Surviving the Crazy Twins

But the story of the record breaking run down the river is, in many ways, mostly a peg on which to hang the much bigger story of human interaction with one of our nation’s most iconic natural wonders.  It’s a story that revolves around two polar extremes:  the dam building, engineering geniuses who bent the Colorado’s raging spring floods to man’s purposes. And, in the process, turned the river into an enormous, usually docile plumbing system.

At the other pole are environmental groups, with the Sierra Club in the vanguard, who eventually brought the dam building to a screeching halt.  But not, of course, until after some of the Canyon’s most stunning features were submerged in watery graves.

Much of the book is devoted to a history of the Sierra Club and it’s long time Executive Director, David Brower.  It tells how the Club went from little more than an “alpine picnicking society”, to, under Brower’s leadership, an organization espousing a militantly environmentalist, anti-immigration agenda.