News

"We just got back from a Grand Canyon trip 2 weeks ago. We totally abused our Whitis/Martin Guide. It stayed out all day, all night, was wind blown, sand blasted, stepped on and wet for 18 days. It came through amazingly well. Our notes written with a not-so permanent, permanent marker washed off, but all pages on the book are intact. It got packed wet for the trip home, and a few days later we layed the book on a table periodically turning each page to air dry and blow the grit off. No stuck pages, the book still looks almost new and is ready for another trip. In addition to being durable, a well laid out river guide!"

News for Spring, 2008

This is shaping up to be an excellent boating season with above average snowpack throughout much of the Rockies. While we drew no permits ourselves, we have six trips in the works this year. Ahhhh. Life is good. More importantly, Duwain is semi-retiring from his day job to devote more time to RiverMaps. We have several projects in the works, so we're hoping to have some significant improvements to our map and guidebooks ready for the 2009 boating season. Thanks for the patronage and feedback!

The Third Edition of our Grand Canyon Guide won the 2007 National Outdoor Book Award for the outdoor adventure guidebook category! From their website:

For whitewater river runners, the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon is the pinnacle experience. Now there's a river map and guide to match that reputation. It's built upon a series of 7.5 minute topographic maps, correctly oriented and large enough to read easily from the seat of your boat. Outstanding cartographical work combined with accurate descriptions of rapids, camps and landmarks make this the state-of-the-art of river guides.

The third edition was published just last year. Our original plan was to simply reprint the Second Edition. We spoke with the park service in December, 2006 while we were finishing up work on the Middle Fork/Main guidebook, and we learned that they are planning to transition to the new mileage established by the Grand Canyon Research and Monitoring Center. The new mileage varies from the former mileage by up to one mile, but not consistently. Rather than be out of step with what’s an eventuality, we decided to step out front and update our guide. In addition to the mileage, we fine-tuned all of the campsite and rapid locations, added a few camps, and deleted some poor ones. See the PDF file with a listing of the revisions and mileage adjustments. We also added 30+ photographs with many by the excellent photographer, Bruce McElya.

We have begun publishing GPS waypoints files. So far we have the files for the Middle Fork/Main, the San Juan, and the Grand Canyon guidebooks. We will add more as time permits.