Excerpt From My New Book Coming Out in a Few Weeks: Conservation Photography Handbook

My Conservation Photography Handbook: How to Save the World One Photo at a Time will be released in a few weeks. It should be available on Amazon shortly (preview of it is available now as well as pre-orders).

This excerpt is from the last chapter describing a recent float trip on the Snake River in Hells Canyon, one of my early conservation battles in the 1960s and '70s - which we won:

A few years ago I returned to make another whitewater raft trip on the Snake River in Hells Canyon. With me were a few Idaho friends. The rest of our party was made up of other folks from various parts of the country. None of the others in the group had been to Hells Canyon before and I hadn’t been back since my 1972 trip with Pete Seeger. It was refreshing to see that the canyon was as beautiful as I remembered it from my early photographs. For the next six days we floated downriver through magnificent scenery that, if the dam had been built, would all be under hundreds of feet of water.

            On our first day on the river we ran two of the major rapids: Wildsheep and Granite Creek. There was that surge of adrenaline as we plunged into massive waves, getting refreshingly drenched by the cold waters.

After Granite Creek rapid we slipped along on quiet waters, drifting with the current and taking in the lush green hillsides splashed with wildflowers. At the base of one dark towering wall a mountain goat and her two youngsters grazed peacefully. No one spoke for a long while. And then two of the rafts maneuvered closer to mine. In a chorus the people in them shouted, “Thank you Boyd.”

I was dumbfounded. What on earth were they thanking me for? A few made sweeping gestures with their hands, pointing up toward the canyon walls. Then it dawned on me: my Idaho friends had told the others of my involvement in saving this place, stopping the proposed dam and getting protective legislation passed.

Wow. I have to admit I got choked up. Their gratitude, expressed in the midst of this wild beauty, was ample reward for the years of hard work it took to save the place.

We drifted on, absorbing and enjoying it all.