Brave the Wild River

Several times throughout my life, I have admittedly, felt like a badass. These moments of vanity emerged through achieving several "firsts" and often outperforming men in a challenging adventure sport, which required grit and serious hard work. And then, as sometimes happens, awareness of those who came before you increases, and you realize that your accomplishments, while notable, are also not really all that.  

I had that epiphany recently while reading Melissa L. Sevigny's Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botony of the Grand Canyon. 

"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 influence had begun to change it forever." 

Cover Copy, Brave the Wild River, by Melissa L. Sevigny, W.W. Norton & Company, 2023

I was riveted by this story of two women scholars from the East Coast who joined a small expedition in 1938 to run four hundred miles of the Green and Colorado rivers and conduct the first survey of plant life before the newly constructed Hoover Dam inundated a large section of the river.

Three small wooden dories carried the five-member expedition through some of the biggest whitewater and unforgiving landscape on earth. Many journalists and more experienced river runners predicted they would never make it out alive. They can not be blamed for making that assumption. Very few people had run the most challenging rapids of the Colorado River in the 1930's. The evolution of whitewater craft and technical whitewater navigating skills was still in its infancy. In addition, the logistical realities of maintaining the primitive camping equipment and available food provisions of the day are almost incomprehensible to modern-day river runners.

Lois Jotter, on the Colorado River in 1938

Throughout their six-week expedition, slight changes in fate could have easily made the pundit's predictions come true.  

Instead, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter completed the expedition and contributed substantially to its success with tenacity, intelligence, humility, and humor.  And, along with the backbreaking work of multi-day travel down the river, they scrambled up steep hillslopes and side canyons in the few remaining hours before and after dark to collect plant samples, and scrawl data in their notebooks by candlelight, to compile a benchmark in botanical research along the Colorado river that is still used today.   

For decades, they received little recognition for these accomplishments. Ms. Sevigny's book has rectified that gap in acknowledging their heroic and historic achievement, and I hope it will continue to do so.

I have kayaked and rafted the Grand Canyon of the Colorado five times and numerous trips on the upper reaches of the Colorado River drainage. The desert canyons of the immense Colorado River watershed has a compelling mystical hold, to which I repeatedly return for adventure, renewal, and connection. Because of the duality of my relationship with the river, which I experience both through my lens as a hydrologist/geomorphologist and a lifelong river runner, engaging in this deep dive and unique tale of early Colorado river exploration was fascinating.

Brave the Wild River is beautifully written, well-researched, intelligent, and funny. It is a riveting adventure story that includes a fascinating and relatively untold narrative of a time in history within a legendary landscape. A landscape that has carried such importance to the American West for decades and will continue to for decades more. And through the words of Ms. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River is a well crafted portrait of two remarkable women who, through grit, and a quiet passion for their field of study, accomplished the stuff of legends, if not the fame. 

For me, stories of quiet heroes are the most compelling. Stories about those motivated by their intimate connections to the world rather than widespread attention to their accomplishments. And, in the case of Elzada and Lois, despite being actively suppressed in both obtaining their achievement and recognition.

So, I invite you to read the book, spread the word, and follow YOUR connections wherever they lead.

For a quick read elaborating how Ms. Sevigny found this story and was compelled to write it, please read the following interview in Orion Magazine, On The Grand Canyon Botonists that History Erased. 

"Brave the Wild River redefines the Grand Canyon not as a testing ground for masculine virility, but as a proving ground for women's tenacity and intelligence."   - Alison Hawthorne Deming,  author of A Woven World.

Seth rowing myself and a friend on the Gates of Lodore, Green River, Utah (2018)