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.)


	Bath from hell: a natural sulfurous hot spring bubbles up adjacent to the Dolores, near its headwaters in Colorado's San Juan Mountains. (James Fee)

DOLORES RIVER COUNTRY is a high range of piñon pine and sagebrush interspersed with plots of farmland. Green tractors are scattered about, and an occasional silo shimmers in the sun. Along these two-lane roads, American flags flutter above trailers, and every 20 miles or so there's a tough little town with a no-nonsense name like Egnar or Nucla, where they grow no-nonsense crops like wheat, beans, and hay.

I wondered how these hardscrabble farmers had managed to pay for a $564 million project.

They hadn't. Although irrigators are the dam's reason for being, they pay only 5 percent of its price tag. Most of the cost is recovered through the electricity sold by the Bureau of Reclamation on its other dams, like Glen Canyon. If you live in the West, chances are your electric bill subsidizes irrigation, a cost you're supposed to recoup from lower food prices at the grocery store.

Don Schwindt, 55, a Stanford-educated alfalfa farmer from Cortez and president of the board of the Dolores Water Conservancy District, the agency that owns rights to most of the water in the reservoir, makes no apologies for irrigation. "If you choose to live in civilization," he told me, "you have to accept the limitations it puts on the environment." Schwindt warns that taking water from farmers would not only be illegal; it would make farming less profitable, causing farmers to subdivide their fields and sell lots to city folks for second homes.

"If you want to grow alfalfa, maybe you should move someplace where it rains," says Tom Klema, 56, who lives in Durango, Colorado, and has been guiding on the Dolores—and fighting the dam—since 1975. He complains that farmers use water however they please, even if that means running sprinklers into the wind on a hot day.

Last year a new voice emerged in this debate. Setting up shop in a tiny Main Street office in Durango, the Dolores River Coalition (DRC) is trying to devise ways to get water into the river without pissing off everyone involved. According to Chuck Wanner, the group's director, "Any solution will have to be win-win for both environmentalists and agriculture, or else nobody will cooperate."

One idea is to offer incentives to irrigators. With privately raised funds, the coalition could pay for increased efficiency in the canals; in exchange, a portion of the saved water would be reallocated to the river. Or it could buy water shares outright and simply let it flow downstream.

But for the time being, the only boatable water in the Dolores is the 63 miles below the confluence with the San Miguel River, 108 miles downriver from the Bradfield Bridge launch. A week after Damon and I returned from Slick Rock Canyon, the gauge at the confluence jumped from 200 to 1,000 cubic feet per second. This time I recruited three friends and drove two hours from Moab around the LaSal Mountains, then followed a gravel road down to the Dolores. The river was soupy and lifeless, until we eached the confluence. Here the chocolate waters of the Dolores collided with the churning mahogany flood of the San Miguel.

We slid the kayaks out of the truck and, hopping on one foot, I pulled on my wetsuit, as if in one wasted minute I might lose the water altogether. We lowered the boats off the side of the road through bramble, thickets, poison ivy, loose rock, and cactus. Finally, at mile 108, I dropped my boat into the Dolores and paddled. The two currents swirled together and disappeared downcanyon: Yes, I was finally floating on a river.

It was the first time I had ever knowingly launched just downstream from a Superfund site. The uranium town of Uravan, on the banks of the San Miguel just up from the confluence, was found to be so dangerously radioactive that the mine owners, Union Carbide Corporation, were forced to pay $40 million for its dismantling and cleanup. These days you'll find only massive pools of murky liquid ringed in chain link, and a host of foreboding signs that read NO TRESPASSING or RADIOACTIVE.

We paddled through a deep sandstone canyon, and below us the river followed Colorado 141 for another 30 miles or so. But none of us had thought to bring sleeping bags or tents, because we didn't think we'd actually get on the water. So we pulled out at mile 113 and drove back home to Moab.

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