Dry Run: Rafting the Dolores River

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Outside Magazine, June 2004

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Dry Run on the River of Sorrows (cont.)


	After the gold rush: tailing ponds from abandoned mining operations in Rico, Colorado, just a few yards from the Dolores (James Fee)

WHEN IS A RIVER DEAD? For river runners, the Dolores has been dead since the drought struck in 2000. The last time Snaggletooth saw runnable water was in the fall of 1999, when a freak rainstorm forced a sudden release from McPhee Dam. The Dolores hit bottom the summer of 2002, never flowing at more than ankle depth at the gauging station in the town of Bedrock and dropping, at one point, to a dismal low of one cubic foot per second.

"The reason you don't hear a lot about the Dolores River is because most people already consider it dead," says John Weisheit, of Living Rivers, a nonprofit based in Moab, Utah, that works to decommission dams and restore rivers. Whether the dehydration that's ravaged the Dolores and rivers all over the West is caused by natural cycles of drought or by human overallocation is the subject of endless debate.

Historically, peak season on the Rio de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores—the "River of Our Lady of Sorrows"—was from April to June. Originating in the snowy granite peaks near Telluride, Colorado, the river tumbles 6,500 vertical feet in about 50 miles, through aspen and spruce gorges, before making a U-turn at the

Dolores River Map

Click here to view map

town of Dolores and rambling northwest into Utah. On average, each year has had 55 days of optimum boatable flows, but since 1984 the Dolores has gone slack behind McPhee Dam, where its water waits to be diverted to irrigate farms in Colorado's Montezuma Valley and the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation, and to quench the thirst of about 15,000 people in towns like Cortez and Dove Creek. Now, a well-timed launch in a wet year can still make for a great river trip, but boatable days have dropped by more than half.

When debating the health of the Dolores, it helps to know what it was like before humankind butted in. But this gets tricky. Man's large-scale wrangling of the river predates precise flow gauges, rafting, and even the idea that a river should be "alive."

In 1887, the Montezuma Water Company claimed the Dolores water and dug a canal near where McPhee Reservoir is today. Farmland blossomed in Colorado's southwesternmost corner, and Cortez was founded. Come July and August, with crops drinking thirstily from the canal, the riverbed below the diversion often dried up completely. But during the dramatic spring snowmelt, thousands of acre-feet escaped downriver. This runoff was a delight to rafters, who began floating the river in the 1950s, but an outrage to farmers. Water not used, according to the old western mentality, is water wasted.

And so began the battle between two groups that both call themselves conservationists. Environmentalists wanted to conserve the water in its natural course; irrigators wanted to keep it from going to waste.

The local bickering was mostly background noise to the real battle for the Dolores—and all western rivers—being fought in the U.S. Congress. In 1968, 12-term Colorado congressman Wayne Aspinall emerged from the haggling with five new Colorado River Basin projects in his district, including the Dolores Project, which would balloon into a half-billion-dollar boondoggle crowned by McPhee Dam. A decade later, President Carter deemed the project a piece of pork and tried to block it, but after a mutiny within the Democratic party, the bulldozers went forward. The project was completed in 2000.

By then, drought had overridden everybody: McPhee irrigators were receiving less than half of their annual allocation and dam releases had dropped below 20 cubic feet per second. This year, snowpack in the surrounding mountains looked more promising, but the spring melt won't be enough to alleviate the crisis, and no one is certain when rafting releases, which have been all but shut down for the past four years, will resume.

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