BEDROCK — “We should do it again,” says Luke Schafer, on the final few minutes of a three-day, 36-mile float along the Dolores River in remote Slickrock Canyon, a stunning gorge in western Colorado’s Montrose County.

It takes but a few seconds for the team to wholeheartedly agree to ditch jobs, families and responsibilities for another ramble through the geologic wonder. But there’s a problem.

The receding water line on the banks — evidenced by the rattle of dead willows that hours earlier were underwater — shows the river is dropping rapidly. By dusk, the Dolores will be unnavigable, its flow tamped to a trickle 97 miles upstream at the McPhee Dam.

“Like Lazarus, the river comes to life. And then, it dies again,” says Scott Braden, a conservationist and public-lands advocate like Schafer. Braden rallied the crew on short notice for a rare float on a river that has boasted boatable flows a mere three times in the last decade.

The fickle Dolores River is emblematic of Western water woes, where increasing recreation demands and calls for conservation clash with traditional uses that quench arid towns and farms.

That tension has created conflict in the past, as the river veers from tidal to trickle. There’s no other way to see Slickrock Canyon except by boat, and without raft-floating flows, the canyon is essentially closed.

But, recently, the Dolores River water wrangling has yielded collaboration. And this year, after more than a decade of planning, a diverse team of water users — including water managers, farmers, boaters, conservationists, ecologists and land managers — have galvanized to celebrate and study more than 60 days of boatable flows, creating one of the most vibrant seasons in recent memory on the miles of varying Dolores River below McPhee.

“It’s been a ghost and you have to chase it,” said Schafer, the Western Slope advocacy director for Conservation Colorado, who first navigated Slickrock Canyon during a quick, small release last year. “These last couple years have really opened my eyes to the complexities of Western water policy, the complexities of public land management and the complexities recreation management. But at the end of the day, the overwhelming experience is sheer and utter beauty. This is one of the most spectacular river canyons on the planet.”

Christened by exploring Franciscan friars in 1776 as Rio de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores — River of our Lady of Sorrows — the Dolores River carves a sluicing path through eons of geology.

The Lower Dolores River through Slickrock Canyon — traversing a 30,000-acre Bureau of Land Management wilderness study area — offers geology spanning hundreds of millions of years.

Entrenched channels carve through Wingate Sandstone, the Kayenta Formation and Navajo Sandstone layers that tower hundreds of feet above the river. Panels of petroglyphs and pictographs reveal the canyon’s millennia-old appeal. Ancestral Puebloan, Archaic and Fremont people frequented the remote canyon. Several pictographs and petroglyphs in the canyon show the horned Fremont Man and bear paws. Some of that artwork is near dinosaur tracks.

“Someone has been writing about how awesome this place is for the last 1,000 years,” Schafer says. “We are just the newcomers.”

Ute legend holds that peaceful cliff dwellers once lived in the canyon, but a band of nomadic Indians from the north swept through the canyon and massacred them in a single assault.

Poet Alfred Castner King, a blind miner, memorialized the legend in “Dolores.” The marauders cast their victims into the water, he wrote, and “the laughter and song of the river were changed to the wailing of woe … the river still mourns for her people, with weird and disconsolate flow.”

Those capricious flows have defined the Lower Dolores since the Bureau of Reclamation finished building the McPhee Dam in 1984. McPhee Reservoir, managed by the Dolores River Water Conservancy District, holds roughly 380,000 acre-feet of water, most of it allocated for agricultural use around the Four Corners region.

In 2004, Dolores River stakeholders gathered to forge a unified mission. The group included the water conservancy district; irrigation users; the Bureau of Reclamation, which owns the dam; the Bureau of Land Management; conservation groups; boater groups such as American Whitewater; and Colorado Parks and Wildlife. That mission outlined how the groups can work together to help boaters — who have a legal right to excess water in McPhee Reservoir — and ecologists eager to protect fish habitat while honoring water rights and allocations for irrigation and municipal uses.

It took almost a decade of meetings — during, incidentally, a prolonged drought that pretty much eliminated releases of unallocated water from McPhee — to hammer out a plan that bolstered fish habitat and maximized recreational flows for boaters.

The Lower Dolores Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Plan created a team that helped to manage releases. This year, with a healthy snowpack and good carryover water levels from the previous spring melt, American Whitewater helped negotiate significant releases from McPhee — from the end of March to May 21 and another surprise burst last week.

The surges, including a high-flow, three-day pulse of 4,000 cubic feet per second that limited the length of the boating season but helped restore riparian habitat, marked the largest releases since 2008. The flows drew wildlife scientists, conservationists and boaters in droves.

“We are trying to align everyone’s activities so they all fit together, and this was a really successful year for that effort,” said Michael Preston, manager of the Dolores River Water Conservancy District. “We had really great monitoring this season. We have a plan. We have objectives. We are going to start learning a great deal.”

The Nature Conservancy and Colorado Parks and Wildlife worked together in March to study the deeply channelized river bed before the big flow and then again in April and May to observe the river during a variety of flows. The hope was the big pulse and the sustained flows helped push the river out of its entrenched channel, allowing it to scour riverbanks of dense willows and alder, and restore eddies and backwaters.

“We recognize that McPhee Dam is in place and there are a lot of local families and economies that rely on that water,” says Celene Hawkins, the western Colorado water program manager for the Nature Conservancy. “We understand that in years without water, those local families and economies get hit just as the native fisheries get hit. We are not looking to return the river to its pre-dam state, but we are looking at what we can do to make the river healthier.”

Jim White, an aquatic biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, got onto the Dolores River below McPhee last month for the first time since 1990. He was looking for endemic populations of roundtail chub, bluehead sucker and flannelmouth sucker fish. He found all three in Slickrock Canyon. His team did not find any smallmouth bass, which can decimate native fish populations. That’s all good news. Related Articles September 20, 2020 Along with raising cattle, company aims to raise awareness about the ranching way of life

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“The main thing we want to do is make sure we don’t lose any more ground in terms of the fishery. The density of fish is pretty low, but all three species are present,” says White, who tagged more than 500 fish that can be followed through antennas set above and below Slickrock Canyon. “They are using the habitat in Slickrock and other sections of river. Having a good water year like this helped. Everyone was on the same page. The 4,000 cfs disrupted the channel and … created better fish habitat.”

While scientists surveyed fish, American Whitewater and the Dolores River Boating Advocates canvassed boaters. Conservationists and recreationists have united on the Dolores, merging their missions in a singular push for more water.

The boater survey is trying to quantify the economic impact of boaters rallying in the West End of Montrose County. Paddling advocates want to know whether the flows were announced early enough and whether the timing of the releases offered enough opportunity to float through the wild canyons of the Dolores River.

Early reports show crowding was not an issue, but boaters — almost all of them private paddlers — lamented the accessibility of potential campsites: unimproved sandy beaches that haven’t really been used for several years. Most of the river bank through Slickrock is densely armored with virtually impenetrable willows. Upstream, in Ponderosa Gorge, where the lush mountain river transitions to a red-walled desert canyon, impassable alder thickets guard the banks.

“American Whitewater negotiated a high-flow release, hoping it would help recover fish and habitat. That meant a shorter season. But we will trade a few days if we can get that water down there to work for a healthier ecology,” says American Whitewater’s Nathan Fey.

Rafters rally when the Dolores runs. They come from across the West, with trailers from several states stacked more than a hundred deep at the Bedrock takeout on a Sunday in mid-May.

“The opportunity for boating has been so rare and so fleeting over the last 20 years, that when the word comes down about a release, people flock,” says Braden, a wilderness advocate for Conservation Colorado. “It’s a legendary and mystical river. There are precious few true wilderness multiday river trips left in America.

“This river needs to be protected. There are ways that the river can be managed that provides for agriculture but also maintains a healthy river ecology and creates recreational opportunities for boaters in a way that really helps everybody to win. We have made real progress,” Braden says. “The question comes when we have less water in the river — how do we handle that and provide for native fish and provide recreational opportunities?”

The steady train of rubber-riding river runners spiked business in Naturita and Nucla, the West End’s struggling hamlets that once thrived on uranium mining. That kind of mining is long gone, and soon the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Nucla Station power plant and nearby New Horizon coal mine will close as part of a settlement to reduce air pollution. That’s another 80-plus lost jobs in a pair of communities with only 1,200 residents.

May brought record traffic through Shawn Sinks’ Walk In Liquor Store in Naturita. Rafters love craft beer, and she was ready, with a room dedicated to nothing but Colorado-made brews, liquor and wine.

“An unbelievable May. We had record-setting sales,” Sinks says. “Every morning we’d see them coming with their rafts piled high. Just a great month.”

Across the street, the Nucla-Naturita visitors center saw “an incredible number” of tourists, many of them buying local hats and T-shirts, says Chamber of Commerce director Amanda Tomlinson.

Businesses around the Paradox Valley and West End try to take advantage of the surge in river runners. Shuttle companies sprout up, offering to ferry floaters’ rigs back to the takeout. But the fickle flows of the Dolores River and San Miguel River make it difficult to establish a thriving river-based economy, even though the recreation in the West End is plentiful.

“We aren’t banking on any one thing. We want to market the West End for everything we have. We are just a haven for self-guided recreation out here,” Tomlinson says.

With McPhee Reservoir pretty much full a month-and-a-half into irrigation season, there’s a good chance that releases will happen again next year, especially if winter snowpack is around normal. Water users, Preston says, are upgrading sprinkler technology, reducing irrigation demand.

“This year we will have another good carryover and even with a middling winter, we will have some kind of release,” Preston says. “I’m sure everyone here would love to continue with some more big releases.”