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Speaker 1: The Colorado River emerges as a tiny stream high in a rocky mountain meadow. From that inauspicious beginning, it rolls and roams across 1500 miles of the western United States. By the time it discharges its power in the Gulf of California, It has flowed through a world forever altered by its passing. Chief among its creations is the mile-deep wound in the lime and sandstone of Arizona. Over millennia, it has carved down and down into the soft sedimentary rock, sculpting the giant natural cleft we now call the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon has long been a place of wonder. Inhabited by humans for 12,000 years, it now draws 5 million tourists and adventurers each year who flock there to hike its trails, clamber on its vast red walls, and revel in the almost cosmic scale of one of nature's most awesome sights. And yet, only 5% of visitors ever leave the relative safety of the canyon rim empty. Deeper down is where its true mysteries are found. Even its age is open to doubt. Common geological wisdom dictates that the canyon was formed between 5 and 6 million years ago, but the rock itself poses troubling questions. You see, the canyon is missing time. A lot of time. Rock from the Paleozoic era, sits atop a layer known as the Vishnu basement rocks, and the roughly 1.2 billion years of geological strata that should separate them is simply not there. It was Major John Wesley Powell, a soldier, geologist and explorer, who in 1869 discovered this literal manifestation of missing time, and in the century and a half since, no one has been able to satisfactorily explain the absence. It's a worldwide anomaly, known as the Great Unconformity, but it is greater, more apparent, and more visibly complex at the Grand Canyon than anywhere else on Earth. All Powell could say by way of explanation is that Dame Nature needed this batch of dough very thoroughly. Such a large chunk of missing time leaves a vacuum into which theories and speculation have inevitably poured. In 1909, the Arizona Gazette reported on a Smithsonian expedition which supposedly discovered a huge expanse of caverns at the Grand Canyon, large enough to host thousands of people and filled with ancient statues and weapons. each with a distinctly Egyptian aesthetic. However, with the Smithsonian claiming not to have any record of the apparent expedition, many now assume the story was simply concocted to sell newspapers. And yet, there are those who still point to the hundreds, perhaps thousands of unmapped caves, and those too, perhaps of a more conspiratorial mindset. who speculate about the so-called forbidden zones of the canyon where exploration is banned, and they wander. But for the canyon's most abiding mystery, we have to go right to the bottom, where the river still runs as it continues its imperceptible and irrevocable shaping of the world, to where, pinned between the canyoned walls, The water hurries and twists with lethal intensity, and what it snatches rarely, if ever, makes it back to the surface. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Back in 1927, 22-year-old Bessie Louise Haley boarded a steamship travelling from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Just the year before, the aspiring poet and artist from West Virginia married her high school sweetheart, Earl Helmick. But after spending less than two months living with him in Kentucky, she decided to relocate alone to the West Coast. Little is known about why she left exactly, But almost immediately upon disembarking in Los Angeles, Bessie wrote to her husband requesting a divorce. She'd met someone else on board the ship, she said. That man was 29-year-old Glenn Rowland Hyde, a potato farmer from Idaho. It was just one of many decisions and counter-decisions that Bessie was wont to make, hinting at a natural impulsivity. and thirst for adventure. On first look, her mercurial nature seemed ill-suited to a romance with a 29-year-old potato farmer from Idaho. Yet there was much more to Glenn Hyde than his stolid background would suggest. Glenn was a keen rafter, trained by seasoned rivermen on the salmon and snake rivers of Idaho. He once spent six months kayaking, fishing and hunting, the length of Canada's Peace River. And back in 1922, accompanied by his younger sister Jean, he'd even completed a thousand-mile river journey from his home state to the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps it was something in Glenn's own aptitude for adventure that appealed to Bessie. Perhaps it was just the natural romance of being young and at sea. Either way, they quickly fell in love on that passenger ship For his part, Bessie's husband, Earl, refused the divorce. But Bessie would not be deterred. After promptly moving to Nevada, she established a residency there that allowed her to file for divorce on her own terms. And on April 11th, 1928, it was finalized. The very next day, she and Glenn Hyde were married. The newlyweds soon settled in Murtagh Place, Glenn's farmhouse in Twin Falls, Idaho, where he made a modest living growing potatoes and raising sheep. It was a life largely tethered to the rigor of farm work, leaving little time for the adventure that the young couple both craved. Though Bessie learnt to ride horses in her scant spare time while working the farm with her husband, The transition from the San Francisco art scene to a life of rural mundanity began to take its toll. Glenn was feeling it too. The river waters, never far from his mind, were beckoning. Two years earlier, several parties attempted to film a river traversal of the Grand Canyon. One succeeded. Led by the novice captain Clyde Eddy, the crew of 13, plus a dog and a bear cub, became the first expedition to complete the journey during the canyon's high water season. Their recorded footage brought the river much publicity and didn't go unnoticed by Bessie and Glenn. The images of wild water and towering cliffs were too good to ignore. Bessie and Glenn made the decision to try and recreate Clyde Eddy's journey. It would be a belated honeymoon of sorts, marrying Glenn's lust for the river with Bessie's desire for renown. But Glenn wanted to go beyond simply repeating the feat. He wanted to break the speed record for traversing the canyon and in the process make Bessie the first recognised woman to make the run. After an arduous summer of farm work, the couple left the farm and made their way to the town of Green River in Utah. Feeling excited and rejuvenated for the next two days, Glenn, a practiced boat builder, worked tirelessly to build the vessel they would use at a cost of roughly $ 50, just under a thousand by today's standards. He settled on a scowl a broad flat-bottomed wooden boat said to resemble little more than a plank box and often described ominously as a floating coffin. Scowls were common to the rivers of Idaho where they were usually worked by a two-person crew, one to steer from the front while another steered from the back, both using long oars called sweeps. Glenn had captained a scowl on his epic journey to the Pacific just a few years earlier. To him, it seemed an obvious, dependable and affordable choice for the more robust amounts of the Colorado. The Hydes named their boat Rain in the Face. in anticipation of the unceasing spray and rough waters that lay ahead. They loaded it with supplies for the journey, including a Kodak camera and several journals to record the journey in the hope of selling it later, and a rudimentary box spring bed, because this was, after all, their honeymoon. Glenn felt confident. He expected the entire journey could be accomplished in no more than a month and a half, and he estimated their arrival at their final destination of Needles, California, by December 6th, certainly no later than December 9th. Despite having no prior river rafting experience, Bessie was also in good spirits upon leaving. Glenn assured her, that there'd be plenty of time on the earlier, calmer stretches of river to learn the skills necessary for the raging torrents awaiting them on the Colorado. And with that, the pair set off into the canyon's stony throat. On October 20th, 1928, the Hydes pushed out into the Green River to begin the first stage of their journey. By day, they paddled along the relatively gentle waters. Then come night, they pulled their makeshift bed onto the sandy banks and nestled down together beneath the stars in the ageless embrace of the canyon rock. Those first few days on the river together proved an ideal training ground as Glenn had suggested, for Bessie to learn the ways of the scow, which she quickly got the hang of. After 120 miles, they completed the Green River leg without major incident, except for one brief moment as they passed through Cataract Canyon when Bessie fell overboard. It's easy to imagine the couple laughing as Glenn dragged his soaked wife from the slowly meandering river. but the Colorado River was a different proposition altogether. At Lee's Ferry, a river station at the entrance to the canyon, locals spotting Bessie and Glenn on their boat warned them that it was unfit for the rapids downriver. Only weeks before, three people had drowned when a flood washed the local ferryboat away, a boat far more suited to the river than the Hyde Scowl. but Glenn laughed it off and the couple continued on their way. It was on November 16th when a somewhat harrowed-looking Bessie and Glenn arrived at the home of Emery Kolb in Grand Canyon Village. Kolb was a photographer who'd opened a local studio with his brother Ellsworth in 1906. The Kolbs were key figures in the history of Grand Canyon tourism. Their photographs of mule-riding visitors and their own hair-raising adventures on the river did much to foster romantic impressions of the park, so it's no surprise that the promotionally-minded Hydes sought Emery out. By this point, Bessie and Glenn had been on the river for nearly a month. They were almost 300 miles into their journey, 88 miles into the canyon proper, and on course to break the speed record. Still, they needed to restock and were eager for respite from the endless bob and weave of the rapids, the unrelenting pressure to observe and react to the water's every whim. In search of both supplies and different scenery, they hiked the 5,000-foot climb up Bright Angel Trail to Grand Canyon Village. now a tourist hub through which most visitors accessed the park. In 1928, it was a hamlet of just a few buildings tucked on the southern rim of the canyon. Emery received the pair warmly and invited them to his home for the night. It was immediately clear to Kolb that the Hydes, and Bessie in particular, had been left a little shaken by their journey so far. That night over dinner, Bessie described one incident in which the scow had tipped over suddenly in the Colorado's rapids, sending Glenn plunging deep into the churning waters below. The memory of Glenn swimming for his life, while Bessie, alone in the boat, had suddenly found herself not only responsible for her husband's rescue, but the scow upon which both of their lives depended. had clearly left a haunting impression on the young woman. It was then that Kolb also realised the couple had neglected to bring life jackets with them. Emery Kolb was so concerned by the couple's unpreparedness for what he knew lay ahead, he invited them to stay with him and his wife over winter in Grand Canyon Village. But once again, Glenn neglected to heed the warning. It was vital, he said, that they make it to the town of Needles within a week to stay on track for the record. In any case, he thought, they'd already overcome the worst that the river had to offer. Before they departed Grand Canyon Village, Glenn asked Emery to take their photograph, promising to collect and pay on their return. Emery captured the couple against a wall of stacked stone, standing side by side with slicked hair and rugged outdoor clothing. Glenn holds his hat jauntily in one hand, the other thrust deep in his pocket, while Bessie looks every inch the twenties adventurer, her hair slicked back, the fur collar of her leather aviator jacket pulled up high around her jaw. Over the years, Researchers have pondered whether the photo hints at discord or unease between the heights. For Emery Kolb, at least, there was little doubt that Bessie seemed nervous, reluctant even, to leave the safety of the canyon, as if she knew that nothing good waited for her back down on the river. As the pair prepared to descend back into the bowels of the canyon, Emery's young daughter appeared, wearing fine feminine clothing. Emery watched as Bessie observed the child, muttering to herself, I wonder if I will ever wear pretty shoes again. Then the couple made their goodbyes and headed off back to the canyon, eventually disappearing out of sight as they turned into the bright angel trail, while Emery watched on uneasily. Back at the river landing, the Hydes found a stranger standing next to their scow. The man was a friend of Emery's, named Adolph Gilbert Sutro, a wealthy tourist enjoying a tour of the southwestern states. Sutro made the highs a proposition. If they would carry him a day downriver, he would happily take photographs of the experience for them. Perhaps eager for company, and possibly keen for more promotional material, or maybe just happy to help out a fellow traveller, The heights readily agreed. Adolf Sutro was not unfamiliar with danger. He was an adventurer himself, though of the air variety rather than water. He learned to fly with the Wright brothers and had set several solo records for seaplane flights. Twice he'd been plucked from the wreckage of a crash in San Francisco Bay, yet he was horrified by his time on the river with the Hydes. Over a short seven-mile stretch, they encountered some of the worst rapids on the course. They got stuck in a fierce eddy for hours and the scow was nearly pummeled to driftwood by a crashing descent through granite gorge. The Hydes and Sutro spent an uneasy night sleeping in the sand on a small beach before limping into hermit camp the next morning. The whole experience haunted the aviator. Later he would write, My unfailing guiding light in life has been the precept that it is better to be an alive coward than a dead hero. I disembarked permanently at the very first landing spot. The photos that Sutro took of the heights tell a very different story to the one taken by Emery Kolb. There are far fewer smiles for a start. One picture in particular captures the intensity on Glenn's face as he stares dead ahead down their course. Behind him, Bessie's mouth is a firm line, as if she is girding herself for what is to come. In Sutro's opinion, it was a miracle that the hides had made it that far. At the point where they parted company, they travelled 375 miles and had 430 more to go. Sutro watched them depart, relieved to be alive. but like everyone else who'd met the Hydes along the river, he left them worried for their safety. Sutro's final glimpse of the Hydes as they slipped around the next bend would be the last time that anyone saw Bessie or Glenn alive or dead. Well, no one would ever see Glenn Hyde again. As for Bessie, well that is more complicated. When the hides didn't appear in needles in early December, the alarm was quickly raised. Glenn's father, suspecting something amiss, rushed to the area. He hired native trackers and even persuaded Dwight Davis, the then US Secretary of War, to mobilize an air search. He drafted the Cole brothers in to help too. Emery, who'd never quite got his worry about the young couple out of his mind was only too happy to help. Then, on December 19th, 1928, the pilot of a small plane spotted something caught in rocks some 140 miles south of where Adolf Sutro had waved them off. It was the Hyde's boat. When they found the scow, it was sitting upright and stocked full of supplies. The Hyde's coats and boots were also still on board, as was Glenn's gun, Bessie's journals and the Kodak camera. Bessie's final journal entry was dated November 30th and the last photo was later determined to have been taken 60 miles upstream. The gunwale was scarred by 41 deep scratches, one for each day of the trip between October 20th and November 30th, but there was no sight or sign of the hides. The search began in earnest, up and down the nearest stretch of river and in the surrounding canyon, but still they found nothing. Investigators eventually came to the seemingly obvious conclusion that that Bessie and Glenn had met their end in one of the river rapids. But why then was the boat still upright and river-worthy with less than a foot of water taken on board? Perhaps clinging to hope, Glenn's father insisted that the couple must have attempted to hike out of the canyon and might have gotten lost in the countless folds of rock and trail. But as others pointed out, If that were true, why would they have left their food, boots and warm clothing in a perfectly serviceable boat? That's when the speculation about the character of the Hydes themselves began. Word got around that Glenn was an abusive husband, leading some to theorise that his behaviour had worsened due to the stress of life on the raft, leading him to murder Bessie. before fleeing the crime or taking his own life. Others suggested that it was Bessie who had in fact committed the murder, either in self-defence or after becoming tired of Glenn's abuse. In response, close friends and family came forward to say that Glenn was actually a devoted and gentle husband who loved Bessie dearly. And there the story may have concluded. Unresolved, but in the end, just another disappearance in the American wilderness. A familiar tale of courage colliding with hubris and recklessness. But as the years went by, a series of strange developments began to emerge to fan the embers of the mystery and keep it a flicker. In 1971, a rafting tour made camp at Diamond Creek, a landing spot just a dozen miles from where the Hyde Scow was discovered. As night fell, the guide gathered his group around the campfire to regale them with the 40-year-old mystery. As he reached the haunting anticlimax of the tale, an elderly member of the group stuck her hand up to quieten him. She knew the story well, she said, because she was Bessie Hyde. As the stunned group looked on, she explained that the rumours had been true all along. Glenn was an abusive husband, whose temper did indeed worsen during their time on the river. According to the woman, when she begged him to end the expedition early, he beat her into submission. So what did you do? the guide asked, half-joking. I stabbed him, the woman replied, without missing a beat. The woman then explained how she'd thrown Glenn's body into the white water and watched it disappear before hiking out of the canyon alone. When she eventually reached the town of Peach Springs, Arizona, she caught a bus and began her life anew. It doesn't matter if I say I murdered him now, the woman said, because no one will believe me anyway. That part turned out to be true. No one did believe her. Not least because the mysterious woman was at least four inches taller than the five foot nothing Bessie Hyde. The woman later recanted her story. Five years later, in 1976, human remains were found in a canoe It wasn't on the river, however, but in the boathouse belonging to none other than Emery Kolb. The male skeleton was discovered shortly after Emery's death by his grandson and occasioned immediate speculation that the corpse belonged to Glenn Hyde. A bullet found inside the skull implied that Emery had murdered him. Did the experienced canyon traveller follow the Hydes Down River? perhaps in a misguided attempt to save Bessie from her fate. It's a darkly romantic notion, but here too, such a neat, if grim, conclusion twists away like the river. Decades later, a local sheriff scouring photographs in the Grand Canyon Museum identified the remains as belonging to an unidentified suicide victim found in the National Park back in 1933. The body could not be Glenn Hyde, but quite what it was doing in Emery Kolb's boathouse is another mystery entirely, one of the many secrets that the Grand Canyon is unlikely to ever give up. In 1992, 64 years after the Hyde's disappearance on the Colorado River, A woman named Georgie White Clark died. She was 81 years old. Georgie spent nearly 50 years working as a river guide up and down the Colorado. She was a vastly experienced rafter, the first woman to raft the canyon and the first to swim it. Known for her leopard print swimwear and a penchant for confronting the waters at full speed. In short, Georgie was a legend so integral to the culture of the canyon that in 2001 a rapid was even named after her at mile 24. Yet for all her fame there were things that no one knew about Georgie Clark. After her death friends of Georgie's entered her home for the first time. Throughout decades of friendship they had never been invited inside. While collating her belongings, they stumbled across an intriguing discovery. First, they found a birth certificate. It revealed that Georgie White Clark had not been born Georgie White Clark. Her first name was Bessie DeRoss. Both White and Clark were the surnames of ex-husbands. And according to other documents that were found, Georgie was born in Oklahoma and brought up in Colorado, not Chicago as her friends had been led to believe. Clearly Georgie Clark was not the woman that people thought she was. So who was she? In a bedside drawer, buried beneath faded lingerie, Georgie's friends also found a pistol. Comparison with the gun, seen in several of the photographs found on Bessie and Glenn's Kodak, suggest that it may well have been the very same weapon. And beneath that was the most startling discovery of all. A marriage certificate. belonging to none other than Bessie and Glenn Hyde. So what are we to make of all this? It is tempting to believe that Bessie Hyde escaped a bad situation on that wild water in 1928 and returned to slay that dragon repeatedly over the next half century. that Bessie was the first woman to raft the canyon after all, just under a different name. But if Georgie Clark was Bessie Hyde, it still only answers half the question. Glenn's fate still lingers, unanswered and obscured by a century of passing water. And if Georgie wasn't Bessie Hyde, what are we to make of that marriage certificate? How did it come into Georgie's possession? And what did she perhaps know, and keep secret, about the Hyde's final confrontation with the white maelstrom of the Colorado? With Georgie's death, maybe the final grasp of the truth drifted away forever into history and rumor, left only to be recounted on endless starry nights around campfires in the canyon. All that remains is the memory of a young couple, who once braved a river powerful enough to change the world, who became just one of the many stories fossilised forever in those folds of Arizona rock. Remember, before she became a rafter, Bessie Hyde was a poet, so I'd like to leave you with a verse from an unnamed poem found in her collection, Wandering Leaves. Oh, Mama dear, please come, My Dolly must be drowned. When I put her on the creek, she sunk without a sound. Wee Betty's eyes filled with tears. Where could poor Dolly be? Perhaps she'd turned into a mermaid and drifted out to sea. This episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me, Richard McLean-Smith. Neil is the creator and host of his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he discusses the craft of horror writing with everyone from Tananarive Do to the god of horror himself, Stephen King, I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you as ever for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it if you haven't already done so. Unexplained will be coming to YouTube very shortly in video form, so please watch out for future developments there. You can subscribe to the channel at youtube.com forward slash at unexplained pod. You can also now find us on TikTok at tiktok.com forward slash at unexplained podcast. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLean-Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, were also produced by me, Richard McLean-Smith. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. And feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at unexplainedpodcast.com and reach us online through Twitter at unexplainedpod and Facebook at facebook.com forward slash unexplainedpodcast.
Speaker 1: The Colorado River emerges as a tiny stream high in a rocky mountain meadow. From that inauspicious beginning, it rolls and roams across 1500 miles of the western United States. By the time it discharges its power in the Gulf of California, It has flowed through a world forever altered by its passing. Chief among its creations is the mile-deep wound in the lime and sandstone of Arizona. Over millennia, it has carved down and down into the soft sedimentary rock, sculpting the giant natural cleft we now call the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon has long been a place of wonder. Inhabited by humans for 12,000 years, it now draws 5 million tourists and adventurers each year who flock there to hike its trails, clamber on its vast red walls, and revel in the almost cosmic scale of one of nature's most awesome sights. And yet, only 5% of visitors ever leave the relative safety of the canyon rim empty. Deeper down is where its true mysteries are found. Even its age is open to doubt. Common geological wisdom dictates that the canyon was formed between 5 and 6 million years ago, but the rock itself poses troubling questions. You see, the canyon is missing time. A lot of time. Rock from the Paleozoic era, sits atop a layer known as the Vishnu basement rocks, and the roughly 1.2 billion years of geological strata that should separate them is simply not there. It was Major John Wesley Powell, a soldier, geologist and explorer, who in 1869 discovered this literal manifestation of missing time, and in the century and a half since, no one has been able to satisfactorily explain the absence. It's a worldwide anomaly, known as the Great Unconformity, but it is greater, more apparent, and more visibly complex at the Grand Canyon than anywhere else on Earth. All Powell could say by way of explanation is that Dame Nature needed this batch of dough very thoroughly. Such a large chunk of missing time leaves a vacuum into which theories and speculation have inevitably poured. In 1909, the Arizona Gazette reported on a Smithsonian expedition which supposedly discovered a huge expanse of caverns at the Grand Canyon, large enough to host thousands of people and filled with ancient statues and weapons. each with a distinctly Egyptian aesthetic. However, with the Smithsonian claiming not to have any record of the apparent expedition, many now assume the story was simply concocted to sell newspapers. And yet, there are those who still point to the hundreds, perhaps thousands of unmapped caves, and those too, perhaps of a more conspiratorial mindset. who speculate about the so-called forbidden zones of the canyon where exploration is banned, and they wander. But for the canyon's most abiding mystery, we have to go right to the bottom, where the river still runs as it continues its imperceptible and irrevocable shaping of the world, to where, pinned between the canyoned walls, The water hurries and twists with lethal intensity, and what it snatches rarely, if ever, makes it back to the surface. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Back in 1927, 22-year-old Bessie Louise Haley boarded a steamship travelling from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Just the year before, the aspiring poet and artist from West Virginia married her high school sweetheart, Earl Helmick. But after spending less than two months living with him in Kentucky, she decided to relocate alone to the West Coast. Little is known about why she left exactly, But almost immediately upon disembarking in Los Angeles, Bessie wrote to her husband requesting a divorce. She'd met someone else on board the ship, she said. That man was 29-year-old Glenn Rowland Hyde, a potato farmer from Idaho. It was just one of many decisions and counter-decisions that Bessie was wont to make, hinting at a natural impulsivity. and thirst for adventure. On first look, her mercurial nature seemed ill-suited to a romance with a 29-year-old potato farmer from Idaho. Yet there was much more to Glenn Hyde than his stolid background would suggest. Glenn was a keen rafter, trained by seasoned rivermen on the salmon and snake rivers of Idaho. He once spent six months kayaking, fishing and hunting, the length of Canada's Peace River. And back in 1922, accompanied by his younger sister Jean, he'd even completed a thousand-mile river journey from his home state to the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps it was something in Glenn's own aptitude for adventure that appealed to Bessie. Perhaps it was just the natural romance of being young and at sea. Either way, they quickly fell in love on that passenger ship For his part, Bessie's husband, Earl, refused the divorce. But Bessie would not be deterred. After promptly moving to Nevada, she established a residency there that allowed her to file for divorce on her own terms. And on April 11th, 1928, it was finalized. The very next day, she and Glenn Hyde were married. The newlyweds soon settled in Murtagh Place, Glenn's farmhouse in Twin Falls, Idaho, where he made a modest living growing potatoes and raising sheep. It was a life largely tethered to the rigor of farm work, leaving little time for the adventure that the young couple both craved. Though Bessie learnt to ride horses in her scant spare time while working the farm with her husband, The transition from the San Francisco art scene to a life of rural mundanity began to take its toll. Glenn was feeling it too. The river waters, never far from his mind, were beckoning. Two years earlier, several parties attempted to film a river traversal of the Grand Canyon. One succeeded. Led by the novice captain Clyde Eddy, the crew of 13, plus a dog and a bear cub, became the first expedition to complete the journey during the canyon's high water season. Their recorded footage brought the river much publicity and didn't go unnoticed by Bessie and Glenn. The images of wild water and towering cliffs were too good to ignore. Bessie and Glenn made the decision to try and recreate Clyde Eddy's journey. It would be a belated honeymoon of sorts, marrying Glenn's lust for the river with Bessie's desire for renown. But Glenn wanted to go beyond simply repeating the feat. He wanted to break the speed record for traversing the canyon and in the process make Bessie the first recognised woman to make the run. After an arduous summer of farm work, the couple left the farm and made their way to the town of Green River in Utah. Feeling excited and rejuvenated for the next two days, Glenn, a practiced boat builder, worked tirelessly to build the vessel they would use at a cost of roughly $ 50, just under a thousand by today's standards. He settled on a scowl a broad flat-bottomed wooden boat said to resemble little more than a plank box and often described ominously as a floating coffin. Scowls were common to the rivers of Idaho where they were usually worked by a two-person crew, one to steer from the front while another steered from the back, both using long oars called sweeps. Glenn had captained a scowl on his epic journey to the Pacific just a few years earlier. To him, it seemed an obvious, dependable and affordable choice for the more robust amounts of the Colorado. The Hydes named their boat Rain in the Face. in anticipation of the unceasing spray and rough waters that lay ahead. They loaded it with supplies for the journey, including a Kodak camera and several journals to record the journey in the hope of selling it later, and a rudimentary box spring bed, because this was, after all, their honeymoon. Glenn felt confident. He expected the entire journey could be accomplished in no more than a month and a half, and he estimated their arrival at their final destination of Needles, California, by December 6th, certainly no later than December 9th. Despite having no prior river rafting experience, Bessie was also in good spirits upon leaving. Glenn assured her, that there'd be plenty of time on the earlier, calmer stretches of river to learn the skills necessary for the raging torrents awaiting them on the Colorado. And with that, the pair set off into the canyon's stony throat. On October 20th, 1928, the Hydes pushed out into the Green River to begin the first stage of their journey. By day, they paddled along the relatively gentle waters. Then come night, they pulled their makeshift bed onto the sandy banks and nestled down together beneath the stars in the ageless embrace of the canyon rock. Those first few days on the river together proved an ideal training ground as Glenn had suggested, for Bessie to learn the ways of the scow, which she quickly got the hang of. After 120 miles, they completed the Green River leg without major incident, except for one brief moment as they passed through Cataract Canyon when Bessie fell overboard. It's easy to imagine the couple laughing as Glenn dragged his soaked wife from the slowly meandering river. but the Colorado River was a different proposition altogether. At Lee's Ferry, a river station at the entrance to the canyon, locals spotting Bessie and Glenn on their boat warned them that it was unfit for the rapids downriver. Only weeks before, three people had drowned when a flood washed the local ferryboat away, a boat far more suited to the river than the Hyde Scowl. but Glenn laughed it off and the couple continued on their way. It was on November 16th when a somewhat harrowed-looking Bessie and Glenn arrived at the home of Emery Kolb in Grand Canyon Village. Kolb was a photographer who'd opened a local studio with his brother Ellsworth in 1906. The Kolbs were key figures in the history of Grand Canyon tourism. Their photographs of mule-riding visitors and their own hair-raising adventures on the river did much to foster romantic impressions of the park, so it's no surprise that the promotionally-minded Hydes sought Emery out. By this point, Bessie and Glenn had been on the river for nearly a month. They were almost 300 miles into their journey, 88 miles into the canyon proper, and on course to break the speed record. Still, they needed to restock and were eager for respite from the endless bob and weave of the rapids, the unrelenting pressure to observe and react to the water's every whim. In search of both supplies and different scenery, they hiked the 5,000-foot climb up Bright Angel Trail to Grand Canyon Village. now a tourist hub through which most visitors accessed the park. In 1928, it was a hamlet of just a few buildings tucked on the southern rim of the canyon. Emery received the pair warmly and invited them to his home for the night. It was immediately clear to Kolb that the Hydes, and Bessie in particular, had been left a little shaken by their journey so far. That night over dinner, Bessie described one incident in which the scow had tipped over suddenly in the Colorado's rapids, sending Glenn plunging deep into the churning waters below. The memory of Glenn swimming for his life, while Bessie, alone in the boat, had suddenly found herself not only responsible for her husband's rescue, but the scow upon which both of their lives depended. had clearly left a haunting impression on the young woman. It was then that Kolb also realised the couple had neglected to bring life jackets with them. Emery Kolb was so concerned by the couple's unpreparedness for what he knew lay ahead, he invited them to stay with him and his wife over winter in Grand Canyon Village. But once again, Glenn neglected to heed the warning. It was vital, he said, that they make it to the town of Needles within a week to stay on track for the record. In any case, he thought, they'd already overcome the worst that the river had to offer. Before they departed Grand Canyon Village, Glenn asked Emery to take their photograph, promising to collect and pay on their return. Emery captured the couple against a wall of stacked stone, standing side by side with slicked hair and rugged outdoor clothing. Glenn holds his hat jauntily in one hand, the other thrust deep in his pocket, while Bessie looks every inch the twenties adventurer, her hair slicked back, the fur collar of her leather aviator jacket pulled up high around her jaw. Over the years, Researchers have pondered whether the photo hints at discord or unease between the heights. For Emery Kolb, at least, there was little doubt that Bessie seemed nervous, reluctant even, to leave the safety of the canyon, as if she knew that nothing good waited for her back down on the river. As the pair prepared to descend back into the bowels of the canyon, Emery's young daughter appeared, wearing fine feminine clothing. Emery watched as Bessie observed the child, muttering to herself, I wonder if I will ever wear pretty shoes again. Then the couple made their goodbyes and headed off back to the canyon, eventually disappearing out of sight as they turned into the bright angel trail, while Emery watched on uneasily. Back at the river landing, the Hydes found a stranger standing next to their scow. The man was a friend of Emery's, named Adolph Gilbert Sutro, a wealthy tourist enjoying a tour of the southwestern states. Sutro made the highs a proposition. If they would carry him a day downriver, he would happily take photographs of the experience for them. Perhaps eager for company, and possibly keen for more promotional material, or maybe just happy to help out a fellow traveller, The heights readily agreed. Adolf Sutro was not unfamiliar with danger. He was an adventurer himself, though of the air variety rather than water. He learned to fly with the Wright brothers and had set several solo records for seaplane flights. Twice he'd been plucked from the wreckage of a crash in San Francisco Bay, yet he was horrified by his time on the river with the Hydes. Over a short seven-mile stretch, they encountered some of the worst rapids on the course. They got stuck in a fierce eddy for hours and the scow was nearly pummeled to driftwood by a crashing descent through granite gorge. The Hydes and Sutro spent an uneasy night sleeping in the sand on a small beach before limping into hermit camp the next morning. The whole experience haunted the aviator. Later he would write, My unfailing guiding light in life has been the precept that it is better to be an alive coward than a dead hero. I disembarked permanently at the very first landing spot. The photos that Sutro took of the heights tell a very different story to the one taken by Emery Kolb. There are far fewer smiles for a start. One picture in particular captures the intensity on Glenn's face as he stares dead ahead down their course. Behind him, Bessie's mouth is a firm line, as if she is girding herself for what is to come. In Sutro's opinion, it was a miracle that the hides had made it that far. At the point where they parted company, they travelled 375 miles and had 430 more to go. Sutro watched them depart, relieved to be alive. but like everyone else who'd met the Hydes along the river, he left them worried for their safety. Sutro's final glimpse of the Hydes as they slipped around the next bend would be the last time that anyone saw Bessie or Glenn alive or dead. Well, no one would ever see Glenn Hyde again. As for Bessie, well that is more complicated. When the hides didn't appear in needles in early December, the alarm was quickly raised. Glenn's father, suspecting something amiss, rushed to the area. He hired native trackers and even persuaded Dwight Davis, the then US Secretary of War, to mobilize an air search. He drafted the Cole brothers in to help too. Emery, who'd never quite got his worry about the young couple out of his mind was only too happy to help. Then, on December 19th, 1928, the pilot of a small plane spotted something caught in rocks some 140 miles south of where Adolf Sutro had waved them off. It was the Hyde's boat. When they found the scow, it was sitting upright and stocked full of supplies. The Hyde's coats and boots were also still on board, as was Glenn's gun, Bessie's journals and the Kodak camera. Bessie's final journal entry was dated November 30th and the last photo was later determined to have been taken 60 miles upstream. The gunwale was scarred by 41 deep scratches, one for each day of the trip between October 20th and November 30th, but there was no sight or sign of the hides. The search began in earnest, up and down the nearest stretch of river and in the surrounding canyon, but still they found nothing. Investigators eventually came to the seemingly obvious conclusion that that Bessie and Glenn had met their end in one of the river rapids. But why then was the boat still upright and river-worthy with less than a foot of water taken on board? Perhaps clinging to hope, Glenn's father insisted that the couple must have attempted to hike out of the canyon and might have gotten lost in the countless folds of rock and trail. But as others pointed out, If that were true, why would they have left their food, boots and warm clothing in a perfectly serviceable boat? That's when the speculation about the character of the Hydes themselves began. Word got around that Glenn was an abusive husband, leading some to theorise that his behaviour had worsened due to the stress of life on the raft, leading him to murder Bessie. before fleeing the crime or taking his own life. Others suggested that it was Bessie who had in fact committed the murder, either in self-defence or after becoming tired of Glenn's abuse. In response, close friends and family came forward to say that Glenn was actually a devoted and gentle husband who loved Bessie dearly. And there the story may have concluded. Unresolved, but in the end, just another disappearance in the American wilderness. A familiar tale of courage colliding with hubris and recklessness. But as the years went by, a series of strange developments began to emerge to fan the embers of the mystery and keep it a flicker. In 1971, a rafting tour made camp at Diamond Creek, a landing spot just a dozen miles from where the Hyde Scow was discovered. As night fell, the guide gathered his group around the campfire to regale them with the 40-year-old mystery. As he reached the haunting anticlimax of the tale, an elderly member of the group stuck her hand up to quieten him. She knew the story well, she said, because she was Bessie Hyde. As the stunned group looked on, she explained that the rumours had been true all along. Glenn was an abusive husband, whose temper did indeed worsen during their time on the river. According to the woman, when she begged him to end the expedition early, he beat her into submission. So what did you do? the guide asked, half-joking. I stabbed him, the woman replied, without missing a beat. The woman then explained how she'd thrown Glenn's body into the white water and watched it disappear before hiking out of the canyon alone. When she eventually reached the town of Peach Springs, Arizona, she caught a bus and began her life anew. It doesn't matter if I say I murdered him now, the woman said, because no one will believe me anyway. That part turned out to be true. No one did believe her. Not least because the mysterious woman was at least four inches taller than the five foot nothing Bessie Hyde. The woman later recanted her story. Five years later, in 1976, human remains were found in a canoe It wasn't on the river, however, but in the boathouse belonging to none other than Emery Kolb. The male skeleton was discovered shortly after Emery's death by his grandson and occasioned immediate speculation that the corpse belonged to Glenn Hyde. A bullet found inside the skull implied that Emery had murdered him. Did the experienced canyon traveller follow the Hydes Down River? perhaps in a misguided attempt to save Bessie from her fate. It's a darkly romantic notion, but here too, such a neat, if grim, conclusion twists away like the river. Decades later, a local sheriff scouring photographs in the Grand Canyon Museum identified the remains as belonging to an unidentified suicide victim found in the National Park back in 1933. The body could not be Glenn Hyde, but quite what it was doing in Emery Kolb's boathouse is another mystery entirely, one of the many secrets that the Grand Canyon is unlikely to ever give up. In 1992, 64 years after the Hyde's disappearance on the Colorado River, A woman named Georgie White Clark died. She was 81 years old. Georgie spent nearly 50 years working as a river guide up and down the Colorado. She was a vastly experienced rafter, the first woman to raft the canyon and the first to swim it. Known for her leopard print swimwear and a penchant for confronting the waters at full speed. In short, Georgie was a legend so integral to the culture of the canyon that in 2001 a rapid was even named after her at mile 24. Yet for all her fame there were things that no one knew about Georgie Clark. After her death friends of Georgie's entered her home for the first time. Throughout decades of friendship they had never been invited inside. While collating her belongings, they stumbled across an intriguing discovery. First, they found a birth certificate. It revealed that Georgie White Clark had not been born Georgie White Clark. Her first name was Bessie DeRoss. Both White and Clark were the surnames of ex-husbands. And according to other documents that were found, Georgie was born in Oklahoma and brought up in Colorado, not Chicago as her friends had been led to believe. Clearly Georgie Clark was not the woman that people thought she was. So who was she? In a bedside drawer, buried beneath faded lingerie, Georgie's friends also found a pistol. Comparison with the gun, seen in several of the photographs found on Bessie and Glenn's Kodak, suggest that it may well have been the very same weapon. And beneath that was the most startling discovery of all. A marriage certificate. belonging to none other than Bessie and Glenn Hyde. So what are we to make of all this? It is tempting to believe that Bessie Hyde escaped a bad situation on that wild water in 1928 and returned to slay that dragon repeatedly over the next half century. that Bessie was the first woman to raft the canyon after all, just under a different name. But if Georgie Clark was Bessie Hyde, it still only answers half the question. Glenn's fate still lingers, unanswered and obscured by a century of passing water. And if Georgie wasn't Bessie Hyde, what are we to make of that marriage certificate? How did it come into Georgie's possession? And what did she perhaps know, and keep secret, about the Hyde's final confrontation with the white maelstrom of the Colorado? With Georgie's death, maybe the final grasp of the truth drifted away forever into history and rumor, left only to be recounted on endless starry nights around campfires in the canyon. All that remains is the memory of a young couple, who once braved a river powerful enough to change the world, who became just one of the many stories fossilised forever in those folds of Arizona rock. Remember, before she became a rafter, Bessie Hyde was a poet, so I'd like to leave you with a verse from an unnamed poem found in her collection, Wandering Leaves. Oh, Mama dear, please come, My Dolly must be drowned. When I put her on the creek, she sunk without a sound. Wee Betty's eyes filled with tears. Where could poor Dolly be? Perhaps she'd turned into a mermaid and drifted out to sea. This episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me, Richard McLean-Smith. Neil is the creator and host of his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he discusses the craft of horror writing with everyone from Tananarive Do to the god of horror himself, Stephen King, I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you as ever for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it if you haven't already done so. Unexplained will be coming to YouTube very shortly in video form, so please watch out for future developments there. You can subscribe to the channel at youtube.com forward slash at unexplained pod. You can also now find us on TikTok at tiktok.com forward slash at unexplained podcast. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLean-Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, were also produced by me, Richard McLean-Smith. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. And feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. 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