Gila River Elegy

Gila River Elegy tells the story of the author'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. It can no longer be run in one long run. Various dams along the way siphon water away for irrigation, snow melt floods, canalization, and droughts all have their impacts. Some sections though are sublimely beautiful and some have rocking whitewater. American Rivers named the Gila one of America's Most Endangered Rivers and you can see 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.

978-1-73221-92-6-7, 344 pages, 6" wide x 9" high, 150+ color photographs and maps, June 2020