Life Lessons and the Magical Splendor of Decades Spent Boating The Grand Canyon, with Cindell Dale

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We love our outdoor archetypes, the folk heroes who reject the trappings of the 9 to 5 life and solely focus on the trail, the powder turn, or the frothing whitewater. River guides live a romantic sunburnt existence, ones in which bucket list adventures are their everyday. It’s not just their ability to read water and navigate huge standing waves day after day, but their spiritual connection to the power of the water and landscape they’re paddling through. Folks like professional Grand Canyon guide Cindell Dale. Cindell has been boating “the Big Ditch” since the early 1980s, piloting Ticaboo, her 16 foot dory–a high-sided, v-shaped wooden boat known for its balletic movement and apparent ability to transform a river trip into a religious experience. Cindell was mentored by the female guides who broke through river running’s glass ceiling, a legacy Cindell and her peers continue every summer on the Colorado River. And after countless trips through the heart of one of the world’s most spectacular natural wonders, boy oh boy, does she have stories of the power of paddling through the magical splendor of the Grand Canyon.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Outside podcast with Patio.
0:12.4	We can capture the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River just by sitting still sometimes.
0:19.5	And my favorite piece of water is when we float down river on a quiet moment.
0:26.1	And you hear this little trickle of water hitting a rock.
0:28.9	And it's really loud, even though it's really little.
0:32.1	Because we're paying attention.
0:33.4	I always ponder its quietness.
0:35.6	Like, gosh, it does exist with or without us.
0:37.9	The birds do the bird thing.
0:39.5	The fish do the fish thing.
0:40.8	The wildness is just doing its thing down there.
0:43.7	And we are just passing through.
0:45.5	Well, there's something very sacred and soulfully special to me.
0:50.2	That something like that, a scene like that, a quiet like that, exists before I show up to it,
0:57.0	and far after I leave it.
0:59.0	If you don't go down into the bottom of the Grand Canyon on a river trip, you don't even
1:05.3	get the opportunity to experience that moment.
1:09.5	You can be up on the rim and get your 15-minute photo out there,
1:13.7	but you don't really know the depth of her soul
1:17.4	until you enter into what we call the rabbit hole,
1:22.1	you know, going down into Alice in Wonderland,
1:24.5	going down into the rabbit hole,
	...

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