Kerry's Reviews > Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

Read for the BookTube prize non-fiction. 4.5 stars. It did end up being my third out of six and moved on to the Quarterfinals

What struck me most about this recent book that describes the adventures of two women botanists who made history by being the first non-native women to raft down the Colorado is how young this country really is (or perhaps how old I am). These women noted in history for their bravery and daring in taking a trip few and especially women had ever attempted before was completed only 10 years before my own birth. I remember seeing the Grand Canyon at the age of 12 in 1962 when my family moved from the Midwest to California. It seemed to me at that age that the conquering of the west was over and done and my greatest desire was to visit Disneyland.

This book highlighted how much has changed in the last 70 years as far as the growth in the knowledge of ecosystems, and all the changes that man’s presence is making on the landscapes around us even in the areas of our National Parks, that we believe we are preserving for the generations to come. There was much information that opened my eyes about the recent changes in the use of both the Grand Canyon and the Colorado river. While the story is of these two women, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter both botanists from the University of Michigan, who are lauded as the first two non-indigenous women to raft the Colorado in small boats, much history is folded in between the lines of that journey. And it is an amazing history even if at times it seems to interrupt and pull this reader away from a ripping good yarn of bravery and wet roaring water the story could have been.

I found myself wishing that the history could have been told in one chapter early in the book. While it might have been a little dull and info heavy, there were some startling facts such as the two honeymooners who attempted the trip in 1928 and disappeared, their fate still unknown, and it would have highlighted how this trip was one of a kind, as the damming of this river was already underway. This group of four men and two women who braved this 600 mile journey during the heat of the summer in 1938 in three small boats were the considered extreme explorers of their day. The river know for its treacherous rapids was about to change. The Hoover Dam was completed but as yet Lake Mead was unfilled, the Glen Canyon and as many as 6 more dams were being considered to provide water and power to the 7 states that managed the river. So while several parties had attempted the river run before none had allowed women in the groups and several had ended in disaster.

So the trip was going to be one of a kind in more ways than one. The author primarily highlights the how unusual it was for two women, scientists (an unusual profession for women at that time) undertaking such a journey into the wildness with four men. Clover (41) and Jotter (24) along with the men, only the male leader of the expedition had any river rafting experience, were thought by many unlikely to survive. The book seems determined to highlight the botany aspect of the trip but only occasionally speaks of the gathering of plants and gives more if not equal time to the white water and close calls the group encountered.

It is a good story for sure and also tells how tourism had played a role in the changing use of National Parks, the effect of man’s use of these areas we believe we are keeping in their natural state and in more recent years how climate change and use pose a continuous threat.
I don’t often read non-fiction nature books and admit I was not looking forward to reading this one but I did find it opened my eyes to many aspects of ecology and use of the land I had not considered before. Having gone to college in Arizona and living in the west I’ve seen the Grand Canyon many times but I know I will never see it in the same way again.