Selections from Dave Rust: A Life in the Canyons (University of Utah Press, 2007):
Chapter 3, “Building Trail”:
Throughout the West, in precipitous canyons and on high mountain slopes, one can still see evidence of the incredible energy that early-day prospectors and entrepreneurs poured into developing their dreams. Today only a trace of the Rust tram is visible: some eyebolts and a few scraps of cable sunk in a rock buttress on the north bank of the Colorado River, fifty feet upstream from the present-day Kaibab suspension bridge. The tram was to have been the main transportation link between the South and North Rims, allowing Edwin D. Woolley and his fellow tourism developers, including Rust, to share in the tourist bounty brought to the South Rim by the Santa Fe Railway.
Rust only occasionally kept a journal during his life, but he must have been excited about what he was doing in the Grand Canyon, for he kept a substantial record of his years there. It is filled with his joy at occasional successes and his pain at numerous setbacks, and shows his determination to fulfill the vision he inherited from Woolley, his father-in-law.
Rust set out from Kanab on June 27, 1906, with Woolley and five hired men; a sixth man was already in the canyon. Laden with tools and gear, they took three days to climb over the Kaibab Plateau and reach the North Rim at the head of the trail. Woolley accompanied them down the trail they had built thus far, pointing out the work that remained to be done, before leaving the party. The crew would take until mid-August to complete the trail to the river.
. . . .
The men worked through the punishing heat of midsummer, pushing the trail down from its 8,500-foot elevation at the rim to the canyon of Bright Angel Creek, where, at less than 4,800 feet in elevation, the sun felt considerably warmer. . . . By August 17 the crew had carved a suitable trail through the narrow “box” of Bright Angel Canyon to the Colorado River. “The last few rods are finished this morning,” Rust wrote. “The boys take a plunge in the River and we go to the upper part of the Box for dinner and to Rock Cache before evening. The Trail is finished.”
Their moment of exaltation was well deserved, but harder work lay ahead as they set to bringing down the heavy main cable and stretching it across the river. Dee Woolley had already made arrangements for the ironmongery needed to build the tram car. . . . Its specification were as follows: “Now we want a steel cage as light as can be made to have it strong enough to carry a horse and rider or eight or ten persons. The dimensions wanted are, six feet by ten feet (6x10) and six feet six inches high. You can readily see what this if for. It’s to carry passengers across the great gorge of the Colorado River.”
* * *
Rust began taking clients down the Colorado River in Glen Canyon in 1923, typically guiding one or two parties per year. In 1926 he took Utah Governor George H. Dern down Glen Canyon, accompanied by Oliver Grimes, Dern’s personal secretary and publicist, and Glen Ruby, a mining geologist from Denver. Chauncey Parry, a tourism entrepreneur from Cedar City, served as assistant boatman.
At Bullfrog Rapid, one of the more exciting spots on this stretch of river, Dern observed how Parry “rode it standing up in his boat, stripped to the waist, waving an oar and yelling ‘ride ‘em cowboy.’” Most of the trip was uneventful, but a few miles above Lees Ferry they encountered a series of tall sand waves which were rolling over and breaking. Rust and Dern, in the lead boat, rowed closer to shore, but Grimes and Ruby, following in the next boat, headed into the rough water. Rust turned his boat around to face the two men and calmly observed to Dern, “those fellows like the big ones better than I do.”
Grimes and Ruby made it over the first waves, but then they hit one that Grimes described as a “roaring monster,” which flipped their boat end over end. Rust later recalled that they “looped the loop backwards.” Grimes grabbed the gunwale of his boat and tried to right it, but the next wave washed it from his grasp. “In the next thirty seconds or less,” Grimes wrote in a subsequent article in the Salt Lake Tribune , “three other big waves smashed me in the face and my lungs felt the need of fresh air.” Rust tried to row back to them, with Dern standing in the canoe ready to throw a life ring. It was Parry who made the rescue, however, coming up in the third boat. He helped Grimes and Ruby out of the river, but the canoe sank and was lost. It was the only time that one of Rust’s boats overturned.
Other than this mishap, Dern and Grimes enjoyed the trip and described the scenic features of Glen Canyon in glowing terms. Climbing out of the canyon at Hole in the Rock, Grimes wrote of being "overwhelmed by the splendor of the inspiring panorama unfolded to us. . . . Bare tawny and orange rocks, emphasized by rounded knolls, occupied the foreground and blended into an undulating and gently sloping plain of orange sand to the west. . . . To the east there rose almost perpendicularly the orange wall of the canyon, broken in but a single place, and through this break, flanked on each side by massive sandstone pillars, were faintly discernable the wheel ruts of the old immigrant wagons on the their way to the San Juan. It was a humble and thoughtful little group that stumbled over rocks and sand dunes back to the river."
At Bullfrog Rapid, one of the more exciting spots on this stretch of river, Dern observed how Parry “rode it standing up in his boat, stripped to the waist, waving an oar and yelling ‘ride ‘em cowboy.’” Most of the trip was uneventful, but a few miles above Lees Ferry they encountered a series of tall sand waves which were rolling over and breaking. Rust and Dern, in the lead boat, rowed closer to shore, but Grimes and Ruby, following in the next boat, headed into the rough water. Rust turned his boat around to face the two men and calmly observed to Dern, “those fellows like the big ones better than I do.”
Grimes and Ruby made it over the first waves, but then they hit one that Grimes described as a “roaring monster,” which flipped their boat end over end. Rust later recalled that they “looped the loop backwards.” Grimes grabbed the gunwale of his boat and tried to right it, but the next wave washed it from his grasp. “In the next thirty seconds or less,” Grimes wrote in a subsequent article in the Salt Lake Tribune , “three other big waves smashed me in the face and my lungs felt the need of fresh air.” Rust tried to row back to them, with Dern standing in the canoe ready to throw a life ring. It was Parry who made the rescue, however, coming up in the third boat. He helped Grimes and Ruby out of the river, but the canoe sank and was lost. It was the only time that one of Rust’s boats overturned.
Other than this mishap, Dern and Grimes enjoyed the trip and described the scenic features of Glen Canyon in glowing terms. Climbing out of the canyon at Hole in the Rock, Grimes wrote of being "overwhelmed by the splendor of the inspiring panorama unfolded to us. . . . Bare tawny and orange rocks, emphasized by rounded knolls, occupied the foreground and blended into an undulating and gently sloping plain of orange sand to the west. . . . To the east there rose almost perpendicularly the orange wall of the canyon, broken in but a single place, and through this break, flanked on each side by massive sandstone pillars, were faintly discernable the wheel ruts of the old immigrant wagons on the their way to the San Juan. It was a humble and thoughtful little group that stumbled over rocks and sand dunes back to the river."