The River . . . Wherever It Is . . . Offers a Chance to Get Wet and Wild or Just Relax

Bruce Lebow stood in front of his Huntington Beach home, checking the oil on his motor home. Cody, his 3-year-old son, ran out of the house to greet a visitor.

“We’re going to the Wiver,” he said, his eyes wide with anticipation.

Actually, Lebow, his wife Mindy, their 10-month-old daughter Savanna and, of course, the excited Cody were headed for Lake Mojave. But when water skiers are traveling to their version of Mecca, “The River” can mean almost anywhere along the shores of three lakes and the banks of the Colorado as it flows out of the Grand Canyon to Mexico.

Beginning at Lake Mead, the muddy Colorado is distilled into a crystal-clear skiers’ paradise. The blazing desert sun and the cool water provide the ideal setting . . . and, when the wind is cooperating, the perfect surface to lay down those turns and send up that spray.

Lebow, 34, has spent more than his share of 110-degree days traveling these waters, much of it behind a boat. He has been vacationing at the river since he was 7. He has been to Lake Mead, Lake Mojave, Lake Havasu and navigated much of the rest of the river as it twists toward the Mexican border.

Many avid water skiers have a more limited image of the river, however. To some, it means one or two favorite campgrounds or resorts along a certain stretch or just one corner of the three lakes. A lot of river-goers sizzle summer after summer on the same stretch of beach. There are, however, close to a thousand miles of shoreline to explore and much of that is within a five-hour drive from Orange County.

Here, in general order of popularity, is a close-up view of the five main destinations of those seeking the Southwest’s water-ski experience:

LAKE HAVASU

Family Fun

Princess Di was recently bestowed a prestigious honor that, among other things, offered her the privilege of “driving sheep over the London Bridge without the king’s permission.” It’s not likely she’ll exercise the option, but if she does, she’s going to have to fly the whole flock a few thousand miles.

When the British decided the bridge was too small to accommodate modern traffic demands, Robert McCulloch Sr., who founded Lake Havasu City, bought it, dismantled it and shipped it to Arizona. The bridge is more than 140 years old. The lake is 49 years old. The city is 24 years old.

The bridge draws almost 3 million visitors a year to Lake Havasu City. Many are more interested in the water than ways to get over it, however.

Havasu is an Indian word meaning “blue water.” When the sun is out--which is almost always--you wonder what the Indian word for “turquoise water” is. The lake is narrow, especially when you get away from the area near the city where it is widest (still less than three miles). So it doesn’t develop wind waves easily. The lake offers sometimes secluded coves and some white sand and gravel beaches and as water skiers like to say, “Some great water.”

Crowds can be a problem, though. There are more than 1,000 campsites (about 220 of which are accessible only by boat) and 13 boat ramps along the lake’s shoreline. Boat wakes are a skiers’ most formidable enemy and on holiday weekends, the bays surrounding the city resemble the Santa Ana Freeway during a very rainy rush hour.

“Sure, it gets real crowded here,” said Jim Hoover, co-owner of Lake Havasu’s Water Ski Center and Ski School, “but you only have to go a couple of miles down there (south) to where the lake narrows to find smooth water.”

Water skiers lost seven of the lake’s best coves in a recent court battle with the Chemehuevi Indians who own the land on the California side. Those coves, marked with buoys now, are closed to skiing.

The closures haven’t stopped stopped skiers from flocking to the lake in record numbers again this summer, though. The resorts, motels and campgrounds surrounding Lake Havasu City and Havasu Landing (directly across the lake on the California side) are the most popular, but many are lured to the south end (the quieter end) of the lake, which harbors Havasu Springs Resort and two well-equipped campgrounds (Cattail Cove and Sandpointe Marina) on the Arizona side.

“More than 80% of our guests are from Southern California and a lot of those are from Orange County,” said Carolyn Tierney, the director of sales at the Nautical Inn, located on the lake near London Bridge. “A lot of them started coming here with their parents and now they’re bringing their kids.”

Tierney, who competed professionally as a skier on water and snow before joining the staff of the Nautical Inn four years ago, says the area has a strong appeal for families.

“There’s a wide variety of restaurants, shops and activities here that appeal to all ages,” she said. “In the winter, we’re booked up with snowbirds (retired seniors who come to the desert in winter) who just want to play our golf course and enjoy the warm sun.”

Many of those who come to Lake Havasu to water ski now, started skiing on the 14.4-mile stretch of river south of Parker Dam known as the Parker Strip.

“The skiing down on the river (Parker Strip) can be great,” Hoover said. “But if you’re bringing your family . . . well, I don’t know about you, but the sight of a flat bottom (high-powered drag-racing type boat) converging on a pack of jet skiers at 100 m.p.h. still scares the hell out of me.”

THE PARKER STRIP

Some Like It Hot

“The ideal target area is a dock crammed with cocktail-clutching party-goers. As any Top Gun will tell you, the best angle of attack is from out of the sun. Dive across the wake to gain speed and start your turn about 20 feet before your target (this traditionally is the guy in the Miami Vice jacket). At this point, crank your ski around as hard as possible so that the main body of water thuds into his pina colada and then bug out! Remember to beware of DSMs (Dock-to-Skier Missiles). And don’t fall off. The enemy seldom takes prisoners.”

--GEOFF CARRINGTON, From an article in Water Ski magazine

For more than six months, from Easter until after Labor Day, the Parker Strip is one of the busiest inland waterways in the country. In the 1970s, it was known as Ft. Lauderdale West.

The strip is still the Colorado River’s version of Hollywood Boulevard, a liquid stage for almost 100,000 young Californians and Arizonans cruisin’ aboard boats, rafts, canoes and sometimes only an inner tube.

The river, never more than a quarter-mile in width in this area, is lined with resorts, campgrounds, docks and open-air floating bars, providing Top Gun skiers with a flair for the dramatic a ready-made audience . . . not to forget a wealth of targets.

So, if you’re young--or at least young at heart--the Parker Strip might be the place for you. The night life is nonstop. Sundance Bar, located on the Arizona side a few miles below Parker Dam, is a longtime focal point. It has burned down a couple of times over the years, but keeps springing back up like the stoutest of desert chaparral. And, during the day, those flat bottoms--with their headers blowing exhaust from super-charged 450-horsepower chrome engines--provide a din and a wake that will keep you from falling asleep on your bar stool.

The strip’s reputation for rowdyism began in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when holiday weekend riots were almost commonplace. But the area is much more subdued these days and offers more than a nonstop party and an aquatic freeway.

For the serious skier willing to rise before dawn and begin diving into a turn at daybreak, the strip offers some of the best water on the Colorado chain.

“I think you could safely say this is the preferred water-ski area of the Southwest,” said Ray Stephan, a lifetime resident of the area. Stephan, who was born on his father’s oasis resort here, has been water skiing on the river for almost 50 years.

“It started here when the little dam (a small control dam just above the city of Parker, Ariz.) was finished in ’41 or ‘42,” Stephan said. “We used to ski on homemade things we called aquaplanes. It was just a big piece of plywood, really.

“Everything shut down during the war, of course, and then when water skiing became really popular in the ‘50s, this area became a hotbed for recreational water skiing and testing new equipment.”

It’s still a hotbed, too hot to handle for some. And that infuriates Jeanne Branson, who dragged a mobile home here from Indiana more than 40 years ago. Branson’s Resort was the first development on the Arizona side of the strip.

“I don’t care what anyone says, this is the most beautiful stretch of water in the U.S.,” she said, standing on the bank in front of the resort she still manages. “Look at that water, it’s crystal clear and warm. You’re not afraid to let your kids dive in. There’s nothing to harm them, no sharks or alligators.

“People like to have an audience and people like to be where there are other people, but you’ve got to manage the area so that there’s not too many people. Or it won’t be fun for anyone anymore.”

Branson has battled with the Bureau of Land Management and other local authorities who have opened huge campgrounds on the strip. It’s those campgrounds, some filled to capacity with nearly 2,000 young people on holiday weekends, that gave the area a bad name, she says.

Despite the dams that ended the once-annual flooding problems, the river rose over its banks along the strip in 1983 and brought tourist trade to a halt for two years. When the skiers started returning to the strip, Stephan noticed a marked difference in attitude.

“We still have a younger set than most areas of the Colorado,” he said, “but we have more and more families all the time. I guess some of those wild ones from the ‘60s are coming back with their families now and they’re not quite as wild anymore.”

The crowds may have a more subdued nature, but the Parker Strip is still packed on the weekends.

“When I fell down, I was looking all around me,” said Michele Mann of Buena Park after a ski run on the strip. “It does make me a little nervous, but it’s still really fun here.”

Branson believes there’s plenty of water to handle the crowds these days (those campgrounds seldom fill up like they used to, even on holidays).

“It still gets crowded out there,” she said, “but the only thing wrong with this body of water now is the people who aren’t educated to the rules and regulations . . . We just have to gear ourselves to go by the book . . . whether we like it or not.”

LAKE MOJAVE

Some Like Solitude

“This is our favorite spot on the river,” said Eric Openshaw of San Dimas as he loaded ice into a cooler at Lake Mojave Marina on the lake’s south end.

“There’s so much to do, both day and night. We stay in Laughlin (about 10 minutes from the marina by crossing Davis Dam into Nevada) so we can gamble at the casinos at night. We leave the boat in a slip in the marina here and then water ski all day.”

Both Laughlin and Bullhead City, on the Arizona side of the river below the dam, offer plenty of lodging, but Lake Mojave, which was formed in 1953 when Davis Dam was completed, is really a boat camper’s paradise. There are 254 miles of shoreline jagged with coves that are lined with more white-sand beaches than her sisters to the north (Mead) and south (Havasu).

“I started going to Mojave with my parents,” Lebow said, “and then as a teen-ager, I went to the Parker Strip and Havasu more. Five years ago, I decided to check it out again and we liked it so much, we keep our boat out here in dry storage and come as much as we can. Cody and I went out two weeks ago just to tune up the boat.

“Before we got the motor home this year we always boat-camped. When the water was high a few seasons ago, beaches were hard to find, but the last two seasons have been fantastic.

“I love water skiing. It’s my favorite sport. And the absence of crowds means lots of great water.”

There are only two marinas in the southern half of the lake--Cottonwood Cove and Lake Mojave at Katherine’s Landing--and the lake’s waters are seldom crowded. The water in the northern portion of the lake, coming off the bottom of Lake Mead, is cold and skiing is prohibited on a 20-mile stretch of river directly below Hoover Dam.

“About 8 to 10 miles north of Cottonwood Cove is a spot where the lake narrows and every time I’ve been there it’s pure glass,” said Todd Lackner of Covina. “Even when it’s fairly windy down here, it’s smooth as glass up there. We even tried barefoot skiing up there last year.”

LAKE MEAD

Wet Days, Neon Nights

Somebody once said that a boat was a hole in the water that you throw money down. For those skiers who like to think they have a chance to win some of it back at night, Lake Mead--not to mention the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce--beckons.

The casinos on the Vegas Strip are 45 minutes from the three marinas--Callville Bay, Lake Mead and Las Vegas Wash--that are the doorways to the best skiing on Lake Mead.

The lake, America’s largest man-made reservoir (it can hold two years’ average flow of the Colorado River) with 822 miles of shoreline, gets more than its share of wind. But there are a few spots on Mead’s southern tip that provide sheltered, smooth water on days when the wind chop is three feet in the middle.

“It’s rougher in the northern basins and generally, the skiing is better down here,” said Steve Osterman, a skier from Boulder City, Nev., who works as boat mechanic at Lake Mead Marina. “Boulder Basin (the southernmost arm of the lake) has some places where you can ski when it’s too rough everywhere else on the lake.”

The best is a spot about five miles south of the marina known as the Hemenway Wall. The mountains drop straight off into the lake and the cliffs provide a block from the predominant southerly winds.

One July day when the south wind howled through the marina, The Wall still provided decent skiing. The wind sent a skier’s spray back in his face on every other turn, but the water surface was just lightly rippled . . . as long as you hugged the cliffs.

“Yeah, mainly it’s the wall or the other side of Saddle Island (really a peninsula just north of the marina) if the winds coming from the other direction,” said Carol Daly, 16, from Boulder City who has been skiing on Lake Mead since she was 5. “Those spots get crowded, though, so sometimes I’ll just ski the middle and give my legs a good workout.

“Then I’ll wait ‘til winter, put on my wet suit and ski those spots all by myself.”

BLYTHE

A Slow Pace

Below Parker, Ariz., the Colorado begins to wind through a flat desert turned farmland through Blythe, Calif., Yuma, Ariz. and finally into Mexico.

There are a half dozen campgrounds on the river between Parker and Blythe with two launch ramps--at Blythe Marina on the California side and River Lagoon, on the Arizona side--located just outside the Blythe city limits, right off Interstate 10.

Sand bars can be a hazard here and both skiing and pleasure boating require a watchful eye on the river ahead. The Colorado is shallow and winding and a number of channels can lead the inexperienced into unsafe areas.

“We usually go boat camping out of Katherine’s Landing with about 12 other families,” said Debbie Engel of Fountain Valley, “but the Blythe area is a nice change of pace. There’s so many sandy beaches here and the scenery is different.”

SKIING THE COLORADO

The Colorado River--from Lake Mead, where the muddy torrent is first distilled into crystal-clear water, to below Blythe, Calif., where the flow begins to meander slowly toward Mexico--is the home of the finest water skiing in the Southwest. Hundreds of campgrounds and resorts dot nearly 1,000 miles of shoreline, and thousands of Southland water skiers make the four-to-five-hour trek for a chance to carve through the blue-green water and bake under the desert sun in favorite spots that range from secluded lake coves to tavern-lined stretches of river.