A wild ride: Healthy snowpack makes for raging rapids, happy rafters
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Karl Stolleis/The New Mexican
Photo: Kayakers Erik Anderson, front, and Matt Turner make their way down a Rio Grande rapid south of Pilar on Friday. They and other river enthusiasts are taking advantage of the fact that river flows are at their highest levels in years as the spring runoff begins.
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4/4/2008 - 4/5/08
The Rio Grande was pouring through the Taos Box, a favorite stretch of whitewater for rafters, at 1,800 cubic feet per second Friday morning. And the snowpack in the San Juan Mountains that feeds the river, the best in a quarter century, has just begun to melt."We're expecting to see water levels like we had in the 1980s," said C.J. Robison, a guide at New Wave Rafting Co. in Santa Fe.
Back then, water roared down the river at 7,000 to 10,000 cfs in some stretches. Robison estimates the Rio Grande flows will at least match the 2005 mid-June peak of 6,000 cfs. At that rate, "you're looking at lots of waves, wave trains, currents moving fast," he said. "There's lots of opportunity to get wet."
A drier-than-average March actually might be good news for towns like Aztec that were worried about potential flooding as the healthy mountain snowpack melts, said snow surveyor Richard Armijo of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. March brought Northern New Mexico's runoff numbers down close to average.
Where the Rio Grande Basin was at 149 percent of its 30-year average snowmelt water supply amounts in February, that had dropped to 109 percent by Tuesday. The Pecos River dropped from 137 percent to 109 percent, and the Canadian River declined from 151 percent of average to 106 percent.
The National Weather Service is predicting the drying trend will continue for at least another few weeks.
Cold temperatures in the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges have kept the snowpack in place longer than usual, Armijo said.
High water levels flowing in the Rio Chama and Rio Grande make flyfishing a challenge but still possible, according to fishing guide Karen Denison of Santa Fe. She said fish head to the edges of rivers to seek shelter out of the swift currents. In the long stretches of the Rio Grande with boulders, Denison said, "if you are willing to boulder hop, you can still fish those edges."
For anglers, high water is not all bad news. "It does the streams great good in the long run," she said. "It scours out sediment, makes bugs happy. If bugs proliferate, the fish are happy."
Plus, unlike rafters who can seek whitewater only on the big rivers, anglers can always head to the lakes until the river flows calm down enough to wade. Heron, Abiquiú and Santa Cruz lakes are all reporting good fishing, Denison said.
Contact Staci Matlock at 470-9843 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.