A fish dying of decompression sickness reveals that the Congo is the world's deepest river.

Remembering when one could fish for salmon in Nevada. Not in the Pleistocene, either, just before they dammed the Snake.

Riding the brief pulse of the Colorado to the sea

The Colorado River has reached the ocean!

The destruction of Condit Dam on Washington's White Salmon River: Ed Abbey is smiling today!

Impaled boat, 40 yards from water:



For more detail, check the photoblog.

What a strange year it is for western snowpack!

Click to enlarge. La Nina is clearly visible here: anything south of about Tierra Amarilla, NM has really missed out (though it looks like the Whites in Arizona got a little love yesterday). The snowpack in the Great Basin and Utah is seriously insane, 300% of normal in a lot of areas, and normal is already a lot of snow in the Wasatch. It's going to be quite a year on the Idaho rivers, and a crazy awesome year on the Yampa.

It's good to have projects. And while documenting every bridge over the Rio Grande would not be my project, I wish Mr. Baca all the best in his endeavor. Seems like a relatively healthy monomania for a former Albuquerque mayor, certainly a more laudable habit than politics. I recommend that he also try and visit the source.

Some good news for Desolation Canyon. Plus new photos.

I've been river guiding for a couple weeks now. I'm very tired and don't have much intelligent to say, but I do have some pretty pictures up on the photoblog:

Rafting the Gila Wilderness

Trip report is finally up. Enjoy! Or skip the report and look at pictures.

Mrs. P and I are off for a four-day weekend running the Gila. It's been quite a while since I ran a river not knowing what was around the bend. This huge El Nino snowpack is providing an excellent window for boating a run that's seldom runnable. Reports soon, with any luck. In the meantime, check out my new photography blog, which is finally more or less ready for public consumption.

Tamarisk Beetles Found in Grand Canyon:

Researchers previously thought that this species of the tamarisk leaf beetle would restrict its range to above the 38th parallel, which is near the upper end of Lake Powell. The beetles were not approved for release within 200 miles of southwestern willow flycatcher habitat, an endangered species which is known to nest in tamarisk - a dominant species in the Colorado River corridor. Tamarisk leaf beetles are now causing defoliation of tamarisk trees further south than originally anticipated. According to Dr. Dan Bean of the Colorado Department of Agriculture, the small population of beetles recently documented in Grand Canyon National Park is unlikely to overwinter successfully. However, it appears likely that as beetle numbers increase a viable reproducing population will be established in Grand Canyon within the next several years.

Good news or bad? I'd come down tentatively on the side of good. After all, the whole point of the beetle program is to get them out there eating tammies, and if they're able to do it down south it could be very good for a lot of places I love. But it was somewhat comforting to think that they had geographic limitations.

Reporting on the beetle program is generally rather confused; I never seem to read the same details twice. Tamara Naumann, the park botanist for Dinosaur National Monument and a major driving force behind the beetles, told me this summer that there are actually two species in the mix: the northern-adapted one that was released in Dinosaur, and a more southerly version released (if I remember correctly, which I may not) by the state of Colorado. She also said that there are apparently beetle poachers who are collecting some from release sites and taking them elsewhere.

It's been nice during the last couple seasons in Dinosaur to see some decidedly ratty tamarisk stands. It apparently takes three or four good defoliations to kill the damn trees, so with any luck we'll start seeing real death in the next year or two. Of course, being a biologic control, the beetles are not expected to eliminate tamarisk completely, and then go rampaging about for other things to devour. The best case scenario is that the tammy populations will crash, followed by a beetle crash, followed by a tamarisk rebound, etc. The hope is not that the trees will be eliminated, but that the beetles will bring them under sufficient control that native plants can start competing again and other removal methods will become feasible at select sites. Virtually the only Achilles heel of tamarisk is that it doesn't like shade; there's a hope that if box elders and other natives can get saplings establishes, they may be able to shade out the tammies in places.

If you've just tuned in to this story, I should mention that the decision to use biologic controls was not made lightly. The people behind it, believe it or not, are aware of the risks, disastrous historical precedents, and probably even the relevant Simpsons episode. The decision to release follows over twenty years of lab study, the most intensive study on a biologic control ever. The beetles are very tamarisk specific. Tamarisk has no North American relatives at the genus level, and its only relative in the same family lives in very different (i.e. non-riparian) habitat. The risk is there, but it's low, as low risk as a biologic control can ever be.

Ms. Naumann is humble regarding the introduction, and aware that "future generations may curse my name." She has also worked against other biological control projects where the outlook was more dubious. But she likes to point out that doing nothing was a choice as well, a choice whose consequences were predictable and disastrous, given the high value of the riparian habitat that tammies invade. Of particular concern in Dinosaur are the tammies moving up the Yampa canyon to invade some of the very last cobble bars where the highly-endangered native fish spawn. Introducing the beetles was a calculated risk ; leaving things be was guaranteed to be lousy.

Click here for dystopian tamarisk sci-fi, by a Paonia, CO author.

Can't really blog now: leaving for Istanbul in the morning. Mrs. Peculiar and I are bound ultimately for northeastern Turkey, Erzurum and historic Georgia. One major destination is likely to be Gümüşhane: as Odious will appreciate, this is near where, after a grueling march across Anatolia to the crest of the Black Sea Range, Xenophon's exhausted troops exclaimed, "Thalassa! Thalassa!"

If anyone wondered what (besides sloth) was consuming my blogging output lately, here's your answer: researching Turkey, making the agonizing decision as to just where to go: the place is just crawling with worthy destinations. It's as big as Texas, but oh! so much more fascinating. And I've been studying Turkish,a very laudable tongue, barbaric and yet refined in its intricacy. I really enjoy non-Indo_European languages. The lack of grammatical gender alone makes them greatly superior, and what bliss is Turkish or Finnish regularity, where rules apply consistently enough to be worth remembering.

With any luck, I'll be much more interesting in a couple weeks. Here's a shot from the Selway this summer to tide you over:

I'm back from Idaho and boating the Selway. The Selway river canyon is very pretty, though not sublime; but the water and banks of the river itself are stunning, second to none. More to come...

Water controversies on the Yampa make it to NPR. I just took the Mr. Tierney quoted in the story down the river last week. There's much that I could write on the subject given time, but it will have to wait at least until I'm done running the Selway. For better visual aids to Dinosaur's river than NPR provides, click here.

Lake Mead: Silt, Superposition & Whitewater

One of the most interesting parts of my recent Grand Canyon trip was floating past the usual takeout at Diamond Creek and continuing all the way to Lake Mead. I'd never seen this lower stretch before, and it was certainly very beautiful and pretty fascinating. I do not, however, recommend it in August: our daily highs were somewhere in the neighbourhood of 115 F.

The water level in Lake Mead is currently very, very low. Note the bathtub ring in the photo to the left (click photos for larger, better versions). This was well out within the theoretical perimiter of the so-called lake, and the ring represents the old average pool. This location is also at least 20 miles dowstream of where my map informed me was current's end at the Lake's historic low. Clearly, we've been breaking records for years and years! To add to the general amusement of the place, there were feral bulls wandering about on the river bank.

Unsurprisingly, the name of the game in the Lake is silt. At the Lake's historic high backwater, still well within the Grand Canyon proper, we began seeing banks of silt covering the river's true banks, and as we continued downstream they grew higher and more extensive. Not infrequently, a section would collapse in our view, avalanching dirt into the river and kicking up prodigious clouds of dust.

Once you come out of the Canyon into the flats, the silt really spreads out, into a vast plain covered in tamarisk and willow, corresponding of course to the shape of the former reservoir. The old takeout at Lake Mead was Pierce Ferry; the Pierce Ferry boat ramp is now over two miles from the river. Thankfully, things are livened up around here by a new rapid which has been forming and changing frequently for the past couple seasons. In addition to providing amusement, the Pierce Ferry rapid also provides a near perfect, small-scale illustration of the principle of canyon cutting by superposition (for a full account, read about the formation of Lodore Canyon here).

What's going on here is that, as the Lake level has dropped, the river was not left with its former basin, but rather with the new expanse of flat silt. Unconstrained by its old banks, which are now deep beneath dirt somewhere, the Colorado could meander over the plain rather freely. In many areas, the river of 2008 is far from its old channel. Of course, the current quickly began cutting down and eroding its silty bed, thus fixing its new course somewhat. But in a couple spots, such as Pierce Ferry Rapid, it hit bedrock outcrops a short ways beneath the surface. In the adjacent photo, the silt plain is clearly visible to the right; the bedrock is forming the boulder in the middle and the pourover and whitewater to the sides where the river flows over it. It's probably being eroded very fast; I'm told the rapid is seldom quite the same from one week to the next. The rapid is also much bigger than it looks in this rather dismal snapshot: for instance, the center boulder is easily 25 feet wide, and the whitewater is plenty capable of flipping a loaded boat.

One of our party running the right channel.

Definitely enlarge this one!

If you imagine a much bigger plain and a lot more bedrock in the picture, it's easy to see how a river becomes entrenched in its own course and incises its meandering path deep into stone.

Also interesting is where the river finally ends. Current's end is not a gradual process at all; it's almost as abrupt as if someone snapped a chalkline across the water. Upstream, the water is brown and cold; five feet downstream, it's green and warm. The silt is still coming, still settling in. You have to see it to appreciate fully the extent of the siltation problems facing Lakes Powell and Mead.

The Colorado comes to a halt.

Things you don't see every day

Since I took the trouble to rant the other day about the spectacular absence of water from New Mexico, of course I immediately go out and find counter examples. Here's a waterfall I visited yesterday, not huge but plenty festive, near El Rito. As good as the waterfall, but much harder to photograph, was the enormous quartzite outcrop that formed the gorge.

But this was decidedly small potatoes compared to the next drainage over. The Rio Ojo Caliente flows southward out of the Tusas range. A southern outrigger of Colorado's San Juan mountains, the Tusas are consistently the snowiest part of New Mexico, and their snowpack this year was off the charts. The gracery store and a church in Chama actually caved in this winter. But warm weather is here, and the Ojo Caliente, normally a modest creek, is going big.

The river is charging like this for miles. These falls were the beginning of a fantastic gorge, full of continuous Class III-IV whitewater, pushy and very fast.

A big rapid. Those two V-waves are much bigger than they look in the photo.

Spring wildflowers on a river bench.

This is not an everyday sight in New Mexico. I have heard native New Mexican children exclaim in great excitement, "Look! The water's almost four inches deep!" This has been a very good year for the north.
Incidentally, the headwaters of this river host a truly classic New Mexican village. As I drove in, six cows were crossing Main Street (about eight feet wide) to ransack a garden. I was chased by dogs all the way through town. Splendid place!

The river canyon had no trail and as I was crossing one of many talus slopes a boulder rolled under my feet. After scrabbling a second trying to regain balance, I keeled over onto my right hand, which emitted a very audible snap, like a popsicle stick breaking. I lifted up my hand to see my ring finger pointing a good sixty degrees right of normal, clearly dislocated at the proximal joint. Thankfully, the pain was much less than I would have expected. But the "Holy Shit" factor was high, seeing a body part so far from its wonted environs, and the fight-or-flight response was very strong. I wanted to move, now, to be somewhere else right away. Also, since I wasn't thinking too clearly, I was not quite sure whether the thing was just dislocated or actually snapped through. An initial attempt to pull some traction and put it back in line was not satisfactory. Can I hike out like this? Bad idea. Fortunately, the cerebrum engaged: "You've got to deal with this now, before the adrenaline wears off." All right, brain. I staggered to stabler ground.

It's just dislocated, or it would hurt a lot more, right? Right. I hooked the finger through a loop on my camera bag to achieve a solider purchase, and pulled. Traction in line, then move it smoothly back into position, just like the WFR instructors say. Second time worked like a charm. Next step: extract first aid kit, swallow ten ibuprofen, splint it to the neighboring digit. It's nice to see wilderness medicine theory work in practice, gives you some confidence that they don't just make it all up so your rescuers have something to do while you die, like CPR in the field.

My one regret, a serious regret, is that I didn't stop to take a gruesome picture. At the time I was worried that it would be frivolous and irresponsible; now I feel differently, with posterity to consider. But it looked very much like this, except on the ring finger:

For more New Mexico whitewater, check out the first raft descent of Rio Embudo, just a couple weeks ago. Who says New Mexico has no decent boating?