Award-winning author, filmmaker and adventurer Jon Waterman chronicles his spectacular 1,450-mile journey down the Colorado River – on foot and in a kayak – from its source to the Pacific Ocean in his new book RUNNING DRY: A JOURNEY FROM SOURCE TO SEA DOWN THE COLORADO RIVER.
While the river was once untamed and free, it is now dammed and tunneled, forced into countless canals, trapped in reservoirs and harnessed for electricity, leaving it parched and so yoked to human purposes that in most years the river trickles away 100 miles from its oceanic destination.
Waterman writes with informal immediacy in this eyewitness account of the many demands on the Colorado, reaching out both to adventure travelers and to scientists, conservationists, environmentalists and anyone interested in the fragile interplay between nature and humans.
Jonathan Waterman is the author of nine books, has made four television films and works as a freelance author and filmmaker. In 2004, his writing about the Arctic won the prestigious National Endowment of the Arts Literary Fellowship.