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In the winter of 2004 Laredo writer Keith Bowden packed up a change of clothes, a sleeping bag, chewing tobacco, some sardines, instant oatmeal, crackers, beans, tortilla flour and cheese to make quesadillas, and a Rubbermaid cooler full of Tecate, a beerlike substance manufactured in Mexico. Thus outfitted he set out to explore, by mountain bike, canoe, raft and shank's mare, every foot of the Rio Grande, 1,260 miles of it, from El Paso to the Gulf.

The river (fourth-largest in North America after the Missouri, Mississippi, and Yukon) as Mr. Bowden describes it is at once a polluted swamp, a natural wonderland, a muddy ditch and a treacherous waterway of steep canyons and foaming rapids. It is the habitat of coyotes (the two-legged version as well), black bears, cougars, wild boars, skunks, raccoons, armadillos, herons, ducks, owls, kiskadees, bats, rattlers and scorpions. Human visitors include border patrolmen, fishermen, cocaine peddlers, suspicious characters in battered pickups and the curious, stoic inhabitants of the Mexican colonias a stone's throw to the south.

The author has a deft touch in describing riverside villages such as Ojos Calientes, Bosque Bonito and Lomas de Arena, as well as landmark places such as Big Bend, Judge Roy Bean's Langtry, Amistad Dam and the sister cities of Del Rio-Ciudad Acuña, Eagle Pass-Piedras Negras and Brownsville-Matamoros.

Of Ojinaga, across the river from Presidio, we are reminded that this was a favored corridor for the drug lord Pablo Acosta who shipped 60 tons of Colombian cocaine a year into the U.S. before being gunned down in an FBI ambush in 1987.

All good river-running journals, including John Graves' Goodbye to a River and Gregory McNamee's Gila: The Life and Death of an American River, have at their core an environmental admonition. What started out as a three-month, 1,260-mile beer run for Mr. Bowden quickly evolved into such a moral.

At Fort Hancock, 50 miles southeast of El Paso, Mr. Bowden identifies the worst of the nonhuman contributors to the river's ecological decline: the tamarisk or salt cedar. It's a woody shrub that consumes as much as 300 gallons of water a day, secreting salt through its leaves. The salt inhibits useful trees such as cottonwoods and willows and erases wildlife habitats.

"Considering the systematic abuse man has delivered to this desert waterway through pollution, excessive irrigation, agricultural runoff, and the importation of the ruinous salt cedar, the fact that the river remains as pristine as it does is a miracle of nature," the author says at the end of this lighthearted but powerful tribute to the Great River.

"With the fire glowing, I opened a Tecate and listened to the sounds of the desert night: the river gurgling, the bats shrieking, the campfire crackling," he writes. "Mexico on my right, Texas on my left. I want the river to go on forever."

Dale L. Walker of El Paso lives a half-mile from the Rio Grande and is author of many historical books.

Seventy Days on the Rio Grande

Keith Bowden

(The Mountaineers Books, $16.95)

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