The first summer of operations at the newly constructed Durango Whitewater Park has been a roller-coaster ride, with prolonged high water, a number of rescues and a death, leading to a question: Did grouting boulders in place make the area too dangerous in high water?
Answers vary widely, but everyone agrees on one fact: Whitewater should always be treated with respect.
“The Whitewater Park is a work in progress,” said John Brennan, a member of the Animas River Task Force who has been involved in the park since the beginning. “There are always growing pains when you make changes, and it will take a few seasons of minimal maintenance to work on this, work on that.”
But there were some surprises, he said.
“There were some places where even the designers said, ‘Whoa, that got a little bigger than we thought it would be,” Brennan said.
What is the risk level?
Smelter Rapid, the first of four more-or-less equally sized rapids in the park, is rated a Class III rapid when the Animas River’s flow is at 3,000 cubic feet per second or below, he said, and it increases to a big-water Class IV rapid at higher flows. Class V is the highest rating in the most commonly used scale.
“It was a Class III before the construction, and it is a Class III after the construction,” Brennan said.
While that measurement may be technically correct, the risk level has increased, said Michael Black, a longtime boatman on the river and well-known river activist.
“I remember what it looked like before they started messing around with it,” he said. “It was always challenging, but it was never dangerous. You used to have about a 90 percent chance of making it through Smelter Rapid without people ending up in the water, but now I’d say it’s no better than fifty-fifty. For commercial rafting companies, that’s too high a risk.”
Creating riverwide weirs, or barriers that alter flow, has led to keeper holes below every rapid, Black said. A keeper hole is an area where the water swirls, turns on itself and traps watercrafts.
“Robin Fritch from Flexible Flyers, the only person who’s been on the river longer than I have, attended every meeting on this and said don’t create riverwide weirs,” he said. “They didn’t listen to her.”
Alex Mickel, owner of Mild to Wild Rafting, doesn’t agree.
“Following the construction of the park, the channel is safer, and there is no chance of entrapment,” he said. “When the river gets high, we do put in below Smelter, but it is not a new practice.”
When the river is running at about 4,800 cfs, his company does not take people through the Whitewater Park, Mickel said.
Durango’s park is different than most of the other whitewater parks in the country, Brennan said, because usually, they are built in areas that were previously calm water. The fact that Durango’s park includes a curve leading into the rapids is also a singular part of the topography, meaning Durango’s Whitewater Park is breaking new ground in some respects.
“There’s another risk factor that’s unique to the Animas,” Brennan said, “because it’s really cold. Paddlers across the West, when they’re asking about river conditions, will ask, ‘Is it Animas-cold?’”
A solution in progress?
Scott Shipley, the director of S2O, which designed the park, said his firm is planning to create an expensive 3-D modeling exercise of the park this summer at no cost to the city. This kind of model has never been done for a whitewater park in Colorado before, he said.
“It is a little trickier when the water gets higher, making for a much more powerful rapid,” Shipley said. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it: We’d like to see it perform better at those flows. We’re concerned about safety and navigability for commercial trips, and we want this to be a win for the city of Durango.”
Black doesn’t think the company knows how to fix it, but eliminating or narrowing weirs might be a start, he said.
The city has always understood changes would probably have to be made.
“We’ve altered the course a number of times over the years,” said Cathy Metz, director of Durango’s Parks and Recreation Department. “To make it more stable and permanent, we grouted in structures, and it’s still settling into the new course. We expect to have to make more changes because it’s a river, and it’s dynamic.”
Metz said it’s also important to understand that the Whitewater Park was also designed to provide optimal recreation opportunities in lower flows, too.
“We provided a lot of different features to help the recreational experience,” she said. “You see a lot of rafts and kayaks on the river, of course, but you also see dories, canoes, duckies and stand-up paddleboards. And of course, late in the season, tubers come out.”
Does the city of Durango have increased liability?
“I don’t think we have more or less liability than what has historically occurred on the Animas River,” Metz said. “People have always been told to exercise caution when the water gets higher; people know they float the river at their own risk.”
Black wonders if that’s actually true.
“When it was natural, people just dealt with it,” he said. “It seems like the designers said, ‘Let’s put a rock here and see what happens.’ With what the city’s done, they’ve created a liability trap, not an act of nature. They had a responsibility to create something that’s safe.”
abutler@durangoherald.com
Why build a whitewater park?
In addition to providing a consistent recreation experience throughout the year, there was another key reason for building the Durango Whitewater Park.
“Building the park allows the city to obtain a Recreation In-Channel Water Diversionary Water Right,” said Cathy Metz, director of Parks and Recreation for the city of Durango. “It allows the natural flow of the Animas River that we’ve seen forever to continue for future generations.”
The city’s in-channel right would prohibit anyone from damming the river upstream of Durango or diverting water to pipe it to another area of Colorado.
“As we hear about water needs in other parts of the state, people are coming up with some creative solutions to solve their water shortages,” Metz said. “We don’t want them to look over here and say, ‘Hey, the Animas has some good flows.’”
