Clark's Grand Canyon Shuttle
My 1st Grand Canyon trip in 1980 was the second time
I had done a multi-day trip on a river. The first was on the
Middle Fork of the Salmon, where back in 1979, you were allowed to
use a trash can lid as a fire pan. The Park Service would not let
us use the lid so we put it back in the van. They did except a
very big cooking pot to use as the fire pan, so we were good to
go.
Clark Brown, good ole’ (actually pretty young) boy from Hico,
hired as a parking attendant then raft repair for Mountain River
Tours, was running our shuttle. All of our vehicles were at the
take out, except for the company van, which Clark had for the 16
days we would be on the river. We were only at mile 5 floating
under the Navajo Bridge, when we saw Clark. There he was, 500 feet
up, holding the trash can lid, yelling to us “do you need this”.
He was ready to sling that piece of metal like a Frisbee to us 500
feet below. I wouldn’t have wanted to be below there while that
lid came flying down at us. We all screamed “no Clark! Don’t
throw it” and fortunately he got the picture.
After the trip, Clark was there at the take out. In fact he had
been there about 12 days. His story was that he met a girl in
Moab, Utah and they went to Vegas. He lost all his money in Vegas,
the girl dumped him and he was stranded with no food or money for
gas. He looked through my paperwork and found my credit card so he
got gas and headed to the takeout. The other item we did not take
on the river was a bunch of the variety snack-pack cereals that we
had purchased. Due to space limitations we decided to leave them
in the van. Clark lived for 12 days off of those cereal packs and
some Peyote buds that he had scored in Moab. Needless to say Clark
was glad to see us, when we arrived at the take out.
