Nestled in a high mountain valley, Durango is stretched along the banks of the Animas River, a waterway that became a dump for mine waste in the town’s early days and is now a playground for kayakers, rafters and paddle boarders.

Once businesses ignored the river, choosing to face the highway traffic, sometimes without even a window in their buildings to look over the water. Now the city is working to encourage new development that will lead people down to the water and the river trail that runs through town.

“The town is slowly turning its face to the river,” said John Brennan, a lifelong Durangoan, river advocate and former national title holder in kayaking.

But it’s a slow process, and the river is in many ways still in recovery from the decades of mining near Silverton that produced gold, silver and uranium among metals and a seemingly endless flow of pollution that is still dogging the Animas watershed.

The problem made national headlines in 2015, when the river turned neon orange after the Environmental Protection Agency accidentally released 3 million gallons of polluted water into the river. The spill did limited environmental damage — in part, researchers say, because the harm was already done by decades of ongoing pollution.

However, the vivid orange color that captured national and international attention opened Durango’s eyes to the problem and led the EPA to declare a historic mining district near Silverton a Superfund cleanup site.

The river faced new problems in 2018, when ash and debris runoff from the 416 fire, a 54,000-acre blaze that burned in 2018, delivered another blow to the river, killing off 80% of the fish. Surveys of the fish since then have showed populations are rebounding, said Colorado Parks and Wildlife aquatic biologist Jim White.

Drought followed the ash flows in 2020, taking the river down to record-low flows in the fall winter and parts of this year.

Cleaning up a legacy of pollution

A crew working to clean up the Gold King Mine on Aug. 5, 2015, triggered the now-infamous spill while clearing dirt from a tunnel. The crew believed the water in the tunnel to be only 5 feet high behind the dirt when a small stream of water started flowing from the top of the dirt wall, an on-scene investigator told The Durango Herald the day after the spill.

The crew got out before the water started gushing, escaping what one witness told the Herald was the “filthiest yellow-mustard water you’ve ever seen.”

The spill washed through Durango in about three days and had limited environmental impact, said Scott Roberts, aquatic ecologist and water programs director with Mountain Studies Institute, a nonprofit that tracks the river’s health.

“The damage had already been done — not just from mining, from years of drought and from other stressors, low water, high temperatures (and) in some cases, excessive nutrients,” he said.

But the community didn’t know what lasting harm the spill could bring, and it left residents clamoring for action to clean up the mines, said state Rep. Barbara McLachlan, D-Durango.

The outcry overcame the resistance to Superfund designation in Silverton that was staunch for decades.

Now, nearly seven years after the spill, the EPA has made minimal progress toward addressing pollution, said Peter Butler, chairman for the site’s community advisory group.

The agency has put in a temporary water treatment plant at the Gold King mine to address the polluted water from that one mine, and it is in the process of cleaning up dispersed camping areas with high lead content, he said.

But the agency has not addressed the single-largest discharger of metals in the basin, the Red and Bonita mine, he said. The agency could plug up the mine or treat water draining from the Red and Bonita in the water-treatment plant set up for the Gold King. The agency has told citizens it doesn’t want to treat water from the Red and Bonita, because the staff doesn’t want to generate more sludge when they don’t have a place to store it, he said.

A new sludge storage area could be open in two years, but the agency has not released plans to remediate the Red and Bonita, he said.

“I do think things will get done. It’s just going to take a long time and an enormous amount of money,” Butler said.

The EPA said in written responses it has tested plugging the mine with a bulkhead to stop water from draining and plans to consider that as a solution to stop the mine from polluting the watershed in the future based on further study.

The agency also noted it is close to completing work on six of the 23 sites that are at risk of sudden events that would degrade water quality. For example, the agency improved a pond where metals collect instead of running down into the watershed. It has also rerouted water around waste rock at one mine and plans to do that in more areas, the statement said.

When the work is finished, Butler expects the watershed around Silverton will see noticeable environmental improvements, such as healthier and expanded fish populations.

Discovering recreation possibilities

Thousands of people float down the Animas regularly every summer now, including lots of talented local students. But back in the late 1970s, John Brennan was the only high school student hauling a kayak in the back of his truck, he said.

The first kayakers got started in town after taking a class with Dolph Kuss, a former U.S. Olympic ski team coach and Fort Lewis College professor who fostered a love of many different sports among his students. Brennan’s older brother was among that early class and taught him how to paddle.

In their fiberglass boats the group started running some dramatic and challenging whitewater like the Upper Animas, north of town, and got a reputation as the “gnarly guys from Durango” at the same time many other small pockets of kayaking enthusiasts were forming around the country, Brennan said.

Then Durango’s Four Corners River Sports opened in the early ‘80s, helping to develop a paddling culture in town, something it is still fostering now through classes, he said.

“The kids that go out and paddle now are unbelievable,” he said.

Tens of thousands of people float the river each year on craft from commercial rafts down to inner tubes. While people don’t come to Durango solely to raft the river, they will schedule an extra day to run the river, Brennan said. The region boasts other well-known attractions that draw tourists like the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad and Mesa Verde National Park.

After a socially distanced rafting season in 2020, with limited people on each boat, the crafts are full again, said McLachlan, who watches river life from her deck on the banks of the river, buoyed by recent rains.

“This year they are going nuts. … They are screaming and laughing and having fun,” she said.

Better than others

Despite all this, the Animas is doing better than some of the other rivers in southwest Colorado, White said in part because it’s not dammed, and it is not the primary water source for Durango’s residents.

The “forgotten Florida” — a 62-mile tributary that joins the Animas south of Durango — provided a healthy alternative for Durango’s residents in the early mining days and continues to sustain a town that often needs to take its every last drop, said Jarrod Biggs, the city’s assistant utilities director.

“The Florida has been kind of the hero,” Biggs said.

Flowing from a different watershed, including sections designated as wilderness, the Florida is free of mine waste and let Durango do some things its environmentally conscious population would likely frown on today, such as building a uranium mill on the banks of the Animas. The mill site is now the town’s dog park.

“In many ways having that really pristine source (of water) from the Florida let us neglect the Animas,” Biggs said.

Even now, he said, the town uses only one gallon of water from the Animas for every 60 it takes from the Florida.

Still, as it plans for a warmer, drier future, the town is looking to maximize the Animas’ potential as a tourism driver and its water as a buffer against severe drought or fire on the Florida watershed.

Dramatically low flows

The drought last year dropped the Animas’ flows, breaking a 109-year-old record for lowest water at one point, Biggs said. It was also breaking daily records for low water.

“We’ve been kind of bumping along at the very rock bottom,” he said.

In July, monsoon rains showed up bringing flows back up, extending the rafting season and fending off what could have been the river’s first call ever, when more senior water rights holders shut off supply to more junior holders because of a drought, he said.

As warm, dry weather becomes more common across the West, Biggs wants to see the city tap its water supply in Lake Nighthorse, a relatively new reservoir filled in 2009 that is fed by the Animas. The community has rights to the water but no pipeline to access them, he said. A pipeline into the lake could help safeguard the community in drought and emergencies if both rivers were polluted, he said.

Individual water consumption in Durango is also dropping, which is key in a drier future. In 2012, the city was sending out about 200 gallons of water per person per day, now that’s down to 160 gallons per person per day as homes have gotten more efficient and the price of water has gone up in town, Biggs said.

“We’re all aiming at: How do we conserve? But also, how do we hedge our water supply against climate change? … It will always be both,” he said.

The low flows likely will also challenge the fish by increasing temperatures in the water and could exacerbate metal contamination because it will be more concentrated. Other forms of contamination, such as nutrients that cause algae blooms and bacteria could also be more concentrated, Roberts said.

“Those stressors we are already seeing on the Animas could become more harmful with less water,” he said.

The Animas running through town could be more attractive to suckers and less attractive to trout if the waters consistently warm, Roberts said.

It’s also possible that with less snowpack and spring runoff, fewer metals will flow into the river from the mines, he said.

To help protect the fish and the recreation in dry times, Brennan would like to see some shoreline restoration and new fish pools that could help aerate the water, provide places for boaters to play, and add cool places for fish to take refuge.

“It would be awesome to see some very simple things happen in some key areas,” he said.

Embracing the river

The city of Durango formed its first urban renewal authority last year to fuel redevelopment along an aging and largely treeless stretch of highway near the center of town, adjacent to the river but heedless of it.

The corridor includes two grocery stores, a strip mall, a car dealership and some of the fastest traffic you will find in town. It’s an area that separates the charm of the restaurants and shops of Main Street and flowing water.

Mayor Kim Baxter envisions a time when the redeveloped area will have multistory structures with shops and housing, as well as inviting public spaces with trees and art along the corridor.

It may take 25 years to achieve, Baxter said, but the city is already reviewing applications and she would like to see projects funded by the authority start soon and incorporate what she calls the town “main artery.”

“We should have paths going up to it, not parking lots,” McLachlan said.

This region that thrives on its soaring peaks and lush wilderness is turning its attention to the water that flows past, a way to mine recreational gold from rivers fouled by the real thing for more than a century.