With a few hiccups, this was a very good and enjoyable read, eventually becoming a page-turner.
You get, ultimately, the story of the three rivermen and a dory that ride the crest of the flood release from Glen Canyon in 1983. But you also get a great deal of context: of the Colorado River, the Colorado basin, the people who live on the river in the Grand Canyon, the (dam!) people of the Bureau of Reclamation and, to a lesser extent, the ranger staff in the park. Primarily, though, the narrative resides with the river folk, the bureau folk, and a small boat.
The writer does a great job of bringing the characters - human and otherwise - to life on the page. The dory, Emerald Mile", for example, has more lives than a street cat and this story captures that loyalty to re-build her (over and over again) very well.
The people of the Bureau aren't demonized; the author spends many pages introducing the reader to some of the main players at the bureau who dealt with the '83 flood and gives a good grounding in what transpires over that fateful Spring.
The riverfolk -- really only men inhabit the main stories -- are captured very well and given life on the page and the reader gets a very good sense of who they were and what drove them.
The Colorado River with its many features and, above it, the Grand Canyon, were, I thought, captured quite well. Let's say, instead, they were captured well enough. But this is primarily a story of people and a small boat and that's where the narrative focused. Very successfully.
I was reminded, while scanning some other reviews, that the author is adept at very descriptive prose and the writing, at times, does become very poetic. Which is a good thing.
It is a fine complementary read to other books about the Southwest, dams, rivers, and water.
I highly recommend it.
The hiccups:
1. On a few occasions, the author will spend way too much time, it seemed to me, on setting context to motivate what ends up to be a very short passage in the book.
2. In the epilogue, the author gets into philosophizing about American patriotism and likens the dam-controlled Colorado and the Glen Canyon dam as some kind of Yin/Yang analogy of what America is. It didn't work for me - at all - and fortunately didn't last long.
3. Sometimes it seems the author puts words in the mouths or thoughts in the heads, of the characters in a way that seemed false and done simply for narrative effect which resulted in passages becoming, to my mind, historical fiction. For example, when one of the Bureau's "head office" guys sees first hand what is coming out of the spillway at Glen Canyon and says (paraphrasing) "Jiminy Cricket", which really meant "Holy Mother of God." It happened often enough that it was distracting.
I am a Canadian white water kayaker, who has travelled & hiked all around the canyon lands, hiked down Bright Angel to the river, missed a chance to kayak the canyon (Doh!), and has read a few books about the deserts, the rivers, the dams.
Douglas Wogoman