Customer Reviews:
 History of an Adventure! August 6, 2008
From Front Jacket:
"'There is nothing else quite like it,' writes David Lavender, 'a deeply entrenched water corridor 280 miles long through a desert wilderness of almost overwhelming beauty. No other American river offers, in one unbroken stretch, as great an aggregation of rapids.'
When John Wesley Powell ran the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869, he did not have such forewarning - nor may he have suspected how many others would follow in his wake. Taking to the river by boat has become as much a lure to adventurers as climbing a mountain 'because it's there,' and guided trips through the Canyon now test the mettle of 15,000 brave souls every year.
Today's river rats are linked to Powell by a colorful chain of individuals who braved then-unknown perils of water and rock. David Lavender has traced this history of adventure, beginning with legendary prospector James White who might even have preceded Powell through the Canyon when he was forced to flee Indians on a makeshift raft. A subsequent century of river running has seen the exploits of such individuals as Robert Brewster Stanton, who wanted to build a railroad through the Canyon's Inner Gorge and lost three men in his surveying expedition; trapper Nathaniel Galloway, who perfected a technique for running rapids - by entering a rapid with his boat stern first; the Kolb brothers, who made the first films of running the river; and Georgie White, the 'Woman of the River,' who by introducing rubber rafts ushered in the modern era of river running."
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