Hey, everybody out there in the Pacific Northwest or with access to an airport or a car rental place that can get you to the Pacific Northwest specifically at the end of January. We'll see you in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.
That's right to Our new live show for twenty twenty four is Seattle, Washington January twenty fourth at the Paramount Theater, then Portland at our Homeway from Home at Revolution Hall the twenty fifth, and then winding it all up at Sketchfest on the twenty six at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.
Very nice. If you want tickets, if you want information, if you want tickets, you can go to a couple of places. You can go to our link tree at Linktree slash sysk, and you can go to our home on the web, Stuff youshould Know dot com. Click on the tour button and it'll take you to all of the beautiful places you can go to buy your tickets and we'll see you guys in January.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
That's right.
Life is a highway. I want to arrive in all night long, not again down the.
River Canadian legend Tom broke off. That's right. No, it's not right.
But hey, we want to welcome yet another new writer that's helping us out. Welcome Anna, because Anna helped us with this and Anna Green and I thought this. She did a really good job. And we hope Ana can write some more stuff for us in the future. And I could have sworn this was a listener suggestion, and
I looked and I just could not find it. So if someone suggested that we do a show on a gentleman named Kenton Grua who was a Grand Canyon river guide, pretty remarkable person, then I'm really sorry because I really I looked and looked there em but I just couldn't find it. So that was nice. Yeah, if you want to write in and say, hey, that was me, I'll check it against my records and we'll give you a future shot out.
Also, I got to give Anna the coronation. You ready, that's right? All right?
Welcome aboard the old mouth wornon.
So we're talking Kent and grewa never heard of this person before in my life until I started researching this person, this man, this legend actually really Yeah, he's especially if you spend much time hanging out with Grand Canyon riverfolk, you will you will hear stories of Kent and Grua, although apparently not from him while he was alive. He's supposedly very humble as far as his own accomplishments go.
But if you if you talk to one of his friends, you would probably get some thrilling stories out of them because he did some pretty interesting stuff along that Colorado River.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And we also want to shout out a book that both Anna and we and we used. Kevin Fodarco wrote a book called The Emerald Mile about this river run, this record breaking timed river run down the Grand Canyon River, Colorado River, and I knew the name, and then I remember that I watched this great documentary from nat GEO called Into the Canyon and Kevin Fodarco was one of
the guys. He and a guy named Pete McBride hiked almost seven hundred and fifty miles from one end of the canyon to the other and made this really gorgeous, gorgeous documentary so I highly recommend Into the Canyon as well as the book The Emerald Mile and Big thanks to everything that Kevin Foderco does in terms of raising awareness for the Grand Canyon.
Like, think about that, man, that's so many miles you would have to get a new pair of shoes. At some point in the middle of that.
I think they did you have to take they I think they bailed on an attempt and then came back and did it or something I can't remember, but just gorgeous photography and really good stuff. The Grand Canyon is just a truly a magical place. If you've never been there, just go. It's one of those places that were like, yeah, I've seen pictures and stuff, but it's one of the place one of the few places that where I truly
understood the meaning of bread taking. Like I actually literally got physically short of breath when I first stood there on that rim.
Like you had a panic attack.
No, it was just truly breathtaking. It's really really just you gotta go, you gotta do it.
Have you been, Yes, I have. I've been to the North Rim. I didn't ride a burrow or anything like that, but I did look down and get to see the whole thing from that wooded, forested north Rim. That is not like what you think of when you think of the Grand Canyon. It's like just a whole other side of it. It's really neat.
Yeah, it's amazing.
I did have a panic attack, That's why I couldn't breathe because I was looking over into it. I'm like, I'm this is I can't do this. But yeah, it's pretty pretty neat for sure.
Yeah, I've never been down to the river. My friend Brett and I hiked down there's I don't know, I'm not sure how far down it is, but we hiked down to there's this one sort of area where you can hike down to and hang out for a bit if you don't want to go down all the way, and then hike back out and young in shape Chuck. That hike out was one of the toughest things I've ever done.
Because you're basically just going up right.
Up, up, up up up up in the heat. Heat. Heat.
Oh wow. So back to Kent and Grua. He was somebody who could hike up the sides of the canyon up out of it because he did that a lot, mostly because he spent a lot, essentially his entire adult life in the Grand Canyon along the Colorado River, and if you wanted to go see his family or friends see a movie, that's what he had to do. He had to hike out of the Grand Canyon to go do those things. So he was, from every thing I saw, extraordinarily fit but also kind of at one with the canyon.
If anybody could be, he was definitely one of those people.
Yeah, for sure. He was born in Salt Lake City in nineteen fifty and was really big into snow skiing until he was twelve years old when his family, because of business his father started a trucking company, moved to Vernal, Utah. At the time, there was no skiing in Vernal and so his dad said, hey, kiddo, you're twelve, you'd love to be outdoors in adventure, so let's go on a rafting trip. And they went to the Yampa River for his birthday and kitt and Grua was like, this is
where it's at. I love river rafting. So pops bought him a army surplus raft and he, as a young kid, started taking these little solo rafting trips. And that's kind of where he learned how to navigate rivers. Initially he got the river bug. He totally got the river bug.
A few years later, he was going to study mechanical engineering at the University of Utah, and during winter break of freshman year, he was offered a job working for Hatch River Expeditions, river boating outfit along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. And he said, so long college, I'm going to go do this. And the job was even just patching boats, like it wasn't even as a river guide. But that's how much he'd loved spending time not just on the river but specifically the Colorado River
in the Grand Canyon itself. Yeah, but because of his natural talent and his just complete passion for the job, he became river guide within just a few months of his first job there.
Yeah.
Absolutely, so he's now taking an adventuresome tourist through the Grand Canyon down the river. He got another job after that at Grand Canyon Expeditions for a little while and
met a really important person in his life. There, a mentor in some way as far as conservationism god named Martin Litton l I T t O N who was starting his own company, his own expedition company, and Litton was about he was all about just preserving the not just the Grand Canyon, but just all of nature, and was just sort of ashamed of what humankind had done to nature. And in fact, the boat that grewa would eventually pilot down the Colorado River for that record breaking run.
It was called the Emerald Mile. These boats Linton had, he would name them after natural wonders that had been destroyed by humans as a reminder. And this apparently the Emerald Mile was a stretch of old growth redwoods in California that were clear cut in the sixties. So he named this wooden dory, this boat that you paddle with oars after that stretch of redwoods.
Yeah, and no Dori in particular. For the most part, people at the time, and I think still today, were going down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon on these expedition tours in rubber boats like zodiacs, like motorized boats that you could bump up against rocks all day and they were probably going to be fine.
That's Some of them were regular boats.
What do you mean regular like a pontoon.
No, Like in the early days, they were just like, I saw something that looked like old wooden Chris crafts.
Oh wow, okay, wow, that's kind of cool talk about doing it.
Yeah, okay.
So the dory itself, though, it was originally like a fishing boat that Europeans, I think the Portuguese were the ones who really kind of perfected it would take out on the ocean, so they were like sea worthy row boats basically, and they eventually made their way to New England where whalers would take them out, and then Martin Linton got his hands on them for the Grand Canyon because he was just like you you experience the Colorado River in a dory in ways that you can't possibly
in a raft, let alone a motorized draft. So there it's like a purposefully old timey antique way of going down the Colorado River. And they still use dories today as a matter of fact, some outfits too.
Yeah, and Greua was like, this thing is amazing, because you know, he wanted, as we'll see, he really enjoyed getting down that river fast and this the dory is like they won't obviously, because they're made of wood, they won't bounce off a rock like a raft will. But they're much more able to be steered, they handle a lot better, they're much more I don't know if lithe is the right word, but you can motor down that river in a dory better than you can in a raft if you're into speed and churning.
Sure, but a lot of the most of the dory expeditions use ors their road, right. Oh yeah, So the other thing about it that you mentioned is that like it won't handle bumping against rocks like a raft will. They're much more fragile, much less forgiving than a rubber raft, which means you have to be that much more experienced and have that much greater ability to take a dory down the Colorado River than you would like a raft.
Yeah, and you know, they can get dinged up a little as I kind of thought at first, like you hit a rock with one of these and you're sinking immediately.
This explosion catches fire, right.
Exactly, And I'm sure that can happen. But as as you will see, you know they can. They can get bumped up a little bit, and you know they're pretty hardy.
I think, yeah, no, for sure, but it's just some of those rapids can be pretty rough on the old boat.
Yeah, absolutely so.
Grua was in love with dories just like Martin Linton was, and he came on Linton's company, Green Canyon Dories and began piloting a dory called the Chattahoochie. He did that for like ten years down the Colorado River. He made nearly one hundred trips, which, by my estimation, that's almost half of the days between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy nine. When he made those hundred trips he spent on the Colorado River. That's a lot of time on Colorado.
That's exactly what he wanted to do. He could not have been happier. He chose this life for himself and he just did it. He made it work, and he became an expert on the Colorado River as it runs through the Grand Canyon.
Totally like reading this, I got very jealous of his life.
Yeah. I was looking at some of the dory expeditions they have and I was like, man, that's amazing. Then it's like eighteen days. I said, no, I'm not going to do that. Like, are there helicopters that you can lower in and do a couple of days and then come out. No, there's not apparently.
Well sadly, there are helicopter trips that they will take you down and land you on a big plateau. That's one of the things I learned from that documentary that Fiderco was in was they were trying to raise awareness for these you know, they were trying to build some big like hotel basically like halfway down the canyon, and all these people were fighting it, seeing like you can't do that.
You can't turn this into.
A place where people can get rich, people can get helicoptered in and stay in a five star resort.
Like no, no, no, okay.
First of all, I felt like a jackass before. Now I really feel like a jackass.
But some of you were talking about getting dropped off to Row. Sure, like ziplining out like a ranger.
Right, But I mean like walking down from a resort to go row for a couple of days.
Maybe that's as pretty good.
But the.
Kind of upshot of what you're saying is a good analogy from what I understand. To compare rafting or boating down the Colorado River these days would be like going on an expedition to Everest. It is nothing like it used to be. Yeah, even twenty thirty, forty years ago, it's just gotten so much easier. There's so much money being thrown at this now, it's just not even a challenge any longer. It's like a posh vacation for people
who like to act like their adventurers. And I'm saying that I'm not going to climb Everest, so I can't really be critical, but I'm saying comparing it to how it originally started, when these outfits were first created in like the forties, fifties, sixties, it's just nothing like that today. It's far more commercialized, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, so in the meme how it started, how it's going to be a person like bleeding from the head and spitting a river water out of their mouth, and then another one with a dude holding a martini as he goes down the river.
Exactly, all right, I said.
We took a break, oh yeah, and we come back and we talk a little bit more about Kenton Grua the man. All right, as promised, We're going to tell you a little bit more about the personality of Kent and Grua. He was quite an adventurer like you said was just in love with nature, and in particular the Grand Canyon in that river. His nickname was the Factor.
If you ever read anything you're going to see him, probably called Kenton the Factor Grua and that was because apparently he was just like this larger than life personality and like anytime he was a part of something he had some sort of influence on it, he was a factor, and thus the Factor.
Yeah, we'll put he was also very fond of pot and drinking liquor while he was working on the trail and after, I guess after rowing for the day, sitting on a beach, Yeah, you'd probably light up what one might call it.
Split back then might be a doobie for sure.
And I'll bet it just gave you a headache instantly. But he also is a little kind of fashion conscious, you can say. Anna points out that he would wear cutoff levies that look cool, especially if you're barefoot and you have long hair in your stone. But if you're like falling the water, it takes like a week for those things to dry out. So long story short, Kent and Gruel was very frequently chafed on the inside of his thighs.
Right he was not at all man.
He was five foot six, but you know, had an outsized personality and sense of adventure. I guess there was one story that he was on one expedition and they drank all the booze, so he hiked all the way out of the Grand Canyon to go get more booze, hike back in.
Yeah, that's just one story about Kent and grew, but it definitely drives the point home. Like he liked booze, but he was also willing to physically exert himself at the drop of a hat. So he was a tough dude essentially, But he was also supposedly really kind and gentle with the tourists that he took down the river. Yeah,
he was well known for that. But he was also known for being very opinionated about how the river should be navigated, how an expedition should be run, and so he would be more than likely to butt heads with some of the other river guides that he worked with, but that didn't rub off toward the passengers, which I think makes him a pro.
I'd say, yeah, absolutely, And you know we're going to build up sort of story wise to the record breaking river run. But he did some pretty remarkable things before that, one of which was to hike the entire length of the Grand Canon from Lee's Ferry to Grand Wash Cliffs.
He read a book in nineteen sixty eight that was a backpacker named Colin Fletcher who did that hike, well sort of, we'll see the man who walked through Time was the book and he said, I'm the first person to hike the entire link of the Grand Canyon.
And Grew was like, no, you didn't.
You hiked the canyon within the National Park System. But buddy, that ain't all of the Grand Canyon.
The guy went, what.
So I'm going to do it? And he did.
He tried a couple of times, he tried the first time, and you know, this is two hundred and seventy seven miles as the crow flies. Yeah, like I mentioned before, when Faderka did it, they hiked seven hundred and fifty miles. Because you can't just walk a straight line, there's things you just can't navigate around, so you're having to hike, you know, three times as much or at least two and a half times as much as the length of the canyon to complete that high.
That's a nuts and he did it first time he tried it. Remember I said he liked to run around barefoot and cut off Levi's oh, yeah, well this he realized he was going on a very long hike, so he went to the trouble of buying himself some leather moccasins to hi kid. Those lasted very short time before he started wearing through them and actually cut his foot on a cactus started to get infected. He's like, I should probably stop now.
That surprised me that he would. I mean, that's a mistake.
Yeah.
I think he knew that that wasn't going to work.
You know, I don't know that that's true. Like he was capable of making mistakes, for sure. He's also capable of evolving his opinions and understandings about things. And he wasn't so dumb that he kept going until he died, right, Yeah, you know that was nineteen seventy two, I think. Yeah, four years later, he's like, I'm going to do this different. I'm going to not only wear work boots instead of moccasins. Smart, move out of the gate.
Yeah.
He scouted the whole route in advanced and supply caches along the route, so that he could travel as light as possible, and that's when he set out that second time, and that's when he was successful. Hiking almost six hundred miles is the route that he took.
Wow, that is amazing. I think he if you average it out, he was averaging like almost seventeen mile a day clip, which is super fast. I mean, when I've done hikes and I'm really hauling it, if I get ten miles in a day, that's like a really long, hard day. And he was in the Grand Canyon, arduous conditions in the seventies when gear was not like it is now and averaging close to seventeen miles a day, which is nuts. It took him thirty six days to complete the whole thing.
I can barely get seventeen miles in a day in a helicopter, let alone hiking. So yeah, thirty six days to hike almost six hundred miles. And this is again it's not a straight line flat like there's up and down and over and it's what he did was very significant, and he became the first person on record at least to have hiked the entire length of the Grand Canyon,
not just the National Park, the whole Grand Canyon. And so whenever you're hearing about people boating through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River, what they're talking about is that same length, the whole geographical Grand Canyon from Lee's Ferry to Grand Wash cliffs.
Man.
All right, so let's talk a little bit about that river run that you just described. You know, from point to point. The very first expedition down that Colorado River was by a guy, a Civil War veteran with one arm, named John Wesley Powell in eighteen sixty nine. It took ninety eight days at that point and pretty much wrecked the crew. I mean it was by the time they got there, they were starving. Was it was a very very tough ride in eighteen sixty nine.
Can I just say one thing about that expedition, Chuck? Sure, Three of them, three members of the expedition said nuts to this, like we're giving up, and set off on foot and we're never heard from again. And they left two days before this expedition finally reached its destination. They just didn't know that they were that close to the end, and they left and died. Isn't that crazy?
Yeah, that's sad.
Yeah, but they were the first Europeans on record to have circumnavigated the Colorado River through the entire Grand Canyon, and it was a big deal.
Yeah, that's like the old mine in apocalypse Now. Never never get off the gd.
Boat, right, the gosh darn boat.
In the case of apocalypse. Now, it's because there might be a tiger in the jungle.
Right. So I saw also that this was considered the last voyage of discovery in North America. It was a big deal that John Wesley Powllin is his grew did this.
That's right.
Then in nineteen forty nine there was a guy named Ed Hudson who was a pharmacist who made a run in a motor boat. So it was obviously the fastest at the time at five days and ten minutes. And then all of a sudden, motor boats and regular boats started attempting these speed runs. People are trying to, you know, break previous records. You know, depending on how adventurous you were. I guess it depends on whether or not you want to use some motor But obviously the berets are off
to the people who didn't use the motor. Yeah, I'm sure it was still hard but it ain't like paddling, you know.
No, Ed Hudson, a pharmacist in nineteen forty nine, he did it in like five days and ten minutes using a motor boat. Jim and Bob Rigg I think two years later, said nuts to the motor boat. We're going to not only go down the same path that John Wesley Powell did in eighteen sixty nine that nearly killed him without a motor we're going to break Ed Hudson's motor based record.
And they did actually, yeah, fifty two hours.
And this was at a time in the fifties when like a tourist trip, that same tourist trip and a non motorized boat would be about three weeks. And of course they're not trying to break a record, they're trying to show everyone a nice, good time, right exactly, probably fairly relaxing, so it's not yeah, but some people did like the slow train. The longest attempt was in seventy three, and that took one hundred and three days. That's a little more of my speed, I think.
So we need to say something about the Colorado River. As Kent and Grua knew it. He came along in what was it, nineteen sixty eight or sixty nine, Yeah, one hundred years exactly after John Wesley Powell Kent and Grewa came along and took up life on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. But unfortunately for Kent Grewa, that was six years after the I think the Department of the Interior created the Glen Canyon Dam, yeah, upstream of the Grand Canyon in uh on the Colorado River,
and the Colorado River was tamed. That's the best way to put it. It was up to the I think the Army Corps of Engineers or whoever runs the dam there at Glen Canyon to decide how much water the Colorado River had. And before that it had been considered the wildest river in America because the snow melt from
the mountains upstream. Depending on how how much it snowed that year, and then how how much, how high the temperatures rose, and how quickly they did that spring, that river could turn wild in an instant because so much water would come down from the mountains and it would just flood the Colorado River, including some of the side canyons, and it would make it nuts. And Kent and Grua he knew this too, came along after that ceased, and so now the Colorado was relatively mild.
Yeah, Like, if you're going to go down a river and you want to see how you know, challenging it might be as a rower, You're going to look at what's called the gradient in feet per mile, And obviously the higher the gradient, the more you know, the faster that water's going to be. A pretty wild river can have a gradient between twenty five and sixty feet per mile. The Colorado River has a gradient of eight feet per mile.
So the actual you know, the where the river sits and the land beneath that river, that gradient isn't too crazy. It is the steepness of the sides of that canyon is what makes it crazy. Because, like you said, when that stuff flash floods and it hits the Colorado River, it can move boulders, it can create you know, waves, and when that water hits the still water, it can create a wave like twenty to thirty feet high.
Yeah, for sure in a river. Yeah. One of the reasons why stuff like that happens is because all that debris and boulder create these natural dams on either side of the river, narrowing the channel, speeding up the water, and once you have fast water running into slow water, all sorts of crazy stuff happens. So speaking, geographically, the Colorado River shouldn't have rapids, but because of its situation in that stretch of the Grand Canyon, it does. It
has some pretty cool rapids. And Kent and Gruin knew how to do this, Like his job was to take people through these rapids down this stream. But again the river that he was on was not the same river that John Wesley Powell had been on because of the dam.
Yeah. Absolutely, So you.
Want to talk about the first the first attempt in nineteen.
Eighty, Yeah, I mean successful. A tip makes it sounds like he didn't do it. He actually did set a speed record in nineteen eighty I think how fast was that one?
He did him forty six hours in fifty six minutes. He beat Jim and Bob Riggs nineteen fifty one record, which it stood for almost thirty years.
Yeah, so he breaks the record and you would think, you know a lot of people would say like, all right, I did what I attempted to do, broke that record, But Kit and grew It was like man that river was was not fast that day, a couple of days, and I can do this a lot faster. And he became sort of I don't know about obsessed, if that's the right word. I don't know if someone who smoked that much weed can then get that obsessed or worked
up about anything. But he said, I know I can do this if that like, it doesn't matter how fast I'm rowing. Unless I have a faster river just from the natural conditions, then I can't break that record. So I'm gonna wait until the conditions are right. And that happened in nineteen eighty three because of El Nino. It was at the time, at least the most extreme El Nino that had happened to that point. Caused a ton
of snow. All that snow melts at some point, and all of a sudden, you're gonna have flooding such that if you're measuring like a river flow, you measure it in cubic feet per second. The Colorado River through the Grand Canyon averages about twelve thousand to fifteen thousand cubic feet per second, and that summer that June specifically, I saw anywhere from between seventy thousand and one hundred thousand cubic feet per second, which is, you know, up seven to ten times as fast.
Yeah, that is a lot more water. Number one, it goes a lot faster, and it changes the river. Like the river that he was used to, the rapids, he was used to the features that he had to circumnavigate during a normal boating trip down the Colorado. It was not there. They were different. They were altered by this
huge influx of very fast moving water. And so what had happened is Kevin Fudarco points out in the Emerald Mile that for the first time, probably for the only time in his lifetime, Kent and Grua had a chance to take on the Colorado River, the same river that John Wesley Powell took on in eighteen sixty nine. This stuff did not happen. It caught the corp of engineers by surprise, so much so that they to keep the Lake Powell from topping over the Glen Canyon Dam, they
were putting up plywood barriers. That's how unprepared they were for this incredibly historic flooding. I think there was like twenty six hundred miles of shoreline in Lake Powell. The reservoir that's behind the dam, and the reservoir was rising a foot a day, that's how much snow melt was coming down, And so they were just releasing. According to Arizona Central, up to a million cubic feet per second in a release at a time. So this was flooding
the Colorado downstream. But it's the only option they had to keep the dam from breaking or from being toppled, and you know, the water coming out of control. So it was a wild river again all of a sudden, like it happened before. And Kent and Grew was all about that.
He was all about it.
So I say, we took a break and then we'll come back and let everyone know what happened on June twenty fifth, nineteen eighty three.
Okay, So Kent and Grew says, it's time. Like that nineteen eighty record that I broke that I'm not very happy with, I'm now going to break that record. I'm going to take this river like I know it can be taken. And he went to his friend Rudy Petschek, who was at the time forty nine. Kenton would have been thirty three. Yeah, So Rudy Petchik was like old and then Steve Wren Reynolds was the other guy that
they they brought on. So the three of them decided that they were going to take the Emerald Mile out onto the Colorado River. And they was by the way, okay Ren, Yeah, okay. And they went to the Park Service and said, hey, we'd like a permit. We're gonna take the Emerald Mile down the Colorado River. It's nuts right now, isn't it. And the Park Service said, no, you're not going to do that.
Yeah, you got to get a permit to do something like that. They said, no, Like you said, they were trying to send people, trying to keep people off the river, and as we'll see you later on. They even had a ranger stationed on the river. I guess it was Benjamin Bratt probably telling people to get out. What you never saw the River wild.
No, is that the one with Bruce Willis where he's a cop in a boat.
Nope?
Okay.
River Wilde was Meryl Streep and David Stratham, Kevin Bacon and John c Riley.
Isn't Kevin Bacon like a crazy homicidal serial killer is stalking these guys?
Not a serial killer. He's a bad guy. Though. Okay, it's a really good movie. I highly recommend it.
But Benjamin Bratt is a ranger that literally does what this other ranger did is like stationed down before the bad rapid saying get out.
You shouldn't be here.
I just want to shout out my favorite Benjamin Bratt fact that he was born on Alcatraz during the American Indian Movement's occupation of Alcatraz.
Did we talk about that?
Yeah, in our Alcatraz episode?
And did not remember that?
Well? Also talk about it in our forthcoming Benjamin Bratt episode.
We haven't done one on Alcatraz, have we?
Yes? Dude, you sure? I believe we did one on Alcatraz itself. And the escape from.
Alcatraz, Yeah, I do remember escape from Alcatress.
That escape from Alcatraz one, by the way, was a good one, all right.
So he doesn't get the permit, so he goes back to Martin Litton, his mentor, and he says, hey, man, you got a lot of pull around here. I'm wondering if you could help me out, And Linton said, sure, I'll call up the Grand Canyon National Park superintendent himself, Richard Marx ks not X. Did we gonna make it Richard Marx to it?
No, I just thought it would if it had been b Richard Marx, like in his life, right before he.
Hit it big, right, and he said, he said, you know what, it don't mean nothing. And he went, hey, that's got a nice ring to it.
Yeah, that's right, sign on the dotted line.
That's a good song, it is. And so Mark said, all right, here's what I'll do.
I will call up the rangers out there on the river tomorrow and I'll get back to you. He didn't get back to them, and so Litton and Grewubo said, I guess that means we have permission, right, right, And so they took off on June twenty fifth, nineteen eighty three.
Yeah, eleven pm they took off. I guess under the cover of darkness. Maybe that's the only reason I can think of that they took off so late.
Yeah, Or maybe they just timed it so they've finished at a certain time, or I don't know.
I don't know either, but they did take off just before midnight.
That to heat.
Maybe maybe that's a great one. Yeah, maybe, I don't know. Anyway, the fact is this, they were paddling for hours in pitch darkness because the canyons, the canyon walls of the Grand Canyon can prevent the sunlight from hitting inside the canyon at the river level during the day. This was nighttime, and so the canyon walls were preventing any moonlight from
even getting down. So they were rafting on a river that was flowing at about ten times its normal rate, if not more, in the dark without the benefit of using their eyes. So they were having to like literally feel the vibrations in the oars to tell what was coming up in which way they should go during this nighttime paddling event that they did.
Yeah, and I mean to be sure, these were some of the most experienced people to undertake something like this, but that is still like it just can't be overstated what a accomplishment this was.
Just to make it through that first night.
Yeah, especially doing it stoned wearing nothing but cut off levs.
So they would paddle.
There were, like I said, three of them, so they would paddle for about fifteen to twenty minutes at a time because it's really rigorous, tough stuff that they're doing. I grew up, went up first and paddled first, and they would switch off when they would get tired. They would rest take little cat naps when they could when they weren't paddling, obviously, and things were going pretty good for the first few hours, and then they reached a
series of rapids called the Roaring twenties. That is really tough in particular with all this water, because there's something in rivers called I would assume people know what and eddie is, but you might not. Eddie is like a very calm part of a river, usually off to the side where the water is flowing back upstream and like avoid in the current. Usually it's like blocked by a
big rock or something, and it's a good place. Usually that's where if you want to pull off and you get out of the boat and get on land, you'll pull off to a nice little calm eddie. But you can also have an area where the eddie meets the rapids, and that's called an eddie fence. I saw it described as confused water. It doesn't really know which way to go, so it's going everywhere at once, and it's just really
really unstable water. And these eddy fences were all over the place, just like not crushing literally but just like wreaking havoc on their boat in this trip they were taking.
Yeah, because the water, the boat's going the direction of the water, and if the water all of a sudden is going multiple directions, that gets telegraphed to the boat and it makes it very difficult to move around, right.
Yeah, But they did get through that part, obviously they did.
And again they're going through the roaring twenties at night in pitch darkness. JUSTI I just really want to make sure everybody keeps this in mind. The other thing is is they were taking these rapids wide open. They weren't stopping to scout what was ahead and then getting back in the boat and then taking it with full knowledge of what was coming up. They just took it as it came, essentially, Yeah, which is again really nuts considering that this was not the river that they were used to.
It was the wild, raging version of the river that they were used. It was like the Colorado on bath salts. Basically, that's what they were taking on in the dark without the benefit of eyesight.
Yeah, I think steroids is ever used bath salts.
Yeah, if you really want to drive the point home, use bath salts. No, don't actually use basalts. I meant in your analogy.
Yeah, they get through this on you know, experience, on instinct, like you said, feeling their way. The sun finally comes up. They're flying down this river. They're going through, you know, all kinds of crazy rapids, the huge whirlpools, these big standing waves that talked about that you know, got up to twenty feet. I think one of the guys even said pet Chick said some of them were like three
stories high. Yeah, at times. And they finally get to Crystal Rapid, which is at mile ninety eight, and they were worn out, like super super tired obviously. And that is where Benjamin Bratt was stationed. Yeah, park ranger Benjamin Bratt, and he said, hey, you shouldn't be paddling through here. And also I was born on Alcatraz.
That's a great Benjamin Bratt in person.
Uh No, he was stationed there to get if there were any tourist boats that you know, had somehow already been on the water, which they shouldn't have been to begin with, because they were denying permits.
Yeah. I didn't understand that part, you know.
I guess they were just there were some already out there, maybe because especially if some of them were taking three weeks.
Oh got, they didn't want to ruin people's vacation.
Maybe, but they were Basically he was there basically to say, hey, pull over, all of you tourists, get out and hike out and boat captain and whoever else you're gonna have to take this thing down the rest of the way, like by yourself.
Yeah, I hope you don't like company because ts for you.
Uh, that's right. But what happened with this group.
So they didn't what. One of the things that caused Benjamin Bratt to be stationed there was that a commercial rafting outfit had gotten overturned. One of the boats had been overturned at this under normal circumstances, very tough rapid called crystal rapids, and one person had died. I believe a passenger had died. This happened like eleven hours before the Kent and Grew and his group came along in the Emerald Mile. They were totally out of contact with everybody,
so they had no idea this happened. And so the reason Benjamin Bratt was there was because it was so dangerous what they were coming up on that. Literally, their lives were in danger. So when they came upon the park ranger, Benjamin Bratt, they pretended they didn't see him. What was cool is.
Look over there on the right, guys.
Exactly what was cool about it is that this park ranger had been a river guide himself. He immediately recognized two was in this boat, and he pretended he didn't see them. Yeah, so that everybody could just kind of go their own way and just pretend like they hadn't seen one another, and these guys could continue on because he said he knew immediately what they were doing because of the river conditions, so he just let him go
their way. He kept an eye on them as they went further along, though, and hit that crystal rapid and he witnessed their boat being overturned very violently.
Yeah, this is when they hit one of those the one that Petchick said was two to three stories high, fliped that thing at the top. Everyone ends up in the water. Kent and Greua was pretty okay and Petchick was pretty okay. The boat got banged up a little bit. I think it lost some of its bowel post, a chunk out of the stern but it was still very much operational, and Reynolds was injured. I think there was a head injury, and as a result, he did not do a lot of at least tough rowing after that,
he did anything at all. I figure he'd be like Burt Reynolds in Deliverance at that point, just sort of laying down in the middle of the canoe. But he apparently would row some calmer parts. And I guess take that with a grain of salts, because I don't think any of it was very calm and grew and Petchick said, all right, it's the two of us basically doing the tough, tough rowing in one hundred degree heat, and it was. It was real tough stuff from that point on. It
was already tough, but it was really really tough. But they decided not to quit.
No, they didn't, and that's really significant because again their boat overturned. They Reynolds was injured, they were thrown out of the boat violently into a whirlpool, got sucked under. All three of them miraculously got free and then they had to turn the boat back over upright again get back in it. Totally exhausted at this point and decided to continue on. They did that was just absolutely nuts.
Problem is is they knew the park ranger had seen them, and so they were kind of all worried about possibly losing their river guide licenses because again, this was a wildcat river run. It was not sanctioned, it was technically illegal. But they continued on. They said, we've made it this far, and they kept going and gave themselves I guess a period where they're like, okay, this is not working anymore. We're all too exhausted. We need to take some rest.
Let's just take an hour and we'll all get some sleep, and then we'll wake up and be refreshed and it'll be like starting over again and new.
Yeah.
And of course what happens is they sleep for three hours, almost woke up in a panic because they had just you know, almost killed themselves. They're exhausted, and now they're thinking like, now we've jeopardized this record that we're trying to get. We don't know if the river will ever be this fast again, right, and here we slept for three hours. So instead of taking their ball and going home, taking their ore and going home, they said, now we
got to go extra fast. So at mile two thirty nine, they get out another set of ores and someone said, where did those even come from? And Grewa said, they were at our feet the whole time. Dumb, dumb, And they started rowing two at a time, so they were hauling but rowing together, which obviously, you know, I don't know if that probably doesn't double your speed, but you're you're going much faster at that point.
Yeah, so that was They woke up at I guess about one, because they took that rest at ten and accidentally slept for three hours, so actually, yeah one, I had to count it out on my fingers for a second. And then they kept rowing and they another ten hours later they finally reached the end, so that like they had just been exerting themselves almost constantly for thirty six hours and thirty eight minutes. That's what their final time
ended up being. So they just destroy Grewa's previous record setting run thanks to the river being so nuts.
Yeah, he did it. The three of them did it rather and he did not lose his license. He was worried about that, so that's the good news. Apparently he got a five hundred dollars fine, which he couldn't even pay, so his lawyer negotiated community service, which he may or may not have even done. And like you said, at the very beginning of this, he wasn't a big braggart about his own accomplishments. They kind of spoke for themselves
to him. Yeah, for sure, So he didn't really you know, it's not like he started making the talk show circuit or anything like that. But of course word was going to get out people talk, and he you know, he will always remain a legend of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River because of the speed run.
Yeah. He died at fifty two in two thousand and two, and he died while he was riding his mountain bike. And I couldn't find out how. It's like that sounds like he went over a cliff or something. Apparently he had torn aorta somehow. They're not sure how, but he was found laying beside his mountain bike dead and his wife at his I believe his third wife, Michelle Grewa, said this is exactly how he would have wanted to go.
So yeah, I mean, if you're going to be like a rugged outdoorsman and you die on your mountain bike, that's not the worst way you could go.
No, they you know, it seemed like he was he was just sort of laying there on his side, and they said it looked like sort of a peaceful position. So there there is speculation that he may have sort of known what was going on and just sort of laid down and you know, to be with the woods.
Right, to be with the woods. That's the new euphemism for it, isn't it.
I guess so.
Michelle Grew also wrote in a memorial Boatman's Quarterly, I think that he had mellowed out some a lot actually in his later years. Still lived the life that he lived, but he became focused on being a dad. I think he had three or has three kids, and it was just, from what I can tell, an all round interesting neat dude.
Yeah. I mean he started a conservation group, didn't he.
He did called the Grand Canyon River Guides, that's right, which is still around today, and that Grand Canyon Dories was sold to an existing outfit called Oars, which gives dory tours down the Grand Canyon still today.
Tempting.
It tempted me too, and then I was like, again, seventeen days is a little much and also do I want to perish in the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River? And I decided, now I don't.
He could just be with the woods.
I'd just rather stay locked inside my house. Right, You got anything else?
No, I got nothing else.
I just know that that's one place you will not crash a dory into a boulder is in your house.
It's definitely not.
Yeah.
Well, since I said definitely not, that means it's time for listener mail.
Uh oh, this is cool.
This is from someone who whose grandmother had a nice little what do you call them?
A mnemonic device?
Yeah?
Yeah, for when you want to remember.
Something mnemonic you're thinking's a pneumatic no nomonic.
Hey, guys, stuff you should know as a staple of my daily commute. Truly enjoy learning about common and obscure stuff. And you've helped our trivia team, the Meerkats, claim victory on more than one occasion.
Go Meerkats for sure.
Anyway, just finished the episode on the Wreck of the Coast to Concordia and thought i'd share the way that my grandmother taught me how to remember which direction was port versus starboard. She would say, there's not much port left in the glass like port whye y port side being left port left in the glass. Interestingly, she was not a seafaring woman nor a.
Lover of port.
I wish I could recall the context of her telling me this even but it's always stuck with me. And I thought you might get a kick out of that. Thanks for all the information and laughs. And that is from Aaron. And I wrote Aeron back to see if I could get report No grandma's name, but I didn't hear back. So let's just let's just say grandmother to Aaron, okay inntribute?
Yeah, and that's it. Okay. Is that Aaron with the A A or Aaron with the E E R? I am, oh, thanks a lot, Aaron. That's a good one. It's at least as good as mine that I came up with.
But what was yours?
There's four letters in both port and left.
I think, Oh, think that's what it's good too.
That's how that's what I remember. So apparently the system works.
Yeah, I agree.
Well, if you want to be like Aaron and improve or try to improve upon our devices, we love that kind of thing. You can send it in an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.