rand Canyon boatmen are, by and large, very good at what they do. Required training has become increasingly comprehensive, and many senior guides, still active, continue to pass down their wisdom, born of decades of trial, error, and inspiration, to the new boatmen. Yet boaters from other parts of the Colorado River Basin continually point to the Grand Canyon Boatman¹s Syndrome: guides in Grand Canyon, they say, seem dimly unaware of any other rivers, canyons, rapids, or natural history‹that to them Grand Canyon is so much the center of their universe that it and it alone has become The Colorado River.

Michael Collier¹s Water, Earth, and Sky is a stimulating breath of outside air and should be required reading (and gazing) for all Grand Canyon boatmen. Collier, who a few guides may remember as a boatman in the 1970s, left commercial river running to become a geologist, a writer, a pilot, one of the world¹s top practitioners of fine aerial photography, and in his spare time, a family doctor in Flagstaff. Now, in a quest to find out what the Colorado River is really about, he has climbed into his Cessna and flown the entire drainage, from its sources in the mountains of New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming, to its crippled, muddy finale in the Sea of Cortez. With his airplane on edge in the sketchiest of situations, he has abandoned the controls and dangled from the window with his camera to capture the visual essence of the Colorado River. (Like any good guide, he is more than a little demented.)

The photographs presented in Water, Earth, and Sky range from the remote corners to the convoluted bowels of the Colorado Plateau. Collier has caught the remarkable forms, shapes, and textures of our River, often in the magnificent, rosy, long-shadowed light of dawn or day¹s end, in compositions that artisans in any medium will recognize as fine art. He has assembled some hundred and forty images from a perspective that few mammals will ever share. There are but two flaws: they aren¹t bigger and there aren¹t more of them. Although photography is the shimmering core of the book, there is much more. Collier has collaborated with six of the best scientific and creative minds on the Colorado Plateau to give breadth and detail to the overview. Dave Wegner, who has spent much of his life studying the systems and survival of the Colorado River, opens with an excellent foreword in which he introduces the other essayists far more succinctly than I can:

Geology, hydrology, biology, ecology, photographic and literary art: for the purposes of this book, these are not rigid disciplines so much as they are lenses through which the contributors to this book help us enter understanding. Michael Collier, trained as a geologist, has been running rivers, flying, and photographing the Southwest for twenty-five years. Jack Schmidt is a geomorphologist who has developed fundamental concepts of how river banks respond to moving water. Ned Andrews is a U.S. Geological Survey research hydrologist who has spent decades investigating how the Colorado and other rivers flow through and affect a myriad of landscapes. Rich Valdez is acknowledged as one of the country¹s foremost experts on fish within rivers of the mountain West. Larry Stevens is a research biologist who has spent twenty years inside Grand Canyon researching its riparian ecology. And Ellen Meloy is a prize-winning writer of natural history who has been on hundreds of trips down rivers of the Colorado Plateau.² Together these minds have created a picture of an astounding river system which, although horribly disfigured, displaced, and dismembered in places, remains one of the most beautiful, diverse, and inspirational places on earth.

Brad Dimock