Oh Be Joyful Creek

About

Oh-Be-Joyful Creek, Colorado — 1880s Mining Era, Scarp Ridge, Crested Butte Wilderness. Long before any prospector reached the gulches, Oh Be Joyful Creek flowed through the ancestral territory of the Ute, the Jicarilla Apache, the Southern Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Pueblo peoples, and the Shoshone across central and western Colorado. The stream and its valley served as a travel corridor, a hunting ground, and a gathering place. The cession framework that opened this country to settlement ran through the 1863 Treaty of Conejos, the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the 1873 Brunot Agreement, and the 1881 Ute Removal. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Southern Ute Indian Tribe maintain cultural connections to the region today.

The creek's industrial chapter arrived with the miners. Draining eight square miles of what is now Gunnison National Forest, Oh Be Joyful runs about 4.5 miles south and west from Scarp Ridge and the Oh-Be-Joyful Valley to the Slate River, and that watershed anchored a silver-and-gold rush through the 1880s and into the 1910s. The New Anniversary Mine and the Belcher Mine defined the period. Logging kept pace with extraction: from the 1860s through the 1920s, the surrounding forests were cut to supply Colorado's mining-timber industry, the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad, and the region's coal-mine timber operations. By roughly 1910 the old-growth stands were largely exhausted.

Science followed the miners into the high country. The USGS Colorado Survey of the 1890s and 1900s — built on the earlier Hayden, King, and Wheeler surveys, with USGS work led by Clarence King — produced the first comprehensive hydrological assessments of Gunnison County. A USGS gauging station was established on Oh-Be-Joyful Creek in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the Colorado Water Conservation Board carried out streamflow surveys through the 1920s and 1940s. Later Clean Water Act assessments and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment's Total Maximum Daily Load program extended that record into the modern era.

The mining era's chemical inheritance outlasted the mines themselves. Since 2010, the CDPHE — working with the Oh-Be-Joyful Creek watershed partnerships and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — has confronted more than a century of mining, agricultural, and industrial impacts. Streambank stabilization between 2015 and 2024 and native fish restocking beginning in 2017 have anchored the effort, and the Crested Butte Conservation Corps has driven watershed restoration work in the surrounding decades. The creek that once fed a smelter economy is now the subject of a sustained recovery.

The run that draws kayakers occupies the creek's most concentrated mile, from Ankle Breaker to the Beaver Ponds, dropping roughly 400 feet through continuous slides and waterfalls. Optimal flows run 200 to 625 cubic feet per second, monitored at USGS gauge 06620000; the creek's average is 424 CFS. The Class V grade has made Oh Be Joyful one of the acknowledged "ultra classics" of Colorado creek kayaking — the name that surfaces whenever paddlers gather to talk about the state's best steep-water runs. That standing found its clearest expression on the audacious 2008 day when a group of kayakers ran the gorge fourteen times over, accumulating a vertical mile of descent on a run that measures exactly one horizontal mile.