Women start guiding
Women guides are commonplace now, but in the early 1970s, there were hardly any. ARTA became the first company in California (and maybe elsewhere) to hire women guides, starting mainly on the Stanislaus River in mid-1971.
Rob Elliott – above far right, standing up in blue top in paddle raft in 1971 – relates (from his Grand Canyon River Guides oral history) the momentous late 1970 conversation with his father, ARTA founder Lou Elliott, as Lou had asked Rob to take over the management of the company. Rob said yes, but with three conditions. The first condition, which was agreed to, was moving three quarters of their Grand Canyon trips to oar powered rafts, from motor-powered.
He continues:
So I take a big breath and I go, “Alright, the first one’s down. Cool.” He (Lou) said, “What’s the second?” And I said, “We have to have a paddle option on every trip all over the West, that we can run paddleboats safely. That means a paddle option on every trip except the Selway River and the Tuolumne River the American, the Stanislaus, the Rogue, the Main Salmon, the Middle Fork, the Utah trips. And I think I even have a way to do paddling down the Grand Canyon – just like that first trip in 1965, remember?” He said, “Yeah.” And so I hold my breath. And remember, he’d been on this Outward Bound trip where we did all paddling, and he says, “Okay, no problem. I think that’s the right thing to do, let’s do it.” I said, “It’s gonna take equipment, take a lot of training. It’ll take manuals.”
[Note: the Stanislaus River became a major proving ground for paddle rafts starting in 1971, with one on every trip and soon two or even three on five raft trips]
And he says, “Okay, what’s your third condition?”
I said, “We’ve got to immediately and aggressively start recruiting and hiring women guides.”
And he says, “Oh really?!” I said, “Yeah, I just left Outward Bound and we had sixty-two qualified people in Outward Bound – sixty percent of them were women, and it didn’t even occur to us to think anything about that. And I’m moving into a company that has no women unless they cook.”
He says, “We can’t do that.”
I said, “What do you mean we can’t do that? You know there were two women instructors on that program in Outward Bound you did with us. They were pretty mongo, they can handle it. What do you mean ‘we can’t do it’?!” And he said, “Rob, think of the liability. They’re not strong enough. We’re gonna flip boats, we’re gonna wrap boats, people are gonna die, we’re gonna go to court and we’re gonna lose.”
I could see he’d really dug in his heels. And I could also see that I had gotten quite a bit of progress already in this discussion. So, I wanted to cut my losses about this point, and I said, “I’ll tell you what. You say that the big problem here is strength.” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Okay, how strong do you have to be to be a paddle captain?”
He says, “Well, yeah, the girls could do the paddle captaining just fine.” He called them “girls,” I call them women. That’s part of the problem here. He says, “But you just have to be smart, and you’ve got to mold that crew, you’ve got to get ’em all working together. You can do the whole thing as a paddle captain. You’ve got to get your crew all worked into it, and you’ve got to read the river better. Yeah, women can do that. I don’t have a problem with intelligence here, it’s just strength.”
“Okay”, I said, “what do you say we just hire women to do the paddle rafts then, which you just agreed to? He says, “Okay, I’m willing to compromise with you on that.”
I took another big breath and went, “Okay, we got it.” I knew that once women were in, there’ll be no holding back. And that’s the way it started.