Now that summer is virtually here, we decided it was time to go on a river trip and splash through cold water flowing off the San Juan Mountains and into the Chama River. Many people don’t know this river exists because it hides in one of New Mexico’s most remote and under-populated regions. Local river rats know it as a place to escape into the wilderness and surrender to river time close to Santa Fe.
The kind people at the BLM’s office in Taos sent us a permit to run the Chama River from El Vado Dam down to Big Eddy, and so we did exactly that. Apparently such permits are hard to come by with far more people applying than actually get the positive letter from the Taos office. We invited half of Santa Fe to join us and three people did.
New Mexico is short on rivers and water compared to other states in the West but we have incredible beauty on the Chama River. This is the largest tributary of the Rio Grande, gathering its water from snowpack in the South San Juan Mountains and sending it down through the railroad village of Chama, then on to Heron Reservoir, then El Vado Reservoir before the water is freed into the Wild and Scenic stretch of the river that also happens to be the Chama River Wilderness. After that beauty, the river gets bogged down in Abiquiu Reservoir before it flows into the Rio Grande at Okay Owenge Pueblo, long known as San Juan.
Risk taking river rats sometimes run the river above Heron Dam in kayaks but that trip is for really hard core people only with the possibility of fences crossing the river and cows staring you down through vacant eyes. More rational and irrational types put their various water craft in below El Vado Dam where you can drift off into three days of boating on river that has very few rapids but enough current to keep you moving along as the scenery changes gradually from timbered slopes over the adobe brown river to a world of sandstone walls towering overhead, yellow, red and purple as the afternoon shadows grow.
El Vado Dam has a little “resort” at its base called El Vado Ranch where you can buy corn chips and enlist “Up the Creek Shuttle Service” to shuttle your vehicle down to the take out for a small fee. You also meet the BLM river ranger there who inspects your gear, making sure you have a good way to dispose of your feces in an approved container, and that you know fires are not allowed when things are tinder dry. (The whole trip I imagined fire running out of any of the camp sites and finding itself hemmed in by sandstone. We saw our neighbors across the river violate the fire ban one night.)
Off we went, a hard sided canoe with Kevin at the paddle, a red ducky with Tim and Gretchen and our bulging raft, stacked with food, beer and enough clothing for any temperature shift that could come our way. Tim has run the Grand Canyon 5 times already, working the oars of 16 foot rafts through the most challenging rapids in North America. Kevin runs rivers alone mostly, feathering through rapids in his canoe, camping in silent side canyons all over the Southwest. I have run lots of rivers up and down the Rockies, just not in the last five years. The packrats had been living in our rolled up raft, eating holes in it to try to escape the cold winters.
The Chama is not a river that scares you with its rapids. Aragon Rapid needs some scouting so you know how to slalom through the rocks in the fast water running past a cliff. Later rapids are rock gardens where you peer downriver for the telling waves or piles of water that show where grounding rocks hide in the noisy water. In one of these my boatmate went flying out of the boat when we hit a rock hard, sideways. When she finally got to where I had grounded the boat among rocks, she had some bruises and not a dry thread on her body.
As you slip down the canyon the walls rise up around you, yellow, red, white, gray and purple. Its easy to look at them, like you look at the extraordinary displays of stars that spray across the sky when the last light is really gone from the west. The walls are really old. Geologists date them to the Mesozoic (145 to 250 million years old) from the time when North America was jammed against South America and much farther south and dinosaurs stomped around with blood dripping off their teeth.
Many of us have a tendency to skip over geologic information as timeline gobledegook that we decided not to engage in long ago. The Chama Canyon puts the rocks in your face. You can’t help but gaze at them in awe and unless you are wasted on Bud Lite, your mind seeks some explanation.
Sandstone gathers in layers, not like tree rings that organize themselves into annual rings, but in seemingly random layering that happens erratically over unknowable amounts of time. The time humans have existed is trivial in the scheme of Chama sandstones. Now and then you see a chunk of sandstone perched by the river, old water wave impressions fossilized on its surface from a body of water that has not existed for millions of years. But exist it did and now the earth is uplifting those old sediments, eroding them away over more millions of years and depositing them down river where they will be arranged again for millions of years before facing more changes and erosions. Though it all you and I are completely unimportant. Our lives are so short in the large picture, we don’t even register as a blip, or a tiny spark flying off a burning tree.
Once you’ve thought about all of that, you finally pass the Christ in the Desert Monastery on river left. Its adobe buildings and beautiful church with high windows against the red cliffs seem to fit in with this place. The church bell clanged when we floated past and I could see why some people cling to a God . Time created us and time will erase us with nothing but some plastic debris and ruins of cities to show for this crazy time we live.
Hops grow near the church which are for beer the monks used to make on site called “Monk’s Ale” until demand grew and they moved brewing to Moriarity. The monks continue to control the brewing so it is not a “contract” arrangement such as Bosque Brewing has with a Denver brewery.
The roughest stretch of the river awaits you after the monastery. Trains of waves jostle you around, tree corpses that have washed off eroding banks lie partly submerged everywhere it seems, and “the Wall” rapid tests your remaining arm strength as you keep your boat from slamming into a shale wall where the current goes right against a cliff. This is your last test before the take-out at Big Eddy where people drink whatever beer is left from their trip and roll up their boats in the hot summer sun.
Speaking of beer, we brought a few six packs of canned beer on ice for the trip. We had Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing, Bosque IPA and Santa Fe Brewing 7K. Much as I like local beer, the Hazy Little Thing was the hands-down winner of the nightly taste tests among our group of discerning drinkers. However, Santa Fe Brewing has really improved with their 7K which is as good as any IPA from master brewers.
Get out on the river! Have some fun.
