Yampa River Trip

Monday, July 6, 2009

Last week, I got to work as a volunteer tamarisk destroyer along the Yampa River with the monument's botanist and a work crew of 24 people including monument employees, members of the Wasatch Mountain Club, and members of Friends of the Yampa.

Tamarisk (also called salt cedar) is a tree-like shrub that is entirely non-native to this continent. It was introduced from Asia in the 1800s and cultivated in the American west as an ornamental shrub where it quickly spread and infiltrated deeply into riparian communities. It is a bank-stabilizer and its seeds are easily transported by wind. As the tree travels downstream, it competes with and dominates over most native plants, producing swaths of dense thickets on the river banks. The problem with this in Dinosaur is that certain species of fish require cobble bars to breed their young. The tamarisk roots itself into these cobbles and traps sediment flowing downstream. The cobble bars are quickly inundated with this sand, choking out the natural breeding habitat of these fish, effectively wiping them from the river over time.

The Yampa River is the last undammed and undiverted river in the Colorado tributary system. Hopefully these factions will remain deadlocked with eachother forever. Here is a map of our route (in red), 71 miles!:

















Because the river is wild, it has a very short rafting season, from late April to Late June. This stretch of it is regulated by the National Park Service, and in order to win a permit to float down it, you have to compete with thousands of others in a lottery system. Only two commercial and two private parties are allowed to launch at Deerlodge every day - this is intended to keep the feeling of being alone in a wild place intact for each party. Even a resource management trip for the Monument itself, like ours, had to be scheduled in carefully. I'm so incredibly lucky to have had this experience.

SO! On June 26th my field partner and I got in our truck to head over to the monument's Colorado headquarters to meet up with the river crew. We had just crossed the Green River and were on our way towards CO when the truck started dying. Apparently cars need gas to function... Don't ask how that happened, it was pretty stupid of us. Everytime the car lost power, we'd stop it and then restart it and it would drive us a liiiittle bit further. We turned around and made it to the last gas station for 30 miles but then realized that neither of us had our wallets or our cell phones because we were told not to bring them on the river. We could've left them in the car though, doh.. So we were stuck without money or communication and it was raining and we were a couple miles from our boss's house in a dead car. We got it started again and then drove it as far up the road as we could, about 3/4 mile. I got out and ran the last mile or so up to Dan's house (in pouring rain) to shamefacedly tell him that we needed gas and money, haha.

He was really great about it, already had a gas can filled in his backyard, so we were able to quickly fill the tank with a gallon and drive it to the gas station. Dan is the best.

We arrived (only!) 30 minutes late, hoped into the river truck and drove through the rain to the put-in at Deerlodge Park. We helped to load the rafts with about 1000 lbs (no kidding) of equipment each, had a brief meeting, and then lunch of deliiicious quinoa salad before embarking.

The first day we only floated down a couple of miles before camping at Anderson Hole (yes):


We spent the afternoon picking all the leafy spurge we could find at this location. I think it's a beautiful plant, but it's aggressively invasive and non-native, so it has to die. We picked this weed all along the trip whenever we saw it. I found so many fossilized brachiopods up in the drainages while looking for the spurge! They were articulated with very nice ridges, and they were both embedded in rock as well as freed and littering the ground, it was amazing.

We camped at this location on the beach. I loved hearing the steady flow of the river all night.

Saturday morning was a long boating day, something like 24 miles. I rode in John's boat and he taught me the basics of reading water and rowing with 2 oars (it's harder than I thought!). I got to row for most of that day, slowly understanding the reasoning for rowing backwards when you want to go forward. When you want to avoid an obstacle, you point the bow of your boat towards the obstacle at an angle and start rowing backwards as the river carries you past it. It's a cool trick and was something I got to practice quite a bit.

My awesome instructor:

His friend Bumbles, the abominable snowman from that old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer claymation film, is strapped on the bow of his raft. Bumbles has lost a few toes and is looking mangy and has been brutalized by so many river trips. Once, he was almost smashed into a steep wall, but John cried "Bumbles nooooooooo!", rowed backwards with all his might, and spared Bumbles that fate.

At one point along the river, we parked our rafts and got out for a 1/4 mile hike to some petroglyphs:



And there was even this one underneath an overhang:



We camped Saturday night in this increeeedible semi-goosenecked canyon. This was by far my favorite place to camp because I found my own secluded little beach downriver away from the group.
My clothes are drying on tamarisk, by the way.

I really fell in love with this part of the river. We got to camp here for two nights, so after dinner I would sit in the sand and read until dusk and then spend an hour poking around in the cobbles on the shore, looking for fossils and skipping stones. So many of these cobbles were fossiliferous! I found these bryozoans:

And bits of bivalves:

There were lots of corals too.

Sunday was spent working here, as this area is a major seed-source for tamarisk spread. We lopped branches:

Carried them to huge piles:

Dug around to expose roots:

And worked on the tripod crews, ripping the stump and its roots out of the ground:
During the lunch break and after work, most everyone would put on their life jacket and jump in the river upstream from all our rafts. It was cold and clear and you could float quite a ways down the river towards my beach where the current picked up and carried you beneath a tree. It felt so good. It was also important to ignore the fact that everyone's urine from our group and from groups further upstream was somewhere in the river. The Groover is the toilet that these rafting trips are required to bring along for such large groups. Four thousand people raft down this river every year, that would be 4,000 catholes dug around the camping areas if it weren't for The Groover. But it was only used for number 2; we were required to pee in the river. Yes, required. I love how freespirited everyone was on this trip, especially these old 65 year old ladies who had no qualms about holding onto a tree limb, squatting with their butts hanging over the river, and going in front of the entire group.

On Monday we rafted 1/4 mile down the river to an island that *was* infested with tamarisk. We spent the whole day working there, creating this pile of branches and stumps that will be allowed to dry out over the winter. Next summer, when the trees are dead, a team of people will come through and send these piles down the river:

Tuesday was another long, exciting boating day which included going through the class IV rapid Warm Springs (named one of the West's 10 Biggest Drops), meeting the Green River at its confluence with the Yampa in Echo Park (!), and rafting between the incredible geology and ancient rocks exposed in Whirlpool Canyon to our next camping site at Jone's Hole.

Everyone was really nervous about Warm Springs. Our leader was told that if another flip occured in that rapid, the program would have to be shut down. The week before our trip, there had been so much rain that there was a hole the size of a school bus in the middle of the rapid and two NPS rafts had flipped in it. We parked upstream from Warm Springs and all of the boatsmen got out to scout the rapid. Turns out that the river had gone down a little in volume and the rapid was manageable. Nobody flipped.

The confluence with the Green was sort of anticlimactic. I expected us to come rushing in upon another rushing river, but instead, the two beasts combine into this very placid, slow-moving expanse of water, with cattail-hoisting sandbars speckled in here and there.

Echo Park:

Mitten Park fault:

You can see this fault from high above at the terminus of the Harper's Corner trail, where it looks even more spectacular:

Floating through Whirlpool Canyon:

Made it to our last camping spot at Jone's Hole:

Wednesday saw us working a half day, pulling the tamarisk from the camping site. THIS tami was one tough cookie. I had to wack a boulder out of its roots that was the size of four bricks. I'm especially proud of this root because I did all the lopping, digging, prepwork, and final pulling of the stump myself. It was a little beast in those cobbles:

This guy is awesome because --



While most everyone was hiking around up in Jone's Hole, and while I was 4 miles uptrail hanging out at this place:


A microburst swooped in with lightning and rain and blew my tent (with everything in it!) away. Of course, this was the one night I hadn't bothered with stakes. Never making that mi-stake [foghorn] again. He ran after my tent, returned it to where it had been, and tied it to a huge branch and some rocks. He saved the belongings of a number of other people as well, good man. I'm grateful that my down sleeping bag didn't end up in the river!

Thursday we rigged the boats one last time and floated through beeeaaaaautiful Island Park. Check out this fault:

Left side of the river

Right side of the river

Whole thing from a little further downstream

We made it through the final class III rapids mostly intact, after an exciting rescue of two ladies who flipped their duckies in Moonshine, and reached the take-out at Split Mountain in the afternoon.

Talk about a life changing experience.