Fred Rogers
He was just as you'd expect
In May 1871, eighteen-year-old Frederick Dellenbaugh floated down the Colorado River on John Wesley Powell’s second expedition through the Grand Canyon, and the young Ohioan’s first night on the river was also the first night in his life that he slept outside.
“It was some time before I could go to sleep. I kept studying the sky; watching the stars through the ragged breaks in the flying clouds. The night was silent after the gale.”
He woke to rain falling on his face, then it turned to snow. And from that one night, a life was set in motion. Hired as an artist and cartographer, Dellenbaugh spent another three months on the river with Powell. He went on to help create the first accurate maps of the Colorado, and his paintings were instrumental in the formation of Zion National Park. In 1904 he co-founded the Explorer’s Club, and his 1905 book, Breaking the Wilderness, was a love letter to what he’d first found on the banks of a river twenty-four years prior. It opens, “The natural habitat of man is the wilderness. No matter how civilized he may become, his heart turns with longing to the woods, to the sea, and to the mountains.”