Grand Canyon river runner who had fire in her soul

She was a wild woman who fell in love with the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River the first time she saw it on a Sierra Club outing.

But hiking canyon country wasn’t enough for Georgie White Clark. In 1945 and ‘46, she and her buddy Harry Aleson swam parts of the river from Diamond Creek and Parashant Wash with little more than life jackets and pocketfuls of hard candy, washing out in Lake Mead.

Then she bought a rubber Army surplus boat and started taking passengers through the great gorge of the Colorado, with no frills, just canned ham and lima beans. She wore leopard-spotted leggings, usually had a beer in hand and taught her clients to say, “Everything is just the way we like it,” even if the beans and getting dumped in the river at Lava or Crystal rapids weren’t quite what they wanted.

Georgie didn’t like whiners.

But she did like the Los Angeles Fire Department. Members of the force worked for Georgie almost from the time she started on the river in the early ‘50s until summer 1991, a year before she died of stomach cancer.

The origins of Georgie’s connection with the Fire Department are obscure. She lived in L.A., and, if things had been different in postwar America, she could have been a crack firefighter.

Harry Stires, an 87-year-old LAFD retiree who lives in Silver Lake, thinks a deputy chief may have been the first L.A. firefighter to go down the river with Georgie, somewhere around 1950.

After that, word spread in the department. Though Georgie didn’t pay, her firemen/oarsmen were happy to join her for the amazing ride. Spending two or three weeks on the river with her became summer camp for some L.A. firefighters. Stires worked for Georgie from 1952 to 1968. “I never knew her when she wasn’t in charge,” Stires says. “She was ornery, but I dearly loved her.”

That sums up Georgie’s conflicted legacy. She was adored for her deep understanding of the river and despised for her devil-may-care attitude. It’s said she left dirty campsites, snubbed female passengers and wasn’t careful enough. When an initiative arose to name a rapid after her, some river runners objected, saying she contributed little to the region’s history and lore compared with such pioneers as John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who ran the Colorado in 1869.

But in 2001, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names turned 24 Mile Rapid into Georgie Rapid.

It’s hard to say whether this would have pleased her. But I suspect that Pat Tierney, an L.A. firefighter for 28 years who died last November and who was one of Georgie’s boatmen from 1976 to 1985, relished it.

Tierney’s widow, Mary Jean Tierney of Albuquerque, just sent his ashes down the river with friends to be scattered at Hermit Rapid. “It isn’t like Lava or Crystal, but it was his favorite,” she says. “He just liked the ride.”

Mary Jean met Pat on a Georgie trip in 1977. She and her sister decided Pat looked like the most reliable boatman of the lot, even though he was wearing a T-shirt that said “Libidinous.”

Apparently the firefighters knew how to party, as did Georgie. More important, they could keep her boats afloat through whatever the river threw at them. They could patch up almost anything, work together and keep their heads.

“Whatever the odds, we used our resources to overcome adversity,” says Ray Olsen, an L.A. firefighter who worked with Georgie from 1969 to 1983. “Sometimes, on the river, we had to spend hours patching boats. Sometimes the food was only palatable. But she said we were special because, no matter what, we made a good time.”

Tom Prange, an L.A. firefighter who took Georgie to see the river for the last time before she died, reminded me that river running was different in her day, before the advent of Glen Canyon Dam and rules imposed by the National Park Service.

“Once you started, there was no way to get out,” he told me. “In a group of 100, there would be a few disgruntled passengers. You might not like to sleep in the sand, but it was really a personal decision whether you had fun or not.”

Stires recalls a time when a passenger fell off a cliff. “He busted his head open,” Stires says. “It looked like a broken egg. But there was a doc from Stanford on the trip. It was amazing. We almost always had a doctor; Georgie arranged that.”

L.A. firefighters made a stretcher out of oars and shot 72 miles of the testy Colorado in one day to meet a rescue helicopter.

Georgie always sought the edge and cottoned to firefighters attracted to it too. Rosalyn Jirge, one of the few women Georgie took a liking to and employed, said Georgie traveled through the Grand Canyon with L.A. firefighters “because they were physically strong, fearless, knew how to work as a team, were well trained in rescues and really knew how to have a good time.”

Teresa Yates, who also worked for Georgie, says river guides must be adventurous, outgoing and intense. They also must have a strong ego. Georgie certainly did -- as big as the trough between the North and South rims of the Grand Canyon.

Her firefighting comrades, however, are quiet about their achievements on the thrashing river. I guess that’s a fireman thing, Lord love them.

Lord love Georgie of the Colorado River too.