Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River

University of Arizona Press, 2003-03-01. Paperback. Like New. 8x5x0. One page corner has been creased. More than a century after John Wesley Powell launched his boat on the Green River, Ellen Meloy spent eight years of seasonal floats through Utah's Desolation Canyon with her husband, a federal river manager. She came to know the history and natural history of this place well enough to call it home, and has recorded her observations in a book that is as wide-ranging as the river and as wild as the wilderness through which it runs. Winner of the Spur Award. Meloy wrote three excellent books of natural history and contributed numerous pieces to National Public Radio before her untimely death in 2004. From the dust jacket- "Desolation Canyon. Awestruck first explorers described it as 'empty,' 'tortuous,' and 'worthless.' But Ellen Meloy, lured by an obsession to experience weather and an intense love of Place, introduces us to a canyon that abounds with ghosts, legends, and life. In Raven's Exile she chronicles a back-country ranger season on the Green River in Utah's red-rock canyon country. Culled from mud-spattered, salsa-stained notebooks that went down nearly every stretch of Southwestern whitewater, her words treat us to the strange anomaly of this desert river and to her extraordinary home in Desolation." Her book Anthropology of Turquoise (2002) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Utah Book Award and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Award in the adventure and travel category. Meloy is the namesake of an award, given yearly by The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers.