Outfitters Lou Elliott and Bryce Whitmore having a moment on Camp Nine Road in 1968

Ty Childress (who guided for Bryce in the late 1960s and Sierra Mac thereafter) writes:  I took this picture of Lou Elliott (ARTA owner) and Bryce Whitmore one time when we stopped on the Camp Nine Road on the way to put in. I don’t think Bryce was too happy about my aiming my camera at the pair. When I asked Bryce if he resented Lou beginning trips on the Stanislaus (in 1965), and he claimed no, not any more than the many other companies who followed his lead. But I think he didn’t care for the way Lou micromanaged Bryce’s efforts as his area manager.

Bryce and Lou Elliot used to lead kayak trips for the Sierra Club River Touring Section in the late 1950s. After Bryce’s house in El Sobrante burned down, he took the $5,000 insurance payout and decided to spend the year exploring rivers.

Since, by then, Lou was running a Jon boat rig with 24-foot pontoons on either side through Glenn Canyon, on the Columbia, below Niagara Falls, and on the Sea of Cortez, Bryce accepted a job as Lou’s Area Manager. His first job was to paint Lou’s gear truck, then he started driving the Jon boat rig for Lou in Glenn Canyon. Bryce was on the trip when Dave Brower first realized what he’d traded away in exchange for the Bureau of Recreation deauthorizing the proposed Echo Park Dam in Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument. He stopped compromising after that.

When they were running the Columbia River together, Lou flipped in a hole and took a nasty swim. Bryce picked up Lou’s wife, Claire, and caught up to him a few miles downstream, sitting on the bank.

In 1965, Martin Litton wrote a story about Wilderness Water Ways’ Stanislaus run in Sunset Magazine. Martin was the magazine’s travel editor while my dad, Clyde Childress, was the staff photographer. After the story appeared, Bryce’s reservations took a rapid uptick, but it also tempted a slew of new outfitters to begin running trips on the Stanislaus. Lou was Bryce’s first competitor, Bryce having started his company just four years earlier.