Guides will sometimes live, eat and do their jobs on the river for a week or more alongside clients — and meanwhile, they're at risk of being harassed, federal officials say, as generally younger employees who rely on customer satisfaction.
A Moab-based Colorado River rafting company begins their float trip at the Lower Oniion Creek rapids, Saturday, Aug. 13, 2022.It happens almost every time Tyler Jameson leads a river rafting trip.
“Trying to create safer spaces for people to be their authentic selves is the goal of a river trip,” said Lauren Wood, whose grandfather founded Holiday River Expeditions. Guides will sometimes be stuck for a week or more living, eating and working on the river alongside clients. Jameson has worked in the industry long enough, she said, to know that other women experience unwanted comments, and behaviors that are “a bit more dark.”But sexual harassment on the river hasn’t always been talked about in the guiding world.
Blevins found in her research that women have been hazed at work or told to shrug off crude jokes. Some have felt unsafe during overnight trips when men — either clients or coworkers — made unwanted sexual advances while they partied at night along the river. Laura Dewey, a river guide with Paddle Moab greets Margy Swenson, right, during a paddleboard trip down the Colorado River, Monday, Aug. 15, 2022. Swenson, a river rafting guide for 10 years from 1999 to 2009, experienced sexism and harassment from her former male coworkers.
The organization has been around in fits and starts since the early 1990s. One of its hallmarks in the early days, Evans said, was hosting days-long interpretive training trips for guides.
But this year was different from the training trips of years past. It was time, organizers believed, to start talking about sexism and harassment within their industry.Seekhaven Family Crisis and Resource Center Colin Evans, center, president of the Colorado Plateau River Guides , shares a laugh with Richard Rootes. a CPRG board member and river guide and Cora Phillips, the Director of Prevention and Education for Seekhaven Family Crisis and Resource Center in Moab, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022.
Finally, she said, she taught the guides to check-in with the person who has been targeted, to make sure they are OK and feel supported. “When you ask them those questions out on the river,” he said, “I think you’re going to get a better reaction than if you put them in a room in a community center and you tried to have that under fluorescent lights.”That training has had a ripple effect, Phillips said. After a few guides from Western River Expeditions returned from that trip, she said, they spoke to management and encouraged training companywide. Phillips did the training again for 80 people in that company.
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