Corrections to ‘Remembering an Unforgettable Yampa River Rafting Experience’
June 16, 2008.
Mea culpa…
I thought I had done sufficient homework about the creation of the Warm Springs rapid on the Yampa River. I searched exhaustively the Internet and read Roderick Nash’s “The Big Drops” book. I should have, however, checked in with the folks who were on the scene.
According to Bruce Julian, who was on the Yampa River in 1965, Les Oldham was not the first person to run the new Warm Springs rapid. Nor was the Yampa dammed ‘for a few hours’.
Julian reported, “If it was dammed at all, it was on the late afternoon/early evening of June 10, not the morning of June 11. If a ten-foot-high dam (a generous estimate) was emplaced, it would create a lake about 1.5 miles long (the gradient shown on the river survey is 7 or 8 feet per mile), holding an extra 5 million cubic feet of water (assuming a river width of 200 feet). It would take the river, with a discharge of about 20,000 cubic feet per second, only a few hundred seconds (i.e. about 10 minutes) to fill this volume and overtop the dam. This is consistent with what we could see at the time, albeit from a distance and in dim light. These numbers might be off by a factor of several, but a dam holding the river back for more than an hour, and certainly until the next morning, is out of the question.”
Julian also reported, “The detailed description of Les Oldham’s accident must be pure speculation, since neither Al nor Bob Holland claims to have seen or otherwise know what actually happened. Nobody who actually saw what happened has yet been found. Oldham’s partner, Al Holland, was in a separate boat, and didn’t realize anything was seriously amiss until below the rapid, when someone asked, "Where’s Les?" He says he has had nightmares about all the possibilities (broken oar, catapulting boatman, …) for years, but just doesn’t know. The replacement boatman reported that all the oars on the boat were unbroken. That’s about all we know. Roy Webb told me he doesn’t know if there was an autopsy. If there was, it might provide some evidence.
“Calling the flood a "slide" is similarly speculative. Nobody has investigated its origin, as far as I know. Our observations at the time were of an initial debris flow followed by a lot of water for a couple of hours. The cleanness of the rocks the next morning confirms this.”
Julian, O.A.R.S. Founder & President, George Wendt, Doug McDowell and others were part of the recent raft party organized by Roy Webb, from the University of Utah’s Special Collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library. The Warm Spring History trip was organized to get as many of the people who were there at the time of the events, or have first-hand knowledge of the events, to record facts.
