HRE Spotlight: Belknap River Guides

January 10, 2025

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”

― Herman Melville

What is a map? Once upon a time, the answer was simple: a diagrammatic representation of a physical landscape. But what now, in a world where everything has been explored, documented, digitized, covered with layers upon layers of additional datapoints, and shared freely via the internet? A world where maps have been so seamlessly integrated into our daily lives that we often forget we are using one but have also largely lost the ability to manually read and appreciate them.

Digital mapping services, like this three-dimensional CalTopo representation of the Tetons that includes slope angle shading, have enabled us to go into the backcountry with more preparedness and peace of mind than ever before. At the same time, many of us have grown so dependent on using maps that we pay little attention to the road we’re on or the terrain that surrounds us, and we have arguably become less aware of our surroundings because of map’s ubiquity.

Maps can be an invitation to intimately explore the world and get to know a landscape. They can also become a distraction from doing so, a tool we depend on so heavily that it obscures that which it was meant to reveal. The effect a map achieves depends on both the person using it and the people who designed it.

I recently sat down with Loie Belknap Evans and her daughter Lynn Evans Peesel, two of the most influential mapmakers on the Colorado Plateau. Their family was the first to publish a user-friendly guide to its river canyons, starting with the Grand and eventually expanding to include Dinosaur National Monument (Green and Yampa rivers), Desolation Canyon (Green River), and Canyonlands (Green and Colorado rivers).

Today, their products are a river guide’s best friend, and they’ve arguably done more than anyone else out there to make river running accessible to new boaters, so I wanted to learn about the Belknap River Guides’ humble beginnings and how they grew into their current state.

Finding the way

When you look through a Belknap River Guide, you’ll notice some things that don’t normally appear on a map. Yes, it has mile markers and camp sites and contour lines, but it’s also full of lore, hard-earned wisdom, and evidence of years of passionate exploration. To better understand how Belknap guides became so much more than a typical map, I asked Loie and Lynn about their relationship with maps.

“My family has always loved maps,” Loie told me. “Growing up and traveling all over, there was nothing like having maps to make sense of the landscape around me. Our AAA Indian Country map was always my favorite. Looking at a map and getting an expectation in my head about where we were going has always been essential for me. I always want to know where I am and where I’m going.”

When Loie’s dad Bill began rowing the canyons of the Colorado Plateau in 1950, the only map available was a blank USGS topographic map. Any additional information—i.e. river miles, camps, rapid beta, spots to hike, points of interest, etc.—had to be procured via word-of-mouth and written in by hand.

Lynn agreed, adding that “a map means you’re going somewhere new and adventurous that requires some guidance to explore. Nature doesn’t need a map, but we need one to find our way through it.”

Their responses made me reflect on my own relationship with maps. I realized that it wasn’t until I moved to Utah that I began actively paying attention to maps, using them intentionally and letting them change how I made sense of the landscape around me. At first, my use of maps was limited to looking for new places to explore and keeping myself on established trails.

But I recall one friend telling me—shortly after I arrived in the state—that eventually I would move beyond the existing lines on the page. He described how a lifetime of living and playing in the Wasatch range had led him to orient himself relative to ridgelines and drainages, as opposed to the freeways and businesses that most of us use as landmarks to locate ourselves.

I set out to test his claim; to see how long it would take to shift my own thinking from artificial reference points to natural ones. I continued studying maps from the comfort of my living room, but rather than picking a trail to go follow, I would find an interesting peak or canyon and study its characteristics. Then, I’d go out into the backcountry to physically explore the area I had inspected on paper. Afterwards, I would revisit the map, alongside my route (which I could precisely track using Strava), and attempt to reconcile what I was seeing in two-dimensions with what I had navigated through in four.

After a year of trail running during summer and backcountry skiing during winter, and hundreds of hours spent studying maps before and after going out into the landscapes they described, I had constructed a vast mental map of the space around me. And, exactly as my friend had predicted, I began describing where I lived and worked and played relative to what mountain or wash it was closest to, while human-made locations started to lose their significance.

Along the way, something else interesting happened to my preconceived notion of land. I stopped seeing maps as the single source of truth, as an omniscient guide to where I could and couldn’t go, and I began recognizing that they were a work-in-progress, a wonderful but also incomplete tool that we can use to plan, validate, and enrich our exploration. Although this is easier to grasp when thinking about the wilderness, I’ve found that it’s just as true for maps of urban spaces and small cities, as constantly in flux as they are.

So, seeing how much my relationship with maps had evolved, and how much they had in turn led my relationship with the landscape to mature, I asked Loie and Lynn how they’ve seen society’s relationship with maps change overtime.

Looking back at my notes on Strava from exploratory adventures during this period of time, I recognize myself adopting a whole new vocabulary, becoming familiar with a place that had always intimidated me, and finding hidden treasures out in the world and inside my own mental landscape.

Afraid of getting lost

Lynn explained that “our expectation of maps has increased a lot. People want more details. We’ve become more dependent on maps and less willing to try to figure things out for ourselves.” Loie seemed conflicted about this, and when I asked why told me more about how Belknap River Guides got their start.

“[My dad] pioneered a lot of these hikes and camps. He would do a ton of research about each stretch of river, talking to the river legends of his time—Dock Marston and Don & Ted Hatch to name a few examples—and going out himself to validate what he heard. Starting in 1968, he began taking guests down the big Western rivers in Sport Yaks and teaching them to row.” By the time the family sold his commercial business 20 years later, he and his guides (Loie among them) had introduced thousands of people to the rivers of the Colorado Plateau.

“My dad loved the river and loved teaching people and felt strongly that the river guides shouldn’t be the ones having all the fun. And, at the time, the rivers weren’t as crowded, and there weren’t as many rules, so it felt more like pioneering exploration and people inevitably came away really changed.”

Loie Evans, center, enjoying some river time with close friends and family. Photo by Noah Wetzel

Returning to the present day and my original question about how the ways we interact with maps has changed, Loie suggested that people used to be more willing to embrace discomfort and fill their days with tons of exploring, learning, and working. “My dad was very good at being gentle and inclusive and taking things slowly and making them fun,” she explained, “which modeled a sense of adventure and assurance that lead to trust and buy in.”

We all agreed that while it’s still possible to retain some of this magic through intentional effort, much of the trends in outdoor recreation, including river running, are gravitating towards comfort and certainty and assurance; away from adaptability and exploration and adventure. You can see this as well as anywhere in the ways that wilderness guides have changed, which of course says a lot about how society itself has changed.

“You want to leave a little bit to the imagination of the river runner,” Loie explained. “Don’t tell them everything. For a while we stopped marking the camps in Desolation, because you can camp anywhere except on the Ute nation and private land, but people didn’t like that. They needed to be told where they could camp, and they wanted to have complete confidence. But that’s not our style—not what we believe the river is about.” So, they compromised: indicating the best-known camps, while also encouraging river-runners to explore.

Reflecting again on how maps have aided my own development as a backcountry athlete and guide, Loie’s comments made me more fully appreciate the delicate balance between giving people enough information to be safe and giving them too much information to have an authentic expedition. Plus, to make things even trickier, that equilibrium is constantly shifting as the regulations governing river travel change, as consumer’s demands grow, and as the opinions of the Belknap descendants involved in the family legacy evolve.

Loie told me that “the big Western rivers are in our blood,” with her and her brother Buzz joining their dad on trips in the Grand Canyon starting at a very young age. She gives Buzz credit for kickstarting the guide business, realizing shortly after graduating from college that there was a gap in the market for a user-friendly river-map. Leveraging the strengths of everyone in the family and tapping a Salt Lake City artist to design the layout, they published their first guide to the Grand Canyon. Over 50 years later, it has kept up with the times while retaining its characteristic Belknap family flare–full of beautiful, well-researched, but not too thorough information about the Colorado Plateau’s river canyons. Although the maps are also available digitally now, Loie feels confident that “people will always treasure their paper guides.”

Orienting towards the future

As our conversation began to reach its terminus, Lynn’s youngest daughter Spencer came into the room. I suddenly grew conscious that I was keeping them all from dinner, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask one final question, now directed at three generations of the family: Where do you want to see Belknap River Guides go from here?

Loie deferred to Lynn, who wants to stay connected to the river community, constantly seeking out new ideas and updating the guides to ensure that they stay responsive to the evolving needs of river runners. Then we all looked to Spencer, our stand-in spokesperson for the future who’s preparing to head off to college next year.

“I want to explore new ways that we could make our maps more sustainable,” she responded. “For example, where are we getting the physical resources to make our maps from? Could we be doing better? How can we better support the Earth that’s trapped in the map?” Lynn added that they recently began printing guides in the U.S. on environmentally-friendly Viastone paper, a decision that’s costly no-doubt, but reflects the fact that profit isn’t the guiding principle for the Belknap family.

As we wrapped up the conversation, memories from a trip I’d done with the Belknaps the previous summer came up, and we all agreed that the rivers of the Colorado Plateau are some of the most spectacular places on Earth. I was overcome with an intense sense of gratitude that I’ve gotten to explore these rivers, with such wonderful people, coming to know their canyons so deeply.

Maps have been and remain an essential part of my relationship with Utah’s incredible landscapes, presenting countless invitations to explore and giving me the information I need to do so safely and enjoyably. And getting to know the Belknaps has helped me understand that the maps which help us do this—that enrich instead of encroaching upon our exploration—are the result of years of experience, love of a place, and intentional design decisions, all made with the hope of helping people successfully enjoy a landscape (like a canyon on the Colorado Plateau) the way it was meant to be.

Matt rows boats for Holiday in the Summer, and runs/skis/bikes around the West in the Winter. Writing and photography are his favorite ways to scratch the creative itch. If you liked this post, you can follow along with more stuff he’s making here.

He’d also love to hear your stories and opinions! What do maps mean to you? Do you think technology enriches or complicates our relationship with maps and the landscapes they describe?