Warming to the chilly San Juan River

This might be the only river trip that we come back from the river with more ice than we left with.

I thought that on Saturday morning, after I awoke to a curtain of steam over the river, a furry coat of rime frost on all metallic objects, and a crust of ice in the water jugs.

But, at least it wasn't raining any longer. Or lightninging. Yet, anyway ...

Lava Lessons

I started worrying about Lava three years ago. That's when the Park Service reshuffled its Grand Canyon river permit system, and we were able to move our launch date from "someday maybe" to Summer 2011. A good time: my son would be graduating from Durango High School a month before we put on, and head off to college a month after we took off. A perfect rite of family passage for a family raised in large part on the river.

This is your brain on silt ...

We all who crave the river understand: Things are different out there on the water. Especially after several days on the river.

"Things," of course, don't actually change -- but our perceptions of things change after a few days of floating. Our views of the world, both the real physical world, and the "world" we construct in our minds with our daily living. That's one of the reasons we go on the river -- especially for long river trips: to not only get out there in the real "real" world, but also to change the way we see the cultural/social/economic worlds we live in most of the time.

Because those changes in our psyches wrought by the rio are, we know from experience, real and valuable and better than the way we perceive things after having been submerged in our daily at-home worlds. That's why "re-entry" after a long river trip is sometimes such a hard and jarring affair.

So, what is that change that being "out there" induces in our ways of perceiving the world around us? Is it just an environmental thing, a shifting of ideas? Or is it an actual, physical, mental re-wiring of our brain brought on by silt, sun, and time on the water?

That was the question addressed by a group of neuro-scientists recently when the took a five-day trip down the San Juan River earlier this summer (Mexican Hat to Clay Hills). While no answers were uncovered on the trip, the five researchers used the river trip as an environment more condusive to brainstorming -- because of that calmness and clarity of mind found on the river -- future research looking at how the brain reacts to wilderness experiences.

And the trip's effects on the otherwise un-wilderness-y scientists themselves also became fodder for future study. "If I looked around like this at work," one relaxed researcher observed," people would think I was goofing off."

This trip and its questions are chronicled in an Aug. 15 New York Times article "Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain," by Matt Richtel. It's a worthwhile read for those of us who get what the river does, but, well, haven't thought too much about how the river does it.

As a side note, scientists or not, seems ike men, at least, are the same on the river: Talking about the middle of the trip, Richtel observes, "The men drink Tecate beer and talk about the brain."

Now that' a man's brain on the river, eh?

Below is a brief video included with the article. In the video, one of the group wraps his canoe in Government Rapid. When we went down the same stretch in mid-June, a few weeks after the trip described in the article, that green canoe still sat submerged and fully wrapped at the top of the rapid.



Read the article here.

Check out some of our own "brain research" from a June San Juan trip below. There was, shall we say, a lot of drinking Tecate and talking about the brain ...

Pulling out the river gear ...

At last.

Got on the river a couple of times this past weekend, finally moving the Summer (in the broad, six-month-long season sense) from the getting-the-gear-out stage to the getting-out-with-gear phase. At last!

(Read about my affection for that Spring ritual of pulling out gear in "Getting in Gear," this month's "San Juandering" column, in the June Inside Outside. )

On Saturday some friends and I took my niece and her husband on a rollicking paddle run through town. The river had peaked that morning, at 5,100 cfs. It was a wet, fast, and rockin' ride -- and my niece's husband's first-ever river trip. A good one, fer sher.

And on Monday, a slice of our river-trip tribe gathered for a duckie trip down a little-run section of our home river, paddling the Animas from Baker's Bridge to Trimble Lane. This lovely, riffly, meandering stretch features big cottonwoods, sweeping views of the redrocked upper Animas Valley and upstream toward Engineer Mountain and surrounding still-snowfielded peaks. We also passed the confluence of Hermosa Creek and the Animas.

Let Summer roll!



Read "Getting in Gear" here.

Check out some pics of the Baker's Bridge to Trimble Lane run on the Animas River here.

Floating the San Juan in August ...

... is like taking a slow boat to Utah. Or, uh, in Utah. Through Utah?

Well, whatever it is, is certainly is slow. Especially this year, when our annual dose of welcome monsoonal weather has failed to materialize over the Four Corners.

Last weekend, I got to do five days on the lower San Juan -- Mexican Hat to Clay Hills -- with some folks I've never been down with before. Some I've known, some I met there. Some who've been down the San Juan before, some for whom it was their first visit.

Some Augusts at this time of year, the river can be in the thousands of cfs. And there can be floods and fluctuations in that flow. A few years ago, we were on the San Juan at the end of summer, when over night the flow bulged. We went to bed with the river a stately 1,000 cfs, and awoke to a bullying 10,000 cfs in the morning. It stole our groover and a bunch of gear, too, but this was a thief in the night, and there was nothing we could do about it. We were fortunate we'd tied our boats high and securely.

Not so last week, though. Last week we found the river slow and gaunt -- a mere 500ish, with its skin hanging off as wide beaches and long sandbars, and its bones showing through in rocky rapids and bouldery midstream obstacles.

Case in point: I humbly admit I suffered my first-time-ever wrap in Government Rapid -- usually an all-bark/no-bite class II bit of splashy water. This year it was a sieve of boulders, a sandstone net that snagged my cataraft like a rabbit in a snare.

I bowed humbly to the river as we tugged and low-sided and tried to pry and finally got roped off the rock. The river this year seems determined to remind me to always be respectful ...

Aside from that, though, our float time consisted of mainly long, lazy days on the water. On the second day we floated for 17 miles -- which took us a good 10 hours. And what did we do in those 10 hours -- and all the other hours we spent on the slow boat ... across? ... Utah over five days?

Talked. Sat silent. Looked. Smelled. Felt. Thought. Didn't thought. Rowed. Didn't row. Did nothing. Drank warm cheap beer. Which was everything we set out to do.

But isn't that the San Juan River? As staggering a landscape as the canyon of the San Juan is -- with its crumbling-layer-cake limestone ledges and cliffs, its herds of Bighorn sheep, its sprawling sandy campsites, it's fantasmagorical sidecanyon hikes, and its opportunity for day upon day upon night upon another day of such beauty -- it isn't all that popular. We saw two other parties on the river, and it turned out I knew one of them.

The reason, I believe, is that the San Juan doesn't offer big whitewater, which deters most folks, given its remoteness and long shuttle (the 56-mile lower, Mexican Hat to Clay Hills, section, anyway). It's slow. And so, for mst, especially younger, more adreline-addicted younger river runners, there's nothing there.

They're wrong. Everything is there.

Everything for us, anyway. For our kind. Because with its slow, sweltering loveliness, the San Juan is a river for poets and drunks (two traits that, in my experience, are often correlated). Not loud, hammering, sloppy, sotty drunks -- but philosophical, pagan, playful, active, convivial drinkers. Like us.

And families. And both other parties we saw, including ours, were parents with kids. Fellow San Juanistas.

Slow floating down the San Juan suits me. It suits me and all those fellow San Juanistas. Enough said. And it suited this band of companions brought together for this particular trip this particular time down this, the Four Corners' family river.

Gathered on our slow boats to through over across in around and within our kind of place.

Check out more pics from the San Juan here:

The Great Animas River Afternoon Urban Expedition

Alright, it wasn't exactly an expedition. And it wasn't quite "great" maybe in scope or ambition or epic-ness.

But it was just an afternoon, and it was urban, and it was just our everyday downtown Animas River.

And it was "great" in the everyday sense of very much fun.

Yesterday a small gathering of us townies rallied a run through downtown Durango, down the low-flowing Animas, to get out of the heat, away from chores, and onto the river. Even if it was just a 200-cfs trickle. And even if it was just through town.

What at bigger flows is a quick hour-long blast north to south through town -- 29th Street put-in to the old saw mill site -- took us three hours. Lots of float time, but lots of rock maneuvering and narrow chute paddling, too. The low water also gave us a chance to study the bone structure of what are whitewater sections at higher water.

We certainly weren't alone, either. Tubers, anglers, swimmers, sunbathers, beer drinkers, squirt boaters were out there in our downtown playground. And even a forlorn-looking family of four passed by on a big commercial raft, threading the rocks and revelers while their guide earnestly regaled with them with Durango history on their "two-hour whitewater adventure."

That it wasn't. But it was, as we set out to find, good, recharging, time on the water, with friends, right in our own town.

This, too, is a big part of what our kids will remember about their growing up in Duranago -- summers days spent bobbing the Animas in tubes and duckies. And with all the rest of us who love and appreciate our little mountain river through town.

Check out more views of Durango from waterline here:

Four days on the San Juan

It was about damn time. To get on the river, I mean.

Late, even: Last year we were on the Dolores in April and May, and the San Juan by late May. But this year, very little Dolores River, and no San Juan permit forthcoming on first application from the Bureau of Land Management (overseer of the San Juan in southeastern Utah).

But our friend Matt managed to snag a cancellation on the San Juan for the first week of June, and by then we were all damn near rabid to get on the river. Sure, it wasn't our usual week-ish run down the length of the lower San Juan, and instead was just a little 24-mile Bluff-to-Mexican Hat jaunt. But, hey, we'll take it. So we took it.



So we dragged our allotted river miles out over four days, and had a lot of beach time and hiking, checking out places we hadn't been for a while or ever: Riverhouse Ruin, Chinle Wash, wanderings around Eight Foot Rapid. A good pace: dead slow. And good company: lively and engaging.

And a good trip. And, as I said, as needed as an annual chimney sweep -- scrubbing away the mental ash and spiritual clogging from the working winter season.

Notes:

-- This was JUNE? Cloudy and a gritty wind and chilly much of the time, and sunny and breezy and chilly the rest of the time.

-- Kids took their own boat. Start of things to come ... ?

See some pics below.

On limits

“I hope it encourages people not to run huge waterfalls but to understand that the only limits that exist are the ones you create, no matter what you are doing.”
[Tyler Bradt, in Kayak Session Magazine interview]

Palouse Falls [Photo credit:D S Dugan]

(Forgive the departure from home range limitations, but I couldn't resist this one.)

Launching the 2009 river season: Take me to the river ...

... Drop me in the water.

It wasn't how I planned to launch the river season -- or the Next Big Life Project I'm on. But somehow it was the PERFECT way to launch both:

With a hefty heapin' helpin' of humility.

See, I was cocky. No doubt about it. My buddy Jono was visiting from San Francisco, and for his last day I planned a grand -- and very nearby -- adventure: a canoe float down a stretch of our home-town Animas River. It would be, I assured him, just a two-hour cruise ...

... a two-hour cruise ...

Jono and I have been on several multi-day canoe ventures together, so this one seemed like a leisurely trip -- from Baker's Bridge, at the north end of the grand Animas Valley, down to Trimble Lane, where we usually put in for our canoeing day trips down the valley to town. This stretch is, I had been assured by a kayaking friend of mine (renown for his class- V paddling expeditions, which should've suggested to me that I get a second opinion), a flat-water float through wide, slow, low-water meanders.

It was, he assured me, just a ... two-hour cruise ...

With Spring starting to spring, the river season a'comin', and my paddling pal in town, I decreed that this quick two-hour trip also, then, would be the first run of my life's next Big Project: Over the next few years I will paddle my canoe down the lengths of the San Juan and Animas rivers, as both my 50th Birthday pilgrimage, and also to serve the narrative thread that will run through my next book.

So with all those auspicious beginnings afoot, I knew: It was going to be a great day!

But I was cocky. It was, after all, flat water. (Even if I'd never actually seen this stretch myself ...) And we are experienced paddlers. And it is right close to home. (Even if one of the themes of this book-to-come is the adventures to be had that lie close to home ...) We wouldn't need much, then. Floatbags? Naw. Hell, I'll bring a little token bail bucket. Spare paddle? Ha! Ballast? I'll throw in a couple of bags of gear and a few beers. Dry bags? Well, I'll bring one, but I certainly won't seal it well. And I'll put the rest of our gear -- extra jackets and shells and hats and gloves -- in a day pack and call it good.

After all, it was just a ... two-hour cruise.

For us, it was about a hundred-yard cruise. Paddling anyway. Then we swam. Then we spent an hour running up and down the bank, recovering out boat and gear, and communicating with with comical versions of American Sign Language to our friends who had beached their boats on the far shore so they could gather our various jetsam and flotsam washing up on the other side of the river.

Meanwhile, my beloved canoe sat abandoned and flooded and lodged on a rock (there were a lot of rocks ...) in the middle of the river.

After an hour or so of recover and rescue, I and Jono (whom I, in my cocky "guiding" mode, urged to wear hiking boots and jeans for our mellow, flat-water float) were damn cold. Our "dry bag" was half-full of water and weighed about 50 pounds, full of now-sopping foul-weather gear. Much of the rest of my gear was either redistributed among the still-floating boats or (including our beer) had been sacrificed to the river gods.

We prudently chose to abort.

We humbly chose to abort.

We respectfully chose to abort.

Failure, then? No way. Yes, I still consider that short venture the start of both this year's river season, and of my grand multi-year paddling project. I also, though, now consider it the perfect start to both.

For now I will go into both the right way: With humbleness. And respect. And prepared.

The way one should always go to the river -- whether for a two-hour cruise or a multi-year project.

Our two companions continued on to finish the trip. Meanwhile, Jono and I are determined to tackle this unsuccessful venture again. Hell, maybe we'll make it an annual mission. We could call it the "Annual Baker's Bridge Classic": a triathlon that consists of a hundred-yard paddle, a 20-yard swim, and a three-mile trot along a cobblestone shoreline mostly carrying a 16-foot canoe.

The river will always be the winner.

Check out the pics below. Note that there are no pics of the actual flip, or of my canoe lodged like driftwood in the middle of the river, since my camera was still in the swamped canoe.



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This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com. Check it out!

As snow flows to rivers, so we look to floating ...

Well, another ski season is logged in Üllr's books. (Ski area-wise, anyway -- backcountry corn is still yet to come ...)

So if you're like me, then your eyes are now turning from looking upstream to gazing downstream.

Alas, though, even despite this weekend's small gift of April snow, that prognosis looking upstream to see what might be headed downstream as temperatures rise isn't all that promising.

State-wide, the snowpack across the state's seven major river basins was 96 percent of normal on April 1 -- that after having been as high as 120 percent of normal on Jan. 1, after December's mega-storms. In February, reports were calling the snowpack the best since 1997 , including above-average snow in the San Juans -- the Rio Grande basin was 130 percent of average, and the Animas/Dolores/San Juan basins were 116 percent of average (still, though, at only 75 percent of last year at that time).

But then came a warm, dry March ...

According to an AP story this morning, though, this weekend's storm pushed the average back up over 100 percent of average.

In Southwest Colorado, though, the reports aren't quite as bright.

Dolores River

Last year we long-time Dolores junkies felt like were thrown a party and got to binge once again on one of the region's -- or, hell, the damn planet's -- most glorious river canyons. For the first time since the mid-1990s, the Dolores offered up boatable floww from April into June.

This year, though, the Dolores Water Conservation District is now reporting that an early prediction of a month of recreational flows to be spilled from McPhee Reservoir has been scaled back after the dry March. The district's website reports:

March was not a good precipitation month for us. The storms that rolled through brought mostly high winds and dust, and almost no precipitation. The current forecast for April 1 has dropped the spill to approximately 30,000 AF (acre-feet). Therefore our best estimate at this time is that the spring runoff will be below normal. The rafting window has closed some, but water that becomes available will be released around the end of May.

The district predicts:

• Flows in April will stay as low as 50 cfs.
  
• Releases in early May should increase toward 400 cfs.
  
• Releases the week of May 11 - 15 may increase to 400 cfs to facilitate Colorado Department of Wildlife fish surveys.
  
• After that week flows are projected to rise to rafting levels of 800 to 1,200 cfs.
  
• Those flows may last about two weeks and should include Memorial Day.

The district urges boaters to check doloreswater.com around May 7 for updated predictions.

San Juan River

In mid-March, with the San Juan Basin snowpack at just over 100 percent of average, the Bureau of Reclamation was predicting several weeks of releases of 5,000 cfs beginning in mid-May.

Since then, though, BuRec has lower its estimates to as little as a week of high-volume releases.

A public meeting on Navajo Reservoir operations will be held at 1 p.m., Tuesday, April 28, in Farmington. Reservoir operations over last fall and winter will be reviewed, and plans for next spring and summer 2009 operations will be discussed. Contact BuRec's Durango office at 970.385.6560 for information.

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This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com. Check it out!

Pythons along the ol' San Juan?... on the "science of appearances"

[ U.S. Geological Survey, Department of the Interior / National Park Service photo by Lori Oberhofer]

Last year, the U. S. Geological Survey released a study projecting that the climate of the Four Corners region could become habitable for pythons, just one long lifetime from now.


[Projected climate in the continental United States in the year 2100, based on global warming models, that matches climate in the pythons' native range in Asia. USGS image.]

Midway through this winter of seriously weird weather, while waiting for fresh pow to blanket the back country of my home range, I took a walk on the mesa the other day. Snow was melting off the fields, and in some south-facing furrows, I got a glimpse of the future. Not pythons, gators, or tigers; but, oh my, green-up was in full (so to speak) 'bloom.'

Got your attention?...a call for citizen-scientists

"Phenology is the study of periodic plant and animal life cycle events and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate. Examples include the timing of leafing and flowering, agricultural crop stages, insect emergence, and animal migration. All of these events are sensitive measures of climatic variation and change, are relatively simple to record and understand, and are vital to both the scientific and public interest." [USA National Phenology Network(USANPN)]

Long the province of of a disorganized rabble of farmers, hunters, gatherers, and peripatetic seekers of random knowledge (see Thoreau's "Faith in a Seed"), citizen-phenologists now have a budding national network to collate and analyze their observations. Since 2007, the USANPN has collected botanical data in two programs, Project Budburst and NPN Core Protocols, to document budding and blooming times. Both are looking for citizen observers, so all interested plant-gazers should check them out.

In December 2008, USGS announced the launch of a new Wildlife Phenology Program, a partnership between USANPN and The Wildlife Society. Data collection will begin in 2010, giving plenty of time to document the projected invasion of our beloved local waters by the dreaded duo depicted above. (OK, those two were doing the dance of death in Everglades National Park. Be careful in the Big Bend country though. See below.)


[Current areas of the continental United States with climate matching that of the pythons' native range in Asia. USGS image.]

One last touch of the river

Today the air thickened and the sky paled with the welcomed sensual early symptoms of an approaching winter storm. And I feel all the better for winter's imminent arrival because I got in a last blast of river season over the weekend.

It was a cool blast, for sure. When the sun was out -- or was shining on the same side of the canyon I was paddling -- it felt like we were really in the desert outback of Utah's San Juan River. But when the sun's low near-solstice slant was sliced by the canyon rim or, more so, when it made its early-evening descent behind the sandstone landscape, the cold grabbed hold and was held at bay only by the thickest polyester shields and the primeval radiant warmth and security of a driftwood fire.

Colors, too, were subdued, robbed of the life of summer -- but offering up a purer, deeper sense of raw bone against the bottomless blue of the November sky. And at night? The stars were ridiculous.

We were too, probably, seven guys away rom work and family and the general demands of the daily business's busyness. But we sucked up every glorious minute of it -- three days of paddling and guitar playing and bocci throwing and beer drinking and talking and sleeping out for two glorious and treasured bonus nights alongside the river.

Remembering yet again why we live here. And love it here. And fight for here.

And now we turn our eyes toward that slow-building proto-river we call the Snowpack ...

Click on the slideshow below for mo' and biggah pics.

Take me (back) to the river ...

So, it's that nasty in-between time for us San Juan fun-seekers: it's not ski season yet (unless you're willing to hunt for it), and river season hath passed into memory ...

Well, pull up a glass of something and take this little trip down memory lane. Or memory river. Desolation and Gray canyons, to be exact.

(Thanks to "Wild" Bill Boudreaux for the video!)