Northern Arizona University
Cline Library
Tape Number:53-2B
This
is September 18, 1994, the Legends Trip [done through the auspices of Dr.
Bob Webb’s Stanton photo-match project, in conjunction with the Glen Canyon
Dam EIS], recorded at Mile 196 camp in the Grand Canyon.Interviewer
is Lew Steiger.Cameraman is Jeff
Robertson.Also present is Karen
Underhill.
Steiger:Are
we going?For starters, It'd be good,
if you would, tell us who you are and give us a brief resume of your river
running career.You know, how you
came here and how you got involved and how the hell you got on this trip.
Litton:Well,
I'm Martin Litton, and I first went down the Grand Canyon as a result of
getting to know P.T. Reilly who invited me to come on a 1955 trip.And
there were a total of nine of us, I believe, including my wife, his wife,
and three or four other people.(pause
to allow noise to pass)You know
all this stuff anyway.
Steiger:Yeah,
I know.I just want to get it down,
in case we end up cutting a little piece out, that's just confined to this
trip.
Litton:Do
you want to start over?
Steiger:Yeah,
but let's wait another minute.
Litton:Well,
I'm Martin Litton, and I first ran the river through the Grand Canyon in
1955, and have come here ever since, on and off.And
through the late sixties, seventies, and eighties, I was a concessionaire
here.So I ran the river quite a
few times?-I don't know exactly how many?-eighty, ninety, maybe?-and got
pretty well acquainted with it.Always
in small boats.And always in rigid
boats, dories.
Steiger:Were
you ever involved in the environmental movement?
Litton:Yes,
I'm involved in the environmental movement.I
was on the board of directors of the Sierra Club at the time the fight
over the dams in the Grand Canyon took place.Going
farther back, in the Dinosaur National Monument fight, where the dams were
proposed at Echo Park and Dinosaur National Monument, and at Split Mountain.And
that was our first real big fight on dams in the whole Colorado
River System, of course.It was what
they called the first Sierra Club major victory, since the creation of
King's Canyon National Park in 1940.Nothing
else much happened in which the Sierra Club really took a fighting stance
until the Dinosaur National Monument controversy came up.And
that was stopped.We never believed
it would be stopped, because the President of the United States himself
stood up before the world and said, "Echo Park Dam will be built."And
we said, "The hell you say!"And
it never was built, despite the fact that all the Utah delegation and administration,
secretaries of the Interior came and went, and they all pushed for the
building of the dams in Dinosaur National Monument, and they all lost.When
it came to the Grand Canyon dams, the Sierra Club was intimidated by a
then-administration which threatened to cut off its tax-deductible status.Of
course, being a charitable and benevolent organization, it had tax deductibility
and exemption.So there was this
intimidation, this blackmail, if you may call it that, because the Sierra
Club was openly fighting the adoption of the Central Arizona Project, and
the Upper Colorado Storage Project and all that, because it included dams
in the Grand Canyon.So then the
administration sent its goons, FBI, to the Sierra Club, with threats that
our tax deductibility would be lost if we kept pursuing this fight.And
so that was the one great moment in the Sierra Club's history where it
stood up and said, "We don't care.We
reject the tax deductibility, we don't want it any more.We're
gonna stop these dams."And we lost
the financial advantage of the tax deductibility and tax exemption?-people
could no longer deduct their membership dues and all that sort of thing,
but the Sierra Club membership jumped from 25,000 members up to 175,000,
practically overnight, because of this stance that the Sierra Club was
willing to take.
Steiger:And
here we are in the Grand Canyon, and there's no dams.
Litton:Congress
finally passed the Central Arizona Project forbidding any dams to
be built in the Grand Canyon.Of
course the administration, the Bureau of Reclamation, had tried every way
to obscure the issue by not calling them dams in the Grand Canyon.They
called one Marble Dam, thinking, well, nobody will know that's in the Grand
Canyon.And then they called the
one down here, Bridge Canyon Dam, because there was a little side canyon
there that had a natural bridge in it.Then
eventually they naturally got a little more politically correct by calling
it Hualapai Dam, the idea that anyone who empathized with Indian tribes
would then feel compelled to support this dam, which would be partly on
the Hualapai Indian Reservation.
Steiger:Back
up a second.In the Dinosaur fight,
were you involved?I understand that
the Sierra Club actually signed off on Glen Canyon, without knowing what
was there?
Litton:When
the Dinosaur fight was finally won in 1955 or 1956, the Glen Canyon Dam
was about to be constructed, and the Sierra Club, unfortunately, with its
concentration on the dams in the national monument in Dinosaur, and then
later to be dams in Grand Canyon National Park, which was not then all
as big a national park as it is now.Those
dams that were proposed in Grand Canyon, neither one of 'em would have
been located in what was then Grand Canyon National Park.They
would today, because the park has been extended.But
they would have affected the national park because one would have
backed water into it, another would have affected the upper end of it by
the releases.Glen Canyon has been
called "the place no one knew."And
it's a sore point in the conscience of the Sierra Club that we did not
get in and fight against it until it was too late.And
by the time we were able to concentrate on it. . . .Although
I will say, I opposed it and Dr. Bill Halliday [phonetic spelling], a prominent
Utah physician, opposed it with all his might and all his will and made
a big issue of it.The Sierra
Club did not get on board.And the
excuse given later was, "Well, it wasn't in any park or monument.Glen
Canyon Dam was not in a place that was protected in any way."Despite
that, if you went back into the Roosevelt administration, before World
War II, there was a strong movement to make Glen Canyon the principal feature
of what would have been our greatest national park, the Escalante National
Park.And that whole thing was promulgated
first by Helen Gahagen [phonetic spelling] Douglas.She
was a member of Congress from California.Helen
Gahagen was a prominent movie star, noted for her leading role in the Rider
Haggard [phonetic spelling] movie "She."And
so she was that kind of a movie star, and then ran for Congress and made
it, and then began to promulgate a national park which would include Grand
Canyon, Glen Canyon, all the Escalante side canyons, Kaiparowitz [phonetic
spelling] Plateau, Navajo Creek, everything on up the river through the
entire length of Glen and Cataract and all the canyons that lead right
up to about Green River, Utah.That
would have been our greatest national park, but at that time there was
no immediate threat to it, before World War II.Nobody
was going to build dams or anything, and so the project died.And
of course the President died, and maybe she died?-at least she's not in
Congress any more.I know she's dead
now.So the greatest of all our national
parks to be, never came about, and that left Glen Canyon out there, vulnerable,
and Glen Canyon was not in a national park or monument, so organizations
like the Sierra Club did not feel at that point compelled to defend it,
especially since its wonders were not well-known.
The
other thing about Glen Canyon Dam is that all the concern about it, when
the Elliot Porter book, The Place No One Knew, came out, the concern
was what would be drowned, what would the backed-up water cover up?-not
what the downstream effects would be.People
didn't stop to think about what it would do to the Grand Canyon,
to have the Colorado River stopped up there and released in surges, the
way it's been ever since Glen Canyon Dam was built.So
that wasn't an issue.
One
issue that came up was Rainbow Bridge National Monument, because by filling
Lake Powell, so called, or the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam, the water
would back up into that national monument, and did.And
that's strictly against the law.I
mean, that's forbidden by federal law.You
cannot have a dam that's in or affecting a national park or monument.That
makes Glen Canyon Dam illegal down here, because it affects this
national park.But the direct effect
on Rainbow Bridge National Monument was very obvious, and one river outfitter,
Ken Sleight, took it upon himself to stop the filling of Glen Canyon Dam,
until some way was devised to protect Rainbow Bridge, so the water could
not back up under it, or could not back up into the Rainbow Bridge National
Monument.And he did get some injunctions
and so forth, court orders that required dumping water out of Lake Powell
while it was being filled, and we got some high flows down here as a result
of that.But in the long run, administrations
being what they've been, they were able to prevail and the law was ignored.It's
being ignored today.
Steiger:You're
a strong proponent of the "no compromise" approach.And
that's been interesting to us.There's
a bunch of us around here who got involved in the politics down here, and
we got on board this EIS and we basically signed off on a kind of a compromise,
which is the moderated fluctuating flows.
Litton:Yeah,
but who did?Who?
Steiger:Well,
just the people who were sitting in a room who were involved in this thing.
Litton:I
was involved in it, and nobody told me about that, until I saw it
in the River Guide’s News, which is hardly an official publication
of the government.But the government
is the enemy of the Grand Canyon?-the enemy of the people, for that matter?-and
it doesn't really give a hoot what happens down here.That's
the problem, we don't elect the people who will take care of the Earth
that we love.
Steiger:What
strikes me is, on the "no compromise" thing:we
went in there with these guys and we sat down with them, and we. . . .Like
right now, the issue is, how are you going to run the dam, how are you
going to release the water out of the dam from here on out?
Litton:Well,
of course to compromise is to lose.When
you're willing to compromise your principles, you've given up, you abandon
them.As Dan Looten [phonetic spelling]
said, "When you compromise nature, nature gets compromised."It's
gone, it's hurt, it's injured.You
gain nothing back, ever.And here,
Glen Canyon Dam could operate, producing all the power it's capable
of, and should, but it doesn't have to send down surges of water,
there doesn't have to be any peaking power generation at that dam.It
would still generate 100 percent of the electricity it's capable of generating.Hoover
Dam, on the other hand, below the Grand Canyon, has a capacity 79 percent
greater than that of Glen Canyon Dam.It
can generate that much more power.It
has less water to do it with, because it loses 750,000-800,000 acre feet
per year in the evaporation off the surface of Lake Mead.So
Hoover Dam sits there with this tremendous capacity, waiting to
peak, waiting to run up and down the way they want to do in order to get
surges of power during the hot weather and when they have to pump water
out of the Salt River Basin, and all these other things they want to do,
turn on the air conditioners?-Hoover Dam can do all that, and it's
much closer to the market.But we've
got this Upper Basin/Lower Basin rivalry which is ridiculous from
the federal point of view, it's asinine that these little gangs of sheepherders
and what-not, small-town bankers up here in the Upper Basin can run our
nation into the ground and steal from the taxpayers the way they do.It's
absolutely incredible.And I spoke
with the then regional director for the Upper Basin of the Bureau of Reclamation,
David Crandall, a man I respected, a man I'd had a lot to do with in the
years when we were first talking about this surge and this ups and downs
that have destroyed the beaches and hurt the river in so many ways.We
talked about putting the peaking power at Hoover Dam, where it should
be?-could cut down a lot of wires and save a lot of copper, because not
as much of the power would have to go so far.And
he said, "Well, from the standpoint of the federal taxpayer, and the rate
payer, and the nation at large, and the people who care about our national
parks, that's the way it should be done."He
openly stated that to me.I hope
you'll get him on this program to confirm that.And
my question was, "Then why don't you do it that way?!"And
he looked rather shocked.His region
is centered in Salt Lake City?-that's the Upper Basin.And
his answer to me was, "Well, if we did that, Boulder City would get the
credit."That's the only reason
that they see in the Upper Basin for not letting this dam produce
steady power, which is now being done by that Navajo Power Plant that pollutes
the air so you can see the smoke cloud from outer space and so forth.Glen
Canyon Dam could still be doing that.It
wouldn't soak the beaches then with the high water, and then drop the water
down and have these heavy, soggy masses of banks collapse into the river,
the way they do every day, and the way you can see it right across the
river there.That's yesterday's plop-plop-plop
line.The river's been eatin' away.And
that would not happen if there was some stability in these banks, if plants
could get a foothold, and the bats would have something to eat if the natural
insect hatch could take place?-it wouldn't be flooded one minute and dried
out the next.But anyway, so that's
the answer:the Lower Basin would
get the credit for the peaking power.And
peaking power doesn't really bring any more money, in the long run, than
steady flow.But it is a convenience,
and it's popular with the utilities, and the utilities demand it.Therefore
the government pushes buttons and throws switches all over the West in
order to get the peaking power at the time of day that they want it.That
would all be taken care of, the need for all this monkey business up here,
where they work the grid all the way from the Columbia River to Nebraska
and down to the Mexican border, at great expense?-they work that all the
time in order to get peaking, because Glen Canyon Dam is now under what
they call interim flows, and the peaks are not as extreme, and the lows
are not as extreme as they would be if the Bureau of Reclamation did what
it wants to do, and what it plans to do.Because
the favorite alternative, the preferred alternative of all the different
programs and plans they have, involves not 8,000-12,000 or 13,000 flow,
cubic feet per second per day, up and down by three or four thousand cubic
feet per second?-it involves 5,000 lows and 20,000 highs.It
states it very clearly.That's what
we're headed for.Once they've numbed
the river community, or people who care about this national park, who care
about anything, they've worn us down, they've gotten us so we don't care
any more, then here come the lows and the highs, and what's left of these
camps, and what's left of nature down here that took centuries?-not eons,
but centuries?-to produce, is forgotten.And
their hope is that by that time nobody will care very much.People
will be so tired of fighting this that they won't bother, they won't go
to court and get the results that we should get.But
the Bureau of Reclamation wants to appear not only indomitable, but infallible,
that they can't make mistakes, and they don't admit that they make mistakes.They've
made terrible mistakes, they make them every day.But
all they have to do to correct one big mistake is to let that water
come out, seasonally adjusted, going up as the summer approaches, and gradually
going down with the fall, being at it's lowest point of 5,000 feet or so
in the middle of winter, and then coming up again in the spring.There
would then be ample water all through the river-running season to give
us something more than this trickle we've got out here now, and to produce
a decent experience for Americans and others who want to come down here
and really savor the soul of the Grand Canyon.We'll
never do that until we have the water go up and down once a year.Nature
can adapt to that?-it always did.The
plants came and went and the fish came and went, and they could spawn and
so forth and so on.But now, nothing
is normal.You see the creatures
trapped when the water goes down in places like Shinumo Creek and so forth.Everything
is drowned if it comes up any substantial amount.This
interim flow period, who knows how long that's going to last?That's
intended to kind of quiet you down.You
don't notice that things are so bad.They
are bad!But they'll really
be bad when they drop this thing to half of what it is now, or less, every
day, and raise it to three times what it is now every day.And
we'll be right back where we were, and yet people who come down here and
run this river, who make a living at it, are giving in to this, just surrendering
to this.We don't have to surrender!It's
our canyon, it's our national park.The
Bureau of Reclamation is an interloper, and everyone behind it is an interloper.They
don't belong here, they're here for money.We're
here for something more than that.They're
another government bureau that wants to look good, control political situations,
get rich, do as they please, exercise power.That's
what the bureaus in our government love to do.And
they love to entrench themselves so that all the people they have, the
thousands and thousands of people they hire, will be indentured, they'll
be there forever, until they die.And
you go back to [Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner] Floyd Dominy, people
like that, people who just want to control things.And
this place doesn't need them.We
just don't need them, we need to straighten out this situation, let that
dam work?-who cares?-but let it send out the flows.Let
the Audubon Society decide how much comes through.
But
as you know, I once worked out the daily flows for every day of the year
on this river, no matter what the weather, no matter what the snowpack
in the Rockies, what they should be.And
in the summertime, well, say starting with April, May, June, July, there
be a rise, a gradual fall in the fall through October, and there were certain
minimums at that time below which the river could not go.And
we have all those figures, they've all been studied by the Secretary of
the Interior and so forth, but it was a heck of a lot of arithmetic to
work 'em out, and the acre feet, the flow that's required into the Lower
Basin, taking care of Mexico too, would be taken care of by this, the 825,000
acre feet per year.In the summer?-we
know that winter and summer, we're not always going to get the same
amount of in-flow into the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.But
the way to take care of that is, let's call it summer flows, late
spring, summer, and fall, you would have minimums.You
could not go below certain flows.And
then in the middle of winter, when very few people would think of coming
here anyway, and if they do, they're not the type who require an ideal
floating situation, then you would have maximums.The
flow could not go above a certain figure?-five or six thousand cubic
feet per second?-at any time of the day, because in nature, it never would
have.In fact, in nature, it was
frequently a thousand cubic feet per second or less, down here in the wintertime
when everything froze up in the Rockies and the water just wasn't coming
down.So in nature, we're trying
to recreate that, but we don't want to wipe out the river as completely
as nature did, bringing it down to a little trickle.We
have to consider the fact that the dam is up there, and it is going to
operate, and if it can operate at 5,000 in the summer, it can operate at
5,000 in the winter, when there's not the demand for farm pumping?-it
takes so much electricity?-there's not the demand for air conditioning
and so forth.Let the river serve
a function, but not a big function, not a dumping of water
down here just to create a surplus of power up there that they have no
use for.But certain limits should
be established.They're in our graph,
it shows very clearly how the river would go up every year and down every
year, and it wouldn't be a totally natural flow, because they can't let
60,000 cubic feet per second go, which was very common in the summertime,
before the dam was built.They have
no way to release that much.Therefore,
being realistic, and being reasonable, and very reasonable, we say,
"Okay, we won't tear down the dam, as long as the dam is operated for the
maximum benefit of Grand Canyon National Park."Hoover
Dam can take care of everybody below there.A
national park is more important than the convenience of the Bureau of Reclamation
________ petty politicians that are involved in the Upper Basin.
Steiger:When
you came down with P.T. Reilly that first time, that was 1955?
Litton:1955
was my first trip through.
Steiger:What
was the flow then?Do you remember?
Litton:I
don't remember what the flow was then, but it was. . . .Oh,
we've got all those records.In the
neighborhood of 30,000-35,000 cubic feet per second.And
in 1956 it was very similar.That's
the way I remember it.Now the first
year I paid much attention, I went 1955, 1956, then I didn't go again until
1962.I had a job that kept me from
doing this all the time.But as it
happened in 1957, the flow got up to 127,600 cubic feet per second.Then
in 1958 it was very close to that, and in 1959 it also hit 90,000 I believe.And
the next time I went was in 1962, and it was 52,000-something when
we started, and 47,000 when we finished, and it was an ideal stage.We
didn't have to worry about the beaches in those days?-Glen Canyon Dam had
not come into existence and hadn't started eating away at them the way
it's been doing.So we had beautiful
camps and beautiful water and very easy water to run on, but thrilling
water to run on.The next time I
went was in 1964, and as you know, when we were up here near Whitmore Wash,
an airplane came over and dropped a message that the water had been cut
off at Glen Canyon Dam to 900 cubic feet per second.And
(laughs) the National Park Service instructed us to "leave the river" at
that point.Now it wasn't at
Whitmore Wash, it was two or three miles this way."You
are to remove your equipment from the canyon at this point, and go to the
rim and we will notify your rim party."In
those days, you had to have a rim party that was watching over your welfare
as you went down the canyon.Can
you imagine anybody around here who could get here and see how you're doing?!It
was such a joke that nobody paid any attention.But
we always put a rim party on record for the permit, because that was required.So
very often we'd put Dave Brower or Booker T. Washington or Winston Churchill?-anybody
on the rim party, because it was such a joke.The
Park Service had no idea what was here, and permits were just a
farce.And so they were going to
notify our rim party?-900 cubic feet per second in 1964, when we were here
to create the Sierra Club book Time and the River Flowing, which
was our statement against the dams in the Grand Canyon.That's
why we were here.We brought Francois
Leydet, who wrote the book later, and Phil Hyde [phonetic spelling], who
took a lot of the pictures in the book.So
here we were, trying to produce that book, and it looked as if the government
had cut off the water to destroy the project.However,
John Riffey [phonetic spelling] was in that plane that came over and dropped
the message.So he added a little
pencil-written note at the bottom of the message that that morning, at
Bright Angel Creek, the flow was 3,000 cubic feet per second, so it wasn't
going to be 900 for a while yet.So
we still had a little daylight, a half-hour of daylight, so we were making
camp, and we threw everything back in the boats, and rowed as hard as we
could, and we got down ten miles or so before it got too dark.And
then the next day, thirty-five miles, and then thirty-five, and after a
while we were safely ahead of the low flow.
But
in 1965 things began to be what you might call "normal."P.T.
Reilly didn't go any more, but we began running trips, and it evolved into
a business that I kind of got trapped in.The
river then was under the control of Glen Canyon Dam, and it reached some
terrible extremes, like in 1972 when they cut the water off and had the
baloney boats stuck at Hance and all that, then in 1977 again.But
dories, we could always get through.But
the big rigs could not.Their people
had to be helicoptered out, frequently, from someplace where they were
stopped in the middle of the river, or food had to be brought in to them,
because they weren't provisioned for the length of time it was going to
take.Those were some rough years.And
then we began to work on it, and tried to go to court and create publicity.The
hard light of the press and other means of publicity is not enjoyed by
the government bureaus at all.They
don't like to be examined.They don't
like to have it known what they're doing.And
so by producing the book we spoke of, which if you haven't read, is a beautifully-written
book.I'd say Francois wrote the
best book on the Grand Canyon that's ever been written.Those
things began to accumulate, and after a while we had reached the public,
and then we're getting back to the place that I spoke of before where we
were running newspaper ads in the New York Times and the Washington
Post and so forth, asking the public if they'd like to flood the Sistine
chapel so the tourists could get closer to the ceiling and see [Michelangelo’s]
paintings more easily, because one of the arguments down here for the dams
was that people would be elevated, and they'd be safe, and they'd be up
high where they could see better.(laughs)The
river would be wiped out, as you know.Marble
Dam at Mile 39, below Lee's Ferry, was going to back water up to Glen Canyon
Dam, was going to divert the water from the river through a pipeline that
would come under the Kaibab Plateau and drop the water back down through
a powerhouse at Kanab Creek.The
dam downstream here was going to back everything up to Kanab Creek?-ninety-three
miles, I believe it was.And so the
whole canyon would be controlled, and in order to support fish life, they
were going to release a hundred cubic feet per second from Marble Dam.Now
if a hundred cubic feet per second comes out of Marble Dam, how far down
the canyon do you think it would get before it dried up completely?What
a ridiculous set of circumstances we're asked to accept!And
we didn't accept them, and we don't have the dams, but we do have
the damn dam up there.And that dam
doesn't have to continue to be a disaster?-all it has to do is run seasonally-adjusted
steady flows.Anybody who doubts
that that would work better than anything else they proposed, only needs
to ask Dave Wegner [phonetic spelling], who was intimidated by the organization
he works for, the Bureau of Reclamation, but he is the one person who knows,
he conducted these environmental studies and so forth, and he knows
that, and he'll tell you that, "peak at Hoover, and these problems
will be ended."But as you know,
he hasn't been very much favored by his bureau since he uttered those words.He's
been kicked downstairs, downstairs, under various supervisors and so forth,
so he no longer has the freedom to investigate and to research that he
once had.When he started, he was
riding the crest of the wave?-he could research honestly and come up with
straightforward opinions.Then they
began to clamp down on him, and they put other people over him who would
filter what he said, and digest it, and decide how much of it could be
published, and how much could not.So
Dave Wegner, if he were here, I think he would openly tell us what the
problems are.And he and I have talked
about it so much, and each of us knows what the other thinks, and it's
very, very close.But being political,
he doesn't think we can win.I think
we can win, and we only have to speak with a united voice.But
we've got to do something about this.This
is a trick:here we've had very little
change in the flow.All the time
they're doing this deciding what they're going to end up doing,
the various alternatives, most of which are just farces and not intended
to be taken seriously.All those
things are in the offing, and they'll come up with one and they'll adopt
it and they'll say, "Well, we had all the input from everybody, everybody
had his say.Now this is the way
we're going to do it."They won't
say how everybody voted, they'll say, "They all had a chance to talk about
it, they all had a chance to comment.Now
we're going to do this."Well
that's what they tell us, and we're going to end up with a situation as
bad as anything we had under Glen Canyon Dam.But
one of the alternatives, out of the many, many alternatives from which
they are going to make their final decision, the possible alternative was
to peak at Hoover Dam and have seasonally-adjusted steady flow at Glen
Canyon.They did not even publish
that as a viable alternative.That
was not even considered.That
isn't even in the cards at all!And
yet it's the one viable alternative of all of them, that can help,
or can save the Grand Canyon.But
they would not even consider it, they wouldn't let it see the light of
day.They rejected it, in two or
three lines in their book.It's
getting nothing from the Bureau of Reclamation or its various bosses
and so forth.
The
power that is in this group, and in the NAU, and in Grand Canyon River
Guides and so forth, could easily have a tremendous bearing on the
Secretary of the Interior, who with a stroke of his pen can fix all this.That's
all he has to do, is say one word or the other.He
is in charge of the Bureau of Reclamation, but he's not getting.
. . .His back isn't being stiffened
by anyone.You know, it's hard to
reach him, but a group like this can reach him?-Cline Library and
so forth, NAU and everyone else that's involved in the Grand Canyon, if
they care.Grand Canyon River Guides
is now an organization to be dealt with, and the Secretary of the Interior
will listen.It only takes one paragraph
to explain to him where we are.But
is that ever going to be forthcoming?Not
that I know of.He can fix it.Will
he?Does he care enough?Does
he know enough?He's been
told, but unfortunately he seems to be rather political too.He
will do what is right, though, if the newspapers and television, radio,
books, people?-anyone!?-and enough people stand up and fight for it.But
people are not fighting for it.It's
amazing how. . . .It's like a lot
of cattle being led to the slaughter?-they don't know where they're going
and they don't care.They're going
to have their heads knocked in, they're not objecting.I
think we should object, object loudly, and not sit around making choices
among these asinine alternatives that we're faced with.They're
terrible!All of 'em are terrible,
except the one that they don't consider, that they wouldn't even
publish, and the one that the Bureau of Reclamation itself knows could
solve all the problems?-knows and admits could solve all the problems?-that's
the one that's being ignored and buried.
Underhill:What
was the rationale for dismissing that seasonal alternative?You
mentioned in the book they give it short shrift ____________.
Litton:Yeah,
the rationale, they never said.They
never said why.They know
that it's right.And if you could
get all the engineers in the Bureau of Reclamation from the Upper and the
Lower Basin?-the Lower Basin doesn't get involved in this, isn't invited
to be involved in it, really?-get them together, you know what the vote
would be, it would be overwhelming that everything move there.And
Arizona, Utah, they're worried about things like that.Even
though Arizona's in the Lower Basin, it's so afraid of California getting
something-or-other.And that is paranoia
at its worst, because Arizona's already got all it will ever get, all it
can ever get, all there is.It's
got way more than its allocated share under the 1922 compact.It
went way above what it was authorized.And
that's because the Supreme Court wanted to help the underdog.But
when Arizona said, "You can't count the Salt River and the Gila River against
our share of the Colorado River, because those are our rivers."Well
now suppose Wyoming said, "You can't count the Green River as part.That's
our river."Suppose Colorado
said, "The Colorado River is our river.You
can't count that!"Then where would
we be?And then Utah at one time
said, in their newspaper headlines and so forth, editorials, "Well God
gave us this water, so it's ours."Well
now if you'd left it up to God, it would all end up in the ocean and nobody
would use any of it.So the crazy
thing is that Arizona got away with this, that the Salt River and the Gila
River are not counted against Arizona's share.Not
only are they part of the Colorado River system, but they don't
even begin in Arizona?-they begin in New Mexico, which is part of the Upper
Basin.So you know, Arizona was making
an ass of itself all along, and nobody seemed to care the Supreme Court
gave Arizona this extra 2.8 million acre feet.It's
kind of funny.But everything that
the Upper Basin states and Arizona will do?-and Nevada?-hurts us all, because
unfortunately?-and there's a long story in this, that we won't go into
here?-it makes California go out and get the water and/or the power somewhere
else.And as far as I'm concerned,
I'd rather see the Upper Basin and the whole basin of the Colorado River,
the watershed, stay undeveloped, and let California develop to a
fare-the-well.And it'd keep our
wonders wonderful.There's nothing
much more California can get anyway.You
have to give California credit, that in the early days, around 1900, it
was already using Colorado River water at its own expense.It
didn't get federal money, federal projects.It
didn't have a Central Arizona Project with that vast canal system, paid
by the taxpayers in Pennsylvania and Ohio and everywhere.They
don't even realize how they're being stuck for things like that.When
California went for these things, the Imperial irrigation district built
those vast canals.The Metropolitan
Water District built the canals and tunnels and so forth that took the
water to Southern California.And
then when Hoover Dam was in process of being planned, and the expense was
talked about, California said, "Well, if Arizona and Nevada won't pay their
share, we'll pay it for them."And
as a result of that, Arizona and Nevada never did pay their share.And
the dam is operated by the City of Los Angeles, not by the Bureau of Reclamation
which owns it.
Steiger:That's
Hoover Dam?
Litton:Hoover
Dam, yeah.Los Angeles Department
of Water and Power and the Southern California Edison Company operate Hoover
Dam, and Parker Dam and so forth.
Steiger:When
you did those first trips?-one in 1955 and then the next one was 1956.In
1955 and 1956, what did the place look like?How
did it change, what was it like then, and how's it different from what
it's like now?
Litton:When
you start a river trip, you don't really make notes saying, "I'm going
to notice what the river's like now so that I can note the changes later."You
don't think of that.You may today
note what it's like and try to remember what it was then, but no,
there wasn't any thought of that.The
main difference that anyone would notice was, that when you got to a beach,
there were no footprints on it.When
you got to Red Wall Cavern, it was as smooth as a carpet in there?-not
all the volleyball games had taken place.There
was nobody else there.There might
have been one or two other trips on the river that year, but only under
the rarest of circumstances would you ever encounter them.Very
few people were going through then.In
fact, in 1955 when we went, until we went through, only about 175 people
had ever gone down the Grand Canyon.When
we finished, it was 185, as I recall.Anyway,
that's the way Doc Marsten had it.The
main difference that you would note between then and now was the peninsulas
of earth, of sand, that came out into the river that overlapped one another
as you looked down the river, with flowers on them, and willows, vines
and so forth, and never a human footprint on any of them.And
of course all that space and all that camping space would have been available
to anyone who was here, but there just wasn't anybody.Red
Wall Cavern is a shock, if you compare it what it is now to what it was
like then.Not only would the beach
go way out, but today it's just pocked with footprints everywhere.And
when we went down in 1955 and 1956, there wasn't a single footprint, and
cliff swallows were nesting in the back of the cave there, and their little
mud nests were there, and the babies, when they'd hear you coming would
stick their heads out and open their mouths thinking you were Mama.And
of course there's been no life like that for years and years.We
didn't think that it would ever. . . .It
never occurred to us to think that would ever be a place that would be
so beaten down by human feet, the way it's become.You
got hard banks now, where people land and set up their kitchens and all
this and that.We used to always
camp on damp sand, because it went out near the river, and usually it was
very hot, and you wanted to be as close to the river as possible.So
you camped on damp sand and avoided dry sand.Well,
the reason for that was, if the wind blew at night, you'd get sand in your
ears and so forth.You want everything
perfect, so you'd make your bed on the damp sand, and then dry out your
groundcloth in the morning, and that way you kept cool in June or July
when it's so blistering hot here.Now,
we look for dry sand, because we're looking for any sand, anything
we can count on.If we camp on damp
sand, we might be floating before morning, because the water is going to
come and go.But we always went down
the river on a declining stage.In
other words, after it had peaked for the year?-or as far as we knew, it
had peaked for the year?-sometimes it did have a second peak?-but the water
was going down.In July it was going
down.After about the end of the
first week of July you could count on the water receding.Therefore
you had all these great vast sweeps of beach where you could put your bed
and never have to think about the water coming up?-the water went down.And
of course the water was muddier than it is now, most of the time.
Steiger:Would
you say there were a lot more beaches?-more and bigger and all that stuff?
Litton:I
think everyone knows that the beaches have largely disappeared.Some
of 'em have just been moved around and changed.And
some of the apparent enlargement of beaches has come about because where
the eddies and other currents have tended to keep the beaches there,
people use those spaces because they're available.And
in so doing, lots of people trample around over them, and open them up.The
place we were last night [above Lava Falls on the left],you
remember, there were lots of little trails and camping spots and so forth,
which if people hadn't used that area, would have been totally covered
with plants.But here we created
the open spots?-we didn't, but "we, the human race" did?-by using a place
like that so heavily.So that's what's
made a lot of it available, where there's not much beach compared to what
there used to be, but these beaches have been created by human use.
Steiger:Why
is it important to have the river be natural, or as natural as possible?
Litton:Well
there are several reasons why the river should be natural, one is the joy
of running on a natural river, and knowing that you're as close to nature
as you can be.And the other is .
. . whether we run it or not, nature has its right.It
has a right to be here untrammeled, unfettered.Man
doesn't have to screw everything up, and yet we go out of our way to do
so.The West was open for grabs.After
Powell, everybody was going to start irrigating and doing all kinds of
things in the West, and those things can't be done, of course, but greed
was the motive.It's important to
frustrate greed.We're all greedy
for one thing or another, but some of our desires, I think are on a higher
plane than some of those of others.And
we have no right to change this place, even though our change is only very
temporary, in the long run, as Pat Reilly used to say, you'll never know
those dams were there.In a hundred
thousand years, there won't be a trace of 'em.And
there won't be a trace of us either.But
do we have a right even to interrupt nature, even for a short time?To
exterminate species?To kill the
last fly?That's not really our
right.We're the aberration on Earth?-humans
are what's wrong with the world.And
it shouldn't show down here.We should
be as close to what creation brought us, as we can be.And
we need to be sensitive to it, aware of it, and appreciative of the fact
that we have this place to enjoy because of natural processes, which we
had no control over, and couldn't have changed, but just the same, we're
off on the edge of nature, and we ought to show appreciation.It's
the same thing about throwing garbage around and so forth.Those
are things that are so obvious and we can easily control.But
when we're here, we should stop and think that we as a people, we as a
race, we're controlling the present, as we have the past of this place,
and the future of the Grand Canyon.And
as an experience, which is a soulful experience, a really deep experience,
this canyon can be for people who are attuned to it, we should make it
the best possible experience.And
that means the canyon can be as wonderful, as natural, as it's possible
for it to be.That's one thing why
I'm disturbed about these baloney boat trips who race by and don't slow
down for Tapeats Creek and so forth.On
the one hand, you say, "Well, those people are missing the wonders of the
canyon."They don't go up Matkatameba
[phonetic spelling] or anything.They're
missing the wonders of the canyon, and yet somehow you have to be thankful
that they are, because there are already too many people appreciating,
exploring, and impacting the wonders of the canyon.We
have to be awfully careful.The most
careful we can be is by what's going on at that dam up there, changing
that.What we do down here is relatively
trivial.
Steiger:Well,
I think the use level is an issue, and it's coming up.They're
going to rewrite the Plan by next year, 1996.
Steiger:It's
too bad the people that rewrite plans all the time aren't the people who
know how to do it.The Park Service
comes and goes?-it's a transient bunch, you know.And
by the time you have a Grand Canyon National Park superintendent who begins
to know the score, he's gone.And
then you gotta train somebody else, and it's up to us to train them!But
they don't always listen.And the
Plan, there is overuse, but on the other hand, what else can you do?There's
only one Grand Canyon for all these people.And
when they came up with this plan to eliminate motors, I was ambivalent
about that.Actually, if nobody
could go on a motor trip, there would be fewer people going down the Grand
Canyon, but there would still be a lot of people.And
if you slowed everything down to the pace of a rowing trip, let's say half
the speed of a motor trip, then at any give time you would have twice as
many people in the canyon, provided you allowed the same number of people
to go through.And that didn't look
good either.So one of our attitudes
was, if they want to get through, clutching their airline tickets, and
unable to wait for the other end of the line, and are willing to pay the
money and so forth, then I'm afraid we'll just have to let them go, but
let them go fast, and let them get out of our way while we enjoy the Grand
Canyon.I know that seems like a
rather crude way of putting it, but you wouldn't want all that traffic
piled up in here.
Steiger:Just
for the record, even though we have it elsewhere, with your company, if
you could give us a little description of that:What
kind of boats did you use and what was your schedule like and why?
Litton:Our
company was called Grand Canyon Dories and we didn't expect every other
company to be like that.We used
dories and we didn't augment the trip with rafts or motor rigs or anything
like that.Later on we took some
training rafts occasionally down, small rafts that would sometimes be called
"baggage boats" and so forth.But
the people went in dories, which we thought were, and we know are, the
best way to go.And they appreciated
the canyon, they enjoyed the ride, and we stopped where we could see things
that were very special.And sometimes
we'd spend a day, or part of a day, concentrating on these wonders of nature
that are all through the canyon, and unseen by many of the people who come
through?-many of whom don't care whether they see 'em or not.Thunder
Spring is one, of course.So we
ran a longer trip, not rushing.On
the other hand, it wasn't just a dawdling trip.Eighteen
days to Pierce Ferry is not just floating?-you're making time.When
you allow for the stops you make, which may represent two nights, often
two nights at Monument Creek, two nights at Chuar Creek.That
allows for people to go and see things that are very special to the Grand
Canyon.Two nights at Tapeats Creek.And
so it was more than just a float down a river, and a chance for people
to say, "Well, I've been down the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River."To
me that's not the purpose of being here.The
purpose of being here is to soak it up.And
we realized we were here, along with all the other people, and our impact
was here too, so we tried to minimize it in every way and tread lightly
on the Earth.
Steiger:How
did you come to name the boats?
Litton:How
did we come to name the boats?I
don't remember what inspired me to do this, but there were so many places
of wonder and beauty, natural places on the Earth, and sometimes they weren't
100 percent natural, but they were lovely and wonderful, that were being
lost?-are still being lost.And I
felt we need to remind ourselves of what we're throwing away in this world,
what we've given up, what we've allowed to be destroyed.And
so the names for the boats began to memorialize the Earth's natural wonders,
big and small, that have been lost, destroyed in one way or another, or
badly injured by human activity.So
we named boats after the places you're familiar with.Reached
all around the world, most of 'em in this country, though, of course.We're
most sensitive to places in the Colorado River system?-of course people
on the Colorado River are most sensitive to.A
lot of places under Lake Powell?-which would not have been named Lake Powell
if Powell had anything to say about it.I
think that was the biggest insult to Powell there ever was.A
guy who's dead and can't defend himself has to have his name attached to
that thing.But at least under Lake
Powell there are a lot of wonderful places that will never be wonderful
again, as long as that thing is there.We
used those, as you know, Music Temple and Hidden Passage, Moqui Steps,
and the other things you think about up there.
Steiger:Well
what about this trip here that we're running now?Why
did you come, and what's it been like for you?
Litton:I
got a free trip!(laughter)I
didn't have to organize the trip.It's
so wonderful just to come and row a boat.And
I got to see some old friends after a long time?-some of 'em I hardly ever
knew, but I knew of them.You
realize that some of these people predate me:Lois
Jotter [phonetic spelling], the most wonderful person you can think of,
who came down here in 1938.In 1948?Something
like nearly twenty years before I took a boat through here, and here she
is, big as life.So coming on this
trip was a temptation, as long as I had an opportunity to bring my boat,
to bring a boat, which I bought for this trip.And
to be with the crew too, people that I've known in my own organization:you,
Brad, and others who are here?-Kenton, of course, Diane.These
are things that made the trip attractive, and it was going at a nice time
of year, from the standpoint of weather.It's
a good assembly, it's a good way to put people together.It's
the only thing of its kind that'll ever happen in history, where the "oldtimers"
as they're called, those available, could get together and not only reminisce,
but put on record their memories of what was here.I
know it's changed a lot, and some of 'em have expressed their recognition
of the changes.But it's not easy
to remember the changes as you go along, because the level of the river
changes everything anyway.I think
Bob Rigg has been one of those who's been most sensitive, because after
all, he did great things on this river a long time ago.In
1956, which was the second year I'd ever gone down here, he and his brother,
at that time, set the all-time record for any kind of a craft, going down
the Grand Canyon, motored or rowed, motor-driven or oar-powered, and they
did a very spectacular thing, the two of them:Something
that's been eclipsed since then by Kenton Grua, who's also on this trip,
in a dory with two other members of our former crew at Grand Canyon Dories.So
I guess that gives me a little satisfaction, that a dory holds the all-time
record, and probably the all-time record there will ever be for any craft
going through the canyon.It's incredible.I
mean, these motorboats lug through here in eight or nine days, and here
three guys with a pair of oars come shooting down here in thirty-six hours.And
what the purpose of that is, I can't say, except it was done, and it was
done with human power without the benefit of internal combustion, as the
Rigg brothers trip was.So it says
something about human muscle.
I
don't think you want to hear any more.
Steiger:Well,
I don't know, what are we forgetting?
Litton:I
don't know what to say, this is just blabber.
Steiger:No
it isn't!
Underhill:Here
goes my question, Martin.Today you
did something that. . . .
Steiger:Are
you taking pictures?
Robertson:I
am.
Underhill:Today
you did something that really intrigued me, that I would consider to be
Abbeyesque, like in Edward Abbey.
[Steiger
announces need to change batteries.]
Underhill:I've
got this great question, and you'll probably have a one-word answer.(tape
turned off and on)Well, today you
did something that reminded me of a moment in Desert Solitaire.And
in Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey is playing around with a slingshot,
and he's spinning around, and he sees a rabbit go by, and so he spins it
around and "smack!" hits this rabbit and kills it.And
I thought, "Oh my God!"And this
is Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire and he's just killed this rabbit,
and he felt a little bad about that.But
today while we were rowing, there was that little business card sitting
on the deck that didn't make it in the box and we're getting ready to go
through a riffle or maybe 185, and it got tossed in the river.What
is that about?
Litton:The
little business card that you saw was a card that was printed with my
name on it as the founder and chairman of the Sequoia Alliance.Well,
whether that's true or not, I had nothing to do with the way that card
was printed.It didn't even have
my address on it or phone number?-it had the address and phone number of
the Sequoia Alliance.I had nothing
to do with the way that card was put together, and I thought it was pretty
fatuous to have a business card saying you're founder and chairman of something.I
would just rather have my name on it, and that's all.I
wasn't. . . .The identification
part of it wasn't necessary.And
so I haven't used those cards, and one of them was in my ammo box, where
I do have some cards that I put together about the Sequoia
situation, a very simple one with my name on it, and so I haven't given
anybody that card.When it went
overboard, I thought it was the Lord's will, and that somebody would find
it someday, buried in the rock, and it would become a fossil, and nobody
down here would be allowed to pick it up, just as they won't be allowed
to touch your beer cans if you leave 'em in the river.Those
will be antiquities.You see, what
we are required to protect was another generation's junk.When
Indians threw away broken pots, that was trash to them.(chuckles)We're
not allowed to pick it up and clean up the canyon.
Did
I answer your question?
Underhill:You
did.
Litton:Okay,
we're done.
Steiger:How
about you, Jeff?
Robertson:You're
going to wish you'd asked a bunch more.
Steiger:What
is it?What are we forgetting here?
Litton:Dinnertime!
Underhill:That
too!Martin, what is it that people
today need to know?You talked a
lot about the environmental importance of the canyon, and that is a very
clear message, but is there anything else that people today need to know
about the past to understand where we need to head?
Litton:Well,
you know, it's been said that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat
it.You can't repeat what we've done
here, because once it's done, it's done.I'll
switch that question a little bit, if I may, because I don't know how to
answer it.It's not important that
we physically enjoy being here.What's
important is that it's here.And
I think a lot of satisfaction, a lot of pleasure in wilderness is experienced
by people who never go to the wilderness, or who rarely do, or maybe can't
or may someday, or may have in the past, can't do it any more?-because
it's knowing it's there, that's where the real satisfaction is.And
sometimes, if you think it's there, you're enjoying it.If
you go there, you may not enjoy it,it
may not be what you hoped for, what you idealized.Yosemite,
for example:to go there now is
torture for a person who remembers how beautiful it was.And
the Grand Canyon hasn't gotten to that point yet.It's
a vaster distance.
George
Miller, congressman from California, who is a good environmental legislator,
said something in a program that I was involved in, which made me wince.I
don't think he really meant it, and I don't think he thought about it before
he said it, but we're trying to establish a national preserve among the
giant sequoias which have been at the mercy of the National Forest system.And
of course they're out to murder everything in sight.We've
had to sue and so forth, and many of us have become paupers because of
it, trying to stop what our government is doing to the most wonderful forest:as
John Muir said, "the noblest forest of the world."And
Congressman Miller was asked about this, and he'd never been informed about
the preserve that we're trying to establish, which is, of course, not ideal.It's
not ideal to set something aside.It'd
be better if everyone understood what the values are, and it didn't need
to be set aside, like here.And he
came on this program?-which I have a tape of, we countered it a little
bit later on?-but he said, "Well, you can't just draw a line around something
and think you've protected it.That
doesn't work.We're interested in
ecosystems."I said, "Ooo, George,
why did you say that?!"Maybe you
can't protect everything by drawing a line around it, but that's the only
thing we've ever been able to do.Grand
Canyon National Park had a line drawn around it, and that's why it has
some measure of protection.Every
national park, every wilderness, every national monument, every state park?-it's
got a line drawn around it and there are things you cannot do inside that
line, and that's what the protection is.But
to think that you're going to convert people into ecologists overnight,
the way some of these idealists seem to think we can do, that's
the fallacy.Better get those lines
drawn, and then hang onto them, and eventually they'll coalesce, eventually
we will care.I know people
who you shouldn't really expect this of, but they'll take a drive for a
vacation up through Oregon and Washington, and they'll come back home outraged,
even though every effort is made to keep the tourists from seeing these
things, the logging, the destruction of the land?-mainly by logging, also
by mining and grazing?-people can't believe it.They
can hardly believe they've seen that, and they don't know what to do about
it, they don't know where to turn, they don't know what club to join, they're
fighting mad.But we haven't given
them the instruments through which they can vent their outrage and help
to protect and save what we have?-what we had, because we've lost
most of it.So we'd better draw some
lines, and we'd better do it in a hurry, and that's one of my projects
to get to Congressman Miller, point out to him that we'd better draw a
lot more lines before we think that we've converted our people to the point
where they're going to take care of nature.As
long as there are projects, as long as there are businesses, as long as
there's money to be made by sacrificing nature, people are going to do
it.And it's too bad, but the jobs
issue is the worst thing we face.You
can cut yourself right out of a job in the Northwest, without even realizing
it, and then blame the environmentalists for stopping the logging.The
logging stopped because you cut all the trees down.And
that's the story of nature everywhere.Here
we don't have an immediate extractive industry because it's just a bunch
of rocks.(laughs)But
there used to be people trying to take things out of the Grand Canyon:Old
Hance with his asbestos mine; Georgie started an asbestos mine in Tapeats
Creek, you know.And her brothers
were hauling asbestos down the river in pontoon rafts.And
the amounts were ridiculous.And
then we had the bat guano mine down here, you know.So
people, if there were anything here to get, they'd get it?-but thank God,
there isn't anything.
Steiger:Georgie
had an asbestos mine?!
Litton:Her
brothers [she had one brother] were mining asbestos. . . .
Steiger:Georgie
Clark's brothers?
Litton:Georgie
White Clark, yeah.You know the trail
where you go up?Well, I don't think
there's any trace any more?-where you go up to that slide or that talus.You
go up to where you hit the level, and then you go along the ledge to where
the shovel used to be and all that.On
the way up there, you come to an overhang, and it used to be, before people
picked away at it too much, that the layers of rock were actually asbestos,
and if you stuck your finger in there, you could pull out these asbestos
fibers that big.You could pull
out a whole handful of them.And
Georgie got all excited about that, and her brothers began to dig that
asbestos up, and put it in rafts and bring it down to sell it.Well
you know, it takes an awful lot of asbestos to be worth anything, and now
it's not worth much, because they don't use it!Yet
all of us grew up with asbestos. . . .
Underhill:And
here you are!
Litton:Yeah.It's
so stupid, the things we go through!People
in a restaurant will say, "Oh, I can't stay here, there's a man smoking
over there."And then they'll go
out and stand on the corner, waiting for the signal to change and 500 cars
will go by and they don't pay the slightest attention, and they're getting
a lot more poison then, than they get out of 10,000 cigarettes, or whatever.
You
don't want this!
[discussion
about batteries not transcribed]
[END
OF INTERVIEW]