95 books match the query 'Rivers' and 2 start with v

cover of Voyage of a Summer Sun: Canoeing the Columbia River

Voyage of a Summer Sun

Canoeing the Columbia River

Robin Cody

Oregon State University Press, 2012

“The story is the Columbia River, not the canoe and me, but I’ve learned that friends can’t hear me tell about the river until they know why I was out there. This is not an adventure story, though some adventure was unavoidable, and I didn’t set out to find myself if I could help it. Nor did I launch the trip with a large point to prove. It was a voyage of discovery, and its telling is the uncovering of surprise on a river I thought I knew…” —Robin Cody, from the prologue

On a June morning in 1990, high up in the Canadian Rockies, Robin Cody pushed his sixteen-foot Kevlar canoe through tall grass and mud to launch it on peaceful Columbia Lake, the nominal source of the river that heaves more water into the Pacific ocean than any other in North or South America. For the next eighty-two days, Cody would portage massive dams and revel in the rapids as the great river plunges 2,700 feet in 1,200 miles before reaching the river’s mouth in Astoria.

Cody’s canoe sneaks up on the bear and moose and raptors and beavers who make a living on the Columbia. He drops in on riverpeople: the trapper, the wind surfer, the archeologist, the lock operator, the native woman who grew up at riverside in a dwelling of tule reeds. With a generous and infectious spirit, Cody draws us into the mysteries of a much-altered and regulated river that is still, at heart, a life-giving place.

This first OSU Press edition of Voyage of a Summer Sun—winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award and the Oregon Book Award, and an Oregon State Library choice for “150 Books for the Oregon Sesquicentennial”—includes a new afterword by the author.
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cover of Voyage of the Adventure: Retracing the Donelson Party's Journey to the Founding of Nashville

Voyage of the Adventure

Retracing the Donelson Party's Journey to the Founding of Nashville

John Guider

Vanderbilt University Press, 2021

In the harsh winter of 1779, as the leader of a flotilla of settlers, John Donelson loaded his family and thirty slaves into a forty-foot flatboat at the present site of Kingsport, Tennessee. Their journey into the wilderness led to the founding of a settlement now known as Nashville—over one thousand river miles away. In the fall of 2016, photographer John Guider retraced the Donelson party’s journey in his hand-built 14½' motorless rowing sailboat while making a visual documentation of the river as it currently exists 240 years later.

This photo book contains more than 120 striking images from the course of the journey, allowing the reader to see how much has changed and how much has remained untouched in the two and a half centuries since Donelson first took to the water. Equally significant, the essays include long-ignored contemporary histories of both the Cherokee whom Donelson encountered and the slaves he brought with him, some of whom did not survive the journey.

Guider, a professional photographer, has created images of every point in the thousand-mile trip from a platform just a few feet above the waterline of three of Tennessee’s most notable rivers.
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