Glen and Bessie Hyde

In the autumn of 1928, two newlyweds set out to do something no woman had ever done.

Glen and Bessie Hyde had been married for only a few months. They had built their own boat — a flat-bottomed wooden scow, about twenty feet long, with long sweep oars at either end. And they had decided to spend their honeymoon floating it down the Green River and the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, all the way to Needles, California.

If they made it, Bessie would be the first woman known to run the entire length of the canyon’s rapids. They hoped the trip would make them famous. They planned to write a book, go on the lecture circuit, and make their fortune telling the story.

They almost made it. And then they vanished, somewhere in the last stretch of the canyon, leaving behind a boat that was still floating, upright, with all their supplies aboard.

Glen and Bessie

Glen Hyde was twenty-nine, a farmer from Twin Falls, Idaho, who had done some river running on rivers in Idaho and Canada. He was confident, ambitious, and, some who met him later said, a little reckless.

Bessie Haley was twenty-two, an art student and poet from West Virginia who had moved to California. She was small, slender and quiet. The two had met on a ship traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco. They married in April 1928, after Bessie divorced her first husband.

The Grand Canyon was one of the most dangerous stretches of river in the world. In 1928, only a few dozen people had ever run it. Its rapids were terrifying — walls of churning brown water crashing over boulders, in a canyon a mile deep. Most river parties carried life jackets and used sturdy boats built for whitewater.

The Hydes didn’t carry life jackets.

The River

They launched their scow on the Green River in Utah on October 20, 1928. They moved fast. Over the next few weeks, they floated through Labyrinth and Stillwater canyons, down to the confluence with the Colorado, through Cataract Canyon, past Lees Ferry, and into the Grand Canyon itself.

On November 16, about halfway through the canyon, they stopped at Bright Angel Creek, near the bottom of the Bright Angel Trail. They hiked up to the canyon’s South Rim to buy supplies and visit Grand Canyon Village.

There, they met Emery Kolb, a famous photographer and river runner who, with his brother Ellsworth, had run the Grand Canyon himself years earlier. Kolb was impressed by their speed. He was worried about their boat and their lack of life jackets. He reportedly offered them life jackets. Glen declined.

A tourist who met them on the rim, a man named Adolph Sutro, joined them for a short ride on the river below. He later said that Bessie seemed tired and unhappy, and that she told him she wished she had a nice pair of shoes and a normal life. According to one account, she looked at her shoes and said she wondered whether she would ever wear nice shoes again.

On November 18, Glen and Bessie pushed off from the bottom of the Bright Angel Trail and continued downriver. They were seen by a few people over the following days.

Then they were never seen again.

The Scow

When the Hydes didn’t arrive in Needles as expected in early December, Glen’s father, Rollin Hyde, raised the alarm. A search was organized. Emery and Ellsworth Kolb joined it. So did the U.S. Army Air Corps, which sent planes to fly over the canyon — one of the first aerial searches of its kind.

On December 19, searchers spotted the Hydes’ boat, floating upright and undamaged in a calm stretch of the river near Mile 237, in the lower part of the canyon. Its bow line was tangled in rocks, holding it in place.

Everything was still aboard: their supplies, their clothes, their guns, Bessie’s camera, and a diary. The last entry in Glen’s diary was dated November 30.

Of Glen and Bessie, there was no trace.

The Theories

What happened to the Hydes has never been explained.

The most likely explanation is that they died in the river. Perhaps one of them fell overboard in a rapid, and the other jumped in to save them. Perhaps they both went in while scouting or lining the boat through a dangerous stretch. Without life jackets, in the cold, swift water of the Colorado in winter, they would have had little chance.

But other theories emerged over the years, some of them extraordinary.

Some people speculated that Bessie, unhappy and frightened, had killed Glen and hiked out of the canyon, starting a new life under another name. Decades later, in 1971, an elderly woman on a commercial river trip in the Grand Canyon reportedly told other passengers that she had been on a honeymoon trip down the river with her husband in 1928, that he had been abusive, and that she had stabbed him and escaped. Some believed she might be Bessie Hyde. Others thought she was joking.

Many people also wondered about Georgie White Clark, a legendary river guide who ran the Grand Canyon for decades. After she died in 1992, people going through her belongings reportedly found Glen and Bessie’s marriage certificate, a pistol, and a birth certificate in the name of Bessie Haley. Some concluded that Georgie had been Bessie all along. Researchers who looked into Georgie’s background found that she had a documented life history that didn’t fit, and most dismiss the idea.

And there was one more strange discovery. After Emery Kolb died in 1976, a skeleton was found in a boat in his garage at Grand Canyon, with a bullet hole in the skull. Some wondered if it might be Glen Hyde. Forensic examination determined that the remains belonged to a much younger man, who had died much later, and they were not Glen.

Lost in the Canyon

The story of Glen and Bessie Hyde has haunted river runners in the Grand Canyon for nearly a century. Guides tell it around the campfire at night. Their story has inspired books, a novel and documentaries.

I think the image that stays with me is the scow, floating peacefully in a quiet eddy of the river, with everything still on board. A young couple’s whole life, packed into a wooden boat: their food, their clothes, their camera, their plans for a book and a future. And no one there to tell the story.