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Rafting On Borrowed Water

The Colorado River is limping along on temporary fixes

Jun 21, 2026

On a hot Friday afternoon, we put our packrafts into the tepid water of the Colorado River. A truck with a trailer pulled a large whitewater raft off the sizzling concrete boat ramp. A couple of girls sat on a deflating paddleboard folding itself in half, asking for a pump that no one had.

We pushed out into the slow-moving water, waved goodbye to J, and thought nothing of our takeout 40 miles and three days downriver.

The chatter, to start, was mostly about our jobs and feelings of deep overwhelm. As Grand Junction receded behind us in the summer heat, I was grateful Microsoft Office could not hurt me here.

What I did worry might hurt me was a small hole fizzling in a seam in the front of my boat that I had failed to notice or patch before launching. That trickle of bubbles required a pump or two of extra inflation every 3-4 hours. It was by no means a catastrophic failure of the raft, but the annoyance of the stream of lost air gnawed at the edge of my thoughts the entire float. What if it gets worse and the raft can’t be inflated and we’re miles from the takeout? What if it’s this way forever and can’t be repaired? I tried to put it out of my mind, but it agitated me in the way a small fine splinter from a prickly pear cactus gets stuck in your fingertips and stings you with every touch.

Meanwhile, the very water that vaguely threatened to sink my raft was running historically low after Colorado’s worst snowpack year since records began. There was barely any water to speak of. With nearly all the state in drought and 80 percent in severe drought, there was irony in my fears of sinking.

However, by Loma, 14 miles later, we were racing daylight. And because of that, we were no longer talking about work and I wasn’t thinking much of the pinhole, but rather the many beavers who glided across the river and slapped their broad tails at us as well as the dozens of great blue herons fishing the banks, squawking big honking squawks, and roosting up in the tips of bushes.

We hauled out on a steep, muddy beach with the last squeeze of daylight and ate dinner in the dark at 9:30pm.

All night long, a skunk wandered in and out of camp, waking us up with its stink, and I wondered how we would de-skunk two packrafters while on the river.

Of course, it never came to that. The skunk let us be and anyway, by 7am it was too hot to stay in bed. We made instant coffee and instant oatmeal and eggs that were somehow both raw and burned.

We spent the morning walking down the canyon looking for petroglyphs and found only modern scrapings that so-and-so was here and loved this other so-and-so and one scraping of a deer that was questionable.

In the heat of the late morning, we packed the boats and dragged them over the steep ramp of the bank—made steeper by the achingly low river levels—and pushed out for our second campsite.

With just eight river miles that day, we opted to paddle as little as possible and mostly let the river pull us along at its ambling pace.

As of June, Lake Powell is less than a quarter full. A hundred miles upstream, Flaming Gorge Reservoir is now sending 100 million acre-feet of water downstream. Folks around Grand Junction have commented that the river looks better, not realizing they’re seeing an emergency release rather than a recovery.

I trailed my hand through the languid current and thought that this whole trip we were floating on borrowed water.

A friend had told me to keep my eyes peeled for our day-two campsite because it could be tough to spot, especially at low water. And I listened to this advice, and also, we nearly missed our campsite.

The extremely low water levels made the map tough to trust. As we pulled around the tip of an island, we realized the island extended much farther than it must have in previous, higher water years. So far in fact that we had drifted slightly beyond our campsite on the wrong side of the river and had to turn about face and claw our way back upriver to the sandy bank. We hopped out of the rafts in the shallow rocks and dragged our boats behind us the last 30 or 40 feet through swiftly running water.

As we deflated our rafts and dug out our gear, the afternoon winds started pulling up canyon.

We set up our chairs and cracked open our books and beers under the shade of a single cottonwood tree and thought little of the oven-like waves blowing over us. The breeze kept the biting flies away and offered a little reprieve from the heat. But an hour later, those gusts grew up to 30 miles per hour while the sand whipped across our faces, exfoliating our eyeballs.

Around 6 pm, I began wondering if it would even be possible to set up the tent for the night, let alone cook dinner over the small flame of a JetBoil. We left our dry bags piled under the cottonwood and headed for the edge of the river, where the bank created a tiny windbreak. We pressed our backs into the sand, hiding against the bank of the river, and watched clouds whip over the lip of the canyon.

Each of us had a big sip of mezcal, half a lime, and a lot of sand in our cups. A few rafters paddled past our site, their faces flattened by the wind and we raised our mugs to them as a sort of salute and thanked the river gods we weren’t the suckers still on the water.

When the winds finally calmed down around 8pm and we were getting snuggly in our beds watching the light fade from the day, we heard several rafters still scraping their way downriver, likely behind schedule from the five hours of gale force winds.

We heard a group paddle by well after the stars had popped out, who sounded moderately panicked. Checking the map, I saw they were still at least four miles from the nearest campsite— possibly further depending on what they’d actually booked.

We would have invited them up, but the water past our site was moving fast and they were too far downriver before I could find my headlamp. And it was a warm night, and the river was flat and safe, and I was already cuddled in for the night with my book. What more could I do?

I lay in my tent listening to the bugs bonk against the mesh and jumped out of my skin all night long when the trains periodically roared by on the far bank.

By morning, the river had visibly dropped. A wet line in the sand showed the river had receded at least six inches from the night before. And though it is not uncommon for the river to change levels in this way, I had a momentary vision of the Colorado running completely dry—the afternoon wind blowing sand over round river rocks and sparse lizards. I pictured Flaming Gorge as just a pit in the earth. I shook the image from my head and then we were packed and back on the water.

We only had 15 miles until the takeout, but after the previous day’s wind, we wanted to start paddling early and be off the river before 1pm.

Through the morning and afternoon, the canyons rose and fell until the ancient black metamorphic rocks appeared out of the river, weathered and worn by wind and water. These Precambrian chunks of schist and gneiss are nearly 1.8 billion years old, incredibly dense, and much more resistant to erosion than the Mesozoic walls throughout the rest of the canyon. They are some of the oldest rocks in the entire Grand Valley and they looked as though they’d been placed in the water decoratively, like rhinestones on a bedazzled denim jacket.

When the gigantic geologic features finally fell away, we floated into ranchland and scraggly high desert that yawned on either side of the river—a horizon on either side finally visible.

And then, without much fanfare or warning, we were at the takeout along with a dozen other boats. We lifted our little rafts off the river and within a few minutes had our gear tidied into a small, neat pile and our deflated packrafts rolled into log-sized bundles. Meanwhile, trucks and trailers with winches and stressed-out drivers yanked their heavy rafts off the concrete while a line of other boaters waited impatiently to get off the river.

Scientists are saying El Niño is here with a 63 percent chance of a super El Niño. That could bring a wet fall and a better snowpack to Colorado this winter. That same superheated ocean water will also cause a host of destruction around the world.

In a poem by Mary Oliver, the narrator says she sees the body of a river dying. When asked what she will do about it, she says that she will grieve.

“For the river. For myself, my lost

joyfulness. For the children who will not

know what a river can be—a friend, a

companion, a hint of heaven.”

The question asker steps in again, asking, “Isn’t this somewhat overplayed?”

And perhaps the long, slow death of the Colorado River is overplayed. And perhaps, also, grief requires repetition.