SALIDA — Sarina Perret takes a seat on a concrete block next to the tall glassy wave on the Arkansas River. A friend holds the nose of her surfboard as she positions her feet and begins to stand up. She glides across the wave, carving smooth turns on the flowing wedge of green water. The line of waiting surfers cheer.
“You are a surfer!” someone yells as she returns to the line at the Scout Wave on the Arkansas River in Salida.
It’s Perret’s first day on the Scout Wave. This is her first season river surfing.
“I grew up in Colorado so it’s not like I grew up saying ‘I want to be a surfer.’ I mean I watched surfing on movies but that was it,” the Evergreen physical therapist says. “It’s so cool to be part of the river surfing culture that has exploded here in Colorado. Everyone is so supportive. It’s such a great sport.”
There are about a dozen surfers in line at the Scout Wave on a recent Monday morning. Over the previous weekend, there were several dozen waiting for their turn. At night, surfers haul battery-operated lights to the banks of the Salida whitewater park and carve the Scout Wave through the dark. Even in winter, the surfers flock, girded in thick wetsuits.
The Salida whitewater park was conceived in 1999 by Salida locals — paddler Mike Harvey, restaurateur Ray Kitson, excavator Fred Lowry and businessman Jerry Mallet — who eventually recruited Recreation Engineering and Planning, the pioneer of Colorado river park designs, to build a river park that has transformed Salida and inspired dozens of other communities.
“When they decided to turn and face the river instead of turning our backs to it like everyone had done for the last 100 years, that’s when everything changed,” says Mike “Diesel” Post, the head of Salida’s parks and recreation and a former administrator at the high school in Buena Vista.
Post is standing amid the wave riders. Their heel-side carves sprinkle the crowded banks with curtains of mist.
Sarina Perret of Evergreen surfs the Scout Wave in the Salida whitewater park on the Arkansas River on July 22, 2024. It was Perret’s first day surfing the Scout Wave. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)
Post is getting a debrief on how the revamped wave has worked so far this summer from the designers: Recreation Engineering and Planning’s engineers Harvey and Spencer Lacy. Lacy’s father, Gary, started the company in the 1980s.
Last year, Harvey and Lacy scrambled through June and July to temper the Scout Wave as the Arkansas River flows peaked, turning the wave into a violent, boat-flipping hole when flows crept above 1,250 cfs. They used a crane to plop 4,000-pound sacks of sand into the river to adjust the river’s flow over the concrete slab they built into the river bed in 2022 as the second iteration of the Scout Wave, which they initially built in 2010. What could have been a disaster for Salida turned into a gem as Salida officials gave the wave sculptors another shot at refining the Scout Wave.
Last fall, Harvey and Lacy pulled the sandbags and made permanent changes to the river bed for a third time, creating what everyone calls the Scout Wave 3.0. And then they held their breath as high flows on the Arkansas River in June peaked well above 4,000 cfs in Salida.
After last fall’s adjustments with giant concrete blocks and rocks — and the reworking to build a river-left boat chute for paddlers in smaller boats who want to avoid the turbulent high-water hole, the Scout Wave’s third iteration is about perfect.
“It is the best river wave in the world. Period,” says Denver musician Eric Halborg, who has spent several weeks camping and staying in hotels this summer so he can spend a few hours a day surfing Salida. His favorite time: 5 a.m. under the lights “when the line is shortest.”
Last year, when no one surfed the Scout Wave for two months during peak flows, the city counted 9,000 people with mobile phones on the banks of the river. So far this summer, the city has counted 20,000 cellphone pings from the river park. On a recent Monday morning, guided anglers and commercial rafters floated through the wave. Upstream, very young kids on boogie boards surfed the Kindergarten Wave under the watchful eye of moms standing on the shore. Visitors donned life jackets from riverside loaner station and swam near the kayak hole.
And a growing crowd of board-riders is flocking to the Scout Wave 3.0. The wave is the equivalent of a ski area for a mountain town, with people coming from far away for a playful holiday. It was only a few decades ago that Salida had a long, high wall in its Riverside Park that kept people away from the river. Now the river “is the lifeblood of the city of Salida,” Post says.
“We are a river town. We are about as OG of a river town as it gets. This has been a whitewater park for 25 years … kind of a kayaker surf spot we called a whitewater park,” Post says. “But eight years ago we started seeing people on tubes, people in little boats and stand-up paddle boards and now surfboards and all of the sudden, it became a park. And now with this wave, it’s all coming together in such a beautiful way that everyone can see and recognize.”
Record high flows this season on the Arkansas River
Last year’s high flows gave Lacy and Harvey a good guide for a second tweaking of the Scout Wave. They adjusted the boat chute and worked on permanent edges — boulders and concrete blocks flanking the wave, which was designed as a “surfing treadmill” known as a sheet flow wave with carefully directed river water flowing over a smooth slab of concrete.
But, as with most wave-making features built in moving water, it was unclear exactly how the wave would take shape this season when the river rose. There were more than a few sleepless nights for Post, Harvey and Lacy as they waited for daylight to check the live webcam and make sure the feature survived the night’s surging flows.
The upside of the record-high flows in June is “now we know,” Harvey says.
The wave “is way less gnarly this season. If we had a (smaller) peak like the last few years, we would still be wondering,” Harvey says. “We ripped the Band-Aid off for sure.”
Harvey and Lacy stroll through the clutch of giddy surfers and examine the downstream sidewalk with Post. Riverside springs are leaking below concrete steps. A few years ago the springs simply made the banks muddy, but now that thousands of people are there, the seeping springs are a problem. In the winter, surfers and people who like to sit by the river and watch the surfers must navigate ice. The park designers are thinking about dog walkers and river watchers as much as the surfers.
Recreational Engineering and Planning counts the Salida park “as definitely our star project” out of more than 100 river parks the company has designed across the country, says Lacy.
“Salida is the project where people come to us and say we want what Salida has,” Lacy says. “And we are continuing to lead here.”
The energy around river surfing is growing. There are two parks on the South Platte in metro Denver with adjustable flaps that sculpt surfable waves at a variety of flows. A new surf wave atop a demolished dam on the Arkansas River near Pueblo’s City Park is drawing surfers this summer. The surf wave at Glenwood Springs on the Colorado River offers big-water surfing when flows top 10,000 cfs.
Harvey and Lacy are planning to renovate a wave in the Buena Vista River Park this fall to allow surfing at a wider range of flows.
Park planners and local communities across the country are asking for surf features in their downtown rivers. Parks are evolving to accommodate the new wave of river users. Designs built for kayakers — a sport that requires a base-level of expertise (like knowing how to roll) and a big investment to even start — are changing to accommodate the much more accessible sport of river surfing.
“There are towns all over the country where this could be just a ginormous thing. This sport is bringing in more women, more kids and just attracting more people who have never really spent time in rivers,” Harvey says.
There’s a level of trust around Salida’s whitewater park that is uncommon. Harvey has lived in the city for several decades and has guided every step of the park’s design. His son, Miles, is considered one of the world’s top river surfers. Badfish SUP, the company Harvey and his friend Zach Hughes formed more than 15 years ago, makes the top boards in the sport and its downtown surf shop is always busy. (Nearly everyone at the Scout Wave is riding Badfish boards.) Council members surf the wave. Or their kids do.
Larry Sherwood, the longtime owner of Lowry Contracting, has spent countless hours moving tons of rock — at deep discounts — to sculpt the river park and Scout Wave. Harvey and Lacy often work for free on their hometown river park. Harvey created the Arkansas River Trust in the late 1990s to help raise money for park improvements. The park builders have a close relationship with local leaders.
Those relationships have given the park designers room to adjust a feature when most other towns would opt for removal after fielding complaints from soggy boaters who flipped in the churning feature at high water.
“It’s hard being the light on the engine, you know,” Post says. “We take a lot of bugs but the view is really sweet. It’s great being at the front of all this but you do take a lot of shit. But this is what we do as a river town — we try it out.”