kenton said, you were there when those guys pushed off on the speed run in 1983. I actually am really curious as to how that trip went. Then you guys went on down into all that shit. 
Helin: Oh, yeah. 
Steiger: And that was fairly exciting, was it not? 
Helin: Yes, that was a great trip. 
Steiger: And stuff like that. I feel like there's a lot of stuff out there. So if you're up for it, for sittin' down just one more time, that's an option. If you're not, I understand. 
Helin: It's fine. It's fun to go through some of the stuff. 
Steiger: I mean, the Sobek years, the Omo, I know you guys had wild times there. We haven't even come close to delving into the lifestyle. 
Helin: Yes, that would be fun. ________. 
Steiger: All right, I'll turn this machine off. 
Helin: Goodnight. 
[END OF INTERVIEW]