On the river -- at last!

The weather may have curtailed this weekend's Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, but a few of us managed to slip in a lovely half-day float down the Animas Valley between this Memorial Day weekend's waves of cold and wet.

The stretch north of Durango, from Trimble Bridge to 32nd Street, where most trips put in for the "town run," is little visited. The reason, I suppose, is it's a flatwater run, and so of little appeal to most. And it takes a while: although a boat on a river is trending southward, most of the time it's actually traveling east and west, meandering leisurely in great bowtie waves. So you gotta just want to ... float. And paddle.

But we're appealed. Because what we found on this reach of the Animas River were grandiose views of the redrock-lined valley (many of the same sandstone layers found in Canyonlands and along the Colorado River along Powell Reservoir), great stands of spring-green cottonwoods, and long looks back up at the snowy -- freshly snowy today, in fact -- San Juans.

In most other places, this would be a national park.

Today, for us, it was a lovely backyard run.