Published on July 14, 2026 03:11 am
This story is taken from Heather Hansman’s new book, Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the WildWhich follows three unsung heroes of recreation and conservation to examine how we care for the wild places we love, why those places matter, and why their stories resonate when we talk about being outdoors. you can find it HereOr anywhere where books are sold.
At the boat ramp at Lee’s Ferry, at the beginning of each Grand Canyon trip, the shuttle van thermometer reads 100 degrees. The mercury would remain there for most of our trip, except when the monsoons burst upon us, flooding the shore creeks with runoff, and pushing us back upriver with persistent headwinds. Here, before my body can adjust, I start feeling dizzy from the heat.
In contrast, the river rises 15 miles upstream from Glen Canyon Dam at a temperature of 46 degrees. It is clear, green and devoid of most sediment, nutrients and insects.
I have heard that Georgie White used to stand chest-deep in cold water and drink beer slowly without shivering. She would then challenge the firefighters whom she had appointed as sailors.
I haven’t stiffened up to that point, but I look over my shoulders to cool myself down as we do the final rounds of preparation. We adjust the gear bags and fit life jackets and reapply sunscreen, and then we’re off.
Georgie was the first female Grand Canyon guide. She was one of the first and only people to walk on the river for years, and she was the only woman to guide for decades. He’s one of my heroes, although he’s complicated and it took me a while to find him. I came here to see if I could understand him better. And understand why I never heard his story until I’ve been involved in the guiding world for years. Why has it been so difficult for me to find heroes in the outside world?
The entry into the valley feels surprisingly fast. For the first 4.5 miles you explore the road and float past places you’ve seen before, but once you pass under the parallel Navajo Bridge – the ninth highest in the country – you’re in new territory, and there aren’t any other roads to cross until you hit Hoover Dam, about 350 miles downstream.
Jeff, one of the guides, points overhead as we swim under the bridges.
“Conders,” he says.
In the 1980s, giant vultures were endangered; There were only 22 left in the world. They were reintroduced here into the valley, and now their population is up to 500, but they still feel special and rare. “I can’t see them,” I yell in response, but I keep looking, staring into the glare until finally I do, their 10-foot wingspan turning into black dots.
As we float downstream, instant and geologic time feel as if they are occurring on the same scale. We pass the first 5 layers of rock in 16 miles, falling over centuries. That afternoon we hit the first significant rapid, Badger Creek, at mile 8. It’s rated a 5 on the Grand Canyon Rapids scale of 1 to 10, and on the surface it seems straightforward, down to a series of gut-wrenching wave trains. But I am not prepared for its power. As we wade in, deceptively large waves halt the boat’s motion, and powerful eddies in the bottom quickly catch the oars.
There is more of everything here: darker, redder, warmer, bigger. And we’re not even in the heart of it yet. The first night we camped on the beach and watched the valley turn golden and pink. In the clay soil around the campsite, immaculate white Datura flowers bloom on bright green stalks. I’m starting to see why the Georgie could never go anywhere else, how no other rivers could compare to it.
Over the next few days, we delve deeper into the history and landscape. We pass Georgie Rapid at mile 24 – named after him after he passed away – and then the white water begins to swell.
Our days fall into a rhythm. I’m here as a bogeyman, basically an unpaid apprentice, at the bottom of the guide hierarchy, so it’s my job to do the heavy lifting. There are Dutch ovens and dishpans and hand-washing buckets, a shocking number of which always need refilling from the river. I’m constantly reminded of water weight. I haul stuff, unload boats and always misplace things. I try to succumb to the repetitive zen of rebuilding my house on a different diagonal beach every night. I try to be entertaining and helpful and never get in the way. When real guides let me row, I have to make do with the eddies. I use the weight of the oars in my hands. The brand new muscles inside my elbows ache, and my arms feel like half-cooked spaghetti, wobbly and limp against the sheer force of the water.
Georgie said that by the time she stopped rafting, people weren’t as tough as they were before, and I believe it. I get dehydrated easily, constantly slathering myself with sun block or body lotion, or wrapping myself in a wet sarong, constantly gulping down electrolytes and rubbing my sore shoulders.
I remember that water, paradoxically, makes you dry. My toes and heels crack and crack. Whenever I step out of the river, dipping myself to get relief from the heat, I feel a dry itch on my back. My hips are cramping and my shoulders are knotted from hours of sitting on the gear pile in front of the luggage boat. But I also feel stretched, buzzed, bouncing. I sprint across the beach and wrestle with the other guides. We swim in small rapids and explore side canyons.
I’m actually paying attention for the first time in a long time. Soaking in the colorless light of pre-dawn. Seeing the warm afternoon blue, so high and clear, and the way the evening sky slips from golden blush to red to red and lilac before it turns blue again. It changes so quickly that it’s impossible to capture it, even if I try with paint and photos and words. At night I sleep on the deck of the slowly rocking boat.
We are trapped in the entire cycle of known time, billions of years and countless generations. As one retired sailor told longtime guide Lewis Teal, who wrote a book about women in the canyon, “When you put your paddle in the water, you feel the whole story. There are no words, but it’s the whole language of the earth’s creation.”
Georgie’s first trip through the canyon was swimming. In 1945 she started swimming in the river wearing only a lifejacket and from then on she became obsessed with it. In the early summer of 1952, Georgie again set his sights on the Grand Canyon. This time he decided to take the raft down instead of swimming. She brought along her friend Elgin Pierce, who was with her when she suffered a head injury during the climb. She knew he was reliable in case of emergency.
Their boat was a ten-man army surplus raft that Georgie had salvaged after World War II. Unlike today’s Hypalon or PVC boats, which are self-propelled, curved, multi-chambered and balanced, the Army’s surplus rafts were bathtubs made of rubber that felt like the skin of an eczematous elephant. In addition to rowing and navigation, you had to save the water you carried, but by using a rubber raft instead of a wooden drift boat, Georgie was predicting how river sailing would change the world.
I’m not sure how he convinced Elgin that this was a good idea, but on July 11, they pulled the raft into the water at the mouth of the Paria River, just below Lee’s Ferry.
Georgie and Elgin packed three weeks’ worth of canned food and made plans to take turns sailing. To navigate they had a map of the lower valley that Georgie had gotten from Jim Rigg, who ran a fledgling guide company, Mexican Hat Expeditions. He was planning to take a trip that month also.
Georgie and Elgin successfully negotiated the first significant rapids, but at mile 77, Hance Rapid, things changed. Depending on the water level, the Hance is at an 8 or 9 on the Grand Canyon’s 10 scale. It is both technically challenging and powerful as is the fast pace. The flow of debris causes the river to shrink, leaving large holes at the top left and bottom right. The central part is invincible due to a huge rock. The trick is to start on the right, catch a pocket of slow water behind the big rock in the middle, and turn left, fighting huge side waves on the way. From a scout point, you can imagine the line, but when you’re in it, it moves so fast that it’s hard to know where you are.
Georgie and Elgin may have been distracted by the flush, or they may have become cocky after a few successful days on the water. The rig had told them to run faster to the left, to avoid the heavy waves rolling in on the right, but Georgie said he had had good luck running up the middle so far, so he decided to give it a try. Elgin was thrown off the boat almost immediately, taking the oar with him. Then the boat overturned. Elgin swam towards the shore, but Georgie stayed with the boat and tried to climb aboard as it drifted downstream.
Georgie held on to the overturned boat but was swept two miles downstream into Sockdollager Rapid. With that speed she pushed the raft into a whirlpool, exhausting her. She said she was beginning to lose her grip, about to give up, when she heard someone yelling upstairs and saw Elgin running toward her. Together they put the boat in a big turn and took out the bag of food. They spent another cold, wet night on the shore and then were able to turn it around and continue downstream.
They stopped one night at Phantom Ranch, a lodge at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, 88 miles below, to dry off and rebuild their confidence and then headed back down. They tried to stretch out those days, because they knew the Mexican Hat Expedition trip was behind them, and they did not want to navigate the river’s largest rapid, Lava Falls, alone.
Lava, the rapids that give guides stomach aches, is named for the 100,000-year-old intrusion of volcanic rock deep into the canyon’s depths. The rapids are deceptively calm from above, but there’s a huge ledge hole in the middle that’s hard to see above the horizon line, and once you’re in the thick of the white water, there’s even more to avoid.
After a week, the Mexican Hat trip picked up steam and together they decided to row boats around the lava, picking their way through the sharp black rocks. At the bottom of the rapids, Rigg led the trip through a start: a slug of brandy and a bucket of river water in the face to signal that they had made it through the rapids and could call themselves Grand Canyon River Runners. This would become one of Georgie’s signature moves. As they swam through the remaining flat water to the mouth of Lake Mead, Elgin swore he would never make anything like this trip again; He had enjoyed the back-and-forth, the swimming, and the rigors of the canyon, but Georgie felt reluctant to go home, already ready to go back into the canyon.
