-- resource protection. No difference. There was very little damage done
by either group, and that done was attributable to individuals. The
"worst" outfit and the worst non-commercial boaters were indistinguishable,
and were at a standard that I suspect would be a pleasure to anyone who
runs a private RV campground. In three years, the gravest environmental
violation was a on cold rainy trip when some people got out of control and
actually broke 3 or 4 limbs off a tree and burnt them. The trip leader
turned himself in. This caused my staff spasms of righteous horror,
indignation, outrage, and sorrow, which in turn made me wonder how they'd
handle seeing babies spitted on bayonets or napalmed.
It's time for a reality check here. I've been lectured by the Middle Fork
Ranger about environmentally sound ways to spit out your toothpaste; when
it is a demonstrably safe, biodegradable, wholly soluble product that will
vanish in the next heavy dew..... They tell you in the lecture in the
orientation at Grand about not putting your firepan on the sand, because
the heat will cause microcrystalline fractures in the sand; when the
longtime degradation of the Colorado Plateau is 3 cubic miles/century, and
any sand fractures will decrease the tractive force necessary to mobilize
that sand by perhaps 15%, thus accelerating the loss of Grand Canyon sand
by .15 X .12 ft**3, or 1.36 X 10**-11 of the annual load (assuming the
dreaded [and wholly unevidenced] fracture zone extends a full inch below
the pan).... I've said it before: present-day river runners from both
sectors do about as little damage as any group of humans can.
safety and competence -- I think the standard deviation on non-commercial
boaters was a bit wider than on professional river boatmen in Dinosaur. By
this I mean you had a standard of moderate competence among the
professional boatmen that was relatively high, and so was the standard
among the non-commercials. The professionals did not have representatives
that were quite as bad as the worst of the non-commercials, nor as good. I
knew of no professional boatman that handled the hair that some of the
non-commercials regularly did. The better non-commercial parties held
themselves to standards of equipment that outfitters have not yet reached.
Consider highwater Cataract trips in 95 and 97. I saw non-commercial
parties (I was among them) who required helmets and full wet or drysuits
for everyone. From watching a number of outfitter trips and the
Canyonlands Natural History Association video shot this spring (a must
purchase, incidentally, if you like bigwater videos), this was not
something all of them did. When the high water came to Dinosaur in 83,
the commercials got into as much trouble as the non-commercials did; real
high water doesn't come very often. When it does it trains both sectors,
and by the time it comes again, that crop of boatmen is drained off into
suburbia and their knowledge unavailable. In my professional opinion, no
nod to either sector in this respect.
I think it's time for a reality check on this issue, too. Harding
commented supra that he was sometimes surprised at how few people died
running rivers. I'm not. It's a safe sport. Wear a tight lifejacket, put
on a wetsuit when it's cold, stay off cliff faces, think about arroyos and
slot canyons, stay out of the kitchen, don't drink; and you damned near
can't die or even get hurt much on the commercial western rivers. The
generally unspoken rule by which reputable professionals operate is that
you don't run rapids that you wouldn't let your weakest passenger swim.
"We're safe now, boys. We're on the river."
It isn't as if someone like Dave Yeamans lost his brains, his abilities,
and his commitment to the earth when he hung up his pliers and reverted to
being a "private" boater. It's not as if Ben Harding's commitment to the
Canyon and the people who run or want to run it is enfeebled because he
never got paid to take a boatload of dudes through.
With regard to revising the CRMP, these issues are red herrings. You don't
write a river plan around prejudices about which entirely arbitrary
category of user is supposed by you to behave better or worse as a class
than some other, equally arbitrary group. To see why not, substitute
"women," "blacks," "men" or "hispanics" in arguments for changing
allocation or demand-response systems based on the supposed characteristics
of certain classes river runners. Resource protection and safety are
actually administrative issues, and are solved administratively: by
drafting minimal and sensible regulations about equipment and conduct; by
teaching, warning, citing, arresting; and by modeling, training, rescuing.
====================================================================
To subscribe, send email to majordomo@songbird.com, with "subscribe
gcboaters" as the only line in the message body. To unsubscribe send
"unsubscribe gcboaters". For further information send "info
gcboaters", or see http://www.songbird.com/gcboaters
====================================================================