A story centered on the legendary Westwater Canyon stretch of the Colorado River, blending river-running culture, history, and storytelling from one of the most iconic whitewater sections in the Southwest.
Mike Milligan's book on Westwater Canyon is the kind of regional history that people outside a specific river community might not know to look for, and that the community would be poorer without. Westwater is a fourteen-mile section of the Colorado River in eastern Utah, and a lot of what is known about its history, its characters, and the specific arc of commercial and private river use on it is either undocumented or scattered. Milligan pulled it together, talked to the right people, dug up the right photographs, and produced the single-volume reference that Westwater deserves.
The book covers more than just the whitewater. Westwater has a rich and strange history — outlaw hideouts from the Butch Cassidy era, early uranium prospecting, archaeology, the early commercial river-running scene, the specific characters who ran the canyon in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Milligan treats all of it as one continuous story of a place, which is the right frame. Westwater is small enough that the river history and the land history share a single cast of characters, and separating them into different books would lose the relationships that make the canyon what it is.
I bring this book up at Westwater put-ins. People who have been running the canyon for years still don't know some of the stories Milligan has collected, and telling them at camp on a trip is a way of populating the canyon with the specific ghosts who belong there. The Star Canyon story. The Miners' Cabin. The specific rapids and their naming histories. Westwater is too short to be its own multi-day world for most private trips, so the layering of story onto landscape has to happen fast, and Milligan is the best resource for that layering.
The book is not a polished commercial product. It has the feel of a regional-history book assembled by somebody who loves the subject more than he was ever going to get back in royalties. The editing is uneven in places. The design is functional. None of this matters once you are inside the material. The care is in the research, and the research is unmistakably the work of somebody who has been on the canyon, talked to the old-timers, and taken the time to verify what could be verified and flag what could not.
Read it the week before your next Westwater trip. Run the Skull Rapid with Milligan's stories in your head. The canyon is a denser experience when you are running it with its ghosts loaded, and this book is the best way to load them before you launch from the Little Dolores put-in.
