Dolores River

About

Dolores River — 1984 McPhee Dam and the Canyons Into Utah. The canyon of the Dolores was home to the Ancestral Puebloans for at least 2,000 years. Their cliff dwellings and rock art panels, dating from roughly 750 to 1300 AD, line the gorge, and the 1,000–1,200 CE cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde sit within the river's watershed. The Spanish arrived later: the traders and explorers who named the river for Our Lady of Sorrows—recorded in 1765 and again in 1776—gave it the mournful identity it still carries.

Euro-American industry followed the water. From the 1830s through the 1920s the Dolores watershed was logged to feed a regional timber industry and railroad expansion, with local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations working the forests until the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910 and state forestry conservation took hold. Overlapping that era, from the 1880s into the 1920s, extensive uranium mining spread through the watershed—a legacy that would later require the 1988 Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) cleanup at the former Uravan mill site, one of the EPA's major reclamation efforts on the river. The first systematic look at the river's hydrology came earlier still, through USGS surveys beginning in the 1870s.

The defining event of the modern Dolores was the 1984 completion of McPhee Dam, the principal storage facility for the Dolores Project. The dam flooded the river's lower 14 miles and diverted 80 percent of its flow to irrigate 30,000 acres in Montezuma County. It remains one of the most controversial water projects in the region: abundant farmland on one hand, a starved and altered channel on the other. Downstream flows now depend on dam releases, so the boatable season hinges on wet winters.

Protection came in stages. The 1984 and 2009 designations placed 66.4 miles of the Dolores in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, shielding the lower gorge and the Tabeguache Area from further damming. Management on the ground runs through the BLM's Dolores River Canyon and Slickrock Canyon corridors. In 2022, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet introduced the Dolores River National Conservation Area and Special Management Area Act, a measure crafted to protect wildlife, cultural resources, and existing land uses along the corridor—the latest chapter in a long argument over how to balance agriculture against a wild river.

For paddlers, the run divides into three acts. Bradfield Bridge to Slickrock covers 75 miles of Class II–III through the Ponderosa Gorge. Slickrock Canyon follows for 45 miles of Class III–IV, the river's deepest canyon. The final 30 miles, from the Lower Dolores to the Colorado River, ease to Class II as the canyon widens through the Paradox Valley, where the Soggy Bottom Rapid churns at high water. Outfitters such as Dvorak Expeditions run multi-day canyon trips when the snowpack cooperates. The Dolores endures as a cherished, contested thread of the Colorado Plateau—wild where it can be, worked where it must be.