With two powerful oar strokes 90-year-old Martin Litton squares our dory to the boulder-strewn rapids of oregon’s Grande Ronde River. “Stay dry,” Litton says wryly as the bow leaps and crests each wave at his whim. After a half-hour of steady paddling, Litton makes for shore and a chance to reflect on the run with passengers and crew of Sundog Expeditions.
“Isn’t it great to be out here on this river without evidence of human disturbance?”
The white-bearded Litton asks, surveying the towering ponderosa pines that surround our camp. this place is typical of the hundreds of places he has guided and worked tirelessly to protect for more than 50 years.
The Grande Ronde and many of the most popular whitewater rivers up and down the western U.S. are relatively undisturbed because of Litton’s uncompromising efforts to stop dams and development. He takes people down rivers for thrilling adventure, but more importantly for him, to educate them about the West’s endangered places and entice them to join the fight. He spins captivating river-running stories and charismatic wilderness sermons while rowing passengers in his dory or holding court around the campfire.
“Every person that Martin Litton has taken down these rivers is another brick in the wall of protection that’s going to ward off the dam builders, timber industry and developers,” says Ric Bailey, a river guide and environmentalist who has worked with Litton for the last 20 years.
This afternoon along the Grande Ronde is no exception. Litton is enlisting his audience to help him in a number of battles, from stopping logging in California’s Giant sequoia National Monument to opposing dams that are driving the Pacific Northwest’s wild salmon to extinction.
His track record is impressive.
He’s led successful fights to stop dams that would have thwarted the Colorado River’s free-flowing run through the Grand Canyon, flooded Dinosaur National Monument and blockaded the Lower Salmon River in Idaho. Along the way, Litton started Grand Canyon Dories in the 1960s—the first outfitter to offer strictly oar-powered trips through the Grand Canyon—and taught generations of guides to row and to fight for the wild waters they may otherwise have taken for granted.
Litton, now 91, is the oldest person to row the Grand Canyon and has no plans to stop running whitewater rivers—not only because he loves the challenge, but because he believes there’s so much work left to do.
“This is what counts,” Litton says as he settles back behind the oars, “saving every bit of wild country that’s left.”
This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.
