So last weekend my wife and I drove to Utah to spend a week kayaking the San Juan River. It’s a beautiful, relatively easy float—typically a calm river with many rare Native American petroglyph sites. It rises in the San Juan mountains of southern Colorado, winds its way west/southwest until it crosses into Utah, south of Blanding, near the tiny town of Bluff. We stayed at a great, quirky hotel called the Recapture Lodge. But the El Nino we’re now experiencing seems to have thrown a monkey wrench in the weather gears. The San Juan usually flows at around 500 cfs (cubic feet per second). When we arrived on Saturday (for a Monday launch) it was at 8,000! The river was many feet higher than usual, filled with brown silt. By Sunday it was 8,300 cfs. The banks were flooded into willow trees. We were lost in the Great Utah Flood of 2026! It looked like this:
Kayaking a flooded river is certainly not impossible but rather foolish. It was full of silt, mud, and debris—mainly tree branches and whatever loose stuff could be swept away from the banks. Like drowned cows floating down the river. (I did not see any but a guest at our hotel reported a sighting of one.) And if you’re ever in the area, I heartily recommend the Recapture Lodge. It has a great location for the popular outdoor sports of southern Utah: rafting, kayaking, rock climbing, and mountain biking. Good breakfast and great proprietor, Jim. I’ve stayed there several times, and have read an essay but the terrific writer Joy Williams in which she says she always stays there when passing through southern Utah.
We planned five days on the river. (Our own self-guided trip, not a commercial thing.) Canceling the trip was disappointing of course but we’d be slip-sliding in the mud along the banks at every place we wanted to land, then scraping mud off our boats (and probably each other) after we did. So we bailed. Plus there was more rain on the way. Instead we did some awesome early-autumn hiking in the canyon lands of Utah. Here’s a gorgeous vista from the Butler Wash archaeological site. (It features cliff dwellings similar to the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park.)
After hiking to sites in Utah we pivoted east to Mesa Verde National Park, one of my favorite places in the world. There’s a zen spiritual mystery to the mesa and the canyons. We stayed at the Far View Lodge, and had good views of the sunset.
