When I was around 11 years old, my Dad spotted a silver and black Kent guitar in the window of Friedman’s Pawn Shop. A full hour later, after some wicked wheelin’ and dealin’, it was wrapped in a bed sheet in the back of the car. When he brought it home, I was surprised beyond all reason and I set out to play the three or four chords that I knew in loud and glorious fashion. Problem was, though… I had no amplifier. At first I was convinced that this was his plan all along, for obvious reasons. But gradually I came to realize that he’d gone and spent his money on other, less important things… like food and clothes and stuff. And when you blow your paycheck on things like that, you just can’t afford to buy a good amplifier when you need one. And I needed one. In an effort to make something happen, and still be able to pay the light bill, Dad cast his frugal and inventive eye on our old Slivertone portable phonograph.

Some of you remember vinyl records and the machines built to play them. This one was portable in the same sense that a mobile home is mobile… the thing weighed in the neighborhood of 40 lbs and was about the size of a small chest freezer. Covered in silver vinyl with white piping, it sported a flat metal control panel with plastic knobs that looked like big throat lozenges. Its phonograph mechanism has long since ceased to operate, having been worn to shreds by years of Hank Williams tears and whiskey, Marty Robbins gunfighter ballads, Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, and the syrupy strains of The Mystic Moods Orchestra. But when you turned on the power, you were rewarded with a little static, then a fat, healthy hum… meaning that there was life in there if you could only find a way to get at it. So into the trunk of the car it went.

Now my Dad was an Ironworker. For those of you unfamiliar with that particular breed of men, it refers to guys who climb perilously up an unfinished steel structure, clinging to whatever they can while feverishly bolting yet more structure on top of that. All so they could climb yet higher, cling tighter, and bolt even more feverishly the next day… and this they would repeat all day, every day. You would think that this type of work would breed fearlessness, and in truth he didn’t fear much… except maybe my mother. But my ol’ man was scared silly of electricity. And with good reason. I had recently seen him lying on his back holding a melted and smoldering screwdriver in his trembling hand after attempting to hook up a welding machine in his shop. He had a right to be scared. That stuff’ll kill ya.

But he had a buddy who had harnessed the mysterious ways of the electron and, after a mail-order tutorial or two, had gone so far as to open a TV repair shop in the neighborhood. Ted’s TV Repairs, proudly displaying Ted’s mail-order diplomas on the wall, was a place permeated by the smell of hot solder and fried picture tubes. It was to this place that Dad traveled with our unsuspecting phonograph.

They worked through most of the day on that thing. They worked their way through most of a case of Pearl, too. And when he brought it back to the house, he was as proud as a new Papa. There it was, resplendent in its art-deco motif, some 25 years before that would become cool. No longer was it a phonograph, but now a thing of wonder and imagination. Right there, on the control panel between the BALANCE and TONE knobs, winked a shiny new ¼” input jack.

I plugged it up and turned it ON, kicked the volume knob about halfway up and WOW… I was rewarded with a sure ‘nuff guitar sound! A little thin and watery, perhaps, but clear, twangy, and fairly loud.  OK… so far, so good. But you know I had to, sooner or later. I grabbed that cheesy plastic VOLUME know and cranked it up all the way. Our mild-mannered old phonograph sort of hunkered down on its vinyl-clad haunches and let out a beastly roar! It was ALIVE, and its long-fettered electronic insides were unleashed and imbued with a new and frightening purpose.

We’re not talking Marshall here. This was not the chunky growl of a well-heeled guitar amp. No, this was uncivilized, uncontrolled, and unmitigated grunge… long before such was the vogue. The strings on that old Kent were thrumming with power. Every note was bathed in endless, fuzzy sustain. My parents fled the room in horror… away from the tortured whine of their once-loved appliance.  While I, as its newly proclaimed master, stayed behind and flirted brazenly with the beast. It was sign of things to come and that cheesy little VOLUME knob seldom strayed from its position at “10”.

Of course, the old Silvertone didn’t last long under such conditions. It was never meant to be subjected to such extremes, and its little phonograph circuitry kept stroking out until even Ted’s mail-order wizardry could no longer revive it. By then, Dad had come by an old Harmony amp actually designed for guitar and I was in the tall cotton. But no matter how I tweaked it, I was never quite able to duplicate the balls-out attitude of that old piece of furniture. (I came pretty close a couple of weeks ago when the innards of my old Tube Screamer decided to self-destruct, but it only lasted a couple of minutes.)  It was far from a perfect tone, but it was a starting point to what would become an obsession.

Several decades… and countless amplifiers, FX gadgets, and stomp-boxes later… I’m still looking for The Ultimate Tone. My quest has far out-paced King Arthur’s passing affair with The Holy Grail. Hey, when you start out playing through a converted phonograph you gotta move ahead. The expense has been high, but the fringe benefits have been pretty good… I’ve had the opportunity to play with some really neat stuff along the way. And since my Quest isn’t over, who knows what’s next?

Cool. Sounds good, doesn't it. Kind of a macho, manly, hiking-boot, flannel shirt sorta thing.

Suddenly, you envision yourself there in a group photo with Lee Marvin, James Coburn, Earnest Hemingway, and Steve McQueen. There, against a backdrop of blue skies and rugged mountains, your windburnt faces smile through week-old beards as you clap each other on the back hard enough to bring up the biscuits and hardtack you ate for lunch.

"Mother Nature's tough, ain't she boys? But she ain't tough enough to whup the likes of us!" Cries of "Bully, Bully!" echo through the primeval forest. Your eyes moisten at the acrid odor of testosterone fumes.

The reality, though, is a bit more... brutal.

We started down New Hance Trail at 8am, bound for the Colorado River, which lay some 12 miles away and 1 mile down into the single largest hole in the ground to be found anywhere in the world. I had convinced a friend to come along.

Darrell, who was against the whole adventure from the very beginning, looked over the South Rim of the canyon trying to locate our path downward. There it was, a faint trail meandering its way down the canyon wall. A mountain goat couldn't make it down that, much less a couple of aging flatlanders with beer-bellies and bad knees.

"You're an idiot." he says. "And I'm an idiot for listening to you." I could only agree. But down we went.

There were 5 people in our party... Jeff, JoAnn and Marshall were veteran hikers and climbers who were used to this kind of adventure. Then there was Darrell and myself. Our idea of vacation fun usually includes the three B's... Boats, Budweisers, and Beaches. This time, though, it looked we'd have to settle for Blisters, Backpacks, and Bottled Water. To make matters worse, our wives had laughed at us and told us we were way too out of shape to do this. They were right, of course, but it became a matter of principal when we found out they'd doubled our life insurance policies. Hah! We'd either show 'em, or we'd make 'em wealthy...one of the two. We didn't ask which one they'd prefer.

It took over twelve hours to get down to the river. The others were very patient with us... they'd go a ways and sit down to wait for us to catch up. Then, pausing a moment or two for some derisive laughter, they'd move on. Eight hours into the journey, Darrell quit bitchin'. Not because he ran out of stuff to say, he just didn't have the wind to say it. Two hours later we were both out of water and the others were nowhere in sight. We could hear the river roaring off in the distance, but it remained out of reach. We trudged along a dry creek bed trying to follow the trail left by our fellow sufferers who had run out of water, too, and were making for the river as fast as they could. They were no longer laughing... nor waiting. When we finally rounded a bend and saw the muddy Colorado ahead, we tried to cheer but all we could mange was a dry croak or two. It would have to do.

We camped for two nights at Hance Rapids. It took that long before my legs would even function again. If climbing in and out of the tent was so painful, how the hell did I expect to climb out of this, the very butt-crack of the earth? The cliffs around us were absolutely magnificent, but they were mere foothills compared to the actual canyon walls off in the distance.

We camped in a little grove of cedar trees overlooking the river. We had a little trouble coaxing drinkable water from the river because it was very silty from all the rain they'd had upstate. The cocoa-colored water plugged every filter we had and, after working at it most of the night, we only had a couple of gallons to show for the effort. We had passed some small pools of water in the "dry" creek bed we stumbled down the day before, so Jeff and Marshall humped back up there to try and find that. Meanwhile, Darrell (who makes water for a living) limped down the river a found a little spring there. Between these two sources, we squeezed enough drinkable water to keep us going. The days were unbearably hot, and the river was much too cold to actually swim in. But, through experimentation, I found that I could sit in the sun all day as long as I had my hat on and my feet in the water.

Throughout the day, rafters and kayakers drifted by... pitting their skills against the angry water there at Hance Rapids. We tried to flag them down... Darrel and I had close to a thousand bucks between us and we would have given them all or part of it to haul our asses out of there in aquatic elegance. There were no takers, however. Darrell would look out toward Grandview (our point of exit some 20 miles away) and recount his various opinions about my ancestry and my intelligence. He assured me that we would all suffer greatly before we reached the rim again, and that he'd never ever let me forget it.

Dawn of the third day found us breaking camp and shouldering our backpacks once again. We were headed toward an obscure mountain oasis called Miner's Spring, supposedly four and a half hours away from the river. The trek started out OK, with the trail sloping gently upward over and around the canyon walls. Five hours later were, again, out of water and nowhere near Miner's Spring. Darrell had reverted to muttering curses under his breath, not wanting to waste the moisture required for normal speech. This was it. We would all fall out from dehydration on this uncaring, hardscrabble footpath overlooking some nameless dry creek bed. We were pondering the irony of our imminent demise when we happened to notice a little grove of willow trees growing at the bottom of the creek bed. Willows really like water and we thought how strange it was that we would run across some in the middle of this desert. Then the relentless sun glittered off something else in the creek bed... there amidst the gravel was a tiny stream of the coolest, clearest, best tasting H2O that you'd ever want to meet.

We gorged ourselves on the stuff and filled every water bottle we had. Then we walked downstream to a shady place where we happened upon another group of intrepid travelers who'd just come down the trail we were heading up. There were three ladies, one of which was a professional guide, and an older man who said he was “in training”, but never said for what. The guide was a petite, sun-bronzed California girl who did this kind of thing for a living, when she wasn’t attending the University of California at Sacramento. I thought she would look far more at home in a Ferrari than a backpack, but here she was. One of the girls wore a loose tank top and spoke with a heavy Latin accent. She wandered demurely around our group, making sure each of us got a good look at her small, but well-formed, breasts. We smiled in appreciation, but our fatigued and dehydrated libidos were not much aroused. (Want to impress us? Show us ice. Show us a cold beer. Show us a shortcut outa here. Then yu’ll have our attention!)

The third female was a tiny, reticent Asian lady who seemed determined not to look or speak to any of us. Considering how we must have smelled, she was probably the most honest person in the group. We mentioned to the leader how glad we were to be at Miner's Spring... she looked at us sort of funny and told us that this was Hance Creek. Miner's Spring was another 2 hours away... “Straight up that cliff over there.” she pointed.

"How bad is it?" we asked.

"Its bad," she said, eyeing Darrell and myself. “Real bad.” So up we went.

As she had promised, the trail got hairy in a hurry. In no time, we were looking straight down at the little grove of willows and the mysterious people we’d met there. I was terrified for long periods of time... thousands of feet of nothing on one side, rock walls on the other, and only a narrow, gravel-covered footpath in between. And finally... down the narrowest. hairiest side trail of them all... we found Miner's Spring.

One normally thinks of an "oasis" as a shady, grassy area surrounded by featureless desert. Miner's Spring was shady, alright... shaded by sheer cliffs all around. The spring itself was a closet-sized crevice in the cliff wall that collected pure, clear spring water. You couldn't help but wonder how many thirsty travelers, both the two-legged and four-legged kind, have quenched their thirst within it's mossy confines. I knew of five for sure!

I was convinced we couldn't go on... or at least I couldn't. My legs felt like dead wood and I would've been very content to stretch out my sleeping bag on one of those big, flat granite boulders and let the gentle music of the spring lull me to sleep for the evening. But Jeff told me that I couldn't do that "because of the animals". He didn't elaborate. Now I'm wondering... would my presence have prevented all the small furry desert creatures from making their cautious way to the spring for their evening drink? Or would I have become dinner for the larger desert creatures who came there to eat the smaller ones? I never asked. I just crammed down a bowl of soup and gnawed on a couple of those awful Power Bars to try to regain enough strength to make another 2 or 3 hours ascent onto Horseshoe Mesa.

Along the way to Horseshoe Mesa we passed an old copper mine and I was curious how anyone managed to even find this place, much less mine it. The trail had steepened to a ridiculous angle and, in many places, was buried by rockslides... no doubt caused by idiots like myself who had slipped and fallen to their deaths from the endless trail above. The peril factor had increased along with our altitude. We no longer harbored any resentment toward our wives about the life insurance thing. In fact, I silently praised Jennifer for her good judgment and hoped I would live long enough to tell her so. But the sun was almost gone, and darkness was upon us. No time for contrition... we had to get on the mesa before nightfall.

Near the Mesa, at the steepest point, the path had been obliterated by falling boulders. We had to cling to the rock face using crevices and footholds to climb past 10 or 12 foot of missing trail... tough enough under any circumstances, but with a heavy backpack it seemed impossible. Only a heady mixture of fear and desperation could've have driven me to do such a thing. Luckily, there was plenty of both available.

That was it, though. The worst part of the journey was past. A short crawl through a dusty little cave, and we climbed out onto the relatively level ground of Horseshoe Mesa just as the sun dropped behind the canyon rim. OK! Drop the packs, high-fives for everyone, smoke 'em if you got 'em. We're still alive, but only halfway to the rim.

The final leg of our journey was on Grandview Trail. So far, all our travels had been over little used, unimproved, unmaintained footpaths. Grandview was supposedly a freeway compared to these... all we had to do was find it in the dark. Hindsight says we should've made camp there on the gentle slopes of the mesa. We had plenty of water and food, and our original plan called for watching the sunset whilst camping there on the Horseshoe. But we were smelling the barn, not to mention each other, and the lure of a cheeseburger and a hot bath drove us to find the trail and hike ourselves out of the canyon that very night. Again, we underestimated the distances involved.

Marshall found what he thought was the bottom end of Grandview Trail and we set out after him and JoAnn as they led the way. Soon we were, again, walking along the edge of a smaller canyon with a sheer drop on one side of the trail, and a steep rock wall on the other. Sure, the trail was wider... but now it was pitch dark and difficult to distinguish between where the ledge stopped and the abyss began. After an hour or so of this suicidal behavior, Darrell and I mutinied.

"Y'all can go on ahead if you want, but we ain't walking any more tonight!" Jeff didn't want to leave us, but we assured him we'd be OK. We smelled so bad that no predator would dare get near us, and we had plenty of provisions to make ourselves comfortable right where we were. He said that, since we were almost to the top, they'd get on out... then come back down at first light to give us a hand. It was 8pm, Canyon time. None of us knew it, but it would take them 6 more hours to get to Grandview Point.

As for us, we smoothed us off an area and spread our sleeping bags out on the trail. I found a spot where a small boulder sprouted up on the outside of the trail and I wedged myself between it and the rock face. Darrell did the same with a little cedar tree about 10 yards away. We munched on jerky and some of that god-awful "trail mix"... sipped on our dwindling supply of fresh spring water, and watched the moon rise full over the Canyon. It was an awesome sight. Soon the sound of snoring coon-asses reverberated through the primordial night, eerily echoing off the canyon walls. Against all odds, we awoke refreshed and ready to go at dawn.

The morning sun revealed a couple of things. One was the fact that we were not nearly as close to the top as we'd thought. The other was that there was no morning sun. Wet, gray clouds were rolling in and you could smell the rain in the air. Resigned to another day of torture, we trudged ever upward. The trail got better and better, but the weather turned on us. A cold wet wind blew in from the East and it was sprinkling rain. Grandview, meanwhile, had changed from a foot path to a huge rock-clad stairway zigzagging it's way straight up the canyon wall. It was slow going... we'd climb up one "rung" and rest, then another rung and rest, and so on until, three hours into the day, we saw our compadres headed down the trail toward us. Our only hope was that they hadn't actually started down at first light.

To our delight, we found that we were almost to the top. Through the wee hours of the morning, they had stumbled and crawled their way to the rim, reaching Grandview Point at 3 am. Exhausted, hungry, and thirsty, they'd had to take care of themselves before they could head back down to us. So they had only just started down when they spotted us a couple of hundred feet below, huffing and puffing our way upward. Marshall and JoAnn grabbed some of our stuff and led us the rest of the way up to the point. Tourists from all aver the world were pointing at us and chattering in exotic languages. Those downwind of us merely turned and ran for fresh air. Jeff waited at the top, nursing a couple of prize-winning blisters from the night before. As we reached the "Scenic Overlook", we dropped our packs and managed to smile for a group photo. Then off we went in search of hot water and cold beer.

The long drive back to Texas lay ahead, but we were undaunted. After all we'd been through, driving a couple of days didn't intimidate us much. That night in Flagstaff, we were working on a couple of Crazy Bill's finest Porterhouse steaks and a pitcher of cold Bud. On the big-screen, the Astros were dropping yet another playoff game.

"Still pissed off?" I asked Darrell over the cheers as Atlanta drove in another run.

"Nope." he says. "But next time, I’m planning the trip."

Fair enough.