March Meeting at REI on Wetmore Rd. REI store on Wetmore Rd. – Wed., Mar. 12, 2025, 6-8 PM. Meeting room on 2nd floor. Parking in lots adjacent to REI at the Tucson Mall.
The Southern Arizona Paddling Club is holding a fundraiser presentation of
Dock Marston: The Colorado River Running Historian
Otis Marston went on his first river trip in the Grand Canyon in 1942. His life was never the same again. Within a few years, Otis, nicknamed Dock, rowed with fellow boatman Norm Nevills through the canyons of Glen, Cataract, Lodore, and the Grand, as well as the Snake and Salmon rivers in the Pacific Northwest. Dock became fascinated with the stories of river people and in 1947 he started writing a history of those adventurous souls. Little did he realize he would still be working on it at the end of his life in 1979.
Dock saw the National Park Service transform from trying to prevent most river trips from even launching to regulating river recreation with permit systems. He recorded the change in watercraft from unwieldy wooden designs to hard hulls and inflatable rafts, with and without motors. He participated in the one and only successful river trip that ran upstream in the Grand Canyon powering up the rapids in jetboats. In the middle of it all, Dock was friends with NPS superintendents, rivermen and riverwomen as he amassed a huge collection of river running material. This presentation includes a number of historic film clips, including 1945 Cataract Canyon.
Tom Martin is the author of “Dock Martson: Grand Canyon’s Colorado River Running Historian Volume 1”. A Colorado River historian, Tom worked on Volume 1 for a decade reviewing tens of thousands of documents from The Huntington Library’s Otis Reed Marston Collection, National Park and Bureau of Reclamation archives scattered across the country, as well as private and university collections. He also tracked down and interviewed river runners who boated with Dock.