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WORK TITLE: The River’s Daughter
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://bridgetcrocker.com/
CITY: Malibu
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Montana State University, Bozeman, B.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
White water rafting guide and writer. Contributor to Lonely Planet travel guidebooks, the Patagonia blog The Cleanest Line, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing series.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous magazines, including Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Trail Runner, and Outside.
SIDELIGHTS
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Bridget Crocker is a renowned white water rafting guide and an experienced travel writer. She has led river expeditions everywhere from Zambia to Peru to India, and she wrote for Patagonia’s blog for almost twenty years. She has also contributed to Lonely Planet travel guidebooks and magazines such as Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Trail Runner, and Outside.
Crocker’s book debut, The River’s Daughter, is a memoir that chronicles the challenges of her childhood, particularly her parents’ traumatic divorce and the sexual abuse she suffered, as well as how she made her way as a trailblazing rafting and river guide. Crocker also explores how her connection to the outdoors and especially the river helped her recover from the trauma she experienced, and how she then guided her family to overcome their own generational trauma.
“A brave, sincere story” is how a writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book. They especially appreciated Crocker’s “efforts to explain and understand her parents,” describing that effort as “heartrending in its maturity and quest for empathy.” “A triumphant road map for following one’s passions,” wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. They described the book as a “convincing case for outdoor adventuring as a tool for teaching people to trust their intuition.” Colleen Mondor, in Booklist, recommended the book for readers “seeking domestic-violence survivor stories,” but she cautioned that the book is “not for the faint of heart.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May, 2025, Colleen Mondor, review of The River’s Daughter, p. 17.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2025, review of The River’s Daughter.
Publishers Weekly, April 28, 2025, review of The River’s Daughter, p. 50.
ONLINE
Bridget Crocker website, https://bridgetcrocker.com/ (October 7, 2025), author website.
Paddling Life, https://paddlinglife.com/ (July 17, 2025), Eugene Buchanan, author interview.
Explorer. Storyteller. Guide.
A leading whitewater explorer and river guide, Bridget Crocker writes adventure memoir for life travelers forging new directions in their relationships and lives. Crocker's writing transports readers to far-flung locations filled with flawed characters overcoming incredible adversity. A trauma survivor, Crocker explores themes of recovery and overcoming multi-generational cycles as well as sexism and racism in the outdoor industry. In her work as an author, speaker and leader of women's empowerment river workshops, Crocker helps others strengthen their connection with the natural world and find the courage to navigate harrowing obstacles both on and off the river.
Author Bridget Crocker #amwriting along the Subansiri River in Assam, India. Photo: David Clifford
Writing Background
Crocker’s adventure travel background combined with formal studies in Anthropology and Native American Studies have shaped her ability to integrate the natural and cultural spirit of varying landscapes into her writing. She attended the University of Montana in Missoula and holds a degree in English Literature from Montana State University, Bozeman. She's an alum of Book Passage Travel Writing and Photography Conference and the Livingston Writer's Workshop. Her work has been featured in magazines including Westways, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Trail Runner, Paddler and People among others, and she worked as a writer for the outdoor clothing company, Patagonia, for nineteen years. She is a contributing author to Lonely Planet guidebooks and Travel Anthology and The Best Women’s Travel Writing series from Travelers’ Tales.
River guide Bridget Crocker on the Subansiri River. Arunachal Pradesh India. Photo: David Clifford
River Explorer
As a young girl growing up on the banks of the Snake River in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Crocker developed a relationship with water and nature that is at the heart of her writing. Crocker began guiding on the Snake and has guided remote river expeditions down many of the world’s greatest river canyons in far-flung regions of Zambia, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, India and the Western United States.
New River Running Must Read: Bridget Crocker’s “The River’s Daughter” (Plus: Special PL Author Q&A!)
Eugene Buchanan
By
Eugene Buchanan
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July 17, 2025
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There’s a new book to put on your river running reader’s list: Bridget Crocker’s “The River’s Daughter.” If ever a book was able to personify a river and put it on your side, it’s this one, as Crocker used them throughout her life, from Wyoming’s Snake to California’s Kern and Africa’s Zambezi, to help her get through a troubled past and emerge on the other side wiser and wetter.the river's daughter
The plot in a nutshell: After Bridget Crocker’s parents’ volatile divorce, she moved with her mother from Southern California to Wyoming. Her life was idyllic, growing up in a trailer park on the banks of the Snake River with a stepfather she loved, a new baby brother, and the river as her companion—until her mother suddenly took up a radical new lifestyle, becoming someone Bridget barely recognized. The one constant in her life—the place Bridget felt whole and fully herself—was the river. When she discovered the world of whitewater rafting, she knew she’d found her calling.
On the river, Bridget learned to read the natural world around her and came to know the language of rivers. One of the few female guides on the Snake River, she then traveled to the Zambezi River in Africa, some of the most dangerous whitewater in the world, where she faced death and learned to conquer her fears—both on the water and off. The river taught her how to overcome years of betrayals and abuse, to trust herself, and, finally, how to help heal her family from generational cycles of trauma and poverty.
A beautifully rendered memoir of a woman coming into her own, The River’s Daughter opens us to the possibilities of transformation through nature.
the river's daughter
Crocker, with her inspiration as a backdrop…
We caught up with her between stops on her road-tripping book tour this summer to shed a little more light on her book, writing, and the power of rivers.
Paddling Life: How’s it feel to have the book out?
Crocker: I’ve received so many messages from people who have found hope and encouragement through reading my story, and that feels incredibly gratifying to be in alignment with my purpose of helping others in this way.
Paddling Life: What was the hardest part about writing it?
Crocker: Obviously, it was difficult to put myself back into traumatic scenes to recreate the details of the worst events of my life, but honestly, even more difficult than reliving the scenes over and over was overcoming the feelings of guilt and fear that I was going to get in trouble for telling. As someone who was raised in a dysfunctional family system, these pervasive feelings were hard-wired into me and the mechanism that keeps the system going. To constantly override the system and the intense feelings it produces was more difficult than surviving–and writing about–the events.
Paddling Life: Does it make you nostalgic for your commercial guiding days?
Crocker: My favorite thing about commercial guiding has always been introducing people to the river and helping to facilitate greater connection between people and our natural world. I still keep a paddle in the guiding world, in the form of leading on-river writing classes and women’s adventure wellness retreats on my favorite rivers. I am really enjoying seeing how sharing about our guiding community and culture in “The River’s Daughter” has really stuck with readers, since one of the best aspects of guiding is the sense of belonging and family that springs up around the sport.
Paddling Life: What do you hope readers take away from it?
Crocker: My enduring hope has been to use my story to encourage others who may be struggling with difficult cycles of trauma, abuse, alcoholism/addiction or family estrangement. My intention in publishing my story is to help those who feel disconnected to realize that no matter your past, it’s possible to transform suffering into resilience and find empowerment. I also hope that the lighter parts about experiencing incredible whitewater, connecting with nature and other communities through river running serve to spark curiosity among readers.
Paddling Life: A constant theme, it seems, is the river being there for you and having your back…do you think that’s real, or just your subconscious?
Crocker: My relationship with rivers has developed over many decades and is a relationship that has nurtured and supported me, helping me to survive difficult situations. Rivers are sentient beings, like all of nature. Developing a deeper relationship with the natural world is something that’s available to all of us. We need only believe it’s possible.
Paddling Life: Any tips for other aspiring writers?
Crocker: This book took me 22 years to write, and I chided myself the entire time for not having completed it sooner, feeling that I was missing my window of opportunity. The truth is, this was a complicated story to live, to heal from and to write. It took its own time and I could only write about the interior part of the journey to the degree that I’d experienced emotional healing, which provided me with greater perspective. When I finally did finish the manuscript, the opportunities lined up quite easily. I set out to write “The River’s Daughter” as an act of devotion to my younger self, and in doing so, my present self was set free, which in turn serves to inspire and help others. I’m here to remind writers that sharing our stories matter, both on and off the river.
About the author: Crocker’s adventure travel background combined with formal studies in Anthropology and Native American Studies have shaped her ability to integrate the natural and cultural spirit of varying landscapes into her writing. She attended the University of Montana in Missoula and holds a degree in English Literature from Montana State University, Bozeman. She’s an alum of Book Passage Travel Writing and Photography Conference and the Livingston Writer’s Workshop. Her work has been featured in magazines including Westways, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Trail Runner, Paddler and Velaamong others, and she worked as a writer for the outdoor clothing company, Patagonia, for nineteen years. She is a contributing author to Lonely Planet guidebooks and Travel Anthology and The Best Women’s Travel Writing series from Travelers’ Tales. A trailblazer in women’s empowerment within the outdoor industry, she’s a leading whitewater rafting guide, having led remote river expeditions down many of the world’s greatest river canyons. She lives in Malibu, California.
Testimonials
“In The River’s Daughter, renowned whitewater rafting guide Crocker delivers a powerful narrative of resilience and self-discovery, navigating the tumult of family upheaval and personal trauma. With courage and insight, Crocker reveals how the rivers she braved also guided her toward healing and strength. This unforgettable odyssey is a testament to nature’s power to transform and inspire. A remarkable debut.”—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Little Monsters
“The River’s Daughter is poignant and absorbing, vividly transporting the reader along Bridget’s journey to heal from abuse and betrayal, where the power and grace of the world’s rivers inspire her passion for life and offer her a place to channel her pain.”—Norman Ollestad, author of Crazy for the Storm
“An exciting, entertaining, fast-paced adventure travel memoir.”
—Catherine Raven, author of Fox and I
“This memoir by legendary river guide Bridget Crocker runs fast and deep. Whitewater scenes are electrifying and precise. But there are also profound personal matters here—pockets of fear or joy and even love—that add a shimmering depth to this fast-paced and nuanced read.”
—Tim Cahill, author of Jaguars Ripped My Flesh
“No one writes with more conviction and heart about the outdoor world, rivers, and family than Bridget Crocker, who has been to the river’s edge, both literal and metaphorical, navigated its rapids, and drawn strength from it in many more ways than one. This fast-paced but deeply insightful book about a woman harnessing the power to confront her past and surge into her future will steal readers’ breath from the first scene—when Crocker first hears the river’s voice—to the last.”
—Tracy Ross, author of The Source of All Things
Info: https://bridgetcrocker.com
Crocker, Bridget THE RIVER'S DAUGHTER Spiegel & Grau (NonFiction None) $29.00 6, 3 ISBN: 9781954118546
A trailblazing rafting guide retraces the events that led her to whitewater.
Crocker grew up alongside Wyoming's Snake River, but her ascendance to rafting renown was not straightforward. The author's pensive, potent full-length debut is a twisting journey from her childhood in a trailer park, through an adolescence pockmarked with divorce, abuse, drugs, parental neglect, and sexual assault, to the banks of the Zambezi River in the nascent days of East Africa rafting tours and the rampage of the HIV epidemic on the continent in the 1990s. While the constant in Crocker's life is the magnificence of the rivers she travels and her reverential relationship with water, her story is more than a cataloging of exciting conquests, defining romances, and fearless adventures. With the distance of decades and the intervening years honing her literary skills, she turns a reprising eye to the people and forces that made her and advances keen observations on the tensions between adventure-based service industries, their patrons, and their geographies. Her efforts to explain and understand her parents is heartrending in its maturity and quest for empathy: Appreciating their work in "breaking the chain" welded by their own histories of trauma does not release them from their responsibility for harm she experienced as a child. As she makes her way back to the American West and into adulthood, she hints at the entirety of the emotional impact of her past and foreshadows the complicated work of confronting it, but the details of that work lie largely beyond the text. Instead, this is the story of how Crocker found the strength, not only to make inroads into a male-dominated, thrill-oriented career, proving herself to the gatekeepers of her industry, but also to provide her own protection.
A brave, sincere story of the shattering and saving powers of adrenaline and humility.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Crocker, Bridget: THE RIVER'S DAUGHTER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832991641/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a2922db0. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
The River's Daughter: A Memoir
Bridget Crocker. Spiegel & Grau, $28.99 (304p)
ISBN 978-1-954118-54-6
"Rivers have shaped not just my calloused hands but the course of my life," writes white water rafting guide Crocker in her inspiring debut. After surviving a fall into Wyoming's Snake River as a girl, Crocker felt protected and understood by the river's current in the midst of her turbulent childhood. (Following her parents' divorce, Crocker bounced between their homes in Wyoming and California, and endured physical abuse from her father.) Through adolescence and into adulthood, Crocker habitually sought solace in the water, including after she was sexually assaulted as a teenager by an older acquaintance. Eventually, she followed her boyfriend's lead and became a certified rafting instructor, making good on her dreams of visiting southern Africa's Zambezi River and leading excursions on the Kern and Snake Rivers. Throughout, Crocker makes a convincing case for outdoor adventuring as a tool for teaching people to trust their intuition: "Over the years, I had spent a lot of time ruminating about what my family had not given me, overlooking what I had inherited as my birthright: the ability to transform suffering, rise up, and survive." It's a triumphant road map for following one's passions. Agent: Lauren MacLeod, Aevitas Creative Management. (June)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The River's Daughter: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 17, 28 Apr. 2025, p. 50. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A838688168/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=43a08f93. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
The River's Daughter. By Bridget Crocker. June 2025. 304p. Spiegel & Grau, $29 (9781954118546); e-book (9781954118867). 810.
Whitewater rafting guide Crocker shares her stark personal story in this memoir of abuse and resilience. After her mother destroyed their family by abandoning her parenting responsibilities, Crocker fled to her father, only to suffer violent physical abuse with the tacit approval of her stepmother. Returning to her mother in desperation, she found her in the grips of a fringe environmentalist group, and Crocker was soon sexually assaulted by a friend of her stepfather's. Another sexual assault followed while on a canoeing trip, neither attack garnering parental sympathy. Desperate to flee all family ties, she joined her boyfriend on a rafting trip and committed to a new freedom on the water. The horrific family drama consumes the first third of the book, which may dissuade readers seeking reflections on Crocker's rafting adventures. Those who persevere will find many details, especially about the Snake and Kern rivers, and also of her travels in Africa (where she describes assisting an abuse victim). Not for the faint of heart; recommend for readers seeking domestic-violence survivor stories.--Colleen Mondor
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Mondor, Colleen. "The River's Daughter." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211530/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=72dd920a. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.