We’ve past high flow for the year, and the boulder didn’t shift.
On April 15th it was covered,
and on March 23 the water was about the same level as it was today. It’ll take a heck of a season to move that rock downstream.
The railroad bridge in Durango was swept away in the flood of 1911, and was rebuilt high enough to be safe in a hundred-year flood… if the flooded river just carried water. But water high enough to toss this boulder downstream would take out a few trees, and it would float away some of the trailers in the floodplain upstream of the bridge. Next time there’s a big flood, the water won’t take out the bridge like it did in 1911. Instead, the build-up of trailers knocking against the bridge would likely tear it down. The older I get the more it seems that it’s not the journey that’s the problem; it’s the baggage.
Published on July 1, 2008
in water.
West of the Mississippi, the right to use water in a stream or river is real property that is bought and sold like a house or a car. If you own property with a ditch or a stream running through it, you can’t touch a drop unless you buy water rights. This area has 19 inches of rain a year, so your water rights determine whether your land is lush pasture or near desert.
Water rights have three parameters. There is the location the water is extracted from the waterways; there is the amount of water you can use; and there is the original date that the right was first filed for in water court. Bob and I own shares in a ditch company with rights from 1881, and since the oldest water rights get their allotment first when the river runs low, we’re set for most any situation.
In La Plata County, well over 90% of the water rights are owned by ditch companies and old ranching families. Agricultural diversions account for most of the water extracted from the river.
From a management point of view, you’d think since these ditches take so much of the river’s flow that it’d be measured. No, no, nooo. You just get in some heavy equipment and split the flow.
Just move the boulders swept downstream in the run-off to partition off part of the river for the ditch company. Casual over-appropriation is part of the reality of western water management.
On some of the smaller rivers and streams, more water rights are owned than are actually flowing in the river, so the streams are drained completely. A friend with land on the La Plata River used to watch as a backhoe placed stones to divert the entire flow of the river into an irrigation ditch. After midnight, she’d tiptoe out in her nightie and move rocks to let some of the flow into the streambed. She’d telephone a friend downstream at 1am to say, Water’s coming in 20 minutes.
Women in nighties subverting the flow is also part of western water management.
Animas River Days slalom races were held on Saturday. This is a paddling town, and these kids are fast. World class fast.
This path goes beside the rapids and the race course is set right on this stretch of river. People leave their boats and gear on the grass until it’s time for their class to race.
A kayak slalom course has 18 - 22 gates and takes a few minutes to run. You go through the red gates against the flow of the river, and the green gates with the flow. Each gate is hanging from a cable stretched across the river, so the race course can be changed from race to race. When there isn’t a race, the gates are pulled over to the side of the river.
In an eddy near the head of the course, the paddlers wait their turn to run the gates.
Here’s a kid approaching the first gate. He makes the drop before the gate, and then starts turning his boat upstream
rotating around that firmly set paddle blade.
He clears the gate, quickly turns his boat for Gate 2
and squeaks through.
And then he’s gone around the bend.
The Animas River Days, a weekend celebration of the Animas River, kicked off Friday evening with a raft parade. I think there were about sixty boats and lots more kayaks.
Dory men led the parade. These dories are used to go down the Grand Canyon, and they’re the same type of wooden boats as the ones used by Major John Wesley Powell when he led the first geographic expedition through the canyon in 1869. Dory men are the most radical whitewater enthusiasts. They are extreme pilots.
Water people and their dogs all wear PFDs (personal flotation devices, or life preservers).
College kids don’t. (Q and A in newspaper - Q: What is the most unusual sight you’ve ever seen on the river? A: A raft without beer.)
The people on the bridge with me thought this cupcake had zero chance of making it through Smelter rapids.
And there they go floating down the river from their mass start, everyone paying attention to the first stretch of rapids ahead.
This part of Colorado is mineral-rich. Silver, gold, lead, copper, coal, and uranium have all been mined near here, and the higher metal prices make it profitable to put old mines back into production. Some people object.
Mining has big impacts on water quality because abandoned mines leak acid into the river. Private citizens have worked for years cleaning up the old mines that drain into the Animas River, and the handful of new mining ventures in the region was a topic of discussion at a recent water meeting.
One question was: Are these big ventures? Are they national, well funded companies? (Do they have the money for proper environmental mitigation, and a reputation to protect?)
Oh, no, was the response. These aren’t modern mining operations. This is traditional mining, where small operators fleece big city investors and leave behind an environmental mess.
Which would be funnier if it wasn’t true.
A Californian consortium is trying to reopen a gold mine in Mayday. Here’s one local’s response:
There’s a nifty Burma Shave type series of signs that reads
TAKE YOUR
GOLD RUSH
BACK TO
CALIFORNIA please
and the last sign is
Whatever your opinion of mining in Mayday (or political theatre, for that matter) you gotta love someone who takes you from Uranus to heinous* in less than a half mile.
*love that word.
heinous
c.1374, from O.Fr. haineus (Fr. haineux), from haine “hatred,” from hair “to hate,” from Frank. *hatjan (cf. O.S. haton, O.E. hatian “to hate”).
| Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper |
Published on June 13, 2008
in water.
I wanted to take a nice picture of the river, so I took the five mile hike to the top of Animas Mountain. I didn’t get a good shot. This is the best of the photos I took, and it’s lame. So I am going up the mountain again tomorrow, this time with a picnic, and will try again. Patiently. (I don’t know if stubbornness is a virtue, but patience is.)
I hope to have a spectacular river shot for you on Monday.
Published on June 10, 2008
in water.
This is a parade of five rafts heading towards the rapids. A friend who runs a raft company says that it’s been a very slow season. She thinks the RVers who usually raft with them didn’t come this year because of high gas prices. This healthy flotilla of paying guests was a flash from the past.
We may have passed high water this year.
The red line is this year’s hydrograph, and you’d think those high flow days would come as a surprise, but they don’t. For two days this year the river flow doubled… and I got kayaking pictures from both days. Those peak flows are ecstatic. A lot of the reshaping of a river occurs in those few days when the flow is two and three times higher than the mean.
High water is a thrill but I don’t mind the lower flows of summer. My personal favorite is tubing season, but for that you have to wait until July, when the flow is below 600 cubic feet per second. Drinks and snacks are optional.
Published on June 3, 2008
in water.
The last time I took high water photos was 5/21 when the river was running 6,400 cubic feet per second–it’s the red spike on the hydrograph. We had a freeze and the melt slowed, and then we had a hot wind and the melt increased. Monday the river was at another high–people estimated it was 5,800 cfs.
Kayakers have gotten more practice and are ready to try the big waves. At Smelter Rapids there are about 20 people watching; there is a group of kayakers getting into their dry suits in the parking lot; and there are three kayakers taking turns on a six foot standing wave.
This is the same guy who kayaked alone here last high water. His kayak is facing upstream, and he is being held in place by the backwash created by a big boulder in the river. He has big water flowing downstream, the foaming rush pushing upstream, and he’s balancing in the fulcrum of these forces.
He makes it look easy but it’s not.
It’s pretty hard to settle into the sweet spot when the forces are so enormous.
Dang hard.
I heard that Fire and Rescue is averaging 3 saves a day from here, because there’s a tight eddy on the other side of the river that people can’t get out of, and the water is icy. Of course, it’s not the kayakers who need rescuing.
It’s the rafters who get thrown in the rapids and can’t get to the other side of the river. I’m all in favor of scantily clad rafters in summer, but not in spring. This water is from snowmelt, and it’s fierce.
When it comes to cold water safety, it’s all about the clothes.
We think of streams and rivers as fixed features of the landscape, but they’re not. Trees continually fall into the water because the banks are always moving laterally (unless the streambed is artificially restrained by riprap or levees). A river is constantly shifting because of the way water flows.
Water that flows in a river moves like a corkscrew, twisting in on itself. Water flowing at the bottom of the river is slower because of the friction between the water and the riverbed, while the water on top flows faster. When a river bends, the faster water on the surface pushes against the outer banks and dumps trees into the waterways, while the slower siltier water at the bottom slips to the inner bank and drops some of its sand or gravel.
Most of the waterways we see are controlled by dams, where the high flows are moderated and the trunks are removed from the river. Here we have a natural stream in the spring, sweeping great trees downstream.
This is near the start of our walk, with tree trunks piled at the point of this little instream island.
Next we have this log caught midstream a wee bit upriver.
Big logs collect smaller logs and branches,
and you can see that the water was much higher a few days ago, when the flow around the near side of this tree caught a bole and a lot of small branches.
By midsummer, this torrent of snowmelt will have faded to a babbling brook. This huge trunk will be immovable… until next spring shifts it downstream again. By nature, a stream is a messy, trunk-littered path.
The Animas flooded its banks today,
and with the high water I went to Smelter Rapids, the town’s best white water.
It was big water today, one of the highest flow days of the year. There was one kayaker out there, and maybe twenty people watching.
Can you see the joy?
The balancing of immense forces? This guy is likely Olympic caliber–there are a lot of world champion and Olympic kayakers living here
and I assumed everyone was there to watch his perfect form. Instead,
the main attraction was a group of four commercial rafts due at 2:15. Two rafts made it through intact, one raft lost and recovered a passenger, one raft flipped…
and it was really entertaining.
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