My river journey started in 1962, while I was going to UCLA, when I floated down the Colorado River through Glen Canyon.  I found that rafting was a lot easier than backpacking!  Right after school was out in June, a group of the Bruin Mountaineers, took off from Hite, UT for a 10-day float through, what I think was, the most magical river canyon in the world.

We had over 20 young people who used a variety of craft, including a canoe, several small rafts, and the Huck Finn-type craft that my friend and I constructed.  Our “raft” was made of 12 inner tubes (stacked 2 high), which were lashed together and decked with planking to make a stable platform.  I foolishly went on the trip without a life jacket.  We maneuvered our raft with canoe paddles although, with a flow of 40,000 CFS in June, we really didn’t have to work to make downstream progress as we floated considerably faster than a hiking speed.

Glen Canyon truly was, as shown in Eliot Porter’s photographs in the Sierra Club’s book, The Place No One Knew, spectacularly beautiful.  Eliot’s photos, however, really didn’t do the canyon justice.  Glen Canyon had miles of high vertical walls, magical glens and side canyons with countless narrow slot tributaries that were similar to those still available in a few parts of the Southwest like in Buckskin Gulch and the Paria Canyon.

A friend at UC Berkeley shared with me a list of over 20 amazing side canyons to explore that were described in some detail, usually ending with the phrase “normal, run-of-the-mill Glen Canyon spectacular.”  Some of the Colorado’s side canyons had a series of giant alcoves that were as deep or deeper than Redwall Cavern.  Those of you, who have floated the Grand Canyon, know that it is a long way from the Colorado River’s shore to the back of Redwall Cavern.  Now, imagine a tributary of the Colorado River with several such alcoves within a mile of its mouth.  One such wonderful side canyon was Twilight Canyon, just down river from the more well-known Music Temple.

The beautiful hike to Rainbow Natural Bridge was, at the time, about six miles from the river.  Less well known were the side canyons of the Escalante River where some tributaries such as Davis Gulch became partially re-exposed in 2005, when the Southwest drought dropped the level of Reservoir Powell, to allow Cathedral in the Desert to re-emerge. You may want to look at the YouTube video: Resurrection: Glen Canyon and a New Vision for the American West, for some ideas about the work conservationists have ahead of them in the fight to drain Lake Powell so that the canyons it submerged can someday be reclaimed.

When the gates of Glen Canyon Dam closed in 1963, the 186-mile canyon above it slowly died over the subsequent years.  During that time, my brother and friends and I sea kayaked much of the lower parts of Glen Canyon to hike in the narrow slot canyons that were being flooded.  It was the death of this beautiful canyon and its amazing tributaries that galvanized much of my conservation zeal over the subsequent years.

Yampa River: Near death experience

In 1965, I continued my river journey, by rafting the Yampa River in Dinosaur National Monument.  It was there that I narrowly escaped an early death, when a major flash flood created Warm Springs Rapid. We were camped at the mouth of the side canyon right there during a tremendous rain and flood event.  The river’s flow, apparently, was temporarily blocked by a huge debris flow that flushed huge boulders into the river, removing about a 100-yard section of the old-growth trees where we had been huddled shortly before.  Water backed up above this new river dam, creating a giant mud bathtub ring on both sides of the river upstream, which remained after this new river impediment was breached relatively quickly.

Initially, this new rapid was about the size of Crystal Rapid in the Grand Canyon, but it has been modified over the years.  Parenthetically, as some of you may have read, after the rafting season on the Yampa River this past season, there was a major new flood event and/or a major rock fall from the wall opposite Warm Springs Draw which will make running the rapid radically different this next year.

The day after we survived the flash flood and debris flow at Warm Springs, after photographing the new rapid, we floated to our take-out at Echo Park, where the Yampa and Green Rivers join.  Then, after an all-night drive to Lees Ferry, I had the good fortune of being able to join a 10-day motorized Sierra Club trip through the Grand Canyon, becoming one of the first 1,100 people to go through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River.  Even though the water was fairly high (running at over 40,000 CFS), and I had only a little rowing experience, I thought that most of the rapids we saw looked like they could be navigated with the 17-foot,10-man military surplus rafts that a couple of friends and I had recently acquired.

Saving the Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon was spectacular! It is hard to believe now, but in 1966 the Bureau of Reclamation was working hard to get approval to build two large dams in the Grand Canyon–one at Marble Canyon and one at Bridge Canyon.  These two planned dams would have flooded 133 miles of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.  The relatively small Sierra Club, realizing their mistake of accepting the destruction of Glen Canyon, took out full-page ads in the Washington Post and the New York Times:  ”Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel so Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”  To contact members of Congress in the 1960′s, people wrote letters.  The Sierra Club ads helped generate a veritable flood of letters, resulting in more mail to Congress on this one issue than on any other contemplated legislation up to that time.

Subsequently, the IRS revoked the Sierra Club’s tax-exempt status.  The resulting publicity for the Sierra Club all over the country and the feeling that they were being unfairly targeted led to a quadrupling of their membership in the ensuing months.  This fight to save the Grand Canyon further shaped my life.  I became an advocate of the position that if the public doesn’t know about how valuable something is, they won’t work to save it.  Beginning in 1967, while still living in Los Angeles and working as a school teacher, I worked to begin offering yearly river trips in the Grand Canyon to share the canyon with other people.

The ongoing battle to protect our rivers

About 1969, I also started running weekend trips on the Stanislaus River.  With the ’59 Ford that I borrowed from my brother, it usually took us until after midnight to get to Camp Nine after work on Friday.  Then, in 1971, San Fernando Valley had a fairly large earthquake that rated 6.6 on the Richter scale.  It rattled the entire Los Angeles area and my wife, Pam, was frightened enough that she wanted to get out of Southern California. She wanted to move back to Minnesota.  Since I was a California native, I wasn’t terribly interested in moving to Minnesota.  So we compromised on Angels Camp, CA. We moved there in 1974 and raised our two sons, Clavey and Tyler, who I am proud to say, are now working for O.A.R.S. and putting their energy into making sure that we run good trips.

Living in the Foothills of the Sierra did allow us to run more trips on the Stanislaus River and we soon were offering 2-day trips starting 7 days a week, April through October.  We were one of the original 13 companies on the Stanislaus River that worked collectively to negotiate things such as designated campsites along the river and launch times that were designed to avoid having companies in sight of each other while floating down the river.  We incorporated a co-op named Stanislaus River Recreation Association, which charged dues so that our new entity could buy a small truck and hire a ranger and an assistant who patrolled the river instead of the BLM.

Back in 1973, a 2-day river trip cost about $45 per person, and the outfitters all agreed to ask their passengers to voluntarily raise the amount they paid by $5 per person (a contribution of over an additional 10 percent of the trip’s cost) to help fund an effort to save the Stanislaus River.  The money our passengers paid went to the organization largely founded through the efforts of Mark Dubois and Friends of the River.

During the November 1974 election, we all worked hard to mobilize support for Proposition 17 to save the Stanislaus River. But unfortunately, some well-funded opposition from Bank of America and Guy Atkinson Construction, among others, led to the defeat of our ballot initiative.  This loss galvanized the river community’s efforts, however, and the work of Friends of the River, the Tuolumne River Trust (which the outfitters helped fund by adding a voluntary contribution of $10 – $15 per passenger), as well as other conservation organizations, eventually led to the protection of the Tuolumne River with Federal Wild & Scenic designation.

Years later, after New Melones Reservoir filled to the brim in 1983 and flooded the old Camp Nine Bridge and put-in location, an Angels Camp local came up to me at the Calaveras County Jumping Frog Jubilee.  He told me, in retrospect, it was apparent to a lot of county residents that they had killed a good economic engine by flooding the beautiful Stanislaus  River, which had brought so many visitors into the area.

Then, he turned to me and gave me some advice that has stuck with me ever since.  He said, “George, you Stanislaus River runners made a mistake.  You should have set up a local company that would have hired local young people to run the river.”  He went on to tell me that more of the locals would have then realized what they were giving up when they voted overwhelming, by a vote of about 80 – 20 in Calaveras and Tuolumne Counties, to flood the Stanislaus Canyon.

I have just returned from a tourism conference which celebrated some notable worldwide conservation successes.  The opening address resonated with words which have made a lot of sense to me over the years: “We save what we love and we love what we know.”  Those words inspire me to want to do more to share access to our river canyons with our young people and, through education, work to inspire them to want to save our wild places for the future.

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George Wendt will be honored this week by Friends of the River with the prestigious Mark Dubois Award at the 2012 California River Awards.  The event honors those who have made outstanding contributions to river conservation, preservation and protection.

We might be a little biased, but that’s not the only thing that makes him a river hero in our eyes…

George, who is also co-founder of Sobek and recipient of the Adventure Travel Trade Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, is a true pioneer in the adventure travel industry. His passion for running rivers was born in the 60s, when he became one of the first 1,100 people to descend the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In the decades since, O.A.R.S. has set the standard for first-class rafting, as well as environmentally and culturally responsible travel, on over 35 rivers and coastlines worldwide.

George has run first descents on some of the world’s most legendary rivers, fought to include California’s Tuolumne River in the National Wild and Scenic River System and helped to establish the Upper Navua Conservation Area in Fiji. He has also testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on River Preservation, and through O.A.R.S. spearheads donations totaling more than $70,000 per year to dozens of conservation efforts. He has donated countless hours and river trips in support of youth, community and conservation causes and has helped introduce more than 500,000 people to the beauty of rivers and the natural world.

Don’t miss the video above to see how it all got started as George recounts some of his early rafting and conservation days.

Got another river hero you think we should know about?  We’d love to chat with them.  Tell us who it is below and why you think they’re a river hero.

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He wanted to focus more intimately on the whitewater rafting business he started in 1969, which was intended to be a weekend-only business but soon became a full time gig. As the founder and president of O.A.R.S. and recent recipient of the Adventure Travel Trade Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, George is a true pioneer in the adventure travel industry. His passion for running rivers was born in the 60s before the inception of his company, when he became one of the first 1,100 people to descend the seldom-traveled Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

In the decades since, O.A.R.S. has set the industry standard for first-class rafting as well as environmentally and culturally responsible travel on over 35 rivers and coastlines worldwide. To date they’ve positively affected the lives of over 500,000 travelers and in 2008 and 2009 the company was recognized by National Geographic Adventure as “The Best River & Sea Outfitter on Earth” based on education, sustainability, quality of service, spirit of adventure and references.

Over the last four decades, George has testified before the Senate Subcommittee on River Preservation on behalf of American Outfitters, helped found an eco-tourism operation in Fiji and donated countless hours and numerous trips to support youth and community organizations around the county. George is a founding member of the Adventure Collection and a regular speaker at the annual International Ecotourism Society conference. In 2006 George joined producer/director Greg MacGillivray in the Grand Canyon with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Anthropologist Wade Davis for the filming of the IMAX movie, Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk, a story about the global disappearing act of fresh, clean water and wild rivers.

Many consider you a pioneer in adventure travel. How did you go from teaching middle school math to running rivers?

It was actually a fairly easy transition because as a middle school teacher I had summer vacations free. So that meant that after the last class in mid-June, I could take off for a summer of doing river trips. We did the Grand Canyon, Middle Fork of the Salmon, Cataract Canyon, [etc.] and it was something that really allowed me to recharge my batteries for the next school year.

How has O.A.R.S. evolved to meet the needs of your travelers over the last 40 years?

As our clients have gotten older, can you believe our client at one time was about 29 years years old? And they were very active as a camper. Over the years, we’ve found the typical client has gotten older and older, and today our typical client is 47 or 48 and these people in general are less willing to rough it. Therefore, we’ve had to create more creature comforts, we now supply real nice foam pads for people, we have more quality meals and we’ve actually added chairs to most of our trips. In the olden days – 35 years ago – people would sit on the ammunition case that we supplied and that was their seat for the evening. Not nearly as comfortable as the nice chairs we have now; we have better quality tents, of course the whole outdoor equipment field has evolved considerably the last 35 – 40 years.

What are the fundamental components of a good river trip?

Quality guides is number one. Great guides that are not only skilled in taking people through the rapids, but also in sharing their love for the outdoors, which ties in to telling them about the natural geology and the history of the area. It involves having good quality equipment and a very dedicated reservation staff that makes the pre-trip planning effortless.

Generally, what kinds of people take the trips you offer? What are the benefits of a guided trip?

As a professional outfitter we’ve gained the support of the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service, so we have dedicated trips that are available so that people can plan in advance for a trip. We take care of pretty much all the logistical details so there aren’t car shuttles that have to be done before or after the trip. Guided trips offer a tremendous number of advantages and the biggest one probably is the nice people who come on our trips, who are [typically] not all from one group. We may get a couple from Seattle, or a single attorney from Chicago, or we could get a professional accountant who travels west for her first trip all the way from Atlanta. So it’s a diverse group of people and that’s the fun [typically] on a trip with about 16 people, to get to know a lot of different professionals from different parts of the country.

What would you say to someone who is apprehensive about camping?

Actually, there is no need to be apprehensive about going off on one of our trips because we specialize in catered camping. We make it real easy since the guides take care of the camp set-up, they take care of the food detail, they set up the portable toilet and the chairs for people every evening. They’ll get out the horseshoes and it’s just a relaxed experience. The guides – both male and female – are happy to take any novice camper aside, without embarrassing them, and give them some coaching about how they can take care of their feet or anything else they might be especially concerned about.

What is the most common question that people ask you?

Where do we go to the bathroom? [Laughs]. And so this year we added a special page in the back of our 2011 O.A.R.S. catalog that shows the nice, portable toilet that we take along on the river because, as we’re trying to be good stewards of the resource, and to make it easy for our clients, this portable toilet containerizes human waste. We then take it to an approved sanitary facility after the trip.

You must have “a few” stories to share, what is one of your favorite tales to tell?

A long time ago, I got this phone call from an advertising agency in Chicago asking if I had a stamp collection. I thought that was a little bit of an unusual question, but I confirmed that I did collect stamps, and they decided that they would do a major print ad and video ad that actually ran as a 30-second commercial promoting the sale of postage stamps to collectors. This ad ran on Super Bowl Sunday, it showed at least twice during the game (maybe three times) and it was seen by millions of people all over the country. My son at the time who also was in the ad was only 3 years old, but today he is 35 and is one of the managers in the company.

What have you enjoyed most about the last 40 years?

The thing that charges me up more than anything else is hearing from clients after the trip. We get letters, phone calls and emails from people who I think very sincerely tell us that this was the best adventure vacation, or sometimes even the best vacation, they’ve ever had. And that’s especially true because families have an opportunity to dialogue together without the intrusion from various electronic devices which impact most families at home.

Got a question for George? Give him a shout in the comments below!

The post Meet George Wendt, O.A.R.S. Founder And Adventure Travel Pioneer appeared first on River Currents.