It’s late May at Lee’s Ferry, the starting point for rafting trips down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.
The ferry lies at the end of a two-lane asphalt road that snakes under cliff faces the color of campfire embers.
It’s hot. There’s the smell of spray-on sunscreen, the buzz of excited crowds, and — beyond that — the extrasensory vibrations of a tinge of collective anxiety.
Anxiety, because the water level in the river is on the lower side of normal for this time of year. Because a historically dry winter in terms of snowpack in some parts of the West means less water in Lake Powell, and less water released into the Colorado River by Glen Canyon Dam. Because, aside from the millions of people who rely on the river system for water and hydropower, there’s an entire river rafting economy in the Grand Canyon that does not know what to expect going forward.
“Do I foresee a possible negative impact on our numbers of people going? Potentially,” says Dennis Smoldt, the general manager of Arizona Raft Adventures, or AzRA, a commercial rafting company that leads tours down the canyon.
Standing near tourists decked out in multicolored polyester shirts, pants and wide-brimmed hats, one of AzRA’s owners, Fred Thevenin, says bookings are down this year by about 25%, but that it’s hard to say exactly why. For one thing, he wonders if it’s because increased interest in recreation during the COVID-19 pandemic has worn off.
“It's still not that bad. Our numbers are still doing pretty good,” Thevenin says near the boat launch.
Smoldt and Thevenin explain that a layman who’s rafting down the Colorado this June might not notice anything amiss: The river has been lower in years past and still accommodated commercial rafting trips, they say.
But it’s the future that gives them some pause. The West is in the midst of a 26-year megadrought, and it’s unclear when or if that might change.
Today, AzRA is taking a group of National Park and Grand Canyon Conservancy employees on a voyage 225 miles down the river to Diamond Creek.
“The lower water [level] is a concern for all of us,” says Linda Cook, the senior philanthropy officer for the conservancy. “The whole aridification of the West, the wildfires, the drought, it's a pressing issue.”
Mark Streeter, a river guide sitting aboard a boat called the Mount Emma, agrees with Cook.
“It's definitely a point of conversation, wondering what will happen,” says Streeter, who works for Grand Canyon Expeditions. “The question for me, I'm seven years into my career, what happens when it's 1,000 or 2,000 cubic feet per second lower as an average? What happens then? I don't know, and a lot of the experts I've talked to aren't sure either.”
Looking upriver: Lake Powell
All this aquatic consternation can be traced upriver, to lower water levels in Lake Powell. The second-largest reservoir in the U.S. is rapidly dwindling due to climate change and overuse.
Already this year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has said it will ratchet back the total amount of water released from Glen Canyon Dam into the Colorado River to the lowest amount in decades.
That’s meant to prop up the dam, which is approaching a point where the low reservoir level could fail to generate electricity and threaten the dam’s structural integrity.
A new preliminary Colorado River management plan released by Reclamation proposes cutting the amount of water Glen Canyon Dam releases into the Colorado even further.
In an emailed statement provided to KNAU, a Reclamation spokesperson wrote that in the absence of state-level consensus about sharing the river’s water, the feds will release their own Colorado River management plan later this summer “to provide certainty and stability for the Colorado River Basin.”
In the pines, in the pines
Hundreds of miles away in Flagstaff, a river outfitter who supplies boats for private trips has many of the same fears. Scott Davis, one of the owners of Ceiba Adventures, says his company’s bottom line hasn’t been impacted by lower flows besides a couple canceled motorboat trips.
Still, while sitting around a table in his boathouse, it’s clear Ceiba’s economic future is on his mind.
“I can say I legitimately worry about it, but most of it is out of my hands,” says Davis.
It’s not just possible revenue lost: In future years, if water levels drop much further than where they are now, it could change the river rafting community. He says safety is a concern.
“It becomes incredibly dangerous, and it becomes incredibly violent,” he says. “For the big motorboats, it's a whole different deal to navigate through the Grand Canyon at 5,000 [cubic feet per second] or below. For the boatmen, it's incredibly difficult and challenging. Damaging equipment is very common.”
Below a certain water level, Davis thinks there could be fewer motorboats operating in the Grand Canyon, and more rowboats. If that happens, it could change the cadence of river-trip launches due to the potential for congestion. That could also mean less refrigerated food taken on trips, less equipment and longer trips overall.
But no matter how low the water gets, if there is a river to float on, Davis says he doesn’t foresee dampened enthusiasm for rafting it.
“You would hear some grumbling for a while, but it's just one of those things that we have to adapt to because of the environment that we're living in now,” Davis says.
In spite of everything, he says he’s optimistic about the future of his business and his peers’ businesses.
“I have a lot of confidence in, you know, the various commercial outfitters, private trip outfitters and science [expeditions] being able to adapt, but it will change,” he says. “It will change the dynamics of everything.”
Historically low snowpack this last winter has already caused financial problems for river raft companies in Colorado, like those operating on the Fraser and Arkansas rivers.
Meanwhile, riverboat adventure continues
But back on the Colorado River, it’s hard to tell such big changes might one day be coming for companies like AzRA.
Blueish-green water churns under the thrum of the motorboat engine as the trip moves downriver. Red and black limestone cliffs peer overhead. The occasional cliff swallow flits by.
On the left of the motorboat, a gravely sandbar is covered in water, something that causes Fred Thevenin’s anxiety to melt away.
“This is my first trip of the season, and everybody's been talking about the lower flows,” he says. “Then I come down here, and I'm going through this channel, and there's still water on this gravel bar. I've seen this gravel bar like two feet out of the water.”
So the trip carries on, boats with the current, borne ceaselessly into the future.
