Browns Canyon: The Most Rafted River in America
Near Buena Vista, Colorado
South of Buena Vista the Arkansas River drops into Browns Canyon, a granite gorge that has become the most popular stretch of commercial whitewater in the United States. Huge numbers of people run this river every year, bouncing through rapids with names like Zoom Flume and Seidels Suckhole between canyon walls of rock more than a billion years old, some of the oldest exposed stone in Colorado. On February nineteenth, twenty fifteen, President Barack Obama used the Antiquities Act to designate Browns Canyon a national monument, protecting more than twenty one thousand acres of canyon and backcountry jointly managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service.
The designation capped decades of local campaigning by rafters, anglers, hunters, and ranchers who wanted the canyon kept wild but working. The river itself runs through the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area, run as a partnership between Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Bureau of Land Management. It covers roughly one hundred fifty miles of river from the mining country above Leadville all the way down to Pueblo Reservoir, stitching together boat ramps, campgrounds, and fishing access along the whole corridor.
That partnership is a big part of why a river once poisoned by mine tailings now supports gold medal trout water and the busiest rafting industry in the nation, with Buena Vista and Salida as its twin capitals.
