Grand Obsession: Harvey Butchart and the Exploration of Grand Canyon by Elias Butler and Tom Myers

Grand Obsession
Harvey Butchart and the Exploration of Grand Canyon
By Elias Butler and Tom Myers

Order a copy from Puma Press - Official book website

My first book was published in 2007 titled Grand Obsession: Harvey Butchart and the Exploration of Grand Canyon. It's been named a 2007 Southwest Book of the Year and won an Independent Press Book Award (IPPY) for 2007 Best Regional Mountain West Non Fiction.

I co-wrote Grand Obsession with Dr. Tom Myers (Tom is also the co-author of the popular Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon). The book also contains many of my Grand Canyon photos.

Grand Obsession is the biography of Harvey Butchart (1907-2002). Butchart climbed, hiked, floated, and bushwhacked 12,000 pioneering miles below the rim during a 42-year obsession with the Grand Canyon. His passionate devotion to Southwest canyon country brought Butchart both acclaim and tragedy.

Here for the first time, after 15 years of research, is Butchart's life story: His years as a fatherless child in the mountains of China, his struggles in America during the Great Depression, his 30-year tenure with the Northern Arizona University Mathematics Department, and, finally, his all-consuming drive for greatness by exploring one of the last unknown geographies in the American West.

The story begins at mystical Mount Lushan National Park and the town of Kuling in Jiangxi Province in China, where I traveled in 2006. There's a trail I walked, where Butchart once traveled as a five-year-old, that leads from a handsome Western-style neighborhood into a charmed forest of mist-shrouded pines and shouting waterfalls, ending after a couple miles at a Buddhist monastery. Three trees that rival Giant Sequoias for girth and height continue to tower over Yellow Dragon Temple. They brought Harvey here on his first hike, and me 94 years later for my first time in China.

When he turned 13, Harvey moved to Illinois with his single mom and 3 siblings. From there it would take him 25 years to arrive in Arizona with his own family, a wife, son and daughter. Butchart became a mathematics professor at Arizona St College in Flagstaff in 1945, when Grand Canyon was still a relatively unexplored chasm.

Now a middle aged man at 38, Butchart began hiking the Canyon's trails. He eventually devoted himself to unraveling the backcountry of this immense stone labyrinth - where no trails penetrated - over the next four decades.

Butchart's time in the Grand Canyon included:

• 1,025 days exploring below the rim, 560 trips in all
• 12,000 miles covered on foot
• 83 buttes climbed, 28 of which were first recorded ascents
• 116 rim-to-river routes covered
• 1,079 pages of hiking logs meticulously typed
• Writing the Canyon's first backcountry guidebooks: Grand Canyon Treks I, II, & III

Butchart became the first man to walk end-to-end through Grand Canyon NP in 1963, doing so just ahead of writer Colin Fletcher, who later immortalized Butchart in his book The Man Who Walked Through Time.

Butchart's quest for achievement in Grand Canyon led to fame, but also to a number of broken bones, the death of his favorite hiking and climbing partner before his eyes, and a strained marriage with his wife Roma. Yet all the while, an adoring public praised and glorified his feats. This struggle between personal life and personal goals is the crux of Grand Obsession.

Interwoven with this narrative of man and wilderness, unfolds a parallel story in which Tom Myers and I attempt to neogiate Butchart's routes from Grand Canyon Treks. We relate the challenges of Grand Canyon bushwhacking and climbing, and end with a pilgrimage to one of Butchart's favorite buttes.

To order a copy of Grand Obsession, please visit the Puma Press website at www.pumapress.org. A limited number of hardbacks (sorry - sold out as of 2008) feature all-color maps ($29.95); paperbacks contain black and white maps ($19.95). Grand Obsession comes illustrated with more than 180 photographs.