The Very Hard Way: Bert Loper and the Colorado River, by Brad Dimock. Soft cover, 472 pages, 180 photographs. National Outdoor Book Award winner.

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Brad Dimock produced a marvelous work, certainly registering among the most creative of outdoor biographies.

The subject of the book is Bert Loper, a legendary Colorado River boatman who died on the river at 80 years old while rowing his own boat. Loper, however, wasn’t the easiest subject to write about. He was an ordinary person, not particularly educated, never quite successful at anything, even at building a proper river boat. It was never easy for him – orphaned and abused, Loper worked most of his life at the bottom of society, the nameless grunt in hard rock mines, the sore-backed shoveler on a placer bar, the subsistence rancher on a lonely gravel delta in Glen Canyon.

Dimock artfully combines his own exhaustive research with interviews, first-person stories, letters, and Loper’s own writing to fashion an absorbing portrait of his life.

Tough as boot leather, stubborn and indomitable, Bert Loper was a drifting, uneducated, hard-rock miner, laborer and boatman who came to know and love the rivers of the Southwest like no one else before or since.

This splendid biography, which also tells the definitive history of river-running in the Southwest, takes us down into the canyons and whitewater and shows how they brought grace and meaning to the very hard life of a very hard man.

This is fast-paced whitewater reading all the way through. The way Dimock formatted the telling of the story was brilliant in that between Loper’s life and legend, history, exploits, and deeds and how others perceived him, there is never a dull moment.

You will know Loper and mourn his passing while at the same time marveling in the fact that he was who he was and did what he did.