“Wildlife is the heartbeat of the land. The sight of deer grazing in a high meadow, a red-tailed hawk circling in the sky, or a set of coyote tracks stretching across the snow can make the Colorado landscape come to life. It is the bighorn sheep and the ptarmigan that make the high country more than just rock and ice. It is the cloud of dust behind a running herd of pronghorns that makes the prairie more than empty horizons. And it is the song of the canyon wren that makes the canyons more than silent walls.”

“From somewhere out in the darkness of Duncan Bay a loon calls, a low sound shaped like the moon rising. It is early and still, and the call echoes among the shadows pooled along the shoreline. A string of stars is still tangled in the branches low along the horizon but already the night is beginning to fade … Suddenly the sun lifts out of the water dripping with light. The shadows move back in among the trees, and what is left of the night shatters. It is morning on Isle Royale. I lift my paddle once, sliding it silently through the dark water to turn my canoe toward the sunrise, and then drift quietly, listening again for the loon.”

“Wild rivers are more than just pathways of water from here to there. They are as much pathways into ourselves. There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace, even for a day, changes us, reminds us of other rhythms beyond the sound of our own heartbeats.”

“This was no myth. The bear had been there just moments before the bow of our canoes rounded the bend in the high Arctic river and scraped to a stop on the small spit of beach. In the thick air of a three-day rain we formed a circle around the fresh tracks. Lines were sharp; the edges unbroken; the long claw marks intact even in the rain. Bear tracks.”

“These are the mountains of Colorado, the weavers of weather, the makers of myth. Here some dig for riches like gold or silver. Others come to look, climb, or just sit, gathering a more lasting treasure. Peaks become cornerstones, landmarks in a personal landscape for those who live in these mountains. And for those who visit, the memory of an ice-gray peak gone gold with sunset becomes a memory as lasting as stone.”

“Once, in a shack on a roadside near a river in the southwest corner of the state, I watched a Navajo woman, her eyes the color of worked copper, weaving a tapestry of a river. With thick wool threads of silver, black, gold, and a shade of green like young willow leaves, her hands drummed a rhythm like wingbeats and on the loom appeared a river – slivers of light under a rising moon … The old woman called her tapestry “Shining Waters” and when I asked how soon it would be done she shook her head slowly. “Soon,” she said, “and never.” The story of the rivers of Colorado is like that too.”