Books
Featured Item
Glen Canyon and a New Vision for the American West
This stunning new book, published by Mountaineers Books, was written by Backpacker magazine’s Southwest Editor, Annette McGivney, and features images by the celebrated landscape photographer, James Kay. Renowned environmentalist, Bill McKibben, wrote the forward. These gifted conservation advocates have been longtime supporters of GCI’s work, and we urge anyone who loves Glen Canyon to get this beautiful book!
$29.95
See the restoration of Glen Canyon in this photo essay published by the Glen Canyon Institute. After forty years of being hidden under the waves of Lake Powell, witness areas like Dark Canyon, Cataract Canyon, Davis Gulch, Cathedral in the Desert, and Stephens Arch come back to life. Photography by James Kay, Bill Wolverton, Rob Holt, Harry Newell, Nick Beard, Elias Butler, Chris Peterson.
$15.00
by David and Gudy Gaskill
In June of 1949, authors David and Gudy Gaskill pushed off into the Colorado River above fabled Glen Canyon to experience for themselves a journey that Edward Abbey has called "the ultimate Homeric voyage." They found a mystical world of soaring sandstone cliffs, raging rapids, fern-decked alcoves, and haunting solitude. Before this national treasure disappeared beneath the waters of Lake Powell in 1963, the Gaskills, family, and friends made numerous trips down Glen Canyon, including its maze of narrow side canyons, recording on film their experiences. As a bonus, an included CD-ROM extends the record of The Glen's wonders with over 800 color photos, inspiring music, and sounds of the canyon.
$14.95
Terry and Renny Russell
This is a most wondrous and unusual book. Its scattered text and stunning photographs convey a spirit of reverence and adventure that will cause readers to recall their own private epiphanies gained through contact with the natural world. Originally published by the Sierra Club in 1967, On the Loose sold more than a million copies before going out of print a decade ago; this gorgeous re-release is bound to find a new generation of readers. - Amazon.com
$14.95
by Katie Lee
In Sandstone Seduction, Katie Lee collects her most creative writing, written over her lifetime, telling us about the events that shaped her life, and her encounters with water and rock. As always, her writing is deeply personal, remarkably candid, and abundantly frank. Katie Lee speaks her mind; she does not hold back. She's been listening to the water and absorbing its lessons for more than fifty years; she knows well that we have a lot to learn from rivers about the flow of our lives.
$17.50
A Life On The Loose
"Renny Russell’s Rock Me on the Water is at its heart courageous. To return to the same power of nature that took his brother thirty years previous—to be with it, to confront it, to take solace in it, and to be inspired and healed by it—is remarkable in itself. His book is, as well, a testament to the evocative rhythms of the wilds. In this complicated dance, this profoundly personal journey, Renny Russell also gives us an amazingly spirited tour of one of the truly great landscapes of the American West and a keen understanding of its power to shape a life." -Robert Redford
$36.00
William deBuys Photography by Joan Myers
The Lower Colorado River, that portion between Hoover Dam and the Sea of Corts, lacks the scenic grandeur of the upper portions of the river. No single heroic figure like John Wesley Powell is associated with this stretch of the Colorado. There is no epic tragedy like Glen Canyon Dam. For what it lacks in grandeur, tragedy, and heroics, it makes up for in engineering errors, political intrigue, diplomatic blunders, and high levels of greed.
$21.95
Bert Loper and the Colorado River
Tough as boot leather, stubborn and indomitable, Bert Loper was a drifting, uneducated, hard-rock miner, laborer and boatman who came to know and love the rivers of the Southwest like no-one else before or since. This splendid biography, which also tells the definitive history of river-running in the Southwest, takes us down into the canyons and whitewater and shows how they brought grace and meaning to the very hard life of a very hard man. - Richard Grant (American Nomads)
$25.00
William deBuys Photography by Joan Myers
The Lower Colorado River, that portion between Hoover Dam and the Sea of Corts, lacks the scenic grandeur of the upper portions of the river. No single heroic figure like John Wesley Powell is associated with this stretch of the Colorado. There is no epic tragedy like Glen Canyon Dam. For what it lacks in grandeur, tragedy, and heroics, it makes up for in engineering errors, political intrigue, diplomatic blunders, and high levels of greed.
$39.95
Philip L. Fradkin
A good natural and political history of the entire Colorado River drainage from the headwaters to the delta. Pulitzer Prize winning author's passion for the beauty of the river is combined with a profound understanding of the arid lands of the desert southwest, where man's need for water is a matter of life and death.
$24.95
By Corinne Platt and Meredith Ogilby
This book is a fantastic compilation of environmentalists, authors, and activists who have made a difference in the protection of western lands and water. Featured biographies include Glen Canyon legend Katie Lee, 2010 David R. Brower Conservation Award recipient Terry Tempest Williams, and GCI Founder and President Rich Ingebretsen.
$29.95
David Brower, with Steve Chapple
Glen Canyon Institute Board Member David Brower, former executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, and Earth Island Institute, recalls his fifty controversial years of activism, outlines crucial contemporary battles, and passionately points the way to a green twenty-first century.
$14.95
David Brower, with Steve Chapple
Glen Canyon Institute Board Member David Brower, former executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, and Earth Island Institute, recalls his fifty controversial years of activism, outlines crucial contemporary battles, and passionately points the way to a green twenty-first century.
$20.00
By Michael R. Kelsey
Another Kelsey classic, this book covers the middle third of the Colorado River drainage for the technically inclined and experienced canyoneer. Almost all the canyons in this book are in Utah but with a few-some of the best, in Northern Arizona near the town of Page and the Navajo Nation. Good climbing skills, equipment, and judgment are needed to travel through these very technical slot canyons, most of which have never been described in a book before. These are remote, flood-prone, debris-filled slot canyons, difficult to nearly impossible to exit during an emergency, so beware.
$13.50
By Katie Lee
Katie Lee has masterfully updated 'All My Rivers Are Gone' with new pictures and an index allowing easy navigation to the many stories contained in the pages of this remarkable book. Additionally, she has written an entirely new Afterward -- looking back at Glen Canyon's past and forward to it's future.
"Katie Lee is a joyful raconteur, a woman with grit, grace and humor. She is not afraid to laugh and tease, cajole and flirt, cuss, rant, howl, sing and cry. Katie Lee is the desert’s lover, her voice is a torch in the wilderness."
- Terry Tempest Williams
$16.95
By Robert Adler
Restoring Colorado River Ecosystems explores the many questions and challenges surrounding the issue of large-scale restoration of the Colorado River basin, and of large-scale restoration in general. Robert W. Adler evaluates the relationships among the laws, policies, and institutions governing use and management of the Colorado River for human benefit and those designed to protect and restore the river and its environment. He examines and critiques the often challenging interactions among law, science, economics, and politics within which restoration efforts must operate. Ultimately, he suggests that a broad concept of “restoration” is needed to navigate those uncertain waters, and to strike an appropriate balance between human and environmental needs.
$35.00
Essays on the Southwest
On October 7, 1962, Bruce Berger and three friends embarked on what may have been the last trip taken through the Colorado River's Glen Canyon before the floodgates were closed at Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell began to fill. After thirty years, one can grieve for what was lost and then, like Berger, take another look around. The Southwest Berger sees is an unusual, even odd, place, with inhabitants that are just as strange. In this collection of essays he introduces us to people and places that define a region and a way of life. We meet eccentric desert dwellers like Cactus Pete, who claimed to have mapped the mountains of Venus long before NASA penetrated its clouds. We chart the canals of Phoenix, which have created a Martian landscape out of an irrigation system dating back to the ancient Hohokam; stay at a "wigwam" motel in Holbrook, whose kitsch appeals even to Hopis; and dim our lights for the International Dark-Sky Association's efforts to keep night skies safe for astronomy. Focusing on the interaction of people with the environment, Berger reveals an original vision of the Southwest that encompasses both city and wilderness. In a concluding essay centering on the sale of his mother's estate in Phoenix, he concedes that "our intention to leave the desert alone has resulted, unwittingly, in loss after loss, simply by our being here." Sometimes there are losses—a canyon, a house—but Berger attunes us to the prodigies of change.
$18.95
Elizabeth Grossman
In this whirlwind tour of dams across America, Grossman, a journalist based in Portland, Ore., persuasively illustrates why it's time for many of the 75,000 dams in the U.S. to come down. According to Grossman, dams were born of a driving need to manage the American landscape. More troubling, most were designed and built without a full understanding of how rivers function and without considering each dam's impact on its river system. As a result, rivers across the country are dying from our hydropower, irrigation and recreation needs. Dams affect a river's ecosystem from headwater to delta, throwing off the balance that fosters plant, insect and fish life along the way. Grossman gives a national perspective to the current movement toward river reclamation by visiting about a dozen sites across the country; she reports on the conflicting perspectives that drive or resist reclamation, and she lays out the complex political and economic pressures. By considering each river as a continuous linked entity, Grossman offers a compelling update on a movement that could reshape the face of America. - Publishers Weekly
$26.00
A Journey From Source to Sea Down the Colorado River
Waterman, whose earlier books illuminate the Arctic, strikes an impressive balance between the personal and the political in chronicling his journey down the Colorado River. Quoting those who have traveled its depths before, such as John Wesley Powell and Wallace Stegner, he writes not only about the river’s now-dying power but also the extensive regulations put in place to control and possess it. And yet as much as this is about the river, Waterman also discusses individuals invested in its survival from biologists to the many watermen and -women whose livelihoods come from navigating its length. The misguided playground of Lake Powell proves to be an unsavory stopping point, but the author perseveres in his search for answers. From Vegas to Mexico, he finds waste and ruin and then turns a corner to discover the fruits of hard-won battles for bird sanctuaries and brilliant uses of drip irrigation. Through it all, he ruminates about the choices between life and death for humankind and rivers. An evocative and bold take on a river and what winning the West really means, Waterman’s book epitomizes the best of environmental writing. --Colleen Mondor
$26.00
Elizabeth Grossman
In this whirlwind tour of dams across America, Grossman, a journalist based in Portland, Ore., persuasively illustrates why it's time for many of the 75,000 dams in the U.S. to come down. According to Grossman, dams were born of a driving need to manage the American landscape. More troubling, most were designed and built without a full understanding of how rivers function and without considering each dam's impact on its river system. As a result, rivers across the country are dying from our hydropower, irrigation and recreation needs. Dams affect a river's ecosystem from headwater to delta, throwing off the balance that fosters plant, insect and fish life along the way. Grossman gives a national perspective to the current movement toward river reclamation by visiting about a dozen sites across the country; she reports on the conflicting perspectives that drive or resist reclamation, and she lays out the complex political and economic pressures. By considering each river as a continuous linked entity, Grossman offers a compelling update on a movement that could reshape the face of America. - Publishers Weekly
$35.00