What is a river?

It’s longer than the storied Colorado River. It rises and falls through more dramatic scenery and geology changes than any river in the state. Hosts 100 miles of gold medal trout waters. Delivers bounty to farmers and consumers. Supplies a lesser-known drinking water lifeline to Colorado’s biggest cities.Yet nearly every inch of the Arkansas River through Colorado has been pummeled by humans for more than a century. From the high headwaters all the way to the state line, Michael Booth has this story on how the people who care are trying to redeem a hard-working stream

▶ Read more

From a mine dump to floating rubber flotillas to community surf waves, the Upper Arkansas River shapes communities like Buena Vista, Salida and Cañon City. Today, the Upper Arkansas River between Leadville and Pueblo is the source of a lot of fun. While it primarily serves as a source of urban water, that tumbling snowmelt delivers a secondary but critical benefit of countless good times. Jason Blevins has more.

▶ Read more

Conflicts between river uses and property owners date back decades in Colorado, a state that has the murkiest access laws in the country. Courts have handed down rulings in contentious lawsuits involving access on the Arkansas River and Colorado River. For years, those conflicts have been settled on a case-by-case basis, with landowners, boaters and anglers sitting at a table and finding some sort of agreement. Now, writes Jason Blevins, camps are forming for a renewed fight. 

▶ Read more

In just more than a decade, this city of 17,000 people has worked to supercharge a new identity as an outdoors hub with river and trail improvements that have turned heads across the Front Range. But for all the energy in Cañon City’s reinvention bid, steep challenges remain, from contending with a gnarly highway separating downtown from the river, to dealing with an abandoned industrial strip that has long blocked redevelopment in a riverside corridor seen as key to making the area feel more like a river town, and less like a prison town. After 15 years of river and trail improvements, Lance Benzel reports on how the southern Colorado city is confronting the legacy of its industrial past

▶ Read more

Pueblo has a brutal history with its backyard river. For over a century the Arkansas was purely used for industry and agriculture, demonstrating the irony of a city built for access to waterways that residents will rarely use. But the city wants to change that. Waterworks Park, which officially opened in May, took just under seven years and $11 million to bring it from idea to the ribbon cutting. The project turned a once-dangerous swimming hole — the old dam had been the site of several drownings — into a quarter-mile-long, family-friendly park that rivals any mountain town’s riverside recreation. Parker Yamasaki has more on Pueblo’s latest bid to change its relationship to the Arkansas River.

▶ Read more

Rocky Ford’s modern history starts with a train, some watermelon seeds and a man named George W. Swink. When he sold slabs of the juicy goodness to a couple thousand people one day in the late 1880s, it was such a joyous occasion he decided to build an entire fair around it. Nearly 150 years later, the Arkansas Valley Fair in Rocky Ford is the oldest of its kind in Colorado. But the north end of the town is what you might call a playground desert. Concerned about their children and wanting a place all residents can connect with nature, Rocky Ford leaders have sparked a plan to link the fairgrounds to a lake to a network of trails along the Arkansas River. As Tracy Ross reports, they’re slowly making progress.

▶ Read more

With construction of the long-awaited Arkansas Valley Conduit finally under way,  the May Valley Water Association is in line to get clean water from Pueblo Reservoir, more than 100 miles to the west. Then contamination notices from the state health department will stop and the cloud that lies over these small towns in the Lower Arkansas River Basin due to their historically bad water will begin to lift. Jerd Smith of Fresh Water News has this story on the long-awaited conduit. 

▶ Read more

For Jake Rogers, the 28-year-old curator of the Big Timbers Museum in Lamar, the Arkansas River’s meandering ribbon ties together its more recent significance — as an engine for agriculture and, gradually, recreation — with a complicated history of westward expansion and native displacement from the water’s once heavily timbered banks that extended more than 60 miles west toward La Junta.

▶ Read more

The Granada Relocation Center — better known as Amache — was purposely chosen for its remote location, one of 10 relocation centers hastily built in 1942 and sited in the country’s dust bowls and deserts to contain people of Japanese descent. But unlike much of the dusty Plains, Amache had the Arkansas. Since 2008, Dr. Bonnie Clark, archeology professor at the University of Denver and founder of the Amache Archeology Project, has worked with students, Amache survivors and descendants, Granada locals, amateur archeologists and volunteers to meticulously uncover an expansive network of gardens cultivated by incarcerees during their wartime imprisonment. Parker Yamasaki has this story on Amache and the Arkansas.

▶ Read more

In the last Colorado town before the Kansas state line, the Arkansas is brown and slow, in some spots like a string of big mud puddles connected by sand bars. Ten miles into Kansas, it disappears, depleted this time of year by thirsty cities and farms along its 360-mile journey through Colorado. By the time the Arkansas leaves Colorado, it is a different river. But it’s still vital to the people in this dry part of the state.

▶ Read more