In the Backcountry with Rich Rudow

Behind the Scenery

Ever wondered what secrets are hiding way down in the depths of Grand Canyon? That curiosity has driven Rich Rudow to spend over 1,000 nights below the rim. On the latest episode of the Behind the Scenery podcast, Rich talks about getting his start in backcountry hiking, canyoneering first descents, and his hopes for the future of Grand Canyon National Park.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Rich Rudow: I spend probably 70 or 80 days a year below the rim these days. (Acoustic guitar fades in) Jesse Barden: That’s probably more than most rangers and you certainly get into some really remote wild places. Rich: It was probably 10 years of getting acquainted with the canyon, and hiking trails, and then we started to go off trail from there, and it just kept progressing. Kate Hensel: My name is Kate and you’re listening to an episode of Behind the Scenery, Canyon Cuts. Jesse joined me in interviewing Rich Rudow, a famed canyon explorer. (Acoustic guitar fades out) Rich: Rich Rudow, and I’ve been coming up to the canyon for thirty years now, going places and learning about things. My first experience with Grand Canyon was in 1989 my wife bought my uncle and I a river trip. We launched at Lees Ferry in June with Hatch and travelled down the river for a week and were pulled out by helicopter at Whitmore. Like a lot of commercial trips still are today up to Bar 10 Ranch. During that weeklong introduction you quickly realize, you do these side hikes, and we did all of the typical side hikes that most folks do that are on a river trip. Like going up Saddle Canyon in the Marble area, going to Elves Chasm, and Deer Creek, Havasu, places like that. So I had that customary commercial river trip experience. I was just enthralled with the place. Every time that we would hike to an attraction site I would be asking the boatmen “What’s up there? Can’t we go further?” And I always got this puzzled look. Ultimately at some point in that week the river guides at the time, I still remember them, said “you know you really just get Harvey Butchart’s book and learn about this place. Jesse: Just to give folks listening some context Harvey Butchart is considered the most prolific Grand Canyon hiker in the modern era. He hiked over 10,000 miles in Grand Canyon and pioneered or rediscovered many rim-to-river routes. Rich: And so when I got out of the canyon, my brother-in-law and I both had a real interest in hiking at that point. We were in our late 20s, I guess. So, we just started hiking the trails that everybody hikes. Starting with Bright Angel, and South Kaibab, and doing a rim to rim, down South Kaibab up North Kaibab. And ultimately as you scroll through the 90s I’m reading Harvey’s book about these routes and we started to get more interested in going off trail and doing some of these routes that Harvey had talked about in his very terse prose. Jesse: There’s often a moment when you realize just how meaningful each word in every sentence is for Harvey Butchart. Did you have one of those moments? Rich: (laughs) Oh yeah! I think one time…this is probably 2001, I’m kind of guessing on time frames here, it was close to 20 years ago. My brother-in-law Dale and I had the idea to go off Swamp Point and down Saddle Canyon into the Tapeats Amphitheater and we had never done that. George had actually talked about that trip. Jesse: George Steck connected horizontally through the canyon a lot of Harvey’s rim-to-river routes. Rich: But the idea was to go down to junction of Crazy Jug and Saddle Canyon and then exit this route that goes out of Crazy Jug Canyon up to the esplanade layer. And then traverse the esplanade level towards Bridger’s Knoll but go out this sneak route in between Crazy Jug and Bridger’s Knoll. So we had this grand plan, and it was a mixture of some stuff that George and Harvey had written about. And we were depending on Harvey’s terse prose for the Redwall break to get out of Crazy Jug and then to get up the rim break to get out between Crazy jug and Bridger’s Knoll. So we were following George’s instructions down Saddle Canyon and had a great time and found water. We’re sitting there that first night kind of reading Harvey’s sentence and a half on this exit out of Crazy Jug, of this Redwall break, near the mouth of Crazy Jug. And I was starting to get nervous about this whole enterprise because it was super hot. It was well over a hundred degrees. The thinking was, if we missed we’re probably okay and you know retreating a different way but really didn’t want to do that so we weren't having this debate about the meaning of six words and Harvey put in a sentence and a half. And so we finally decided we would give it a try and we tanked up with 8 liters of water to go up this Redwall break because it was hot we weren't gonna find water we knew once we Got the Esplanade so we found the Redwall break and scrambled up to the top of the Esplanade in a relatively straightforward way, we were pretty pleased with ourselves. But we realized you know that we're down to about 3 liters of water at that point and so we made a run for, we’re on Esplanade level at the edge of Crazy Jug Canyon and we’re going to traverse the Esplanade to a rim break, a break in the Coconino that Harvey had written about and so you know we’re traversing across its 105° probably and I remember its two o’clock in the afternoon we're both down to about a liter and a half, we’re sitting under a juniper tree trying to catch the smallest shade, trying to catch any shade at that point. Looking at the Coconino cliffs and having this debate about what Harvey's words meant because we weren't picking up the break. We didn't visually see the break and at that point it was like, well this is really a big problem if we make a guess at what Harvey really means, and we can get to the base of the Coconino and it doesn't go we’re really in big trouble. We don't have the water to make a try at it and then retreat any place we’d be in big trouble. So, we finally kind of cursed Harvey and decided the safe route would be to make our way around Bridges Knoll and connect with the Thunder River Trail and then go out the Bill Hall Trail to the rim. We did that, the whole-time kind of thinking oh man this is really long way, we could have saved ourselves hours and hours and hours of hiking in the heat had we had we had some certainty about what Harvey was really talking about. So by the time we connected with the Thunder River Trail we were out of water and it's I don't know 6 at night in the middle of summer it's still really, really hot and of course we remembered that people leave water caches on that route. We found a gallon jug of water that had a date that was 2 years old. We figured this one was fair game. We were both just so thirsty we were taken a swig, and the water was so hot water, it was like drinking water out of your shower as it comes out of the hot water spigot. But uh, that saved us, and we topped out of the Bill Hall Trail 9 or 10 at night or something in the dark. The whole time was hours and hours of discussion about what Harvey really meant by those six words. And of course, it bothered us so much that we came back a few weeks later bound and determined to find that Coconino break and we did. And it didn't turn out to be that hard. And so we would go do some of these routes and see more things and learn more things and we would just getting more interested, it was like this place had a magnetic pull that got stronger with each trip that you did. Jesse: It's funny like, you know, there's the puzzle of trying to parse those six words and then the puzzle of looking at the potential route and often in Grand Canyon there are things that look like from a distance there's no way it goes but actually are pretty easy and then the reverses is often also true where it looks like it goes and it's going to be pretty easy but actually doesn't go at all. Rich: Yeah that's right there a lot of these routes that Harvey found that from a distance just look like complete no goes, no way it's going to work, and when you get up and start climbing around -- and that’s how a lot of routes are. I mean, I found some routes in the canyon that are really really fascinating intricate routes that you would think had no way that they would possibly go. And you on these routes and you'll find a stick stuck in a crack or you'll find couple rocks stacked on each other and you immediately realize it was an ancient Indian route and it totally goes. One route in the western part of the canyon it took me four years to put it together and you know just poking at it from the bottom up from the river and poking at it from the top down for the rim. And the crux was between the Supai and the bottom of the Redwall, the rest is pretty easy so if it took about four years and maybe I don't know half a dozen trips to kind of piece it all together and realize that it really could go. And then, of course, you know you figure it all out you start to find signs that you know the Ancestral Puebloans were there and they use the route too. Jesse: Yeah, I think chances are if it goes somebody else has been there. Rich: Yeah, That’s right. (Canyon Wren song) Rich: You know we started doing things where, you know, Harvey would talk about well, you know, a hand line would be great or you know you need a short rope there to lower a pack. And George Steck talked about the same things. So we started doing these routes where you know, that were harder and where there was a little climbing involved and you're using some ropes either as a handline or to lower packs and ultimately we started to get more and more confident with that and started to do some things with short rappels involved and I guess some point maybe 1999 or 2000 my wife got nervous about hearing these stories about what me and her brother were doing. And she thought we were not educated enough to be doing hard things so she bought us rock climbing lessons, which turned out to be just another faster slide accelerating down the slippery slope because once we got some training on what to do with ropes and gear we bought longer ropes and more gear and would go do harder stuff. And so, ultimately, that kind of morphed into checking out some canyons that you know really didn't have good beta or that were hard and involved some anchors and some repelling. You know by maybe 2005 or 2006 I’d become acquainted with Todd Martin and Todd and I had lots of mutual interests and one of them was the idea that there were a lot of slot canyons in the in the Redwall Limestone layers that probably hadn't been seen before. And we got really interested in in these places because some of these canyons we were going into were just stunningly beautiful and so the more we did this the more we got enthusiastic about just finding more of these Canyons and we just kept going and going and going. Any given adventure that we take these days you know sometimes…we did one in October of last year so just about a year ago not quite and I ended up blowing out my rotator cuff on a climb in this Canyon but it was a canyon that hadn’t been done before and we had a 600 foot rope with us. You know it just seems to spiral deeper and deeper into the abyss and you discover the place is so big you never find the bottom. Jesse: A 600 foot rope is a pretty punishing load to be carrying through Grand Canyon. So in all your time exploring Grand Canyon what do you think is the most important thing to know or one of the most important things to know if you're traveling off trail in the canyon? Rich: Well by far the most important thing to know is where to get water. I think that’s the problem in the canyon. There have been instances where I have walked by a water source, you know, a hundred feet away and never knew it was there and found it four years later and like wondered how could I have missed this? But, it’s pretty easy to miss water. Jesse: Yeah sure can be, surprisingly, especially those potholes where there's not necessarily as much growing around it as there would be a spring. You can’t spot it from a distance. Rich: Potholes are interesting on the Esplanade. It’s not intuitively obvious which ones actually dry up first and which ones might have water longer-term. You know there are some clues that you can get but I've actually gone to some really big potholes that are eight feet deep, and you’d swear they have to be holding water for a long time and they’re dry as a bone and two hundred feet away there’s a pothole with 3 inches of water, It's very minor so it's not obvious where those you know where those potholes are that hold water either. Jesse: So you said you've been hiking and traveling in Grand Canyon for about 30 years in that time like what are some of the changes that you've noticed? Rich: The threats to the canyon seem to just increase year-over-year the threats from developers especially. The idea of Building a tram at the confluence of the Colorado River and the Little Colorado River for example. The threats from uranium mining are still ongoing. There’s a mine that has big tailings piles that are exposed to the elements in a bowl basically a breccia pipe bowl that feeds into Parashant Canyon that's kind of an open source sitting there today. And Parashant runs right into the Grand Canyon and into the Colorado River this particular mine goes down this drainage through the Supai and then it starts to cut a Slot Canyon into the Redwall and we call that slot canyon, it’s never been published, we call it Radioactive. It’s a beautiful canyon, it’s stunning, but when you go through that slot canyon you can look down in the water or in the gravels and you can pick up big pieces of copper. And so the mine’s called The Copper Mountain Mine and they first discovered copper there and mined it for copper and then in the 50s realized that there was uranium. It kicked into a full-blown uranium mine and they stop mining uranium there in 1974. To this very day there's been no remediation done at that site at all and so you know if I can look in in the waters and the gravels of this beautiful slot canyon and pick up copper, I'll guarantee you there’s uranium in there too, I just don't know what it looks like. There’re some old wounds, the Orphan Mine is another perfect example. No matter how much money they end up spending you know through the Superfund Site funds you know remediation of something like that once it's gone wrong is almost impossible, it's really hard, and they've been spending millions and millions of dollars at the Orphan Mine over years trying to remediate that site to keep uranium from leaching in the water and it's still an ongoing project. They haven't even started on this site that I'm talking about, probably never will, it's kind of far enough out there that nobody really thinks about it. So certainly some of these threats are kind of accelerating in there I guess maybe in the frequency or the audacity of some of the developers to do things whether it's mining uranium or building a giant retail shopping space and homes in Tusayan where a lot of water’s required or building the tramway at the confluence. The idea that something the size of the Grand Canyon is large enough that it can't be impaired by man is really a folly. We continue to demonstrate that we can impair that place in a lot of different ways. Jesse: So, Rich, the last question we have for you. What do you hope for the future of Grand Canyon? Rich: I really hope that we have status quo for the future. That the various crazy development ideas that come along don't happen you know we don't need more development of a canyon. There are very very few places where you got large swaths of undeveloped wilderness and the Grand Canyon is probably the preeminent place in the lower 48 where you can literally go get lost. And I think there's some real value in that and I think that the public deserves to have a place that lives up to the ideals of the Organic Act and when the Park Service you know, when Grand Canyon was selected to be a National Park and what the idea of the National Park is. So I hope there isn’t any development at the confluence and there isn’t development in any other part of the canyon. And I would hope that someday there's some more balanced ideas around the aviation tourism problem that’s ruining the western part of the park. That is a reversible problem that does not have to continue and I think, you know, if people start thinking about striking a better balance I think that there is a way for the Hualapai Trip to get the economic benefits that they desperately need. So, I hope for the status quo. I don’t want to see the canyon developed or improved anymore. I don't think we can improve it more. There are obviously a few exceptions. I think the pipeline that provides drinking water to the canyon really needs to be fixed. We ought to come up with the money to do some basic infrastructure things because people do have a right to come see the park and enjoy it and then they ought to have a right to see parts of it by automobile or public transportation or whatever. You’ve got to have drinking water as a basic piece of infrastructure that has to exist so certainly continuing to invest and improve the infrastructure of the park has in the corridor area I think it is important, but I don't think we want to have any other big developments in other parts of the part that don't exist today. (Acoustic guitar fades in) Kate: We gratefully acknowledge the native peoples on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant native communities who make their home here today. Thank you for listening to this episode of Canyon Cuts, a Behind the Scenery micro episode brought to you by the North Rim and Canyon District interpretation teams at Grand Canyon National Park. (Acoustic guitar fades out) Jesse: I really wanted to get that like dun-dadun-dun-dadun- dun Recorded phone music and message “Your passcode has been confirmed”