West’s Newest, Hottest Water War Focuses on Increased River Rafting

Westerners have been squabbling over water almost since the first pioneers crossed the Great Plains. Ranchers fought over water rights in river valleys that are the arteries of life here. Growing metropolises like Denver and Los Angeles diverted rural water over mountain ranges.

In the West of the 1990s, with its booming growth and affluence, water is more than ever a contested prize. But now, with the region having turned into a recreation mecca with some of the world’s best white-water runs, drinking and irrigation are not the only issues. Increasingly, Westerners are battling with paddles and regulations for the right to splash through Class IV rapids in their rafts and kayaks.

In central Idaho, where the serrated peaks of the Sawtooth Range give birth to the storied Middle Fork of the Salmon River, commercial river guides are howling over a plan by the U.S. Forest Service to reduce by half the number of people who can participate in what may be the premier wilderness white-water excursion in the country. On the Colorado, private river-runners are battling with outfitters for a greater share of the permits issued by the National Park Service for access to trips through the Grand Canyon and its huge, heart-stopping rapids like Lava Falls. And state and federal land managers throughout the region are struggling to strike a balance between protecting river resources and accommodating thousands of sports enthusiasts clamoring to launch rubber rafts and kayaks.

“Like Will Rogers said, they’re not making any more of this stuff,” said David Brown, executive director of America Outdoors, a national trade association representing outfitters and guides.

Almost everywhere in the West that heavy winter snows and gravity combine to form navigable rivers and rapids, a bustling commerce has emerged in the last two decades. On Colorado’s rivers, for example, the days each white-water rafter spends on the water--what the rafting industry calls “commercial user days”--have more than doubled to nearly half a million since 1988, with annual increases as high as 23% in high-water years.

But even on rivers that are off the beaten track, recreational pressure is steadily mounting.

Consider Michael Scott’s experience in Montana. An environmental activist in Bozeman, Scott has floated through the limestone canyon of the Smith River in central Montana every year since he came to the Big Sky in 1985. It is not much of a white-water experience, but the scenery and fishing are world-class on the five-day, 62-mile float.

“When I first got here, you just called up and they gave you a permit,” Scott said. But beginning in 1991, as the Smith River became more popular, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks began charging fees, limiting the size of groups, restricting the number of launches each day and conducting a lottery for permits. This year, worried about too many people, the department cut back again, from 63 launches a week to 58.

In 1992, almost all the 216 people who applied for permits on the Smith were accommodated, said Doug Habermann, who oversees river operations for the state. In 1997, nearly 4,000 applications were received, and the state Legislature is being encouraged to give the Montana parks department authority to regulate use on other rivers such as the Big Hole, the Blackfoot and the Bighorn.

Habermann should be thankful that he is not in charge of the Middle Fork of the Salmon, which cuts through the heart of the 2.4-million-acre Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area in central Idaho.

Long recognized as one of the best wilderness river trips in the Lower 48, the 100-mile float down the Middle Fork is an unforgettable experience for the about 10,000 people who make the trip each year under a quota set up by the Forest Service. Under that system, commercial outfitters are limited to three launches a day with a maximum of 30 people per group, and private boaters are limited to four launches a day with a maximum party size of 24 people.

In late January, the managers of the Salmon Challis National Forest proposed to cut the size of outfitted parties to 15 people and private groups to 10 as part of a new wilderness-management plan. “We are looking at the balance between protecting the resource and the numbers of people we can have down there enjoying the wilderness,” said forest spokesman Kent Fuellenbach.

That will shrink supply for a river already in great demand: Under the lottery for private trips, boaters have only a 1 in 23 chance of getting on the water, and people able to pay an outfitter $1,500 for a six-day trip often have to book a year or more in advance.

The proposal has created a storm of controversy among river guides such as Dave Mills, who has been outfitting on the Middle Fork for 21 years. “This is not broken,” he said. “What they are using for justification is flawed. This is held up as the best working example of a well managed wilderness that gets used by the public.”

Greg Simonds, executive director of the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Assn., accused the Forest Service of taking “a meat-cleaver approach to a hangnail problem.” Enlisting the support of Idaho’s congressional delegation and state Legislature, the outfitters have launched an all-out fight to get the Forest Service to reverse its preliminary recommendation.

Far to the south, another federal agency, the National Park Service, is coming under intense pressure from competing users of the lower Colorado. About 22,000 people a year float all or part of the 277 miles of river that wind through the Grand Canyon.

Officials at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona last fall began a two-year revision of their river-management plan. Stakes are high for the 16 river-running companies that charge up to $2,200 per person for floating the Colorado and the nearly 7,000 private boaters on a waiting list for a river permit.

Under the current allocation system, outfitters control about 65% of the river-use days. Even with that advantage, some of their customers must book up to two years in advance for a seat on a raft. Private boaters aiming for a prime date often must wait more than a decade, although the savvy ones with flexible schedules often can get on the river far more quickly if they know how to pounce on cancellations.

Both sides are jockeying frenetically for advantage, proposing new systems to the Park Service that either will protect the status quo advantage enjoyed by the outfitters or give the private boaters a larger share of user days.

Caught in the middle are Park Service employees such as Patrick Hattaway, Grand Canyon’s river district ranger, who is trying to protect the river and provide equitable access.

“I think that we have a demand, whether commercial or private, that exceeds what the resource can sustain,” Hattaway said. “We have people on the waiting list from almost every country in the world. I can open it up tomorrow, but it would not be the experience it is today, and the resource wouldn’t be the same.”