John Ladue Williams belonged to one of Moab’s legacy families, and he left his own enduring mark on the community through NavTec, the guide business he founded and operated for decades. Williams passed away on June 5, 2025 at age 78. Friends remember him as visionary, meticulous, generous, and stubborn, and with an unceasing love for the Moab landscape.
“I don’t know anybody who has trained or been involved with as many guides as he has,” said Brian Martinez, current general manager at NavTec, who knew Williams for over 20 years.
When Martinez joined full-time in 2006, there were about eight guides at NavTec. Now there are about 50 guides running river and 4×4 tours, and many more have worked for the company over the years. Williams came into the NavTec office every day up until the last year of his life, keeping an eye on the operations and enjoying guides’ trip reports. He was a revered source of knowledge and wisdom, and could also be a stern and demanding employer.
“When I first came here, there was a guide who had forgotten a tent on a trip, and some customers had to double up,” Martinez remembered. When the guide returned to the office, Williams “chased him out with a broom,” and not in a playful way, Martinez said. But Williams was also generous, often buying breakfast for his employees from Burger King and helping struggling guides through hard times.
Blaine Reniger (a contributor to this magazine) started working in the NavTec office in the fall of 2018. He was in town for a visit and hadn’t planned on staying, but on a gut feeling applied for a job at NavTec. Williams was behind the counter when Reniger walked in.
“Can I help you?” Williams asked.
“Yes sir, I want to work here,” Reniger replied.
“Pfft,” Williams scoffed. “Why?”
Reniger persisted, and Williams came out from behind the counter.
“He was circling me like a shark, asking me the most random questions,” Reniger recalled. “I thought, ‘What kind of interview is this?’”
Williams did hire him, and Reniger worked in the office through that winter. Reniger is a history buff and founder of the local nonprofit History Moab, and relished tales of “old Moab” as much as Williams enjoyed telling them. But he was surprised by Moab’s cold winter temperatures—a North Carolina native with no prior knowledge of the desert, he thought it would be warm year-round—and he also didn’t know that tourism would drop to almost nothing.
“All I had was my van, I had no money,” Reniger said. He told Williams he didn’t know how he was going to pay for his bills and groceries. Williams gave him a few hundred dollars out of his own pocket to get him through the winter.
“He was a very, very giving person,” Reniger said. “It was really awesome to be able to see that side of him,” even though he was also familiar with the broom-wielding side of Williams’ personality.
The Family Business
Williams learned the tourism business early. His father, Mitch Williams, ran one of the first commercial outfitters, Tag-a-long Tours, in the 60s, taking visitors on river and backcountry tours. John Williams started running commercial tours for the family business when he was just a teenager.
“The day he got his driver’s license, he was running tours,” said Reniger, who is now assistant general manager at NavTec.
Williams had even deeper roots in Moab: his grandfather, John W. Williams, was Moab’s first official doctor, known as “Doc.” In addition to providing medical care, Doc Williams had a ranch and rode horses all over canyon country to visit his patients, developing deep familiarity with the landscape. Doc Williams also promoted tourism and the establishment of Arches National Monument; he was friends with Bates Wilson, who advocated for the establishment of Canyonlands National Park. Wilson once scolded a young John L. Williams for leaving dirt bike tracks in the backcountry, and made him go rake them all out.
Williams followed the family passion for canyon country. He loved to ride his motorcycle in the red rocks, explore old roads, run the river, and discover secret, beautiful spots.
Williams joined the Army at age 18 and was stationed in Panama. After that he studied chemical engineering at University of Utah, then returned to Moab and Tag-a-long. He ran tours around Moab, ran the Grand Canyon as a support boat for research trips, and guided overland tours in Baja California, sharing his discoveries with clients. He married Chris Wanke (they later separated) and had two children, Angela and Wes. Angela later worked for a time at NavTec.
NavTec
Williams started NavTec in 1987. He and a friend had an idea—joining the rigid hulls from jet boats to the inflatable sponsons of the soft-bottomed rubber boats they were using to run white water. They experimented with the design and eventually perfected the rigid-hulled inflatable boat, or RHIB, also called a sport boat. It was an innovation in white-water travel and the inspiration for the name of the company, which is short for Navigational Technology.
“I don’t know if he knew exactly how good of a boat he was building,” Martinez said. “It’s incredible.”
A seasoned river-runner, Martinez described how the sport boat is both more agile and more durable in rapids than soft-bottomed rafts. NavTec is still using some of those boats, built in the early 90s, to run commercial trips.
A National Park Service boat builder even took at look at Williams’ boats for inspiration. Skeptical at first of the battered, well-worn boats, he was later impressed by videos of them on the river.
“He was like, ‘I didn’t know boats could do that,’” Martinez said. The model remains a landmark in white-water technology.
“You have the guy who built the J-rig, you have the guy who built the S-rig…. John will always be known for the sport, for the RHIB,” Martinez said.
Williams was also skilled at running white water, and even set a speed record. In 1993, Williams and two other Moab boaters, John Weisheit and Clyde Deal, got a permit for the Grand Canyon.
“It was right in the middle of the season and they knew they couldn’t take off all that time to go down, so they decided they were going to go run a one-day Grand Canyon trip,” Martinez said.
They put in at Lee’s Ferry at first light, but by mid-morning, they had damaged their motor by hitting it on a rock. They floated down one of the most intimidating lines in Bedrock Rapid and pulled over at a beach where some other boaters had set up camp. There they ran into Kenton Grua, a member of the party that had set the speed record for the Grand Canyon in 1983, ten years earlier (that record was set in a wooden dory, and documented in the book The Emerald Mile).
“Kenton Grua was like, ‘Oh, you’re here to beat my record?’” Martinez recounted. “They’re like, ‘Not really, we just wanted to run a one-day Grand Canyon trip.’”
Williams and his companions fixed up their boat and got going again, and soon realized that if they hustled, they could, in fact, beat Grua’s record. They finished the trip in 35 hours and 43 minutes, beating the record by 55 minutes.
Williams also became known for his fleet of Toyota Land Cruisers, which began with just one purchased in 2008. They gradually acquired more, modifying them at the shop and experimenting with the best tweaks to bring clients out into Moab’s terrain.
“Next thing you know, we just have this gigantic fleet, 25 of these things, and they’re all unique,” Martinez said. “We have so much fun naming them—they’re all named after places you find on that map. Lockhart, Angel Arch, Sweet Alice, Hell Roaring, Big Drop, Dollhouse, Syncline, Hell to Pay…”
Those were more than just places on the map for Williams. He had an intimate knowledge of the remote corners of the landscape.
“He still knew the places well enough that he could describe them down to the finest details,” Martinez said, not just of the Moab area but of Baja and the Grand Canyon as well. “It’s like you were going on an adventure with him right here in this office.”
The ability to memorize and visualize details was a defining characteristic of Williams. Not only could he remember routes and locations in the wilderness and the optimal lines through rapids, he could also picture things that had never been and bring them to life—a new kind of boat, a new kind of tour, or a very specific way of running a schedule or a trip.
“John always had a vision that nobody else did,” Martinez said. “He was a bit mad. He’d draw these drawings, and they would be upside-down while he was drawing them and in the fourth dimension.”
The drawings might have been of a backcountry route, or a diagram of a motor—Martinez couldn’t decipher them.
“I never understood his drawings, I could never do it,” he said, laughing. “Am I looking down, am I looking sideways? Is this a dissected view? I finally got to the point where I would just listen. I could follow what he was saying.”
In the last few years of his life, Williams’ health declined. He was diagnosed with cancer and with COPD. Breathing was increasingly difficult, and he couldn’t run the river or go into the backcountry anymore. Reniger made sure to give detailed accounts of all the trips he guided, giving Williams the vicarous experience that Williams had offered to others through storytelling.
“He was a very giving man, he had a very big heart,” Reniger said. “Despite all the funny stories of him getting grumpy, he had a big heart.”
Now Reniger tries to embody Williams’ attention to detail and high expectations for employees at the shop.
“I see a lot of traits that John had in Brian, I see a lot in myself, I see a lot in all these guys that have been around a long time and that knew him best,” Reniger said. “He left behind a really good team.”
Martinez agreed that what Williams built at NavTec is profound.
“He loved this place, man. He dug it,” Martinez said. “It’s more than just an outfit.” He mused on all the events—birthday parties, trauma shared, beers cracked, fights in the back yard—that had unfolded at the NavTec shop.
“It’s more than just a business,” Martinez said. “It’s a lot. It’s a lot of stuff that’s happened here. And he was involved in it all.”
Feature Image and additional photos courtesy of Brian Martinez.
