Flashback Friday: The Grand Canyon, a Ford LTD on a raft, and Ted Hatch

Did you know Hatch River Expeditions once sent a Ford LTD on a raft down the Colorado River?

The year was 1967, and Ford wanted to show its vehicles being thrashed about on the rustic backcountry Colorado River and then driving away unscathed. The company approached Ted Hatch to help make this vision come true. According to legend, Ted was exhausted from running the river all summer and threw out a number that he was sure Ford would have to turn down. They accepted, and a Ford commercial was born. 

The Hatch family knew the story of the commercial. (Ted even talked about it in a 1984 interview with Elizabeth Sowards.) They knew it really happened—there was a photo in their family albums to prove it. In the photo, Ted is leaning against a red Ford LTD on a raft with the canyon rising up in the background. 

As the internet proliferated and all kinds of footage started to be publicly available, it seemed like the video would be easy to find. Many at the Hatch company tried and many failed to find the car careening down the rapids—with Ted Hatch hidden beneath it, steering through the rapids. 

For Eva Hatch, Ted Hatch’s granddaughter, researching and cataloguing Hatch history has always been a fascination. She examined every piece of media that came out the back corner of a Hatch closet, scoured university library archives, and chased down every lead, but always came up empty handed. 

Then, in 2025 our luck changed. Hatch booked a trip for Mark Truby, the chief communications officer for Ford Motor Company. Mark’s assistant, Erin, put Ford’s archives department on the hunt for the commercial, and within a few days, we had it: a Ford LTD on a rubber raft covered in wooden planks bouncing down the Colorado River. 

Ted’s story of the harrowing experience filming the commercial is recounted in The Rivers We Know: An Anthology of River Experiences. It’s also recapped in a recent Ford From the Road blog post written by Truby!

Truby remarks in his post about the unexpected coincidence that brought a Ford story to his family vacation in Grand Canyon (the one place he thought he wouldn’t find one!). For Hatch this happenstance turned out to be an unexpected blessing—it brought a piece of business and family history back to us. 

That’s the story of old companies that touch people’s lives. They cross paths in history. If we’re lucky, that history surfaces when our paths cross again.

Check out the commercial here: