I worked for 25 years as a wilderness guide and outdoor educator on the Colorado Plateau and in Alaska, and the Grand Canyon is my favorite national park and one of my two favorite places on earth (the other being Alaska’s Brooks Range). My background in cultural anthropology has given me a deeper appreciation of what it took for indigenous peoples to make a living inside the canyon. And it’s a humbling perspective indeed. When I lived in Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon was my “backyard” weekend wilderness. I’m still drawn there and visit at least once a year, even while living up north.
I wrote
No Walk in the Park: Seeking Thrills, Eco-Wisdom, and Legacies in the Grand Canyon
I love a writer who is willing to put his life at risk to solve a mystery. And I love history and biography. The mystery? What happened to Glen and Bessie Hyde, a young couple who vanished on their honeymoon while trying to run the length of the canyon in 1928 in a scow—a boat that looked like a water trough.
Dimock, a Grand Canyon guide and builder of wooden dories, researched this type of craft and, together with his wife, braved the rapids because he thought this would provide clues about the disappearance. Having rowed unwieldy baggage boats in the canyon myself, I emphasized with their plight, and the story of the honeymooners is one guides often tell the clients sitting in camp chairs in the after-dinner circle.
I once dislocated a shoulder while crossing the canyon’s Thunder River raging with snowmelt; another time, I got lost on the Paria Plateau, separated from my pack, and spent a miserable night in a tee-shirt and shorts while thunder and lightning scared the Bejesus out of me. So, these tales of death and disaster compiled by two canyon veterans cut close to the bone.
They’re not depressing reading, surprisingly. There are accounts of amazing survival, and much can be learned from these cases to avoid getting yourself into trouble. Not something most readers will read cover to cover, but I did and dip into it still on occasion.
I love the artwork: funny, pictograph-style vignettes of the different ways you can die in the canyon (many more than you’d think).
This is a vastly expanded and revised edition of the 2001 classic that sold a quarter million copies, now updated after a decade,containing many gripping accounts of all known fatal mishaps in the most famous of the World's Seven Natural Wonders. Also available as an very limite, signed and numbered editionof 380 hardcover copies, under a separate ISBN and order item listing.
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
Having attempted my own Grand Canyon thru-hike, on the largely trail-less north side of the Colorado River, I have walked in Fletcher’s shoes, metaphorically speaking. Mine started to come apart—with their soles delaminating—on day 1; before the end of day 40, I had to have a replacement pair brought in. Those pinched, and I lost toenails.
Beyond the minutiae of long-distance backpacking, the Welsh author of this classic of outdoor literature makes plenty of room for contemplation. At the end of a long, hot, hard, blistering day, I, too, spent many an hour perched on the rim, with a glimpse of the river far below, pondering my role in the grand scheme of things. Then it was always on to supper, which never has tasted better.
You can’t make a list like this one and ignore John Wesley Powell, the one-armed geologist-explorer credited with the first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
My beef with this man is that he was a grandiose (if not untalented) writer. He fudged the truth, conflating accounts of two trips into one. Important to a guide, he could be an overbearing leader. This book puts him on the page, warts and all, and puts you right there with him and his crew—moldy bacon, capsized boats, and thunderstorms included.
In this way, as through the canyon’s geological wonders and archaeology, history comes alive. Though I knew the outcome, the writing riveted me to my seat (as you hope to be in Lava Falls, the gorge’s biggest rapid).
Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals, Down the Great Unknown is the first book to tell the full, dramatic story of the Powell expedition.
On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis—and as perilous. The ten men set out from Green River Station, Wyoming Territory down the Colorado in four wooden rowboats. Ninety-nine days later, six half-starved wretches came ashore near Callville, Arizona.
Even the most perfect pictures simply cannot do the canyon justice—none of mine ever have. But the photographic montages of Klett and Wolfe come close; fusing historical shots with contemporary ones they took at the same location, from the same angle, they manage to show what impresses me most in the grand gorge: its timelessness, how little the geology and even the vegetation changes over decades.
This really puts human life into perspective. The images in this coffee table book for the discerning are daring, whimsical, playful, and experimental, all of which are qualities that the best guides and canyoneers display.
Using landscape photography to reflect on broader notions of culture, the passage of time, and the construction of perception, photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe spent five years exploring the Grand Canyon for their most recent project, "Reconstructing the View". The team's landscape photographs are based on the practice of rephotography, in which they identify sites of historic photographs and make new photographs of those precise locations. Klett and Wolfe referenced a wealth of images of the canyon, ranging from historical photographs and drawings by William Bell and William Henry Holmes, to well-known artworks by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams,…
These essays by an award-winning writer and student of culture sift decades of experience backpacking and boating for a stance that questions the mainstream. Vivid, finely crafted, shot through with humor, self-effacing while deeply opinionated, this book shows what it means to meet nature on nature's terms. Read it at home in an armchair, or at a river camp, or stuff it into your pack before you go wandering.
Join me on a night hike to the great chasm’s bottom; trek forty days in my company below one rim, or snowshoe the other; visit a Hopi mesa for a ceremony; marvel at hidden rock art; sip epic solitude; tag threatened fish; and float through Glen Canyon’s slickrock remains or below Niagara-size fleeting falls.
Embark on a riveting journey into Washington State’s untamed Olympic Peninsula, where the threads of folklore legends and historical icons are woven into a complex ecological tapestry.
Follow the enigmatic Petr as he fearlessly employs his pirate radio transmitter to broadcast the forgotten and untamed voices that echo through the…
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…
