RIVER CLAN

Mark Zoller was a third-grader in 1973 when his father came home from a long work day overseeing the family’s small chain of Portland-area restaurants and made an announcement.

“I got a new job today,” Phil Zoller declared. “I got my guide’s license.”

Said Mark, “I honestly remember thinking, ‘We’re going to starve.’ “

But Phil had raised his boys to be outdoorsmen, river men and, above all things, resourceful. The family thrived in its new livelihood.

“As a child I thought all kids were out in the woods and on the rivers having adventures just like us,” said Mark, now a 44-year-old living in BZ Corners, a riverside hamlet overlooking the White Salmon River.

“We did wild things. We grew up doing harebrained things. My dad was different, and I didn’t recognize that until I was in junior high.”

Thirty-five years later, Phil Zoller’s one-man fishing-guide business has morphed into a family-wide, river-borne cottage industry with three generations of Zollers working in two distinct operations that entertain nearly 10,000 guests a year.

Phil’s oldest son, Tracy, 46, runs Adventure Fishing on the Klickitat River with his wife, Lori.

Their oldest son, Levi, is already an experienced and busy guide at 21, having become a licensed guide at 16 – the same age Tracy was when he became the state’s youngest licensed steelhead fishing guide.

Mark, Tracy’s younger brother, is now the owner-operator (with his wife, Sherri) of Zoller’s Outdoor Odysseys, an outgrowth of the rafting business Phil started six years after he traded the restaurant business for life on the river.

Mark’s two top guides? His daughter Rachel, 22, and son Zachary, 20.

Phil has phased off the rivers to manage a hunting preserve in northeast Walla Walla County, raising pheasants and chukars and taking clients out to hunt them.

At 66, after what he figures was “about 50,000 miles of rowing driftboats and rafts,” his shoulders had simply had enough of pulling oars.

“It’s like a treadmill with a driftboat,” Phil said. “You’re holding the boat back against the river and it’s going out from under you; you might float eight miles, but you’ve rowed the boat 15. It all adds up.”

Phil whet his desire for steelhead guiding as what Mark calls a “pirate outfitter” four years before getting his license.

Not that Phil and his sons weren’t always up to the task. Phil had already been a de facto guide – “a pirate outfitter,” grins Mark – for four years before he became licensed.

“If you have perfect water conditions, you will have steelhead; they will be there,” Phil said, and no current was too difficult for Zoller to find them on the Toutle, Kalama or North Fork Lewis.

Friends referred to Phil as Sasquatch or Grizzly Adams because of his robust beard, long hair and the muscular girth Mark describes as “370 pounds of brick.”

In 1974, an Oregon rafting outfitter asked Phil if he’d be willing to guide a raft during a trip through Hells Canyon on the Snake River. Phil had never rafted before, but he figured, why not.

“You’ve got to remember,” Mark says, “if you know how to run a drift boat well, you can take a raft almost anywhere.”

So Phil took the job guiding the second raft behind the lead raft, and brought Mark along as a go-fer. On the second day, one of the paying clients asked Mark, “Is this your first rafting trip ever?”

“ ‘Yeah, and my dad’s, too,’ ” Mark recalls answering. “The look I got from my dad was the ‘You’re about to go swimming’ look. But Dad was by far the best boatman on that trip.”

Still, fishing remained the family business, and Phil’s Guide Service was always busy.

On May 18, 1980, Phil was going to be on the Toutle River, where his clients had been hammering the steelhead all spring. But that day, he wasn’t quite feeling himself, so instead of driftboating the Toutle, he opted to take his jet boat on the Cowlitz. That morning, of course, Mount St. Helens erupted, turning the Toutle into a deadly torrent of mud.

“He would have died,” Mark said. “He would be gone.”

The Zollers weren’t daunted by the eruption. With media from around the world fervently attempting to chronicle the devastation, Phil Zoller saw an opportunity.

Confident on any manner of river, even flows of volcanic mud infused with treacherous logjams and debris, he took some media members down the Toutle on his driftboat, and their footage created significant publicity for Phil’s Guide Service.

More “scenic tours” of the damage ensued, and the Zollers’ reputation spread.

A Sports Illustrated article featured photographs of Tracy “in his baby-blue driftboat rowing through huge, chocolate-covered waves,” Mark recalls. “Everything was brown because of so much silt, and here’s this 18-year-old kid rowing driftboats through the aftermath.”

With the steelheading business on the Toutle a muddy memory, Phil encouraged Tracy to make his first raft trip down the White Salmon River. The teenager negotiated the river, including the 14-foot drop in Husum Falls, with his dad anxiously waiting at the bottom to ask, “What was it like?”

The Zollers were taking their first steps in the infancy of the region’s whitewater tourism industry.

Tracy started his own rafting business on the side, and built the business on pure chutzpah.

“I became the vacuum cleaner salesman for whitewater rafting. I’d walk into CEOs’ offices and say, ‘Next year you’re going to do an employee picnic with Whitewater Adventure Rafting’,” Tracy said, laughing. “It was weird, I know – nowadays you wouldn’t even get past the front door. But back then, things were different.”

When Tracy’s business outgrew his dad’s, he sold his rafting company in 1997 to Phil, who sold it four years later to Mark.

“Mark loved the water, he loved kayaking,” said Tracy’s wife, Lori. “Sometimes we’d have to go looking for Mark. You know how when you’re a kid, you just live life on the edge? Well, (Mark) would come back from the river missing a shoe, one time he came back without a kayak. He really did live on the edge.”

Mark has settled in to being a businessman, running a sprawling, successful rafting operation.

The Oregon rafting company that had hired Phil for that Hells Canyon back in ‘74? Mark bought it four years ago, to acquire the company’s river-running permits.

Tracy, meanwhile, is full-time with his first love, fishing – steelhead year-round except for the August-to- October king salmon season.

“I knew when I was just a kid that this was what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. “I’m thankful. It’s not an easy way to make a living, that’s for sure, and I’ll never get rich. But you know what? I’m rich because I get to do what I like.”

Phil Zoller said he enjoys watching each ensuing generation of Zollers take to the river. Tracy’s youngest son, Ben, is already rowing drift boats at 13.

“Next time I go over, he will take me fishing,” Phil said. “I’ll be his passenger. It’s a tradition.”