Last week the city of Durango issued a statement urging Animas River users to practice caution due to a new set of rapids at Santa Rita Park.
The city might be better served by a billboard erected in the dog park so river runners can’t miss it. Because as water levels rise with spring runoff, this is one caution that deserves to be blown up into a don’t-miss warning.
“The new rapid at the Santa Rita intake has significantly more gradient than before,” reads the city’s statement.
Indeed it does. And while a change in gradient over distance is one thing when translated by the hydraulics of swift, cold water, immediate changes of gradient, as in the case of the new series of river-wide drops at Santa Rita, can be quite another.
Old-time river runners were careful to distinguish this kind of river feature from the longer stretches of whitewater they called rapids. They labeled these sudden drops as “falls.” Durango resident Sandy Bielenberg, in a recent letter to the editor, suggests just such a name for the new drops: Flip Factory Falls.
The ongoing, and expensive, remodeling work on the river channel at Santa Rita seems to be progressing at cross-purposes. While stream modifications have been made to provide a more “user friendly” experience in the whitewater park’s signature Corner Pocket rapid, the more recent work just upstream to direct more flow to the water treatment plant’s intake structure looks to have produced the opposite effect.
At present river levels – the Animas was swollen to about 2,600 cubic feet per second on Wednesday, with much higher levels to come – getting to Corner Pocket looks to be more challenging than running it.
The water flowing over the drops is producing significant recirculating “holes,” much like those produced by low head dams, and there is not a lot of room to avoid them, especially since boulders have been scattered in the channel. Low head dams, of course, are infamous for trapping and drowning unsuspecting river users at higher water levels.
As the Animas rises, these new features may mellow, as is sometimes the case with rapids and other channel obstacles. Or they may not. The addition of more places to eddy out on river left above the intake, including a long gentle ramp to allow for boats and rafts to be taken out and portaged to below the whitewater park, are smart improvements. Look for many commercial companies and their clients to utilize this option this year.
But river runners beware: this is not last year’s gateway to Santa Rita. This is a significant new stretch of whitewater that will require some experience and technical skills at the oars or paddle to navigate.
Wear proper life vests and helmets. Take the time to stop and scout before heading in, and be ready to deal with the results. It is absolutely no place for neophytes, innertubes or other single-chamber watercraft, and may not be even when the river drops to summer levels.
This stretch does promise an adrenaline surge for those who take it on, and likely plenty of “carnage,” the morbidly humorous term whitewater enthusiasts apply to flips, spills and other waterborne mishaps.
We hope it does not prove too challenging for the popular commercial rafting trade so important to our summer economy, or end up requiring more “riverscaping” next year.
At this point, Durango can afford neither.
