08/16/2026
Wow!!
In 1981, Grand Canyon river runners built floating corrals on two surplus military pontoon boats, loaded wild b***os 12 at a time into the fenced platforms, and ran them down the Colorado River through rapids because flying every animal out by helicopter cost too much. They made roughly 20 trips. A hundred b***os rode the river. Zero died on the water. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times watched part of the operation and called it a donkey Dunkirk.
The operation began because the National Park Service had a b***o problem and a public relations disaster. Feral b***os descended from animals released or abandoned by miners had been living in the Grand Canyon for decades, overgrazing native vegetation and competing with bighorn sheep. The NPS solution was to shoot them. Public outrage was immediate and severe. Cleveland Amory, founder of the Fund for Animals, pressured the Park Service into suspending the shooting and proposed an alternative: his organization would fund a live removal of every b***o in the canyon. The NPS agreed. The Fund for Animals raised the money. Helicopters began sling-loading b***os out of the canyon one at a time at roughly $1,000 per animal.
Jerry Johnson and Russell Sullivan, two Colorado River boatmen, were eating lunch on a sandbar one day when they looked up and watched a helicopter carry a single b***o overhead in a sling. Johnson recalled the moment: we figured, if we built a corral on a motor raft, we could get a whole herd out of the canyon on a raft, and maybe they would pay us to haul them out. They approached the operations manager that same day. He shook their hands and told them to build it.
Sullivan and Johnson took two 33-foot World War II surplus pontoon boats, welded steel frames to the decks, laid wooden platforms across them, bolted livestock fencing around the perimeter, and installed loading ramps at the stern. The result looked like a cattle pen floating on the Colorado River, because that is exactly what it was. On January 1, 1981, the crew launched from Lees Ferry and motored 198 miles downstream to the rendezvous point where cowboys on horseback were already pushing b***os out of side canyons toward the river.
The roundup was a collaboration between river runners and horseback wranglers that belonged in a different century. Cowboys and dogs drove b***os down the steep trails from the rim to the river. Some animals were roped from horseback in the canyon bottom. When b***os were trapped in terrain too rugged for horses or too far from the river for a ground drive, helicopters sling-loaded them directly onto the floating corrals. No tranquilizers were used on any animal during the river portion of the operation. The b***os were wild, confused, and standing on a boat.
When the corrals were full, roughly 10 to 12 animals per raft, the boats headed downstream toward Diamond Creek, the only road-accessible takeout point in the lower canyon. The route included rapids. At rapids 205 and 217, the pilots turned the boats upstream and backed slowly through the whitewater, keeping the bow pointed upriver to maintain control while the stern dropped through the waves. Sometimes a b***o lost its footing and fell over. It stood back up. The fencing held. The ramps held. The b***os rode the whitewater the way they handled everything else in the Grand Canyon: by standing where they were put and refusing to die.
At Diamond Creek, the b***os were offloaded into a holding corral, then trucked up the unpaved Diamond Creek road to the rim and eventually transported to Cleveland Amory's Black Beauty Ranch in East Texas, where they were available for adoption.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Arizona Raft Adventures / Arizona Highways / Northern Arizona University / Fund for Animals / Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times.
