The River Radius Podcast

In March of 2021, three women launched a source to sea expedition on the Sacramento River in California.  In this new episode, we talk for 25 minutes with the crew at mile 153 and hear about how the river has changed once they left the mountains and was impounded behind a few different dams.  They call themselves Sacramento Source to Sea.  They skied on snow to get to their river launch and began paddling downriver.  We interviewed them before they launched in episode 16, Mile 0 Sacramento River Source to Sea. They are now low in the Central Valley meeting river people in river towns to learn about how modern day communities engage with this river that irrigates farms and ranches that feed America.  They will paddle through the capital of California, Sacramento, and switch from pack rafts to sea kayaks and continue paddling on the salt water to the Golden Gate Bridge.  We will interview them again as their trip progresses.  

River Radius Podcast: email, website, instagram, facebook.

Sacramento Source to Sea instagram.

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The last time Lake Powell was full was in 1986; today it sits at 1/3 of its capacity and it is expected to end 2021 lower than it is today.  As this reservoir drops, it exposes more and more of the sediment dumps that have been hiding below the water.  As the Colorado River hits the dead current of Lake Powell, it drops its sediment load.  That sediment is clogging the river way and is critical to the health of the river downstream, all the way to the ocean, and yet it can't get there.  In the Returning Rapids episode we learned about the problem of the sediment first hand as we toured the clogged river way; in this episode we talk with the managers of Lake Powell, The Bureau of Reclamation, about their vision and plans for Lake Powell and for the sediment that is now in Powell's wake.  

Bureau of Reclamation

Lake Powell

Glen Canyon Dam

High Flow Experiment

Colorado Compact

Disturbance Flow

Colorado River

Cataract Canyon

Hite Marina

Returning Rapids

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Relevant Previous Episodes
"The Returning Rapids of Cataract 2021"

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Source to Sea trips are the journey from a river's headwaters to where that river meets the salt water.  In 2021, The River Radius will host on river, real time interviews with various source to sea trips.  The first is the Sac Source to Sea, a journey launching on March 14 2021 down the Sacramento River.  The Sac, as this river is called, feeds a huge agricultural community in the Sacramento Valley, and that valley supplies an immense amount of food to the United States.  In this Mile 0 episode, you will meet the three crew members, Ari, Jamie and Alyssa two weeks before they launch on this expedition.  This Source to Sea project will allow us as host and listener to learn about a river we haven't yet explored.  

The River Radius website, instagram, and facebook.

Sac Source to Sea website and instagram.

Rivers for Change (they provided a scholarship to Sac Source to Sea)

Sacramento River

Sacramento Valley

Central Valley

San Francisco Bay

Strait Up film by Jamie Trapp

Previous River Radius episodes with Source to Sea content:
138 Days on a River
Rowing Home 5000 Miles

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When the free running Colorado River smashes into the still water of Lake Powell, it drops its massive sediment load into Cataract Canyon and the reservoir.  This has been happening since the late 1970s when Powell was approaching full pool.  And for the last 20 years, Powell has been slowly and steadily decreasing its volume because there is not enough annual inflows from the Green, Gunnison and San Juan Rivers that drain the Southern Rockies into the Colorado River.  As the water drops more, sediment and silt is exposed and the river keeps carving down through the mess.  A group of river runners has been paying close attention to the changes as only river runners can do.  They got organized and developed the Returning Rapids project to document the re-emergence of Cataract Canyon and its rapids.

GIVEAWAY of EmRiver educational river table

Returning Rapids Project

Center for Colorado River Studies

Colorado River

Cataract Canyon

Glen Canyon

Canyonlands National Park

Lake Powell

Glen Canyon Dam

Bureau of Reclamation

Eddyline Welding

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Do you rally up your river friends each January and coordinate your river permit dates?  Do you get permits?  Do you wonder who is behind the curtain of rec.gov and the permitting offices?  This episode asked all those questions and spoke with the river permitting "boss" at rec.gov, and the river permit offices at Dinosaur National Monument, Salmon-Challis National Forest in Idaho and Grand Canyon National Park.  There are people behind the curtain, they are very friendly and shared with The River Radius information to help all of us better understand the why and the how of the river permit systems.  

Each river office has a website with relevant information and deep statistical data that tells a story of each seasons application numbers.  Here they are:

Dinosaur National Monument main river info page

Idaho 4 Rivers main river info page

Grand Canyon National Park, River Lottery

Grand Canyon National Park, River Lottery statistics

Recreation One Stop (rec.gov)

These two previous episodes listed below from The River Radius Podcast offer more and different information about the content in this episode:

Hoops’ Echo
Herm Hoops worked at Dinosaur National Monument for years and spent many days and nights on the Green River.  He was a strong and passionate river conservationists and wrote a comprehensive history of modern river rafts.  Herm passed away late in 2020.  

8000 Years on the Selway
The Selway River in Idaho has hosted humans for thousands of years with Salmon and Steelhead fisheries, resources to build shelters, and amazing water. Over the summers of 2018 and 2019 archeological research has been conducted on the Selway to clarify and protect the artifacts in the river valley. Jeff Adams explains as much as he can, the story of humans along the Selway long before the Europeans arrived.

Contact The River Radius Podcast:  [email protected]

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The first river Ellen Falterman paddled was the Amazon, upriver in a 400 lb dugout canoe for a few weeks with her brother.  But that is not the story here.  The story here is that her second river trip was a run down the Missouri River from Montana to St Louis, and then her third river to paddle was the Mississippi River from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.  And she kept going, along the coastal islands and then via the Intra Coastal Waterway to Texas, to her home and her family.  She accomplished this all by the age of 25.  Ellen was peeling back life.  She comes from a family of pilots.  Her older brother, a pilot, crashed his plane into the river and did not survive.  This is the story of a human digging in on her own humanity.  Anointing herself with her grief and finding strength there.  Ellen is a river boater, a pilot, a flight instructor and is preparing to row around the world across the oceans.  

ellenmagellanexpeditions.com

Missouri River

Mississippi River

Trinity River

Atchafalaya River

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The Blue Nile River starts in Ethiopia and confluences with the White Nile River in Sudan to form the Nile River.  The Nile River is the longest river in the world.  The Blue Nile starts in the highlands of Ethiopia and courses through deep gorges and canyons, open country and passes by many small and larger groups of people living along the river.  This river is home to the Nile Crocodile and Hippopotamus both of which can pursue humans as prey.  The Grand Renaissance Ethiopian Dam was recently completed and is now filling with water from the Blue Nile.  This will inundate much of the river upstream of this dam, change the flows, the nature of the river corridor and the land where many people live.  In 1987 Steve Stahl was 21 years old when he floated the Blue Nile.  in 2019 he came back to see the river again that will soon be underwater.  In this show, he tells of the river and the people that he encounters.  And he explains the Croc rocks.  

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A local guy from Moab, Utah was ready to turn himself in for a warrant in Colorado.  The jail he would spend time in was near the same river that ran through his hometown of Moab.  He brought his kayak with him and planned to float home after his jail time was up.  As he approached the jail, the call of the river and the "nice day" simply won out, and he floated right past the jail.  Downstream that day and the next were two permitted stretches of river, Ruby Horsethief and West Water, and he did not have nor want the permits for either.  He grew up on this river.  That didn't matter to the beauracratic systems in place and his actions invited the River Rangers and state law enforcement to track him down.  This short story gives the details and hears how this human loves this river.  

Colorado River
Ruby Horsethief
West Water
Grand Junction, CO
Clifton, CO
Moab, UT
 

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After the genetically pure Greenback Cutthroat Trout was found above a waterfall in Bear Creek, Colorado Parks and Wildlife quickly worked to secure this fish, and to propagate it in its native basin, the South Platte River Basin.  Projects have included several smaller stream areas where the Greenback has been reintroduced to its basin.  Currently the largest project yet, over 30 miles of stream reintroduction, is in the works.  This is a multi-agency effort, involves the Wild and Scenic Poudre River, and in the effort to restore a fish, the ironic path of eliminating other fish and possibly using dynamite to further change a stream are part of the plan.  Are these too much or are they simply what is needed to bend the path of the Greenback back to its true headwaters.  This episode explores fish biology, Wild and Scenic River regulations, modern river recreation, and genetic diversity.  

Colorado Parks and Wildlife

Rocky Mountain National Park

Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest and Pawnee National Grasslands

Wild and Scenic Rivers:  Cache La Poudre River

American Whitewater

Poudre River

South Platte River Basin

Cameron Peak Fire

Greenback Cutthroat Trout

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