Most river rafting operators dabble in soothsaying. Every day, sometimes every hour, they closely study river flows and try to predict what kind of adventure Mother Nature has in store for them and their guests.
This season, it was easy. Seeing how little snowpack the mountains held this spring after Utah experienced its warmest winter on record, river guides collectively expected the worst. And they were right.
For the first time in their decades-long histories, at least two rafting companies earlier this month had to cancel trips through Utah’s Westwater Canyon due to the Colorado River’s low flows. One of them, Holiday River Expeditions, also had to halt its trips down the Yampa River in early June — nearly a month ahead of the norm — because of low river flows. One longtime river guide said he knows of some outfitters in Colorado who gave up on rafting before the summer even started.
“If there ever was a year that you’re like, ‘Oh, is this the bottom?’ Or ‘Where is the bottom?’” said Jason Taylor, operations manager for Western River Expeditions and a Moab city council member. “It is this year.”
Utah rafting outfitters aren’t wringing their hands over the future of their business like a client wrings out his shirt after plunging into a Class IV rapid, though. They say a number of factors have buoyed Utah’s rafting industry — at least through this summer.
First time in 60 years
The two- or three-day tour of Westwater Canyon, located in east-central Utah, rides the Colorado River through black canyon walls and over Class III and IV rapids. Western River Expeditions runs it from May through September, and Taylor said it has always been reliable. If he had to cancel a trip there, it was because there was too much water. Still, he worried that this would be the year Westwater tours got shut down.
That day came Aug. 4 when water levels slumped to 1,080 cubic feet per second. That’s the slowest Tim Gaylord has ever seen the river move.
“We’ve been doing this for 60 years,” said Gaylord, the operations manager for Holiday River Expeditions, which has bases in Green River and Vernal. “It’s the first time we stopped running a trip in there due to [low] water levels.”
Taylor said he had to cancel three trips. Gaylord canceled about five. In both cases, the outfitters were able to reschedule most of their clients for the same time on another section or on a trip on the Green River, which has benefited this summer from the release of water from Flaming Gorge to boost water levels at the shrinking Lake Powell.
Both Western and Holiday are larger outfitters that run multiple trips on multiple rivers at a time. Taylor and Gaylord said that flexibility may give them an advantage over smaller outfitters in dry years.
Another outfitter that only offers trips on the Sevier River, for example, said it had to cancel more than half its rafting days this summer. Low water wasn’t the only reason. Fires scared some clients off and operators opted to not run trips in the stinky muck deposited into the river by floods.
“The rivers are … let’s just say they’re not themselves this year,” said Mike DeHoff, executive director of the Moab-based Colorado Plateau River Guides, who has been running Utah’s rivers for 30 years.
The math of water allocation
Though it was unprecedented, both Taylor and Gaylord predicted this might be the year Westwater met its match. Same with the Yampa.
Gaylord said Holiday pulled trips out of the Yampa almost a month ahead of normal. The fate of rafting there was easier to foresee because it is one of the Colorado River’s few tributaries that isn’t dammed. So, its flow mostly mirrors the snowpack.
With most other raftable rivers in Utah, more factors are at play. Flows depend on agricultural demand and the construction of data centers and urban developments, among other variables. This year, the release of water from Flaming Gorge has kept water levels elevated in the Green River and in the lower parts of the Colorado below where the two merge, even during the drier summer months.
Water agencies typically do not inform rafting companies when they intend to release water from dams, however, which can cause some consternation among outfitters. What really frustrates them, though, is that the basic math behind the allocation of water from the Colorado River doesn’t math. The original 1922 Colorado River Compact allocated 15 million acre-feet of water out of the river, but modern flows have been closer to 12.5 million acre-feet or lower.
“There’s no doubt that there’s overconsumption of the river,” Gaylord said, “and you take a low water year like this, and it’s just hard to keep up with it all: Farmers and the ranchers, they — everybody — needs their piece of it, and here we are trying to figure it out.”
Among the low Colorado River flows, though, one small silver lining has begun to surface in lower Cataract Canyon, near the mouth of Lake Powell. As water levels in the lake drop, several rapids have popped up.
DeHoff has been chronicling the reappearance of the water features as the lead investigator for the Returning Rapids Project, which bills itself as a “citizen science initiative” that operates under the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute. DeHoff said he attributes the initial disappearance of those rapids to poor legislative and resource management decisions. While he’s glad to see the rapids return, he said he would rather it be the product of policy changes than climate changes.
“Some people are like, ‘You guys are just cheering on the drought,’ and that’s not really the case,” he said. “It’s more like the further our research team goes down the road of trying to do all this investigation into what’s happening, the more it points out that we’re just not managing this really important resource to the degree we should.”
’Don’t give up on our rivers’
Despite historic-low river flows and canceled trips, river outfitters don’t seem down on the season.
“It was not as bad as we thought it possibly could have gotten in April, when we started looking at the snowpack and what was going on,” Taylor said.
The excess water in the Green River helped outfitters who hold permits for that river and areas below. And thanks to monsoons in Colorado, Westwater was only offline for larger rafts for about a week. Outfitters with smaller rafts continued to run trips through it even during the water slump.
Plus, Gaylord noted, most of Holiday’s clients book well ahead of time and do not closely monitor river flows. He expects numbers to be down across the industry, but said the falloff shouldn’t be drastic.
Next year, though, will be harder to predict.
A super El Niño weather system may pad this winter’s snowpack, which should increase river flows. However, outfitters also expect more water than usual will be held back from the Green River to refill Flaming Gorge. They also fear that news of this year’s low flows will make guests hesitant to book future trips.
Amid the uncertainty, DeHoff said he could offer one surety to those considering a river trip:
“I would tell everybody: ‘Don’t give up on our rivers; they’re still out there,’” he said. “It’s a wonderful way to recreate. It might just change a little bit.”
This story was produced in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent reporting initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.