Tag: Warm Springs rapid

Low Water Run of the Yampa River, Part 7: Running Warm Springs Rapid

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Dear Reader, Warm Springs is the biggest rapid on the river; a jumble of house-sized rocks that’d tumbled down off the rock walls, leaving fresh scars up above. At high water, the Class 4 rapid is scary with big holes and waves. The river races and crashes and turns back on itself as it gets constricted between the huge boulders. But at low water, the danger is different: It’s getting pinned on a rock without enough water to wash you and your boat over it. Arriving at Warm Springs On Day 4 we arrived at Warm Springs Rapid. We’d been …

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Low-water Run of the Yampa River, Part 4: Running Low Water

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Dear Reader, The river gauge on the Yampa would have read between 1000 and 2000 cfs (cubic feet per second moving past the gauge) on a normal late-June day. On this particular day, though, it read half that much, at 600 cfs. And it was dropping. The Only Ones on the River We were the only group at the put-in. Everyone else, who we normally would’ve had to share the river with, had canceled or been scared away. Even the shuttle company we’d hired to drive our vehicles from the put-in, in Colorado, to the take-out in Utah, had told …

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