Mike Harvey | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Mike Harvey has been at the heart of the river scene in Salida, Colo., for more than 25 years. As a river guide and a competitive freestyle kayaker, a whitewater park designer and an entrepreneur carving out a market for river surfing and paddle boarding through Badfish, the manufacturing company and surf shop that he co-owns in Salida.
Adam Williams talks with Mike about how he and Zack Hughes started Badfish in Zack’s garage and became huge influences in growing the adventure sport of river surfing into what it is today.
They also talk about Mike’s involvement in developing the whitewater park in Salida, including the Scout Wave, and the opposition some feel toward those efforts. Among other things, like Mike’s recent trip to Northern Ireland and the Netflix series “Derry Girls.”
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Public Health & Environment: Office of Health Disparities.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio FM in Salida, Colo.
Mike Harvey / Badfish
Website: badfishsup.com
Instagram: instagram.com/badfishsup
Facebook: facebook.com/badfishsup
YouTube: youtube.com/c/badfishsup
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:14): Welcome to We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanness, and well-being rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams. Today I’m talking with Mike Harvey of Badfish and other Ventures.
Mike has been at the heart of the river scene in Salida for more than 25 years. Interestingly, the sport that Mike says made him who he is at heart as a kid growing up in Cleveland, it’s not tied to the water. And it was from the discipline suite in his boarding school dorm that he was urged by a teacher to come west to the Arkansas Valley and taste the river and white water, and that profoundly changed Mike’s life forever.
He would become a river guide and a competitive freestyle kayaker, a white water park designer working with Gary Lacy, who Mike calls the modern godfather of white water parks in the US and an entrepreneur carving out a market for river surfing and paddleboarding through Badfish, the manufacturing company and surf shop that Mike owns here in Salida.
(01:08): He tells about this 25 year project that he and others set out to turn the river from being at Salida’s back door, being kept behind chain link and barbed wire fencing, into the town’s front door as a vibrant focal point for tourists and residents alike. We talk about his involvement in developing the white water park in Salida, including the Scout Wave. I ask about the opposition that some feel toward those efforts too.
We also talk about the amazing community vibe among the surfers here, which I really appreciate, even as a spectator who has yet to gather my courage and get out there and ride the wave myself. We talk about how Mike and Zack Hughes started Badfish in Zack’s garage, and while they didn’t invent the sport of river surfing necessarily, I think they have an undeniable presence as pioneers who have broadened its appeal and grown it into what it is today.
(01:58): And because of that, it seems that Salida now holds a very special place in the sport with surfers traveling thousands of miles to ride the Scout Wave. Mike and I also talk about the Netflix show, “Derry Girls,” among other things.
Interestingly enough, this is the second guest on the podcast just in recent months in which the troubles in Northern Ireland have come up. The Looking Upstream podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority. Show notes with photos, links, and a transcript of the conversation are published at weareChaffeepod.com. As always, you can also subscribe to the Looking Upstream newsletter there and you can see more photos and connect with the podcast on Instagram @wearechaffeepod.
Okay, here we go. Mike Harvey.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams: You and your wife, Hanley, recently went on a trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Mike Harvey (02:56): I did, yeah, we did.
Adam Williams (02:57): I get the impression you don’t post a lot on social media, but what little I saw, they weren’t photos you might expect to come from those places, pictures of sheep in the landscape, pubs, things like that. You posted something about what you were seeing and the history related to the troubles, and I’m curious about what drew your attention to that, if you are particularly a history buff kind of person or what?
Mike Harvey (03:23): Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s total evidence of my middle-aged-ness that I’m really interested in, I think I’m pretty curious in general, and I read a lot of non-fiction and history is an interest of mine. Yeah, that’s one of the things that changes I guess when you get older is you go someplace and you’re super curious to learn more about the place versus just, I don’t know, maybe the way I would’ve traveled when I was younger and it was all about going surfing or going kayaking somewhere.
Adam Williams (03:57): The adventures of it.
Mike Harvey (03:58): Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s still mostly what I want to do when I leave town. But yeah, it was just interesting for me to learn more about the place and learn about the history, and I read some books before I went just to try to be able to, I don’t know, have a little more authentic experience while I was there.
Adam Williams (04:16): That’s interesting. And to go to that effort to kind of prepare for it and then be able to identify what you were seeing around you. I mean, you had pictures that included, there was some graffiti, there were murals, there were different buildings. A lot of people could go over there and walk right past all that and not really give a thought to, what am I seeing? What is the relevance? What is the importance of this to, I mean, everyday people’s lives? Historically, the troubles are, I mean, that’s a big thing and it’s not really over in terms of how people feel it is it?
Mike Harvey (04:48): No, and I mean, I would really hesitate to pretend like I’m an expert, because I read a couple books and went there for two weeks. But it was something I read, I was a kid in the ’80s and in high school in the early ’90s, and so I remember looking at Newsweek magazine or was just sort of in the air. I liked U2 as a kid, and I remember hearing the song Sunday Bloody Sunday and not knowing what that was about, what the Bloody Sunday event was.
So I don’t know. It was interesting for me to learn about their conflict, which they refer to as the troubles, and since we were going to be in Northern Ireland and they’re now whatever, 25 almost years since they signed their peace accord. So yeah, it was just interesting for me to learn more about it and also because not to veer this conversation the wrong direction, but because we’re in election season here, and so it feels so divided here, but it does feel very divided, I think it is, but it’s also a helpful reminder that we’re not shooting at each other and hopefully it won’t come to that.
Adam Williams (05:58): Yeah, it is tough to make the comparison, isn’t it? But it is a reminder. This conversation came up actually with Jenn Dempsey who was on the podcast, I don’t know, some months ago maybe. She lived over there for an extended period of time. And so we talked a little bit about the troubles and her perception of the things there. And I think I did kind of the same thing you just did. I’m like, well, I’m not an expert, and I would really hesitate to draw a connection to the divide we have here, and yet we feel it. It’s hard not to in a way, because now to whatever extent there are similarities, this is our experience here is there’s a lot of anxiety and there is some violence that has happened, and it’s hard not to make those connections a little bit.
Mike Harvey (06:39): Yeah, I mean, you think about the breakdown that happens when literally conflicts get to a point where it turns into violent conflict, and I think there’s a lot of rhetoric and kind of casual conversation and things that are on social media that are pretty irresponsible and probably if nothing else, evidence that we’ve never actually dealt with, at least not in anyone’s lifetime, we’ve never really dealt with a violent conflict in the US.
And yeah, seeing what you can see still very visibly in Northern Ireland is a reminder that, I mean, it’s still very visceral there, and there’s still a lot of the Irish Republican neighborhoods in Belfast feel very different than the Unionist, Loyalist neighborhoods, and it’s still very present in a way that feels actually much more divided than in the US.
(07:37): It’s not just yard signs, it’s memorials to people that died and very, very strong language comparing the IRA to ISIS and sort of very inflammatory stuff. So yeah, I mean, you can’t help as an American, but draw those parallels. But it was also just fascinating to learn about it in and of itself because I was alive during that time period, but as a kid, just not really paying attention.
Adam Williams (08:00): I don’t know if you have heard of or have ever watched, there’s a show on Netflix called “Derry Girls.”
Mike Harvey (08:04): We just started watching it because we went to Derry, and so yeah, it was cool.
Adam Williams (08:10): And I’m also, you’re only a couple years older than me, so we have that same timeframe growing up in the ’80s, teenagers in the ’90s, and that show is set in the ’90s with these kids.
So in a way, you and those around our age can also connect with, well, this was what was going on in that part of the world when we were that same age in the ’90s, they were living through some stuff that, yeah, it’s not on our minds because like you said, in our lifetimes, we’ve not had to deal with this sort of thing.
Mike Harvey (08:40): No, yeah, and it’s a great show. The writing’s really good and the conflict isn’t front and center, but it’s like the ambient background for the show, and you have definitely watch with subtitles on. It’s pretty hard to understand.
Adam Williams (08:56): Can’t understand the language and accent.
Mike Harvey (08:58): No, the Irish teenage slang is tough to follow. But yeah, it’s been fun to watch. Yeah.
Adam Williams (09:04): I have the impression that you have traveled the world quite a bit in general throughout, I don’t know, the last 25 or whatever years probably, and a lot of times maybe in regard to water, probably white water kayaking.
Mike Harvey (09:16): Yeah, I mean, I love to travel and my wife and I have been fortunate enough to take our children a lot of places when they were younger and expose them to a lot of things. And we have had an opportunity to do a couple few really cool international river-oriented trips. And the most recent one was this past December, December of ’23 with some friends here from town. We spent a couple weeks in Chile and Patagonia running rivers and floating some rivers. So as a river runner, running rivers has always been sort of a central organizing principle of a lot of our travel, and it’s an awesome and thing to do as a family, because the mission is clear.
(10:00): We’re going from point A to point B, we’re going to float down this river, we’re going to do it together, and we’re going to work together to get from here to there. And I always really liked that type of travel with my family because everybody’s sort of focused on the same goal, we’re doing the same thing together. It’s less of everybody’s sort of going different directions or being distracted by something. And so it’s felt like including just river trips, normal summer river trips in Utah or Idaho or wherever, multi-day river trips have been something that we’ve done a lot as a family for vacations.
Adam Williams (10:37): Did you grow up with that similar kind of background where your family would go and do whether it was kayaking or canoe trips or something like that?
Mike Harvey (10:45): No. No, not really. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, but my dad was really into fly-fishing, and so we spent a lot of time fishing together, so I spent time on rivers and spent time in the outdoors. My dad really loved being in the outdoors and he’s into bird watching and he’d take me along. We would go to that local parks and things like that. For me, the interest in all that really started because both my parents’ siblings lived in Colorado when I was a kid, and so I spent a lot of time out here as a kid and skiing and sleeping on their couches and coming out in the summertime. And I mean, by the time I was eight or nine years old, I was like, oh, I’m definitely going to live in Colorado. And so I actually moved to Colorado six days after I graduated high school in June of 1993.
When I was 18 years old, I had a teacher, a mentor in high school. I went to a boarding school and my teacher who lived in the apartment next to my dorm room, I lived in the dorm room for three years. That was referred to at my school as a discipline suite because it was right next to this, at the time, I don’t know, he was in his mid-30s, I guess, teacher who would keep a real close eye on us, make sure if one of myself or my roommate needed to go in his apartment and study to pay attention, we’d get split up like that. But he was just a really kind of a surrogate parent for me in those years and somebody I connected with, and he would work out here in the summers as a raft guide on the Arkansas. And so he knew that I wanted to come to Colorado.
(12:26): I didn’t really have a plan. And he’s like, “You know what you should do is come out with me after you graduate and I’ll get you a job as a raft guide.” And I knew nothing. I’d never been white water rafting at that point in my life. Like I said, most of the time I spent on rivers was fishing, but I was like, “Sounds great, let’s do it.”
And I drove out six days after I graduated high school, drove into Johnson Village and became a raft guide and just fell in love. I mean, knocked over in love with the whole thing, the lifestyle, the people I met, the actual act of going down a river. I learned to kayak a couple weeks after I moved here or I bought a kayak and started to learn. And at 18 years old, I guess I probably been looking for something, but at that age, you’re not self-aware enough to know what you’re, and I just found it. I just was like, I’ll just go ahead and do this the rest of my life.
Adam Williams (13:22): The dots connected, it sounds like having that teacher and be able to provide that kind of guidance.
Mike Harvey (13:28): Oh, totally. And I’ll say this about Jeff, it’s been a powerful lesson for me as I grow older to when I can, try to offer opportunities to young people because you just don’t know the impact you’re going to have on somebody. Maybe I would’ve done it one summer and gone to school and I don’t know, done something else in my life, but he changed my life by just giving me that opportunity. And so I try to remember that. You can offer an opportunity to somebody and you don’t know where it’s going to go, and just that gift of being able to give someone an opportunity is something I’m really grateful sometimes when I can do that.
Adam Williams (14:07): Do we want to get into the reasons that you were discipline dorm?
Mike Harvey (14:12): Yeah, I mean, it’s normal. Yeah. I mean, I was the kind of kid that needed something… I mean, especially in those days it was like, do school this way or you fail, and there weren’t a lot of alternative options for me, and it was mostly about keeping their thumb on me and keeping me in line, and I didn’t react well to that, and I’ve never reacted that well to that sort of environment. So yeah, I wasn’t a particularly good student, and I regret that actually. I look back and I was like, yeah, I was kind of a punk, but whatever. I found something that, I needed something that give me some motivation and give me sort of a guiding principle, and I found it in the river, and I’m so grateful I did. I just feel so lucky that I was given that opportunity.
Adam Williams (15:04): It’s interesting with that authoritarian sort of, “This is the way you’re going to do it. This is how you’re going to do your homework. This is how everything has to happen.” And when you resist or kind of buck that, the mindset on the other side is, “Well, I guess we need to lean on you harder.” No, you’re not getting it. That’s not the way to reach me. But I think back then there wasn’t a lot of versatility in whether that was parenting or teaching-
Mike Harvey (15:28): No.
Adam Williams (15:28): Or anybody in those positions. I think they saw it as I’m the authority and that’s all there is to it.
Mike Harvey (15:33): I think that’s absolutely right, and I do think it’s changing, it’s changed a lot. I think people find ways. I mean, I’ve seen it with my own kids and my son, he won’t mind me saying this, but he’s dyslexic and he worked hard in school, but he struggled. But there were so many great resources at Salida High School that recognized that he needed some different approaches, and then they helped him find those approaches and I think helped set him up for success as a young adult. And so I think it has changed a lot, but yeah, when I was in high school it was like, do it this way or you’re doing it wrong.
Adam Williams (16:11): Who’d have thought we’re all different?
Mike Harvey (16:12): Yeah, exactly.
Adam Williams (16:13): We don’t all fit into that mold the same way and hammering harder on us doesn’t necessarily make it work.
Mike Harvey (16:18): No, it doesn’t work for everybody.
Adam Williams (16:19): So not to shift gears too hard here, but you own Badfish. It’s a surf shop manufacturing company, and I would say brand. It’s a brand in the industry. And we’re going to get further into that, but I guess I just want to start with asking how does somebody end up owning a surf shop in Colorado? Because when you say surf shop, what comes to mind? It’s California, it’s Hawaii, it’s a certain aesthetic, a certain style and vibe and culture. How did we get here?
Mike Harvey (16:50): It’s a long story. Yeah, it’s not, I mean, 7,000 feet of above sea level is not typically where you find a surf shop. Well, basically that first summer I was here on the river, I met a guy named Zack Hughes, and he was into kayaking too. He was a rookie raft guide as well. And he became a good friend, and he’s been a good friend for however many years ago that was, 30 plus years ago, he’s been a good friend for all those years, and we did a lot of kayaking together, traveled around and paddled together. I ended up at the same college that Zack was at as well, transferred into a school that he was a student at, and he graduated before me. Went to work for an outfitter in Honduras guiding American kayakers who would come down for a vacation to run rivers in Honduras.
(17:40): And when I was in college, I started going down there and hanging out and kayaking with those guys and picking up a little bit of work, but mostly just kayaking. It was really an expensive place to be in the ’90s in Honduras, and so you could go down for a month and spend literally a few hundred dollars. And so yeah, we became good friends and we both settled here in Salida full-time together in 1998.
We actually got married within a month of each other and settled in Salida together and continued to paddle and ride bikes and snowboard and do stuff together. I got interested in seeing if I could figure out how to develop a white water park in Salida. White water park’s like a term for basically, it’s become a generic term for a bunch of different types of improvements, but it’s basically like an urban river improvement project that creates recreation, creates access to river corridors in urban areas.
(18:39): And Colorado’s really the birthplace of white water parks really started here. You can go back even into the ’70s with Confluence Park in Denver, but the most relevant modern example is in Golden, Colorado. They built a white water park on Clear Creek in the mid ’90s, and I started competing in white water kayaking in what’s now called freestyle kayaking. It used to be called rodeo kayaking, and we went to a competition in Golden after they opened that white water park.
And it just hit me that this was something that made a ton of sense in Salida, and it wasn’t completely out of left field. I should make sure to say that people have been moving rocks around in the river corridor and Salida for a long time with the FIBArk Festival, the oldest white water festival in the world, even I found photos from the ’60s where people drove a bulldozer in right at where the boat ramp is now and pushed up piles of rocks to make white water features so that they could have a slalom race.
(19:39): And that continued through the ’90s. A group of local kayakers would get in and rearrange rocks in the river channel, and sometimes the high water would come and push them over and they’d redo it, but it was really just focused right on the end of the boat ramp at the time. I could see in Golden this sort of different vision for that where the community was really integrated into the river corridor.
There were trails, there were access points, there were beaches, there were eddies, there were people using the river right in downtown Golden. And it just seemed like a total no-brainer for Salida. But this was 1999 and I was, didn’t really know how to accomplish that. I didn’t really not how accomplish anything actually at that point. And so we just set about working on it. And I know this is a roundabout way to get to Badfish, but you can’t really tell the story without telling the story.
Adam Williams (20:31): No, that’s all good. Yeah, let’s do it.
Mike Harvey (20:33): Yeah, so basically we started working on that project, and when I say we, it involved some other local guys like Steve Holmes and P.T. Wood and Ray Kitson and Jerry Mallet were kind of there to help sort of figure out how to get this project started. And we actually had a meeting in The Vic and back in 1999, and we started a nonprofit organization called the Arkansas River Trust, and the idea was to raise some money and try to have a vehicle to make these improvements on the river in Salida. And so we did. We went through this project and I mean, there’s lots of side stories and there’s a lot of detail, but basically by the spring of 2000, we had gotten as far as getting a Army Corps of Engineers permit and getting permission to go in off the end of the boat ramp and build this structure.
(21:28): And I had gotten to know a local contractor named Fred Lowry, who was an amazing guy. I miss him. He passed in 2015, but Fred had agreed to help me with the project for free. So 100% donation of materials and labor to do this project, which when I think back on that, I mean, I can’t believe that he took that leap of faith because I’m not sure I would’ve done it if I had come into that meeting and pitched that, me at that age had pitched me now on this project, I don’t know. It was a leap of faith for Fred. But-
Adam Williams (22:04): You were only around 25 at the time, right?
Mike Harvey (22:05): I was. I was young and a lot of enthusiasm, high on enthusiasm, low on intelligence probably at that point. And Fred was agreed to do the project, and so we did this project, but about a week before the project started, he unloaded the excavator on the boat ramp in this big pile of boulders. And I just totally freaked out. I was like, “What am I doing? I can’t do this. I don’t have any qualification to go into the Arkansas River and move rocks around.”
I kind of just panicked. And I found out the name of the guy who had designed the Golden white water park. His name was Gary Lacy, and somehow through some contacts I had, I got his home phone number and I called him and I left him a message and was basically like, “I have a permit from the federal government, a pile of rocks and an excavator, and I’m going to go in next week and I’m going to build this thing in Salida and I am not sure what I’m supposed to do. Please help me.”
(23:10): And to his credit, he called me back the same day and was like, “Hey, I’ll be down tomorrow.” And so he drove down here. Gary has a long history in Salida. His father, Lieutenant Joe Lacy raced in the second FIBArk ever in 1950. He was one of the founding members of Colorado White Water Association.
So Gary had sat on the old railroad trestle that used to cross right at the boat ramp in the ’50s as a kid and dangled his feet off the bridge and watched his dad paddle by. And then in the ’70s through the ’80s, Gary won six FIBArk Downriver Races and kind of a legendary guy in white water paddling. And Gary was an engineer, and he started really, he’s sort of the modern father, godfather of white water parks in the US and he just agreed to come down and help me.
(24:02): And so he came down and turned out he was going to go on vacation when we were actually going to do the work, but he painted some lines on the banks. And he explained to me, well, he drew some pictures on the back of a napkin basically and was like, “This is what you want to do, and you got it, you can do it.” And I’m like, “Okay, okay.” And so we built that first structure and it worked actually really well for about a season fell apart, but that started the whole project. And so I’ll fast-forward because it’s a long story. It’s a 25 year story. But basically we started working with the city. We started working with Great Outdoors Colorado with foundations in the state to raise money for this vision. And over time we were able to phase this improvement in.
So a lot of things that people see now, like the trail along the river, the improvements in Riverside Park, all of that has come through this white water park effort, the whole sort of behind the steam plant. Some folks that have been around a long time will remember that there used to be a barbed wire fence actually behind the steam plant, a chain link fence that went right to the top of the bank with barbed wire on top to keep people out of that area. All that stuff came down.
I feel like it sort of was like we turned our front doors facing the river downtown. It was at our back door for a long time, which is normal. That’s how almost every urban river I’ve worked on in the last 25 years in the US, it’s out your back door. It’s the place that things flow away from your community.
(25:30): And so that’s where we put trash, that’s where we put our sewage. And most urban rivers are impacted that way, but this project and through lots of partners, lots of people that have worked on over the years, it’s become this effort of really making the river a focal point of downtown, and it wasn’t that way initially. In fact, in Riverside Park when we started, there was a concrete wall across the top of the bank to keep people from going down to the river.
And one of the things that people were upset with me about was that if we took that wall out, then children were going to go down there and drown. And the wall was only 36 inches high. So I was questioning how many kids were not making it over the top of it anyway. But the point was is that was the mentality was like the river, we should keep people away from the river.
Adam Williams (26:17): That’s such an interesting piece of history here, I think, because now anybody who comes in and we have, I don’t know how many thousands and thousands of visitors who come through here every season, how many people would think of Salida as not being a river town at this point. But what you’re saying is only 25 years ago and however long before that, nobody would’ve thought that because it was almost incidental that there was a river there.
Mike Harvey (26:40): Yeah, I think it’s a story of communities along rivers everywhere in the US, which is they’re working rivers. I mean, the river was obviously extremely valuable to the communities since it was founded, but Salida is where it is because there’s a 100-acre rail yard on the north side of the river. And that is what the town built out from.
Our downtown, all our brick buildings, that was all built by the railroad and the railyard there was the sort of main economic driver of this community for a long time. And in addition to those changes that it made to our community, it also made dramatic changes to the river. So what the railroad did was they dumped and filled and straightened out the river and basically for flood control, which that’s how a lot of communities have treated rivers through communities, is they’re a nuisance.
(27:27): They flood, they go up and down, they spread out. So organize them into a ditch and keep them flowing by the community and that’s what we were left with here. Despite the fact that we are the premier white water river, really in the US are one of them. So either side of Salida, we have 80 miles of world-class white water, but in downtown Salida, we had sort of the remnants of this historic impacts from the railroad.
So yeah, white water paddling has a long history in Salida, but I don’t feel like it was as enmeshed in the community as the river is now because it was more like, oh yeah, there’s some weirdos down there, paddling kayaks, or the hippies are up in Browns Canyon or once a year everybody comes town for FIBArk and thank God they leave after the weekend. And what I think has changed is that now it’s a part of our community and kids grow up playing on the river.
(28:20): That’s our gathering place. That’s where people spend time. So that’s been a big change, I’d say over the past 25 years for sure. But you asked me 10 minutes ago about Badfish. Basically what happened is I started working for Gary Lacy and learning. It was a really good time because he had just started to get more projects. This was something more communities wanted to do.
And so I had the opportunity to work with him at a time when it was really a brand new industry. So I got to learn with him and had some experience in construction, and I was a white water kayaker, but I’d never done anything like this before. So I just learned sort of in a mentorship way, apprenticeship way with Gary. And in the mid-2000, like in 2005, we built a white water park in Pueblo. And when the water came up at the time, we were white water kayakers and sort of our customers, so to speak, were white water kayakers.
(29:13): So we were designing features, thinking about what white water kayakers wanted. And then when the water came up, this big green wave stood up, and there were some guys, landlocked surfers who had been living in Pueblo who brought out their surfboards. And they were actually riding this wave at high water in the spring during the runoff.
And I went down there to inspect the project at one point during high water to see how things were holding up and everything. And I saw these guys surfing, and I was like, “Oh, wow.” It hit me. I was like, “Wow, that’s cool.” And I had seen, it’s not like river surfing was invented right there. People had surfed on rivers before it’d been happening in Jackson, Wyoming, for example, for a long time. You can Google on YouTube Mountain Dew commercial from the ’80s where they’re surfing on the Snake River, classic.
(30:00): But it was always a novelty. It was like something you’d see at high water on the Colorado, there was this wave that would come in and there’d be this one kind of weird dude out there on a longboard. So it wasn’t something people really did, but it had been done. But these guys were surfing this wave that we’d built. And it was kind of on accident that we made this wave. We weren’t trying to. So my buddy Zack grew up in San Diego and he grew up surfing, and I grew up being a skater, and skateboarding was like the organizing, that was the sport that made me who I am in a lot of ways, the way I look at the world was because of my passion for it as a kid. So of course, if you’re a skater in Ohio as a kid you wish you were a surfer in Southern California.
(30:42): That’s the ultimate pinnacle. And so Zack actually was that. And so I called him up and I was like, “Hey, man, we should bring some of your surfboards down here and try this.” And so we did. Went down there and surfed and Zack got it right away. I mean, guy’s an incredible athlete, grew up surfing, and I was just kind of flailing, but I was like, this is cool. This is different. And on the way home from that session, Zack was like, “These boards aren’t quite right. These are boards designed for surfing in the ocean, and this is different. I can see how this is different.”
He’s a white water kayaker too. So he understood everything that was going on here. And he’s a maker, he’s a craftsman, he’s an artist. He makes things with his hands. So he immediately started thinking, how could I make a board that works better for this than these ocean style surfboards, which are the dynamic’s totally different in the ocean than surfing on a river.
(31:35): And so he went back and he got on YouTube, and this has got to be early YouTube basically, and found a video how to shape surfboards. And he started making surfboards out of blueboard foam insulation that he bought at Hylton Lumber. And his idea initially was that what we needed was a fish shape, which is a particular shape of surfboard that he would surf in the summers in Southern California when there’s not much swell. So the waves are sort of mushy and slow and not very good. And a lot of the river waves were also not terribly powerful and weren’t very big. And so he thought, yeah, we need a fish, but it needs to be a mutant fish. It needs to be thicker and fatter and have more volume. And so pretty quickly mutant fish became Badfish, and he started making these boards. The very first one he ever made actually hangs in our shop downtown.
(32:24): You can come see it. It’s hanging up over where the wetsuits are. And so he started making boards and messing around, and we started looking for waves to surf. But the problem was was that Zack is really good, and I wasn’t and I couldn’t get to my feet on these boards very easily. And so a couple year or so later, a friend of ours named Earl Richmond, who owned a Colorado kayak supply for up in Buena Vista for a number of years, 20 plus years, he brought a stand-up paddleboard back, and he’s also from Southern California, went out there, saw a stand-up paddleboard, and brought one back to the Arkansas and was like, “Hey, this would be fun. We could do this on the river.” It’s like you’re standing on a big surfboard with a long canoe paddle. It’s like kayaking on your feet. And so we started messing around with stand-up paddleboards.
(33:10): And for me what clicked was like, well, what I need is what Zack has been doing with making these weird little surfboards, but I need it to be big enough that I can stand on in the eddy and have a paddle in my hand, and then I will just be like, I know what to do then. I could just paddle out of the Eddy and I could be surfing and I could stop messing around with all this popping into my feet and all these things I was struggling with.
So I asked him, I went over to his garage and was like, “Hey, could you make me a bigger version of what you’re making, but that we could stand on and it would float in the eddy?” And he was like, “Sure.” So he made that board for me. At the same time, this was 2009 at this point, I got a grant with the City of Salida to build two new features in the park, the features that are now referred to as the Office Wave and the Scout Wave.
(33:57): This is the original versions of them. And we had this idea that we could make something that actually stood up into a wave. So that’s actually quite hard to do in nature on a river, a hydraulic feature either wants to lay down flat and be too flat, or it wants to fall over on itself and turn into a foamy, what we refer to as a hole. To get the perfect wave that stands up just steep enough that you could surf the face of it but still be green and not crumble into a white water feature, that’s not something that nature wants to do.
It’s actually challenging to create that. But we had this idea how we might be able to do it. And so we built these two features over that winter in town, and when the water came up just a little bit in April, I brought that board that Zack had made me down, and I paddled out of the eddy on it, and I stood there and I surfed, and I stood there, right away it worked.
(34:45): So I was standing there for 15 minutes, no one was around, just standing on the wave. And it was a profound perspective shift for me. It was like I was standing up six feet tall over the river, not sitting on my butt. So everything looked so different. The rocks looked different. The way the water was rushing by looked different than all those usual surfing on my kayak. And it felt different. I was like, how do I make this thing turn? And I was doing things and I was just totally blown away. And I literally just came, once I finally came off the wave, I came over to the side and I had my cell phone, and I called Zack and I was like, “Hey, man, we should probably do, other people are going to want to do this. We should start a business together.”
Adam Williams (35:29): I have one of those boards.
Mike Harvey (35:30): Do you?
Adam Williams (35:31): Yeah, the inflatable one.
Mike Harvey (35:36): Yeah, yeah.
Adam Williams (35:36): So that’s kind of for-
Mike Harvey (35:36): That came a few years later.
Adam Williams (35:36): Well, yeah, yeah, for the beginner.
Mike Harvey (35:37): Totally, yeah.
Adam Williams (35:37): And I haven’t even gotten out there and tried it yet. A little bit intimidated.
Mike Harvey (35:41): Yeah, we’re going to go though. You and I are going to go this spring.
Adam Williams (35:44): I’d love that.
Mike Harvey (35:44): Yeah, yeah.
Adam Williams (35:45): Yeah. So I’m kind of wondering if what I’m hearing is that while people had surfed on Rivers before, there wasn’t really an active idea or sport of this.
Mike Harvey (35:45): No.
Adam Williams (35:56): I’m wondering if you and Zack kind of invented this.
Mike Harvey (35:59): No, I wouldn’t take credit for that. I would say that people were doing it in few random places. There was a guy in Oregon that had an early website talking about it. The difference was that it was very fringe. We knew everybody that river surfed in the entire state of Colorado when we started river surfing, literally. I mean, I knew them all.
Adam Williams (36:20): Talking about a handful of people.
Mike Harvey (36:22): Yeah, yeah, it was a very fringe activity because one, it was hard. There weren’t waves that were consistent. You had to know exactly when they came in and you have to drive there. And they were hard to access and they were sometimes really hard to get onto. And what the paddle board surfboard did was it opened it up to the next potential for people to do it in white water parks, which were being built like the one here in Salida, like the one in Buena Vista. So the-
Adam Williams (36:49): That’s where there’s cross-section here of you as a designer, a wave builder, a designer working with Gary Lacy. You have what ends up being a pretty lengthy career. I mean, are you still involved in doing that, traveling and doing that?
Mike Harvey (36:49): Yeah, yeah.
Adam Williams (37:00): So we’re talking 25 or so years of that education and you learning how to be that guy, and you and Zack are developing this as a sport to surf on these rivers. There’s an interesting, and I think can’t be overlooked sort of component to your place in the history of all this.
Mike Harvey (37:19): Yeah, no, we’ve been involved for a long time and in trying to both make the waves and then make the things that could ride the wave, but what was going on was that it was a sport. I mean, if you look at, and before I say this, I’m going to preface this by saying I’m not comparing myself to Jake Burton, the guy’s a legend.
Burton Snowboards is a legendary brand. I’m just as an example, Jake Burton started making snowboards and there was nowhere to ride them. So they weren’t allowed on ski resorts. You could go hike up a hill somewhere and ride down them. But right away he recognized that the weakness in the whole sport getting in people’s hands was that he had to create the market for it.
(38:06): And now I’m going to sound like I had some evil plan here to turn everybody into river surfers, and that’s not it. That is something I get accused of by the way. So I just confirmed it. But no, but basically what’s had to happen for river surfing to become something that people could do is you had to have places to ride waves. And that is very challenging. So Jake did something really hard, which he got ski areas to say, “Yeah, you could go down a hill on a snowboard.” And that took a lot of politicking and eventually some resorts allowed people on, and now basically everybody does. But the chairlifts were already there, the industry was there, the snow falls on these hills, and they just needed permission to go up the chairlifts and come down the hill.
(38:51): In this case for river surfing to really be a thing, it has to be an effort where you actually try to make the thing that you ride happen because they won’t happen on their own very easily. And so they do in a few places. There’s some really good natural river surfing waves in the country, but they’re few and far between. And in Colorado they’re particularly scarce because of our geology here, because we have young kind of freestone glacially influenced rivers. We don’t get bedrock ledges and things like that that make, so we create them by building white water parks.
But for me, what I saw was that have being a white water kayaker, white water kayaking, I mean, that’s still my favorite thing to do. I go as often as I can, but it’s a high barrier to entry sport. It’s a sport that requires mentorship. You have to have instruction. You have to have somebody take you under their wings, teach you about the river, teach you about, there’s technical skills that people get hung up on like rolling the kayak back up if it flips over.
Adam Williams (39:50): That’s a scary idea to me.
Mike Harvey (39:51): Yeah, for a lot of people it is. And so it’s a sport that requires money and time and a community that can bring you into it. Lots of people learn because their parents were into it. But even as a parent teaching my kids, both my kids paddle white water, but it was a lot of investment of time and effort to bring those kids along on that. River surfing is totally different. The barrier entry is much lower.
You can get into it for much less money. A kid in town could get a bodyboard and a PFD, they don’t even need to buy a PFD, because there’s loaner PFDs at the white water park. So for $150 you could get a kid out on the river and starting to experience the river and learning so much. And then within very short amount of time, they can get good enough to have fun with their friends and start to enjoy it.
(40:39): And also the activity all happens in one place. So the whole community’s looking out for that kid. So that kid doesn’t just show up blind and start flailing around in the river. There’s going to be adults there that say, “Hey, try this.” Or, “Don’t do that.” Or, “Hey, let’s make sure we watch and make sure that kid gets out of the river.” So it’s a very easy way for people to get into the river and to enjoy the river. And I felt like this sport has a potential to introduce a ton more people to the river than anything I’ve ever been involved in. And that’s born out, it’s growing in ways that other river sports have never grown.
Adam Williams (41:17): I’ve really enjoyed being able to go down to the Scout Wave as a spectator and witness exactly what you’re describing for adults too. If somebody shows up, and clearly there are some different skill levels with surfing that Scout Wave and people who don’t have as much experience, they get so much support, encouragement, they get suggestions, tips on how to succeed. When people do succeed, everybody cheers and supports them. It’s just a really amazing vibe to be around.
Mike Harvey (41:45): Yeah, we’re proud of it, because it is a welcoming place, and part of that is endemic to the sport because the wave is in in the morning and it’s in at night and it’s in every hour in between because it’s not like we’re going to have the wind shift or the tides change or the swell subside or whatever, now the wave’s gone. In the ocean, waves are very limited resource, and there’s a naturally competitive atmosphere because if I get this wave, then you don’t get it. And vice versa with river surfing. I mean, yeah, maybe it’s annoying to wait in line for 10 minutes, but you’re still going to get a ride. I mean, the wave isn’t going to be any different.
Adam Williams (42:22): Everybody’s having so much fun even when they’re standing in line it seems to me, because of that support, because of the communal sort of shared thing.
Mike Harvey (42:29): That’s right. And it’s a fishbowl. Everybody’s looking at the person riding the wave, which can be intimidating for people. But for us, one of the things, Zack and I, when we finished that wave and we understood that it was going to be pretty good, we said to each other, and I’m not trying to take credit for this, because it’s really been the whole community, but we said each other, “Let’s make sure that the vibe is friendly.”
As some of the quote, unquote, “leaders” in the scene, we have to create that. We have to be say hi to everybody, introduce yourself to everybody. Go ride up to somebody new you haven’t met before. Shake their hand. Ask them how they’re doing. For me, I love that. I like to ride the wave. It’s fun. But I’ve done it a lot now, and I’m at the point in my life where it’s more fun in a way for me to see somebody else get stoked for the first time, have their first really good ride, or see that excitement and for somebody else. That that’s way more fun for me.
(43:23): So I go down there a lot with multiple boards, somebody board’s not working well, “Try this.” Or giving people a tip, “Hey, move your foot back or try…” Just little things that I could lend somebody to have a better time. And then that fishbowl doesn’t feel intimidating, because it’s like, no, these people are here to support me, not to judge me, and if I fall off, they’re laughing at me or something like that. It’s like, no, the fishbowl people staring at you on the wave are actually there to A, make sure you get out of the river safely.
So that’s a key part is let’s watch and make sure the person, when they fall out off the wave gets over. And secondly, that those people are there to support you and hopefully help you have a good time. So we tried really hard to create that scene here in Salida.
Adam Williams (44:05): I’ve gotten the impression that there has been at least some opposition to the Scout Wave that you’ve built. What is that? What’s that opposition about? Do you understand or have you talked with those people?
Mike Harvey (44:15): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there has been some opposition and I understand it. So I think there’s a few different reasons for that. So this is the second iteration of the Scout Wave. So we built this one in the winter of 2022 into 2023. I think the engineering that was required, this is a pretty new type of technology that I’m now working with Gary’s son, Spencer Lacy.
So Spencer and I worked a lot on this wave together, and there’s been some other examples of these types of waves built around the country, but they’ve always had operable parts, so like hydraulic bladders and things that go up and down. And because it is so hard to make a wave that’s consistent, we had an idea that we could make that same type of feature, but with a feature that doesn’t need a bunch of movable parts.
(45:06): And so we had an idea and it was a new idea, and it looks different than the other features in the park. And you go, look, it’s more architectural, there’s more concrete. Those elements are required to keep the wave working and keep it green. So I think visually some people look at it and think it looks like pretty engineered and not natural, and it’s hard to argue with that. I mean, those aesthetic reasons are people’s opinions.
And then it’s been a big change. So there’s a lot of people down there all the time using it. And so for some folks it’s like, “Who are all these people?” And they’re sleeping in their vans, wherever and some of those type of management things. And then in the first year, in a place where you could just flip the water on, a place where you had a dam upstream for hydroelectricity, you could send a pulse of water down and test it and see, okay, okay, here’s what it looks like at 1,000 CFS, this is what it looks like, 2,000.
(46:05): And then make changes and then turn the water on again. Well, we can’t do that here. Our testing period is 12 months long. We wait for it to snow, we wait for the snow to melt, we wait for the water to come down, we observe what happens, and then we make changes as needed. And so that first season when the water came up for a while, the wave crashed out into a pretty powerful hydraulic. That was not what we wanted.
I mean, I’ve never been actually more stressed in my life for those weeks that the wave was like that. But we learned a lot. We actually spent all of our own money to test it, to crane in sandbags and do things to be able to have some level of confidence that we can make changes this past winter, which we implemented this past winter. And that worked really well this year, despite the fact that we had really very high water this year.
Adam Williams (46:49): Was your stress on that due to safety and that someone would be on it and it wasn’t going to go well?
Mike Harvey (46:55): I mean, yeah, I was 100% worried about safety, about somebody potentially flipping a raft in there, having an accident. And also this river’s for everybody. And I’m not a single-issue voter. Yes, I like to river surf, but I love to fish, I go rafting, I like to go kayaking and it’s everyone’s river. And so I feel a lot of responsibility when I’ve been working on this river corridor for 25 years.
The great joy that comes from me from having done this project is not having built a really good wave. That’s great. And that’s been fun, but the great joy is that everybody’s out using the river and that we’ve had some hand in that and that we’ve been able to see and seeing kids, seeing the local kids and packs of kids swimming through the white water park in the summer, having a good time together, seeing families enjoying it together, local people enjoying it, that’s what I’m really psyched about.
And I would never do something with that responsibility that I’ve been given, I would never do something that excluded people from that experience. And so that’s what stressed me out was that this feature was going to somehow exclude people from the experience. And it hasn’t. And what it has is it’s brought a whole bunch of new people in, but people reacted to that, and I understand that. I mean, and also if you haven’t been here for 25 or 30 years and seen the whole evolution of the project, it’s like why does this guy get to do this and who is it? And those are fair questions.
Adam Williams (48:29): That’s a good question. Do you have a thought on that? How did you end up in this central role? I know you’ve named a bunch of other people who have been involved in things, but you do seem to kind of have a central role, and I hear you saying responsibility that you feel for that to somebody who’s like, how did you get to be the guy who took the collective river and did this thing?
Mike Harvey (48:50): Well, and I don’t know that I always will be, and that’s one of the things that I’m very aware of now and working with the city on now is like, well, what happens when I’m not around? This is the city’s project, the city’s park, it’s the public’s park, and I want it to go on for a long time after. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow or just… It’s important to me that it’s not about me, but why is it me now?
Well, I have to take you back to a meeting at The Vic in 1999 when we started with this idea, and it’s been my life’s work. That’s what I’ve been doing for 25 years, and I’ve done it in other communities as a professional, but here in Salida, it’s not about that. This is my town, this is my home. I raised my kids here. My kids grew up playing in that river. It’s never been about making money. It’s been about-
Adam Williams (49:44): For you personally, you’d say.
Mike Harvey (49:46): No, no. I mean, if it is, it’s the dumbest get rich quick scheme in the history. It’s just because I just love it and I have a passion for it, and I’ve seen what I think are positive impacts on our community. I don’t think I’m right all the time. I’m actually like, the river is an amazing teacher of how wrong I am all the time.
Adam Williams (50:08): It’s humbling.
Mike Harvey (50:09): Oh man, it’s so humbling. There’s just no hiding from mistakes you make. You just have to learn from them and then try to do something better the next time. And hopefully in the sum total of the whole thing, in the end of the day, people will feel like been a positive impact in the community. But I will say, I know that there’s people that don’t like it, and I’m available. I’m not hard to find. My business on the corner of E and First Street. I would love to talk to anybody about it and hear those concerns. And I have heard those concerns from people, and they’re valid and I’m not callous to it at all.
Adam Williams (50:47): I think there are immeasurable ripple effects from this. If we step back and look at a bigger picture and a longer view of this, you’ve not only helped to make the river accessible and be something that Salida now sort of has, I’m sure economic impact that comes from it.
All these people who do come here and do participate, you’ve created this sort of community cultural thing in Salida, and then there’s also the ripple effect of raising kids with a relationship with it rather than a fear to stay away from it. What does that do for conservation? What does that do for their perspective on nature and how they engage with things that aren’t just the river, aren’t just in this spot? I think there are probably lots of things we could discuss there that look at impacts that are positive from this life’s work that you’re talking about.
Mike Harvey (51:35): I certainly believe so. And when we first started, Salida was a very different place, and there was a lot of, the local conversation was all about economic development, because we still had lots of empty storefronts and we were still recovering from the railroad leaving and mines closing and this transitional economy from a resource extraction based economy to a tourism based economy. So initially, economic development was a big motivator, but now it’s a double-edged sword.
Now because it’s expensive and housing prices are high and affordability is the huge issue. But for me, the real impact, the one that for me, I feel the most proud about or the most, I don’t know, just gives me the best feelings is just seeing those kids and those people out there, local people using it. It cuts across socio-economic categories. It cuts across… And not all those kids are going to grow up to become super passionate river users or anything, but they all experience it.
(52:35): And for me, the benefit from that maybe, I’m just projecting, I hope this is the benefit, the benefit from that maybe is that over those kids’ lifetime, that they have a relationship with that river. And like you said, maybe that transfers to other things in the natural world that need responsible adults to make responsible decisions. And certainly the Arkansas River, there are potential challenges in the future that it could face. And we want a community of young people that become young adults who become adults decision makers that have that connection to that resource because it is obviously the lifeblood of Chaffee County, of our communities.
Adam Williams (53:15): I’m of the opinion that people who really do something, they really succeed, they really thrive and put something forward, tend to draw haters. There’s going to be people who feel opposition and want to express that. I don’t think that that’s something you can escape when you are willing to go out on that limb and say, I’m trying to do something that I believe is good and positive, there’s going to be somebody who says otherwise. I think that’s just always the case. Can’t be avoided.
Mike Harvey (53:43): Yeah. I mean, yeah, and I’ve learned one of the best lessons I’ve learned is that particularly when it comes to social media, it amplifies certain voices and certain feelings and you shouldn’t take it is anything more than just sort of people, well, maybe the sort of venting they used to do in private now just gets broadcasted.
And so I don’t take any of it personally and honestly, everyone I’ve talked to in the community has really valid points and I value people’s opinions. And like I said, it’s everybody’s river and I have a lot of responsibility to make sure that the broadest possible cross-section of our community can enjoy that river Corridor. And that’s extremely important to me.
Adam Williams (54:29): I think your life’s work is incredible. Again, you’re only two or so years older than me. Everything that you’ve been doing for the last 25 years and accomplishing is extraordinary.
Mike Harvey (54:39): Thank you.
Adam Williams (54:40): Certainly more than what I feel like is the impact I make. You’ve built so much, literally and figuratively. I feel like, and I won’t ask you to address this unless you really feel compelled, because I think out of humility, I think you might blush at what I’m about to say. I feel like the first quarter of the 21st century, the history of Salida here can’t be written without your name being part of it for what you have created and built here.
And I think the same goes for river surfing as a sport, let alone the other tangential ideas of your involvement in water sports and rivers and white water kayaking, and all the things. I just think that your role here is significant, and I’m really honored and I appreciate getting to speak with you today.
Mike Harvey (55:23): Well, thank you for saying that. And I will say, I just want to make sure it’s clear that it was a lot of people that have contributed to this over the years and people in the community and we’ve had an amazing team in the city Salida has been an amazing partner. And so I’m just grateful for the opportunity to have been able to be a part of that effort. And yeah, it’s been a lot of fun and I still got more to give, I think.
Adam Williams (55:47): I look forward to it.
Mike Harvey (55:48): Yeah. Thanks, man. I appreciate it.
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Adam Williams (55:57): Thanks for listening to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast. I hope that our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you. And if so, you can learn more in this episode show notes at wearechaffeepod.com. If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me at adam@wearechaffeepod.com.
I also invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever platform you use that has that functionality. I also welcome you telling others about the Looking Upstream podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation.
(56:33): Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer, and photographer. Jon Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to KHEN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado. And to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment and Lisa Martin, Community Advocacy Coordinator for the We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative.
The Looking Upstream Podcast is a collaboration with the Chaffee County Department of Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and it’s supported by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Office of Health Equity. You can learn more about the Looking Upstream Podcast at weareChaffeepod.com and on Instagram @wearechaffeepod.
You also can learn more about the overall We Are Chaffee storytelling initiative at wearechaffee.org. Until the next episode, as we say at We Are Chaffee, “share stories, make change.”
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