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Meet James Wilkes of Salt River Rafting in Hwy 60

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Today we’d like to introduce you to James Wilkes.

James, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
At the age of 32, I ran my first river trip on the Upper Salt River in May of 1997 at the start of my third year of commercial river guiding. The place was pure magic! Since then I have run rivers for over 20 years from Alaska to Ecuador and from California to West by God Virginia and there is nothing like it anywhere. The canyon is only two hours from Phoenix yet a world away on the White Mountain Apache Reservation. It is 2,000 feet deep, runs over 50 miles and contains all the beauty of the Sonoran Desert including black bear, wolf, javelina, and coatimundi. I lived off the grid before that was an expression, in a van down by the river much like the expression. It is one of my very favorite places in the world and I look forward to returning year after year.

In the summer of 2006, I was surprised to be contacted by my employer on the Salt River announcing he was moving the family out of Globe, AZ back east to be near to the rest of his family and wondered if I might not be interested in buying the rafting outfit. I told him I would think about it, but what I was really thinking with my inside voice was that owning a rafting company in the desert with its uncertain flows from year to year was a fool’s enterprise. Furthermore, I had kind of perfected the gypsy vagabond lifestyle, a migrant wave farmer if you will, and this could seriously compromise my much-valued lack of responsibilities. So I informed my buddy Wiley about the opportunity since he already owned a rafting company with his friend Mike called Independent Whitewater on the world famous Arkansas River not far from Denver, Colorado.

His response was uncannily well thought out, almost like he anticipated this day. He said, “James, this is what we have been dreaming of doing. Look, being the owner is fun, you get to make all those things happen that you’ve been thinking of for the last ten years while you sat in the back of a raft guide for someone else. I mean, what are you going to do? You’re old, 40 ish, are you going to go back to school and get your masters and a real job? It’s too late for that for so many reasons, and you already know all about rafting. Besides, I don’t have any money, we need you to float the loan until we can pay you back.”

So that’s how it happened. I had never had such a dream, but maybe I hadn’t dared to dream? It did stroke my ego that someone would want to get into a business with me and thought I had something to bring to the table. And it was true that I owned a house that had appreciated in value that I could get a loan against. And Wiley very conveniently left out all the challenges of owning a business. Hell, I hadn’t even managed a little bit in my entire work history. But in the end and despite a few challenges he was right. It was a dream come true. Working for yourself brings so much satisfaction and meaning and value to your day to day life. I highly recommend it.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I guess it depends on who you are. If you have garnered a significant amount of upper-level business experience in your working life, have excellent skills in business triage, understand what motivates people to successfully manage them, can handle stress in a healthy way, have a family who is okay with not seeing you in any meaningful way for months, then I would say it was a smooth road. But for me, not so much. Given that we knew most everything we needed to about the operations of a rafting company and how to keep it in the black, I think the biggest struggles were employees and partners.

Employees. Managing people has been the biggest struggle. None of us went to school for this. We have bounced from being everybody’s buddy to being total assholes that everybody couldn’t wait to get away from. I think that learning how to be an effective leader that people want to do their very best for is the most important aspect of a successful business. Especially one in which the most significant component is the customer experience which is shaped by the guide. Everything else between the competition is the same: the trip, the cost, the equipment. It is our people who bring the greatest value to the product. Their stoke must be high!

Partners. The experts will tell you never go into business with family or friends. I’m not so sure about that. Trust is huge and fortunately for us that has never been an issue and I think it is because we knew each other quite well and the one thing we never worried about was one of us ripping off the other. Besides, there wasn’t much there to take. But as things evolved over time there was not adequate communication to keep things smooth. One annual preseason meeting started with our partner Mike informing us that unless things changed dramatically and immediately that he wanted out. Basically, he felt that an unfair and under the compensated amount of work had fallen upon him.

After the total shock of hearing this, we confirmed that the three of us did still believe that we were reasonable people and that reasonable people are obligated to work shit out without things getting ugly. And we did. I myself had felt like Mike once or twice but had checked myself that I had taken on the burdens of doing the accounting, the web authoring, and optimization, operations management, etc and that if I felt it was unfair I only had myself to blame for not speaking up. I wish that Mike had spoken up earlier too once I realized how unhappy he was. The biggest take away for me is to keep checking in, keep the channels open, communicate. Face to face is really important because text and emails can very easily be misinterpreted.

Salt River Rafting – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Salt River Rafting provides guide whitewater raft trips in the Upper Salt River Canyon 2.5 hours from Phoenix on the White Mountain Apache Reservation. We are also permitted by Tonto National Forest for the Federally protected wilderness stretch above Roosevelt Lake which is one of the most desirable multi-day river trips in the U.S. and the only commercially run stretch of river in the Sonoran Desert.

Salt River Rafting specializes in just running trips on the Upper Salt River whereas our 3 competitors have very large companies that run many different rivers in multiple states as well as do everything from outfitting trips in the Grand Canyon to running jeep tours in the mountains of Colorado. With our focus on the Salt River of Arizona, I think it enables us to create excellent customer service.

What I am proud of are a number of things that came directly from ownership’s experience of having been guides for so long, almost 100 years collectively. When we took over we made helmets mandatory which is not an industry standard on Class III rivers even now over ten years later. We recognized the remote location, like many rivers, ups the ante and makes sense to take the extra precaution. Class III rivers are great fun and appropriate for first timers and family but why not go the extra step to reduce the risk by wearing helmets? And you know what? No one has ever complained about it once and all the companies require them today on the Upper Salt River. We felt another safety issue was the practice of renting wet-suits to rafters. It is not unusual to have booked and paid for your trip and upon arrival find that this important piece of equipment to keep you warm and protect you in the case of a swim is going to cost extra. We had noticed in the past as guides that people often underestimate their need for a wet-suit or simply want to save some money and forego them.

Now that they are included in the cost of the trip everyone is safer and warmer. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. The last thing I want to mention being very proud of is our company policy of having our guides be “pilot in command.” What this means is they have the final say in deciding who should run the river. In the past I have found myself as a guide taking people down a stretch of river that was just not appropriate for them and having no way to address the situation. Sometimes it was credit card courage, they paid, they get to go mentality. Sometimes management made it clear that if you didn’t take them they would find a guide who would and your workload might adjust accordingly. It is often not unusual for clients to intentionally or not misrepresent themselves. There are so many factors and the environment is so dynamic that you have to trust your guides experience and intuition to decide if and when a person or group is not on the correct trip. And our guides know that we have their backs. There is a really simple way that I sum this up: neither you nor I ever want to make that phone call. End of story. Make the right decision for the client, the company, the crew and you.

Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
Firstly, it is our guests having a safe and fun time in the truly foreign environment of a wild river in a remote and beautiful place. Having guests connect with our guides and wanting to come back year after year or excited to run other rivers. Seeing the value of wild places. We often hear that we were the highlight of their trip, that we created a memory of a lifetime.

Secondly, is having a company culture that supports and cares for our guides. Empowering and entrusting them to take ownership, to care about their guests and coworkers, to know that they are the 1% who can’t wait to go to work every day.

The markers from our guests are TripAdvisor, Yelp, Facebook. From our employees, it is communication and trust.

Pricing:

  • Our most popular trip is the full day, 10 miles and 14 Class III rapids. Grilled river-side lunch. Adult $129 Youth $99
  • Full day of rafting & car camp at our river side base, 3 meals. Adult $189 Youth $149
  • World class, 52 mile, 3 day Class III & IV wilderness trip. Adult $629 Youth $479

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Getting in touch: VoyagePhoenix is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

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