Oral history interview with Regan Dale [includes transcript], November 6, 1998.

              Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection
Regan Dale Interview
Interview number: 53.15
[See document DALECLAN for group interview with Regan, Ote, and Duffy Dale] 
[ABOUT 30 MIN. INTO TAPE 1, SIDE A] 
This is still the River Runners Oral History Project. This is Part 2 of an interview that we started in Kanab with Regan Dale. In Kanab there we had Ote and Duffy present, but now it's just Regan. We're in Flagstaff now. Still Lew Steiger, and it's November 6, 1998. 
Steiger: We didn't do it there in Kanab, but the way I've been kinda doing this is asking everybody for just a little rundown on their family history, just a little bit of family background et cetera, and then kinda segue into how you got on the river. 
Regan: My immediate family? 
Steiger: Yeah, just your circumstances growin' up. What was it like bein' a kid? I mean, I kinda know some of these things, but.... 
Regan: Sure, we can go through that. I was born in Riverside, California -native Californian. My parents were native Californians. I was the oldest male in my family. I was one of ten children, second born. I have six sisters, and then the last three were brothers -all of whom now work for me on the river. (chuckles) Pretty ironic. I lived with my parents until I was about sixteen, and then I moved in with my grandmother, 'cause she was alone, she was a widow. It gave me an opportunity to get out of the house. 
Steiger: Did they kind of send you over there to look after her? 
Regan: Uh-huh. Well, it was ideal for both of us, 'cause livin' with nine other children was a bit hectic, and this gave me the opportunity to get out of the house and get out on my own a little bit. She needed somebody to kind of look after her, she was alone. So it was good for both of us. I lived with her for about five years. Eventually I went to college. I was workin' for my dad at AtoZ Printing, which was a printing company that his dad has started in Riverside in 1909 or something like that. 
Steiger: Wow, so you were really a native Californian. Your parents were born there. 
Regan: Uh-huh. And I was goin' to school, workin' for my dad, and that's when I met Bill Belknap. He came in one day and wanted a Colorado River map printed. I was at that time runnin' some of the offset presses and we ran his Colorado River guide on one of the presses, so I got to see first-hand the Colorado River via a river map. The first year he printed it, my cousin, O. C., had just gotten back from Vietnam -1969 or 1970. Maybe it was 1970, he had just gotten back. So he was kinda lookin' for somethin' to do, and Bill offered him an opportunity to go down the river in 1970. And a funny story -I might have mentioned this the other day -about the little raft. 
Steiger: No. Well, you mentioned it, but we didn't get it on tape. It was when this thing wasn't rollin', so I would love to hear that. O. C. told a story about the first time he'd ever seen the Grand Canyon was you drove him out there to hike down. (
Regan: Oh, yeah, to hike in.) So you guys went out there together. So how old were you then? 
Regan: I was probably eighteen or nineteen. Yeah, he was hiking in at Phantom Ranch to join a trip. I'd forgotten that. I took him to the South Rim. 
Steiger: Was that like your first look at the Grand Canyon? 
Regan: No, I had seen it when I was about sixteen. My parents -we'd done a cross-country tour from California to New York, and we had stopped in at Arizona and looked over the edge, just like most tourists do. Spent forty minutes and then we were off. I'd forgotten all about that time I dropped O. C. off there. Anyway, so he ended up spendin' the summer on the river with Grand Canyon Expeditions. At some point during that season, I went down to the local surplus store and bought a little $49 raft. 
Steiger: 'Cause you had already decided you were gonna do this? 
Regan: Yeah. Well, he called me back after a couple of trips, he said how cool it was, and it was really exciting, that I had to do it. So I figured, "Well, I'll go get me a raft and I'll go do it!" (laughter) So I went down and bought this $49 raft. It might have been $29, I can't remember back then. 
Steiger: One of those little yellow.... 
Regan: Yeah, just little plastic oars and stuff. I was ready! (laughter) I called him up one time, I told him I'd gotten myself a raft and I was comin' out. He goes, (flatly) "Take the raft back." (laughter) (excitedly) "No, man, I'm comin'! Really, I'm comin' down to do it!" (flatly) "Take the raft back." (laughter) Okay, so I took the raft back. You know, he came back and told me all kinds of stories that fall. And then Bill came to the print shop and we were reprinting his guide book. We did that every year for a number of years. 
Steiger: You mean, you just did a run that was for a year's worth? 
Regan: Uh-huh. This was a brand new thing. 
Steiger: He didn't want to get in too deep. 
Regan: No. And at the time, he was partners with Grand Canyon Expeditions -he and Ron Smith were partners, and they were operating out of Salt Lake City, driving to the Grand Canyon for every trip, from Salt Lake. 
Steiger: Whew! I just remembered, I should have got ahold of Loie [(Belknap) Evans]. She's probably gone, too. 
Regan: Yeah, she just left yesterday. It was real interesting, 'cause I started thinkin' about it, and her dad gave me my first opportunity to go down the river, and now she works for me. 
Steiger: Yeah, thirty years later, almost. 
Regan: Pretty ironic, how things turned -"How the Oarlock Turns" you know. (laughs) 
Steiger: That is, that's wild. 
Regan: So I asked Bill if I could go down the river with him. He goes, "Sure. You come up to Kanab, Utah, and we'll give you a river trip or somethin', give you an opportunity." I said, "Great!" About two weeks later, I quit school, quit work, packed up -I had a backpack, and was gonna hitchhike to Kanab from Riverside. I had, I can't remember who it was, give me a ride to the on-ramp for the freeway, and I'm sittin' there hitchhikin'. 
Steiger: This is like 1971? 
Regan: In the spring of 1971, like in March. This car pulls up, and it was full of five or six black guys, and they go, "Hop in!" I'm goin', "Where you goin'?" They said, "Wherever you wanna go!" I don't know about this. (laughter) "I don't think so." And they go, "You got any money? Got any drugs?" I'm goin', "No, I don't think so. I'm not gettin' in that car with you," and I started walkin' away. They were just gonna roll me. (
Steiger: Yeah.) They were gonna take me out in the desert and take everything I had and bury me somewhere. So I was pretty lucky I didn't get in that car. And after that I went, "Shit, I'm not hitchhikin'. This is crazy!" I went back and got a bus ticket to St. George, and pulled into St. George about 7:00 a.m. It was like an all-night bus ride. Pulled into St. George and started askin' 'em, "Where's Kanab?" They said, "Well, you got a little ways to go yet." I started hitchhikin' out of St. George and hitchhiked over to Hurricane, and then spent about half a day on that Hurricane Hill, you know, sittin' there, waitin'. Finally somebody gave me a ride to Colorado City. 
Steiger: Now, you probably looked pretty clean-cut and everything, huh? I'm tryin' to just place the times. 
Regan: I can't remember. No, I probably had long hair and a beard. 
Steiger: Even by then? 
Regan: Yeah. So finally I got to Fredonia, and then I got another ride to Kanab. It was probably four o'clock in the afternoon by the time I got to Kanab. I'm walkin' through town, and the local sheriff pulls up, wants to know what I'm doin', where I'm goin'. You know, checked me out thoroughly. Wanted to see my I.D. I thought he was gonna go through my pack, you know. That wouldn't have surprised me. But I kept tellin' him I was just goin' up here to Grand Canyon Expeditions, that they had offered me a job. So he kind of escorted me up there. They had just bought the building. (
Steiger: The warehouse.) The warehouse. And I walked in, and Dean Waterman was there, and O. C. was there. Dean said he'd give me a job, and I spent the next.... Well, the first three or four weeks, we built the bunkhouse: put the siding on the bunkhouse and put in windows and doors, and just labor. 
Steiger: Was there part of a structure at all there? 
Regan: Yeah, there was a structure there. I'm not sure what had been there prior, but the foundations and the walls were there. They just didn't have any siding on it. 
Steiger: And that's where the building is now? 
Regan: Yeah, same bunkhouse. 
Steiger: You did a pretty nice job! 
Regan: Yeah, it's held up well. And they had their office in there also, in part of it. They gave us a room. I don't think there was any heat, but it was summertime or springtime. Then we started workin' on the main warehouse: started putting siding on it. It had mostly been sided, but there were big holes, and we put up doors, and filled-in trenches, and took out old plumbing. For the first couple of months, that's all we did, was work on the warehouse, tryin' to enclose it. 
Steiger: Didn't see any of the river at all? 
Regan: Unt-uh. And then I started buildin' fiberglass coolers, and I did that for a couple of months. So it was probably May before I got on the river. The first trip I went down was with Rick Petrillo and Pete Gibbs. I'm not sure what ever happened to Rick. He had a lot of back problems, and eventually he went to work in Idaho, and that's kind of where I lost him. 
Steiger: Yeah, I ran into him up there years ago. He was a buddy of Skip Jones'. 
Regan: I did about five trips that summer, and they needed somebody to go up and run Cataract -run triple-rigs in Cataract. 
Steiger: After you'd done five Grand Canyon trips. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Were you just swampin' or were you runnin' a boat? 
Regan: Well, Rick would let me run as much as he thought I could. He taught me a lot, actually. I drew maps, and I had my own little map that I tried to keep track of with notes and stuff. It takes a long time to learn the river, you know, so any little aid that you could use.... 
Steiger: What were the boats like? 
Regan: The boats were very similar to what they are now. It's amazing how progressive Dean Waterman was. 
Steiger: It's amazing how far ahead of the curve you guys were then. (
Regan: Yeah.) I mean, compared to what everybody else had. 
Regan: Uh-huh. I mean, they've modified them a little bit, but they were pretty much just like they are today. I mean, they used those coolers that I built in 1971, until about 1990. They used 'em for almost twenty years -those big, red, polyester resin coolers. 
Steiger: Yeah. 
Regan: Made out of mat -huge, heavy, very heavy. And red food boxes. Pretty amazing. Anyway, we used those for many years. Well, anyway, to get back to.... So then I went up and ran Cataract with Mark Smith and Foxy and a couple other guys -I can't really remember their names. But they put me on back oar, 'cause you didn't need quite as much experience on the back oar. 
Steiger: Of a triple-rig? 
Regan: Of a triple-rig. And we set off down Cataract. I'd never run Cataract, and I was back oar on this triple rig, and we just went down there and just got hammered, you know, by the Big Drops. 
Steiger: Well, by that time, it must not have been huge water. 
Regan: No, it was down. I think the highest that I ran that spring was probably about 30,000, 35,000 -pretty big. We got thumped good in Satan's Gut. I remember gettin' trashed. But we made it. It was pretty amazing. Those boats were pretty forgiving in a lot of ways, in that they kind of snaked through. I mean, we didn't really need to be all that precise. 
Steiger: Right on the money, yeah. 
Regan: Then I did about, oh, five or six Cat trips, and then went back down to Grand Canyon and did a couple trips in the fall -one in a triple-rig with Rick Petrillo and the geologist, works for USGS now. 
Steiger: George Billingsley? 
Regan: George Billingsley. So George was runnin' back oar, and Petrillo was runnin' front oar. O. C. was runnin' a motor rig for support. This was in September or October, I can't remember. We got to Phantom, and George Billingsley learned that his grandmother had died. So he was gonna hike out, but he was gonna go out from Monument. So we went down and I was ridin' in the triple-rig, just kinda ridin' along. I didn't really have any duties. We went right over the left horn in Horn Creek in low water, and the back boat just kinda went (boom!) like that, and just kinda snapped up. Well, this gal sittin' right next to me, she was this frail lady, probably about 110-120 pounds. Just as we dropped over the rock there and into the hole behind the rock, it was so violent that she broke both bones in her forearm -the radius and the ulna. 
Steiger: Ow! That's a serious fracture! 
Regan: Serious. And she was right next to me. So we went down to Monument, we splinted her up and went down to Monument, and George was gonna hike out and get help. He was gonna hike out anyway, but.... It was pretty funny, because we're sittin' around, and I kept watchin', and he's just kicked back real casual. "George, when are you leavin'?" He goes, "Oh, I'm gonna leave after dinner." So here it is, we ate dinner and it's gettin' dark, and pretty soon it's pitch black, and George decides well now he's gonna hike out. And I'm lookin' at this guy goin', "What is he, some kind of superman or somethin'"? But he preferred to hike out in the dark. (
Steiger: Wow.) He was an interesting guy. 
Steiger: I guess he's a pretty experienced hiker. 
Regan: Yeah, he'd done lots and lots of hiking, and he knew the route, and he wasn't worried at all about gettin' to the rim. Probably only took him three or four hours. 
Steiger: So he already knew this woman, it was gonna be tomorrow morning.... 
Regan: Yeah, it was gonna be in the morning. This was before we had radios, you know. But we could have signaled, probably, from the lower beach and gotten help just as quick. 
Steiger: To the rim, yeah. 
Regan: Yeah, 'cause there's a direct line of sight to some of those viewpoints up there. So he starts hikin', and we all go to sleep and wake up in the morning, and (shoop, shoop, shoop, shoop) here comes the helicopter, and George is in it with the Park Service. Or no, when he went out, that's when he found out his grandmother had died. 
Steiger: Oh, so he wasn't gonna hike out anyway. 
Regan: No. No, no, it was when he got out there. So then, they didn't have a back oar, but then I was there, and I had done back oar in Cataract all summer, so they figured "Perfect!" 
Steiger: "You can do it." 
Regan: I can do it. Funny story was that he got to the rim probably about three or four in the morning, and he's walkin' from Hermit's Rest back to the village, because he doesn't want to wake anybody up at Hermit's Rest, 'cause he's afraid he might get shot. There's a bunch of people sleepin' in their cars and stuff, but he's, "Naw, I'm not wakin' anybody up." So he's walkin' to the village and he falls asleep, walks off the road.... 
Steiger: While he's walkin'?! 
Regan: While he's walkin'. (laughter) He's walkin', and he just kind of falls asleep, and runs into a tree and knocks himself out. (laughter) 
Steiger: That's incredible! 
Regan: Wakes up, and he's sittin' there at the base of the tree, you know, with a big ol' bump on his head. 
Steiger: That's like I drove off the road! That's amazing. (aside to Duffy) 
Regan: It was pretty funny. So we go down the next day, and we're runnin' Hermit, and Petrillo wants to cheat it. He doesn't want to run down the middle of it. So we try to get left of it. Of course we don't get left of it, we go right down into that hole on the left side, just crashes and just trashes us. So then he's a little bit shaken. Of course this was the first time he'd ever run a triple-rig, but he'd been down the canyon quite a few times and had a lot of experience, but had never run a triple-rig, and he's front oar on this thing. I should have been the front oar. 
Steiger: Because you knew more about it. 
Regan: I knew more about techniques and triple-rigs than he did. 
Steiger: Neff told some pretty funny stories about Petrillo, but I won't get into that. 
Regan: Yeah. But he was always over-pullin' me. You know, he'd start pullin' way before me, and then I couldn't catch up with him. 
Steiger: 'Cause the downstream oar could always outrun the upstream oar. 
Regan: Exactly. And it didn't matter how hard I pulled, I could never catch up with him. 
Steiger: So you were always the one that was hangin' out there. (laughs) 
Regan: Yeah, exactly. 
Steiger: And he was in next to shore. 
Regan: Yeah. And a lot of times we'd just spin. You know, he'd catch the eddy, and then the boat would spin and pretty soon I'd be front oar and he'd be back oar, and then we'd just kinda cartwheel downriver. We got to Crystal, and this was when Crystal was still pretty nasty, when it still had both holes. Fortunately, it wasn't very high water. It was probably only about maybe 10,000 or less. It was either September or October. And we go down and run the old hole on the left side. Of course he overpulls me and we spin and we go down there. 
Steiger: Oh, my God! 
Regan: And it takes the front boat and folds it over on the middle boat. I'm in the back boat. 
Steiger: So it takes him and folds him right on over? 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Oh, shit! 
Regan: So there was probably five or six people in the boat. O. C.'s parents, his dad was on the trip, and I think his brother was on the trip. 
Steiger: And are they on the boat with him? 
Regan: Yeah. Now they're all in the middle boat. 
Steiger: Oh, they're in the triple rig? 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: But he's got a single boat? 
Regan: Maybe his dad was on the motor rig, and it was just Little Eben that was in the triple-rig -I can't remember exactly. So I jumped up and I tried to lift it up, and just barely could get enough of a grab to get 'em out. And they helped me, and we pushed it over, and got it right side up again -the front boat -just as we went down and got hung up on the rock pile. 
Steiger: Oh, my God, on the island. (
Regan: Yeah.) Oh, shit! 
Regan: And we were there for fifteen minutes, just kinda draped over some rocks in this triple-rig. And one guy in the boat had gotten a pretty good laceration in his head from the whole ordeal. But they made passengers a lot tougher then, it wasn't a big deal. We patched him up and he went on. Anymore, you'd fly somebody out with a head injury. (
Steiger: Uh-huh.) But it was quite the experience. So the next summer, I had my own thirty-seven, and Kenton and I ran together most of the season. I think I did nine or ten trips that year. That was in 1972. Toward the fall of that year, Martin Litton chartered a boat from GCE. He had rented the north warehouse from Ron Smith for their operation for that summer, and over the course of that year I got to know Jeff Clayton and Bill Bodie and Curt Chang and Wally Rist and John Blaustien [mostly phonetic spellings], 'cause they were in and out of there, and so were we. Anyway, they needed somebody to run this charter. It was toward the end of the season also. So I told 'em I'd do it. So Martin and Curtis, Ronn Hayes, Martin's secretary, and three guys from Hollywood, we set out to do a seven-day trip through the canyon. They were scoutin' for a movie. Martin wanted to impress 'em, so he had a Yampa that we rolled up and took along with us, and in certain sections of the river, he was gonna blow it up and put these guys from Hollywood in it. 
Steiger: And show 'em what it was like from a little boat. 
Regan: Yeah. Another funny story was that we got down to Lava Chuar -Lava Canyon there -and that was when there was a big lateral comin' off the right shore there, about halfway through the rapid. And Curt hollers down to 'em, "Run right, Martin, run right!" He was thinkin' that he'd go down there and just have a big ride. Well, Martin flips this Yampa with these guys in it. 
Steiger: So that got their attention! (laughter) 
Regan: So then I had to gather 'em up, pull 'em back in, and then Martin's boat goes down and goes around the island there at Espejo, around the left side. Well, I'd never been down there, so I didn't go down there after it. I just went around the bottom and waited and waited and waited. And finally it came out. We probably waited twenty minutes. And I was thinkin', "Well, it probably got hung up somewhere for a short period." And then we rolled it up, and I said, "That's it, Martin, we're not playin' in the Yampa anymore," 'cause we had to make tracks. It was a seven-day trip or somethin' like that. And that was the reason why he had chartered the rig from.... 
Steiger: These guys didn't have time, they had to just blast through real fast and see what was goin' on. 
Regan: Yeah, check it out. We got down to Crystal, and these guys wanted to run the biggest wave in the canyon, which was the left side in Crystal, both those holes. They wanted to see what it was like in the big boat, 'cause they wanted to strap on a five-ton generator on the front of one of these boats, and they wanted to see if they could take it. So I told 'em I'd run it. And I'm comin' down there, and I look down there and see those two holes and I went, "Oh, shit, man, I can't do that." So I ran right, and they're goin', "What's the deal here?" And I'm goin', "Man, we're out here, by ourselves, and those are big, big, waves and we're not goin' in 'em. That's it. If you want a big ride, I'll give you the right in Lava or somethin', but I wasn't about to run those holes in Crystal by myself." You know? (
Steiger: Yeah.) They were huge. 
Steiger: I remember, yeah. 
Regan: So we got on down there and we made it without any incident. At the end of the trip, Martin asked me if I would be interested in workin' for him. I said, "Yeah, I'd love to row dories." And he said, "Well, give me a call this winter, we'll talk about it." So sometime during that winter I got a call, and it was Ronn Hayes and Martin -they were on two phones and they were callin' me. They both wanted me to go to work for 'em. 
Steiger: For different companies: Ronn Hayes had Wilderness World. (
Regan: Yeah.) But they're callin' you at the same time? 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: They were arguin' over it. 
Regan: Yeah, as to who I was gonna work for. And finally I decided that I wanted to row dories more than I wanted to row rafts, so I went to work for Martin. The first trip I did with him that spring, we were still in the warehouse on the north side of GCE. It was Bill Bodie and John Blaustien and I and Curtis and Martin and his secretary -Debra was her name. 
Steiger: So M. L. was really just kinda gettin' started as a company then. (
Regan: Yeah.) He'd just started the year before. 
Regan: He'd run two or three trips that year in 1972, and that was the year I took him down in the motor rig. So in the spring of 1973, was when I went to work for him. The first trip I did, Martin was leadin', and about two-thirds of the way down, there was this big hubbub about Bill Bodie and Debra and Martin -took up all of Martin's time, and eventually at some point in the trip, Bodie and Debra were both fired and hikin' out of the canyon at Havasu. 
Steiger: Oh, my God! You mean those guys weren't gettin' along? 
Regan: Well, Bodie and Debra were an item, and Martin was very upset about it. 
Steiger: 'Cause he had his eye on.... 
Regan: Yeah, it was his secretary. I mean, they were sweeties. 
Steiger: This isn't supposed to be, so he fires 'em! (laughs) 
Regan: Fires 'em right in mid-trip. Of course this took all his time, so he really wasn't leadin' the trip anymore, so I took over. I said, "Shit, we gotta take care of these people. We can't just ignore 'em." That was the beginning. I led every trip after that for the next ten years. 
Steiger: So Martin just at the end of that trip was like, "Okay, R. D...." 
Regan: "You're in charge." So I led one set of trips, and Wally Rist led the other. 
Steiger: But relations were still okay with Ron Smith and those guys? You guys were all in the same warehouse. 
Regan: Well, at some point, right after that first trip, we moved to Hurricane. 
Steiger: And then did Kenton come over too? 
Regan: Martin asked me after that trip if there was anybody else that I knew that would be good for his operation, and I told him, yeah, I knew somebody that would love to do this -Kenton Grua. He goes, "Well, call him up, tell him to come on over here," 'cause we needed some more guides, we needed some people. He went from four trips in 1972 to twelve trips in 1973. 
Steiger: Yeah, so it was a huge surge. 
Regan: Yeah, and he needed guides. He needed qualified guides who could row, and I'd run with Kenton, so he and I were friends. He was excited to do it and came right over and got right on the river, runnin' dories. 
Steiger: How was that little transition? 
Regan: Oh, I remember gettin' in the dory the first time we were runnin' down through the Paria, and it was just so cool, it was the best. I knew right away, before I'd gone two miles. (
Steiger: That you'd made a good decision.) And I had never rowed a dory before, I had just put in one. 
Steiger: Had you seen 'em? 
Regan: I'd seen 'em on the river, sure. I'd seen 'em on the river for a couple of years. 
Steiger: And this was back in the days when it was nothin' but plywood, huh? 
Regan: Oh, yeah, they were just painted plywood. I mean, every year you'd sand the paint down and paint 'em, and they'd soak up water. 
Steiger: For the first.... 
Regan: ... week, you'd have water just gushin' in. Pretty soon they'd swell and close off. But, I mean, it was a ritual. Everything would be wet in the hatches, and you'd just get used to bailin' 'em. It was part of it. 
Steiger: Yeah, I guess you didn't even have sponges to begin with, huh? 
Regan: Unt-uh. 
Steiger: And no bilge pumps, no sponges. 
Regan: No, just plastic containers to throw the water back out. Big rocket boxes, lots of ammo cans, everything was in an ammo can. We might have fifteen, twenty ammo cans, twenty mils, in your boat, just 'cause they had to put everything in twenty mils. 
Steiger: 'Cause it was so wet, and that was all they knew to put 'em in. 
Regan: Uh-huh. 
Steiger: Wow, that must have been pretty difficult to work with, to get in and out of those. 
Regan: Oh, yeah, really awkward. I mean, you'd have twenty mils layin' on their sides, back up under the seats. 
Steiger: Plus there was no baggage boat, huh? 
Regan: No. 
Steiger: So you had to get everything in there. 
Regan: But we didn't carry -I mean, you didn't have toilets, you didn't have stoves, you didn't have water jugs, you didn't have tables, you didn't have tents, you didn't have.... I mean, it was fire pans.... 
Steiger: A couple of kitchen bags. 
Regan: Yeah. No tables. For about a year, we didn't have tables, and finally I started takin' tables because I said, "This is stupid!" 
Steiger: Too hard on your back. 
Regan: Yeah. Why can't we have tables? Oh, it wasn't the wilderness experience to have a table! 
Steiger: That was Martin's thing, yeah. 
Regan: I said, "Well, bullshit, we're gonna start carryin' tables. We're gonna make it easy." 'Cause you'd be eatin' food off the ground. You'd serve lunch off the tarp on the ground. 
Steiger: Full of sand, yeah. (chuckles) But yet, did you always have cooks? 
Regan: We always had cooks. 
Steiger: From the get go? 
Regan: Yeah. Anne Marie Gretch, Sabina, Kenley, Carol Starling [phonetic spellings] -those were some of the early dory cooks. 
Steiger: Was Kenly married to Rudy then? 
Regan: Oh no. 
Steiger: So she was Tuck's sister? 
Regan: Just Tuck's sister, yeah. Tuck came in 1974, I think. 
Steiger: That's Kenly and Tuck Weills. 
Regan: And when he came, he brought his sister out soon after. 
Steiger: Who was every bit as much of a live wire as he was, huh? 
Regan: Oh, yeah. Tom Gallagher. Sharkey came in the door one day, wanted to do river trips. He did about three, and all of a sudden he had his own dory. 
Steiger: Did you have a raft or not? So there was a raft. 
Regan: I think at some point we started taking rafts. I can't remember exactly when it happened. 
Steiger: Was that for carryin' out the human waste? Was that when it started? It was before that? 
Regan: Yeah, we were buryin' it initially, and we were takin' porta-potties. 
Steiger: So you'd take a porta-potty and just dig a hole? Or initially it was just a shovel and a roll of toilet paper? 
Regan: Yeah, initially it was up in the rocks, far away from camp. 
Steiger: In the cracks. 
Regan: Yeah, it was an adventure. (chuckles) "Burn your toilet paper." 
Steiger: And that was it. 
Regan: There were a few times where we had big fires from people burnin' toilet paper. We'd have to all get buckets and carry 'em up and put the fire out. I remember a couple of really big fires. (chuckles) Lower Lava one time. Martin had a big fire goin'. 
Steiger: Just to back up a little bit, before we drive off from your earliest days. You said you were goin' to college in the winter. What did you study in school? 
Regan: Initially I was studying psychology, and then I changed my major to philosophy, and then I changed it again to anthropology, and then eventually I settled on physical education. 
Steiger: Ah-ha. But you're thinkin' like this might.... 
Regan: I wasn't thinkin'. I was just goin' to school. 
Steiger: Takin' courses that interested you. (
Regan: Uh-huh.) Stay[ing] out of Vietnam was probably a big part of it. 
Regan: Yeah, exactly. At one point I did lose my student deferment 'cause I wasn't takin' a full load. I went from twelve units to nine, and you had to maintain a full course level to stay out of the military. So I got drafted and was called for a physical -put you on a bus and take you into L.A. to a big place where there were thousands of guys gettin' physicals. At some point during that day, they took my blood pressure and they decided that I had high blood pressure, so I was put in a different category. They told me they wanted me to come back the next day. So I said, "Fine." So I went home, and the next day I drove into L.A. -the first day I was on a bus. So the next day I'm drivin' in, and I thought, "Well, this could be my out, you know, high blood pressure." 
Steiger: That might not be bad. 
Regan: Might not be a bad deal. So on the way in on the freeway, it was early in the morning, I had to be there at eight o'clock in the morning or something. I'd slam on the brakes and skid for a while. (laughter) It'd get your heart pumpin' up, you know, get the adrenaline goin'. So I did that a few times just before I got there. I walked in there, and my blood pressure was still high, but it wasn't quite as high as it was. (
Steiger: As it had been, yeah.) So they said, "Well, you're gonna have to come back again." So they gave me like a three-month deferment. So in three months I had to go back in. Three months and I got another notice, and I ignored it, didn't go. So I got another notice that said "If you don't come, we'll send the law after ya'." And my dad wrote back a letter and said, "Hey, I don't believe in your silly little war, and leave my son alone!" Well, that set 'em back. (
Steiger: Whoa!) You know, they didn't know how to relate to that. 
Steiger: Well, now, your dad had been in the military? 
Regan: Yeah, he'd been in World War II. 
Steiger: And so had your uncle, huh? 
Regan: Uh-huh. And O'Connor was in. 
Steiger: And got shot in Vietnam. 
Regan: Yeah. And he didn't want to lose his oldest son, so he was kinda pissed off about the whole deal and told 'em to leave me alone. Well, that set 'em back. For about six months I didn't hear a thing. And finally they had the lottery, you were given a number. I got 357. 
Steiger: Okay! 
Regan: I was out of the picture. I didn't hear again from Selective Service for about a year, and finally they sent me a 4-F notice in the mail. 
Steiger: And that would have been.... 
Regan: [In] 1969. 
Steiger: Wow, so this is.... 
Regan: Right in the heart of the Vietnam War. 
Steiger: So you didn't hit the river until after all that stuff settled down. 
Regan: Right. 
Steiger: When you went to the river, when did you start thinkin' in terms of this was somethin' you were gonna do for a long time? 
Regan: Oh, I never thought about that. It was more of a summer -just fun, a fun thing to do in the summer. 
Steiger: Like your very first time down, do you remember much about that very first experience on the water? 
Regan: I remember the first time I saw Lava Falls. You know, I had heard a lot about Lava Falls. 
Steiger: From O. C.? 
Regan: Yeah. So the first year he was runnin', I hiked in at Lava. 
Steiger: Just to go see that? 
Regan: Just to go see Lava. I can't even remember how I found it. I think I wandered out there, and somehow found my way down to it and sat down there and looked at it. I was kind of.... 
Steiger: This was after you'd taken the little boat back. (chuckles) 
Regan: Yeah. I was kinda thinkin' it was gonna be this big waterfall, and it turned out to be just this little waterfall, so I was kinda thinkin', "Well, shit, this isn't much." And then I watched a couple Hatch boats come through, and they were rowin'. They had the tail-draggers and they pulled their motor and rowed down the left. 
Steiger: Ah, that's no big deal. 
Regan: Yeah. And one of 'em went right into the ledge hole, sideways. 
Steiger: Oh, my God! 
Regan: Yeah. I remember vividly. And they got thumped pretty good, but they washed out the bottom. Those were the only boats I'd seen, so I figured all the boats were like that. It was no big deal. But I can't remember the first trip I did. 
Steiger: Just that it was a cool thing, but nothing really sank in? 
Regan: Unt-uh. I remember.... At some point in 1971, the first year, I remember meetin' Ote. She was on a trip with Pete Gibbs and Bego, and they were climbin' that granite spire just below Grapevine, a big chunk of granite that comes down. 
Steiger: Yeah, the one on the.... No, wait, below Grapevine? 
Regan: Below Grapevine on the right. Next time you come down there -big ol' thing, big wall of granite, sheer wall, comes right out of the river and goes up about 700-800 feet. And they were climbin' that. 
Steiger: On a commercial trip? 
Regan: No, it was a private, just a couple of rowboats. Then we had 'em in for dinner below Deer Creek, and that was the first time I met her. 
Steiger: So back to the Dories. So no tables, no toilets, no baggage boat, all twenty mils. How did you do in terms of runs? 
Regan: I remember the first trip I did in a dory, I hit a rock pullin' out at Havasu. Didn't quite make it far enough across, and hit those rocks right at the top of the rock pile, put a big hole in the Makaha. 
Steiger: Damn! So that got your attention right there. 
Regan: First trip, yeah. Second trip I did, I went down and got stuck in the corner pocket for a couple minutes. 
Steiger: Oh, my God! You're kidding! In the Makaha again? 
Regan: Uh-huh, and did some damage there. So I was havin' a tough go the first couple of trips. 
Steiger: Were you guys doin' a right run when you got in there? 
Regan: Uh-huh. Maybe it was the right. I can't remember if it was the slot or the right. But it was right side up. (pause) Or maybe it was upside down. Might have been upside down in the corner pocket, and I was on the bottom of it. The third trip I did, I finally made it through Lava, and I was pretty excited. Martin has some footage of me jumpin' up and down on the deck of the Makaha. Pretty funny. I was pretty excited. Finally made it without hittin' anything. 
Steiger: Oh, 'cause you figured once you got below Lava, then you're pretty much home free. 
Regan: Yeah. But for many years, you know, it was always down the right -[Sunday's?] water, lower water. Always big. 
Steiger: Did Martin go on most of those early trips? 
Regan: He went on, yeah, a couple, right in the first two or three, and then he got too busy. 
Steiger: Doin' other stuff? (
Regan: Uh-huh.) Not so much with the company, but environmental battles or whatever. 
Regan: Right. And he lived in California. He'd fly back and forth. A funny story was that he used to buy bread at the day-old bakery in Palo Alto and load his plane up with bread and fly it out and put it on the trip. It was already two or three days old, and we'd start off with day-old bread. 
Steiger: To go for twenty-two days! 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: 'Cause he got a deal on it. (chuckles) 
Regan: Uh-huh, he had a great deal on it. And then we bought Schaeffer's. Schaeffer was the beer that we carried. It was pretty funny, 'cause the slogan on the side of the can was, "It's the beer to drink if you're havin' more than one," or somethin' like that. If you're gonna drink more than one beer, have a Schaeffer, 'cause after that, you didn't notice how bad it was. (laughter) And he was buyin' six-packs for ninety-nine cents or somethin'. So between bread and Schaeffer's he always had his plane full of stuff that he brought out. We'd pick him up at the airport in Hurricane and we'd have to bring the van to load up. 
Steiger: You'd think it would cost more just to fly out there (
Regan: Oh, absolutely.) than it would.... 
Regan: It did. But it was his way of.... 
Steiger: Economizing. Well, maybe he was comin' out anyway. 
Regan: Yeah. But it was just the classic Martin Litton. Schaeffer beer. 
Steiger: What did you think about all the environmental stuff? Were you aware of that? 
Regan: Oh, yeah. 
Steiger: Were you aware of the dam fight and Martin's part in that? 
Regan: Sure. Everybody felt really proud of the man for what he had accomplished. He was still very involved in fighting to save the Redwoods and trying to keep a powerplant out of Diablo Canyon. We were all really proud to work for the man, 'cause he was tryin' to do some good stuff. 
Steiger: Yeah, I remember. I would have to say the Dories were kind of at the forefront of just environmental consciousness back in those days. You guys were thinkin' way more about it than anybody else, it seemed like. Which I always thought was really cool. 
Regan: In the fall of 1971.... Oh, what was his name? He works for Lake Mead Air now. 
Steiger: Gallenson? 
Regan: Yeah, Art Gallenson. He had just startin' workin' for Ron. He came to me one day and asked me if I'd fly with him and take notes, 'cause he was gonna fly the canyon with Earl Leisberg, 'cause he wanted to take pictures of the beaches, 'cause it was part of his master's thesis or somethin' -or doctoral or somethin' -I can't remember exactly what. I said, "Sure!" So Earl showed up and we got in his plane and started flyin' into the canyon. We came down South Canyon and flew through that saddle. 
Steiger: Yeah, I know the one. 
Regan: Through that saddle and down to the river. From there to Kanab Creek, we couldn't have been more than a hundred feet off the water. 
Steiger: Flew the whole danged thing. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Oh, my God! How'd your blood pressure do in that?! (laughs) 
Regan: And Art was takin' pictures, and I was takin' notes, 'cause he wanted to say, "Okay, Mile 29, Mile 30, Mile 45." He wanted me to jot down where he had taken the pictures so that he could know later. And finally we got down around Kanab Creek, and you know how it narrows up in there. I'm going, "Earl, if you don't level this plane out, I'm gonna hurl all over the place." (laughter) 
Steiger: Cause he's turnin', he's takin' every turn there is. 
Regan: Oh, yeah. (imitates sound of airplane engine) 
Steiger: Oh, my God! Right down through the gorge. 
Regan: Oh, yeah, a hundred feet off the water. 
Steiger: Yeah, he's a phenomenal pilot. 
Regan: That was quite the adventure. One other time, we went down to Lake Mead and I was just gettin' this pilot's license. He went down over the lake and was practicing his stalls and stuff like that, and I'm flyin' with him in the back of this little single-engine plane, little Pogo thing, you know. Talk about scary! (tape turned off and on) 
Steiger: So you're out there practicing stalls. Did you know you were gonna do stalls before you guys got out there? 
Regan: He just asked me if I wanted to go flyin' with him. I had no idea what we were gonna be doin'. It scared the hell out of me, though. He'd take it up and just stall it out, and then drop it (schoom!) and then try to start it again right over the lake. (laughs) That was wild! I'm surprised I survived all those days. 
Steiger: I wonder what Gallenson was tryin' to figure out with that study of his. I wonder what his question was. 
Regan: I don't know. That'd be interesting to find out what he ever did with it, if anything. 
Steiger: He's another guy that's on the list, but boy, time's gettin' short. 
Regan: Yeah, he's actually not doin' real well. 
Steiger: That's what I heard -Parkinson's or something. 
Regan: Uh-huh. 
Steiger: Well, let's see, so as far as techniques go in the early days, maybe just a little on how all that evolved, how you started figurin' stuff out. I mean, you obviously don't run the same now as you were doin' when you first started, are you? 
Regan: No. You know what was interesting was there was really nobody that really knew anything. Martin was probably in his fifties, so he was past his prime, almost. 
Steiger: Well, and he had just learned from.... It was all upstream ferry, huh? 
Regan: Oh, yeah. 
Steiger: Which those guys had picked up from rowin' those Cataract boats, which wouldn't track. 
Regan: Yeah, so we had to figure things out ourselves -the "Powelling" and ferry angles and all that -that kind of evolved over time. I don't think there was anybody that really actually showed us how to do that. We just learned the best way to move 'em was to use the water. It was all trial and error. We used to call it the school of hard knocks, because very seldom would you go on a trip where you didn't smash a boat or two. I mean, it was part of it. Golden trips were unheard of. 
Steiger: Oh, yeah? So that was really an event. 
Regan: Oh, yeah. I mean, it was pretty standard to hit somethin', somewhere. In the early seventies, we had the lower flows, too. Seventy-seven [1977] was the whole issue of Rainbow Bridge came to light. 
Steiger: I remember it was too low to run in the spring. 
Regan: Yeah, and they closed the river and nobody was runnin'. We decided we wanted to go see what it looked like at 1,000 cfs. So O. C. and I, and Rudy and Kenton, and it might have been Dale, decided to.... We took three Selways.... Oh, it was Richie Turner -no, Gary Cull -one of those guys. Took three Selways and two kayaks. And I had just bought a Selway from Ron. 
Steiger: Boy, those are nice boats. 
Regan: Yeah, they were. I decided I wanted to have a little bathtub to play in. So it was kinda brand new. We took those down, and there wasn't anybody on the river. The water was warm, 'cause there was no flow, and it was the middle of summer. We had a great time. Stopped and looked at all the rapids, took pictures of 'em all, which someday will probably be interesting to go back.... 
Steiger: Yeah, did you ever look at 'em after that? You got 'em stored somewhere? 
Regan: I've got 'em stored somewhere, yeah. But I got some really fun pictures of Hance, Crystal, and Lava. 
Steiger: Did you guys run everything? Did you have to portage anything? 
Regan: We did portage twice: Little Ruby and Lava. 
Steiger: Wannabe Ruby. 
Regan: Yeah, Wannabe Ruby. 
Steiger: That one up above. Wow. 
Regan: And the whole river funnelled down and dropped right onto a rock, right in the middle of the river, so there was no way we were gonna.... 
Steiger: No good run for anybody. 
Regan: Unt-uh. You know the rock that makes the hole in Crystal? (
Steiger: Uh-huh.) I remember pullin' in behind it, in my Selway -we ran left of it.... 
Steiger: I remember that rock. It was a flat rock, wasn't it? 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Wasn't it kind of a flat, gray rock or somethin'? (
Regan: Uh-huh.) Not like you'd expect it to have been. 
Regan: Unt-uh. We ran left of it, 'cause that was where the water went, and I pulled in behind it, parked, and climbed up on it, and it was like six feet out of the water. I'm standin' on it goin', "Wow, this is wild." And Horn Creek, we went down the far right side. Far right, as far right as you could get. 
Steiger: Which is a pretty big ride. 
Regan: Oh, it was huge! It was a funnel down between these rocks, and drop-offs and waves and holes. It was wild. It was a wild ride. And then Lava -we went left at Bedrock. That was the only place there was any water. 
Steiger: No water goin' to the right. 
Regan: And it was calm water, goin' around the left side. 
Steiger: No big deal. 
Regan: No biggie. Floated around the left side. Pretty interesting. At Lava, all the rocks that make the ledge were sticking out of the water. 
Steiger: So it's a bunch of different rocks (
Regan: Yes.) it's not just one. 
Regan: It's like three or four rocks. 
Steiger: It's not like the ancient Lava dam or any of that. (
Regan: Unt-uh.) It's Prospect Canyon rocks. 
Regan: Uh-huh, big rocks kinda like the rocks that make the domer in the left side of the "V" wave. There's about three of 'em up on top there. And there was still a slot. You could actually see where the slot was. 
Steiger: In the rocks. 
Regan: Yeah. And we chose to portage our boats. I think somebody kayaked it. I can't remember who -it might have been O. C. or Gary Cull. Other than that, it was pretty interesting. It was really fun. It was just mostly a boating trip, we didn't do any hiking on that. We just wanted to see the river at low water. 
Steiger: Yeah. Boy, those training trips were pretty fun. O. C. talked about that hundred-day trip that they did. He talked about that quite a little bit. I think that stuck in his mind as bein' one of the highlights. I wanted to hear about the trip that you and Ote did. This tape's gonna run out any second. I don't know if you want to talk about that or not. (
Regan: Sure.) But that sounded like an all-time great. 
Regan: Yeah, that was. 
Steiger: You guys were -it was just the two of you, a two-boat trip? 
Regan: Yeah. Back then all you had to do was call up and tell the park that you wanted to go, and it was no big deal. 
Steiger: Was that a, quote, "training" trip? 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Not a private trip. 
Regan: No, it was a training trip. Most of our trips were training back then. For some reason, we decided -this was before we got married, though. 
Steiger: Good idea! (laughs) 
Regan: That's where you really find out if you're compatible. 
Steiger: Yeah. 
Regan: Well, that fall we started livin' together in the fall, after our season. I had this 1947 Ford bread truck that I lived in. 
Steiger: Bread truck?! 
Regan: Yeah, it was an old Wonder Bread truck, and I traveled all over the West in it, and she started livin' with me. We hiked in at Nankoweap in the fall, spent a week down there fishin' and hangin' out. Boy, there were some big fish at Nankoweap in the early seventies. 
Steiger: So this is like mid-seventies or somethin' like that? 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Not too long after you went to work for Martin, huh? 
Regan: No, it was probably 1977, 1978. You were born in 1978, right, Duff? Duffy: In 1979. 
Regan: So it was probably 1977 or 1978. And then we decided to do a trip that next year, just the two of us. We each had a Selway, and put on in mid-February, 'cause we were gonna take a couple of months. We were in no hurry. 
Steiger: Open-ended departure. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: You left and then it was an open-ended take-out. You'd just figure that out somehow. 
Regan: Yeah. We didn't even do a shuttle. I think we hiked out. What we did is, we hiked out at Phantom and resupplied ourselves. Then we hiked out at Lower Lava, stashed our boats. Rolled 'em up, put 'em under a big tarp high enough for the river, and hiked out at Lava. And I'm tryin' to think.... Oh, we hiked to Riffey's, and then Riffey gave us a ride to Kanab. That was where my truck was. Then we went to a training seminar at the South Rim -Guides Training Seminar. 
Steiger: Wow, that must have been one of the first ones of those. 
Regan: Yeah, it was, at the Albright Center. That was where Mark Law drew the gun and fired his gun in the classroom, just to scare.... 
Steiger: Oh! Not Mark Law -Ernie. 
Regan: Ernie Kunstle [phonetic spelling], yeah. Just to scare everybody. 
Steiger: I remember hearin' about that. 
Regan: Had some blanks or somethin'. People got so pissed off they got up and walked out. It was really bogus. So then we went from there to Southern California, picked up Peter and Roger and Tim, drove back out to Toroweap, and hiked back in, blew up our boats, and went down river. 
Steiger: With all those boys? (laughs) 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: On those Selways. 
Regan: Yeah. And took 'em on their first river trip. 
Steiger: So the total trip was probably two months or somethin' like that. 
Regan: I think it was like forty-two days or forty-three days. 
Steiger: You guys must have done a lot of hikin', huh? 
Regan: We did a lot of hikin'. Yeah, there were many places where we'd spend three or four days. It was really a wet spring, it was really beautiful. I mean, it probably rained twenty, twenty-five days out of forty. It was really wet. We both flipped in Hermit. 
Steiger: How'd that work? 
[END TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A] 
Steiger: This is the River Runners Oral History Project. This is Part 2 of an interview with Regan Dale here in Flagstaff at the dory warehouse. It's still November 6, 1998. This is Lew Steiger, and I'm sittin' here with Regan and Regan's son, Duffy. We were just gonna hear about Regan and Ote runnin' Hermit. So there you guys are in your little Selways. 
Regan: Yeah, and we had just figured out flip lines. 
Steiger: Just like, you mean a few days before? 
Regan: Well, no, I mean.... 
Steiger: In the dories? 
Regan: Yeah. Initially, everybody thought if you put a line on your boat you're just askin' for trouble. You're gonna flip for sure [if] you put a flip line on there. 
Steiger: Oh, you mean just like it would jinx you? (
Regan: Yeah.) Not so much that it would be too much drag, or.... 
Regan: No, no, it was just.... 
Steiger: That's a negative attitude. (laughs) 
Regan: Yeah. And we thought, "Well, shit, this is the only way to go." Initially we had a lot of damage to the boats, they'd tip over. 
Steiger: And so the procedure was you'd have to push 'em into shore before you could right 'em. 
Regan: Push 'em into shore, and that's where most of the damage happened. Was just gettin' 'em to the shore. 
Steiger: Gettin' 'em in. 
Regan: Yeah. As you were gettin' close to shore, that's when (
Steiger: You'd hit the rocks.) you'd hit the rocks. Finally we decided that there had to be a better way. And I don't remember how it all started, but I remember Kenton and I started usin' 'em, runnin' a line underneath. 
Steiger: And sayin', "To hell with this, we're gonna right these out in the deep water." 
Regan: Yeah, get these right side up right away. So we were usin' 'em on our Selways, too, 'cause they're just a little eleven-foot boat with twelve-inch tubes. They're little, like a bathtub. Turned out that we both flipped in Hermit. We were right behind each other. Ote had a huge ride in Granite, where she'd just gotten pummelled, and was full of water and kinda got beat up a little bit, got washed out of her boat. Didn't flip, but she was kinda shaken a little bit. So we decided we'd run Hermit. She didn't want to look at it, she just wanted to run it wide open. 'Cause she knew if she looked at it, she'd get scared. 
Steiger: What was it runnin', do you remember? 
Regan: It was probably about 15,000, 16,000. 
Steiger: Oh, yeah, so it's crankin'. 
Regan: It's crankin'. 
Steiger: And this is like.... 
Regan: This is like in March. 
Steiger: And there's nobody else down there. 
Regan: Nobody else down there. We had full wetsuits and helmets. Both of us were pretty well outfitted. Booties, full wetsuits, and helmets, and so we were ready for whatever happened. Turned out that we both flipped, boom! boom!, within two or three seconds of each other. 
Steiger: In the first big wave? 
Regan: No, in the fifth wave. 
Steiger: I mean, the fifth wave, the one opposite the hole, the first really big one. 
Regan: Yeah. It was just too big for our little boats, and it flipped us both. So I crawled up on the bottom of my boat and turned around, and there was Ote, she'd crawled up on the bottom of hers. And we started laughin'. But we were about thirty feet apart. We tried to right our boats, each one of us. 
Steiger: But you couldn't do it by yourself. 
Regan: Couldn't do it by ourselves. So she reached under her boat and got one of her oars out and used it as a paddle and paddled down to where I was, and then we righted my boat, climbed in it, rowed back over to her boat, climbed on it, righted it, climbed back in it, rowed back over to my boat. And all this time we're floatin' downstream. So we pulled in at Schist Camp and said, "That's it! Camp for the night. No more." (laughter) That night at Schist Camp it stormed to beat the band. We had thunder and lightning and rock falls. We're camped out, and every once in a while we'd stick our head out to see if the river had come up, and our boats were still there. (aside to Duffy) We didn't have anything else happen on the trip. We got to Lava and we were runnin' the slot in Lava. 
Steiger: Oh, my God, 'cause it was 15,000 or somethin'? 
Regan: Yeah, in our Selways, and we're thinkin', "Oh, shit, we'd better ride with each other in case we flip." 
Steiger: Yeah, good idea. 
Regan: And then we go down and look at it, and Ote goes, "I don't want to ride through here twice!" "Okay, let's just do it." 
Steiger: Run it together. 
Regan: Run it together. We both had good runs in the slot. Boy, talk about a big ride in a little boat! 
Steiger: So were you guys engaged when you went? Or did you decide to get married on that trip? 
Regan: No. Probably sometime that spring Ote told me she was pregnant, and I said, "Well, let's get married. What the hell." So we set a date for October. This was sometime in the spring. 
Steiger: After that trip. 
Regan: Yeah. So that fall we got married out at Toroweap. 
Steiger: Boy, that's interesting. It was a whole different pace, wasn't it? 
Regan: Uh-huh. 
Steiger: I mean, thinkin' about.... Guys I knew, it seems like when you were runnin', you were just kinda.... I mean, I don't remember thinking, "Well, this is gonna be the career." I don't remember thinkin' about those kinds of things. 
Regan: Nobody ever thought that they'd do that for a living, for a livelihood. It was more of a hobby. We were makin', I don't know $5,000-$6,000 a year, at the most. 
Steiger: Yeah, but you'd have it at the end of the season, was the thing, which wasn't that bad. 
Regan: I had no expenses, 'cause I lived in a truck. Usually, for the first three or four years, I drove to Salt Lake, parked my truck, and bought a season pass at Alta and just skied all winter. 
Steiger: And that was it. 
Regan: Yeah, and lived off my earnings. 
Steiger: Did your parents give you a hard time? (
Regan: No.) I mean, about "What are you guys doin' for the future?" 
Regan: Oh, not a hard time, really. 
Steiger: I mean, I look back on some of that now, sometimes you wished that you'd have bought some property or something. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Well, but you guys did. 
Regan: We did. We decided we had to have some property right away. 
Steiger: As soon as you got married. 
Regan: Yeah. And we looked around, all over the Arizona Strip. Dean Waterman and Jean Waterman were close friends of ours. I had known them for a while. 
Steiger: Is that his wife or something? 
Regan: Uh-huh. Then we had heard that they had a fire at their house, and their house burned down. So we went out to check it out. Of course I was looking for any kinds of materials that I could scrounge -building materials -'cause I knew eventually we'd find some property, and I'd need some building materials. So I asked Dean Waterman if I could salvage what was left out of his house, 'cause it had burned down. He said, "Sure, help yourself to anything that's there." So we went out there and we started goin' through there, and I was gettin' electrical boxes and two-by-fours and doorknobs and hinges and just whatever I could salvage. 
Steiger: This is before you even had the property? 
Regan: Yeah. And it was such a neat place, over the course of a week or two that we were there, I decided that maybe this was a good spot. And so we approached Dean about it, and he said, "Well, it's Jean's now." He had given up on it, and they had given up on each other, and she had moved to Salt Lake City. See, they had lived in the basement of this house for three or four years. The upstairs was just framed and sided -nothing else. Dean was just tryin' to get his business going at that point, and he had no desire to work on his house. He loved working with metal, but he wasn't that good at working with wood. So he had no interest in building, and when it burned down, he didn't have any interest in rebuilding. Plus Jean had gotten kinda tired of livin' in the basement, and kind of tired of the whole deal and said, "To hell with it," and she'd moved to Salt Lake. So they were in the process of getting a divorce. He said, "Well, it was Jean's house, so do whatever you want." So we called her up and asked her if she'd be interested in selling it, and she said sure. So we bought it for, like, $16,000. Eight acres and the foundation. 
Steiger: Yeah, those were the days, huh? 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Oh, man. 
Regan: So then we spent all that winter repairing the foundation, cleaning up the mess from the fire, and getting ready to rebuild. Ote was due in March, Duff was born on March 21. So we had kind of a deadline. We punched it out that fall, and that was the biggest winter in Kanab's history. We were livin' in my truck in the front yard of this property, just workin' every day. (
Steiger: Whew!) We had it framed-in and sheathed and roofed, and the day before Duff was born, we moved into the house. 
Steiger: So Otey was workin' right with you, being pregnant and everything. 
Regan: Oh, yeah, I had her diggin' a ditch that day, for a water line. That's probably what sent her into labor. 
Steiger: Well, was he about on time and everything? 
Regan: He was a couple weeks early, but close enough. 
Steiger: Wow. What was happenin' in the company? How did things evolve, like with the dories? 
Regan: Oh, things just kinda.... It was in the early eighties that things started to change at Grand Canyon Dories. People like Brad Dimock and Bill Bruchak [phonetic spelling] and people like that had started comin' in. 
Steiger: Did the company suddenly get.... 
Regan: Bigger? 
Steiger: Yeah. Was that a part of that management plan, when they gave extra use ________. 
Regan: Uh-huh. 
Steiger: So all of a sudden Dories got (
Regan: A lot of use.) another third bigger or somethin'? 
Regan: Yeah. And instead of twelve trips, we were twenty-four trips. 
Steiger: Oh! So it got twice as big. 
Regan: Yeah, counting the secondary season use. So we were.... I mean, we were crankin'. And we'd gone through a couple of managers. Jeff Clayton had quit, and Tuck Weills took over for him. And then Tuck did it for a while, and then he quit, and Jane Whalen took over for him. I think that was basically it. Jane and I didn't get along too well, 'cause she was hiring all these new people. The way the pay structure was there, there was no -you weren't paid as far as being senior, there was no seniority system. 
Steiger: It was just everybody got the same, except for the leader got $10 or $20 more a day. 
Regan: Yeah. And she was tryin' to incorporate a lot of different people into leadin' trips, and that was an extra $300-$400 a trip that I needed. And so we had a lot of friction between us. And Martin was kinda absent. He wasn't really doin' much in his company anymore. 
Steiger: What was he up to? 
Regan: He was busy with Idaho. Curt had gone to Idaho to run the Salmon and the Snake and get that whole operation set up there. So he was kinda busy doin' that, and fightin' his environmental battles, and travelin' back and forth from California. We really saw him all the time, but he didn't seem too concerned about the operations of his business. Things just kinda went on. 
Steiger: I guess he wasn't too mathematical of a guy, huh? He wasn't lookin' too hard at the bottom line. 
Regan: No, he gave away a lot of trips, he spent a lot of money on his airplane and traveling. He lived pretty extravagant for a while. He thought he was rich, and he was always spendin' next year's money this year. You know, people would send in their deposits, and that money was gone, so that by the time next season rolled around.... 
Steiger: You had to be a year ahead. 
Regan: Yeah. And eventually he got himself into financial difficulty, to where the bank was comin' to repossess his home. 
Steiger: That was when he sold. 
Regan: Yeah, Esther, his wife, gave him the ultimatum. "You'd better keep this house, buddy." So he was lookin' for somebody that he knew could give him some money for it, and would keep it goin'. He wanted to make sure that Grand Canyon Dories survived. And so he went to George Wendt, and then George Wendt went to John Vail, and they decided they couldn't do it alone, but they could do it together and they'd split the use. 
Steiger: And here we are today. 
Regan: Uh-huh. And Vail wasn't too interested in the dories, he just wanted the user days. And George didn't really know anything about dories, but part of the Park Service agreement was that half the use had to stay as dory use. So actually Mike Walker told George that he wanted the dories. 
Steiger: Walker did?! 
Regan: Uh-huh. 
Steiger: "Let's get 'em." 
Regan: Yeah, 'cause Walker had been livin' in Toquerville, with Roberta's sister, Connie. And he had been runnin' for Hatch a few years. 
Steiger: And so then he had just started. He had started managing for George. (
Regan: Right.) He made a jump there. 
Regan: Uh-huh. 
Steiger: Interesting. I didn't realize Walker had.... 
Regan: So George came to him and said, "Do we want the dories?" And Walker said, "Yeah, we do. Let's get 'em." So when they transferred down to Flag here, there were eighteen boats that came with the sale: I think the Rainbow Bridge and the Nipomo Dunes and the Nechako River and Lava Cliff. There was a couple of other boats I can't remember. I sold 'em. George didn't even really know what he had. He was mainly interested in the use. 
Steiger: And he wasn't that up on the specifics of the equipment and all those things. 
Regan: No. There was quite a bit of equipment, but it was all used. It was all old, wore out. 
Steiger: I know there's a million river stories from all those times. 
Regan: Oh, yeah. 
Steiger: O. C. told this great story about bein' on a six-boat trip and they flipped like five out of six. 
Regan: Oh, yeah, that was String of Pearls. 
Steiger: Yeah, that was pretty wild. There was just all these.... I guess it was kinda like every trip was pretty much of an adventure. 
Steiger: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you never knew what was gonna happen. We used to run a sixteen- and an eighteen-day trip. And the sixteen-day would launch two days after the eighteen. 
Steiger: And catch 'em. 
Regan: And catch 'em at the last day. They'd catch up with each other, and then they'd take out together. It kinda made it so that Martin could bring all his trucks and trailers and equipment and drivers and everything out at the same time. I was on the eighteen-day trip, just ahead of O. C., and we got to Lava, I can't remember exactly. I think it was like a Tuesday and a Wednesday. We got there and the water was about 20,000. And there was no left run, and the right looked horrendous. 
Steiger: I guess it did. Why wasn't there a left run at 20,000? 
Regan: I don't know. I think the left has changed. 
Steiger: Yeah, I know it has. 
Regan: Back then it just looked bad. I don't know, maybe it was.... 
Steiger: Maybe it was there, but you guys didn't know it? 
Regan: Uh-huh. 
Steiger: I know when you look at it from the right, it doesn't look good, either. 
Regan: No, that's true. There probably was a left run, 'cause it was pretty high water. So the only run, really, was down the middle, through the ledge. We figured if we flipped there, you wash on out, wash straight on through. So we ran it, and there was probably five or six boats on the trip I was on. We had two flips, two out of five. The next day, the sixteen-day trip got there, and they had three out of five, or four out of six. 
Steiger: I think that might have been what it was, was four out of six. Didn't O. C. flip too? (
Regan: No.) Or did he make it? 
Regan: He was in the last group. 
Steiger: Him and somebody else, and they made it. But they had watched four boats flip. 
Regan: Four in a row. The first four. 
Steiger: (whistles) Man, oh man. 
Regan: All in different places. 
Steiger: Yeah, that was the thing. 
Regan: None of 'em the same place. 
Steiger: Yeah, so it was like the odds were not lookin' too good. 
Regan: And before that time, we had been runnin' the slot for about two years. 
Steiger: Pretty successfully. 
Regan: Pretty successfully, yeah. I mean, we'd had over 100 boats run through the slot without any incident. So this was what we deemed... the String of Pearls had been broken, you know. In the course of two days we flipped six dories. 
Steiger: If you could stand it, we should hear a little bit about 1983, what that was like. 
Regan: That was pretty exciting. I took notes on that trip. I think I probably have a notebook somewhere, (
Steiger: Good idea!) 'cause I wanted to be able to look back on it, you know, at some point in the future. So every night I took notes about how I felt and what had happened. 
Steiger: Interesting. 
Regan: I have no idea where it is, but I'm sure I have it somewhere. 
Steiger: That would be really interesting. 
Regan: Not something you'd throw away. 
Steiger: No, not at all. 
Regan: But I remember gettin' to Lee's Ferry, and the water was up on the pavement, or up on the asphalt there. 
Steiger: Kenton and them hadn't left yet, huh? 
Regan: Oh, no. And Kenton was tryin' to get a permit to do it. 
Steiger: What did you think of that? You didn't care whether he did or not -it didn't matter? 
Regan: No, it didn't matter to me. We got there, and the ranger told us the water was flowin' 62,000. And there was a lot of hubbub about the lake bein' full and not enough storage for the water. We were pretty excited, 'cause this was a new adventure for us, 62,000. 
Steiger: Who was the crew? 
Regan: It was Tom Rambo, Mike Davis, Ellen Tibbetts, myself, and Mike Taggett [some phonetic spellings]. The highest water I had seen had been the flood of the Little Colorado back in the fall of 1971 or 1972. The Little Colorado had flowed 25,000, a big flood. 
Steiger: And there was another 20,000 comin' down or somethin'? 
Regan: Uh-huh, so it got up to about 40,000, 45,000. That had been the highest water we had seen, and that was pretty exciting. 
Steiger: And this was a lot more than that. 
Regan: Yeah. And I remember pullin' away from Lee's Ferry, and goin', "Whoa! this is unbelievable!" how powerful it was, and how fast it was moving. We went down to Badger and pulled in there, and we were camped way up on the beach, and it was just new and exciting. We weren't sure what to expect. We were thinking the 20s could be horrendous, and they were. Twenty-four-and-a-half Mile.... 
Steiger: I remember the whirlpool above that thing. 
Regan: Oh, man! Twenty-four-and-a-half Mile was scary! We stopped and looked at it, and all the water ran into the wall on the right -the whole river ran into the wall, and then came off the wall, and I'm thinkin', "Jesus! we're liable to be right over there." So we walked our people around, and then we went with each other. 
Steiger: Good idea. 
Regan: That was a technique that we had started to develop. 
Steiger: And that was what that other trip didn't do, ____ a little later. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Maybe one reason why they had so much trouble. 
Regan: Uh-huh. They had taken their people with 'em, and then one of the boats had flipped, and had a bad swim, and then people were gettin' freaked out. 
Steiger: But you guys all made it. 
Regan: Uh-huh. It was pretty exciting. The whirlpools were unbelievable -the eddy lines. We camped pretty much the same places that we normally do, but way up high -you know, back in the canyons. Like at North Canyon, you were way back in there. Buck Farm, way up on the hill. Unkar, way back up. Those were pretty much standard camps -Nankoweap. Everything was big, but we weren't havin' any trouble. We were lookin' at everything and bein' real careful. Hance was pretty spectacular. 
Steiger: Yeah. I remember I just cheated that in a motorboat, but I bet you didn't really want to.... The eddy lines were really scary -it wasn't like you wanted to be over on the side too much, was it? 
Regan: No, you had to be out in the water, out in the middle of the river, 'cause if you got on the eddy lines, the river was goin' in too many directions, spinning. 
Steiger: Too powerful. 
Regan: And those tailwaves in Hance were huge. They were monstrous, but they were pretty smooth. I mean, not crashin' real bad, but kinda movin' around. You know, not really in one place. It was pretty exciting. Rapids like Sock and Grape weren't even there -they were washed away. They were fast water. Horn Creek. We got to Phantom, actually, the park ranger came down and told us that the water was gonna go to 72,000, and I asked him if I could camp there. 
Steiger: At Phantom? 
Regan: Yeah. He goes, "No, you can't camp here, it's against the regulations." Then I said, "Well, can you tell me where I can go to camp?" 'Cause we're in the gorge, and there's just no beaches anywhere. 
Steiger: I guess Granite was underwater, huh? 
Regan: Oh, yeah. He goes, "No, I can't tell you where to go. I don't know the river that well, but you can't stay here." I said, "You tell me the river's gonna go up, and that I can't stay here, but you don't know where I can go." He goes, "Yup." I said, "Well, you call the superintendent then, I want to talk to him." I was gettin' a little pissed, 'cause this guy was a complete idiot. He goes, "Well, I don't know if I can do that." I said, "You call him up. Tell him that there's a river trip here at Phantom that wants to talk to him. There's a trip leader down here that's got trouble, and wants to talk to him." He goes, "Okay." So he goes back up to this office and I go back down to the boats and we're eatin' lunch. I'm tellin' everybody that we're gonna camp there anyway. Fuck it. And he comes down about a half-hour later and says, "The superintendent's out to lunch." And I said something like, "It sounds like all you park people are all out to lunch." I was pissed. He goes on about how we can't camp there. Fuck it! We're leavin'. We all get in the boat, and I had gone down and scouted the beach on the left side right below the bridge. There was a camp there. 
Steiger: With enough high ground. (
Regan: Yeah.) Below the Gray Bridge, yeah. Kinda up there by the trail. 
Regan: Yeah. So we were tryin' to pull in there. Ellie missed the landing, went on downstream. So we had to pull out and go on down. And then we pulled in at Granite and pulled back in there where the trees are -pulled back in amongst the trees, and climbed down to the lower beach and decided we could camp there. 
Steiger: If you could get there. But that was probably pretty open on the left, huh? 
Regan: Yeah, it was real open. But we ran it empty anyway, just to give ourselves a better chance of landing. We were camped there when the water came up to 72,000. We used the two rafts against the shore, and then we put the five dories out off of them, and anchored it out and tied 'em both ways. All night long they were goin' like this. 
Steiger: And everybody was down there on that sand dune (
Regan: Yeah.) below the rapid. 
Regan: Uh-huh. 
Steiger: (whistles) 
Regan: So the next morning it was up seven or eight feet from the previous day, and God, it was huge then, you know, really startin' to get big. We went down and looked at Hermit, and I was pretty savvy about where to scout the rapids from, because I remembered that on the left at Hermit, all those big, big rocks -well, I knew they'd be all covered, that we might not be able to get anywhere close to it. So we stopped on the right, above it, climbed up the hill and looked straight down at it. 
Steiger: Oh, right, 'cause the river would be up just against the cliff all the way down. 
Regan: Yeah. And Hermit was huge -huge waves in the middle. And on the left was just huge waterfalls over the top of those big rocks. So we ran far right. We pulled down and pulled along the footwaves along the right there, and stayed close to shore. Got down to Crystal, and parked way up above Crystal. Walked about, oh, 300-400 yards down to where you could scout it. 
Steiger: Parked above where that kind of rock spine goes down there and cuts the beach? (
Regan: Oh, yeah.) You guys were.... 
Regan: Way up above that, yeah. We had to climb to get down to that bench to where we could look at it, 'cause we didn't want to get sucked into it. 
Steiger: It was haulin' ass right there, too. 
Regan: Oh, man, it was haulin' ass. We got up to the top of that bluff, and we all just stood there with our mouths open, lookin' at the big hole on the left side that was huge, just absolutely like a tidal wave. 
Steiger: I remember, because I was there the next day. 
Regan: I figured it had to be about a hundred feet wide and thirty or forty feet high. 
Steiger: Yeah, and an honest thirty or forty feet high. Real, real honest. 
Regan: Yeah, just huge. 
Steiger: And not that much room between there and shore, is what I remember, but you would probably remember that as good as me. 
Regan: Just about ten minutes after we got there [at Crystal], Tom Rambo turns to me and goes, "Do you think we ought to portage this?" I'm goin', "Well, shit, I don't know. Let's just hang on here a second and think about it." 
Steiger: Is Rambo a pretty conservative guy? 
Regan: Yeah. He was thinkin' we should portage, 'cause he didn't want to go out there and get killed, you know. Then this helicopter shows up and hovers right over the hole for about ten, fifteen seconds, just sittin' there. A big "NPS" written on the side of it -big orange and white helicopter. We're lookin' at that, and then all of a sudden, boom! they're gone. We're goin', "What the fuck was that all about?!" you know. Well, they had come to see what it was gonna look like. I don't know who in the River District had decided they'd better go check Crystal out at 72,000. (
Steiger: Not a bad idea.) 'Cause they had had a boat, I think it was a Western boat.... 
Steiger: Turn over the week before. 
Regan: Right. And they wanted to see what it looked like with the higher flow. Well, we didn't know what that meant, and then they're gone. So we decided we'd take one of the rafts through. There was a guy who was rowin' one of the baggage boats -his name was Nick Grimes or somethin' like that. He'd worked for Moki Mac. I went up to him, I said, "How you feel?" He goes, "Don't tell me I'm not runnin' this!" I go, "No, no, just relax. Calm down. We'll figure this out. How do you feel about runnin' this?" He goes, "I'm ready!" "Well, okay. But let's talk about what you're gonna do." You couldn't get down close to it. The only place you could look at the rapid from, was up high, 'cause the river was all the way in the trees. 
Steiger: I remember. What I remember, there was this big hole, and there were these trees that were wavin' around out on top. There was one, that it looked like you wanted to be right behind that. But then I remember there wasn't that much room between the hole and a bunch of other trees. 
Regan: No, there was probably only about thirty or forty feet. 
Steiger: I remembered it as bein' less, but probably you remember it better. 
Regan: But that's not much, when you're lookin' at a big, wide river, and 80 or 90 percent of the water was goin' into this hole. That's just a narrow little slot, halfway through the rapids, that you had to be there. And it was hard to tell. 
Steiger: And you could have got into the trees if you were too far over. 
Regan: Oh, yeah. I was thinking we'd hit the trees and bounce out, which we did hit the trees. He came down and he tucked.... 
Steiger: Did you ride with him? 
Regan: I rode with him, yeah. 
Steiger: Oh, God! "Okay, now let's just talk about this." (laughter) 
Regan: I wanted to see what it looked like when we got out there. 
Steiger: From out there, yeah. 
Regan: Because if it didn't look like we could make it with the dories, I didn't even want to take that chance. But he had a pretty good run. 
Steiger: How'd it look from out there? 
Regan: It looked like we could make it. I was fairly confident that we could do it without any problem. And we actually went empty. Each one of us rowed our own boat. 
Steiger: All by yourself? 
Regan: Yeah, just to be super-light. So anyway, we ran through. We were able to actually make Thank God Eddy, right there at the top, with three of the boats. 
Steiger: You didn't really have to make -there wasn't that big of a lateral, huh? You just had to be over there. 
Regan: No. You just had to be there. 
Steiger: And you couldn't see it that good comin' in. 
Regan: It was really fast. Smokin'. I remember I think it was Mike Davis and Ellen Tibbetts ended up in the lower eddy. The three of us hit the top eddy. 
Steiger: And halfway through the rapid? 
Regan: Yeah. Actually, no, both of 'em missed the lower eddy, and were halfway to Tuna. They didn't have quite as good a run. So we had our people walkin' down to the lower eddy. Actually, we didn't make the top eddy -no way -we were in the bottom eddy. 
Steiger: And those guys were one notch down. 
Regan: Yeah, they were down a little ways. So we were there, waitin' for our people to walk down, cause they watched us. They all show up, and we're sittin' there, and all of a sudden, two Hatch boats pull in: Bob Hallett [phonetic spelling], and somebody else. Might have been Billy Ellwanger, I can't remember. They pull into the eddy, and he goes, "If I were you guys, I'd get the hell the out of here, 'cause there's three Western boats gonna be pullin' in here any minute." I went, "Oh, shit!" And I said, "Well, can you haul some people down to those other two dories for me, that missed the eddy?" He goes, "Yeah, if they got their life jackets and they're here within the next couple of minutes, I can do that." I said, "Well, you have to wait here, you can't leave." 'Cause I was figurin', "God if we have to pull out of here with six, seven people in each boat, it's gonna be really a pain in the ass." 
Steiger: Did they walk their people around, or did they carry 'em? 
Regan: They had 'em on board. 
Steiger: Yeah, we carried ours, too. 
Regan: So I ran back up the trail and got the folks movin', told 'em to hurry their butts down there. And Hallett did take eight people down to the other two dories, and then we regrouped and went on down. There was just nowhere to stop between there and Bass. 
Steiger: Yeah, like nothin'. 
Regan: Nothin'. We got close to Bass and we were gonna try to stay there. Ellen missed the pull-in again. (
Steiger: Oh, man!) You know how it kinda surged back out? 
Steiger: Yeah, it was hard. 
Regan: It was really hard. 
Steiger: We had people missin' it at 45,000 on that GTS -even like kinda tellin' everybody. Yeah, it's just if it surged or not when you were there. 
Regan: If it surged when you were there, you were out. Well, she missed it, and the rest of us made it, so we decided we were gonna camp there anyway, 'cause I couldn't imagine where else we were gonna go. 
Steiger: Not gonna be any 110 or anything. 
Regan: No. One-fourteen was even under. We couldn't get too far ahead. It was like an eighteen-day trip. So she pulled over right above Shinumo in a little eddy. So the rest of us had made the eddy, so we got all our bow lines and all our throw bags and tied 'em all together, and tied a cushion on it, and walked down as far as we could along that wall, and threw it in the river and floated it down to where she was. She tied it on her boat, and then we drug her back up the wall. She was pushin' off the wall. 
Steiger: She had people in the boat? 
Regan: She had people in the boat, yeah. And we got her back up to where we could unload her people -there was no way we were gonna get her boat to camp. But we got her far enough up where we could offload her people and anything that she had for the camp, and then we told her to go down and anchor along the wall, and Taggett [phonetic spelling] went with her. Just tie off the wall in three or four places, and anchor out, you know. And we'd come down and belay her up the cliff, which we did. We got her back to camp, and her boat stayed the night down there. The next morning we got woke up and we had breakfast, and then we were gettin' ready to leave, and we were gonna put her people in the other four boats -divide 'em up -and take 'em down to her boat and offload 'em and then she'd pull out and we'd stay together. One of the main things we were tryin' to do was to stay close to each other, try to help out each other -not get spread out very far, stay really tight. 
Steiger: Yeah, 'cause a swimmer would just go, huh? 
Regan: Yeah. We were lining our boats up along the rocks there so we could get up far enough to where we could get out, 'cause it kind of piled up against that wall. 
Steiger: Just to get back out of the eddy. 
Regan: Just to get out of the eddy. And we're linin' our boats up there, and all of a sudden, I hear these screams, and I look up, and here comes an upside down Tour West boat. 
Steiger: Was it Tour West or Georgie? 
Regan: It was Georgie. 
Steiger: Yeah, 'cause that was the day I was there. The Georgie single-boat. Not Georgie herself, but a thirty-three. 
Regan: Yeah, upside down, with about eight people on it, all in a panic. 
Steiger: I guess so! 
Regan: They had come all the way from Crystal that morning, upside down. 
Steiger: And they had left people behind, and nobody knew nothin'. 
Regan: Yeah. So there was nothin' I could do. I mean, they just went by me in a flash. 
Steiger: Yelling, "Save us!" 
Regan: Oh, yeah, in hysteria. So I got out my radio and tried to get an airplane, and finally about a half-hour later I got an airplane, told 'em to give the message to the Park Service, and they relayed it. Eventually, we got out and we got all our people in Ellen's boat -all her people -and pulled out around the corner there from Shinumo. 
Steiger: So that Georgie boat just disappeared, adios? 
Regan: Yeah, went around the corner. So we come around the corner there from Shinumo, and there's the boat, pinned against the wall at 110, Lower 110, where it makes that sharp left turn. 
Steiger: People are on it? 
Regan: No, they're on the shore, up on the rocks. 
Steiger: They got off? 
Regan: Yeah, they got off. The boat's like this, pinned. 
Steiger: Oh, my God! 
Regan: My initial reaction was to pull over, and then I thought, "Shit! if I pull over, that means everybody behind me will pull over, and one of us is liable to get pinned on that wall just like that boat is." And so I started pullin' the other way, and hoping that everybody else would, too. But Mike Davis and Mike Taggett decided to pull over and be heroes. You know, go down there and save those people. Well, they were able to pull over, and as soon as I saw them pull over, I pulled over on the other side, down about a half a mile. 
Steiger: Yeah, it was just haulin' ass, wasn't it? 
Regan: Yeah, it was just haulin' ass through there. But I didn't want to get separated. I didn't want to get separated, 'cause I saw them pull over. So we floated around this one eddy for an hour, the rest of the boats, just waitin' for those two guys to catch up with us. What they had done is they had pulled over far enough upstream where they could walk down and make sure everybody was okay. And then as soon as the Park Service showed up, they left and came down to where I was. 
Steiger: Park Service choppered in? 
Regan: Uh-huh. 
Steiger: In response to your radio call. 
Regan: Yeah. And while I'm sittin' down in that eddy, waitin' for my two boats, the Park Service chopper flies down, hovers right there. I talked to 'em on my radio. They asked me if I'd seen any swimmers, 'cause they were missin' some people. I said, "No, I hadn't seen any swimmers." 
Steiger: Yeah, they were back upstream. 
Regan: They were back upriver. But they [the Park Service helicopter] disappeared downriver. Then about fifteen minutes later they came back and went upstream. That was the last time I ever saw 'em. Then my two boats showed up, so we went on down and we camped at 119 there on the left, way up in a little draw. 
Steiger: Spent the day at Elves [Chasm] or something? 
Regan: Uh-huh. That night.... 
Steiger: You camped like at Michael Jacobs' Camp? 
Regan: Uh-huh. That night a boat pulls in, a motor rig, another one. I can't remember who it was. Pulls in and said everybody was okay, they'd found everybody. So that was kind of a relief to us. [END TAPE 2, SIDE A, BEGIN SIDE B] The next day we went down and we stayed across from Tapeats there at the Upper Owl Camp. We were eatin' dinner, and somebody hollers, "Hey lookit!" There's a bunch of stuff in the river, a bunch of paper plates and ammo cans and life jackets -anything that would float, all in a line, comin' downriver. So we launched a boat, one of our dories, right along the eddy line, in case there was a swimmer. We were thinking if somebody comes by floatin', we'll grab 'em, 'cause we didn't know what had happened. Pretty soon all the stuff quits comin', all the gear. So we pulled back in. And then just before dark, an upside-down Tour West boat goes by, just a lone boat, nobody on it, nobody behind it, nobody with it. And then about an hour later, another Tour West boat comes by and tells us that they'd had one fatality, asked us if we'd seen their boat. [We] said, "Yeah, it's that way." It had gotten stuck in the Narrows, probably pinned against one of those walls, 'cause we saw 'em the next day. Nobody had ever said anything to me about Granite Narrows. I had no idea. 
Steiger: So you were not at all.... 
Regan: I was totally unaware of what was gonna happen when we pulled out from shore. But I had pulled out a little earlier, because I wanted to go down and scout the landing at Deer Creek where we were gonna spend the day. I wanted to make sure we could all get in there, and I was gonna signal them as they came down. So I was out front. 
Steiger: I'm surprised, 'cause Martin probably should have remembered that a little bit. 
Regan: Well, he wasn't there. 
Steiger: Yeah, when you guys took off or anything. 
Regan: Nobody had ever said anything about "watch out for Granite Narrows." So I'm probably ten minutes ahead of everybody else. I am instantly into the Narrows, and I look downstream, and I see the river kinda goin' (imitates sound of wildly undulating river). I'm goin', "Holy shit!" (laughter) And it was all I could do to keep from gettin' sucked under that right wall where it dove down. I mean, I was right next to it, rowin' as hard as I could, just kinda inchin' my way down that thing, and finally got free of it. 
Steiger: So you had faced up dead into the wall with just a little bit of a ferry, just ferryin' across. 
Regan: Yeah. Well, first you have to hit the eddy line comin' off the left, and then pivot and start pullin' left. I mean, it was wild. I remember vividly thinkin', "Holy shit!" 
Steiger: Holy moly! 
Regan: Yeah. And apparently the other boats behind us had been totally unaware, too, 'cause we'd never talked about it. So they were shocked, but fortunately nobody had any trouble there. We were really lucky, 'cause that could have been a disaster. 
Steiger: Oh, yeah. I guess there was a lot of paint scraped off from motorboats and stuff on the wall up there. 
Regan: Yeah. So we spent the day at Deer Creek, up high. 
Steiger: You know what's amazing, everybody else that I've talked to about that, that ran that, they were all in rubber boats. Everybody else hit that cliff and scraped along it. (laughs) Nobody else stayed off of it. 
Regan: Well, you know, if you'd have got in there with a wooden boat, you'd have tore it up. 
Steiger: Yeah. 
Regan: Fortunately, we didn't. I spent the day at the overlook at Deer Creek. 
Steiger: Just watchin'. 
Regan: Watchin'. And we hadn't seen anybody since the Tour West boat was upside down. And nobody the day before. 
Steiger: We went by you guys the day before, because I was camped.... We were in the middle of the Georgie flip and the Cross boats and all that. And then you guys must have been at Elves, or did you go into Tapeats? 
Regan: We went way up in Blacktail. 
Steiger: Maybe that's where you were. 
Regan: We rowed way up into Blacktail. 
Steiger: I'll bet you that's where you were, 'cause I don't remember even seein' you particularly. 
Regan: Our boats were way up in Blacktail, up in the narrow part of it. We spent probably half the day there. 
Steiger: Anyway, we were there at Crystal, and we ended up stayin' at Bass while they helicoptered the Georgie people out, and the Cross people. That night, the day of that flip, we got out of there so late we camped somewhere on Conquistador Isle. So we went by you right then. You guys were either in Blacktail, or you were camped at Jacobs' Camp. Well, you would have went to Blacktail the next day. 
Regan: The next morning. 
Steiger: So we passed you that evening, we had to. 'Cause I remember we camped at the end of Conquistador Isle, up on the ledges, 'cause that was the only place we could think of. And then the next day we were below Deer. There's a big camp on the left, above Fishtail, and we were at that one. The riffle above -not that Chicken Wing Camp, but there's just a big ol' beach. And I remember sittin' there when all those plates and shit went by. 
Regan: Oh, yeah? 
Steiger: Yeah. And then we went by that morning and saw there was a side tube that had come down all by itself. 
Regan: It'd gotten off the Tour West boat? 
Steiger: Yeah, and we tied that up. That was floatin' in an eddy below Kanab. And then we parked at Havasu, and the Tour West boat went by us, upside down. So we had went by you somewhere. But I don't remember seein' ya'. 
Regan: We must have been in Blacktail then. 
Steiger: Yeah. 
Regan: So you camped at Bass? 
Steiger: No, we left out of Bass at like 5:00 p.m. We had stayed there. We must have passed you guys at Blacktail. 
Regan: No, we were at Elves then. We were probably all up in Elves. 
Steiger: At that time. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: There wasn't anywhere to go, so we left.... Well, you said 119. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: On the left. Maybe we passed you there. I'm tryin' to think of where the hell.... No, wait! That's not Jacobs'. 
Regan: Yeah it is, that's _________. 
Steiger: Oh, yeah, that's right, that night. Yeah, you guys.... I think you were at Elves. 
Regan: We probably were at Elves when you went by. 
Steiger: Yeah. Anyway.... 
Regan: So I'm up at the top of Deer Creek thinkin', "Where is everybody?! There has to be more trips on the river." Well, that's when they stopped trips from goin' by Phantom and from leavin' Lee's Ferry. It was kinda right in that interim period, so nobody was out there, and we're out there all by ourselves. I'm thinkin', "What the hell's goin' on?! There's no other trips around here." And we're parked under the falls, almost, against the left wall there where you climb up. That's where we were parked. And all day I watched this helicopter fly up and down the river. And I had my radio out, and I'm thinkin', God I know if they know we're -they must know we're here." What they were doin' was, they were puttin' a ranger down at Lava, to flag all the trips in. 
Steiger: At Lava? 'Cause they had decided nobody can run that either. 
Regan: Right, nobody should run Crystal or Lava. So they were puttin' a ranger down there, and they were lookin' for whatever -people in the river, I guess. I couldn't figure it out. So we went to Kanab that night, and we're about 200 yards above Kanab Creek, and I hear this commotion and I look around, and here comes Kenton and Wren and Rudy. They went by me so fast, all I had time to do was say, "How was Crystal?" They hollered back, "Flipped! Everything okay. See you in a couple days." And the boat was tied together with duct tape, the bow of the boat, and Wren had a bandage on his head, and they were gone in a flash. I took one picture of 'em as they went by. 
Steiger: Did that come out? 
Regan: Uh-huh. I have it somewhere. Then we had to pull in at Kanab, and we stayed there for two days. 
Steiger: 'Cause you guys were ahead of schedule. 
Regan: Yeah. It was a nice big lake back in there. It was a great place to camp. 
Steiger: So you had a nice, calm, peaceful camp way up in there out of the way of everybody. 
Regan: Yeah. It was great. It was calm and off the river. And then the next day we went to Havasu, and that's where they told us it was gonna go to 92,000 the next day, and we're goin', "Jesus Christ, where is this headed?!" Our boats are parked way up above the crossing. 
Steiger: Who was it that.... That's where you must have run into Jimmy then. 
Regan: That's when Jimmy showed up, yeah. 
Steiger: He said everybody was way up in there, to where the first waterfall normally was. 
Regan: Above that. 
Steiger: You had floated in to like the first crossing. 
Regan: Uh-huh. 
Steiger: And everybody was laughin' about what if the water went down, the dories would be stuck. (laughter) 
Regan: That's when the helicopter came by and dropped us the note out the window. "Camp high, be safe," in a little rice bag. And we're goin', "Jesus!" So we weren't worried about the water going down, we were worried about it comin' up and not being able to get out, because it narrows up towards the top. 
Steiger: Oh, at the very top. 
Regan: At the very top it gets real narrow. So I'm all day sittin' there, watchin' the water come up, thinkin'.... 
Steiger: And it's comin', too. 
Regan: It's comin'. But it never got that close to the top. I mean, we had plenty of room to get out. 
Steiger: I guess there wasn't any unloadin' people outside for you guys. 
Regan: Oh, no. It was in the boat, and as soon as you pulled out of there, you were locked-in down the river (shoom!). And we went to Fern Glen that night in about forty-five minutes. National was totally underwater. Tuckup was a huge rapid, like Hermit -big, big waves. All night the water came up at Fern Glen, and by morning we were camped on a piece of sand about as big as this room, with twenty-six or seven people. 
Steiger: Holy moly! 
Regan: There was nothin' else. 
Steiger: That's a pretty big ol' beach, too. 
Regan: It was all underwater. It was unbelievable. And I was up in the canyon in the morning, sittin' up there goin', "Fuck, I wonder what Lava Falls is gonna look like? Are we gonna go down there and just die, all of us?" So I'm thinkin', "This is crazy, 92,000!" I had no idea what Lava was gonna look like. It could have been huge. So we pulled in way upstream, and walked down. 
Steiger: Pulled in on the left, that eddy? 
Regan: On the left. Even above that. We pulled in way above that. 
Steiger: I know the one. There's like a little camp there. The eddy above the helipad. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: The old helipad. 
Regan: Yeah, we pulled in 200-300 yards above that. 
Steiger: Oh, wow. 
Regan: Way up there. I wasn't about to get sucked into somethin'. So we pulled over early, walked down there. Got up on top and a Moki Mac trip came by -didn't even stop, just ran down the left. We're goin' "Jesus!" Two boats, four people. 
Steiger: A rowin' trip? 
Regan: Yeah. I don't know where they came from. 
Steiger: Wow. 
Regan: And they had good runs down the left. "Yeah!" 
Steiger: How'd it look? 
Regan: It was huge on the right. 
Steiger: Huge on the left, too? 
Regan: It was big on the left, but it didn't look big from where we were lookin' at it. It looked like it was okay. But when you got down in there, it was huge waves. 
Steiger: And then kinda big waves on down a ways. 
Regan: Oh, yeah. You know where the rock is that we kinda tuck in behind now? (
Steiger: Uh-huh. Halfway to....) That was a huge lateral. 
Steiger: Huge lateral. 
Regan: Yeah. I came down and I hit that, and it filled me up, just kaboosh! 
Steiger: But Lower Lava probably wasn't such a big deal, huh? 
Regan: Well, as soon as I was full of water, I was right over against the left wall. 
Steiger: Oh, my gosh, so it was a big deal! 
Regan: It was a big deal, yeah. We were tryin' to make Lower Lava, to camp. I was downstream. I got thrown in that eddy below the left wall and spun around a few times, and then (swoosh!) on down I went. So we were about halfway to 183 before we could stop. As soon as we stopped, we camped. (Steiger laughs) We got all the boats over in one spot, that was it. 
Steiger: "This is it!" 
Regan: "This is it." The next morning, Martin flies over -airplane circling overhead. I get on my radio, Martin wants to know how everything was goin'. I told him everything was fine. We hadn't had any trouble up to that point -none. The only problem we had was tryin' to get all the boats to land at the same place. And he goes, "Well, good luck!" And I said, "Hey, how about goin' down and lookin' at the lower canyon for me?" He goes, "Okay." So he takes off and disappears. Then all of a sudden there's another airplane flyin' around, and so I called them, and it was Rudy and Kenton, and they wanted to know how we were doin', 'cause they were launchin' a trip the next day, and wanted to know how everything was goin'. 
Steiger: So they got in a different plane besides from Martin. (laughs) 
Regan: Yeah, they wanted to get the straight scoop, so they chartered their own airplane. 
Steiger: They didn't trust M. L., 'cause he'd just say, "Aw, hell, it's fine." 
Regan: Yeah. (laughter) So I told them, and then they disappeared, and then Martin came back. It was really funny, I was all morning on the radio. Martin goes, "Well, it looks flat from up here." (laughter) 
Steiger: Two-oh-five [205] probably was pretty big, wasn't it? 
Regan: Huge! Yeah, it was huge. It was pretty funny. We went down, and just below Travertine Grotto, where it narrows up there, just above Travertine Falls, Rambo got caught in a whirlpool, and it sucked his whole boat underwater and flipped it. 
Steiger: Oh, my God! This whirlpool just came and got him. 
Regan: Yeah. There were some whirlpools down in that lower gorge that were unbelievable, where half the river would be spinnin' on this side. And there was one place right above the grotto, where there were two huge eddies, like this, and it didn't look like you could get through 'em. I mean, the whole river was spinnin'. It was really ominous. 
Steiger: Oh, man! 
Regan: And fortunately, I didn't have any trouble, but Rambo got caught in one of 'em just below the grotto, and (imitates sound of garbage disposal) sucked the whole boat under. 
Steiger: Completely underwater (
Regan: Yeah.) and it comes up, upside down. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Man. Everybody stay with it okay? 
Regan: Everybody stayed with it. So I'm down at Travertine Falls, we were havin' lunch there, and he pulls in, he goes, "God! did you see that?!" I went, "What?!" He goes, "I just flipped!" I went, "No!" And he was tryin' to tell me how he'd just tipped over and they were able to get on the bottom of it and right it. 
Steiger: And get back in it. 
Regan: And pull over. And I'm goin, "Gees!" I mean, it was wild down in there. And it was so nice to hit the top of the lake. We got down and camped in Spencer, way up in Spencer Canyon, and it was calm water, and it was so relieving to have it over with. I decided right then and there I'd never do that again with people. 
Steiger: That high. 
Regan: That high. It was just too scary. 
Steiger: Yeah. I didn't mind it too bad in a motorboat. But.... 
Regan: In a rowin' rig, in a dory, whew! 
Steiger: Yeah, really exciting. 
Regan: Too. 
Steiger: This was before anything was fiberglass, too. It was still wooden, huh? 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Man, oh man. 
Regan: Pretty exciting trip. 
Steiger: But that's probably not even the wildest trip you ever had, huh? God, I know there's all these other ones, too. 
Regan: Oh, yeah. That might have been the wildest one, but I've had so many trips that we have a lot of boat damage, and people gettin' hurt, and people fallin' off cliffs. 
Steiger: You thinkin' of Marie? 
Regan: Yeah. Were you there? 
Steiger: Yeah, I was. That was a pretty wild day. 
Regan: I'll say! 
Steiger: That worked out pretty good, didn't it? God! Yeah, I can remember that, vividly. This girl fell. She was about fifteen years old or somethin'? 
Regan: Fifteen, sixteen, yeah, pretty young. 
Steiger: Kinda clutzy. 
Regan: Chubby. 
Steiger: A little bit awkward. And she fell at the worst possible place in Matkat. But boy, it looked terrible, we thought she was gonna die, huh? 
Regan: Oh, yeah. I thought for sure she was dyin'. When I got to her, she was face down in the creek, in the water, having convulsions. 
Steiger: This girl went off the upper trail at Matkat at the worst possible place, fell probably forty-five feet, do you think? (
Regan: Uh-huh.) Straight off. Over kind of down a little slope, and then straight down where you couldn't see, but landed on hard rock in the creek. (
Regan: Yeah.) Face down, convulsions, in the creek, when you got to her. (
Regan: Yeah.) Holy moly! I was out at the boats. 
Regan: I just got her head, and tried to stabilize her head and lift it up out of the water so she could breathe, and didn't move her. Real quick a couple of other people showed up. 
Steiger: Dave -what was his name? (
Regan: I can't remember.) Becker? Is that right? 
Regan: Yeah, that's right. 
Steiger: He was really good on that one. 
Regan: Yeah, he was. 
Steiger: So this girl had taken this terrible fall, and we thought she had a head injury and all this stuff, but boy, I remember it was a really wild evacuation. Peter Dale took off right away for Havasu, to call a chopper. I remember there were these German guys that had this snout rig. 
Regan: A private trip. 
Steiger: We had to [get] her out of there. You knew that we couldn't helicopter her out of Matkat, so we were gonna take her across. 
Regan: Yeah, there was a beach right across the river, on the other side of the mouth. We put her on a back board and put her on this snout rig. 
Steiger: Which looked like these guys.... I remember they were rowin' it, and one guy, they faced two different ways. Remember, there was a guy on each oar, and one guy, they sat across from each other, facing opposite ways, but they worked that boat. 
Regan: Oh, yeah. 
Steiger: I remember we put her on there, and they just shot right across there, came out with a perfect angle, and just boom! right over to the other side. 
Regan: And that was a stormy afternoon, stormy night. 
Steiger: Really stormy -black, black clouds. But the ship got in. 
Regan: Uh-huh. There were actually a couple of 'em that came: remember the one from Kingman and the one from South Rim? 
Steiger: I remember you kept me and I guess Dave Becker with you, and everybody else went down to Matkat, and we all sat there. But we didn't think the helicopter would get in, because it was so stormy. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: And then that guy came in and really made an impressive landing. 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: That always impressed me, because I remember thinkin' the wind was gustin' so hard and there were all these black clouds, and here comes this guy at 150 miles an hour, and I remember thinkin', "Man I hope he can...." 'cause that beach wasn't very big. 
Regan: No. 
Steiger: "I hope this guy doesn't blow this." But boy, he set it right down. And she turned out to not be hurt so bad after all. 
Regan: No, it was just a broken arm or somethin', and lacerations and abrasions and concussion. 
Steiger: I know there's a bunch of stories. The one is the story of the sinking of the Lava Cliff. 
Regan: Oh, yeah. That's a pretty wild story. 
Steiger: I don't know if you've got the gas to do that or not. 
Regan: How we doin' on tape? 
Steiger: We got another half-hour. How are you doin'? I mean, I can come back, too. 
Regan: Good. I'll probably just have time for this, and then we'll have to.... 
Steiger: Okay, and then we'll do a Part Two if you're up for it. 
Regan: Okay. This was a trip that was probably in the year right after the high water -probably 1984, where it was still pretty high, and Crystal was still very ominous. It had changed and become a really big, big ride, and big rapid. 
Steiger: Really tough to row. 
Regan: Tough to row, a lot of laterals that you had to bust through, and another classic example of where we were walkin' our people around. But we were goin' with each other. (pause) I'm tryin' to think. Oh, this isn't the same trip where the helicopter and the plane collided -this is a different trip. And I ran through, I think it was Mike Davis and I went through, the first two boats. And then we came back up to ride with two other guides, and I was ridin' with Dale Delomas [phonetic spelling]. 
Steiger: And there was Martin and all these politicians. 
Regan: Oh, and Bruce Babbitt, who had hiked in at -he either came in at Phantom, or there was another trip that we picked him up at Nankoweap. 
Steiger: I remember Alice Arlen [phonetic spelling] was on that trip, that she was a screen writer. She was a lady who later got that James Taylor thing goin'. 
Regan: Oh, really? 
Steiger: Yeah, she remembers that. So Martin and all these Grand Canyon Trust guys, and Bruce Babbitt and all this political stuff. 
Regan: All these lawyers. 
Steiger: So they're walkin' around, they don't give a shit about Crystal. 
Regan: Yeah. Well, they're busy talkin' politics, 'cause Bruce Babbitt was gettin' ready to run for the presidency, and he had all his advisors with him, and they were talkin' strategy. 
Steiger: So here's all these political guys, and they're workin', they're talkin' politics. 
Regan: And we're tryin' to run the rapid. So I go back up and ride with Dale. I'd already taken my boat through and parked in the little eddy halfway through. And Rudy must have been the person who ran with me, 'cause he went to the lower eddy. We came down, and Dale was a little bit late -I could tell he was late -not much, twenty feet, but it was enough, and he hit the first wave -big, green, monstrous wave -dead sideways. And I high-sided for him, but it didn't matter, it was about four feet over my head, and I never looked around. 
Steiger: The first lateral was four feet over? Or the new wave? 
Regan: The new hole, the new wave that we called the new hole. It was huge. 
Steiger: Oh, yeah, dead sideways. 
Regan: Dead sideways. And I high-sided. I didn't look to see where he was, but I leaned out over the boat and put as much of my weight into it as I could, and it just buried me. You could feel the boat flip underneath ya'. I popped up right next to it. I wasn't able to hold onto it. I made a couple of efforts to grab it and couldn't. The next thing I knew, we were in the old hole. I remember goin' down, and the boat was in front of me, and it was goin' up, and all of a sudden it was comin' back at me, and I reached for it and got ahold of it, went under it, and was able to hang onto it, finally crawled out from underneath it, just as we went down. I got up on the bottom of it and looked around for Dale, and he was about thirty feet downstream of it. It was obvious he wasn't gonna get back to it. And we proceeded to go down and get stuck on that big pink rock, upside down. We hit it and stopped, instantly. And then the boat started sinkin'. Within seconds it started goin' under. 
Steiger: Did it just kinda paste on it? 
Regan: Yeah, it just kind of pasted on it, and then slowly just kind of started goin' down -gettin' sucked down, I guess, I don't know. And as soon as the water got up to my chest, I decided fairly quickly that I wasn't going to go under with the boat. No more did I think about it than it washed me off of it and I got flushed downstream. 
Steiger: So for a while there, you were just sittin' on the bottom, kinda holdin' onto the flip line? (
Regan: Yeah.) But then the thing's goin' down. 
Regan: Yeah. So I got washed through the rest of the boulders there, and kinda got beat up a little bit. Finally I'm lookin' up and here comes Rudy, and he had picked up Dale, and he was tryin' to get me. Finally I got close enough, and he pulls me in. By that time I was pretty wasted, I was totally spent. We got back to the eddy -or no, actually we were down a little bit, I think. But anyway, I walked back up to where Martin and Babbitt and all these guys were, and they're sittin' there still talkin'. They didn't even see it happen, they had no idea. And on the way back up, as I'm walkin' up there, I'm lookin' out there for the boat, and it's completely underwater. You could see the water goin' up and over it. It was makin' a big dome. But it was gone, it was underwater. So I walked back up there, and I find Martin and I pull him aside. I said, "Martin, we just lost the Lava Cliff." He goes, "What?!" I said, "Yeah, the boat's underwater, out in the middle of the rock pile. It's under water." He goes, "You've gotta be kiddin'!" (laughter) I said, "Yeah, I was on it when it went under." And I'm bleedin'. Both my shins have been raked over the rocks and I'm bleedin'. He goes, "Oh, my!" So he calls all these guys over, Babbitt included. He goes, "Gentlemen, I think we just lost one of our boats out in the river." And there was instant panic. These guys ran down to the boats and started opening hatches and pulling stuff out to see if their stuff was safe. And certainly there was a bunch of stuff in the Lava Cliff, so we lost a lot of stuff. And because Babbitt was the governor still of Arizona at the time, he had a state police office as an escort -this gal who certainly didn't look like a state police officer, but she was. And she had her weapon and a radio in the boat that was out in the river, because the state police were flyin' over every day to check on the governor. 
Steiger: Make sure everything was okay. 
Regan: Make sure everything was okay, that he hadn't been attacked. (laughter) 
Steiger: Hadn't got bit by a red ant! 
Regan: So we were down just above Tuna, havin' lunch, on the left side. 
Steiger: So the boat just stayed underwater, you can't even see the thing. 
Regan: You couldn't even see it. 
Steiger: You got no more boats upstream anyway, there's nothin' you're gonna do. 
Regan: Nothin' we're gonna do, it's underwater, it's sunk. So we regroup, go downstream, have lunch. And all these guys are real upset that they lost their gear. All of a sudden, a river bag floats by. Yeah! Things are lookin' up here! And then an ammo can. So we put a boat out and grab it, and sure enough it's the state police gun and the radio. 
Steiger: Okay, the very first one! (
Regan: Yeah.) Pretty good! 
Regan: She was happy. 
Steiger: Oh, yeah, if you lose your gun.... 
Regan: That's a bad deal. So that was all. The back hatch had come open. 
Steiger: And that's where her stuff was? 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: Like the stern hatch. 
Regan: Uh-huh. So we had to divvy up everybody, and we proceeded on down, and they were hikin' out at Tapeats. 
Steiger: Or was it Bass? 
Regan: No, it was Tapeats, 'cause I hiked up, and Martin hiked out with 'em, and so did Dale, 'cause he didn't have a boat, no sense of him stayin'. And he went back to Hurricane and called the Park Service and told 'em what had happened. They flew in and righted the boat. By this time, the water was a lot lower. The next day the water had dropped out. Then you could see the boat wrapped on the rock, upside down. 
Steiger: I remember talkin' to Crumbo about that. I don't think they righted it. Did they get it right side up? My recollection of what he said was that they come-alonged it off, and then he kept tryin' to get it into shore. But it was still upside down, and he didn't realize. (
Regan: That could be.) It sounded like if he had known about dories, you know.... He was tryin' to get it into shore upside down. And it sounded to me like all he really had to do was get somebody on it and right it. 
Regan: It was probably full of sand. 
Steiger: Oh, and water too, I guess -either way. 
Regan: Sand and water. Either way it was gonna be a tough deal. Apparently they didn't have enough gas in the ship to go chasin' after it again. They had to go back to the South Rim to get more fuel. 
Steiger: And so then by the time they got.... 
Regan: By the time they came back, it was gone. 
Steiger: Adios, Lava Cliff. 
Regan: Yeah. Sunk somewhere probably right below 100 Mile Rock, or right above it. Somewhere down there in one of those holes. 
Steiger: Yeah. Pretty wild. I know there's been a billion other adventures. I know there was a lot of years there, like you say, where you were runnin' down the right in Lava, and it's like every time you get there.... 
Regan: There was one time we got there, and Kenton was right ahead of me, a day ahead of me. And we pull in there and walk up to scout, and looked down, and here's the Niagara sittin' in the corner pocket, upside down. Just sittin' there, nobody around. Didn't see anybody. 
Steiger: Oh, man! 
Regan: And finally Kenton walks back up to where we're scoutin', and he goes, "Any ideas?" (laughter) "What do you mean?" He goes, "Let's get that boat out of there." "Well, let us run first, and then we'll talk about it." So we ran through. Then we came back up, and there was no way, it was wedged big time. 
Steiger: This was a metal boat, though (
Regan: Yeah.) not wood. 
Regan: Yeah. It was dead sideways in the slot, with the deck out. 
Steiger: Deck upstream. Oh, man! 
Regan: Yeah. So I finally talked Kenton into just leavin' it, 'cause there's really nothin' we can do. We couldn't pull it out. And I didn't want anybody gettin' hurt. So Kenton, bein' the determined guy that he is, gets his hatchet, and starts cuttin' his way in through the bottom of the boat. 
Steiger: Oh, wait, so the decks are toward the rock? 
Regan: Yeah. 
Steiger: So the bottom of the boat.... 
Regan: We could see the bottom. 
Steiger: And that was all you could see. 
Regan: Yeah. And he's out there with this hatchet, whalin' on this aluminum boat, (
Steiger: He's gonna get his stuff out of there.) tryin' to get into it. And I'm with him, and the water's comin' up, and it's late in the day, and it's about six o'clock at night, and the water's comin' up and it's gettin' dark, and I'm tryin' to pull him off this boat, and he's goin', "No, no, just a few more minutes. I'll get this out of there." He's cut a hole in it, and he's reachin' in and pullin' out stuff. Finally I said, "Kenton, we're outta here," and grabbed him and pulled him away. We eventually left it. It went underwater that night, and the next morning we were downstream. He and the Cold Chisel Gang hiked back in at Lava with come-alongs and cables and bolts and winches and all the stuff they needed, and they winched it out and took it to Lower Lava and choppered it to Tuweap, where they put it on a trailer and eventually took it to the recycling center in Las Vegas. 
Steiger: But it wasn't gonna be a boat anymore after that. 
Regan: No, it was pretty well tweaked. It was bent up, bad. Lots of stories like that. 
Steiger: Yeah. Why would you want to row these boats, if they're all that much trouble?! I know the answer. 
Regan: It's always somethin' different. 
Steiger: Yeah. Well, they're just fun to run. I think it's really true. I mean, there's nothin' like bein' in one of 'em. Well, it sounds like you're kinda runnin' out of gas here. 
Regan: Yeah, I'm runnin' out of time. 
Steiger: Well, maybe if I can, I'll sit you down one more time, and just roll a little more tape on this thing. I'm not sure exactly when. 
[END OF INTERVIEW]