Buzz Holmstrom

In November 1937, Haldane “Buzz” Holmstrom sat in the sand below Lava Cliff, the last substantial rapid in Grand Canyon. He’d come nearly a thousand river miles in a boat he built in his mother’s basement, starting on the Green River in Wyoming, into the Colorado, through the powerful whitewater of Cataract Canyon and the wondrous Glen Canyon, as yet undammed. He continued into Grand Canyon, a place of profound beauty and fearsome rapids that only a handful of river-runners had yet descended, seldom without mishap and never, until now, alone.

The filling station attendant from tiny Coquille, Oregon, knew he would soon be lauded as the first person to solo the Grand Canyon. It should have been a moment of triumph, but as the twenty-eight-year-old Holmstrom mused in his river journal about “the last bad one above me,” he turned contemplative.

“I had thought once past there my reward will begin, but now everything ahead seems kind of empty and I find I