Melissa L. Sevigny

The riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off down the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious expedition leader and three amateur boatmen. With its churning rapids, sheer cliffs, and boat-shattering boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. But for Clover and Jotter, it held a tantalizing appeal: no one had surveyed the Grand Canyon’s plants, and they were determined to be the first.

Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their forty-three-day journey, during which they ran rapids, chased a runaway boat, and turned their harshest critic into an ally. Their story is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a little-known corner of the American West at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.

W.W. Norton, May 23, 2023: order now

Advance Praise from Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile:

In Brave the Wild River, Melissa Sevigny unfurls one of the finest river stories of the Grand Canyon while presenting a long overdue, richly deserved, and beautifully written tribute to a pair of legendary botanists who peeled back the petals of a mysterious, intoxicating landscape, and made it blossom with new knowledge and wonder.

Melissa L. Sevigny is a winner in the 2019-20 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition, taking the gold place in the Adventure Travel category for “The Wild Ones” in The Atavist Magazine. The annual competition is sponsored by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. Winners of the awards, the most prestigious in the field of travel journalism, were announced October 16, 2020, at the annual conference of SATW, the premier professional organization of travel journalists and communicators. This year’s gathering was a virtual event.

The competition drew 1,299 entries and was judged by faculty at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. This year, the SATW Foundation presented 99 awards in 26 categories and more than $21,000 in prize money to journalists. The awards are named for Lowell Thomas, acclaimed broadcast journalist, prolific author and world explorer during five decades in journalism.

In honoring Sevigny’s “remarkable re-creation” of Lois Jotter and Elzada Clover’s 1938 expedition down the Grand Canyon, the judges said: “Her chronological narrative is full of colorful details and used tension and foreshadowing. The story also showed that women could face danger as well as the men.”

THE SECOND SPRING in our new home, the tree by the mailbox bursts into white blossoms. Last year, the blooms snapped off under a hard late frost. But now I hope for apples. The flowers give way to small green spheres, but they never grow any larger than a thumbprint. When they begin to blush pink, my father, up the mountain for a visit, plucks one off the tree and tastes it. “Cherries,” he says.

Read the rest of “The Price of Cherries” in the fall issue of Orion magazine.

“Women do not belong in the Canyon of the Colorado,” declared a famous river-runner in 1938. But 24-year-old botanist Lois Jotter would change his mind. Read this longform narrative in The Atavist Magazine of the adventures of  two female scientists who rafted the Colorado River in 1938, determined to make the first botanical survey of the Grand Canyon. (Photo credit University of Michigan Herbarium, Clover & Jotter collection – used with permission).

Check out the March 2017 issue of Desert Leaf for my story on Messier Marathons. These all-night star parties honor 18th century astronomer Charles Messier, whose catalog includes 110 deep-sky objects, which you can see in a single night in March!

Mythical River was named a “Nature Book of Uncommon Merit” by the John Burroughs Association, which honors the best published nature writing. This year’s John Burroughs Medal went to Brian Doyle’s novel Martin Marten. Other medal finalists, in addition to Mythical River, were John Lane’s Coyote Settles the South, Nick Neely’s Coast Range, and J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place. Learn more about the award.