With water levels over 600 cfs and rising quickly, the long-awaited opening of the Taos Box stretch has now arrived. The snowpack in the San Juan mountains of southern Colorado has begun melting in earnest, and should provide runnable flows in the Taos Box for some number of weeks. We are expecting to be able to run the Box until mid-July, which is typical for a year of average snowpack. Come and have some serious fun with New Wave on the Box!

Here's the most demanding rapid in the Box. We know the first name, the last name and the social security number of every rock in Rock Garden!

Mike, Joe, Troop 18 and myself spent May 21, 2011 in the Taos Box. Watch the action!

This is a video short of Dead Car Rapid, a Class 3, on May 21, 2011, at 375 cfs.

As warm temps begin to arrive, so does the river begin to rise! Today the level is 388 cfs (cubic feet per second). We just love more water in the river, along with all the other users, recreational and agricultural. We don’t have quite enough to run the Taos Box yet, but are running the Racecourse and Rio Grande Gorge white water stretches. I took the water temp yesterday evening when I went fishing. It was 59 degrees. Not so chilly, at all, and good for funyaking, as well.

Today also saw the beginning of the first session of New Wave’s 2011 Guide Training Program, with 11 hopefuls paying $150 each for four days of intensive training, followed by two weeks of practice. More about our Guide Training Program can be found in the body of the website, under “What Else>Guide Training Program”. This Program is taught by New Wave guides Britt Huggins and Mike Boren.

On Wednesday, some of those guide trainees to be and returning New Wave guides, attended the River Rendezvous, an annual educational event for river guides. This event was put on by the BLM, our federal regulating body, and the New Mexico River Outfitters Assoc.(NMROA), our local commercial outfitting group. Yours truly, Steve Miller, is the President of that group. Stay tuned for a video of the event, soon to be posted to YouTube and this blog.

And last, but not least, another NMROA sanctioned event is this weekend’s Mothers Day Races, for kayaks, canoes and rafts. This is the official rafting season opener.

A youngster having fun in a funyak

Our tulips have been up for a while, and the willows are leafing out. We expect our first trip to take place on 4/19, but we’re awful glad that we’re not rafting today, because it’s in the fifties and the wind is howling. Spring is always windy in New Mexico, and this Spring it has really been blowing, with gusts up to 50 mph over the last few days. Of course, the wind always blows upstream, which makes getting a raft downstream particularly troublesome. That’s why we always wait until the last half of April to open. Otherwise, the irrigators in Colorado are already beginning to divert water out of the Rio Grande, so the river is now low and will remain so until the melt starts up in the headwaters. This year our snowpack is at 80% of average, which will shorten our Taos Box season. Our other trips (Rio Grande Gorge, Racecourse, Float) will, as always, run all summer. Hope to see you soon!

Our tulips have been up for a week or so.

Just clink the link and enjoy the excitement.

For more of New Wave Rafting videos and slide shows go to our home page and click the You Tube or Face Book link at the bottom of the page.

See Yah this summer,

Britt

We ran our final Taos Box trip of the 2010 season on 6/23, as the water level in the Rio Grande had, by that time, dropped to 500 cfs. Below that level the Box is just too hard to negotiate. We will,of course, be offering all of our other trips for the remainder of the season, which ends on August 29. Being less steep and rocky, our other trips remain do-able at any level. With the lowered water level, the river water has warmed up (over 65 degrees), and we are bringing out our funyak fleet, which will add considerably to the excitement that can be had on the river.

Some of you know that we had a pretty good snowpack going, which normally would give us a Box season that would extend into July. What happened? We had a very windy Spring, and strong sustained winds cause the snowpack to evaporate directly off the surface. It’s called sublimation. We also had a period of early snowmelt, in April, when the river was running over 1000 cfs for quite a while. But we had very little Box (or any) business at that time. We would like to encourage you to consider doing the Box earlier in the year. Of course, it might snow on you, but so what – we give you wetsuits, after all!!!

So now, the Box returns to a quiet and remote locale, populated by the critters only. The Bighorn sheep will no longer have boats passing by to relieve the monotony of munching riverside grass all day …

Rio Grande Gorge High Bridge, which spans the Taos Box section of the Rio Grande river. And guide Neil O. Photo by Steve Miller

The Desert Bighorn just continue to pose for me in the Taos Box and I can not resist capturing the image.

One of the alpha males.

Here’s a very short video of the High Bridge Rapid in the Taos Box section of the Rio Grande River which lies 650 feet below the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. Watch closely and you can see as we pass through it’s shadow. Just click on the link and please leave a comment.

High Bridge Rapid

A New Wave rafting trip down the Taos Box not only bring lots of white water thrills but moments of superb wildlife viewing. It’s safe to say that we see Bighorn Sheep on every trip, which is an absolute treat and sometimes it’s the other wildlife that puts the icing on the cake.

Oh, ok, just one more sheep photo. It's just that the babies are so cute. This is Cloe (note the tracking collar she wears) with this years offspring.

Western Tanagers migrate through each spring and bring a "splash" of color to the Rio Grande River.

Canada Geese nest along the banks. This proud mother was seen in the Playground section, an area suitable for the chicks.

During a break below Power Line Rapid we had a brief encounter with a friendly Bull Snake.

This Black-crowned night heron was seen fishing, just above the confluence of the Rio Grande and Taos Creek.

Click on the above images to enlarge and please document your visit by leaving a comment. Thanks.