Rio Chama

About

Rio Chama, New Mexico — 1692 Don Diego de Vargas, 1935 El Vado 1963 Abiquiu 1974 Heron, 1988 Wild and Scenic 130-mi. Flow defines a paddler's Rio Chama. The gauge at 08284100 records an average of about 580 CFS, with an optimal boating window of 300 to 1,500 CFS. Scheduled dam releases from El Vado provide reliable whitewater flows during the summer season, a system formalized when the Santa Fe National Forest updated the river's management plan in 2012 and established a permit system to protect the wilderness character of the canyon. The run holds at Class II, with sandstone walls rising as the river drops toward the Rio Grande.

The canyon's human story runs deep. In pre-contact times the corridor was home to Tewa-speaking Pueblo peoples and later the Jicarilla Apache, who found shelter, water, and game in the semi-arid landscape of northern New Mexico; Pueblo ruins and Apache camp sites are found throughout the canyon. The river's defining historical chapter came in 1692, when Don Diego de Vargas re-conquered New Mexico for Spain and returned to the Rio Chama Valley.

Industry followed. From the 1830s through the 1920s the Rio Chama watershed was logged to supply the regional timber industry of 1850 to the 1910s and the railroad expansion of the 1860s to the 1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. The exhaustion of old-growth stands in 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale logging.

The twentieth century remade the river with concrete and earth. El Vado Dam in 1935 was the first of a series: Abiquiu Dam followed in 1963 and Heron Reservoir in 1974, capturing the flow of a 130-mile river that runs from Colorado into New Mexico as a major tributary of the Rio Grande. Water rights became a defining issue of the century as those three reservoirs took control of the Rio Chama's water. In the 1990s the Rio Chama Watershed Restoration Project shaped a new era of stewardship.

Protection came in 1988. Recognizing the river's outstanding scenic beauty, recreational value, and the remarkable geological formations of the canyon, Congress designated 24.6 miles below El Vado Dam a National Wild and Scenic River. That protected reach, within the Santa Fe National Forest, defines the river's identity today. The classic wilderness run divides into three eleven-mile segments: El Vado Ranch to Skull Bridge, entering the canyon through red walls at Class II; Skull Bridge to Christ in the Desert, the deepest canyon and the monastery, at Class II–III; and Christ in the Desert to Big Eddy, where the canyon widens to the takeout at Class II. The river today supports the Chama, Abiquiu, and Espanola economies and draws boaters who drift beneath towering sandstone walls and anglers who cast into a current ranked among the top 100 trout streams in the country. Engineered reservoirs and preserved canyon country endure together in one channel.