When Al Birch, Charles Mace, Fred erick Dunham and Burt Moritz Jr. left the Denver Post building on the morning of Aug. 16, 1928, they had little notion of the adventure they were about to undertake.
Over the next two weeks, these men — a reporter, two photographers and a student — would come to learn as much of their own character as they would of the Yampa River Canyon they had agreed to explore. To their knowledge, they would be the first team to navigate the uncharted gorge, should they succeed. Five prior attempts reportedly had failed, claiming several lives.
The men knew nothing of river navigation, launching their wooden boats — Leakin’ Lena and Prickly Heat — long after the river had receded from peak spring flows. Where there was water in the channel, they were unable to avoid the river’s rocky hazards. In the shallows, they were forced to drag the 400-pound vessels over tortuous gravel shoals.
Three long days into the adventure, the Yampa River claimed the Leakin’ Lena. Hopelessly broken on jagged rocks, the boat and much of its contents were lost, including film for a movie and the rest of their food. Much of their food had been lost in a previous capsize.
“None of us ever expected to get back alive after the third day out,” Birch wrote. “We just kept going on because there was nothing else to do.”
Already ailing from a back injury, Birch set out on foot to seek a downstream food cache. With nothing but the silted river for nourishment, he staggered through the rocky ravine for four days before reaching a prearranged meeting point with a local rancher at Johnson’s Draw.
“I shouted for half an hour, but there was no answer: The place was deserted,” Birch wrote. “Never in my life have I felt so downcast.”
After a night in the rain, Birch hiked 16 more miles and 4,000 vertical feet to a high desert ranch on his fifth day without food, where he learned rancher Fray Baker had just left to search for the overdue team. Birch ate, rested and penned a short dispatch to The Post before returning to the canyon with provisions.
Regrouping the next morning, the men decided to continue.
With four men now in one boat, they pushed on to the confluence with the Green River at Echo Park. Side trips revealed American Indian artifacts and the cabin once occupied by Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall Gang.
Battered and badly sunburned, the men reached their objective on Sept. 2, 1928, two weeks after launching in Lily Park.
“If anything worse could have happened to us, I don’t know what it could have been, unless the walls of the canyon had fallen in. It was a terrible trip, but at the same time the most sublime I ever took in my whole life,” Birch wrote on the train ride home. “Right now, every one of our quartet feels that not all the money in the world would tempt us again to dare the hardships of such an expedition.”
– Scott Willoughby
