EDMONTON - Dirty. Stinky. Dangerous. Polluted.

These are common things said about Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River, which is why when Stephanie Neufeld told her friends earlier this week that she planned to go for a long swim in the river, one of them said to her, “Only dogs swim in the river.”

But Neufeld, Epcor’s watershed biologist, knows otherwise. Tests on the river in recent years reveal it has not been this clean and unpolluted since the early 1900s.

Most days it’s excellent for swimming, which is what Neufeld, Glen Isaac, the North Saskatchewan’s outgoing riverkeeper, and I did on an overcast, sometimes drizzly afternoon this week. We swam and floated in our life-jackets through the city core, from the Quesnell Bridge to the Walterdale Bridge. It was a fantastic outing on an under-rated water body.

The North Saskatchewan is not your grandparent’s river. In the 1950s, Edmonton used to put raw or barely treated sewage into the river, along with animal waste from Edmonton’s slaughterhouses.

Such practices have ended, leaving our river’s high water quality to shine. Ninety per cent of its water comes from mountain sources, Neufeld says. “That’s pretty pristine still. That is snowpack fed.”

On most days the water quality is fine for recreational use, says Isaac, though if there’s been a heavy rainfall enough pollutants might get in through run-off to make it temporarily sketchy. It’s also true that the North Saskatchewan is a prairie river. It can look bad with a lot of mud and sediment flowing in at times of heavy rains.

But Isaac has swum in the river many times. “Anybody who is a lover of the river gets the same responses, ‘Oh, are you crazy? The river looks so muddy and dirty.’ … What I have to remind them of, especially in times of lower flow or low precipitation, is this is mountain water running through our river. This is great mountain water. This is fantastic water both from a recreational perspective and from an overall water quality perspective.”

When Isaac first mentioned a few years ago how good the river’s water quality had become, it got me thinking about going for a long swim.

I grew up in Devon and we played and hiked along the shores of the river many summer days. It left a craving in me to be down by the sparkling water on the rocky, muddy shores below tall, clay and coal banks. At the same time, however, as kids we never went swimming in the river, mainly because our parents warned us about how the dangers.

When I hiked down to our launching area Wednesday afternoon, all the nasty things I’d heard about the river welled up inside. I started to wonder if it was even legal to swim in the river. If I tweeted out that I planned to make this attempt, would the police or fire department come and try to prevent me?

We are indeed permitted to swim, both Isaac and Neufeld said, but it’s important to swim in a group and to wear a life-jacket. There can be brambles and branches hidden in the water, Isaac said. Without a life-jacket, you could get caught up in one and drown.

“It’s a big, kind of flat bottomed river throughout Edmonton,” Neufeld said, “so there’s not a lot of undercurrents, there’s no rapids. It’s pretty safe in this stretch.”