Join The Mountaineers for the official launch of the new book Elwha: A River Reborn with Seattle Times reporter Lynda V. Mapes—a free event celebrating an incredible restoration taking place on our public lands – on Wednesday, May 8 at The Mountaineers Program Center in Seattle’s Magnuson Park. Beer and wine available with donation.
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/354916
Journey into the Northwest’s legendary Elwha River Valley to discover the people, places, and h... More
Join The Mountaineers for the official launch of the new book Elwha: A River Reborn with Seattle Times reporter Lynda V. Mapes—a free event celebrating an incredible restoration taking place on our public lands – on Wednesday, May 8 at The Mountaineers Program Center in Seattle’s Magnuson Park. Beer and wine available with donation.
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/354916
Journey into the Northwest’s legendary Elwha River Valley to discover the people, places, and history behind the world’s largest dam removal project, an unprecedented bet on the power of nature
Running forty-five miles from mountain headwaters to its mouth on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River Valley has been many things to many people over the past century—a power source for pioneer towns, a favored jaunt for conservation luminaries like Robert F. Kennedy and Justice William O. Douglas, an area for Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe members to sustain a fish hatchery, a playground for steelhead enthusiasts. Once legendary for its pre-dam wild salmon runs and chinook weighing over 100 pounds, today the Elwha is being dramatically rethought as its two massive dams are torn down. With the start of the first dam blasts in September 2011 comes a chance for unprecedented environmental restoration and community renewal, and now the new book Elwha: A River Reborn takes readers behind the scenes, underwater, in the air, and all around the many sides of this monumental effort.
The Elwha will never again be the Eden it was, and it’s no longer an unmapped wilderness…what could it mean to restore a river ecosystem, all the way from the mountains to the sea? How did a region synonymous with hydropower become the world’s biggest dambusting pioneer? How would this place, with its human and natural history so intimately connected, be transformed as it was taken apart and put back together? —from the Preface
Featuring national award-winning science reporting from The Seattle Times and published by The Mountaineers Books, Elwha: A River Reborn is based on extensive interviews, field work, copious historical research and rare period images, and photography conducted over 16 years and continuing today. Getting cold, wet, and dirty, author Lynda Mapes and photographer Steve Ringman made trip after trip into the back country of the Olympics with scientists to learn how the Elwha River Valley ticks.
“More than a fish story, Elwha examines how and why the river was dammed during the early development of the Olympic Peninsula, and how native people and environmentalists—once dismissed as extremists with a loony idea—made the first step to team up to tear them down. The book takes readers deep into the Olympics to see this river up close, and understand what is at stake in this $325 million, taxpayer-funded effort to restore a legendary wilderness valley.”
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