A profusion of indigo blue lupines and deep pink owl clover graces the desert among paloverde trees and ocotillos near Bartlett Reservoir along the course of the Verde River northeast of Phoenix.

WOODEN BOATS

TEXT BY BRAD DIMOCK PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATE THOMPSON

PLUNGE AHEAD

Falls, with its chaos of exploding waves, always brought a unique dread.

Today, as usual, my stomach knots. What is unusual is that I am rowing a plank-built skiff of a type not seen here in more than 65 years. It is of the Galloway style, a design long superseded by newer forms.

Devised in the 1890s by Utah trapper Nathaniel Galloway, the Galloway boat revolutionized whitewater navigation. Earlier boaters, such as explorer John Wesley Powell, had struggled with heavy, round-sided, keeled boats, designed for flat-water work but poorly adapted to shallow, rocky or turbulent rivers.

Galloway innovated a light, flat-bottomed boat, raised slightly at either end to ease pivoting. Then, unlike Powell and his ilk who rowed hard downstream, their backs to the oncoming waves and rocks, Galloway turned around, faced the obstacles and rowed upstream while moving downstream, which slowed his momentum and ferried him away from danger. Galloway's boats and techniques dominated Grand Canyon travel for four decades.

In 1937 the last Galloway boat was built by an Oregon gas station attendant named Buzz Holmstrom. A self-taught boatbuilder, he studied Galloway's design and modified it to his needs. By shortening it to 15 feet, widening it to 5 feet and raising the ends, Holmstrommade the most maneuverable Galloway ever built. He then launched the craft, named the Julius F., in Wyoming's Green River and became the first to solo the Green and the Colorado, for more than a thousand rapidstudded miles, to the Boulder Dam. Sadly, Holmstrom died just nine years later and his boat disappeared somewhere along the rainy coast of Oregon.

In the mid-1990s, I helped research and write Holmstrom's biography, The Doing of the Thing, and swore I would re-create his brilliant boat. To do that, I teamed with Oregon boat historian Roger Fletcher, Oregon boat designer and builder Jerry Briggs, Colorado boatbuilder and veteran river guide Andy Hutchinson, Flagstaff boatman and carpenter Dan Dierker, and more than a dozen others.

Working with old photographs, films, notes and memories, we redesigned Holmstrom's brainchild. Using aromatic Port Orford cedar, cut from the same forest Holmstrom cut his, we milled, planed and riveted together a beautiful lapstrake hull and decked it over with thin cedar strips. Finally, we rubbed it with oil to a luminescent sheen and christened it the Julius.

The Julius now moves lightly on the water, aglow in the afternoon sun. Behind me float Hutchinson and Dierker in their boats.

As THE CREST OF GRANITE FALLS approaches, my twitching anxiety evaporates, replaced by a resolute calm: Anticipate. Act. React. I drop in, spin the blunt stern left, then right, pushing into the exploding billows of muddy water. The Julius, buoyant and corky, climbs each crest and bobs through one wave after another. In less than half a minute, I am through, strok-ing into the left eddy below, jubilant. As archaic as the craft may be by today's standards, the Julius is astonishingly sea-worthy and has taken on but a few gallons of water. Looking back into the fray, I see a pith helmet, then a flash of white and green. Moments later Hutchinson appears in the tailwaves rowing a low, white, flatironshaped boat with "NEVILLS EXPEDITION" painted boldly on each side.

The Nevills boat, a radical departure from the classic Galloway style, was designed by Norman Nevills of Mexi-can Hat, Utah. He had been running square-ended, open plywood punts on the San Juan River for several seasons before he designed the Nevills Cataract boat in 1938. Built from the new miracle material, plywood, the Cataract boat was substantially shorter, wider and more upturned than a Galloway. It had a low, flat deck, a large, open cockpit, and could accommodate one—or more awkwardly two— passengers.

In the summer of 1938, Nevills used three such boats to carry Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter through Grand Canyon—the first two women to complete the full voyage. The publicity from this trip helped Nevills establish the first commercial river company in Grand Canyon.

Hutchinson is rowing the Sandra, which was built by Nevills in 1947 and named for the younger of his two daughters. Tragically, Nevills and his wife, Doris, died in a plane crash two years later. The company carried on, however, operated as Mexican Hat Expeditions by three Nevills boatmen, brothers Jim and Bob Rigg, and Frank Wright, who adopted the Sandra as his personal boat until he left the company. The Sandra's last trip was in 1969, when she was smashed in Cataract Canyon. She was crudely patched and trucked home from the next road access. By then inflatable rafts had taken over commercial river running and the Nevills fleet was left to molder.

Hutchinson beams at me as he pulls into the eddy, having forgiven me for ensnaring him in this adventure. Four years ago, Sandy Nevills Reiff and her son Greg had asked me if the Sandra

could be salvaged. During 30 years of neglect, her bottom and sides all but rotted to dust, her decks cracked and loosened, her paint peeled away to naked, graying wood. Being a sentimental optimist, I told them it looked plenty doable to me—but not by me. “Call Andy Hutchinson,” I said.

Hutchinson's initial enthusiasm over the phone sagged to dubious dismay when he arrived to pick up the boat. I cringed on the sidelines. But after more than 500 hours and a bit of new plywood, the Sandra was again the premier example of the once-famous Nevills Cataract boat design. Now Hutchinson is savoring the honor of taking her on her first Grand Canyon voyage in more than 30 years.

Another boat bounds into view with a sharp red prow jabbing skyward, disappearing, then bounding high again. It's Dierker in a 1972 dory, with his wife, Alida, riding high and dry in the front. This boat was designed and built by Jerry Briggs of Oregon, the same man who helped re-create the Julius.

Back in 1962, conservationist Martin Litton was looking for boats to take a group down the Colorado to rally support against the proposed Grand Canyon dams. He focused on a style he discovered in Oregon: the “drift boat” or dory. These beautiful high-prowed, flare-sided plywood boats evolved on Oregon’s McKenzie River in the 1920s and '30s for the purpose of carrying fishermen down rapid rivers.

'PURE BLISS... ALTERNATING WITH SHEER

Litton decked over the Oregon dories in Grand Canyon fashion and found them to be the best hull yet. In 1971, when Litton began running commercial trips, he went to Rogue River boatbuilder Jerry Briggs and asked him to design the flagship for a new fleet. Stable, able to carry four passengers and a heavy payload, the Briggs dory soon became the new standard for wooden boats on heavy white water.

But wooden boats are still in the minority, rowed by the eccentric and the devoted. Most oarsmen train in inflatable rafts, and the majority of them never find a reason to press their luck with a fragile boat.

Now, at the head of the falls, comes another of our fleet-Pam Hyde in a 16-foot raft, rowing through the Canyon for her first time. “Pure bliss,” she says, describing her debut, “alternating with sheer terror.” This is the latter.

She makes a fine entry, but midway a great wave explodes beneath her, rocking her raft on edge. Moments later a second violent wave finishes her off, dumping Hyde, her two passengers and the raft upside-down in the torrent.

By luck-bad luck-all three of them and the raft wash into the right-hand eddy-an easy place to get into, but a fierce place to escape. Dierker is below, so Hutchinson and I stroke hard across the waves into the

TERROR.'

[ABOVE] Early morning sun urges the mist above the river as Dimock glides on flat water. [RIGHT] The restored Nevills boat, the Sandra, bounds through churning white water as it had first done 30 years before.

swirling vortex and chase down the swimmers and raft. Matt Dunn, rowing another Briggs-style dory, pulls in to assist, as does Jessica Pope, another new oarsman rowing a large 18-foot raft.

The rescue over, we struggle back out of "Forever Eddy" to rejoin Dierker and the last two boats of our fleet: my wife, Jeri Ledbetter, rowing her father and his new bride, and R.J. Johnson with his wife, Terri, in their stock 1975 Briggs dory. We regroup, jabber a dozen renditions of the flip and rescue, then head downriver to the next rapid, leaving the river another great story to tell.

It is day nine of our 21-day trip and, although there will be more excitement, this will be our only flip. The wooden boats, Galloway-, Nevillsand Briggs-style, each prove fun, stable and seaworthy, each unique in its handling characteristics. The Julius is buoyant, quick and dry; the Sandra is stable but wet - “like a wooden raft,” says Hutchinson; the dories ride high and dry, carry the load and row easier and faster than the older boat styles. Each boat type shows its own genius in design, and each has run every rapid without incident.

But we're not always that fortunate. If we have had better luck than some of the pioneers did, perhaps it is because on this trip we have almost 500 transits of Grand Canyon beneath our belts. Galloway, Nevills and Holmstrom had fewer than a dozen trips between them. But their hard-won knowledge, passed down and amplified through generations, is what we inherit. As Isaac Newton observed, “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” ADDITIONAL READING: Grand Canyon Stories: Then & Now is a collection of stories about the Canyon's past characters, including river runners and the “West's biggest liar,” and present-day individualists such as a pathfinder, rescuer and a female mule wrangler. To order the softcover book from Arizona Highways Books ($7 plus shipping and handling), call toll-free (800) 543-5432 or order online at arizonahighways.com.

Brad Dimock has spent 30 years as a boatman in Grand Canyon and rivers around the world. He now lives in Flagstaff. In 2002, Dimock received the Arizona Highways Adult Nonfiction award, presented by the Arizona Library Association, for Sunk Without a Sound: The Tragic Colorado River Honeymoon of Glen and Bessie Hyde. Kate Thompson, who lives in Dolores, Colorado, has been piloting dories in the Grand Canyon since 1996, and has become enraptured by the magic that old wooden boats cast upon boatmen and their crews.