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Donor 4

Desert River Journeys

People float rivers for many reasons. Some go for the excitement of whitewater rapids. Others like to relax. Cast a line out. Here you'll find stories of treacherous water, exciting situations, natural calamities and some outrageous human behavior along with peaceful, thoughtful moments.

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Donor 4

Escalante River, First Run, May 1986

I'd shown Jim some photos of the Escalante River. When he looked at them he asked if it could be boated. I wondered myself. I had thought about it. I knew it would be possible in some stretches. But other parts I had seen were shallow and rocky. And we'd taken inflatable kayaks down the San Juan River a couple of weeks earlier, with raft support. But, as yet, we hadn't done any multi–day trips using only the inflatable kayaks. So we thought about it. We studied the scant information available. We practiced packing our gear into the little boats, keeping the weight light. We asked ourselves: "How long would it take to do this? ... How do we get in and out of the canyon? "

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Donor 4

San Francisco River, New Mexico

It didn't start out this way. Originally, a friend was going with me. But, at the last minute, his boss told him he had to stay put and be on call –– or be fired. My car was packed. I was ready to go. So I went.

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Donor 4

Whitewater Experiences Motivate Mystery Author

I was paddling whitewater rivers and contributing regularly to American Rivers long before I stared writing mystery novels. So it made sense that eventually I would "write what you know" and develop a new series with a whitewater river ranger sleuth set on the nearby Arkansas River.

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Donor 4

Before the River Burned

"The paint actually wore off the paddles" is how James "Doug" Barber, AR supporter since 2000, described his unforgettable trip for a high school science project on Ohio's Cuyahoga River before it, literally, burned. And sources say the river actually caught on fire at least twelve times before that. The infamous condition of the Cuyahoga at that time is described well in an excerpt from a 1968 Kent State University symposium:

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Donor 4

An Interview with a Coot in a Canoe: A Life of Defending Rivers and Writing about It

It was June 10, 2003. I was lying on a big, flat rock on the west bank of the Connecticut River just south of Bellows Falls. My old buddy Ramsay and I were canoeing the entire Connecticut River. After fourteen days and a lot of rain, this was the nicest day we'd had. The sky was blue, the sun bright, the temperature about to hit 90. We were taking a break after paddling around another of the river's big loops.

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Donor 4

Jonathan Berger and a life of canoeing the "Little North"

If one looks at a map in the book "Canoe Atlas of the Little North" one is struck by just how accurate this adage is. The author of the Atlas, Jonathan Berger of Philadelphia, a member of American Rivers since 1984, has spent most of his life canoeing almost every inch of this great expanse, known as the Little North -- a true wilderness -- that lies between the Boundary Waters area of the Great Lakes and Canada's Hudson Bay. Most of the time he and his traveling companion were -- truly -- off the map. So much so there were, in fact, no maps to be had. So, they created their own.

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