Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River

by Ellen Meloy

Book Overview

More than a century after John Wesley Powell launched his boat on the Green River, Ellen Meloy spent eight years of seasonal floats through Utah's Desolation Canyon with her husband, a federal river... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805024972
• ISBN13: 9780805024975
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Fantastic writing....

I have a 1995 copy of "Raven's Exile" and I picked it up again a week ago because I am planning a trip through Labyrinth Canyon and I was looking for insights on the Green River. Colin Fletcher wrote "The River" which I re-read first and then I opened Ellen's work and was immediately entranced and transported again to the Utah desert. While I like Abbey's work, Meloy is less of a curmudgeon. I am an admirer of Fletcher but Meloy is less Narcissistic. She reports her emotions and has a turn of phrase which is astonishing. After a chapter on the absence of Ravens in Desolation... a chapter later she throws in a bombshell about the disappeared native Fremonts... "I believe a small band of Fremont Indians remain in Desolation Canyon. They spend a great deal of time with ravens." After reading that line I believe too.

run rivers

my family has been reading and then re reading this book for at least 10 years.. for us its like poetry and takes us all back to some faboulous river trip memories..

A softer Ed Abbey.

This book is a gem. If Abbey had a feminine counter-voice Meloy's would be it. Like Desert Solitaire Meloy speaks of the raw, untamed beauty of the southern Utah wilderness. We travel with her and her husband Mark down the Green River through Desolation Canyon and deep into the wild places of the human psyche. Meloy takes us back to our more primitive self with an eye for detail and a soft, gentle humor. She transports us on a journey that few of us will ever take. Through her eyes we see the river from a myriad of uses and view points: the prehistoric Fremont culture, early river runners to the modern river rat. Like Abbey before her, Meloy gives us a sense of place that comes alive through her words. This is an ode to a wild river and as she feared, possibly a eulogy. Desolation Canyon its environs remains one of the more endangered places in the southwest. The wild in all of us lost a voice with her untimely death in 2004.