Will on his first river expedition, 1974

Photo by Ben Foster

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Grand Canyon

While a student at NAU in the early 1970s (majoring in Chinese), Will got a job as an assistant preparator at the Museum of Northern Arizona, working for Bill Breed, the Curator of Geology. Bill was looking for Late Precambrian fossils in the Grand Canyon Supergroup, and took Will and another MNA preparator, Ben Foster, on a field trip in 1974. They collected too many samples to carry out in their packs, so they stashed them near Kwagunt (mile 56). Pete Winn, a professional river guide, had met Bill Breed on a trip in 1972, and 1974 he was working as a river ranger for Grand Canyon National Park. Bill convinced the Park to let Pete take Will and Ben down the river to collect the fossils they had left behind.

Will learned to row on San Juan trips (S. Utah) and Westwater Canyon trips (Colorado in E. Utah) with Pete and his wife Cindy Appel in the late 1970's, ran his own boat through the Grand for the first time on a private trip with them in 1982, rowed a boat on several research trips with Larry Stevens, Turey Cerling and others in the 1980s and early 1990s and on three more private trips with Pete and Cindy (1990, 1997 and 2001). Will and Ben were the boatmen on Pete's first expedition in China in 1994 and Ben loaned Will a boat (the "Jalapeno") for the 2001 private trip. Will has also run Lodore, Whirlpool and Split Mountain canyons on the Green in Dinosaur (with National Geographic), Desolation and Gray canyons of the Green in the Unita Basin, and Cataract Canyon of the Colorado in Canyonlands National Park.

If you have any pics or stories about river trips you've been on with Will that you'd like to share with his other friends, please send them to me (see home page).