Thomas Ragan
River runners say the Rio Grande is ripe for rafting for another month.
W hitewater rafting on the Rio Grande will be winding down in the next few weeks as children return to school, summer vacations taper off and adrenaline junkies are reduced to a trickle, the dwindling number of rafts on the river as much a sign of fall as the chile harvest upon us.
But it's been a fantastic season.
Guides say the river hasn't run as fast and high in at least 10 years, which helps to buoy the bottom line in an industry where the gauge of success is tied to the volume of water in a region where water is scarce.
Heavy snowfalls at the river's headwaters in the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado, an early melt in March and a wet May conspired to create great conditions, according to several river rafting businesses that operate from Santa Fe to Taos and along the banks of the Rio Grande.
They tell SFR the river was so high, in fact, that people were rafting the Taos Box as late as August. It's a 17-mile course that's full of rapids and runs beneath the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, but it's usually been off-limits as early as June these past two decades because of the traditionally low-running river.
Jesse Kelly, a river guide for Kokopelli Rafting, didn't even think twice about the question: What was the highlight of your season?
It was when she and a half-dozen guides were out on the river, training together in the early summer, and one of the newer guides, unfamiliar with the terrain, took on one of the bigger rapids head-on in the Taos Box.
"We cleaned it!" recounts Kelly, whose passion for whitewater rafting only rivals the lingo she uses, which in this case indicates success against all odds.
"Yup, we took the meat," says Josh Lee, who was there as well, riding straight through the monster rapid at all costs.
It's a long stretch of river where, if you don't exercise caution as a guide, you could "dumptruck," or flip the raft over, emptying its contents of paying customers.
Brochures even forewarn that the Taos Box is not for children or the faint of heart.
Yet the Class 3 rapids in the Taos Box are just one aspect of the river. The rest of the course on the Rio Grande, beginning south of Taos and running down to Pilar, can be gentle. It can be slow moving. The level of difficulty can be deceiving as such, because it becomes highly technical, like trying to ski a mogul without having the momentum.
But thanks to the expertise of these guides, from Lee to Kelly to Griffin Merians, first-time rafters are capable of dodging rocks both big and small through Albert Falls, the Narrows and Big Rock—all the pockets that make the Rio Grande's 5-mile stretch primo.
The speed of the river is measured by the amount of cubic feet that travels per second. It's a number that guides take into consideration before they even go out on the water.
A river that's running low and slow is generally 350 cubic feet per second, but a river that's fast and high is 2,000, says Jo Baryza, office manager for Los Rios River Runners, in Taos.
From April to July, Baryza says the river ran at 2,000 cubic feet per second, something she hasn't seen in five years, and that's in part due to the San Luis Valley farmers upstream not taking as much water to irrigate fields.
"It was definitely kicking," says Baryza, who adds that the company won't stop its river tours until October, possibly going as far as November, weather permitting.
Los Rios is usually the last rafter to fold, as others call it quits as early as Labor Day, and there are always a few holdouts that make it until October.
"That's when most of the guides start their second jobs, which are seasonal," Baryza says, noting lots of guides work as ski instructors and firefighters, too.
John Parks, a high school English teacher, knows the seasonal drill, and his summer vacation is coming to a close. Which is why he and his two daughters, Eva and Silvie, 13 and 15, busted out of their hometown in River Falls, Wisc., last week and made a beeline for New Mexico.
It's safe to say that here is a family that's familiar with rivers—the big kind, those Midwestern rivers that look more like lakes. The St. Croix River, for example, is the buffer between Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and their hometown, where pastures give way to dairy farms and cheese operations that are just as exciting as the pending chile harvest here.
For the Parks family, the Kinnickinnic River is usually their recreational lifeblood, as it courses through the heart of their small town.
But up in Wisconsin and Minnesota, where the winters are harsh and the landscape is rolling at best, there's no such thing as canyons, at least not the kind you get out on the Rio Grande.
Which was a blast for the family, pictured above, with their good friend Joe Ramier, a local air ambulance pilot. The crew is more accustomed to canoeing or kayaking out on the open horizon, not through a canyon that dwarfs their very existence, turning them into the size of peas as they raft the jagged territory that comes with the Rio Grande.
It's hard to imagine, then, that this river is the same one that starts small and then runs long, emptying into the mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, meandering along the US-Mexican border, the creator of the border, if you want to get right down to it.
Down there, people die trying to cross it. Up here, people are paying to surf it in rubber boats.
And now it's time to pack up and leave, but first the group dons shark masks for a photo, something they'd been vowing to do from the outset of their vacation. And that's it for New Mexico. Next stop: Kansas.
