About The Author

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About The Author

My name is Bob Ribokas and I am the person who envisioned, designed and created the GRAND CANYON Explorer web site during those early, founding days of the Internet and the World Wide Web, way back in 1994. At the time that I started this project my fascination with the Canyon was also in its infancy and I had completed only a hand-full of trails, most of them in the main corridor located near Grand Canyon Village on the south rim. I wanted to share these experiences with others and the result is this web site. Since I began the web site I have completed all of the main trails in the Canyon and have just started my explorations of the more rugged backcountry areas. I started out doing one trip every year, or every other year but now average two or three trips each year to the Grand Canyon. These trips are usually for multi-day backpacking treks, but sometimes they are just for special happenings like the annual picnic of the Grand Canyon Pioneers Society in June or to attend some performances of the Grand Canyon Music Festival in September.

I work as a software developer for Teradyne, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts - about as far away one can be from the Grand Canyon and still be in the United States. I started working for Teradyne in 1984 as a COBOL programmer on a DEC-System 20 mainframe computer. Since then I have migrated to the Digital VAX platforms and from there to the Digital Alpha (which is now owned by Compaq Computers). I have expanded my repertoire of programming languages (technologies) and am now quite comfortable in Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual InterDev, Active Server Pages, Visual FoxPro as well as a host of Oracle products such as PL/SQL, Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports. I still code the majority of the pages for the GRAND CANYON Explorer web site by hand using straight HTML syntax - old habits die hard if ever at all.