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A very niche book that dives into the nitty gritty details about the flora, fauna, and geology of the Grand Canyon and Colorado River winding through it. For folks traveling to the region, it's a gem of a book to prepare mentally for all the things you might encounter! Or for folks who've been, it provides a fun, easy mental journey back to the canyon and river.

The prose is beautifully descriptive, poetry meets nonfiction science paper. However, sometimes it was so detailed that it carried me off to a gentle sleep picturing the canyon in all its hues, the river lapping at sand bars, and tiny critters continuously working for survival until tomorrow.

So many lovely quotes from this book:
As I gained the asphalt walk at the top of the trail, the number of people dismayed me... Out of one of the clusters of people stepped a nice-looking, neatly dressed, middle-aged woman, a question obvious in her face. I paused, uncomfortably conscious of how derelict I must appear. 'Excuse me,' she began,' is there anything down there?' [...]
The question haunted me, as questions like that often do, and the real answer came, as answers often do, not in the canyon but at an unlikely time and in an unexpected place, flying over the canyon at thirty thousand feet... The astonishing sense of connection with *that* river and *that* canyon caught me completely unaware, and in a beath I understood the intense, protective loyalty so many people feel for the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. With that came the answer: there *is* something down there, and it cannot be explained in a listing of its parts. It has to do with truth and beauty and love of this earth, the artifacts of a lifetime, and the descant of a canyon wren at dawn. [...] The 'down there' is bound up with care and solicitude, sunlight on scalloped ripples, loving life and accepting death, all tied to a magnificent, unforgiving, and irrevocable river, a river along which I wandered for a halcyon while, smelled the wet clay odor of the rapids, listened to the dawns, and tasted the sunsets."

"[the river is there,] nibbling at sandbars and rearranging beaches[...] dancing with raindrops, multiplying the sun in its ripples, taking its tolls and levies against the cliffs, pounding and pulsing with life that vitalizes anyone who rows and rides it..."

"Water seldom 'flows' in this country--instead it gobbles, rampages, breaks, topples, undercuts, gnaws, rips, gouges, falls, pounds, pummels, and hammers. 'Average precipitation' is not a useful concept in the Southwest, where annual deviations are often extreme and not all the rain that falls, falls kindly."

"This sunny November morning,[...] goldenweed and magenta windmills tapestry the ground, sunshine polishes the prickly pear pads, typical lower Sonoran Desert vegetation I've seen a hundred times, but this morning it is all festive and fresh because I own the untrammeled time to enjoy it." <3

"With this stupendous panorama before me I wish--but only briefly--that I had a camera. There is no way to catch in a photograph (or in a drawing or in words, for that matter) the breath and breadth of this river valley, the cutting bite of the wind, the clouds layered with shafts of sunlight, the flicker of Mormon tea, the snow wedges on the horizon, all the sweep and vastness. No single picture, no matter how elegant and comprehensive, can capture this riverscape--the delight of moving water, persimmon and lavender cliffs, the sound of freight-train rapids or the silence of a dune, the sassing of a rock wren."