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.

• We started tracking this book on April 25, 2023.
• This book was $14.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 5 times in the past 680 days.
• The current price of this book is $8.72 last checked 17 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past six months.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $5.99.
• The lowest price to date was $5.99 last reached on October 11, 2023.
• This book has been $5.99 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $14.99 last reached on April 25, 2023.
• This book has been $14.99 one time since we started tracking it.

• HistoryAmericasUnited StatesState & LocalWest
• HistoryAmericas
• HistoryUnited StatesState & LocalWest

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 302 Pages
• File Size: 133 KB