Events › Desert Rats, River Runners, and Canyon Crawlers: Four Arizona Explorers

Francisco Garcés, a Franciscan friar, arrived in what is now Arizona in 1768. Assigned to San Xavier del Bac, he traveled widely throughout Arizona and California, charting overland routes that later travelers would follow. An American soldier named Joseph Christmas Ives embarked on an arduous expedition up the Colorado River half a century later, the first American to do so. A dozen years later, the river-running explorer John Wesley Powell would float through the Grand Canyon, and a hundred years after that a writer named Edward Abbey would explore the canyon country, writing classic books such as Desert Solitaire and Black Sun. 

This talk looks at the accomplishments of these four explorers, each of whom shaped our understanding of this wild, sometimes challenging place called Arizona. 

Presented by local author Gregory McNamee