Buzz Holmstrom

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Haldane "Buzz" Holmstrom (1909-1946) was a pioneer of running the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He was the first person to float all the way from Green River, Wyoming to Boulder Dam solo. He built his own rowboats, often of his own design, to run whitewater rivers.

Born in a logging town in southern Oregon, he was raised in Coquille. As a young man, he worked in a filling station. He began building his flat-bottomed boats in 1934, running the Rogue River in southwest Oregon. He ran the Rogue again in 1935 and the Main Salmon in Idaho in 1936. On October 25, 1937, he began his most famous feat, his solo run of the Colorado from Green River down through the Grand Canyon.^[1] At the end of his run down the Grand Canyon, Holmstrom eschewed a motorboat tow across Lake Mead, rowing three days. Symbolically, he touched the newly built Boulder dam with his boat at the end of his journey on November 20. The following year, he repeated the trip, with Amos Burg and Willis Johnson. The trip was captured in Burg's short movie, Conquering the Colorado.^[2]

Despite the ground-breaking nature of Holmstrom's feat, his river-running was characterized not by bravado, but by humility and awe at his surroundings.^[1]

When the United States entered World War II, Holmstrom enlisted in the Navy. Upon his discharge in 1945, he went back to work for the Bureau of Reclamation, where he had worked for two years prior to the war.

Holmstrom died in early 1946, on the second day of a surveying trip for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey on the Grande Ronde River, of a gunshot wound to the head. The motivation for his apparent suicide is not known.^[2]

[edit] Further resources

Vince Welch, Cort Conley, and Brad Dimock (2004). The Doing of the Thing: The Brief, Brilliant Whitewater Career of Buzz Holmstrom. Fretwater Press. ISBN 1892327074.