Brave the Wild River
The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
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4.4 • 21 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography
Winner of the Reading the West Book Award in Memoir/Biography
Selected as a Southwest Book of the Year Top Pick
Rachel Carson Environment Book Award for Reporting on the Environment, Honorable Mention
A Booklist Top of the List Winner for Nonfiction in 2023
A New Yorker Best Book of 2023
"Thrilling, expertly paced, warmhearted." —Peter Fish, San Francisco Chronicle
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 and veteran river runners boldly proclaimed that the motley crew would never make it out alive. But for Clover and Jotter, the expedition held a tantalizing appeal: no one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, and they were determined to be the first.
Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their daring forty-three-day journey down the river, during which they meticulously cataloged the thorny plants that thrived in the Grand Canyon’s secret nooks and crannies. Along the way, they chased a runaway boat, ran the river’s most fearsome rapids, and turned the harshest critic of female river runners into an ally. Clover and Jotter’s plant list, including four new cactus species, would one day become vital for efforts to protect and restore the river ecosystem.
Brave the Wild River is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West, at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this marvelous history, science journalist Sevigny (Mythical River) recounts the 43-day rowboat trip down the Colorado River undertaken by University of Michigan botanist Elzada Clover and her mentee Lois Jotter during the summer of 1938. Sevigny details how the duo successfully catalogued the flora of the Grand Canyon while enduring raging rapids, "stomach-somersaulting drops, and standing waves big enough to swallow a boat whole," but her focus is on how Clover and Jotter refuted sexist assumptions about the role of women in science. Though historically botany had been deemed too feminine for men, Clover and Jotter undertook their expedition at a time when male scientists were becoming increasingly involved in the field and began excluding women (a well-known adventurer remarked, "Women... do not belong in the Canyon of the Colorado"). Sevigny also weaves in stimulating trivia on the natural history of the Grand Canyon, including explanations of the geological forces behind its formation and National Park Service efforts to repopulate native animals in the region. Drawing on Clover and Jotter's journals and letters, Sevigny recreates their expedition in novelistic detail, producing a narrative as propulsive as the current of the Colorado. Readers will be swept away. Photos.
