How do you design a wooden dory strong enough to handle Grand Canyon whitewater? If you’re Zarn, you start by crashing a lot of boats.
Published July 29, 2026 11:43AM
Cricket Zarn couldn’t stop staring. Despite years as a river guide, she’d never seen a wooden boat in the Grand Canyon before—and yet here was one now, bobbing down the Colorado like it owned the place. Its old-school paint job caught the light, and the gorgeous arch of the bow sliced through ripples like skis through powder.
The boat’s captain noticed the look on her face—he’d seen it before—and invited her to come aboard.
“I climbed in, and I got in the captain’s seat, and I got goosebumps,” Zarn says. “I thought, ‘Okay, this might be the rest of my life.’”
Today’s Colorado River dories are descendants of the first known vessels to ever run the Grand Canyon, in the 1860s. Over the years, boatbuilders fine-tuned their approach, strengthening the hull and flattening the bottom to make the boats easier to pivot in big rapids. Then in 1971, Jerry Briggs perfected the design, broadening the back of the boat and pulling up the bow in a sweeping curve. The shape lets the dories surf big waves, not just cut through them.
Zarn couldn’t get the dories out of her mind. She started asking around, and soon stumbled across Brad Dimock, a master boatbuilder and owner of Fretwater Boatworks, a Flagstaff outfit that specializes in wooden boats. The first day Zarn walked into his shop, Dimock set her to work on a dozen sets of oars. By sunset, he’d offered her a job.
Zarn threw herself into the work. Soon, she was learning the art of boatbuilding, helping with the designs, and quality-testing the product—in other words, crashing boats.
“We run ‘em hard,” she says. “My first crash, I missed my line and hit going about 40 mph, and I put a hole in the boat you could throw a cat through.” She repaired it on the spot. Then, she came right back into the shop and tweaked the design to prevent that kind of damage going forward.
This constant iteration has taught her to pay attention to every detail and to build boats that last. It’s a good thing, too: Ever since Kevin Fedarko published his popular Grand Canyon epic, The Green Mile, in 2014, dories have been making a comeback, and Fretwork has had its hands full with orders, guided trips, and boatbuilding workshops. Zarn isn’t surprised; it had always felt like a matter of time before other people started waking up to the magic of wooden boats.
“The running of the craft is kind of sensual—it’s a seductive dance,” she says. “In a raft, you’re sitting on top of the water, but in a dory, you’re about a foot deep into the current. You can feel the water and the waves.”
These days, Zarn is constantly on the move, driving equipment to boatbuilding clinics in Arizona, Oregon, and Maine and hauling dories to far-flung put-ins.
2026 Nissan FrontierMorahan Visuals
“It’s nice to have a vehicle like a Frontier for that kind of thing,” she says. “It’ll hold still on a steep boat ramp, even with a heavy trailer. You take it out of park, and it doesn’t get pulled back an inch. And going fast on crumbly dirt road, it just floats.”
In between all the driving and shop time, Zarn still spends upwards of 200 days per year on the water. She spends a good chunk of those days in her own dory, Peekaboo, building on the legacy of wooden boats in the Grand Canyon, one descent at a time.
“I love it,” she says. “It’s like being a part of history.”
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