http://azdailysun.com/articles/2009/10/17/news/20091017_front_20571...

A GEM of a boat


Flagstaff boatman Tom Martin is remaking on of the earliest wooden boats used to take tourists down the Grand Canyon.

By CYNDY COLE
Sun Staff Reporter
Saturday, October 17, 2009

A local author and boatman is remaking one of the earlier wooden boats used to take some of the first generation of river runners down the Colorado River.

Tom Martin has spent about $8,000 and a lot of his free time since February working on a replica of a boat used in the 1950s to transport some of the first few hundred river tourists down the Grand Canyon, including boating icon and environmentalist Martin Litton. Litton later started Grand Canyon Dories.

Martin, his wife, Hazel, and friends plan to row it down the Colorado River in 2011.

Tom Martin took interest in the boat as a bit of local history lost, found, then somewhat lost again.

Stephen Moulton Babcock Fulmer was a child of divorced parents, growing up in Indiana when he traveled west in the 1930s to see his dad and became attracted to the Southwest.

In 1942, Fulmer and his wife. Janice. took their first river trip with Norm Nevills down the San Juan River.

Back in Indiana, he began building boats and pushing them into a nearby river. One was shaped like a bathtub. Another he made from a ping-pong table.

Stationed in Oregon with the Army in 1945, Fulmer chatted boat design with boatmen in Oregon, redesigning his boat to include some of the elements used by river runners today.

FIRST TRIP IN 1955

Fulmer took the GEM, as the boat was called after family members, down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon from 1955 to 1958.

In these early trips, they were some of fewer than 200 people who had rafted through the Grand Canyon.

Downstream of Phantom Ranch and the Bright Angel Trail in 1958, boaters flipped the boat holding their food in a rapid, losing their supplies.

They decided to push the boats into the river and try to retrieve them later at Lake Mead.

Two of the three boats were found, but not Fulmer's GEM.

In 1964, the water level in Lake Mead sank, revealing the boat in an area called God's Pocket.

It later wound up mostly in pieces, at a warehouse in Grand Canyon Village, until Martin heard about it.

He researched the boat, contacted Fulmer's niece who took one of the 1950s river trips, and began to build a new one.

The niece came to view the remains of the boat she rode in during the 1950s at the Grand Canyon Village.

"With luck, we'll get this boat on the water again in Grand Canyon in 2011, along with replicas of the two other boats the GEM ran with," Martin said.
"We hope to rematch photos from the 1950s do-it-yourself river trips with pictures taken at the same locations today."

Cyndy Cole can be reached at 913-8607 or at ccole@azdailysun.com.