The Very Hard Way

Bert Loper was born in 1869 the very day that Major John Wesley Powell discovered the confluence of the San Juan and Colorado Rivers. Loper spent much of his life devoted to those two streams. But it was never easy. Orphaned and abused, Loper worked most of his life at the very bottom, the nameless grunt in hard rock mines, the sore-backed shoveler on a placer bar, the subsistence rancher on a lonely gravel delta in Glen Canyon. Whatever Loper got, he got the very hard way.

But on the muddy whitewater streams of the Southwest, Loper found a joy, a thrill, and a peace. By the time he died at his oars in a Grand Canyon rapid at eighty, he had covered more river, run more boats, and known more rivermen than anyone. Two weeks before he vanished in the Colorado, the very first motorboat had run Grand Canyon--bookending Loper's incredible career.

Bert Loper's is the tale of river running in the West, and his life encapsulates the spirit of the Colorado. The Very Hard Way is a tour de force of the history of western whitewater.

Brad Dimock was born in Ithaca, New York and received a Bachelor of Arts from Prescott College in 1971. He spent much of the next three and a half decades as a boatman in Grand Canyon and rivers throughout the world.

Fearful of real work, he began writing in the mid-1990s. His work his appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and he has authored, co-authored, edited, or foreworded nearly a dozen books. He is the only three-time winner of the National Outdoor Book Award.

He still works as a river guide in Grand Canyon for Arizona Raft Adventures. He lives, writes, and builds whitewater boats in Flagstaff, Arizona.