Rollin' Down the River: Living in Moab on a River Guide's Salary

Rollin’ Down the River: Living in Moab on a River Guide’s Salary

Most guides are Millennials in their early twenties, so a willingness to disconnect from the world of iPhones, and forfeiting social media one-upmanship and material pursuits is essential. River guides trade material comfort for a spiritual connection. Many are curious souls who quote prose and dabble in mysticism and Carl Jung. But what happens when…

Shannan Butler

February 16, 2020

What does it take to become a river guide in Moab?

Christian Wright

As a child, Christian Wright’s father was an attorney in Atlanta, who took him on adventures every chance he had. “I was fortunate to have a father who spent all his free time doing something with boats or rivers,” he says. Wright‘s affection for guiding started early in life by doing things like guiding his mom from their backyard up the creek near their house when he was around nine or ten.

After graduation from high school and completing his college degree, Wright set off on a road trip headed west. While fishing in the Rocky Mountains, he punched a hole in his oil pan on a rock. As he waited at a Denver repair shop, he met a man who told him about the “Arches” in southeastern Utah. Wright should have ventured to Moab then and there, but he went on other adventures instead, working and living in other towns.

Finding the way to Moab

Wright eventually found his way to Moab and started work as a river guide, living out of the back of his truck. A couple of years later, he earned his Master’s Degree and worked five years full-time as a NPS Park Ranger and part-time as a river guide. He hung up his park ranger hat in 2018 and began river guiding full-time in 2019. In between all that, he said he was “adopted” by his girlfriend, and told a joke common among the guides around Moab. While it’s true that guides don’t make a lot of money, Wright acknowledges that it’s a fair trade. “How many people get THIS (arms stretched out, looking joyfully around at Moab’s grand scenery) for an office?”

Living and working in Moab

“At my company this summer, there were three of us who had a roof over our heads that didn’t have wheels,” Wright chuckles, explaining that it was “a combination of luck, support, and tenacity” that he and his girlfriend were able to purchase a home in Moab from friends who were willing to sell it to them below market cost. Thankfully, their families were able to help them with a down payment.

They enjoy a large yard that allows them to grow their own food in the summer, and they save money by hunting and making their own home repairs. Wright works the occasional odd job. His girlfriend has a year-round, full-time job, and because Wright is able to collect unemployment during the off-season (usually 4 months), they are able to live and work in Moab.

“Moab is my home and this is where I love to work,” says Wright, who enjoys river guiding on the Colorado River near Moab, and through the Cataract and Grand Canyons during tourist season. He has explored the Yampa River, Desolation Canyon, and the Green River near Dinosaur National Monument.

Useful skills

Wright continues learning new skills so he can further his experiences in rafting. He and his father have explored the lower, rarely run sections of the Chattahoochee, and Georgia’s Black Water Creek. In the spring or fall of 2020, Wright hopes to run the Coosa System (Alabama), Flint & Ocmulgee (Georgia), French Broad (North Carolina), and the Nolichucky (North Carolina & Tennessee) rivers.

Wright says guiding isn’t hard because it encompasses all types of people with varying personalities, goals, values, and vices. Aside from having valid CPR and First Aid Cards, there are skills and traits that are useful, like being energetic, agile, observant, having a desire to learn, being a self-starter, following instructions, managing groups and team leading, communicating well, being adaptive, having a great smile, performing excellent customer service, and the most important skill of all—being able to cook and make a great cup of coffee.

If you want to make yourself more marketable, expose yourself to the many aspects of rafting. It will make you a more capable, confident person and guide. Wright suggests taking a Wilderness First Responder course and earning your certification, or taking a swift water rescue course. Learn how to tie knots and downstream angle. Learn to raft in different seasons—including winter. Run as many rivers as you can. Paddle and hike everything, because the more you learn about all aspects of river rafting—guiding, nature, navigation, geography, wildlife, plant life, and the like—the more marketable you will be.

Wright admonishes that “if you see your fellow nature-deprived men and women out there, addicted to iPhones and social media, desperately seeking some kind of authentic connection to the natural world and to other human beings, try to empathize with their condition. If you can see something of yourself in their plight, and you are the kind of person who wants to take them with you and show them something better, then you might be a guide.”

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In the late 1950s, Edward Abbey took a job as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, just outside Moab. What he found there, and what he watched happen to it, would shape the rest of his life. Roads were being cut into the canyon country. Cars were replacing foot traffic. The National Park Service, in the name of accessibility, was engineering a kind of industrialization of the wilderness he’d come to love. Abbey wrote about it in Desert Solitaire, published in 1968, and the anger in that book wasn’t abstract. It came from watching something specific be changed by people who either didn’t understand what they had or didn’t care.

Grand County has long been the most reliably left-leaning county in the state, a fact that puts it in sharp contrast to nearly everything around it. To understand how that happened, and where things stand now, I spoke with longtime residents and politicians who’ve watched it from the inside, people who’ve served in local government and lived through the shifts firsthand.

Robert Greenberg.

Bob Greenberg came from New York in 1976, took a job at the community mental health center, and never left. He went on to chair the Grand County Democratic Party and serve on the county council. When he arrived, he said, “the Democratic Party was said to be able to meet in a phone booth” — and even then, its members were a contradictory bunch. Yellow Dog Democrats from the oil patch were fiscally conservative but surprisingly open socially, allowing different demographics to feel safe moving to the county.

“The town fathers were desperate to have new people come to town,” Greenberg recalls. “They just didn’t want the people who actually showed up. They wanted some other people.”

What followed was a demographic shift nobody planned. The people who filled the gap left by the bust were river guides, federal agency workers, artists, and eventually waves of outdoor recreationists discovering that southeastern Utah was among the most spectacular landscapes on earth. Tourism ended up being the only economic development avenue that actually worked. Manufacturing never had the labor force or market access, sewing factories came and went. The people the tourist economy attracted tended to be younger, more outdoor-oriented, and more liberal.

Kevin Walker.

Kevin Walker, a former Grand County commissioner who moved here in 1990 for the landscape, puts the county’s diversity in context. “Moab [is] a pretty diverse place since, I think, at least the 1950s with the uranium mining boom,” he says. “So it’s not a typical Southern Utah town.”

Part of what makes Grand County distinct is self-reinforcing. Federal agencies like the Park Service, the Forest Service, the BLM, have large presences here and pull in a different demographic than surrounding counties. People looking to live in Southern Utah with certain values gravitate toward the place where those values already have a foothold. Over time, that critical mass has made Grand County what it is politically, while neighboring counties went in very different directions.

The defining conflict in Grand County has always been over land.

In the 1970s and 80s, it was extraction versus preservation in the starkest terms. County commissioners floated toxic waste incinerators. A plan emerged to site a high-level nuclear waste repository at the entrance to Canyonlands National Park.

“It really, really galvanized environmentalists everywhere, but particularly in Grand County,” Greenberg says. Activists put up signs at the park entrance, watched them get chainsawed down, and came back with steel reinforcement. That stubborn, physical, unglamorous persistence became part of the local political character.

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