Robert O. Collins (1933–2008)

The Big Drops is an amalgam of historic fact and fiction about a selection of 10 runnable rapids from the western USA. In spite of the river jargon, its an easy and exciting read.
Collins and Nash have logged over 10,000 miles on the these and other rivers. They share their wealth of personal experiences, as well others', beginning with John Wesley Powell. TBD serves me as a replacement for my waterlogged and soggy river journals. The old waterproof Nikon got me photos, but I never did find good waterproof methods to take notes. I gaped at the Crystal haystack from shore but only understood how it worked after reading The Big Drops. With droll black humor the authors describe the different predicaments faced by each size, weight and type of boat, and how the hole at Crystal is there to "eat" you if you make an error, and even if you don't; actually its more like a house-sized washing machine with boulders playing agitator, and you're a limp sock.
Today's adventure seekers zip-lining and bungee jumping off heights have nothing on the river runners. No one throws rocks at the aerial gymnasts nor douses them with a fire hose stream so they can't breathe. Float with Collins and Nash and experience the gamut of the placid waters gathering behind the house-sized boulders, through the anxious moments as you thread the tongue, trying to avoid the haystacks and holes. Rivers look linear on a map, and feel two dimensional in a canyon, but they're really three dimensional and can appear to be gravity free if you get dumped in and can't find the surface, even a flat surface.
They also shared some of their debate over how to pare down the wonderful list of candidate drops. I would have enjoyed a longer book. More sirs, can we have more? The final pages are dedicated to an Honor Roll of wonderful drops that fell to dams and hydroelectricity. They point out that big rapids are more endangered that wilderness. I noticed that in today's planning for climate change, rivers are once again being threatened with dams, as they haven't been since the passage of the Wild And Scenic Rivers Act. I recommend getting out on the rivers before they go the way of the glaciers and pack ice.… (más)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1263632.html?#cutid1

It is a good basic political overview of the history of Sudan since Mohammed Ali, the Albanian Ottoman ruler of Egypt, conquered it in 1821; followed by the religious rule of the Mahdi and his successors, and then then the peculiarly named condominium arrangement which preserved Egyptian sovereignty in theory but was completely British-led in practice. Independence brought an alternation between elected governments, military rule and (as at present) mixtures of the two.

Sudan was soon cursed with Africa's first civil war, as the southern part of the country, promised autonomy by London but not given it by Khartoum, chafed under direct rule and various southern armed movements, with varying degrees of popular support, territorial control and external backers, challenged the central authority of the state (and Khartoum's inclination to establish Islam as the state religion) and made parts of the south ungovernable and ungoverned. An autonomy deal in the early 70s was abrogated by Khartoum in the early 80s, and the most recent war kicked off, with horrible loss of life and destruction. Eventually in 2005 the southern leader, John Garang, and Sudan's President Bashir signed a new deal for autonomy for the south (without Islamic law applying there) and an independence referendum in 2011.

Just a few weeks after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement came into effect, Garang died in a helicopter crash; meanwhile, elsewhere in Sudan the province of Darfur, long an arena of conflict between neighboruing Libya and Chad, had become the scene of appalling attacks upon civilians by government-led forces.

(Points not mentioned in the above summary: the southern oil reserves, the period of sponsorship of worldwide Islamic terrorism by Khartoum, Sudan's previous and subsequent relations with the US and the West, questions of 'Arab' and 'tribal' identity, involvement of Ethiopia and Uganda, etc: all hugely important issues which I can't do justice to here.)

Collins has all this, (usually) soberly explained, with perhaps a mild bias towards an enlightened Khartoum perspective (which survives despite the decades of repression). If you need a run down of the basic political facts, Collins provides them.… (más)