Kenton Grua: Grand Canyon Legend

SPEAKER_08: Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. Dive into family tales, explore the human mind and laugh with guests like Joel and Benji Madden. It's more than a podcast. It's a celebration of the ties that bind us. And it's fun because we've decided to open it up to really like all kinds of different siblings and it's going to be an awesome season. SPEAKER_08: Listen to Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_01: Hey guys, Britt and Laurie here from Life on Cut podcast. We are the number one dating and relationships podcast in Australia because we do things different down under. We cover everything from dating, sex, relationships, and pop culture. SPEAKER_06: We chat with a lot of experts about things like love, cheating, narcissists because we both dated one, long distance, fertility, communication, and breakups. And we talk to some people you might be familiar with like Rebel Wilson, Matthew Hussey, Steven Bartlett, Joanne McNally, and Mark Manson. SPEAKER_01: You can join us while we unpack it all by searching for Life on Cut now, wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_02: Hey everybody out there in the Pacific Northwest or with access to an airport or a car rental place that can get you to the Pacific Northwest specifically at the end of January. We'll see you in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. SPEAKER_13: That's right. Welcome to our new live show for 2024 Seattle, Washington, January 24th at the Paramount Theater, then Portland at our Home Way from Home at Revolution Hall on the 25th, and then winding it all up at Sketchfest on the 26th at the Sidney Goldstein Theater. SPEAKER_02: Very nice. If you want tickets, if you want information, if you want tickets, you can go to a couple of places. You can go to our Linktree at linktree.com and you can go to our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com, click on the tour button, and it'll take you to all of the beautiful places you can go to buy your tickets. And we'll see you guys in January. SPEAKER_11: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. SPEAKER_02: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Life is a highway. I want to ride it all night long. SPEAKER_13: Not again. SPEAKER_02: Down the river. SPEAKER_13: Canadian legend. SPEAKER_02: Tom Brokaw. SPEAKER_13: Uh, that's right. No, it's not right, but hey, we want to, uh, welcome yet another new writer that's helping us out. SPEAKER_13: Welcome Anna, cause Anna helped us with this. Anna Green. And, uh, Anna Green and I thought she did a really good job and, uh, we hope Anna can write some more stuff for us in the future. And I could have sworn this was a listener suggestion and I looked and I just could not find it. So if someone suggested that we do a show on a gentleman named Kenton Grua, who was a Grand Canyon river guide, pretty remarkable person, then I'm really sorry. SPEAKER_13: Cause I really, I looked and looked through email, but I just couldn't find it. So yeah, if you want to write in and say, Hey, that was me. SPEAKER_13: Um, I'll, I'll check it against my records and we'll give you a future shout out. SPEAKER_02: Uh, also I got to give Anna the coronation. You ready? That's right. All right. Welcome aboard. The old mouth horn. SPEAKER_02: So we're talking Kenton Grua. Never heard of this person before in my life until I started researching, um, this person, this man, this legend actually, really. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Uh, he's a, if, especially if you spend much time hanging out with Grand Canyon river folk, you will, you will hear stories of Kenton Grua. Although apparently not from him while he was alive, he was supposedly very, um, humble as far as his own accomplishments go. But if you, uh, if you talk to one of his friends, you would probably get some thrilling stories out of them because he did some pretty interesting stuff along that Colorado river. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, absolutely. And we also want to shout out a book, uh, that both Anna and we, and we used. SPEAKER_13: Uh, Kevin Fedarko wrote a book called the Emerald Mile about, uh, this river run, this record breaking, uh, timed river run down the Grand Canyon river, Colorado river. Right. Uh, and I knew the name and then I remembered that I watched this great documentary from Nat Geo called Into the Canyon. SPEAKER_13: And Kevin Fedarko was one of the guys. He and a guy named Pete McBride, uh, hiked, um, almost 750 miles from one end of the Canyon to the other and made this really gorgeous, gorgeous documentary. SPEAKER_13: So I highly recommend Into the Canyon, uh, as well as the book, the Emerald Mile and big thanks to everything that Kevin Fedarko does in terms of, uh, raising awareness for the Grand Canyon. SPEAKER_02: Like, think about that, man. That's so many miles. You would have to get a new pair of shoes at some point in the middle of that. SPEAKER_13: I think they did. You'd have to think they, I think they bailed on an attempt and then came back and did it or something. I can't remember, but just gorgeous photography and, uh, really good stuff. Uh, the Grand Canyon is just a truly a magical place. Yeah. If you've never been there, just go. It's one of those places that were like, yeah, I've seen pictures and stuff, but it's one of the place, one of the few places that, uh, where I truly understood the meaning of breathtaking. Like I actually literally got physically short of breath when I first stood there on that rim. Like you had a panic attack? SPEAKER_13: No, it was just truly breathtaking. It's really, really just, you gotta go. You gotta do it. Have you been? SPEAKER_02: Uh, yes I have. I've been to the North Rim. I didn't ride a burro or anything like that, but I did look down and get to see the whole thing from that, that wooded forested North Rim. That is not like what you think of when you think of the Grand Canyon. It's like just a whole other side of it. It's really neat. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, it's, it's amazing. SPEAKER_02: I did have a panic attack. That's why I couldn't breathe because I was looking over into it. I'm like, I'm, this is, I can't do this, but yeah, it's pretty, pretty neat for sure. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. I've never been down to the river. Uh, my friend Brett and I hiked down, uh, there's, I don't know, I'm not sure how far down it is, but we hiked down to, there's this one sort of area where you can hike down to and hang out for a bit. SPEAKER_13: If you don't want to go down all the way and then hike back out and young in shape, Chuck, that, that hike out was one of the toughest things I've ever done. SPEAKER_02: Because you're basically just going up, right? Up, up, up. SPEAKER_13: Up, up, up in the heat, heat, heat. SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow. So back to Kenton Grua. Uh, he was somebody who could hike up the sides of the canyon up out of it because he did that a lot, mostly because he spent a lot, essentially his entire adult life in the Grand Canyon. Along the Colorado river. And if he wanted to go see his family or friends, see a movie, that's what he had to do. He had to hike out of the Grand Canyon to go do those things. So he was from everything I saw extraordinarily fit, but also kind of a at one with the canyon. If, if anybody could be, he was definitely one of those people. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, for sure. He was born in Salt Lake City in 1950 and was really big into snow skiing until he was 12 years old when his family, because of business, his father started a trucking company, moved to Vernal, Utah. At the time, there was no skiing in Vernal. And so his dad said, hey, kiddo, you're 12, you'd love to be outdoors and adventure. So let's go on a rafting trip. And they went to the Yampa River for his birthday and Kitten Grua was like, this is where it's at. SPEAKER_13: I love river rafting. So Pops bought him a army surplus raft. And he, as a, as a young kid, started taking these little solo rafting trips. And that's kind of where he learned how to navigate rivers initially. He got the river bug. SPEAKER_13: He totally got the river bug. SPEAKER_02: A few years later, he was going to study mechanical engineering at the University of Utah. And during winter break of freshman year, he was offered a job working for Hatch River Expeditions, a river boating outfit along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. And he said, so long college, I'm going to go do this. And the job was even just patching boats. Like it wasn't even as a river guide. But that's how much he loved spending time, not just on the river, but specifically the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon itself. But because of his natural talent and his just complete passion for the job, he became river guide within just a few months of his first job there. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, absolutely. So he's now taking adventuresome tourists through the Grand Canyon down the river. He got another job after that at Grand Canyon Expeditions for a little while and met a really important person in his life there. A mentor in some way as far as conservationism. A guy named Martin Litton, L-I-T-T-O-N, who was starting his own company, his own expedition company. SPEAKER_13: And Litton was about, he was all about just preserving the not just the Grand Canyon, but just all of nature and was just sort of ashamed of what humankind had done to nature. And in fact, the boat that Grua would eventually pilot down the Colorado River for that record breaking run was called the Emerald Mile. SPEAKER_13: These boats Litton had, he would name them after natural wonders that had been destroyed by humans as a reminder. And this apparently the Emerald Mile was a stretch of old growth redwoods in California that were clear cut in the 60s. SPEAKER_13: So he named this wooden dory, this boat that you paddle with oars after that stretch of redwoods. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and a dory in particular, for the most part, people at the time, and I think still today, were going down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon on these expedition tours in rubber boats like zodiacs, like motorized boats that you could bump up against rocks all day and they were probably going to be fine. That's some of the more regular boats. SPEAKER_02: What do you mean regular, like a pontoon? SPEAKER_13: No, like in the early days, they were just like, I saw some that look like old wooden criss crafts. SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow. Okay. Wow. That's kind of cool. Talk about doing it in style. But also motorized rafts. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. Okay. SPEAKER_02: So the dory itself, though, it was originally like a fishing boat that Europeans, I think the Portuguese were the ones who really kind of perfected it, would take out on the ocean. So they were like seaworthy row boats, basically. And they eventually made their way to New England where whalers would take them out. And then Martin Linton got his hands on them for the Grand Canyon because he was just like, you, you, you experienced the Colorado River in a dory in ways that you can't possibly in a raft, let alone a motorized draft. So there it's like a purposefully old timey antique way of going down the Colorado River. And they still use dories today as a matter of fact, some outfits too. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And Grua was like, this thing is amazing because, you know, he wanted, as we'll see, he really enjoyed getting down that river fast. And this, the dories, like they, they won't obviously, because they're made of wood, they won't bounce off a rock like a raft will, but they're much more able to be steered. SPEAKER_13: They handle a lot better. They're much more, I don't know if live is the right word, but you can, you can motor down that, that river in a dory better than you can in a raft. If you're into speed and turning. SPEAKER_02: Sure. But, but a lot of the, most of the dory expeditions use oars, they're road, right? Oh yeah. So the other thing about it that you, you mentioned is that like a, it won't handle bumping against rocks like a raft will. They're much more fragile, much less forgiving than a rubber raft, which means you have to be that much more experienced and have that much greater ability to take a dory down the Colorado River. Than you would like a raft. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And you know, they can get dinged up a little. I kind of thought at first, like you hit a rock with one of these and you're sinking immediately. Just explodes and catches fire. SPEAKER_13: Exactly. And I'm sure that can happen, but as, as you will see, you know, they can, they can get bumped up a little bit and you know, they're pretty hardy, I think. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, for sure. But it's just some of those rapids can be pretty rough on the old boat. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, Grua was in love with dories just like Martin Linton was. SPEAKER_02: Um, and he came on Linton's company, Grand Canyon Dories, and began piloting a dory called the Cheddahuche. Um, he did that for like 10 years down the Colorado River. He made nearly a hundred trips, which by my, my estimation, that's almost half of the days between 1969 and 1979 when he made those hundred trips. He spent on the Colorado River. That's a lot of time on the Colorado, Colorado. That's exactly what he wanted to do. He could not have been happier. He chose this life for himself and he, he just did it. He made it work and he became an expert on the Colorado River as it runs through the Grand Canyon. SPEAKER_13: Totally. Uh, like reading this, I got very jealous of his life. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. I was looking at some of the dory expeditions they have and I was like, man, that's amazing. And then it's like 18 days. I said, no, I'm not going to do that. Like, are there helicopters that you can lower in and do a couple of days and then come out? No, there's not. There's not apparently. Well, sadly, there are helicopter trips that, and they will take you down and land you on a big plateau. SPEAKER_13: That's one of the things I learned from that documentary, uh, that Fadarka was in was they were trying to raise awareness for these, you know, they're, they're trying to build some big, like, hotel, basically, like halfway down the canyon. SPEAKER_13: And all these people were fighting it and saying like, you can't do that. You can't turn this into a place where people can get hell rich. People can get helicoptered in and stay in a five star resort. Like, no, no, no. SPEAKER_02: Okay. First of all, I felt like a jackass before it. Now I really feel like a jackass. SPEAKER_13: But you were talking about getting dropped off to row. Sure. SPEAKER_13: Like ziplining out like a, like a ranger. Right. SPEAKER_02: But I mean, like walking down from a resort to go row for a couple of days, maybe even better. Pretty good. SPEAKER_02: But the, um, but the, the, the kind of upshot of what you're saying is a good analogy from what I understand to compare rafting or boating down the Colorado river these days would be like going on an expedition to Everest. It is nothing like it used to be. Um, even 20, 30, 40 years ago, it's just gotten so much easier. There's so much money being thrown at this now. It's just not even a challenge any longer. It's like a posh vacation for people who like to act like they're, they're adventurers. And I'm saying that I'm not going to climb Everest. I, so I'm not, I can't really be critical, but I'm saying comparing it to how it originally started when these outfits were first created in like the forties, fifties, sixties. Um, it's, it's just nothing like that today. It's far more commercialized, I guess is what I'm trying to say. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. So if in the meme, how it started, how it's going, there'll be a person like bleeding from the head and spitting a river water out of their mouth. SPEAKER_13: And then another one with a dude holding a martini, right. SPEAKER_13: As he goes down the river. Exactly. SPEAKER_13: All right. SPEAKER_13: I say we take a break. Oh yeah. And we come back and we talk a little bit more about Kenton Grua, the man. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. You might be asking yourself, what is sibling revelry? SPEAKER_04: Yeah, well, we just made it up. They'll have some laughs and maybe inspire some people along the way with universal tales of what it's like to grow up with brothers and sisters. SPEAKER_05: We're full blood siblings. The only full blood. So in our family, well, not in the world. SPEAKER_09: I mean, no, in the whole world, that's just like no one. SPEAKER_08: Dive into family tales and explore the human mind with guests like Joel and Benji Madden. SPEAKER_10: And it's fun because we've decided to open it up, you know, to really like all kinds of different siblings. And it's going to be an awesome season. SPEAKER_08: It's more than a podcast. SPEAKER_08: It's a celebration of the ties that bind us. Listen to sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_00: Osage County, Oklahoma, is getting a lot of attention right now. It's the setting of Martin Scorsese's latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon. The movie is based on a book about the 1920s Osage murders when white men poured into Osage County and killed Osage people for their oil wealth. I'm Rachel Adams Hurd, the host of InTrust, a podcast from Bloomberg and I heart media. For over a year, I was reporting a different story about other ways white people got Osage land and wealth and how a prominent ranching family in Osage County became one of the biggest landowners here. Their ranching empire was built on land that at the turn of the century was all owned by the Osage nation. So how'd they get it? Listen to the award winning podcast InTrust on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_01: Hey, guys, Britton, Laurie here from Life on Cut podcast. We are the number one dating and relationships podcast in Australia because we do things different down under. We cover everything from dating, sex, relationships and pop culture. SPEAKER_06: We chat with a lot of experts about things like love, cheating, narcissists because we both dated one, long distance, fertility, communication and breakups. And we talk to some people you might be familiar with, like Rebel Wilson, Matthew Hussey, Stephen Bartlett, Joanne McNally and Mark Manson. SPEAKER_01: You can join us while we unpack it all by searching for Life on Cut now wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_03: All right. SPEAKER_13: As promised, we're going to tell you a little bit more about the personality of Kenton Grua. He was quite an adventurer, like you said, was just in love with nature and in particular the Grand Canyon and that river. His nickname was the Factor. If you ever read anything, you're going to see him probably called Kenton the Factor Grua. And that was because apparently he was just like this larger than life personality. And like any time he was a part of something, he had some sort of influence on it. SPEAKER_13: He was a factor and thus the factor. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well put. He was also very fond of pot and drinking liquor while he was working and on the trail. And after, I guess after rowing for the day, sitting on a beach, he would probably light up what one might call a spliff. SPEAKER_13: Back then it'd probably be a doobie. SPEAKER_02: For sure. And I'll bet it just gave you a headache instantly. But he also was a little kind of fashion conscious, you could say. Anna points out that he would wear cut off Levi's that look cool, especially if you're barefoot and you have long hair and you're stoned. But if you're like fall in the water, it takes like a week for those things to dry out. So long story short, Kenton Grua was very frequently chafed on the inside of his thighs. SPEAKER_13: He was not at all, man. He was five foot six. But, you know, had an outsized personality and sense of adventure, I guess. There was one story that he was on one expedition and they drank all the booze. SPEAKER_13: So he hiked all the way out of the Grand Canyon to go get more booze and hike back in. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's just one story about Kenton Grua. But it definitely drives the point home. Like, he liked booze, but he was also willing to physically exert himself at the drop of a hat. So he was a tough dude, essentially. But he was also supposedly really kind and gentle with the tourists that he took down the river. Yeah. He was well known for that. But he was also known for being very opinionated about how the river should be navigated, how an expedition should be run. And so he would be more than likely to butt heads with some of the other river guides that he worked with. But that didn't rub off toward the passengers, which I think makes him a pro, I'd say. Yeah, absolutely. SPEAKER_13: And, you know, we're going to build up sort of storywise to the record breaking river run. But he did some pretty remarkable things before that. Right. SPEAKER_13: One of which was to hike the entire length of the Grand Canyon from Lees Ferry to Grand Wash Cliffs. He read a book in 1968. It was a backpacker named Colin Fletcher who did that hike. Well, sort of. We'll see. The man who walked through time was the book. And he said, I'm the first person to hike the entire length of the Grand Canyon. SPEAKER_13: And Grua was like, no, you didn't. You hiked the canyon within the National Park System. But, buddy, that ain't all of the Grand Canyon. That guy went, what? So I'm going to do it. And he did. He tried a couple of times. He tried the first time. And, you know, this is 277 miles as the crow flies. Yeah. SPEAKER_13: Like I mentioned before, when Fadarka did it, they hiked 750 miles because you can't just walk a straight line. There's things you just can't navigate around. So you're having to hike, you know, three times as much or at least two and a half times as much as the length of the canyon to complete that hike. That's nuts. SPEAKER_02: And he did it. First time he tried it. Remember I said he liked to run around barefoot and cut off Levi's? SPEAKER_13: Oh, yeah. SPEAKER_02: Well, he realized he was going on a very long hike. So he went to the trouble of buying himself some leather moccasins to hike in. Those lasted a very short time before he started wearing through them and actually cut his foot on a cactus, started to get infected. He's like, I should probably stop now. SPEAKER_13: That surprised me that he would. I mean, that's a mistake. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think he was. Truly he knew that that wasn't going to work, you know. SPEAKER_02: I don't know that that's true. Like he was capable of making mistakes for sure. He's also capable of evolving his opinions and understandings about things. And he wasn't so dumb that he kept going until he died. Right. You know, that was 1972, I think. Yeah. Four years later, he's like, I'm going to do this different. I'm going to not only wear work boots instead of moccasins, smart move out of the gate. Yeah. He scouted the whole route in advanced and hid supply caches along the route so that he could travel as light as possible. And that's when he set out that second time. That's when he was successful. Hiking almost 600 miles is the route that he took. SPEAKER_03: SPEAKER_13: Wow. That is amazing. I think if you average it out, he was averaging like almost 17 mile a day clip, which is super fast. I mean, when I've done hikes and I'm really hauling it, if I get 10 miles in a day, that's like a really long, hard day. And he was in the Grand Canyon, arduous conditions in the 70s when gear was not like it is now and averaging close to 17 miles a day, which is nuts. It took him 36 days to complete the whole thing. SPEAKER_02: I can barely get 17 miles in a day in a helicopter, let alone hiking. So, yeah, 36 days to hike almost 600 miles. And this is, again, it's not a straight line. It's not flat like there's up and down and over. And what he did was very significant. He became the first person on record, at least, to have hiked the entire length of the Grand Canyon, not just the National Park, the whole Grand Canyon. And so whenever you're hearing about people boating through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River, what they're talking about is that same length, the whole geographical Grand Canyon from Lee's Ferry to Grand Wash Cliffs. SPEAKER_13: Man. All right, so let's talk a little bit about that river run that you just described, you know, from point to point. The very first expedition down that Colorado River was by a guy, a Civil War veteran with one arm named John Wesley Powell in 1869. SPEAKER_13: SPEAKER_13: It took 98 days at that point and pretty much wrecked the crew. I mean, it was by the time they got there, they were starving. It was a very, very tough ride in 1869. Can I just say one thing about that expedition, Chuck? SPEAKER_13: Sure. SPEAKER_02: Three of them, three members of the expedition said nuts to this, like, we're giving up, and set off on foot and were never heard from again. And they left two days before this expedition finally reached its destination. They just didn't know that they were that close to the end and they left and died. Isn't that crazy? SPEAKER_13: Yeah, that's sad. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but they were the first Europeans on record to have circumnavigated the Colorado River through the entire Grand Canyon. And it was a big deal. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, that's like the old line in Apocalypse Now. Never get off the GD boat. SPEAKER_02: Right, the gosh darn boat. SPEAKER_13: In the case of Apocalypse Now, it's because there might be a tiger in the jungle. SPEAKER_02: Right. So I saw also that this was considered the last voyage of discovery in North America. It was a big deal that John Wesley Powell and his group did this. SPEAKER_13: That's right. Then in 1949, there was a guy named Ed Hudson, who was a pharmacist, who made a run in a motorboat. So it was obviously the fastest at the time at five days and 10 minutes. And then all of a sudden, motorboats and regular boats started attempting these speed runs. People were trying to break previous records, depending on how adventurous you were, I guess. Depends on whether or not you wanted to use some motor. But obviously, the berets are off to the people who didn't use the motor. Yeah. I'm sure it was still hard, but it ain't like paddling, you know? SPEAKER_02: No, Ed Hudson, a pharmacist in 1949, he did it in like five days and 10 minutes using a motorboat. Jim and Bob Rigg, I think two years later, said nuts to the motorboat. We're going to not only go down the same path that John Wesley Powell did in 1869 that nearly killed him without a motor. We're going to break Ed Hudson's motor-based record. And they did, actually. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, 52 hours. And this was at a time in the 50s when like a tourist trip, that same tourist trip in a non-motorized boat would be about three weeks. And of course, they're not trying to break a record. They're trying to show everyone a nice good time. SPEAKER_02: Right, exactly. Probably fairly relaxing. Take this as a lift. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. But some people did like the slow train. The longest attempt was in 73, and that took 103 days. That's a little more my speed, I think. SPEAKER_02: So we need to say something about the Colorado River as Kenton Grua knew it. He came along in, what was it, 1968 or 69? Yeah. A hundred years exactly after John Wesley Powell, Kenton Grua came along and took up life on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. But unfortunately for Kenton Grua, that was six years after, I think, the Department of the Interior created the Glen Canyon Dam. Yeah. SPEAKER_02: Upstream of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. And the Colorado River was tamed. That's the best way to put it. It was up to the, I think, the Army Corps of Engineers or whoever runs the dam there at Glen Canyon to decide how much water the Colorado River had. And before that, it had been considered the wildest river in America because the snow melt from the mountains upstream. Depending on how much it snowed that year and then how high the temperatures rose and how quickly they did that spring, that river could turn wild in an instant because so much water would come down from the mountains and it would just flood the Colorado River, including some of the side canyons, and it would make it nuts. And Kenton Grua, and he knew this too, came along after that ceased. And so now the Colorado was relatively mild. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. Like if you're going to go down a river and you want to see how, you know, challenging it might be as a rower, you're going to look at what's called the gradient in feet per mile. And obviously, the higher the gradient, the more, you know, the faster that water is going to be. SPEAKER_13: A pretty wild river can have a gradient between 25 and 60 feet per mile. The Colorado River has a gradient of eight feet per mile. So the actual, you know, where the river sits and the land beneath that river, that gradient isn't too crazy. It is the steepness of the sides of that canyon is what makes it crazy. Because like you said, when that stuff flash floods and it hits the Colorado River, it can move boulders. It can create, you know, waves. SPEAKER_13: And when that water hits the still water, it can create a wave like 20 to 30 feet high. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for sure. In a river. Yeah. And one of the reasons why stuff like that happens is because all that debris and boulder create these natural dams on either side of the river, narrowing the channel, speeding up the water. And once you have fast water running into slow water, all sorts of crazy stuff happens. So speaking geographically, the Colorado River shouldn't have rapids, but because of its situation in that stretch of the Grand Canyon, it does. It has some pretty cool rapids. And Kenton Gruen knew how to do this. Like his job was to take people through these rapids down the stream. But again, the river that he was on was not the same river that John Wesley Powell had been on because of the dam. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, absolutely. SPEAKER_02: So you want to talk about the first attempt in 1980? SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I mean, successful attempt makes it sounds like he didn't do it. He actually did set a speed record in 1980. I think. How fast was that one? SPEAKER_02: He did it in 46 hours and 56 minutes. He beat Jim and Bob Riggs' 1951 record, which had stood for almost 30 years. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. So he breaks the record. And you would think, you know, a lot of people would say like, all right, I did what I attempted to do, broke that record. But Kenton Gruen was like, man, that river was not fast that day, that couple of days. And I can do this a lot faster. And he became sort of, I don't know about obsessed, if that's the right word. I don't know if someone who smoked that much weed can get that obsessed or worked up about anything. SPEAKER_13: But he said, I know I can do this if that, like, it doesn't matter how fast I'm rowing unless I have a faster river just from the natural conditions. Then I can't break that record. So I'm going to wait until the conditions are right. And that happened in 1983 because of El Nino. It was at the time, at least the most extreme El Nino that had happened to that point. Caused a ton of snow. SPEAKER_13: All that snow melts at some point. And all of a sudden you're going to have flooding such that if you're measuring like a river flow, you measure it in cubic feet per second. Right. The Colorado River through the Grand Canyon averages about 12,000 to 15,000 cubic feet per second. And that summer, that June specifically, I saw anywhere from between 70,000 and 100,000 cubic feet per second, which is, you know, up seven to 10 times as fast. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that is a lot more water. Number one, it goes a lot faster and it changes the river. Like the river that he was used to, the rapids he was used to, the features that he had to circumnavigate during a normal boating trip down the Colorado, it was not there. They were different. They were altered by this huge influx of very fast moving water. And so what had happened, as Kevin Fadarco points out in the Emerald Mile, that for the first time, probably for the only time in his lifetime, Canton Grua had a chance to take on the Colorado River, the same river that John Wesley Powell took on in 1869. This stuff did not happen. It caught the Corps of Engineers by surprise, so much so that they, to keep the Lake Powell from topping over the Glen Canyon Dam, they were putting up plywood barriers. That's how like unprepared they were for this incredibly historic flooding. I think there was like 2,600 miles of shoreline in Lake Powell, the reservoir that's behind the dam. And the reservoir was rising a foot a day. That's how much snow melt was coming down. And so they were just releasing, according to Arizona Central, up to half a million cubic feet per second in a release at a time. So this was flooding the Colorado downstream, but it's the only option they had to keep the dam from breaking or from being toppled. And, you know, the water coming out of control. So it was a wild river again all of a sudden like it had been before. And Canton Grua was all about that. SPEAKER_13: He was all about it. So I say we take a break and then we'll come back and let everyone know what happened on June 25th, 1983. SPEAKER_08: Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. You might be asking yourself, what is sibling revelry? SPEAKER_04: Yeah, well, we just made it up. They'll have some laughs and maybe inspire some people along the way with universal tales of what it's like to grow up with brothers and sisters. SPEAKER_05: We're full blood siblings, the only full blood sibling. SPEAKER_09: In our family. Well, not in the world. I mean, no, in the whole world. That's just like no one. SPEAKER_09: Dive into family tales and explore the human mind with guests like Joel and Benji Madden. SPEAKER_08: And it's fun because we've decided to open it up, you know, to really like all kinds of different siblings. SPEAKER_10: And it's going to be an awesome season. SPEAKER_10: It's more than a podcast. SPEAKER_08: It's a celebration of the ties that bind us. Listen to sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_00: Osage County, Oklahoma, is getting a lot of attention right now. It's the setting of Martin Scorsese's latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon. The movie is based on a book about the 1920s Osage murders when white men poured into Osage County and killed Osage people for their oil wealth. I'm Rachel Adams Hurd, the host of InTrust, a podcast from Bloomberg and I heart media. For over a year, I was reporting a different story about other ways white people got Osage land and wealth and how a prominent ranching family in Osage County became one of the biggest landowners here. Their ranching empire was built on land that at the turn of the century was all owned by the Osage nation. So how'd they get it? Listen to the award winning podcast InTrust on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_01: Hey, guys, Britton Laurie here from Life on Cut podcast. We are the number one dating and relationships podcast in Australia because we do things different down under. We cover everything from dating, sex, relationships and pop culture. SPEAKER_06: We chat with a lot of experts about things like love, cheating, narcissists because we both dated one, long distance fertility, communication and breakups. And we talk to some people you might be familiar with, like Rebel Wilson, Matthew Hussey, Stephen Bartlett, Joanne McNally and Mark Manson. SPEAKER_01: You can join us while we unpack it all by searching for Life on Cut now wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_02: OK, so Kenton Grua says it's time like that 1980 record that I broke that I'm not very happy with. I'm now going to break that record. I'm going to take this river like I know it can be taken. And he went to his friend Rudy Petchek, who was at the time, forty nine. Kenton would have been thirty three. Yeah. Yeah. So Rudy Petchek was like old. And then Steve Wren Reynolds was the other guy that they they brought on. So the three of them decided that they were going to take the Emerald Mile out onto the Colorado River. And they said thirty five, by the way. OK, Wren? Yeah. OK. And they went to the Park Service and said, hey, we'd like a permit. We're going to take the Emerald Mile down the Colorado River. It's nuts right now, isn't it? And the Park Service said, no, you're not going to do that. SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_13: Yeah. You got to get a permit to do something like that. They said no, like you said, they're trying to keep people. No, they're trying to keep people off the river. And as we'll see later on, they even had a ranger stationed on the river. I guess it was Benjamin Bratt probably telling people to get out. SPEAKER_13: What? SPEAKER_13: You never saw the river wild? SPEAKER_02: No. Is that the one with Bruce Willis where he's a cop in a boat? SPEAKER_13: Nope. OK. SPEAKER_13: River wild was Meryl Streep and David Strathairn, Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly. Oh, isn't Kevin Bacon like a crazy homicidal serial killer stalking these SPEAKER_02: guys? SPEAKER_13: Not a serial killer. He's a bad guy, though. OK. SPEAKER_13: It's a really good movie. I highly recommend it. But Benjamin Bratt is a ranger that literally does what this other ranger did is like stationed down before the bad rapids saying, get out. You shouldn't be here. SPEAKER_02: I just want to shout out the my favorite Benjamin Bratt fact that he was born on Alcatraz during the American Indian Movement's occupation of Alcatraz. SPEAKER_13: Did we talk about that? SPEAKER_02: Yeah. In our Alcatraz episode. SPEAKER_13: And did not remember that. We'll also talk about it in our forthcoming Benjamin Bratt episode. SPEAKER_13: We haven't done one on Alcatraz, have we? SPEAKER_02: Yes, dude. You sure? I believe we did one on Alcatraz itself and the escape from Alcatraz. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I do remember escape from Alcatraz. SPEAKER_02: That escape from Alcatraz one, by the way, was a good one. SPEAKER_13: All right. So he doesn't get the permit. So he goes back to Martin Litton, his mentor, and he says, hey, man, you got a lot of pull around here. SPEAKER_13: I'm wondering if you could help me out. And Litton said, sure. I'll call up the Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent himself, Richard Marks, KS, not X. No. SPEAKER_13: Were you going to make a Richard Marks joke? SPEAKER_02: No, I just thought it would be great if it had been be Richard Marks, like in his life right before he hit it big. SPEAKER_13: Right. And he said, you know what? It don't mean nothing. And he went, hey, that's got a nice ring to it. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's right. Sign on the dotted line. Sign on the dotted line. SPEAKER_02: That's a good song. It is. SPEAKER_13: So Mark said, all right, here's what I'll do. I will call up the Rangers out there on the river tomorrow and I'll get back to you. He didn't get back to them. And so Litton and Grupo both said, I guess that means we have permission. Right. And so they took off on June 25th, 1983. Yeah. SPEAKER_02: At 11 PM they took off, I guess under the cover of darkness, maybe that's the only reason I can think of that they took off so late. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. Or maybe they just timed it. So they've finished at a certain time or so. I don't know. I don't know either, but they did take off just before midnight. SPEAKER_02: That day. Avoid the heat maybe? Maybe that's a great one. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. Anyway, the fact is this. SPEAKER_02: They were paddling for hours in pitch darkness because the canyons, the canyon walls of the Grand Canyon can prevent the sunlight from hitting inside the canyon at the river level during the day. This was nighttime. And so the canyon walls were preventing any moonlight from even getting down. So they were rafting on a river that was flowing at about 10 times its normal rate, if not more in the dark without the benefit of using their eyes. SPEAKER_02: So they were having to like literally feel the vibrations in the oars to tell what was coming up in which way they should go during this nighttime paddling event that they did. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And I mean, to be sure, these were some of the most experienced people to undertake something like this, but that is still like, it just can't be overstated what a accomplishment this was just to make it through that first night. Yeah, especially doing it stoned wearing nothing but cutoff levi. SPEAKER_13: So they would paddle, there were, like I said, three of them. So they would paddle for about 15 to 20 minutes at a time because it's really rigorous, tough stuff that they're doing. Grew up, went up first and paddled first and they would switch off when they would get tired. They would rest, take little catnaps when they could, when they weren't paddling, obviously. And things were going pretty good for the first few hours. And then they reached a series of rapids called the Roaring Twenties that is really tough in particular with all this water because there's something in rivers called, I would assume people know what an eddy is, but you might not. Eddy is like a very calm part of a river, usually off to the side where the water is flowing back upstream in like a void in the current. Usually it's like blocked by a big rock or something. And it's a good place. Usually that's where you're, if you want to pull off and, you know, get out of the boat and get on land, you'll, you'll pull off to a nice little calm eddy. But you can also have an area where the eddy meets the rapids and that's called an eddy fence. I saw it described as confused water. It doesn't really know which way to go, so it's going everywhere at once. And it's just really, really unstable water. And these eddy fences were all over the place, just like not crushing literally, but just like wreaking havoc on their boat in this, in this trip they were taking. SPEAKER_03: SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because the water, the boat's going the direction of the water. And if the water all of a sudden is going multiple directions, that gets telegraphed to the boat and it makes it very difficult to move around. Right? SPEAKER_13: Yeah. But they did get through that part, obviously. They did. SPEAKER_02: And again, they're going through the roaring twenties at night in pitch darkness. Just FYI, I just really want to make sure everybody keeps this in mind. The other thing is, is they were taking these rapids wide open. They weren't stopping to scout what was ahead and then getting back in the boat and then taking it with full knowledge of what was coming up. They just took it as it came, essentially, which is again, really nuts considering that this was not the river that they were used to. It was the swollen, wild, raging version of the river that they were used to. It was like the Colorado on bath salts, basically. SPEAKER_02: That's what they were taking on in the dark with, without the benefit of eyesight. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I think steroids is overused. Bath salts. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. If you really want to drive the point home, use bath salts. No, don't actually use bath salts. I meant in your analogy. SPEAKER_13: They get through this on experience, on instinct. Like you said, feeling their way. The sun finally comes up. SPEAKER_13: They're flying down this river. They're going through all kinds of crazy rapids, huge whirlpools, these big standing waves that I talked about that got up to 20 feet. I think one of the guys even said, Petchik said some of them were like three stories high at times. SPEAKER_13: And they finally get to Crystal Rapid, which is at mile 98. And they were worn out, like super, super tired, obviously. And that is where Benjamin Bratt was stationed. Yeah. A park ranger, Benjamin Bratt. And he said, Hey, you shouldn't be paddling through here. And also I was born on Alcatraz. That's a great Benjamin Bratt impression. No, he was stationed there to get if there were any tourist boats that, you know, had somehow already been on the water, which they shouldn't have been to begin with because they were denying permits. Yeah, I didn't understand that part. SPEAKER_13: You know, I guess they were just there were some already out there maybe because especially if some of them were taking three weeks. SPEAKER_02: Oh, gotcha. They didn't want to ruin people's vacation. SPEAKER_13: Maybe, but they were basically he was there basically to say, Hey, pull over. All of you tourists get out and hike out and boat captain and whoever else, you're going to have to take this thing down the rest of the way, like by yourself. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. I hope you don't like company because T.S. for you. SPEAKER_13: That's right. But what happened with this group? SPEAKER_02: So they didn't what one of the things that caused Benjamin Bratt to be stationed there was that a commercial rafting outfit had gotten overturned. One of the boats had been overturned at this under normal circumstances, very tough rapid called Crystal Rapids. And one person had died. I believe a passenger had died. This happened like 11 hours before the Kenton Grua and his group came along in the Emerald Mile. They were totally out of contact with everybody, so they had no idea this happened. And so the reason Benjamin Bratt was there was because it was so dangerous what they were coming up on that literally their lives were in danger. So when they came upon the park ranger, Benjamin Bratt, they pretended they didn't see him. What was cool is. Like look over there on the right guys. Exactly. SPEAKER_02: The the the what was cool about it is that this park ranger had been a river guide himself. He immediately recognized who was in this boat and he pretended he didn't see them. Yeah. So that everybody could just kind of go their own way and just pretend like they hadn't seen one another. And these guys could continue on because he said he knew immediately what they were doing because of the river conditions. So he just let them go their way. He kept an eye on them as they went further along, though, and hit that Crystal Rapid. And he witnessed their boat being overturned very violently. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, this is when they hit one of those. The one that Apechik said was two to three stories high. Flip that thing at the top. Everyone ends up in the water. SPEAKER_13: Kenton Grua was pretty OK and Apechik was pretty OK. The boat got banged up a little bit. I think it lost some of its bow post, a chunk out of the stern, but it was still, you know, very much operational. And Reynolds was injured. I think there was a head injury. And as a result, he did not do a lot of at least tough rowing after that. I was surprised he did anything at all. I figured he'd be like Burt Reynolds in deliverance at that point, just sort of laying down in the middle of the canoe. SPEAKER_13: But he apparently would row some calmer parts and I guess take that with a grain of salt because I don't think any of it was very calm. And Grua and Apechik said, all right, it's the two of us basically doing the tough, tough rowing in 100 degree heat. SPEAKER_13: And it was it was real tough stuff from that point on. It was already tough, but it was really, really tough. But they decided not to quit. No, they didn't. And that's really significant because, again, their boat overturned. SPEAKER_02: They, Reynolds was injured. They were thrown out of the boat violently into a whirlpool, got sucked under. All three of them miraculously got free. And then they had to turn the boat back over upright again, get back in it, totally exhausted at this point and decide to continue on. They did. That was just absolutely nuts. Problem is, is they knew the park ranger had seen them. And so they were kind of all worried about possibly losing the river guide licenses because, again, this was a wildcat river run. It was not sanctioned. It was technically illegal. But they continued on. They said, we've made it this far. And they kept going and gave themselves, I guess, a period where they're like, OK, this is not working anymore. We're all too exhausted. We need to take some rest. Let's just take an hour and we'll all get some sleep and then we'll wake up and be refreshed. And it'll be like starting over again anew. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, and of course, what happens is they sleep for three hours, almost woke up in a panic because they had just, you know, almost killed themselves. They're exhausted. And now they're thinking like, now we've jeopardized this record that we're trying to get. We don't know if the river will ever be this fast again. Right. And here we slept for three hours. So instead of taking their ball and going home, taking their oar and going home, they said, now we got to go extra fast. SPEAKER_13: So at mile 239, they get out another set of oars. And someone said, where did those even come from? And Grua said they were at our feet the whole time, dumb, dumb. And they started rowing two at a time. So they were hauling, but rowing together, which obviously, you know, I don't know if that that probably doesn't double your speed, but you're going much faster at that point. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. So that was they woke up at, I guess, about one because they took that rest at 10 and accidentally slept for three hours. So actually. Yeah, one, I had to count it out on my fingers for a second and then they kept rowing and they another 10 hours later. They finally reached the end. So that like they had just been exerting themselves almost constantly for for 36 hours and 38 minutes. That's what their final time ended up being. So they just destroyed Grua's previous record setting run. Thanks to the river being so nuts. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, he did it. The three of them did it rather. And he did not lose his license. He was worried about that. So that's the good news. Apparently, he got a 500 dollar fine, which he couldn't even pay. So his lawyer negotiated community service, which he may or may not have even done. And like you said at the very beginning of this, he wasn't a big braggart about his own accomplishments. They kind of spoke for themselves to him. So he didn't really you know, it's not like he started making the talk show circuit or anything like that. SPEAKER_13: But of course, word was going to get out. People talk and he you know, he will always remain a legend of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River because of the speed run. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he died at 52 in 2002 and he died while he was riding his mountain bike. And I couldn't find out how. It's like that sounds like he went over a cliff or something. Apparently, he had torn his aorta somehow. They're not sure how. But he was found laying beside his mountain bike dead. And his wife, I believe his third wife, Michelle Grua, said this is exactly how he would have wanted to go. So, I mean, if you're going to be like a rugged outdoorsman and you die on your mountain bike, that's not the worst way you could go. SPEAKER_13: No. They you know, it seemed like he was he was just sort of laying there on his side and they said it looked like sort of a peaceful position. So there are there is speculation that he may have sort of known what was going on and just sort of laid down and you know, to be with the woods. Right. SPEAKER_02: To be with the woods. That's the new euphemism for it, isn't it? SPEAKER_13: I guess so. SPEAKER_02: Michelle Grua also wrote in a memoriam on Boatman's Quarterly, I think, that he had mellowed out some a lot actually in his later years. Still lived the life that he lived, but he became focused on being a dad. I think he had three or has three kids and was just from what I can tell, an all around interesting, neat dude. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. I mean, he started a conservation group, didn't he? He did. SPEAKER_02: Called the Grand Canyon River Guides. That's right. Which is still around today. And that Grand Canyon Dories was sold to an existing outfit called Oars, which gives Dory tours down the Grand Canyon still today. SPEAKER_13: Hmm. Tempting. SPEAKER_02: It tempted me too. And then I was like, again, 17 days is a little much. And also, do I want to perish in the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River? And I decided, no, I don't. SPEAKER_13: You could just be with the woods. SPEAKER_02: I'd just rather stay locked inside my house. You got anything else? SPEAKER_13: No, I got nothing else. I just know that that's one place you will not crash a Dory into a boulder is in your house. Definitely not. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. SPEAKER_02: Well, since I said definitely not, that means it's time for listener mail. SPEAKER_13: Uh, oh, this is cool. This is from someone who, uh, whose grandmother had a nice little, uh, what do you call them? A, a, a pneumatic device. Yeah. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. SPEAKER_13: For when you want to remember something? Pneumatic. SPEAKER_02: You're thinking of pneumatic. SPEAKER_02: No, pneumatic. SPEAKER_13: Hey guys, stuff you should know is a staple of my daily commute. Truly enjoy learning about common and obscure stuff and you've helped our trivia team. The Meerkats claim victory on more than one occasion. Go Meerkats. For sure. Uh, anyway, just finished the episode on the wreck of the Costa Concordia and thought I'd share the way that my grandmother taught me how to remember which direction was port versus starboard. She would say there's not much port left in the glass, like port wine, uh, port side being left. Port left in the glass. Uh, interestingly, she was not a seafaring woman nor a lover of port. SPEAKER_03: SPEAKER_13: I wish I could recall the context of her telling me this even, but it's always stuck with me and I thought you might give a kick out of that. Uh, thanks for all the information and laughs. And that is from Aaron. And I wrote Aaron back to see if I could get a report. No grandma's name, but I didn't hear back. So let's just, let's just say grandmother to Aaron. SPEAKER_02: Okay. SPEAKER_13: Intribute. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And that's it. SPEAKER_13: Okay. SPEAKER_02: Is that Aaron with the a a or Aaron with the E E R I N. SPEAKER_02: Thanks a lot, Aaron. That's a good one. Um, it's as at least as good as mine that I came up with, but what was yours? There's four letters in both port and left, I think. Oh, that's good too. That's how that's what I remember. So apparently the system works. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. Agreed. SPEAKER_02: Well, if you want to be like Aaron and improve or try to improve upon our mnemonic devices, we love that kind of thing. You can send it in an email to stuff podcast that I heart radio.com. SPEAKER_12: Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. SPEAKER_08: Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. Dive into family tales, explore the human mind and laugh with guests like Joel and Benji Madden. It's more than a podcast. It's a celebration of the ties that bind us. And it's fun because we've decided to open it up to really like all kinds of SPEAKER_10: different siblings and it's going to be an awesome season. SPEAKER_08: Listen to sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_00: Osage County, Oklahoma is getting a lot of attention right now because of Martin Scorsese's latest movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, about the 1920s Osage murders. I'm Rachel Adams Hurd, the host of InTrust. For over a year, I reported a different story about other ways white people got Osage land and wealth and how a prominent ranching family became one of the biggest landowners here. Listen to the award-winning podcast, InTrust on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_01: Hey guys, Britton Laurie here from Life Uncaught Podcast. We are the number one dating and relationships podcast in Australia because we do things different down under. We cover everything from dating, sex, relationships, and pop culture. SPEAKER_06: We chat with a lot of experts about things like love, cheating, narcissists, because we both dated one, long distance, fertility, communication, and breakups. SPEAKER_01: And we talk to some people you might be familiar with like Rebel Wilson, Matthew Hussey, Stephen Bartlett, Joanne McNally, and Mark Manson. You can join us while we unpack it all by searching for Life Uncaught Now, SPEAKER_06: wherever you get your podcasts.