The Whitewater Returns

For one hundred and sixty-five years, no one knew exactly what was under the water here. The dams went in beginning in eighteen twenty-eight, and the Chattahoochee above them backed up into something flat and still and industrial, a millpond disguised as a river. The falls that had given the city its reason for existing, the same falls the Spanish had documented and the Muscogee had used as a landmark for centuries, disappeared under the impoundment. You could stand on the bank and have no sense that the river was doing anything except sitting there.

In twenty twelve and twenty thirteen, the city of Columbus removed the Eagle and Phenix dam and the City Mills dam. The decision was not purely romantic, there were engineering considerations, environmental arguments, flood management factors. But the effect, when the water dropped, was remarkable. Class four rapids materialized in the middle of a city of two hundred thousand people. The same hydraulic gradient that had powered the textile mills, one hundred and twenty-five feet of drop in two and a half miles, was now a whitewater course two and a half miles long in the heart of downtown.

The Columbus Whitewater course, which opened in twenty twelve, is now considered the longest urban whitewater course in the world. Its biggest rapids are described as the largest east of the Mississippi.

There is something satisfying about the ending, if this is an ending: the river that built Columbus by powering the mills, that was buried under the mills' dams for the better part of two centuries, has come back. The same water that ran the spindles and drove the ironworks now runs through kayaks on a Tuesday afternoon in a city that needed a reason to look at the Chattahoochee as something other than a boundary.