Click the link to read the article on the National Public Radio website (Ari Shapiro/Luke Runyon). Here’s an excerpt:
October 15, 2024
There’s a lot of anxiety about climate change shrinking Lake Powell, but it also means whitewater rapids upstream have re-emerged. Thrillseekers can now run them for the first time since the 1960s.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
At the bottom of a deep, red rock canyon in the desert southwest, the Colorado River is restoring itself, or at least a part of itself, even as climate change shrinks its volume. And that has river enthusiasts celebrating. Long-forgotten whitewater rapids are reemerging upstream. Reporter Luke Runyon set out to find more.
LUKE RUNYON, BYLINE: Ah. We just docked our boats to scout Gypsum Canyon Rapid. The sky is blue. The sun is out. It’s hot, and you can hear the water roaring.
PETE LEFEBVRE: I’m just going to go down this main wave train and look for this doamer (ph) rock and tuck underneath that.
RUNYON: Professional river guide Pete Lefebvre has been down Cataract Canyon more than 130 times, but he’s never seen Gypsum Rapid. And it looks mean, a churning, roiling mess of water and boulders.
PETE LEFEBVRE: It’s steep. It’s sharp. It’s a must-make move. And I’m nervous (laughter).
RUNYON: Lefebvre has never seen this rapid because for more than 50 years, it’s been buried under mud. Cataract Canyon is a transition zone, where the dammed up waters of Lake Powell start backing up, and sediment buries whatever’s on the bottom. But since 2000, Lake Powell has dropped 100 feet. So here, the river is starting to behave like a river again, carving down and excavating these long-buried boulders. Mike DeHoff is another experienced river-runner.
MIKE DEHOFF: Cataract Canyon, I think, these days is like a friend that was in a car accident or had a terrible sickness that has come home from the hospital.
RUNYON: In 2019, he and Pete Lefebvre started the Returning Rapids Project. DeHoff’s wife, Meg Flynn, a librarian in nearby Moab, keeps its archive. Using old photos from before Lake Powell’s dam was built, they anticipate when and where new rapids might again show themselves.
MEG FLYNN: We see here how flowing water brings life and that the river, if you give it a chance, can recover at a rate that is really astounding to all of us.