River & Water

Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel interweaves the story of a disabled historian with the frontier adventures of his grandparents in the nineteenth-century West. It's about marriage, landscape, and the compromises that settlement demands.

Following the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition, President Thomas Jefferson shifted his focus from exploration to the most American of American pursuits—making money. Enter millionaire John Jacob Astor and his wildly ambitious scheme to create a global trade network, using Lewis and Clark’s newly established route as a primary artery of commerce. Astoria is the tale of this often-overlooked chapter in American history, one with no shortage of adventure, egos, and wild uncharted landscapes.

Stegner's biography of John Wesley Powell — the one-armed Civil War veteran who ran the Colorado River and tried to tell Washington that the arid West couldn't support the settlement patterns of the East. Nobody listened. Everything Powell predicted came true.

Wallace Nichols compiles the neuroscience research on why water makes people feel better — calmer, more creative, more connected. The science is real. The writing occasionally drifts toward self-help, but the core argument is compelling: we are hardwired for water.

McPhee's book about Alaska is really three books: urban Alaska, rural Alaska, and the bush. The third section — about people who chose to live far from everything — is the most powerful. Nobody writes about place and the people who inhabit it like McPhee.

Two of Lopez's slimmest, most mysterious books, published together. Prose poems disguised as field notes, or field notes elevated to prose poetry. The desert and river landscapes are real but also interior — Lopez writing at his most compressed and luminous.

Edward Dolnick's account of John Wesley Powell's 1869 expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon — ten men, four wooden boats, no maps. A ripping adventure narrative built on meticulous historical research.

Abbey floating rivers across the American West, ranting and rhapsodizing in equal measure. Part travelogue, part environmental polemic, entirely Abbey. The Glen Canyon chapter is a eulogy for a drowned landscape.

If anyone is qualified to weave a substantive examination of water challenges in the West with a tale of one woman’s solo journey down the length the mighty Green River, it’s journalist and paddler Heather Hansman. Using her river adventure as the story’s framework, Hansman explores the myriad of challenges surrounding water in the West, providing just enough data and detail to educate, without losing the reader to the mind-numbing jargon that defines most water-related writing.

What happens when legendary environmentalist and Sierra Club founder David Brower is forced to spend time with a miner, a real estate developer, and a dam builder? Exactly what you’d expect: fiery arguments, ideological head-butting, and alpha-male posturing, all in the name the protection (or destruction) of our wild places. A tantalizing storyline when told by anyone, but when written by master wordsmith John McPhee, the book becomes a classic piece of environmental literature.

In Watkins’ poetic and post-apocalyptic debut, a relentless wave of sand called the Amargosa Dune Sea drifts across the southwest, swallowing whole everything in its path—including, if they’re not careful, young lovers Luz and Ray, along with a child they rescued while fleeing Los Angeles. Sure, it’s just a novel, but where people were once drawn west for its titular trio, this dystopian spin on the effects of climate change offers a chilling preview of what might eventually drive us out.

Conrad's novella about a journey up the Congo River is the most influential short work of fiction in the English language. Marlow's search for Kurtz is a journey into the center of colonial violence, human capacity for evil, and a darkness that has nothing to do with Africa.

Peter Heller's account of the first attempt to kayak the Tsangpo Gorge in Tibet — the deepest canyon on earth, with rapids that had never been run. One member of the team drowned. The others kept going. Adventure journalism at its most committed.

Gooley again, this time on water — rivers, tides, puddles, ocean swells. Every body of water is communicating something. This book teaches you to listen.

Yossi Ghinsberg's account of being stranded alone in the Bolivian Amazon for three weeks after a backpacking trip went wrong. Starvation, parasites, hallucinations, and a rescue that came just in time. Raw survival narrative.

Anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and award-winning author of twenty books, including One River, The Wayfinders, and Into the Silence, Wade Davis has a soul of many passions. One of his strongest is for Colombia, the land and people that stole his heart as a teenager in 1968, before cocaine and civil war transformed one of the earth’s most ecologically and geographically diverse regions into a nightmare of bloody terror. After decades of strife, the country now is healing, creating national parks, restoring Indigenous rights, and opening to travel. Charting the wonders of this renewal, Davis turned to Colombia’s lifeline, the thousand-mile long Magdalena River. With four maps and vivid photography, his new book journeys to snowcapped peaks, the Amazon rainforest, impossibly green wetlands, and coastal sands—where “magical realism is simply journalism.” Best shelved between Gabriel García Márquez and Norman Maclean, Magdalena is a magnetic chronicle of the sacredness of water as the source of all things.

Wade Davis's masterwork — the story of his mentor Richard Evans Schultes's botanical explorations in the Amazon, interleaved with Davis's own journeys through the same rivers and forests decades later. A double narrative about plants, indigenous knowledge, and the vanishing of both.

Three novellas set in Montana — hunting, fishing, and the landscape of the Northern Rockies rendered in prose so vivid it feels like weather.

Terry Tempest Williams watched the Great Salt Lake rise and flood the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge while her mother was dying of cancer. The book braids the two losses — landscape and family — into something that feels inevitable. Williams writes about grief the way Abbey writes about anger: without flinching.

The Colorado River from source to delta — its geology, its dams, its indigenous history, and what's left after a century of diversion. Compact and devastating.

Despite his well-document track record of pushing beyond his physical limits and emerging from life-threatening situations mostly unscathed, Theodore Roosevelt’s journey through uncharted regions of the Amazon almost broke him. What started as a comically arrogant march through the jungle ended with TR contracting malaria, gravely injuring himself, and begging his son to leave him for dead. The book offers a revealing peek into the life and psyche of one the most spirited U.S. Presidents.

The history of the Animas River watershed in southwestern Colorado — from Ancestral Puebloans to the Gold King Mine spill. A river poisoned by mining and a community reckoning with the consequences.

Two years teaching English in a small city on the Yangtze during China's transformation. The river rises, the city changes, and the outsider watches with the precision of someone who knows he's seeing something that won't last.

Walking and floating the entire Colorado River from its Rocky Mountain headwaters to the Sea of Cortez — a journey almost no one has done, through some of the most contested water in the West.

Cultural historian Mark Kurlansky, author of the bestselling books such as Cod, Salt, and Milk, turns his signature deep-dive lens to another focus, that of salmon, which until quite recently roamed abundantly wild throughout the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Textbook in size yet lyrically reverent, Salmon is a four-hundred page ode to a fish “beautiful in its many phases; thrilling in its athleticism; poetic in its heroic and tragic life story.” With stunning images both modern and historical—such as a massive, sixty-four pound Atlantic salmon caught on a rod in the British Isles or a Tlakuit fisherman using a dip net on the Columbia in 1910—and even a few recipes for beer bread and chowder, Kurlansky covers seemingly every angle of river dams, fisheries, aquaculture, and piscine ecology. From Japan’s markets to Alaska’s Bristol Bay, Salmon reveals the long, fabled journey of a fish whose survival is intertwined with our own.

Portrait of the Stehekin Valley in the North Cascades — a community accessible only by boat, foot, or floatplane. A place that exists outside the normal American timeline.

An otter's life in the rivers of Devon, told with a naturalist's precision and a novelist's sympathy. Published in 1927, it remains one of the finest animal narratives in English — unsentimental, ecologically exact, and devastating.

Who knew there could be an international bestseller all about eels? Turns out, as Patrik Svensson writes, quite a few knew. Centuries of leading thinkers—Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Rachel Carson—have been captivated by eels and their mysterious life cycles, the details of which remain elusive today. Originally published in the author’s native Sweden, The Book of Eels is part natural history and part memoir, as eloquent in surveying modern science as it is in exploring Svensson’s relationship with his father, who grew up catching eels in a creek near his childhood home. With buckets of fishing gear, flashlights, a can of worms, and lyrical words, Svensson shows us “how little a person can really know, about eels or other people, about where you come from and where you’re going.” From birth to dying and all that lies between, this ode to faith and metamorphosis will move you to surprising depths.

McPhee on humanity's attempts to control natural forces: the Mississippi River, Icelandic lava flows, Los Angeles debris flows. Each essay is a case study in hubris and engineering, told with McPhee's trademark compression and structural elegance.

The subtitle summarizes its engrossing, fast-paced storyline, but The Emerald Mile is much more than a run-of-the-mill adventure yarn. It’s a substantive history lesson of the West’s past and present: Coronado’s 14th-century expedition to the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell’s first descent of the Colorado, the United States’ river-damming efforts (and the ensuing pushback from Ed Abbey et.al.), the culture of river guiding in the West, and more. It’s an adventure classic that stealthy educates and never bores.

Powell's own account of the 1869 first descent of the Colorado through the Grand Canyon — ten men, four boats, no maps, one arm. The expedition that opened the last blank space on the American map.

McPhee on shad — the fish that fed the Continental Army, filled the rivers of the eastern seaboard, and is now mostly forgotten. Only McPhee could make a fish biography this compelling.

Fedarko and photographer Pete McBride hiked the entire length of the Grand Canyon — 750 miles through one of the most difficult landscapes in North America. The photographs are staggering. The text argues that the canyon is under threat from development, and the argument is convincing.

Meloy's final book — essays about nuclear testing, endangered species, and the contradictions of living in a landscape that is both beautiful and bombed. The desert as contested ground.

The true story of Percy Fawcett, the British explorer who vanished in the Amazon in 1925 searching for a lost civilization — and the modern journalist who went looking for him. Grann's investigation into Fawcett's disappearance becomes its own kind of jungle fever.

Award-winning writer Peter Heller has traveled the world as an expedition kayaker from the High Pamirs of Tajikistan to Central America to Peru. Which is to say, few can write about rivers—their shifting colors, sounds, and moods—like Heller. Now the Colorado author of the bestselling dystopian novel The Dog Stars merges his paddling experience with his mastery of suspenseful stories. The River tells of two earnest young men, college best friends from different backgrounds: Wynn, a Vermonter with a goofy smile who learned to canoe at summer camp, and Jack, a tough, skeptical rancher from the Rockies who grew up working outside. With fly rods and smoking pipes and a few good books, they’ve set off on a monthlong canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness, but the adventure takes an ominous turn from the start. Our one copy at Adventure Journal headquarters already has a long waitlist, so be ready to pass this gorgeously written thriller around.

Heat-Moon traveled across America entirely by water — rivers, canals, lakes, portages — from New York to Oregon. A coast-to-coast journey on the country's forgotten highway system.

A comic novel about a young fly-fishing obsessive in the Pacific Northwest who retreats to a cabin on an Oregon river and discovers that catching fish isn't the same as understanding them. The funniest serious fishing novel ever written.

Childs tracking water through the desert Southwest — seeps, springs, flash floods, and the hidden hydrology that makes life possible in the driest landscapes. Two ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning. Both are real.

Seventy days paddling the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico — through the border country, the canyons, and the politics that make this river the most contested waterway in America.

In 1885, shortly after the Alaska Purchase from Russia and before the gold rush, the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant Henry T. Allen was ordered on a 1,200-mile expedition to map the Copper and Tanana rivers of Alaska’s interior. Little was known about the uncharted region at the time, other than frightening legends and a few true tales of previous adventurers who never returned. To the Bright Edge of the World, a novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey, reimagines the journey through fictionalized newspaper clippings, letters, and vintage art and photos, navigating the reader back and forth from actual history to the realm of magical realism. As she carefully reconstructs the wilderness of the late 19th century northern frontier, Ivey also twists the usual Western expedition narrative with a leading female character and an emphasis on First Nations culture. Suspenseful, absorbing, and at times darkly mythical, this is a book made for winter cabin reading.

The Lewis and Clark expedition, told with narrative momentum and deep research. Ambrose follows the Corps of Discovery from St. Louis to the Pacific, through a continent that was anything but empty.

You’ll never regret plunging into the “wild swimming” world of British environmentalist Roger Deakin, who lived in a moated farmhouse. Yes, a moat. You’re already charmed, right? Inspired by a short story, Deakin decided to swim throughout Britain in as many bodies of water as possible, often diving into places that hadn’t seen a human swimmer in years. From lochs to ponds, from rivers to the sea, through farm runoff and past alarmed beach guards, Deakin stroked and kicked. Part amphibious adventure memoir and part right to roam manifesto, beneath Waterlog’s delightful quirk lies a serious treatise on public access and the belief that swimming is intrinsically transformative, for “When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens.” First published in 1999, this book has been a word-of-mouth bestseller with a fervent fan club, and the new Tin House edition with a foreword by Bonnie Tsui is sublimely subversive reading of the highest order.

Books about water rights tend to run, well, a little dry. But in this nonfiction look at the Colorado River and our complex dependence on its every drop, The New Yorker’s David Owen skillfully stokes curiosity for what’s around each bend. Owen’s voice is campfire casual, leading to “oh, now I get it!” moments as he unravels layers of human history and paradoxes of conservation and energy use. From archaic engineering feats to surprising “Law of the River” rules—wait, we haven’t changed that policy since the Gold Rush?—it’s a dusty, fascinating trail of whodunit from the Rocky Mountain headwaters to Mexico, and little is as simple as it seems. Where the Water Goes is important reading, and Owen’s no-stone-unturned reporting shows not only how we got here, but how we might steer onward to the future of the West.

Combining travel and sports writing with cultural history, Why We Swim is a bracing collection of stories from the world’s untamed waters and community pools, and writer Bonnie Tsui, a near-daily swimmer whose parents met poolside, is the perfect guide to the life aquatic. From the free-diving superpowers of Southeast Asia’s sea nomads to the habits of Olympian world record-holders, she ponders how humans have evolved for land yet been drawn for millennia to water: Neolithic cave paintings featuring swimmers date back ten thousand years. If you’re part selkie—a half-seal, half-human character of North Atlantic folklore—then Tsui might inspire you to try diving two hundred feet down in the ocean, or, if extreme cold is more your thing, joining the International Ice Swimming Association. Even if you’re like me, recovering from a childhood of failed pool lessons, here is the push to cannonball, once and for all, into the deep end.