Colorado River is America's Most Endangered River

American Rivers recently designated the Colorado River as America's Most Endangered River of 2013. Please help protect it by taking action at their website! Also, watch the beautiful and disturbing video about the river on their home page. The Colorado River is so over subscribed with water rights that its waters have not reached the sea for many years (and Mexico has not received its fair share of the river's water for even longer!).

I've been an American Rivers supporter for many, many years, long before I started writing the RM Outdoor Adventure series featuring whitewater river ranger Mandy Tanner. I highly recommend supporting this conservation organization and their fight to preserve the Colorado River. The photo below of a rapid in Cataract Canyon in Utah was taken by my husband when we were on our research trip on the Colorado River for my upcoming mystery release, Fatal Descent.

Saving Guatemala's Wild Rivers

Last Friday, my husband and I saw a beautiful, moving, and adventuresome film at the Colorado Mountain College auditorium in Breckenridge. Titled Rios Guatemala, it chronicles an expedition down some beautiful and exciting whitewater rivers in Guatemala. It also shows the brave diplomacy that had to come into play when angry Mayan villagers detained paddlers they mistook for hydroelectric engineers. The expedition had to convince the Mayans that they had the same goals--to preserve and protect the rivers.

The film was made to bring attention to the danger threatening these Guatemalan rivers, due to proposed dam and mine development, and to the need for developing a sustaining ecotourism industry in the area. Ecotourism would offer an alternative to exploitation of these wild and pristine rivers and provide a source of income to the indigenous Mayan people. The film is being shown in the United States to attract attention and funding to a brand new foundation, the Rios Guatemala Foundation.

After viewing the film, I was ready to go to Guatemala! What a beautiful country, and what an amazing trip it would be to paddle down those roaring rivers. To see previews of the film on YouTube, go HERE and HERE.

To find out more about the Rios Guatemala Foundation and its mission to provide for the enjoyment, preservation and restoration of wild rivers in Guatemala, go HERE. You can see and hear the director, Guatamalan native Max Baldetty, talk about their vision at the website. You can read a mouth-watering description of their planned "Highlands to the Sea" fundraising expeditions on the Rios Lanquin and Cahabon, named by Paddler Magazine as one of the twelve best jungle river trips in the world. And you can gather a group of whitewater paddling friends and contact the foundation to schedule your own trip of a lifetime. You can feel good about it, too, because twenty percent of the trip sales go directly to the RIOS Guatemala Foundation and the preservation and restoration of river ecosystems in Guatemala.

Watching a River Come Back to Life

American Rivers is my favorite river conservation nonprofit, and I contribute to it regularly. I was moved by this article at their website about how dam removal has helped a river come back to life as steelhead, other fish and wildlife, and the health of the entire stream has dramatically improved. Take a look!

Horse Creek Dam: Six Years After It Was Blown to Bits

And just for fun, here's a link to an article giving 5 Reasons Whitewater Rafting Is Better Than A Theme Park!

My "River Story"

One of my favorite nonprofits, one that I've donated money to since the early 1980s is American Rivers. The nation's leading river conservation organization, American Rivers is dedicated to protecting and restoring the nation's rivers and the clean water that sustains people, wildlife, and nature. They focus on removing obsolete and unsafe dams to restore natural flows, preventing harmful and destructive projects such as logging or mining, protecting wetlands, encouraging treatment of stormwater and wastewater, promoting water conservation, and educating the public on global warming and other forces that threaten our water supply. Just this month, they opened a Colorado office to focus on my state's ailing rivers--and my river ranger protagonist Mandy Tanner's state.

Both my character Mandy Tanner and I enjoy recreating and working on Colorado's rivers. We have a vested interest in keeping those rivers healthy. As a result, I've been working with American Rivers and local river watershed conservation organizations to see how the release of Deadly Currents, the first book in my RM Outdoor Adventures mystery series, can help raise awareness of river and water issues--and maybe raise some funds to support river conservation, too. You'll hear more from me about this as events and plans solidify.

In the meantime, I've contributed my "River Story" about how I fell in love with free-flowing, natural rivers to American Rivers' website and their upcoming newsletter. To read the story, go HERE and page down to the heading "Whitewater Experiences Motivate Mystery Author." Click on "Read More" to find out about my early whitewater canoeing experiences and more. Then, if the article, and the issue, interests you, go HERE and make a tax-deductible donation to American Rivers. I can assure you that they'll put the money to good use.