Wildwaters
James Writes: Back in the early 1980s, I attended a risk management workshop at Sedburgh College, near Papineauville, Quebec. At lunch on the first day, Bill Mason (who I’d met through a wilderness medicine course I taught at Algonquin College in Ottawa) sat down beside me on the school cafeteria bench and said, “Phyllis Bruce is going to be calling you.” I replied, “Great. Who’s Phyllis Bruce?” Phyllis, Bill’s publisher and editor Key Porter Books (and before that at Van Nostrand Reinhold who had first published Bill’s canoeing book, Path of the Paddle), had asked Mason to do a followup book on Canadian rivers. At the time he had fallen headlong into shooting his canoeing films and couldn’t take on another book project. Having seen my writing and photography in other places, Bill suggested to Phyllis that I might be an alternative editor and shepherd of this river book project. And that’s where Wildwaters began.
Nearly ten years after the first edition of Wildwaters was published, Key Porter thought that the book had done sufficiently well in the Canadian market to warrant the addition of some American content and the publication of a second edition of this book into the North American market. Chapters on the Owyhee River in and the Yukon River were added and Wildwaters took off again in the illustrated wilderness book market.
Both versions are available for sale on the used book market. http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=raffan&tn=%22wild+waters%22