The Colorado — 1985 ·

By Frank Waters

Illustrated by Nicholai Fechin

“Outstanding.”

The New York Times

“Excellent book. Mr. Waters is peculiarly qualified to write about the Colorado. He grew up in the high country of the West—Cripple Creek and the Pikes Peak towns—then crossed the range and followed the Colorado down to the sea, not as a man choosing a subject for a book-but rather as a man who, having followed a river system down for other reasons, looked back over his own years and found what a story he had to tell.”

Weekly Book Review

“This wonderful and unusual book is more than a history of the region. In the author’s own remarkable words, ‘the book was an attempt to perceive… the presence of the spirit-of-place of the immense wilderness of the Colorado and its effect upon us.’”

Council Fires

The vast Colorado River collects water from the highest Rocky Mountain peaks and traverses the widest plateaus, the deepest canyons, and the lowest deserts before emptying into the delta of northern Mexico. This austere land and mighty river resist exploration, settlement, and description. But in the hands of one of the West's great writers, Frank Waters, the history and lore of its past make irresistible reading and a resounding case for mankind's respect for the environment.

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Frank Waters (1902–1995), one of the finest chroniclers of the American Southwest, wrote twenty–eight works of fiction and nonfiction.