16 episodes
Canyons of the Colorado, or The exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons by John Wesley Powell Loyal Books
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- Society & Culture
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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John Wesley Powell was a pioneer American explorer, ethnologist, and geologist in the 19th Century. In 1869 he set out to explore the Colorado and the Grand Canyon. He gathered nine men, four boats and food for ten months and set out from Green River, Wyoming, on May 24. Passing through dangerous rapids, the group passed down the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado River (then also known as the Grand River upriver from the junction), near present-day Moab, Utah. The expedition’s route traveled through the Utah canyons of the Colorado River, which Powell described in his published diary as having …wonderful features—carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds and monuments. From which of these features shall we select a name? We decide to call it Glen Canyon. (Ironically, now almost completely submerged by Lake Powell, behind the Glen Canyon Dam.) One man (Goodman) quit after the first month and another three (Dunn and the Howland brothers) left at Separation Rapid in the third, only two days before the group reached the mouth of the Virgin River on August 30 after traversing almost 1,500 km. The three who left the group late in the trip were later killed—probably by Indians. Powell retraced the route in 1871-1872 with another expedition, producing photographs, an accurate map, and various papers, including ethnographic reports of the area’s Native Americans and a monograph on their languages.
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05 – From Green River City to the Flaming Gorge
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Customer Reviews
Please provide a reader with inflection and ...
The "Canyons" is interesting, I'm sure, but it may be difficult to listen to its episodes, because the reader has some serious issues. The pace of the reader is a tad too fast and the emotion with which she expresses the writings of Major Powell are cold indeed, with all the enthusiasm of a pet rock. Additionally, -- and this is what really drove me up a wall -- the orator really needs to do her homework before she takes on a project like this. Why? Because she kept mispronouncing words. Often. It is her consistancy in butchering some of the local-specific names that will likely cause me to give up listening to this audiobook, and instead I may need to pick up the book itself, which means I won't be able to enjoy this while driving or doing some other task. For instance, the "Gila River" she reads many times is not pronounced with a hard "G", or even soft. It is instead an aspirated "H," as in "Heela." I hit the stop button after her sixth or seventh monstrous mispronunciation of "Gila." But that was not before crashing into the slaughtering of "agave," the important cactus plant of the southwest US. It is pronounced "uh-GAH-vee," and I'll let you figure out how she mangles it. Before taking on a location-specific work, any person who prepares properly will investigate the culture and learn its particular characteristics that make cultures so interesting. This is preparation she obviously did not do.