rivers, United States 

"There's no music like a little river's . . .," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson; "it quiets a man down like saying his prayers." Beautiful and ever in motion, rivers inspire the imagination, with the immense scale of a canyon-carving torrent or the miniature world of a fingerling salmon or a tiny water strider.

America's Wild and Scenic Rivers takes you to more than two dozen of the nation's rivers to find adventure and solitude, camaraderie and encounters with the people who live there. You will hike along falls tumbling through granite gorges and glide in a pirogue through cypress-filled bayous.

In the East, Louis de la Haba found Maine's St. John River "nearly pristine," other streams recovering from abuse. He ran the New River Gorge in West Virginia, drifted on the mirror-calm Peace River in Florida.

Toni Eugene discovered America's heartland the "pleasures of making a river a friend," and the awe imosed by the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone. She found friendship, too, with the Cajuns on Louisiana's Bayou Penchant, with farmers on Nebraska's meandering Niobrara.

"We are in the palm of the river," a rafter told Larry Mosher on the Yampa. He learned there and elsewhere in the Southwest - on the Dolores, the Encampment, the Purgatoire - the value of a river's untamed spirit.

The Far West offered jenny Urquhart rivers where one can "still kneel and drink deep." She found the crystalline waters of the Smith in California redwood country, the enchanted silence of the Hoh River rain forest, and white-water adventure on Idaho's remote Selway.

Once the continent was webbed with splendid, free-flowing rivers. Now these have become rare, and often are threatened with degradation. This volume tells of state and national efforts to preserve these streams and of the dedicated people who defend them.

Illustrated with more than a hundred vivid color photographs, this book will bring the world of rivers to life for you.

Taken from the front inside flap.