Nevills Cataract Boat the Sandra at Lees Ferry, Colorado River, Arizona, July 2010
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The Sandra is a fully restored, authentic wooden Cataract river running boat. It was the last boat that the legendary Norman Nevills built, in 1947. It was named after his then-little daughter Sandy, who christened the boat at Lees Ferry.
Norm Nevills and his wife Doris died in 1949 while he was flying his plane, but until that tragedy he had become renowned as the very first commercial river runner in Grand Canyon (1938), and was regarded as the number one whitewater boatman in the world.
The Nevills legacy was to live on, though. The Nevills river running business, renamed Mexican Hat Expeditions (out of Mexican Hat, Utah), was passed on to Norm's other daughter, Joan Neville, and her husband Gaylord Staveley. The Staveleys renamed the company Canyoneers, Inc., after a term used by John Wesley Powell in his first exploration of Grand Canyon.
The Sandra was part of Gaylord Staveley's flotilla of Cataract boats that re-created Powell's run down the Green and Colorado Rivers in Utah and Arizona in 1969, the 100 year anniversary of Powell's famous 1869 expedition. The Sandra had a bad wreck on that trip and was almost lost. Fortunately she survived, as chronicled in Staveley's book Broken Waters Sing: Rediscovering Two Great Rivers of the West (Little, Brown and Co., 1971).
Today the Sandra is owned by Sandy Nevills' son Greg Reiff, who saved the abandoned boat from the terminal stages of decay in a barn near Flagstaff, Arizona. Employing the boatbuilding expertise of Andy Hutchinson, the fully restored Sandra is now the only working Nevills Cataract boat in Grand Canyon. The Sandra makes three 14-day river trips in the Grand Canyon each summer, traveling along with 18-foot inflated boats from Canyoneers.
Thus Norm Nevills' grandson saved and restored the Sandra, which was named for his mom, and he gets to run it down Grand Canyon again with Canyoneers, which is owned by his uncle Gaylord.
Photo location: Lees Ferry, Glen Canyon/Marble Canyon, Colorado River, Arizona.
