Mountains in The Books Store

The famed Craighead twins, wildlife biologists both, discovered in their years of studying Yellowstone's grizzlies that the bears typically wander up to a thousand square miles--meaning that even that huge park does not provide enough forage within its boundaries to ensure their survival in lean years. A Y2Y corridor of safe passage would offer animals like the grizzly ample room to roam, as well as clear migration routes to lessen the chance of extinction due to inbreeding. Already changes are taking place with such knowledge in mind, like the construction of animal bridges over major roadways. But the region's vastness also guarantees multiple private, public, and bureaucratic hoops to jump through in the conservation effort.

She had brought along a small box of watercolors and stole away from her group each day to paint an illustrated record of her experiences. The results are these field notes from a re-enchantment with the world. She believes the sketchbook was the river's gift to her; in turn she offers the sketchbook to help us find the river for ourselves.

About the experience she later wrote, "I expected the canyon to astonish me. It exceeded my wildest imaginings by at least a power of ten . . . On the river I found myself drunk with visual excitement, engaged in a gluttony of looking . . . Often I would try to recall something I had seen on the river. Other times I would focus on something directly in front of me: a family of barrel cacti in the late afternoon sun, a single cube of zoroaster granite . . .trying to isolate, to understand, the purity of that particular gold of morning light on the ridge, or the muddy claret of the redwall limestone."