The Returning Rapids Project: Good News From the Beleaguered Colorado River
Photo @Cody Cobb: Returning Rapids Team, in order from left to right, Mike DeHoff, Meg Flynn, Peter Lefebvre and Chris Benson
“In a way, our project is a bad joke,” says Mike DeHoff, one of four members of the Returning Rapids project. “A librarian, a pilot, a river guide and a welder walking into a bar. But instead, we start caring about a river and start trying to tell people about it.”
That river was the Colorado. More specifically, a very special section of it called Cataract Canyon in Utah’s canyon country, and a completely unique phenomenon going on there right now. As the water level in Lake Powell—the reservoir held behind Glen Canyon Dam—is receding, it’s exposing parts of the landscape that have been drowned for decades. But it takes a very intimate knowledge of the area, detailed historic perspective, and many successive visits to the same place to truly understand and document what’s going on. That’s where the Returning Rapids Project comes in. Here’s how this project went from a labor of love to a science and policy driver—and why it’s so important right now.
Photo @Cody Cobb: Meg Flynn and Brenda Bowen on distorted sediment flats
What’s the big deal about Cataract Canyon?
“[Cataract] is different from your regular river trip,” explains Peter Lefebvre, the OARS river guide in DeHoff’s joke. “With most river trips, the rapids are kind of here and there … But Cataract Canyon is broken up into flat water, and then—boom—you hit the whitewater and it's whitewater for 15 miles, and then boom, you hit flatwater again.”
The lower canyon looks a lot like the Grand Canyon, with steep walls and side canyons—but unlike the typical free-flowing rivers people usually float, the Colorado is dammed. So the raft trips end on the flat, stagnant water of Lake Powell, the reservoir behind the dam, instead of a river take out. “So you get to the end of your raft trip and it's like, well, what's underneath this flatwater?” Lefebvre says. “Why are these mud banks here? And you start getting curious, well, what do these rapids look like? And you hear about, oh, Dark Canyon Rapid. That was a big one and Gypsum Rapid. It's these sleeping dragons underneath the flatwater in the mud.”
The sleeping dragons are beginning to awake.
Photo @Cody Cobb: “Can Opener Rapid”
A historic treasure hunt
In 2013, DeHoff and his wife, Meg Flynn, a librarian in Moab, Utah, went on a raft trip in Cataract Canyon. And while they’d been in the area many times before, they found themselves camping in a new spot—something they noted, because the campsite would previously have been under reservoir water. The two were struck by how much the canyon was changing as Lake Powell’s water levels were dwindling. They snapped photos, and shared their discoveries with Lefebvre, when they discovered he was a fellow self-proclaimed Cataract Canyon nerd.
Returning from guiding trips through Cataract Canyon himself, Lefebvre would regroup with DeHoff and Flynn at DeHoff’s welding shop. Soon they were comparing photographs of areas newly exposed by receding water. Flynn put her librarian skills to work, digging up archives of digitized historic photos to compare theirs against. And as different features emerged from the water, so did the long-buried rapids.
Photo @Cody Cobb: Sunset over the San Juan & Colorado confluence, reservoir elevation 3520’
It starts with a binder
The group collected and organized their images, logging the reemerging discoveries in Cataract Canyon. The receding water was changing the landscape so quickly, each trip through the canyon brought fresh data that the team began compiling into a single binder. And soon they realized the information they were gathering could be helpful to others beyond their small “Cataract Canyon nerd” crew. River guides began asking if they could take the binder out with them on trips. Between Meg’s library skills and the constantly updating new photos, they were piecing together a picture of what the canyon was like before the dam—and how it was or wasn’t returning to its previous state now.
The up-to-date log of the canyon’s ever-changing status was entertaining for raft trip clients, for sure, but the information could also be a powerful tool in other ways too, they realized. “In 2015, I started tracking the changes in a spreadsheet and shared it with the park service,” DeHoff says. “Because the places to camp were always changing, which rapids were out or not. Just the whole lower section is dynamic. The park service office wasn't always sure what to tell users what was going on.”
Contributing to science
Logistics aside, what is happening in Cataract Canyon is unique, drawing the attention of scientists, too. Soon the Returning Rapids crew was helping with the first raft trip carrying a group of professors and USGS representatives to take an up-close look at the changes the team had been documenting.
For the Returning Rapids team, helping professional scientists plays a part in their big-picture plan to share the river with others and inspire them to advocate for it. “They can speak the language of science for us,” DeHoff says. “We're smart enough to understand geology and different things, but people may look at our credentials and say, ‘So wait, who are you guys? You're a welder and you're a river guide? And we're supposed to take you seriously in this scientific arena?’ It's kind of cool pulling these people in on our team. It's like we're putting our dodgeball team together, and these guys and gals are all scientifically minded and speak the language and are respected in the scientific community.”
And adding Chris Benson—a geologist himself, as well as pilot and river guide—to the team has helped to connect those dots as well, translating scientific jargon into more easily digestible information. “That's what we aim to do,” DeHoff says. “Communicate what we're seeing in a simple language understandable to the greatest amount of people.”
Photo @Cody Cobb: Elevation mapping on the Dirty Devil sediment island
What is it all for?
As the water crisis rages on, lawmakers and news outlets from the New York Times, the Washington Post to the New Yorker turn their attention to this corner of the U.S., the data the Returning Rapids team is providing are more important than ever before. They hope their contribution will help citizens and decision-makers create more sustainable plans for the future. Working under the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute, the team is able to continue to document the landscape as it comes back to life—for science, for recreation, and to shed light on the long-term impacts of water-law decisions. With funding from Mighty Arrow Family Foundation, they’re able to spend more resources on compiling data to communicate with more people—and also to include more people directly in the project, to pass it on.
Photo @Cody Cobb: Skiffs crossing the reservoir
A picture of hope
Documenting the destruction wrought by shortsighted decisions of decades past could be depressing—but the Returning Rapids team don’t necessarily see it that way. The canyon will certainly never be exactly as it was before the dam, and will require wise management (decades of sediment dropped from the reservoir’s stagnant water created mud deltas that have displaced former river features, for example), but the restoration is still happening at a seemingly miraculous pace.
“It's kind of nice to be working on a project that's trying to focus on the positive side of things,” DeHoff says. “To just put a positive spin and talk about things returning and just some level of positivity about what's going on. Because there's really so much negativity around mismanagement, the water crisis… It's like the silver lining.”
In the end, it’s the story of the power of a river, Flynn says. “We talk a lot about how Cataract is this really amazing example of how, if you give the river the chance, it will recover in these astonishing ways. It's a real conservation love story around the Colorado, and what it can do if you let it.”
Photo @Peter Lefebvre: Sunrise at North Wash takeout