Norman Nevills, The Great San Juan Adventurer

Though he died five years before I was born, I remember hearing about Norman Nevills since I was a child. I heard him called The Great San Juan Adventurer. He was a river runner, a backcountry guide, a pilot, and passionate about his newfound home. Nevills was born in California in 1908, with an insatiable itch for adventure that he never managed to scratch away. He arrived in Mexican Hat in 1933 and immediately fell in love with the stark beauty of the endless multicolored sandstone cliffs and the ancient ruins built in high alcoves above the rivers and canyon floors they bordered.
Norm came to join his father and mother, who were here to strike it rich in a hopeful oil boom. When the boom went bust, the family, having all developed a fascination with the river, built the Mexican Hat Lodge on a narrow strip of land between it and the road. Initially, the lodge was a primitive yet sturdy structure constructed from deep, dark red sandstone native to Mexican Hat. In its early days, the lodge had no electricity and only primitive indoor plumbing (there was still a path out the back door to another necessary structure).
Kerosene lanterns provided the sole source of light during those dark winter evenings. Water for the building came from three tanks on a nearby hill, which were filled by trucks from wells in Bluff, because the water native to Mexican Hat was too brackish to drink.
Norm Nevills loved everything about the area, but saved his most passionate feelings for the River. He was always drawn to adventures afloat. As a five-year-old, he snuck away from his parents and attempted to commandeer a small boat in the San Francisco Bay. Lucky for him, his first and only attempt at becoming a pirate was thwarted when a wise policeman spotted him and put a stop to it.
In 1933, he and his new bride, Doris, built themselves a boat from a derelict outhouse and an old horse trough. They covered the knotholes with tin and filled any cracks with scraps of used underwear. That converted outhouse was their honeymoon suite as they floated in it down the San Juan on their first adventure as Mr. & Mrs. Nevills.
The San Juan was a great river for a young, wannabe river rat like Nevills to get his start, but there was more, much more. In early 1937, Norm was visited by another riverman, Ed Holt, who had traveled through the Grand Canyon ten years earlier with the tenth recorded expedition through the Colorado. He chided Norm for bragging about his exploits on the tranquil waters of the San Juan. “You ought to try a real river, like the Colorado.” He said.
Nevills immediately replied, “I’ll be running it next year,” although it was only a dream at the time.
Six months later, Elzada U. Clover, PhD., of the University of Michigan Botany Department, signed the guest register on the counter of the Mexican Hat Lodge. Back in those days, visitors to Mexican Hat were few, so it was no time at all for Norm Nevills to meet Dr. Clover. The two soon discovered they both craved adventure, but Clover’s wanderlust had a goal beyond a sheer adrenaline rush. The title of her doctoral dissertation was “A Vegetational Survey of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas.” She had spent months poking about among the rattlesnakes in the southwest deserts and was anxious for more. To this point, she had only collected plant specimens from places reachable by car or on foot. For years, she had nurtured a desire to conduct plant surveys in areas accessible only by water. She also knew that no botanist had ever explored the entire length of the Colorado River. It remained a mysterious place, about which the scientific community knew little.
Clover had no idea that her comments added fuel to a long-burning desire in Nevills to build a western river-running business. His vision included taking geologists, hydrologists, biologists, tourists, and all other “ists” with a desire to experience a wild river; he wanted to be the one to take them.
His conversation that night in the Mexican Hat Lodge with Clover unleashed a deluge of plans in his mind. He dreamed, as only young men can, of taking film crews and publicists along to document every move they made from the collection of plants to visits to ruins in secluded spots. He laid all this out in a letter. I imagine Dr. Clover reading the letter with a smile. As a college professor, she’d listened to the dreams of many a young man before.
Nevills and Clover continued to discuss their plans, and after some negotiation, they agreed to proceed with an expedition set to begin in June 1938. They would start on the Green, in Green River, Utah, and follow it to its confluence with the Colorado, four miles from the start of Cataract Canyon. They would resupply at Lee’s Ferry, a mile upriver from the Grand Canyon. The trip would end in Boulder City, Nevada, home to the Hoover Dam, which, four years earlier, had begun to fill Lake Mead. Clover recruited Eugene Atkinson, a zoologist working on an advanced degree from the University of Michigan. Lois Jotter, another PhD candidate in botany, completed the crew of scientists.
Jotter, the daughter of a forester, developed a love for the outdoors from birth. In the front yard of her childhood home grew a giant Sequoia tree, planted by her father. From him, she developed a love for the outdoors and pursued an education in botany.
By that year, only a dozen expeditions that included a little more than fifty men had successfully floated the river since one-armed John Wesley Powell made his trip in 1869. In the nearly eighty years since then, only one woman has attempted it, Bessie Hyde, who tried it on her honeymoon in 1928. Neither she nor her husband Glen were seen again. The sole remaining evidence of the Hyde expedition was their boat, found empty and intact. This cemented pubic opinion that women were not intended to run rivers and became the central theme of all press coverage.
Indeed, while Clover and Jotter were driving the two-lane roads between Michigan and Green River, the story gained national attention. Press reports built on the account of the failed Hyde trip to create a sense of foreboding for the two women. When they arrived at Green River, a cast of local river-runners were present to offer predictions of doom for the female members. The last surviving member of the Powell Expedition, James Fenimore, was quoted as saying that the Colorado River “was a mighty poor place for women.”
Part 2, is an account of the trip.
[The details of this story are taken from “Brave the Wild River,” by Melissa L. Sevigny]