Down the River with Rod Nash

By Mike Roselle

When Celia informed me that Rod Nash would be joining us for the Gates of Lodore section of our journey, I was very excited. While not exactly a household word, Rod Nash is perhaps the nation’s foremost scholar on wilderness and conservation issues. He has written many books on the subject, including “Wilderness in the American Mind” and “The Rights of Nature”, two books that belong in every river runner’s ammo can. But Nash is not just an author and scholar. He, along with David Brower and Martin Litton, helped create the modern conservation movement, back in the sixties, when they chose to oppose a dam that would have flooded the Grand Canyon.

At the moment, Rod and I are above Disaster Falls and Hell’s half Mile, two of the most formidable rapids on this stretch of the Green River, and among the trickiest in the west. Nash has also written a book on the biggest rapids in the West, and three of them lie down river directly below us. I am trying not to think about the rapids. Rather, I want to think about our larger mission here, which is to draw attention to the plight of this particularly American river, beloved by many, known by few, which dissects one of the most wild and remote regions on the continent.

Lowbagger: Rod, first of all, it is an honor to have you join us on our attempt to retrace John Wesley Powell’s first expedition from Green River, Wyoming to Nevada. As the author of many books on conservation, including “The Rights of Nature” and “Wilderness in the American Mind”, which I must say, were required reading when I first became involved in wildland conservation back in the early eighties, you are well known in the conservation movement as both an advocate and historian. But what is probably less known is that you are an accomplished white water oarsman, even a pioneer in the area of whitewater boating. Can you talk about when you first started running rivers and when you became conservationists? Are the two connected?

RN: Well, first of all, when it comes to wilderness, I like to walk the walk, not just as a scholar, but as a participant, enthusiasts. This is my seventh decade running rivers. I started at the age of nineteen when I was working as a busboy at Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park. It was just after the war, and my boss had bought some old military surplus rubber rafts. No one knew how to assemble them or paddle them but I had done some canoeing so I volunteered. Soon the Jackson Lake Lodge was offering guided trips, and I became a guide. We were one of the first companies offering commercial trips, along with Georgie White, who was offering guided trips through the Grand Canyon at about the same time. I rowed professionally for a number of outfitters. I’ve piled up a lot of trips, including 70 trips through the Grand Canyon.

Later, I finished college, got my degree, had a family, taught at Dartmouth and then settled into teaching at UC Santa Barbara in 1966.

Lowbagger: 1966 was a big year for Santa Barbara, wasn’t it?

RN: Oh yes; it was of course the year of the oil spill, the first really big one to grab the nation’s attention. This disaster really helped to get the environmental movement going in California. And then the BLM announced that they wanted to build a dam on the Colorado River that would flood the Grand Canyon. I was recruited to float through Glen Canyon with Martin Litton and David Brower.

Lowbagger: What was that like?

RN: Well, I was impressed with Brower’s energy. I had tried very hard to be objective, to be the scholar who could give people information so that they could use it for activism. Brower convinced me that I could do both.

At the time, the fight to save the Grand Canyon was the largest environmental issue to face the country. It received millions of letters to the White House and Congress, a number that has probably not been surpassed by any other environmental issue even today. It catapulted the Sierra Club onto the national political stage and changed everything. Right afterwards, I set up what was probably the first Environmental Studies Department in the country.

Lowbagger: Rod, there were several other dams proposed for the Green and Colorado Rivers besides the one planned for the Grand Canyon, one for Glen Canyon that was built, and of course one for Flaming Gorge that was also built at that time, and another one for Dinosaur National Park, that was also stopped by the campaign. Brower has often said that environmentalists were to quick to compromise on the Flaming Gorge and Glen Canyon Dams, and had they stuck to their guns, those dams too could have been stopped. Do you agree with this?

RN: No. It’s a good question, but we have to remewmber that the Hoover Dam captured a years worth of the Colorado’s flow. Other states wanted to do the same thing. Most people thought that storing water was a good idea, they just didn’t want to sacrifice the Grand Canyon. But few people knew Flaming Gorge or Glen Canyon, so I do not think that we had the power to shut down the whole project. People were just not aware of the negative impacts of large dams.

Lowbagger: Can you talk about some of those impacts?

RN: Sure! We soon came to realize that large dams cut two ways. First we looked only upstream. This was mostly about fish migrations. But there are of course significant downstream impacts as well, and these come in three categories; First, the dam prevents any sort of debris to flow down the river. This includes not only sand and silt, but driftwood and other organic debris that provide energy to the ecosystem. Today, below Flaming Gorge, trout are thriving in the clear, cold water. But the water should be muddier, which favors the native fish populations, fish like the Humpback Chub and the Pike Minnow. Not as sexy, or as commercially valuable, but these are the native fish and they are now having a hard time surviving in this radically altered aquatic environment.

Second, the river water is colder below a dam, as water is drained off the bottom of the reservoir. Again, this favors certain types of fish over the natives like the Chub, which thrive in warmer waters.

And the third major impact is on water volume. Wild rivers are prone to wild fluctuations in water volume. It is very high during runoff and lower in the late summer. These fluctuations favor certain species of wildlife over others. High water volumes uproot certain plants allowing others to flourish. Certain fish need the high flows to migrate and breed. Driftwood from the runoff creates micro habitats. None of this is happening anymore. The wildlife value of the river has been severely diminished for hundreds of miles below the dam.

Lowbagger: Rod, as an elder, someone who has witness the unprecedented growth of the environmental movement, yet has also witnessed the flooding of Glen Canyon and Flaming Gorge, are you hopeful about the future?

RN: Well, society has a habit of ignoring historians. They ignored John Wesley Powell. I tend to think that on evolutionary terms, we are a sitting duck, and that without significant changes in our behavior, homo sapiens could disappear in 500 years. There are six billion of us, making up more biomass than any other species, and we totally depend on markets for our food. What if they closed down? How would we eat? When I think of how dependant we have become on a market economy, a relatively recent development, it frightens me.

If space aliens visited us a few thousand years from now, they would probably say that these apes were pretty smart, but now they are gone. They couldn’t have been that special.

Lowbagger: What do you think is need right now, to address this growing threat to the survival to our planet?

RN: We need to be better at using the media. We need real good writers like Rachael Carson and John McPhee, that can communicate to a wider audience.

Lowbagger: Anything else?

RN: When I was in Crested Butte last year. A man by the name of Joe Wilson, the CIA analyst with the now famous wife that was ousted by the White House was speaking. I spoke to him afterwards. He said, Professor Nash, I was in your class as a student, and I came away with a principle that has guided my life in all the years since. “What principle, I asked?” “Question Authority”, he responded with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

After our interview, we went on to run Disaster Falls and Hell’s Half Mile. The professor was right, and both of those rapids attempted to eat my boat, although without complete success. Let’s just say we made some poor choices that put us in a bad part of the river, and that a backcountry River Ranger named Chris had to peel us off of a large boulder in the middle of the falls with his rescue rope. Josh will likely have a more detailed account of this for your reading pleasure, but let me say that we received a schooling by both the river and the professor, and we can now understand why he goes by the name “Canyon Dancer” which is also the name of his favorite dory.

Watching Rod Nash move back and forth across the river, seemingly without effort, around the rocks, alongside the raging hole’s, in and over the waves, is like watching an artist at work. It is an amazing display of grace and elegance that contrasts wildly with the power and chaos of the churning, leaping waters of the river. It is like a feather floating through the eye of a hurricane or watching a toddler crawl across a busy freeway, both joyful and terrifying at the same time.

And through it all the old man grips his oars and puffs on his pipe, barely taking on any water in his boat. We bid him farewell at Split Mountain, as we head for Vernal in our quest to find two new oars and someone who can weld aluminum.

Mike Roselle is giving Buzz Holmstrom a run for his money.