#1654 Wandering In Canyon Country — A Conversation with Craig Childs

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clay’s conversation with writer Craig Childs of western Colorado. Childs is the author of more than a dozen books about America’s backcountry. He’s spent months, even years, exploring the Grand Canyon and a hundred lesser but magnificent canyons in desert country. Childs has been a river runner, a guide, and a consultant, but mostly, he is a writer of beautiful, spare, sometimes mystical prose about the Colorado Plateau. Clay and Craig talked about how he became a writer, about taking risks in the backcountry, being lost, and getting oneself lost. They also discuss the great 19th-century explorer John Wesley Powell, Henry David Thoreau, and Edward Abbey — the author of the enormously influential book Desert Solitaire. Childs is currently wandering through mountain lion country in western Colorado, trying to understand the ways of these magnificent creatures. You’ll love this quiet discussion of things unrelated to America’s current politics. This interview was recorded March 20, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to this introduction to this week's podcast.
0:04.6	A really lovely, quiet, poetic conversation with Craig Childs, author of 14 books, The Soul of Nowhere,
0:12.5	The Secret Knowledge of Water, Grand Canyon, Time Below the Rim, and many others.
0:18.4	He's a poetic prose stylist.
0:20.6	He has walked the walk. I mean, in a huge way,
0:24.0	he spent months at a time alone or with others of his own way of seeing in the canyons of Colorado
0:35.9	and Utah, particularly the Grand Canyon, which is not one canyon, but thousands of canyons of Colorado and Utah, particularly the Grand Canyon, which is not one canyon, but
0:40.1	thousands of canyons with a big central canyon in the middle of it.
0:44.9	And he's an amazing man who writes about the people who were here before modern natives
0:52.4	and before white people ever came.
0:55.1	He writes with great dignity and caution and respect about these wild places.
1:03.8	He's not afraid to expose himself by taking off his clothes as he walks at times,
1:10.3	but also to talk about the paradoxes of loving
1:14.9	this land and in some sense appropriating it for our own purposes as a writer or as a lecturer
1:23.0	and so on. Really amazing. I met him once two years ago at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
1:32.4	in Cortez, a monumental day in my life. And we've had a little bit of correspondence since,
1:40.0	but my trusty scout, Frank Lister, of Escalante, Utah, arranged this interview.
1:46.0	I was a little nervous coming into it because Craig has a kind of mystical, I won't say detachment,
1:55.0	but it's always clear that part of his being is beyond the moment that he's in, that he's a deep thinker,
2:04.8	works hard to find the language to put you in the scene.
2:09.2	Anyway, it was great.
2:10.3	It was a great interview.
	...

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