Coffee Table Book of: Wild Rivers (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Wild Rivers is a large format book of wild rivers, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: white rapids in narrow canyons, milky glacial rivers braiding across gravel plains, slow meanders and oxbow lakes, deep gorges and waterfalls, and rivers through every season from the spring flood to the frozen falls of midwinter.

In the canyons and gorges a river roars white through dark granite, runs green between basalt columns and glows orange between low red sandstone banks at sunset, while a slender waterfall drops into a round plunge pool, potholes lie worn deep into pale bedrock and a lone pine clings to a rock spire above a misty gorge.

Glacial meltwater bursts from an ice cave and spreads in milky channels over wide gravel plains, round a lone boulder, a spruce island under the northern lights and a gold cottonwood at sunrise. Lower down, a slow river loops through mist at dawn, an oxbow lake curves through autumn woods, a delta spreads into a calm lake at sunset, and a sandy cut bank, a sandbar with one young willow and a logjam of bleached trunks show the river at work.

The seasons turn on the water: a brown spring flood through half submerged willows and slabs of ice jammed at a bend, a mountain river in snowmelt, a clear stream in a beech wood, aspens and a maple in autumn gold and scarlet, a summer storm, soft rain and a river under the stars, then steam fog and hoar frost on winter mornings, pancake ice, a frozen waterfall and a crescent moon over a frozen river.

A heron waits in the morning mist, a moose wades a braided river, a dipper stands in the spray, and a kingfisher, an otter in the snow, a leaping salmon, a trout holding in the current, a beaver, a pair of swans and an eagle on a snag keep the river company.

Short notes run through the book, on how rivers carve canyons, braid and meander, the seasons of flood and ice, and the wildlife and old ways of the riverbank: glacial rivers are milky with rock flour, fine dust ground from the mountains by the ice, herons often fish alone, each guarding its own stretch of shallow water, moose are strong swimmers and cross rivers readily, even wide and cold ones, and beavers fell trees by gnawing round the trunk, leaving a stump shaped like a sharpened pencil.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.