Moments: Grand Canyon Slow Ride

Ote Dale wanted to live in the Grand Canyon. The daughter of a Utah dirt farmer, she’d come of age on desert rivers in the early 1970s, when women weren’t supposed to run boats. At least that’s what the men said back then. But she did anyway and earned her river name—Coyote, the trickster—and a job swamping rafts for Grand Canyon Expeditions. By the fall of 1975 she’d spent big chunks of summers and long stretches of winters on the river, but it still wasn’t enough. It wasn’t living there. So, late that year she and five friends got permission from the National Park Service to run the Colorado under the guise of scientific research, and at noon on January 9, 1976, with the air temperature at thirty-eight degrees and three herons watching from the shore, she and her river guide pals launched the longest, most leisurely recorded float down the Grand Canyon in history: the now-legendary Hundred Days Trip.