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The O. Zone: Paddleboarding past oil trains like whistling past graveyards
A pair of paddleboarders navigate the Upper Colorado River between Roundup River Ranch and Dotsero over Labor Day weekend with a Burlington Northern Santa Fe oil train in the background (Kristin Kenney Williams photo).
Editor’s note: A version of this column first appeared in Vail Valley Magazine as a sidebar to a profile on the water-policy efforts of outgoing Eagle County Commissioner Kathy Chandler-Henry. It has been updated with my late-in-life standup paddleboarding exploits over the summer.
When I first moved to Vail as the sports editor of the Vail Daily in June of 1991, I distinctly remember the roar of Gore Creek nearly drowning out the sound of I-70 as I covered a professional cycling event in Vail Village – an offshoot of the Red Zinger/Coors Classic.
In the early 90s, when the Vail Daily offices were in the attic of the now-demolished Crossroads Building (current site of Solaris), it was still snowing in June and sometimes even on the Fourth of July parade, snowpacks were huge, and the runoff resounded deep into summer. It sometimes felt like ski season had just ended when the snow started flying again for the following season.
Local ski patrollers and instructors who switched over to raft guiding in the spring would eye the Riva Ridge ski trail on Vail Mountain, knowing water levels were peaking when the first mud started to show.
That first summer I spent in Vail was wet all the time, and somehow – after a brief window of covering and riding as a beginner in the Vail Recreation District mountain bike series and talking to celebs at the Jerry Ford Invitational Golf Tournament (imagine asking coach Bobby Knight his thoughts on Vail), I was taken in by the whitewater rafting community.
That first year I had just missed covering the Champion Whitewater Series rafting and kayaking event that kicked off the “summer season” every year on Memorial Day and was often met with blizzard conditions (it was the early precursor to today’s GoPro Mountain Games). But I still parachuted into Vail in plenty of time to enjoy the annual running of Gore Creek.
Typically just a two-week window even back then, I think rafting Gore Creek is fairly hit or miss these days as stream flows have shrunk due to global heating, reduced snowpack and earlier runoff. But back then it was a wild ride, ducking under a couple dozen bridges and navigating Betty’s Hole near Ford Park with legendary guide Billy Mattison and his Timberline Tours crew.
As for that name, the late first lady, Betty Ford, was reportedly aware of it and found it amusing. To this day her children say the namesake of Vail’s iconic alpine gardens was possessed of a coarse sense of humor she often had to explain to her husband, the late President Gerald R. Ford.
Those first few rafting seasons in Vail I graduated from Gore Creek to the Eagle River, with its action-packed wave in Dowd Chute, where Gore Creek meets the Eagle, then the nearby Arkansas River on the other side of the Divide, with its daunting Pine Creek, Numbers, Brown’s Canyon and Royal Gorge runs – the best in the state, really.
But it was the long-defunct Raftmeister company, and its owner and Fiesta’s founder Debbie Marquez, who made possible the most life-altering raft adventure of my life – a trip to Costa Rica in the early 90s with a flotilla of North American raft companies on a fam trip to experience the Reventazón, General and Pacuare rivers before they were dammed.
Toucans and howler monkeys grunted and screeched from the trees, boa constrictors crossed the roads, and giant albino spiders shared our tents at night, while some of the craziest river guides I’ve ever met purposefully tried to submerge squirt boats in whirlpools and capsize rafts in giant Class V waves of warm water as the heavens teemed with endless October rain.
Returning to Vail, I was skiing knee-deep powder on Kangaroo Cornice on Nov. 6 for one of the earliest natural opening days ever, and the change in climate — from jungle to high alpine — made me as sick as I’ve ever been. From venomous snakes to snow snakes, all in one week.
After that I felt empowered to join friends for Westwater Canyon on the Colorado River in eastern Utah, with its infamous Skull Rapid, and the more benign Shoshone run through Glenwood Canyon, which an outfitter actually talked me into riverboarding (you ride the river with a boogie board, fins on your feet, a helmet on your head and pads on everything else).
From there, it was a natural transition to buying a used kayak, taking an introductory lesson at Alpine Kayak, and trying to master my combat roll on the flat water of the Upper C section of the Colorado River in northwestern Eagle County (Yarmony Rapid and the Piney River got me every time). My nasal passages would fill with ice-cold river water as I frantically kicked out of my boat, my head bouncing on rocks, before someone finally told me about nose plugs.
Once my wife and I started having kids, I gave up on ever becoming any good at kayaking, sold my boat, and retreated to the realization that rafting is more my thing … and the ideal family adventure. Plus, we got in on the paddleboard craze as well, where, again, I found myself limited to flatwater situations.
That changed this summer as we paddleboarded in very light surf on both coasts (Birch Bay in Washington and Caye Caulker in Belize), reservoirs in Montana and Colorado (Hyalite near Bozeman and Dillon near home) and finally hit the upper Colorado River. Three things I learned the hard way from that experience: Switch out your deep-water fin (mine broke off), kneel in most rapids (I went flying into shallow rocks a couple of times), and you will see some oil trains.
The relatively placid flows of the Upper C are in danger for so much more than water sports from these trains, overuse of the river for agriculture, and our dependence on fossil fuels.
Scientists who’ve studied the matter found the flows of the Colorado River are down 20% since the early 1900s and 10% in just the last 20 years of megadrought and aridification due to climate heating from the burning of fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
One low snow year can take Colorado’s rafting outfitters from a $231 million industry in the record 2021 season to a $216 million business the following year of much lower flows. That’s why it’s critical to support the efforts of people like outgoing Eagle County Commissioner Kathy Chandler-Henry, who is pushing hard to finalize the Colorado River District’s acquisition of Xcel Energy’s senior power water rights at Shoshone for hydroelectricity.
The antiquated hydro plant is in danger of being shuttered, which could mean the loss of those water rights. Instead, a huge coalition, including the state, is feverishly fundraising to convert those rights to instream flows that will forever protect endangered fish and keep water flowing to junior water rights holders such as Glenwood Springs and downstream farmers.
Not coincidentally, those of us who like to float will reap the benefits as well. Fully 500,000 acre-feet of the Colorado River is currently piped out of its basin to the state’s Front Range, about 3.73% of the Colorado River’s overall 13.5-million-acre-foot yield, and that trend needs to end soon. If that limits the growth of suburban sprawl from Pueblo to Fort Collins, sobeit.
All those folks moving to Colorado might as well stop at Kansas if we continue to constrict the flows of our mountain streams and rivers because, let’s face it, that’s what we all came here for in the first place – to play in the winter snow and surf the summer waves.
Editor’s note 2: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams.
Monty and the author paddleboarding in Birch Bay, Washington, with Canadian mountains in the background.
David O. Williams
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