The Historic Grand Canyon Adventure Two Women Had For Science - Botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter braved rapids and steep cliffs to catalog numerous plant species.
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In a rural town along the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, an esteemed botanist and local innkeeper got to talking in the summer of 1937. Together, the pair hatched a plan—to run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. A journey like theirs had never before been attempted. The University of Michigan botanist, Elzada Clover, intended to make the first-ever botanical survey of the river and its environs. The innkeeper, Norman Nevills, wanted to commercialize trips down the Colorado River (despite never having run the river himself). The next summer Clover and Nevills, along with two other boatmen, a photographer, and botanist Lois Jotter, Elzada’s close friend and a University of Michigan graduate student, set out. Newspapers had little doubt the hodgepodge crew would fail, even perish, on the river. Women like Clover and Jotter weren’t sturdy enough to survive the journey, journalists wrote in papers across the country. But, in early August, the team made it to their destination: Lake Mead, Arizona. Clover and Jotter had identified more than 50 species of plants along the river, including four new species, and together the team traversed more than 660 miles over the course of 45 days.
Today, few people remember Clover and Jotter as the first women to successfully run the Colorado River. Even fewer people remember that they were the first people to make a botanical survey of the region. With her new book, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, science journalist Melissa Sevigny hopes to change that. As part of our She Was There series, Atlas Obscura chatted with Sevigny about Clover’s cacti obsession, how Jotter braved dangerous rapids to save a boat, and how botanists continue to use the pair’s work today.
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...er-lois-jotter