ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
At the bottom of a deep, red rock canyon in the desert southwest, the Colorado River is restoring itself, or at least a part of itself, even as climate change shrinks its volume. And that has river enthusiasts celebrating. Long-forgotten whitewater rapids are reemerging upstream. Reporter Luke Runyon set out to find more.
LUKE RUNYON, BYLINE: Ah. We just docked our boats to scout Gypsum Canyon Rapid. The sky is blue. The sun is out. It's hot, and you can hear the water roaring.
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PETE LEFEBVRE: I'm just going to go down this main wave train and look for this doamer (ph) rock and tuck underneath that.
RUNYON: Professional river guide Pete Lefebvre has been down Cataract Canyon more than 130 times, but he's never seen Gypsum Rapid. And it looks mean, a churning, roiling mess of water and boulders.
PETE LEFEBVRE: It's steep. It's sharp. It's a must-make move. And I'm nervous (laughter).
RUNYON: Lefebvre has never seen this rapid because for more than 50 years, it's been buried under mud. Cataract Canyon is a transition zone, where the dammed up waters of Lake Powell start backing up, and sediment buries whatever's on the bottom. But since 2000, Lake Powell has dropped 100 feet. So here, the river is starting to behave like a river again, carving down and excavating these long-buried boulders. Mike DeHoff is another experienced river-runner.
MIKE DEHOFF: Cataract Canyon, I think, these days is like a friend that was in a car accident or had a terrible sickness that has come home from the hospital.
RUNYON: In 2019, he and Pete Lefebvre started the Returning Rapids Project. DeHoff's wife, Meg Flynn, a librarian in nearby Moab, keeps its archive. Using old photos from before Lake Powell's dam was built, they anticipate when and where new rapids might again show themselves.
MEG FLYNN: We see here how flowing water brings life and that the river, if you give it a chance, can recover at a rate that is really astounding to all of us.
RUNYON: The group has now seen at least seven formerly buried rapids reemerge, with names like The Chute, La Rue's Riffle and Can Opener, in addition to the ones that never disappeared, like Little Niagara or Satan's Gut. Jack Schmidt runs Utah State University's Center for Colorado River Studies.
JACK SCHMIDT: As a geologist, we study rates of change that are invariably slow. I mean, my heavens, things are just going gangbusters here.
RUNYON: Schmidt says the Colorado River's problems are significant. The region struggles with a massive gap between water supply and demand. These changes are only happening because the giant reservoir has dropped precipitously under warming temperatures.
SCHMIDT: You know, at the same time, this place is both a reservoir in crisis and a river restoring itself. It's both those things.
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RUNYON: Back in our yellow inflatable rafts, Pete Lefebvre dips his oars into the water just above Gypsum Canyon Rapid.
PETE LEFEBVRE: Well, here we go.
RUNYON: The boat drops into the newly returned white water, its nose pointed right into massive cresting waves.
PETE LEFEBVRE: Oh, whoo-hoo (ph).
RUNYON: After making it through that brand-new rapid, Lefebvre says he can't wait to see which one comes back next.
For NPR News, I'm Luke Runyon in Cataract Canyon, Utah.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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