Gila River Elegy is a guidebook, but more importantly, it tells the story of Jon Fuller’s epic canoe journey from the headwaters in New Mexico to its confluence with the Colorado River. The Gila has not been run in its entirety for over a hundred years and can no longer be run in one long river trip. Still, some sections remain sublimely beautiful and some have rocking whitewater. Other sections need a bicycle or… a helicopter. American Rivers named the Gila one of America's Most Endangered Rivers and Fuller explains why, but also why it's worth saving. Jon's writing is at times humorous, always reflective, and ultimately poignant, as development threatens the river's very existence.
Jon Fuller's fascination with rivers began in early childhood, spending hours floating sticks in a creek and pretending they were boats. He paddled his first real boat at age five. At age twelve he took his first multi-day, unsupervised canoe trip. Jon's love of rivers took him to graduate school in Arizona, where he studied the flood histories of the Salt and Verde rivers. There, the subtle magic of rivers in the desert captured him, and he made Arizona his home. Over his 34-year career as a well-known hydrologist and geomorphologist, he authored hundreds of reports about rivers throughout the West. This is his second book, following on from Verde River Elegy.
344 pages, 6" wide x 9" high, 150+ color photographs and maps, June 2020, $24.95 + $4.00 Shipping (USA ONLY) (+ $10 Shipping for Canada)
NOTE Gila River Elegy is also available on Amazon as a kindle ebook.