Hi, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and welcome to a new episode of Women Who Travel, a podcast from Condonast Traveler.

Before we begin, we're asking for your feedback on our show. We'd love to know what stories you'd like to hear, what you've enjoyed the most and the least.

So go to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. This week's show is about two adventures along the Colorado River,

the first in 1938 and the second in 2021. I'd never imagine doing a trip like that, but I had to. I had to follow in the footsteps of these two women and find out what they experienced when they went on that journey in 1938.

Science journalist Melissa Seveni lives in Flagstaff, Arizona and grew up in Tucson, meaning the Grand Canyon was never too far away,

but she'd only ever seen it like a tourist.

So her decision to go down to the river level and run rapids in a two-person rubber boat was definitely not something she'd tried before.

I was going to have to run the Grand Canyon.

That was not on my radar. It was never on my bucket list.

You certainly went into that trip with a fair amount of imposter syndrome. I've never run a river

before. I'm not a botanist. I felt very intimidated by the whole concept of being able to contribute

to this scientific expedition I was on and be useful and not lose my head if something went

wrong. Where I grew up in the desert, I would think of rivers as being dry river beds,

you know, rivers of sand. And it never really occurred to me as a child that you could put a

boat on a river and go on a boat trip. So this is the first time that I've

done a river trip this trip through the Grand Canyon of Arizona. I have to admit I have lived

in the U.S. for a little over a decade now, and I have still never been to the Grand Canyon,

and I've never seen the Colorado River, which I actually think is the case for also many Americans who were born here. The country is so vast and it just feels

like it's almost mythologized now as this great natural thing that you can go see and experience

and you got to know it very well. Most people see the Grand

Canyon from the South Rim, Grand Canyon National Park, South Rim. And if you see a photograph of the

Grand Canyon, that's probably where the photo was taken, right? You see all of those banded colors and all

...