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Gently Down the Stream, Part One |
Bill Hudson | 6/24/08
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We have enjoyed taking our daughter's dog Hank for walks along the San Juan River, ever since Ursala received him as a birthday present last year. And somewhere in my collection of digital photos, I have a great shot of Hank standing on a dark gray, sandy beach, with the Hot Springs bridge in the background.
The remarkable thing about the photo: that dark gray, sandy beach did not exist three years ago. Three years ago, that spot on the San Juan was still a prime fishing hole.
That may be a real problem for the Town of Pagosa Springs.
At the Town Council work session last week, hydrologist and former Pagosa resident Dave Rosgen gave his theory about the origins of that dark gray, sandy beach — and other pending problems, if the Town goes forward with some questionable river enhancement plans.
“I got up about four in the morning to be here for this meeting,” Rosgen began. “There has been a lot of discussion about the river, especially over the past three years, and a lot of it has been one-sided. Let me give you a bit of history, a bit of background, about what went on in the river.”
 A dozen years ago, consultant Rosgen and his Wildland Hydrology firm — click here to visit his company website — was hired to restore the San Juan River. I remember the activities well, because we had only recently moved here, and we suddenly noticed huge boulders appearing in certain locations all along the downtown stretch of the San Juan. At that time, the San Juan was a fairly lifeless looking river; according to the stories I heard from local historians, the townspeople had purposely removed all of the boulders and large rocks from the San Juan following a series of floods early in the 1900s, leaving the downtown stretch without much character — and without any good fishing holes to speak of.
Rosgen’s job was to restore the San Juan to health, so to speak.
As Rosgen noted for the Council last Thursday, the San Juan has a fairly gradual slope through the whole downtown stretch, less than half the drop of some other area rivers such as the Animas in Durango, one of the more popular kayaking rivers in the region. As I understood Rosgen’s story, a restored San Juan is well suited for fishing — perhaps less suitable for white water recreation.
“When we first started the river restoration,” Rosgen told the Council, “we went to a lot of public meetings and asked he people what they really wanted, what their objectives were for the river restoration. We had the Fishing is Fun grant, and I spent a lot of time studying the river. I moved here in 1985, so I spent 18 years studying the San Juan — sediments and flows and river stability.”
Rosgen’s training as a hydrologist, and his long study of the San Juan, helped him make the decisions about how to best use the Fishing is Fun grant. He designed a series of massive “V” and “W” shaped structures in the river, between Town Park to the east, down to the Sixth Street bend in the river.
“Part of the work I did was to assess the current condition on the river. There was a lot of bank erosion. The river was wide and shallow; some of you who have been here for many years know what I’m talking about. And the fishing habitat was quite poor. We had water quality issues, we had sediment issues. We had some flood issues.”
“So whatever I designed as supposed to meet numerous objectives: bank erosion, addressing flood issues, moving the sediment through so it didn’t fill up, improve fish habitat to improve recreational fishing, and to improve recreational boating. Those were the key objectives.”
Rosgen did not get up at four in the morning and drive to Pagosa Springs, merely to tell an entertaining history to the Council. The hydrologist was here to warn the Council about the proposed San Juan River enhancements, designed by another firm and currently on the drawing board and tentatively scheduled to change the course of the downtown San Juan.
Those river enhancements started under the direction of former Town Manager Mark Garcia, in March 2005. Working with a white water recreation engineering company, Recreational Engineering and Planning — click here to visit the REP website — Garcia and a crew of volunteers moved into the San Juan and removed several of Rosgen’s fishing and boating enhancements, claiming “safety issues.”
They then installed a rock and concrete check dam, a white water feature that would supposedly help turn the mild mannered San Juan into an exciting boating river. The new feature was christened “The Davey Wave” after volunteer Davey Pitcher, who had provided the heavy equipment for the work.
Garcia’s plan was curious on many levels. For one, REP had apparently done almost no studies of the river hydrology, before building the Davey Wave and sketching a series of additional drops for other spots on the river. For another, the Town — which has something of a reputation for carefully soliciting public input before commencing large projects — had failed conducted any well-attended meetings about the river changes, and had relied on input from a small handful of interested people.
For another, the Town had no permit to perform the work.
The Army Corps of Engineers was upset. The Colorado Division of Wildlife, which had funded the Rosgen-designed Fishing is Fun structures ten years earlier, were upset. The fishermen in town were upset.
DOW and the Army Corps of Engineers demanded that Garcia stop work immediately on the river project, and three long years of negotiations, charges and counter charges ensued. Still, Garcia's river plans, drawn up by REP, lingered as the Town's official river restoration policy — scheduled to be built at some point in the future.
Now Rosgen was standing before the Council, trying to help them understand what had gone wrong — perhaps seriously wrong — when the Davey Wave was installed in March 2005.
And why I have a photo of Hank standing on a gray, sandy beach that was not there three years ago.
More tomorrow… |
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