'The Wild Ones': The Story Of The First Women Who Successfully Rafted Down The Colorado River

By Steve Goldstein
Published: Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - 1:06pm
Updated: Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - 9:16am

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Rafting down the Colorado River
Mark Lellouch/National Park Service
Rafting down the Colorado River below Havasu Creek in Grand Canyon National Park.

Thousands of tourists go rafting on the Colorado River every year, but going back 80 years or so, the number of rafters was much smaller, and every person who’d successfully ran the river was a man.

Two female botanists from Michigan aimed to change that in 1938.

Reporter Melissa Sevigny wrote about them in the Atavist magazine in a piece called “The Wild Ones” and joined The Show to talk about their journey.

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