Washington Life Magazine
Washington Life Magazine

The Colorado River, star of the film Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk will be playing at an IMAX theater near you. Courtesy of MacGillivray Freeman Films / Photo by Wade Davis . More about the film and the adventures detailed here can be found in Wade Davis’ forthcoming book, Grand Canyon: River at Risk, published by Earth Aware Editions.
I have always been drawn to rivers. My heroes as a boy growing up in Québec were the coureurs de bois, the fur traders and explorers who broke open a continent. I would spend hours on the banks of the St. Lawrence, imagining their journeys up the river. When I, along with Tara, was invited to join a celebration of the Colorado, and travel the length of the Grand Canyon, by reputation the greatest white water trip in North America, I was delighted. It was, after all, at Lees Ferry that the modern rafting adventure began. The idea for the expedition originated with Greg MacGillivray, a pioneering IMAX fi lmmaker and dedicated conservationist. Recognizing that the supply and quality of fresh water were among the most daunting of global environmental challenges, Greg wanted to tell a story of water conservation against the backdrop of the Colorado, at once the most iconic and compromised river in the United States. Inspired no doubt by his love for his own daughter, Megan, Greg envisioned a journey in which two fathers, each in their own ways advocates for the wild, would run the river with their daughters, just before the girls left home to attend university for the fi rst time. With this premise in mind Greg, together with Liz Ferrin and her team from fi lm sponsor and investor Teva, recruited the two of us, along with Bobby Kennedy Jr. and his daughter, Kick. It was a bold and somewhat risky experiment. The success of the fi lm would in no small measure depend on how these four characters got along. If the chemistry was not right, it would surely show, especially once projected onto an IMAX movie screen six stories tall. As it turned out, any such concerns evaporated within hours of our being on the river. Kick and Tara bonded from the start, forging a friendship that continues to deepen to this day. Bobby and I knew of each other, and had met once before the trip, when by chance we had both addressed a conference on river conservation. But only once we were on the Colorado did we realize the extraordinary ways in which the trajectories of our lives had intersected. We had gone to Harvard at the same time, studied anthropology, and found inspiration in many of the same courses and professors. Both of us had come of age in Colombia, and as we compared notes, we were able to work our way down through the landscape to countless remote mountain crossroads and small lowland towns that we had both come to know. A single phrase or reference, a forest traversed, a tribe encountered or an escapade survived, invoked telling laughter that reinforced our growing sense of fraternity even as it left both of our daughters wondering just how crazy their fathers had been in their youth. Bobby had gone down the Colorado with his father in 1967, a journey that inspired in him a love of white water and a passion for rivers that would in time lead him to become the country’s foremost advocate of water and river conservation. I found him to be an extraordinary man, charismatic and brash, decent and true, with a terrifi c sense of humour and immense reservoirs of physical energy and strength. In one instant he was an Irish bard regaling the guides with some bar room joke. In another he would be orchestrating the entire crew in an impromptu game of football in which the rules changed by the moment, with extra points being awarded on the spot for the most clever and cunning innovation. Kick, running the length of the rafts, bouncing from one pontoon to the next, catapulting off the rigging of the last to catch a
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