Colorado Plateau River Reads

The epic story of the fastest boat ride in history, through the heart of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado river. In the winter of 1983, the largest El Niño event on record — a chain of “superstorms” that swept in from the Pacific Ocean — battered the entire West. That spring, a massive snowmelt sent runoff racing down the Colorado River toward the Glen Canyon Dam, a 710-foot-high wall of concrete that sat at the head of the most iconic landscape...

"The riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists...

What started as a scientific expedition through the last uncharted territory of the continental United States turned out to be a harrowing adventure for John Wesley Powell and nine other men who set out to explore the Colorado River in 1869. Their story, recounted from Powell's journals, is as exciting today as it was when first published in 1874. Photos & line drawings.

Wallace Stegner chronicles the life and career of explorer John Wesley Powell. Filled with triumphs and frustrations, Powell was one of the first people to explore much of the American West, including the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon.

River runners and armchair naturalists alike will be enthralled by this stunning tour through the natural, environmental, and human history of Cataract Canyon, a spectacular seventeen-mile run of free-flowing river above Lake Powell in the canyonlands of southern Utah.

On t.p.: . . . and with special reference to the voyages of Powell . . .

Glen and Bessie Hyde began their honeymoon trip down the Green and Colorado Rivers on October 23, 1928. They vanished without a trace. More than forty years later, in 1971, an older woman on a Grand Canyon river trip announced she was Bessie Hyde. She said she had stabbed Glen, hiked out, and started life anew. In 1976 a skeleton thought to be Glen Hyde's was found at the canyon rim with a bullet in the skull. Since then, another suspected Glen...

Zak Podmore sets out to explore exploited Western rivers-and some of the most pressing environmental justices of our time. After losing his river-running mother to cancer, Podmore disappears into the American West's iconic canyon country to heal. He kayaks down a rare release of water in the Colorado River Delta, investigates uranium tailings on Ute Mountain lands near San Juan River, ans interrogates the treatment of asylum seekers crossing the Rio...