Andre Spino-Smith scoots his Waka kayak into the trickling Arkansas River. It’s barely flowing at 350 cubic-feet-per-second in the river above the Pine Creek stretch. The rapids below are meek, far from the raging rowdiness of a couple months earlier when the steep section of Class V rapids here peaked at nearly 1,700 cfs.
“You know, it doesn’t matter what the flow is,” says Spino-Smith, a former professional kayaker who has probably paddled this stretch more than anyone else in the last quarter century. “I always have fun on this river.”
Today, the Upper Arkansas River between Leadville and Pueblo is the source of a lot of fun. While it primarily serves as a source of urban water, that tumbling snowmelt delivers a secondary but critical benefit of countless good times.
The river boasts one of the most vibrant trout populations in the land and floats more paying rafters than any stretch of river in the country. The Upper Arkansas River’s modern-day role of floating rubber and sating cities has evolved over many centuries.
The Arkansas River from Leadville down to Pueblo sustained Indigenous people for most of that time. Then came the miners and railroad builders and high country settlers. The waterway was a thoroughfare for floating beaver pelts and fresh hewn lumber to market. Then it was a dumping ground for miners scouring deep holes for gold and silver. Its meandering path through craggy gorges marked an easy route for railroad builders who breathed new life into former mining towns at the dawn of the 20th century.
The Upper Arkansas River continues to feed its communities, but residents extract less from the endlessly rolling water. Before reaching taps in thirsty cities and sprinklers on the arid plains, the river is celebrated for being, well, a river. Recreation in the water has expanded to trails above the canyons, anchoring economies that are increasingly dependent on natural beauty.
That embrace of the lifeblood of the Upper Arkansas Valley continues to evolve as communities grapple with larger and larger crowds and new residents flocking to a place where water runs and stars sparkle.
“National models for what people want”
Mike Harvey leans on his shovel, whistles and points.
Tommy Garcia, piloting a John Deere 345 excavator in the middle of the Arkansas River, turns his head and swings his boulder-pinching bucket toward Harvey. Garcia, with Lowry Construction, deftly drops a massive stone in the river, right where Harvey is pointing.
“That machine is pretty impressive to watch, isn’t it?” says Harvey, standing atop a gently sloping, freshly poured slab of concrete in September.
In a few days, Garcia will shift more boulders and the Arkansas River will flow over that slab, creating a glassy standing wave. Even with super-low fall flows, the surfers will flock, just as they do downstream at Harvey’s slab-formed Scout Wave in his hometown of Salida.
This is the third time in more than a decade that Harvey has tinkered with the Pocket Wave in the Buena Vista Whitewater Park. Buena Vista locals — led by the Friends of the Buena Vista River Park — raised more than $150,000 to support this year’s $240,000 rebuild of the Pocket Wave.
Harvey and the park builders at the pioneering Recreational Engineering and Planning firm have deployed the heavy equipment operators from Lowry Construction to build both the Buena Vista and Salida parks. Piloting quarter-million-dollar excavators, they nimbly pluck giant boulders as if they were pepper shakers, twisting and turning them to fit so just in the river puzzle. Harvey directs the rocky Tetris like a maestro, pointing and whistling over the machine’s rumbling diesel engine.
Two decades ago, nascent whitewater parks on Colorado rivers were largely about economics and luring visitors. Now they are more about local amenities and community-based recreation. That resonates with communities in the Midwest, says Harvey, who has designed and built more than a dozen river parks in Colorado as well as parks in Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas.
“Salida and Buena Vista are national models for what people want,” says Harvey, noting the cooperation of the local South Main developer, a nonprofit and the Buena Vista recreation department in designing and building the Buena Vista Whitewater Park and miles of hiking and biking trails spiderwebbing above the river.
Salida and Buena Vista are “making their river the focal point of their community in a way that drives economics and works for locals.” And other riverside communities are watching.
“For towns in the Midwest, we are seeing communities trying to figure out how to keep young people around and they want to make their town as attractive as possible,” Harvey says. “And younger generations don’t necessarily want golf courses. They want bike trails and surfable waves.”
Harvey said river parks have “democratized the river” for the recreation generation, the growing demographic of young and old championing outdoor play as a sort of life purpose. Being able to safely play in swift water once required years of practice with wise mentors. Now, river park lineups, like at the Scout Wave in Salida, include school kids carving potato-chip surfboards next to middle-aged moms and land-locked surfer bros.
“I think there’s going to be a profound impact in the coming decades as these kids grow older and start businesses and families here,” says Harvey, whose son, Miles, grew up surfing his dad’s waves in Salida and now ranks as one of the world’s top river surfers. “These kids are going to be business leaders who clearly recognize the value of the river.”
Private investment, public reward
Like Harvey, Brice Karsh has spent long days improving his stretch of the Arkansas River. Karsh just dropped about $100,000 to improve riparian habitat along 300 yards of Arkansas River at his 262-acre Rolling J Ranch at the confluence of the river and the Lake Fork of the Arkansas and Halfmoon Creek. He hosts anglers and is planning another $200,000 to improve the fishing on the property downstream of Leadville he bought in 2016.
“There are 300 head of elk in the willows outside my window right now,” he says on a warm Tuesday in late October.
He’s used mapping technology to plan his million-dollar restoration effort on nearly 2.5 miles of riverfront. His ranch is just downstream from the 30-year, $40 million Superfund project in the 18-square-mile California Gulch, where federal cleanup of more than 2,000 mine waste piles and miles of toxin-leaking underground mines dating back to the 1860s is nearing its end.
His property, Karsh says, has been transformed “from outhouse to penthouse.”
“The people who do have access to the public areas below me and above me, just below Turquoise Lake, they catch my fish all the time,” he says of prized golden palomino trout he’s released into the river. “Private land owners who put a lot of money into their watersheds should not be forgotten when we celebrate trophy waters in the Arkansas and elsewhere. When we invest, everyone wins.”
“Every pan is a scratch ticket”
Kevin Singel is a guardian of one definitively old-school use of the Arkansas River. The Silverthorne resident and guidebook author is highly respected among the thousands of recreational gold panners who poke through eddies in Colorado rivers every year, sifting through sediment in search of shiny flakes swirling in their ridged pans.
“It doesn’t take a very big piece to be exciting,” Singel says, poking a shovel into a pile of rocks just below a shack-sized boulder on the Arkansas River. “I’ve had some amazing experiences just downstream of big rocks.”
Singel has more than 28,000 members who follow his Facebook posts detailing how to find gold in Colorado. His 2018 “Finding Gold in Colorado: Prospector’s Edition” details 186 sites he’s visited in his search for gold. His 2023 “Finding Gold in Colorado: The Wandering Prospector” details 270 legal-to-pan locations where Singel suspects there could be gold.
Not much has changed for how placer mining prospectors pan for gold. But everything else around the rivers has changed.
The 1859 gold rush in Colorado followed economic distress back East that sent countless young people West in search of fortune waiting in rocky landscapes. Many mountain communities were established during that rush as miners stuck around after scouring the hills.
“The history is powerful. We all feel it,” says Singel.
After many decades of poking and prodding through the rivers, the frequency of finding life-changing nuggets has faded. A full day of panning typically yields flecks that make up a fraction of a gram. It’s been many years since a Colorado panner scored big.
Most panners count a win with tiny hydrophobic grains that flicker in a swirl of sandy sediment.
“We call it flour gold or even fly-poop gold,” Singel says. “You just never know. This is like scratch lottery tickets. Every pan is a scratch ticket.”
Suddenly, the sun glints in black sand swirling in his blue pan.
“There we go. That’s what we are chasing,” he says, scooping the speckles into a tiny vial.
After a couple decades of prospecting, Singel tips his vials of gold flakes into jeweler melting pots. He turns his bits of gold collected from a couple dozen rivers across Colorado into wedding rings and pendants for his wife, nieces and nephews.
“I make them come digging with me too,” Singel says. “It’s become a thing for our family.”
A 100-mile video map of the Ark
Brian Ellis and his team at Wilderness Aware recently floated the Arkansas River from Granite through Cañon City with a 360-degree camera. The uploaded photos provide a foot-by-foot Google Street View of more than 100 miles of the river and its rapids. Ellis hopes the video can expose more potential rafters to the thrills of whitewater.
“We are thinking this could open the river to a lot more people,” says Ellis, who started guiding on the Arkansas River in 1999 and he bought the venerable Wilderness Aware rafting company in 2019.
In the late 1990s, whitewater rafting was on the edge; “kind of an extreme sport,” says Ellis, sitting on a rock down by the Wilderness Aware boat ramp.
Today, it’s much more mainstream and there are a lot more folks paddling their own rafts. Wilderness Aware, on the banks of the Arkansas River at the put-in for the easy Milk Run downstream of Buena Vista, offers boaters private river access and a parking lot. Back in the 1990s, there were maybe 100 boaters using that put-in every season. Today, more than 100 boaters pass through the Wilderness Aware boat ramp every summer weekend.
And that growth in private traffic has accompanied a general flattening and even a decline in the number of commercial rafters. Still, the more than 200,000 paying customers rafting with 45 outfitters every year makes the Arkansas River the most commercially rafted stretch of water in the country.
The Arkansas River Headwaters Recreation Area, which spans 152 miles and 5,355 acres along the Arkansas River between Leadville and Florence, hosted 1.13 million visitors in 2024. That’s up 314,000 — or 40% — from 2014.
The management system for the AHRA is a national blueprint for regional and federal collaboration. The recreation area is managed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife and covers four counties as the river winds through Forest Service and BLM land and a national monument.
In the early 1990s, rafting outfitters proposed a one-of-a-kind arrangement with the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and the powerful Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which manages the complex Fryingpan-Arkansas Project that diverts water from the Western Slope into the Arkansas River drainage to water some 900,000 users along the growing Front Range.
Since the early 1990s, the Voluntary Flow Management Program has rafts floating on about 700 cfs every day between early July and the middle of August by timing the release of up to 10,000 acre-feet of water each year from Twin Lakes. The program gives the Arkansas River one of the most reliable boating seasons in the state. In 2022, nearly 200,000 commercial rafters on the Arkansas River spent about $39 million, supporting 498 jobs and creating a $50 million economic impact in the region. Almost all of that impact is delivered in June, July and August.
“The folks who have the biggest interests in this river — the owners of all the water rights and the Front Range municipalities— they have a much greater understanding of what this resource means to recreation now than they did 20 years ago,” Ellis says.
Harvey, standing in the Arkansas a few miles upstream of Ellis’ rafting company headquarters, agrees. He too is seeing a bit of a local pushback on development that draws tourists to the Arkansas River when tax funds could maybe be better spent on things like housing and infrastructure. That’s certainly the case across most of Colorado, where a growing number of communities are redirecting lodging tax dollars once dedicated to tourism marketing toward things like early education, housing and trails.
“It’s funny how you can actually kick out the other side of the economic development argument into a place where people are saying ‘Hey pump the brakes,’” Harvey says.
But it’s coming from a deepening local attachment to the Arkansas River, Harvey says.
“What’s changed here is the level of collaboration,” he said. “What’s impressive here and probably is a model for other places is how these varied interests work together to meet their own needs while protecting the resource. I’m not sure other communities have such an impressive coalition around their river.”
Both Harvey and Ellis appreciate the renewed vigor in supporting the river but they fret the accompanying shift that is scrutinizing the visitors who flock to the valley.
The summer months are, obviously, exceptionally busy along the Arkansas River. And that is stirring a bit of a shift in communities hosting all that traffic. While lots of people visit the Arkansas River, today, a lot of people are moving closer to the river. The population in Chaffee and Fremont counties is up 20% in the last decade. That growth has shifted public sentiment around the river.
“People have moved here to better appreciate the river and its resources. But back in the 1990s and early 2000s, that often meant a lot of support for rafting. But that’s changing now,” says Ellis, who employs 40 workers at the height of summer. “That’s a little bit of backlash against rafting and visitors. Some people want town to be quieter in the summer because the restaurants are too full and the streets are too crowded. It’s an interesting dynamic, with a growing number of folks who are maybe not in the working world around them. And maybe they don’t recognize how badly we need that tourism flow to support the local economy.”
In the dark
Browns Canyon National Monument, nearly a decade after it was designated by President Barack Obama, secured International Dark Sky Park certification in December 2024. The campaign was organized by the nonprofit Friends of Browns Canyon, which regularly hosts night-sky gatherings and hired tech-equipped light measuring scientists to earn the recognition by DarkSky International.
The Friends of Browns Canyon group also was instrumental in forcing the Surface Transportation Board to scrutinize a plan to revive railroad traffic over Tennessee Pass and along the Arkansas River through Browns Canyon, the Royal Gorge and Cañon City. The board in 2021 nixed a request for expedited approval of trains on the Tennessee Pass Line, which has not seen trains since 1997.
While that 2021 decision was a victory for communities vehemently opposed to restoring train traffic along the Arkansas River, the threat is not dead. The Tennessee Pass plan was proposed by Colorado Midland & Pacific, which promised it would only transport people and perhaps construction materials, but not crude oil on the mountain route owned by Union Pacific.
The company that owns Colorado Midland & Pacific is the planned operator of the Uinta Basin Railway in Utah. That controversial 88-mile railroad was approved by the Surface Transportation Board in 2021 but a federal appeals court overturned that approval in 2023. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned that 2023 court decision earlier this year, resuscitating a plan that would route 2-mile-long trains loaded with Uinta Basin waxy crude along the Colorado River and through the Moffat Tunnel and metro Denver en route to Gulf Coast refineries. A secondary route for that eastbound crude could be over Tennessee Pass; a possibility that galvanizes communities who fear oil-train traffic along the Arkansas River would be a step back to that industrial use of their quiet, natural waterway.
“We have come such a long way from the mining and the railroads being economic drivers to the rafters and anglers, who pioneered recreation as the new economy in this valley,” said Michael Kunkel, who cofounded Friends of Browns Canyon and has lived in Chaffee County for more than 25 years.
“Depending on how the chips fall with the Uinta Basin Railway, I think trains on Tennessee Pass could come back. And we’ve got to fight that. There is no more precious resource than water.”
That water — for drinking, farms, fish and fun — has shaped unique communities along the Arkansas River. And those communities are increasingly ready to step up and protect the lifeblood of their valley.
“It’s still the river that is driving everything here,” Kunkel said.
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