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This mystery takes us down a wild river into a hole in the ground and then flings us at the heart of a lost country. Glen and Bessie Hyde make us tremble as they face those jagged rocks and that last wave. And they fill us with envy for the freedom, guts, and joy of the funky and hardscrabble America they knew in their bones and we only know of as rumor. Brad Dimock deserves a medal for bringing them back alive to confront us all. And it's a helluva read, too. Charles Bowden |
Brad Dimock has carefully peeled away the layers of mystery and shone light on those haunted faces of Glen and Bessie Hyde. What he found in the course of two years of methodical research has emerged as a compelling tale of love, romance, adventure, and devotion. And the mystery has only deepened. Roy Webb |
Sunk Without a Sound, despite its tragic subject, is engaging, beautifully and impeccably researched, and delightfully written. Dimock's tour de force is not only an essential addition to Grand Canyon literature but a fine reading history on any terms. Ann Haymond Zwinger |
Brad Dimock cannot know the Hydes' story without knowing the river. He places us inside their adventure by placing us inside his own, a ride on the wild Colorado in a replica boat that resembles a sort-of-floatable wooden horse trough. His writing is clear, suspenseful, and keenly edged-prepare for delicious outbursts of dry wit-and his compassion for Glen and Bessie makes the story: how a dream, a boat, and a river of terrifying beauty could blind any one of us to our own fatal innocence. Ellen Meloy |
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Sunk Without a Sound is a well researched narrative, well worth reading for river running enthusiasts and history buffs, those who enjoy a mystery, as well as the general public. Richard E. Westwood |
Brad Dimock's Sunk Without a Sound is a solid, well-researched biography, a myth destroyer, and a vital chapter in Grand Canyon history. Verne Huser
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Reads like a who-done-it! Great fun... a fascinating tale.
A must-read for John Blaustein
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The research is outstanding, and the author's blending of his experiences in his own scow with those of the Hydes made the book come alive. I can't say enough. Betty Leavengood |
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What's fascinating about both history and wilderness is the element of mystery. We'll never know-nor should we-about everything. But we can thank Brad Dimock for lifting the corner of the veil and telling one heck of an exciting story. Roderick Frazier Nash |
Dimock doesn't just narrate the Hydes' voyage, he re-creates it. [His] book is driven by his knowledge of rivers, rapids and boats. A series of equally tantalizing twists occurred in the ensuing years, and Dimock investigates them all. Ann Japenga |
A love story spiked with unsettling rumors, violent death and bizarre characters; where facts seem as elusive as the river wild. A puzzle with unexpected twists and eerie coincidences. Gary Ghiotto |
It's a mesmerizing tale, skillfully told, and almost certain to be recognized as a classic in the field of outdoor adventure writing. David Lavender |
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An enthralling story--especially for those who know the river. Colin Fletcher |
Elegantly written, wonderfully researched, and intricately plotted, Sunk Without a Sound has all the allure of a great mystery novel. James Aton |
With a gift for storytelling and the obsession of a sleuth, Brad Dimock captivates us with the kind of mystery only reality and a great river can invent. Bruce Berger |
A damned good book. Tony Hillerman |
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The descriptions are detailed; the subject matter eerie; the writing entertaining; the mystery engrossing. Steve Mann |
The book is a must read for all boatpeople, guides, history buffs, boat lovers, river runners, river lovers, and anyone else with a penchant for a good biography. |
An engrossing book by Brad Dimock, "Sunk" is about one of the whitewater world's greatest mysteries. ...an enthralling book that refuses to be put down |
A well-researched, well-written, inspiring story of the mystery surrounding the Hydes in the Grand Canyon in November, 1928. The best book yet by Dimock... a real page-turner. A Gathering of Writers |
 In 2001, Sunk Without a Sound was one of two winners in the History/Biography category of the National Outdoor Book Award. The National Outdoor Book Awards (NOBA) is the outdoor world's largest and most prestigious book award program. It is a non-profit, educational program, sponsored by the NOBA Foundation, Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education, and Idaho State University. |
"AzLA's Author Awards committees met in June of this
year to vote on which Arizona authors should receive AzLA's highest
honors for this year. Previously, these awards were divided into
three categories: adult, young adult, and children's author/illustrator.
This year, however, Arizona Highways has generously offered to
sponsor the adult awards and to give an award in both the fiction
and non-fiction categories. Winners of all the awards must live
or have lived for a significant time in the American Southwest
and must use the Southwest as a setting for their books." |
"PEN Center USA 2002 Literary Awards competition honoring outstanding works published or produced in 2001 by writers living in the western United States. PEN USA's annual awards program, established in 1982, is a unique regional competition that rewards writers in ten categories. Distinguished panels of judges, comprised of writers, editors and journalists, selected this year's winners and finalists from among more than 500 entries; Los Angeles Times Arts Editor Susan Brenneman served as chair of judges." |
| The Arizona Historical Society combined with the University of Arizona and the Tucson-Pima County Public Library to choose the Southwest Books of the Year for 2001. Sunk Without a Sound was tied for second place among a team of five judges. | Sunk Without a Sound was a finalist for the 2001 Independent Publisher Book Awards, in the Biography Category. The IPPY is given annually, honoring the year's best independently published titles. All independent, university, small press, and self-publishers in North America are eligible to enter. | Sunk Without a Sound was a finalist for the Ben Franklin Award in 2001, presented by Publisher's Marketing Association. |
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Combine the wild Colorado River, an adventuresome young couple, and their unexpected disappearance; add an anguished father; pile on rumor and speculation lasting 73 years; and then cap the story with meticulous research, and you have all the ingredients of a compelling mystery. Dimock, a whitewater guide and one of the authors of the National Outdoor Book Award-winning The Doing of the Thing, has all the credentials to investigate the disastrous honeymoon journey of Glen and Bessie Hyde through the Grand Canyon on an unwieldy Idaho sweep scow. Soon after the couple's disappearance in November, 1928, Glen's father instigated an extensive search that lasted several months. Only the scow was recovered, fully loaded in calm water. Through the years, a woman claiming to be Bessie surfaced, a skeleton reputed to be Glen's was discovered in a shed at the canyon's southern rim, and the TV program Unsolved Mysteries featured the story in 1985. Dimock here provides a thorough history of Glen's and Bessie's backgrounds and even recreates part of the Hydes' river route with his own wife in a homemade scow. Profusely illustrated with photographs and maps, this informative account is highly recommended for most public libraries and academic libraries in the region. Library Journal
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The inexplicable disappearance of an appealing pair of honeymooners in the depths of Grand Canyon in 1928 has been an irresistible story around late-night campfires for decades. How and why Glen and Bessie Hyde's homemade scow was found floating, upright and with its contents intact, has long intrigued and perplexed Grand Canyon boatmen, locals, and rivertrip passengers. Brad Dimock, a veteran river runner, set out to write the tale of the doomed couple, and actually built a sweep scow and persuaded his wife, Jeri Ledbetter, to join him in recreating the Hyde's journey. Dimock, whose research and authorship are as watertight as his knowledge of the river, wanted to experience as closely as possible what the Hydes were up against. The bare facts are these: at the small town of Greenriver, Utah, Glen Hyde spent two days building the wooden sweep scow that he and his bride took down the river. On October 28, 1928, they loaded the boat, christened it Rain-in-the-Face, and launched without fanfare. Their provisions were scanty, their preparations minimal, and they brought no lifejackets. Midway through the Grand Canyon, they hiked out to the South Rim and met with photographer and riverman Emory Kolb. They walked back down, got in their boat, stopped briefly at Hermit Camp, launched, and were never seen again. Over the years, in spite of the telling and retelling of the saga, little was actually known of the Hydes. Speculation always centered around what really happened to them. Woefully inexperienced in navigating a river like the Colorado in an unforgiving boat, did the young couple drown? Did the boat get away from them? Did an attempted escape from the rugged canyon country fail? Did they have a fight and one end up doing in the other? Was Bessie perhaps alive years later to tell about it? Dimock fills in the hitherto unknown details of the search mounted by Glen's father after the boat and Bessie's diary were found; the excruciating and fruitless efforts by the man he calls the real hero of the story. Not content with that narrative (fascinating as it is), he goes farther, to tell the life stories of the two and their families, their forebears, their travels and travails, intimacies of childhood and adolescence, secrets revealed, and the poignant leavings of a too brief existence-high school yearbooks, youthful writings, photographs, letters, memories and gossip of relatives still live to reminisce. To embellish and intensify the tale, he tracks down all the fauxBessies and potential Glens, discerning the permutations of various possibilities, and ultimately putting to rest all the innuendo and conjecture. And Dimock admits his inability to remain aloof from his subjects. Returning to the canyon, alone in a kayak, he goes to Mile 232 in the river's lower gorge. Having determined from Bessie's diary that this was the last point they likely reached on the river, he sits in the rocks studying an especially nasty pair of rocks protruding in the rapid. He writes "I continued to stare at the fang rocks, mesmerized by the unrelenting violence of the river pummeling the spires. I was overcome with sadness, knowing that these two people, in whose lives I had been immersed for so many months now, had died here. I had grown fond of them-too fond-and now, in my mind's eye, I had to watch them die." The power of the legend, and the power of the author's obsessive inquiry and spellbinding prose is that readers, even knowing from the very first word the tragic outcome, will grow fond, too, and will also mourn the inevitable. Rose Houk and Dolly Spalding |
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Love and Death on the Colorado River Their Salmon River scow was found floating in a backwater below 232-Mile Rapid in December 1928, gear as neatly stowed as anyone ever stows it on a scow, eerily empty, with no trace of the honeymoon couple who had left Greenriver, Utah, 5 weeks before. Grand Canyon boatmen, no matter how brilliant, educated, or literate, inhabit an oral tradition: their weakness a perfect tale entrances them; their strength they reproduce a perfect story almost without alteration for decades. So the stories of Glen and Bessie Hyde vanishing on their honeymoon entered the epic cycle almost as soon as their scow was found, and have been told ever since. But some variants on the story had a literary perfection that cried out to be told, and thus the missing honeymoon couple has nacred over with myth through the years. He violent, she an early exemplar of the battered wife syndrome? What of those occasional people who surface as Bessie or as Glen? The skeleton below the rim with a .32 slug in the skull: Glen's body? These variants on the story have been too perfect not to tell. But the truth has been elusive. Brad Dimock, a long-time Grand Canyon boatman who collaborated with Welch and Conley on The Doing of the Thing (the biography of Buzz Holmstrom that won the National Outdoor Book Award in 1998), went detective on these missing persons, and found the story simpler and far more complex than we ever knew. What he found heroism, competence, love, devotion makes a remarkable and richly illustrated tale. Biographies as good as this one are quests. Dimock is a perfect choice to achieve this one. One of the things that distinguishes this book is the metabiblic research. Anyone presumably could though no one else ever did track down the written and photographic records. But to write is to judge, and Dimock has gone to extraordinary length to inform his judgements with experience. He brings to bear not just his 30 years in the Grand Canyon, but learns how to run a scow so he could assess the Hydes' remarkable achievement as boatmen. He can even answer more intimate questions about the dynamics of the honeymoon trip and what might have happened, as his fellow boatman on the run where he recreated the Hydes' trip was his wife Jeri Ledbetter, the boatman, environmentalist, and at moments, humorist. He also keeps in mind that we are not all boatmen, so the book is informed by maps, sketches, and the kind of off-hand knowledge (say, of subsurface currents and vultures) that answers each question as it arises. Some of the nicest touches at conveying personality were to use Bessie's poetry as chapter epigraphs, and quotations from Glen's stories as commentary. The Hydes were remarkable people who died well; they are memorialized in a remarkable book that displays one rare literary virtue: concinnity. The book itself is a pure joy to hold and read. Dimock discovered and honed his own skills at layout and design during his stint as the editor of the boatman's quarterly review, the journal of the Grand Canyon River Guides. He carried the bqr and himself from the realm of a xerox sheet chronicling the odd thoughts of a batch of polymathic misfits, to one of the most attractive and best-written magazines around; many a sophisticated reader will open her bqr before the Atlantic, and way before the New Yorker. His book evokes memories of the sensuousness of handling incunabulae and illuminated manuscripts. Paper clean and subtly scented, perfectly chosen and reproduced sepia photographs, careful links among the design elements. Really a book to own and handle. Earl Perry, |
Glen and Bessie Hyde floated the Green and Colorado Rivers on their honeymoon in 1928. Glen built a two-ton sweep scow from wood he scrounged at Green River, Utah. With a little experience gleaned from rivers in Idaho, the newlyweds made their way through Labyrinth, Stillwater, Cataract, and Glen Canyons before facing the awesome power of the Colorado in Marble and Grand Canyons. They were last seen at Hermit Rapids on November 18; their empty boat was found upright 142 miles downstream one month later. I can relate. In 1981, I took my wife on a honeymoon trip down the Salt River. The water was fast, the kayaks were tippy, and she swore I was trying to kill her. We survived and drove to Lees Ferry, where Grand Canyon river trips begin. Our honeymoon lasted another two weeks, this time aboard my more stable (if more crowded) Havasu raft. Rose began to warm to this life that moves to the rhythm of rivers. Sunk Without a Sound is Brad Dimock's new book about Glen and Bessie Hyde. Dimock is hardly a newcomer to this world, having earned his keep for the past quarter-century by rowing in Grand Canyon as well as on rivers in Utah, Alaska, Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. Stories of Glen and Bessie had swirled around many of his campfires in the Canyon. With every telling, the myth seemed to grow larger, the implications darker. Had Glen Hyde really forced his young wife to endure a brutal trip that she did not want to make? Had Bessie really shot her new husband and escaped, only to reappear on the Colorado four decades later? Dimock could have taken any number of cheap shots with this book, playing upon innuendo, stirring up waters that have long been muddy . But he didn't. Instead, he wrote about two real people who gambled and lost. He writes with poignance about Glen's honor and Bessie's spunk. He draws a remarkable picture of Glen's father, tenaciously clinging at first to a thin hope of rescue, then left haunted by catastrophe. And Dimock does a beautiful job of depicting the Canyon in which this drama played out. He knows and loves this country, and it shows. His story-telling runs as high and fast as the river. Dimock felt that he could tell Glen and Bessie's story more accurately if he followed in their footsteps. With his wife Jeri Ledbetter, he too built a scow and they struggled to guide it through the Grand Canyon. The trip came close to doing them in, with the scow's sweep oars thrashing them daily. They learned to dive cowering into the boat's bottom through the worst of the rapids. No points for style; many points for survival. With each twist and turn of the canyon, Dimock better understood what motivated Glen and Bessie, what they experienced, where they were going and why they didn't get there. Sunk Without a Sound will take its place among a handful of books which have made Grand Canyon's history come alive. Michael Collier |
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It's obvious that Dimock has done his homework in writing and researching this superbly crafted book detailing the disappearance of Glen and Bessie Hyde, the 'honeymoon couple' who attempted a run through Grand Canyon in their sweep scow--Rain-in-the-Face--during 1928. Here we find three great stories packed concisely into one
exceptionally good book. It is part mystery novel, part an historical
account replete Their family members appear in startling detail, their history
is laid out in a colorfully woven chronology, and their ultimate
end is surmised in Illustrated with maps, diagrams, and an interesting variety
of historic Grand Canyon and Hyde family photos, Dimock ultimately
takes the reader on a whitewater trip not to be forgotten. Dimock's
first book, The Doing of the Thing, a biography of riverman
Buzz Holmstrom, won the Shane Murphy |
