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From one of Outside magazine’s “Literary All-Stars” comes the thrilling true tale of the fastest boat ride ever, down the entire length of the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon, during the legendary flood of 1983.
In the spring of 1983, massive flooding along the length of the Colorado River confronted a team of engineers at the Glen Canyon Dam with an unprecedented emergency that may have resulted in the most catastrophic dam failure in history. In the midst of this crisis, the decision to launch a small wooden dory named “The Emerald Mile” at the head of the Grand Canyon, just fifteen miles downstream from the Glen Canyon Dam, seemed not just odd, but downright suicidal.
The Emerald Mile, at one time slated to be destroyed, was rescued and brought back to life by Kenton Grua, the man at the oars, who intended to use this flood as a kind of hydraulic sling-shot. The goal was to nail the all-time record for the fastest boat ever propelled—by oar, by motor, or by the grace of God himself—down the entire length of the Colorado River from Lee’s Ferry to Lake Mead. Did he survive? Just barely. Now, this remarkable, epic feat unfolds here, in The Emerald Mile.
(Summary provided by the publisher)
Kevin Fedarko is a seasoned author and journalist renowned for his exploration of the American Southwest and his fervent advocacy for environmental conservation. He has been a staff writer at Time magazine, where he worked primarily on the foreign affairs desk, and a senior editor at Outside, where he covered outdoor adventure. His writing has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times, and Esquire, among other publications. He and his wife, Annette Avery, owner of Bright Side Bookshop, live in Flagstaff, Arizona, where they spend as much of their free time as possible hiking in the Grand Canyon or in mountains just outside of town.
Kevin Fedarko lives in northern New Mexico and works as a part-time river guide in Grand Canyon National Park. In addition to his travel narratives in Outside, where he worked as a senior editor, Fedarko’s work has appeared in Esquire, National Geographic Adventure, and other publications, and has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing in 2004 and 2006. Fedarko was a staff writer at Time magazine from 1991 to 1997, where his work helped garner an Overseas Press Club Award for a story on the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Fedarko earned a Masters of Philosophy in Russian history at Oxford in 1990.
Kevin Fedarko has spent the past twenty years writing about conservation, exploration, and the Grand Canyon. He studied Russian history at Oxford before joining the staff at Time, where he worked primarily on the foreign affairs desk, then later moved to Outside, where he was a senior editor. His writing has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, and Esquire, among other publications, and a trio of his adventure stories from the Himalayas, the Horn of Africa, and the Colorado River are anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing. Fedarko is the author of The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon, a New York Times bestseller that won the National Outdoor Book Award and the Reading the West Award. He lives and works in Flagstaff, Arizona.
(Biography provided by the author and publisher)
