The River's Daughter

Recalling memoirs like Wild and Educated, an internationally renowned whitewater rafting guide offers a gripping and inspiring memoir about overcoming hardship and coming into her own through her relationship with the rivers she has known.

After Bridget Crocker’s parents split in a vicious divorce, she moved with her mother from California to Wyoming, to a trailer park on the banks of the Snake River. Her childhood was nearly idyllic, with a stepfather she loved and a new baby brother, and with the river as her companion. When her mother underwent a drastic personality change seemingly overnight and left her stepfather for an eco-warrior and radical new lifestyle, Bridget’s world upended. She returned to California to live with her explosive father—until his violence sent her back to Wyoming.

The river was the most constant and nurturing influence in Bridget’s life; it helped instill in her the resilience she needed to overcome sexual assault and betrayals by those close to her and taught her to trust her intuition and embrace her strength as a woman. She became a world-class whitewater rafting guide, leading expeditions on the Snake, the Kern, the Salmon, and Zambia’s Zambezi rivers. Ultimately, her relationship with the rivers she came to know led her to reunite with her family and work with them to transform multi-generational cycles of poverty, trauma, and abuse.

In this propulsive story of finding hope and belonging in a life outdoors, Bridget Crocker not only takes us on exhilarating, and at times terrifying, adventures on the water but opens up a new way of experiencing the world—through its rivers, which can guide us, just as we can navigate them—and introduces a bold and vibrant new voice in adventure writing.