Fran Joseph sat in the back seat of the ancient Cessna, peering out at the rugged terrain of the Colorado River basin. Her friend, Michael Collier, was in the pilot's seat. A longtime hiker, she had never seen the desert from the air like that.
"It's so beautiful," she said, tears streaming down her face. "It's just so beautiful."The comment could describe Collier's new book, published last month, which shows the region's landscape as a complete ecosystem.
The book is "Water, Earth, and Sky: The Colorado River Basin," issued by University of Utah Press. It is a work of science, grist for the mind, with distinguished essays about the great river and its basin.
But it's a rich feast for the eyes and other senses, too, forming an amazing look at the entire region.
As Collier writes, the basin covers 244,000 square miles of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. It is a remarkable terrain of desert, mountains, rivers and wetlands.
The sheer physical impact of the country, its palpable character, comes alive in these pages.
Collier is a physician from Flagstaff, Ariz., who has degrees in geology. Three weeks a month, he works as a family doc. The fourth he spends writing, photographing and flying his plane.
He buzzed close above the back country and took an estimated 12,000 photographs. He selected 140 of his images, mostly taken from the air, but some are close-ups of cactus, reeds, flowers, a pictograph, a section of waterfall.
Aerial views range from the stunning image of the Green River at the head of Labyrinth Canyon, Utah, at sunset, which is the cover photo, to tidal flats at the mouth of the Colorado at the Sea of Cortez, Baja California, Mexico, to seamed mesas and river bends choked with trees, and the hogback ridges of the San Rafael Reef.
Collier presents such views as a patchwork of irrigated fields, a glowing thunderstorm over the darker desert near Utah's Cedar Mountain, and uranium tailings next to the Colorado River at Moab.
With these plates and the essays of skillful observers, he builds up a vision of the region as a living ecosystem.
Chapters by experts cover the geology, river flow, history, water uses, aquatic life, changes that dams and "trash fish" eradication have made, plants and animals. There are also poetic descriptions of personal experiences with the river -- for example, getting dumped into a dangerous stretch of the Colorado.
Some of the essay authors are familiar to many Utahns: Collier himself, who is a freelance writer of books and magazine articles covering topics like the geology of Grand Canyon and Capitol Reef national parks; John C. Schmidt, associate professor of geography and earth resources at Utah State University, Logan; and Ellen Meloy, who wrote Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River, and lives in southern Utah.
The book was a long time in the making.
"It took about 25 years, in the sense that I've been involved in rivers throughout the Colorado River drainage for that long," Collier said, when reached by telephone at Laramie, Wyo., where he was visiting a geologist friend.
"I worked as a Grand Canyon boatman for years, rowing boats through Grand Canyon, and learned water from the water, by rowing and kayaking." At Stanford University, he did his master's thesis on an aspect of the Colorado River's effect on the geology of the Grand Canyon.
"That was more exposure to the rocks and the stories that the rocks had to tell me," he said.
He described the inspiration for Water, Earth and Sky.
One night in 1995, Collier was at Marble Canyon just below Glen Canyon Dam, talking with David L. Wegner, who had headed the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Glen Canyon Environmental Studies. For 13 years, the team examined ecological aspects of the river in the Grand Canyon, focusing on such diverse fields as botany, economics, ichthyology.
All this effort went to answer the question, can the government operate Glen Canyon Dam is such a way that might be more beneficial to the Grand Canyon? It was "a worthwhile question," Collier said.
In talking with Wegner, Collier was impressed by the team's approach. He said, "Dave, this way of thinking about the stretch of river shouldn't be lost."
People should get a feel for the entire Colorado River region as an integrated system, he thought. He should write a book with a single idea at the heart, to "look at the river as a through-flowing system."
Collier told himself, "Don't be distracted by political boundaries like states and national parks. Don't be too dismayed by reservoirs and dams and water diversion systems but rather step back and look at the river for what it is."
With luck, the resulting work would help people to see the Colorado River region in a new way. They should not focus so much on special places that are protected, like Canyonlands National Park but should try to accommodate it all.
"If you look at the whole thing, you realize it is still a river," he said.
With his many thousands of hours of flying time, he knew the region well. "But I went out and looked again" as preparation for the book.
Just to mention some of the Utah scenes, Collier looked at badlands in the southeastern Utah desert, at the Huntington and Cleveland area of Emery County near the San Rafael Swell, at the Price River as it cuts through the Mancos shale on its way toward the Green River. "I looked at moonscape around Caineville," Wayne County, he said.
But as he flew his small plane, he was not restricted to the boundaries of this state. He traveled throughout the region. And he wasn't only fixated on the science, although that aspect makes up a large part of the book.
"I was reminded of how much beautiful land there is up and down the river. And I wanted the book to celebrate the fact that it is a beautiful river."
The result is a blend of beauty and fact that is apt to stick in the reader's mind. If the reader is receptive, it may shape a new approach to the region.