“Yampa Yearnings”: A reflection on a river with history — and issues ...Middle East

An Ode to the Yampa

The cowboy was clearly in a pickle. Wearing the full Louis L’Amour—well-worn and dirty blue jeans, dusty chaps, and, yes, even a red bandana under his frayed cowboy hat—he needed to get himself and his horse across the river to the other side. We stumbled upon him after rounding a corner below Mantle Ranch during a high-water float trip down Colorado’s Yampa Canyon. There he was on the riverbank, pacing back and forth, clearly perplexed. The only neighborly thing to do was pull over and lend a hand.

His cattle, it seemed, had crossed the river during winter’s low water and were now stuck on the other side, thanks to the surging spring runoff. While the rest of our group was already downstream, we still had an old wooden dory with us and a pod of kayakers. Listening to him explain his predicament, we came up with a plan: we tied his horse off to the dory’s bow, had the cowboy hop in, and ferried them across the river, the horse swimming behind. Like all plans hatched on a river, it had its glitches. At one point, the horse stood up chest deep in the water, causing the dory to pendulum beneath it and dangle there, tied off to its halter. Hadn’t planned on that.

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Eventually, we got them both over to the other side, where the real fun began. We spent the next three hours trying to herd his cattle back across the river, using our kayaks as our caballos. The cowboy would round them up on his horse, shepherd them upstream to a cliff blocking the beach, and then Heeyaw! them into the water.

That was our cue. Waiting in the eddy in our kayaks, we’d then peel out into the current and try to nose the bovines in the right direction—complete with our own rookie screams. Invariably, however, once they got about halfway across they’d turn and swim and stampede back to the wrong shore. At one point, the hoof of one such galloping cow came down right on a kayaker’s spray skirt, landing between his legs—a hard injury to explain to a doctor. It was Billy Crystal’s City Slickers, played out on the water.

In the end, we only managed to get two cows across. Eventually, we had to turn tail ourselves and get back to our group, leaving our real cowboy to his own devices. I can only assume that he eventually got them all over, even if he had to pull out his bedroll around a makeshift fire. We told our group the tale when we caught up with them at camp.

“Yampa Yearnings”

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It’s memories like these, stretched along the Yampa’s 250 miles from its birth in the Flat Tops Wilderness Area to its confluence with the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, that hold the river as close to my heart as the cowboy’s bandana was to his. The Yampa is the last remaining free-flowing tributary to the Colorado River that still retains its natural hydrograph. It’s as unbridled as the wild horses in nearby Browns Park, which once hosted Butch Cassidy and his Hole in the Wall Gang. It changes from a trickle in the fall to a raging torrent come spring, cycling through every level in between. In an era of dams, diversions, and drought, there aren’t many rivers in the West that retain such a cycle. Its fluctuations support everything from endangered fish and unique riparian habitat to municipalities, agriculture, and recreation.

Yet despite its pristine nature, not everything is hunky-dory in Yampaland. The Yampa is the last major basin in the state with unappropriated water, meaning all eyes are on it, just like the cowboys’ were on his cows. With tunnels, pumpbacks, and reservoirs already siphoning Western Slope water to the growing Front Range, and drought-ridden states downstream clamoring for more, there’s a bounty on the Yampa’s snowmelt.

It faces threats from other users in the sun-drenched West as well, from municipalities across the Continental Divide to oil, gas, and mining operations pining to pad their pockets. It’s experiencing issues that have long plagued other river basins like development, calls and shortages. All this is prompting what could well become a modern-day showdown at the Yampa Corral.

If there was a horse in the water on our trip, there’s also an elephant, or at least water buffalo, in the room when it comes to the Yampa’s future. “The unanswered question is whether the Yampa will be tapped to meet the rest of the state’s water needs,” says longtime river advocate Kent Vertrees. “It’s likely not long before another trans-mountain diversion is proposed.”

With three sections found suitable for Wild & Scenic designation, the Yampa has already fended off plenty of feuds for its lifeblood, from escaping the Echo Park Dam in 1956, marking one of the conservation world’s first major victories, to dodging pumpback projects and other diversion schemes. And it’s as busy as its beavers with its day-to-day workload. It serves agricultural and recreational interests, two major coal mines, a power plant, seven towns, and snowmaking operations for Steamboat Ski Resort all while helping fulfill the state’s water obligations to downstream users as outlined in the Colorado River’s 1922 Water Compact. Its natural hydrograph supports endemic, endangered fish reliant on its peak flows for spawning and nursery habitat.

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I was barely out of the nursery and a water drop of a man myself when I first saw it on a five-day raft trip with my family in fifth grade. A tighter bond formed when I moved to its banks in 1992, raising my two daughters along its shores. Since then, I’ve surfed its waves, fished its tributaries, and survived kayaking its heralded Cross Mountain Canyon. Its softer memories are every bit as nurturing—tubing and canoeing with my kids, coming face-to-snorkel with a twenty-four-inch trout, and simply lazing along its sandy banks on a Sunday afternoon. I even high-fived the Godfather of Soul James Brown on his namesake bridge in Steamboat, as the river ushered its water seaward below.

When you live by a river, its pulse starts matching your own—from peak runoff, when you can hear its roar from your porch, reborn after its long winter slumber like a bear coming out of hibernation, to its dry times, when, like its fish, it’s hanging on to survive. You become especially attuned to it on longer trips, like floating the seventy-one-mile Yampa Canyon run through Dinosaur National Monument, the one stranding our cowboy.

It’s not like the Yampa is better than any other river. There are waterways that are longer, larger, prettier, cleaner and facing even bigger problems all over the planet. But its story is representative of all of them. I’ve been lucky to have paddled rivers all over the world. I tried counting once how many I’ve run but I gave up. The math is too hard. A 225-mile trip down the Grand Canyon counts the same as a half-mile-long creek back home. And rivers like the Colorado and Yampa have countless different sections. Do you tally all of those, or just the river? Still, the list numbers in the hundreds. And the Yampa is always the one I return home to.

Why single it out? I’ve done much larger rivers, whose canyons could swallow it whole. Peru’s Colca Canyon is billed as the deepest in the world, fourteen thousand feet on its highest side. Africa’s Zambezi River is one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. The Throne Room Rapid on Chile’s Rio Futaleufu would eat the Yampa’s Warm Springs alive. Alaska’s Alsek River eclipsed 140,000 cubic feet per second when we ran it, more than ten times the Yampa’s average peak.

How does the Yampa even warrant comparison to such waterways? Or even smaller rivers like California’s Klamath, which recently underwent the biggest dam-removal project in the country, or tiny creeks in your own backyard? In the whole scheme of things, it doesn’t. But it’s what it represents that matters. And what we all feel when we look at any river: a sense of freedom and perhaps a little curiosity about what lies beyond the next bend.

Like our hitchhiking cowboy, the Yampa has seen its share of jams over the years—log, cattle, political, and more. But still, it courses on, offering a valuable lesson for us all: keep doing what you were put on this earth to do, nourishing as much as you can along the way. I suppose a diversion or dam might make it easier for our cowboy’s cattle to get back across the river. But even a lone, free spirit like him appreciates the importance of being wild and free.

Eugene Buchanan, a former reporter for the Denver Business Journal and 14-year publisher and editor-in-chief of Paddler magazine, has written about the outdoors for more than 25 years, from covering the X Games for ESPN.com to working for NBC at the Beijing Olympics to authoring six books and countless freelance articles. IBuchanan is a former ski patrol and raft and kayak guide whose passion for traveling and writing has taken him to more than 30 countries on six continents. A lifelong resident of Colorado raised in Boulder, he lives in Steamboat Springs, where he and his wife, Denise, raised their two daughters along the Yampa River.

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