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Tom Ross

Tom Ross' column appears Tuesdays and Sundays in Steamboat Today. Contact him at 970-871-4205 or tross@SteamboatToday.com.

Steamboat Springs — I haven’t logged any face time on Facebook yet, but I blog at least three times a week and I tweet like a neo-tropical songbird. Beginning today, I also read good.

Allow me to rephrase that last part. I now have a profile on a social networking site for bookworms called Goodreads. It’s a place for book enthusiasts to give and find recommendations on books they have read. I don’t qualify as a bookworm, but I read pretty well.

Goodreads allows registered members to search for good books by category, author and subject matter. It’s a way that anyone could start their own book club, gain insights into the perceptions of other readers with shared interests or locate interesting titles they might never have stumbled on otherwise.

Input www.goodreads.com into the address bar of your Web browser and you’ll find lists of “The best books of all time,” “Books you would recommend to strangers,” the “Most overhyped and annoying books of all time” and “Books that everyone should read at least once.”

At this writing, I have but one book to recommend on my Goodreads list and to be honest, I haven’t quite finished reading Wallace Stegner’s “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian — John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.”

In some ways, I wish I had read the book before taking my own trip down the Grand Canyon two years ago. But having survived that float, my own experience enriched my reading of Stegner’s monumental work.

And I’m confident that if you are passionate about the West, its mighty rivers and deep canyons, you’ll value the insights to be gleaned from this account of Powell’s improbable first-ever exploration of the Green and Colorado rivers in heavy wooden boats.

Powell and his expedition set off down the Green toward the Moffat County landmark that would become known as The Gates of Lodore on May 24, 1869. His boats had arrived by train from Illinois two weeks earlier and just one day after the golden spike completing the transcontinental railroad was driven into the ground.

When you think about it, Powell launched one era of westward exploration virtually at the same time another era was coming to a close.

One year before Powell set off down the Green, he led a group of amateur naturalists from Illinois on a preliminary exploration of the headwaters of the Colorado River.

They arrived in Denver in the spring of 1868 and set off with pack animals to hike across Berthoud Pass and into Middle Park, setting up camp along with Denver dignitaries near Hot Sulphur Springs.

William N. Beyers, editor of The Rocky Mountain News, acted as a host of sorts. He had set up a summer camp there and wrote glowing reports about the landscape.

Stegner writes that, “In his letters to the paper he (Beyers) glowed about the fishing, the grass, the color and the pageantry of the Utes of Antero and Douglas, eighty lodges of them, camped along the river.”

Imagine a time when Denver was a city in bloom but dudes from the city camped along the river amidst the lodges of the natives. It’s hard to imagine today, but there was such a time.

From there, they crossed the Rabbit Ears Range, skirted the Yampa River and set off to follow the White River to its confluence with the Green. After wintering with the Utes near what is now Meeker, they explored the mouth of the White and noted the mild temperament of the Green at that location before trekking north overland to Green River, Wyo., where Powell would launch his boats the following spring.

Any contemporary Northwest Colorado river rat who has felt a sense of adventure upon setting out down Lodore or Yampa Canyon, Cataract Canyon or the Grand Canyon, can appreciate what Powell and his group of intrepid travelers must have felt before setting off into the unknown and the dangers that lay ahead.

Stegner described the feeling as well as anyone ever has: “There is something ominous about a swift river, and something thrilling about a river of any kind. The nearest upstream bend is a gate out of mystery, the nearest downstream bend a door to further mystery … a mystery clothed in rumor, secret water trails where perhaps even Indians had not passed.”

If you’re not familiar with the prose of Stegner, or more likely, if you know him far better than I, come look me up at Goodreads.com and make a recommendation.