Kolb Studio Celebrates 100 Years

STANDING GUARD AT THE HEAD OF THE BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL on the Grand Canyon's South Rim, Kolb Studio defies gravity. Like so many of the Kolb brothers' photographic exploits, their studio defines remarkable.

From outside, the building appears small and frail. From inside, however, a maze of rooms cascades down the cliff face partway into the Canyon. Stairways zigzag hither and thither. Rooms bright with startling views of the Canyon connect with claustrophobic chambers carved from cool bedrock. There are low-ceilinged basements and bedrock-floored subbasements.

The building that looks so small from the outside measures 105 feet long by 30 feet wide and nearly 50 feet tall. It encloses 6,000 square feet of floor space. The scale of the Grand Canyon camouflages the size of the studio.

The story of Kolb Studio began in 1904 when two brothers from Pennsylvania, Ellsworth and Emery Kolb, erected the first segment of the structure that with the passing of the years would become a highly treasured shrine.

Prior to 1901, tourist visitation at the Canyon's South Rim was sluggish, and the approach road from Williams was rough and troublesome. But when a spur of the Santa Fe Railway reached the Rim in September 1901, tourists flooded the area. With them came Ellsworth Kolb, a 25-yearold adventure-seeker from Pennsylvania,

who got a job at the Bright Angel Hotel. Although the Grand Canyon was not yet a national park and Arizona was not yet a state, the future of Grand Canyon Village seemed bright. Ellsworth, while chopping wood and lugging suitcases, considered how he might take better advantage of this boom in the wilderness.

Emery Kolb, Ellsworth's junior by five years, was still in Pennsylvania when he caught the photography bug. Finding the craft fascinating, he bought a 5x7 camera. When Ellsworth returned home for a family visit, the two boys found themselves discussing a crazy idea - maybe they could open a photography studio at the Grand Canyon.

In October 1902, Emery left Pittsburgh to follow his brother to the Canyon. He arrived by train in Williams, and while waiting for his Grand Canyon Line connection, he wandered into a photography shopand, like lightning, an idea struck. By the next evening, Ellsworth and Emery owned the photo shop, lock, stock and barrel.

Emery took over the photo operation, but on weekends he and Ellsworth explored the Canyon. They quickly learned much about photographing the Canyon and even more about its topography.

about photographing the Canyon and even more about its topography.

In 1903 the brothers opened their first Grand Canyon photographic studio on a mining claim owned by Ralph Cameron. Like some of the "rooms" offered by the rapidly expanding hotels, Kolb Studio was not a building but a tent. The first darkroom was a nearby cave sealed with a blanket. The Williams photo shop closed.

The following year, the brothers obtained permission to build a permanent structure at the head of the South Rim life was in some ways hard on the Kolbs. The Fred Harvey Co., a pioneer in the tourism and hospitality industry in the West that managed utilities at the Blanche Bender, a woman he spotted stepping off the train in Williams. At first they lived in a South Rim tent, later moving into the studio. A daughter, Edith, was born in June 1908. Blanche operated the studio's gift shop and kept the business books. Unlike the often-abrasive Emery, Blanche was well loved by everyone at the South Rim. She was always ready to offer a helping hand.

FROM THE NEW STUDIO, EMERY WOULD PHOTOGRAPH TOURISTS AS THEY BEGAN THEIR JOURNEY DOWN THE BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL ON THE BACKS OF MULES.

Cameron-owned Bright Angel Trail. It was this wooden-framed building that became the nucleus of today's Kolb Studio and the headquarters of the Kolbs' many Grand Canyon adventures.

An explosion of tourist development sprang up after the railroad spur arrived. Both the 100-room El Tovar Hotel and the Hopi House opened in January 1905. President Theodore Roosevelt visited in 1906. Naturalists John Muir and John Burroughs came in 1909. The Kolbs photographed them all.

The railroad brought another big change to the Kolbs' operation. In October 1905, Emery married Canyon in conjunction with the railroad, refused to sell them electricity and water. The company, not inclined to appreciate the beauty of competition, even went so far as to block the trail that led to the Kolb Studio. Emery was tenacious in his defense of the business, but Ellsworth tended to let things slide. He was a soft-spoken explorer, not a businessman. Both men, however, were physical powerhouses. From the new studio, Emery would photograph tourists as they began their journey down the Bright Angel Trail on the backs of mules. With the exposed film in a light-tight container, he'd run down the trail 4.5 miles to Indian Garden, easily passing

the mule train along the way. There, in a darkroom constructed in 1906 and using Indian Garden's clear spring water, he developed the negatives, made prints and high-tailed it back to the South Rim, 3,000 feet above. When the mule train returned to the Rim, Emery greeted riders with a proof print and an order book. Not until 1930, when water was piped to the Rim from Indian Garden, was film processing performed routinely in the studio.

The brothers explored farther and deeper into the Canyon labyrinths. In September 1911, aided by a hired man, they launched two boats at Green River, Wyoming. They planned to row 1,400 miles down the Green and Colorado rivers to the Sea of Cortes. And they would make the first motion pictures of the treacherous river run through the Grand Canyon. With no white-water boating experience and with virtually no moviemaking experience, the three men embarked on an epic adventure.

When they entered the depths of Lodore Canyon in northwest Colorado, the mood of their hired man turned from merry to melancholy to fearful. Finally, he lost his nerve altogether when confronted with yet another rapid. The early years of Green and Colorado river float trips were spiked with tension-some people thrived under the pressure, others wilted. The hired man begged to leave. The Kolbs continued without him.

There were mishaps, but the brothers arrived at the foot of the Bright Angel Trail in mid-November. There they stopped to prepare for the last leg of the expedition. During the hiatus, the brothers resupplied their boats and hired a new man to help on the river. They launched again a week before Christmas.

It was bitter cold, and there were more small catastrophes, but somehow, with daring, wit, care and luck, they carried it off to become the eighth expedition to successfully navigate the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and only the fourth expedition to run the gauntlet of canyons between Green River, Wyoming, and the Virgin River of Nevada. They concluded their run at Needles, California, 200 miles short of their destination, after toiling 101 days on the river, traveling 1,200 miles and descending more than 5,000 feet in elevation. The new hired man, Bert Lauzon, later recalled that during their entire journey, no one at any time lifted his voice or spoke harshly.

The 1911-12 river run brought the Kolb brothers a fair measure of fame, at least a little money, contacts with influential people and the possibility of more adventures.

The movie of the adventure became part of an illustrated lecture. Because Kolb Studio was not large enough for such presentations, the brothers scouted around the South Rim for another venue. The Forest Service, in charge of South Rim operations at the time, would not allow them to use any other facilities, so the lecture went on tour. Until they expanded their studio in 1915, the movie was not screened at the South Rim. It was shown exclusively on tour. One of the greatest triumphs took place in Washington, D.C., when Emery lectured for members of the National Geographic Society. In addition, Dr. Gilbert H. Grosvenor, then president of the society, asked the brothers to write a story for the society's magazine. Eighty-five pages of the August 1914 issue of National Geographic were devoted to the Kolbs' river story with Ellsworth and Emery as authors.

Ellsworth also completed the Kolbs' original river-running plan by rowing on down the Colorado River from Needles to the Sea of Cortes. This accomplishment led to the publication of Through the Grand Canyon From Wyoming to Mexico, a book sold in the Kolb Studio for decades.

More adventurous trips were organized by the brothers in the following years, most of them in the Grand Canyon region. Meanwhile, the movie had become a hit with the public. The studio's theater and living quar-ters were expanded again in 1925; commercial electricity was added in 1926.

Ellsworth had an interest in flying and, in 1922, climbed into the cockpit of an airplane flown by stunt pilot R.N. Thomas. The two men became the first to land an aircraft inside Grand Canyon.

In spite of their varied enterprises, the Kolbs' lives were not without grief. Emery tangled with the National Park Service and the Fred Harvey Co. for years. The Park Ser-vice repeatedly threatened to demolish the studio, a plan that was foiled when Congress passed the Historic Sites Act of 1935, and the studio reached 50 years old in 1954.

Various disagreements concerning the studio's operation gradually soured the once-peaceful relationship between Emery and Ellsworth. Ellsworth, the adventurer, eventually married, but the union lasted only two months.obscurity in 1960-having long since sold his share of the studio to Emery based solely on the flip of a coin.

Emery and Blanche were nearly forced to close the studio during the dismal days of World War I and the Great Depression. During the Depression years, the studio's daily take dropped to as little as $2. And while Emery remained with the studio and gloried in the fame of the Kolb brothers' exploits, Ellsworth passed away in relative Emery died in 1976 at the age of 95. He was buried near Blanche and Ellsworth at the South Rim's Grand Canyon Pioneers' Cemetery.

After Emery's death, the National Park Service took possession of the Kolb Studio, which the federal government bought inhistory of American motion pictures.

Kolb Studio reopened in 1990, restored and revitalized. Today the building serves again as a center of South Rim life. The old auditorium has become an art gallery and special exhibit space, and there's a remodeled bookstore on the premises.

In celebration of the studio's 100th anniversary, tours of the Kolbs' living quarters will be offered to visitors on a limited basis ON FOOT AND BY BOAT, SOMETIMES HANGING FROM ROPES, SOMETIMES TEETERING ON LEDGES, CAMERAS ALWAYS AT HAND, ELLSWORTH AND EMERY HAD THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES AT THE GRAND CANYON.

1962. For the first time in 72 years, the studio's doors were shuttered.

The Kolbs' flickering, oft-spliced movie had evolved into a conglomeration of the historic, the amazing and the amusingly quaint. Even by the 1960s, it was less the documentary's original death-defying thrills and more its antiquated ambiance that attracted an audience. After being shown for more than 60 years, the Kolbs' ground-breaking film likely holds the record for the longest continuously running movie in theduring December 2004 and January and February 2005.

In the early years of the 20th century, the Kolb brothers were young, smart and audacious. They arrived at the Grand Canyon in an age of great explorations and adven-tures in the wild West. On foot and by boat, sometimes hanging from ropes, sometimes teetering on ledges, cameras always at hand, Ellsworth and Emery had the time of their lives at the Grand Canyon.

Now the Kolb Studio has stood for 100 years as a monument to their noteworthy achievements. Also Gary Ladd of Page wishes he could have accompanied the Kolb brothers on some of their wild exploits but wonders how wise that would have been, because he hates swimming in icy waters, an activity they seemed to relish. He felt honored to have his photography exhibited in the Kolb Studio auditorium during the summer of 2003.

Photographing the Kolb Studio provided exciting insights into the pioneer photographers' lives and techniques for history buff Richard Maack, Arizona Highways photography editor.

{highway to humor}

Jokes, Witticisms and Whatchamacallits

SIGN OF THE TIMES

We went camping a few months before the holidays and saw a sign in a yule tree lot that said, “Do your Christmas chopping early.” My husband, a Northern Arizona University graduate who moved East to work, constantly talked about how wonderful Arizona was. On our first trip to Flagstaff together, we decided to have dinner at the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store. We put our names on the list for a table and waited, along with other parties, for our

TIME FOR DINNER {early day arizona}

An old man who had led a sinful life was dying, and his wife sent for a preacher to pray with him. The preacher prayed and talked, and finally the old man said, “What do you want me to do, Parson?” “Renounce the devil!” replied the preacher. “But Parson,” protested the dying man. “I ain’t in position to make any enemies.” name to be called. Then the hostess announced over the paging system, “Saint Paul, party of 12, your table is ready.” My husband turned to me, grinned, and said, “See! I told

you this was God's country.”

NO RUSH JOB

Several weeks after Christmas, I took my Santa Claus suit to the local dry cleaners. The young blond girl behind the counter hung up my suit, handed me a claim ticket, looked me in the eye and asked, “Santa how soon do you need this?”

GIFT GIVERS

When two brothers who were majoring in computer science at the university decided to surprise their parents with a visit during the Christmas break, they first went shopping and bought a lot of things they knew were hard for mom and dad to find in their remote desert home. Their mother, hearing the sound of footsteps on the porch after a car drove up, called out, “Who's there?” There was silence for a moment and then a man's voice replied, “We're geeks bearing gifts.”

PERSPECTIVE UNUSUAL

There are places in Arizona named Christmas and Santa Claus. Just to prove we are an equal opportunity state, we also should have a Bah-humbug.

SMALL TOWNS

We asked readers to send us small town jokes. Here is a sampling of what we got: Our town is so small that our mayor only has to walk for re-election.

One nice thing about small towns is you don't have to walk too many feet to get away from it all.

A small town is where after you dial a wrong number, you may end up talking for 30 minutes anyway.

One of the best things about small towns is that people can be so helpful. For instance, while you may not always know what you're doing, everyone else in a small town does.

You've heard of small towns where everybody knows what everybody else is doing? The town I grew up in was so small that everybody knew what everybody else was thinking!

"Do they have driver education in your town?" "They did for a while, but then the mule died."

My hometown was small and stayed small. The population never changed. Every time a baby was born, someone left town.

A small town Arizona newspaper once carried an editorial that bluntly stated that half of the city council's members were crooks. Under threat of a lawsuit, the editor issued the following retraction: “Half of the city council's members AREN'T crooks.” My town is so small that every time I turn on my electric razor the street light dims.

You know a town is small when its marching band is a kid with a kazoo.

You know the town is small when the entire zoo is a stray cat.

Our town is so small that our general store is an avocado tree and the honor system.

My town is so small that if I want to dish out the latest gossip I have to develop multiple personalities.

{reader's corner}

Prairie dogs live in organized societies broken into males and females. The dominant male gains control by challenging other males, but there is no dominance hierarchy among the females. See, we are more like prairie dogs than we thought. The men go out and try to be “top dog” while the women get all the work done.

Send us your animal jokes, and we'll pay $50 for each one we publish.

TO SUBMIT HUMOR: Send your jokes and humorous Arizona anecdotes to Humor, Arizona Highways, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009 or e-mail us at [email protected]. Please include your name, address and telephone number with each submission.