The Backstory

In 2014 I was reporting on a string of accidental deaths in the Grand Canyon. I quickly discovered most of the fatalities were on self-guided river trips.

I learned fewer accidents on commercial trips, where guides are required to have medical training. A friend told me I should talk to white water guide Adam Bringhurst about how he rescued a passenger in the Grand Canyon in 2005. So I called him and he agreed to an interview. We met up a couple days later. 

Adam said, it was the middle of the night. He was asleep on his boat when he heard a woman scream, “help!” The elderly passenger fell into the river and was instantly swept downstream. Her name was Dottie LaRue. As Adam told me what happened next I thought I have to hear the story from Dottie’s point of view.

So I emailed Dottie’s son Chuck and after some schedule wrangling I reunited Adam and Dottie at her home a couple hours away in Cornville. Adam’s 6 foot 3 inch frame enveloped Dottie in a hug. He introduced Dottie and Chuck to his wife and two small sons. The kids were promised a trip to Out of Africa wildlife park after the interview.

Dottie and Adam recalled what happened on the night nine years prior when Dottie left her tent to go to the bathroom. 

"I was walking very carefully and putting my stick down in the water and all of a sudden my stick didn’t hit bottom and then I knew I was in trouble," Dottie said.

Dottie’s family heard her cry for help. They woke the whole camp including Adam who grabbed his life jacket and headlamp and ran alongside the river downstream. The water that comes out at the base of the Glen Canyon Dam is a cold 50 degrees so he knew he had to act fast. So when he saw Dottie’s headlamp bobbing in the river he jumped in. 

"He yelled at me that he was coming," Dottie said. 

Adam swam after Dottie for about a mile. 

"When you hit the eddy and spun around backwards I thought you had gone under and that’s when my heart sank. I stopped swimming," Adam said. "It was awful. I felt horrible, and then your light came back on. I came swimming up to you and I said, ‘Dotty what are you doing in the river?’ And you said, ‘oh Adam, I’m so glad to see you.’ You were calm as can be."

She was still clutching her hiking stick when he finally reached her and pulled her to shore.

"Everybody did the right thing, that crew was well trained and knew what they were doing and they took good care of me," Dottie said.

It was a great anecdote for the four-minute news feature I was producing for KJZZ but I knew it could have been so much more than that. The reunion of Adam and Dottie was some of the most powerful tape I’d ever gathered. That moment along with the Confucius quote I’d come across planted the seeds for “2 Lives.”

When I started gathering people to interview for the show I reached out to Dottie’s son Chuck in hopes of producing an episode for “2 Lives.” I was sad to learn she died last year.

Chuck wrote: Our mom died last spring on April 2. She was 92. She had fallen in November and suffered some hairline fracturing in her lower back and it was some time before the docs could figure out what had happened that was causing the subsequent pain that persisted after the fall.  

She was kind of doing OK going into January but then declined suddenly. She was still able to live at home and get around. She was pretty thin and I don’t think she had the reserves to mount a comeback rally. She was ready to go. She had lived a good life and lived a lot of places and missed our dad. 

I was sitting with her when she had only a few hours of consciousness left and she was worried we were going to try to take her to the hospital. (She had already twice faced down the EMTs on two previous calls we had made.) When I told her, ‘Mud, it's ok to go, we aren’t trying to keep you here and we only want you to be comfortable in your last time here. Dad is waiting for you.’ She looked in the distance and smiled. 

I asked if she wanted her hiking stick and she said yes and I got it for her and she held it close. Then I said, ‘You were a good mom.’ She got a big smile and said, ‘we sure had a lot of fun, didn’t we?’ 

Then I asked what her favorite things were about her life and she said, ‘hiking.’ Then I asked what was her favorite place to hike and she said, ‘the Grand Canyon.’ Those were her last words. If she was still around you can be sure she would have agreed to help your ‘2 Lives’ podcast.

After Adam and Dottie I started to keep a list of people whose stories I couldn’t do justice in four minutes or less. People who have faced darkness of some kind or another and had some surprising revelation or transformation as a result. These are stories that deserve time and loving attention. Over the last 20 years I’ve come up with a good list.