Reed Dils | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Reed Dils and his wife, Karen, were river outfitting pioneers in the Arkansas Valley (Colo.), in the mid-70s. They owned 4-Corners Rafting, the second outfit to establish itself in the area. Within a handful of years, there would be several dozen rafting companies.
It was a Wild West industry at the time. No rules, no training required, no permits, no insurance. Just put out a brochure, get some paying clients and head downriver.
Reed was part of shaping the rafting industry that exists in the Valley today. He and others worked to create necessary regulations, to negotiate water flows, and to sort out the laws and shared opportunities for boating, fishing and other uses of the Arkansas River.
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SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), We Are Chaffee is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio FM in Salida, Colo.
Reed Dils
Colorado River Outfitters Association: www.croa.org
Arkansas River Outfitters Association: arkansasriveroutfitters.org
Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area: cpw.state.co.us/state-parks/arkansas-headwaters-recreation-area
We Are Chaffee Podcast
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
We Are Chaffee Host, Producer & Photographer: Adam Williams
We Are Chaffee Engineer: 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 an automated transcription app. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
[00:00:13] Adam Williams: Welcome to the We Are Chaffee Podcast, where we connect through conversations of community, humanness and wellbeing in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams and today I’m talking with Reed Dils.
Reed and his wife Karen were some of the rafting pioneers in the Arkansas Valley. This takes us back to the mid-70s. They owned Four Corners Rafting, the second outfit to establish itself here. Within a handful of years there would be several dozen rafting companies. Things moved quickly and it was a Wild west industry for a bit. No rules, no training required, no permits, no insurance. Just put out a brochure, get some paying clients and head down river.
Reed was part of shaping the rafting industry that exists in the valley today. He and others worked to create necessary regulations, to negotiate water flows and to sort out the laws and shared opportunities for boating, fishing and other uses of the Arkansas River.
He was involved in getting the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area created and Brown’s Canyon designated as a national monument. Not to mention he co founded the Colorado River Outfitters association and the Arkansas River Outfitters association, both of which have celebrated he and Karen with lifetime achievement honors. He also was a founding member of the Collegiate Peaks chapter of Trout Unlimited. And well, the list goes on with his service on this board of directors and that one and then some more. I think you get the idea.
Reed has been heavily engaged in many facets of caring for the waterways. We all appreciate these decades since his work here began began. So this conversation, it’s a bit of a history lesson from someone who is part of it. It’s also an opportunity to learn a little about Reed’s – and Karen’s – story.
The We Are Chaffee podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health. Go to wearechaffeepod.com for all things related to this podcast that includes all episode show notes and transcripts and photos and whatnot. We’re also on Instagram @wearechaffeepod.
Alright now, here we go with Reed Dils.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
[00:02:32] Adam Williams: You’ve been very involved in water issues and conservation here for nearly 50 years and I absolutely want to talk about that. I want to learn from you about that as we go today. But before we get there, I would love to learn about who you were before you came to the Arkansas Valley those decades ago. Like where did you grow up? How did you get, kind of, these shaping, influencing factors for this love of the water and outdoors and rafting and so on?
[00:02:56] Reed Dils: Well, I’m from Kettering, Ohio, which is a suburb of Dayton, Ohio. Born in 1947 and basically grew up in what I would say a middle class family in a middle class suburban. My dad loved to fish and my uncle loved to fish. And that’s kind of how I got into the outdoors. When I was up until I graduated from high school, I had hay fever so bad that I could get out. I joined the Boy Scouts and I went on the first camping trip and I had such a bad reaction that I never went back again.
Fortunately, that didn’t last very long and I had to actually go to the doctor and get allergy shots. By the time I graduated from high school, I was. I was pretty normal, but I was into fishing. I think that the thing that I tell people about what turned me on to the outdoors more than anything was when. When I was in fourth grade, my dad and two uncles and all the boys, we got taken up to Canada.
So you go north through Detroit and there was, the Mackinac Bridge was just built, you know. And so we went up there and we spent a week camping and fishing and just had a great time. And then the next year, the wives wanted to go, so we went one more time. But we didn’t camp. We stayed in a little, like, a cottage or whatever. So then when I graduated from high school, I was really into music. I was a trumpet player and my favorite class was band. At a big school, unlike here, in a big school like that, we had a concert band, we had a marching band, we had orchestrate. I was selected to be in an elite summer band for two years. And that was a great experience. But I had a talk with my band director. I said, I’m thinking about measuring the music. And he said, not a good idea.
[00:04:58] Adam Williams: Oh, no. I was just gonna ask if you went with that trumpet to Ohio State, where I know you went to college. So that wasn’t part of your life at that point.
[00:05:07] Reed Dils: Well, it became. Yeah. I started the first year I went to University of Cincinnati and then transferred to Ohio State for my sophomore year. So I hadn’t played much, but I decided I was gonna try out for the marching band, which I did, and I made it played in the Ohio State. So not many people can say they played before. 80,000 people.
[00:05:26] Adam Williams: Yeah. How did that feel?
[00:05:28] Reed Dils: Oh, it was really cool. I mean, we used to brag. I mean, the band director would always brag. He says we practiced longer than the football team. Of course, back then, you know, the football players weren’t in the waiting room year round and that kind of stuff. And so we’re just talking about the daily practices. So you know they’d be out there for an hour, hour, an hour and a half. We were probably out there for hour, two hours. I don’t remember the exact amount of time but we had to memorize all the music for each show, which wasn’t easy.
[00:05:57] Adam Williams: Would it change from week to week?
[00:05:59] Reed Dils: Oh yeah, yeah. It was a different. It wasn’t. It was a different program back then. They didn’t go to every away game. So you, you played for every home game. So back then there were. There were 10. 10 games. So five of them would have been home and, and there would be a new program for that. And then I remember going to Minnesota. We drove to Minnesota for. That’s the only one I remember, I’m sure.
[00:06:23] Adam Williams: For an away game.
[00:06:24] Reed Dils: For an away game. I’m sure there were some other ones.
[00:06:26] Adam Williams: You didn’t ever get to go to Michigan.
[00:06:28] Reed Dils: No, no. Okay. That’s a real great stories about the conflict between Ohio State and Michigan. Yeah.
Off the record, I’ll sing you the Ohio State version of the Michigan fight song.
At the time I was thinking, well I might do this again. But that next summer I had tonsil. I just really bad. And they decided to take my tonsils out. I got two degrees from Ohio State. I got a degree in wildlife management.
And then I decided to go back and get a teaching degree and you know, back this is a Vietnam War era, so as long as you were in school you weren’t going to get drafted. And the rules kept changing. There wasn’t anything you had to do. The lottery didn’t even happen until I had already graduated one.
But talking about did I make the right decision? I think back I ended up being a teacher anyway and I could have been, you know, I was thinking more of could I be a professional musician? Whether it would have been when cloud, you know, classical stuff or, or whatever, I would have never made it. I could have played with Blood, Sweat and Tears or Chicago haha. In bands like that, you know. But anyway, I wasn’t that good and I thought about, well, maybe I ended up only teaching for three years.
My wife Karen and I, we met at Ohio State. She had graduated from the University of Florida. She had a degree in phys Ed and she was in a master’s program when we met. And so we didn’t hit it off right away because I had a summer job that year. I already graduated and I was going to go up, I was going to do a research project up in Lake Erie. So I really wasn’t interested in making having a relationship With a woman. And then when I came back, I remembered because I was an ra, A resident advisor in college. And so I didn’t have a job, but I knew the guy who was in charge of hiring people. So I called him up and I said, got any jobs? And he said, yeah, yeah, we put him in one of the dorms. And then I said, I remember that Karen had worked in one of the dorms, resident halls at Ohio, you know, previous year. And I said, you don’t have anybody there by the name of Karen, do you? Oh, she’s here in the office.
So I talked to her and we had, you know, our first date, our second date. I took her canoeing.
[00:08:54] Adam Williams: Did you go fishing, too?
[00:08:56] Reed Dils: We didn’t go fishing on that, but I had.
I had. The previous year I had a job at a. As a. In one of the state parks. And I did talk nature talks and stuff like that. And one of the things I did was I. We had a special deal with. There was a canoe livery on one of the rivers, and so we do a weekly canoe trip.
[00:09:16] Adam Williams: Was that something that Karen was into at that point when you brought up canoeing?
[00:09:20] Reed Dils: No, absolutely not.
[00:09:22] Adam Williams: She’s like, you’ve lost your mind. Why would I do that?
[00:09:24] Reed Dils: You know, she was very adventurous. You know, she. I always teach her. I said, did you ever go fishing before me? And she said, yeah, my mom took me fishing a couple times with the cane. She’s from Miami, Florida, with the cane pole. And we might have caught fish, but that was about it. But, you know, she was very outdoorsy. And it ended up being a good test because she loved it. And so we basically that next year where I worked on my second bachelor degree, which was to teach, and she was finishing up her master’s degree.
So after we graduated, we’d both gotten into downhill skiing. But Ohio doesn’t have very much good downhill skiing. There was a PE Course at Ohio State, and they had a rope toe on one of the golf courses. So you learned the basics. And there was a ski hill about an hour north of Columbus, and a bunch of guys, we’d go up there occasionally on. So anyway, we found a job in upstate New York in Rochester. So we moved to Rochester, and that was a good experience. She got a job in a different school district. And I. I worked in an inner city school for a couple years, middle school. But what did you teach? I taught basic middle school science, just general science.
[00:10:44] Adam Williams: Were you into fishing at this point as well, like. Or did that kind of fade out a little bit once you got into college and those things or was that always a piece of your life?
[00:10:53] Reed Dils: Kind of faded out because I just didn’t have time. My dad had a stroke when I was in the. When I was in middle school and so he couldn’t get around, he couldn’t work. And then my uncle, you know, I do some fishing with him. But that and the combination of going to college. I had to work in the summertime and I lucked out and I got a job as an iron worker.
Not the kind of iron workers that climb up on tall buildings. I’m the type of guy that was tying rebar for to build highways, you know. But anyway, I made a lot of money. But that was, it was a really, it was a hard job and I just didn’t have any time that was.
[00:11:35] Adam Williams: To help the family. Since your dad was.
[00:11:36] Reed Dils: Well, yeah, what it did was it, I was making.
When I got out of high school I got a job as a plumber’s helper for a dollar an hour. And my mom found. Met a guy at our Presbyterian church and he said I think I can get a job for your son because he was involved with the local iron workers union. And so basically he just got me a job and so I’d have to go down to the hall and just sit around and of course I didn’t have any skills and so I would get all the crappy jobs, which was fine. But you know, I went from a dollar an hour to 450 an hour.
[00:12:16] Adam Williams: That’s a big jump.
[00:12:17] Reed Dils: That’s a big jump. That’s a lot of money back then. So I made enough money being an RA my last two years and then an RA when I went back again.
And the money I made this summer, I didn’t, I. I had no debt when I got out of school.
[00:12:30] Adam Williams: That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s a story that I’m not sure anybody today can speak to.
[00:12:34] Reed Dils: And my wife had the same experience. I mean she went to University of Florida and, and I know that financially she came from a middle class family. Her dad worked for the Miami Herald and her mom had odd jobs and stuff like that. But she ended up with her bachelor’s. She was debt free. And then when she got her master’s, I think we talk about, I think I had to pay off a loan of a couple hundred dollars.
So yeah, times are definitely different. That’s for sure. So then because in New York you had to get a master’s degree in three years. So at the end of my Second year we said, well are we going to stay here or are we going to go somewhere else? And so we looked around, we said, well, I had two offers. One was at a small college in Oregon and the other one was at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.
Both of them would have been from a neat place to go, been fine, but my wife got a job in the running the residence hall where we were staying. So basically we had rent free and.
[00:13:42] Adam Williams: And that’s what brought you to Colorado? Yeah, this was early 70s.
[00:13:47] Reed Dils: Yeah. 71. And so then we, after we decided to get married and we went back in 70. We got married in 72, April 72. And then by then Karen’s sister was out in Boulder, she was working, she was living in a cabin somewhere, being a hippie. And so we visited her when we came out to look around and decided on Greeley mostly because we had a good job. And so anyway, we spent a year then and we got this job in Mancos, Colorado, which is halfway between Durango and Cortez. And it’s a beautiful area. It’s really small back then, really small population. I imagine the town Mancus was probably a thousand people and.
[00:14:39] Adam Williams: And that’s where you really. This is where the story starts to go into rafting.
[00:14:43] Reed Dils: Exactly.
[00:14:44] Adam Williams: And really takes you into what now is more than 50 years total if we count being down in the southwest of this, you know, water conservation interest, rafting interest.
[00:14:55] Reed Dils: Well, you know, it’s really– We skipped over the first rafting trip and when we were in New York, one of my buddies from high school, he had graduated from college and he went to John Hopkins to get to become a doctor.
And he just came, got ahold of us once and said, hey, I heard about this rafting on the Yakahiny river in Pennsylvania. You want to go? And said, what’s that?
Because my only, you know, back in those days, if you ever saw anything about rafting, it was always about going down the Grand Canyon in one of these big motor powered boats. And so, so this was kind of. The trips were guided but not like they are here. It was probably a class at the most, a Class 3 stream. So we did that twice while we were in New York. And when I went to school in Greeley, when I was working on my master’s degree, we were invited to do a trip on the North Platte. And so I did that and then we decided to buy a boat.
[00:15:54] Adam Williams: What hooked you about it? Like what, what was so exciting about it? Just from those minimal experiences so far. Because this changed your life.
[00:16:02] Reed Dils: Yeah, it’s really, it’s. It’s hard to, to say because I think it was a lot of fun. But we didn’t really get into the excitement part until we moved to Mancos. I think it was a combination of just at that point we hadn’t actually become committed boaters or anything.
But we didn’t even know when we moved to Mancos that the Dolores river was there. And that’s what really changed our lives.
[00:16:30] Adam Williams: You didn’t look it up on the Internet before you moved?
[00:16:33] Reed Dils: Yeah, it’s amazing. There wasn’t anything like that.
[00:16:37] Adam Williams: You had to go see it for yourself.
[00:16:38] Reed Dils: You didn’t even have a push button phone back then.
[00:16:40] Adam Williams: Yeah, yeah, the rotary does.
[00:16:42] Reed Dils: So when we got the job, I got a job teaching science high school. I taught chemistry and I think I taught an outdoor ed course and I taught a typing class. And Karen was, she was a PE teacher, but she was also a counselor. And so, you know, we had a lot of time doing, exploring, just driving around and, you know, finding places to, in the mountains to fish. And we did that.
We met some friends and figured out that you could go rafting on the Dolores. And so we, that first spring that we were there, we probably went out about every, every weekend. And that’s what really got us hooked.
So, you know, we were out there a lot. And it’s a long story which we don’t have time to go into, but the Dolores, at the time it was a free flowing river, but they were building a dam on it before we even moved down there. The dam didn’t get completed until we left. But the next year we were both unemployed because we were both fired from our teaching jobs. Fired may be a strong term, but basically what happened was very conservative community. Karen was counseling and she was telling girls who were sexually active to go to Planned Parenthood. And the principal found out about it and the principal said, I’d rather my daughter get pregnant.
Adam Williams: Wow.
Reed Dils: So anyway, the handwriting was kind of on the wall and then they. So for me, they basically offered me a job that I couldn’t qualify for. They wanted me to. I had like nine hours of math in college and they wanted me to be a math teacher. So we. The handwriting was on the wall. But it ended up being a good deal because that was the first year where the federal government was going to. You could collect unemployment if you were a teacher and you were laid off. And so we spent the whole year unemployed with a monthly check from the federal government and so we really got into boating even more. And we thought when we moved there, we were thinking, what do we want to do in the outdoors as a job? And we thought about working in a camp situation. But we decided after rafting it, well, why don’t we start a raft company? That was the year that we were laid off. And so we spent a lot of time researching.
[00:19:04] Adam Williams: How did you do that?
[00:19:05] Adam Williams: Because again, obviously, I’ve already pointed out, you know, jokingly, the Internet was not around at that point. How did you go about research to start a business that was in a field that, you know, there probably weren’t a lot of rafting companies?
[00:19:17] Reed Dils: No, there weren’t. There were hardly any. But I admit there was a guy by the name of Preston Ellsworth, he had a raft company in Durango, and he was. He belonged to the Western River Guys Association. And so he told me about that and I said, I bet I can learn a lot if I join that organization. I think I went to my first meeting before we actually started running trips that first year. You know, you’re rubbing elbows with the elite outfitters of the west. And so learned a lot from that. There was a guy by the name of Bill McGinnis who wrote the definitive book on whitewater rafting.
And I think he published that book probably 1978, something like that. So there was literature out there, people to talk to. And a lot of it was just like the first thing we did that summer we had our first raft trip is we took our own training trip on the Green River. So we went up and spent a week, Karen and I, on our own, floating five days on the Green River. And one of the main reasons was when we were. When we were just having fun, we were paddling. And back then paddleboats had not become popular and everybody went in an oarboat. And, you know, I had experience rowing, but not very much. So we did that. And the river that we were running then we were doing half days on the Dolores, and it was a day trip, it was about 25 miles. And so we ran over 100 people that year, but it was just the two of us. So one day I’d row the boat and she’d pick me up in the van, and then the next day she’d row the boat and I’d pick her up in the van. So that’s, you know, more being self taught and just learning by doing.
[00:21:07] Adam Williams: How did you have the confidence to take responsibility for people out there on the water, but also just to start a new business to Go in a totally different direction with your life away from teaching and those things to say, we know how to create a livelihood and opportunity here. That’s totally new.
[00:21:26] Reed Dils: We didn’t know any of that. I like to tell people that the thing I learned mostly going to college was how to learn. That was the best thing because having a degree in wildlife management has been helpful, even though I only had one part time job. But. And that was my passion anyway. But when you’re teaching, you’re still, you know, you’re still learning there too because you got to figure out how to present things to kids and all that. Well, the other thing that was going on the year that we were laid off, we were still looking for teaching jobs. We were willing to go, we said we were willing to go to Nebraska or Kansas. I don’t know if we would have, but we just. Fortunately, you know, like you were saying back then, it was a little harder to find a job. But the school Greeley had a, if you were a graduate or you worked there, they would keep a list of potential job openings, particularly for teachers. So she actually checked that out and found out there was an opening in Buena Vista. Okay. And so that’s how we ended up in Buena Vista. We would have come here even if we’d never rafted before.
[00:22:32] Adam Williams: Okay. And that was 1976. So that’s almost 50 years ago that you moved here. It was for that job. You’re connecting some dots for me, some of the questions I would have had. And you brought then this rafting company as well.
[00:22:45] Reed Dils: Right, right. And so that’s, that was interesting because one of the things that happened when we were still on the Dolores, I got hired from, from this guy, Press Ellsworth to do a Sierra Club multi day trip. And so I met one of the guides working for him on that trip and we got to talking and he said, well, you know, I’m moving to Buena Vista. You know anything about the Arkansas? And he said, yeah, I work on the Arkansas, but I’m not. But I’m quitting at the end of June. And so you want my job. So I don’t even, I never even–
[00:23:19] Adam Williams: Interviewed as a guide or what was it?
[00:23:22] Reed Dils: Yeah, as a guide.
[00:23:22] Adam Williams: Okay.
[00:23:23] Reed Dils: So.
[00:23:26] Adam Williams: You have some good luck with these things connecting.
[00:23:28] Reed Dils: Oh, it’s amazing. Yeah. So I get the job. So I spent two months working on the Lower river and we still had, you know, we had started our raft company, but it was really good training. So I did my first private trip in Browns Canyon in August of 76. Never been down there before. Scary as hell. I mean, took some people with me that I had met on one of my trips. A couple of them became pretty good friends. One guy was a ski instructor in the off season. So pretty athletic people. So we went down and we, you know, we’d heard about some of these, you know, we’d scout rapids and we got the most famous rapid in Browns Canyon is Zoom Flume. And so we got out and walked down there and, “Oh my God.”
[00:24:13] Adam Williams: Was it different than the Dolores?
[00:24:14] Reed Dils: It was, it was, yeah, it was only different– Most of the Browns is Class 3 and most of the Dolores. The trips that we were running on the day trips were basically class two. But we did some multi day trips and we did some longer trips and on the longer trips there was some Class 4 stuff. And I could tell you some interesting stories about running Class 4 with not very much skill, but a lot. But anyway, so yeah, that’s how that happened that we ended up here. We’d already started our raft business and so we moved here in August. Karen had a full time job. She ended up becoming. This will blow you away. She had the choice of being a high school PE teacher or a middle school teacher. She said, I want to be a middle school teacher. And if you know much about middle school kids, that’s probably the toughest.
[00:25:08] Adam Williams: I’ve got one of each at this point.
[00:25:09] Reed Dils: Yeah, well, so anyway. But you know, she just felt she could be more. She could have more of a positive impact on the younger kids. And so anyway, she did that.
[00:25:18] Adam Williams: And did she keep teaching until retirement?
[00:25:21] Reed Dils: Yeah, here.
[00:25:22] Adam Williams: Okay.
[00:25:22] Reed Dils: When we retired in 2001, we sold, we had, we sold the raft company and she had enough. She had 25 years in teaching. So we were both 54 when we retired.
[00:25:36] Adam Williams: Did you also teach or did you just have the rafting company because you had that for 25 years.
[00:25:42] Reed Dils: I initially started subbing. So for the first two years I would, you know, there weren’t any, there were never any teaching jobs open that I could apply for full time in the valley. But so I did sub. I subbed to both in Bunavis and Salida for two years. And I also.
Karen got named as the volleyball coach. First time they’d ever had volleyball. And yeah, she was a PE teacher, but you know, she’d never played volleyball, I’d never played volleyball. So.
So that’s another self taught. I mean she went to clinics, I went to a few clinics. So she was the varsity coach, I was the JV coach and we did that for two years. And then the school realized we need another professional coach. And by then I was. I was getting pretty busy in the off season with the rafting business, so.
[00:26:32] Adam Williams: So you brought your business from the Southwest. You guided in place of that guy, it sounds like, initially. But then you did have your own business here. One of the early ones, wasn’t it?
[00:26:42] Reed Dils: Right. We were the second.
[00:26:44] Adam Williams: So the one that you came and replaced that. That one person that was the only company at that time until you established yours.
[00:26:51] Reed Dils: No, that– So the company that I was working for was called River Runners, and they’re still here in the valley. They were. They were at the time, they were down on the lower river downstream of Cotopaxi, and they were owned by two college professors in Pueblo. So I spent my whole time down there. In the interim, I knew, you know, that there was a raft company in Buena Vista, part of the trailhead. So back then, the trailhead was owned by two people. Dick Scar, who just passed away just last year. And then Al McClelland, he was the guy. He was the raft guy. So they started two years before us. So we were 76. They started in 74, I think. And then River Runners. We had the option to buy River Runners, but we were too egotistical. We already got our own river, you know, Four Corners Rafting. We don’t need to do that. We probably should have, but …
So River Runners got bought by a guy who was running Jeep Tours in Pontia Springs. So then river runners in 77 moved to Pontius Springs. So that was the only river and lower in Chaffee County. That was the only outfitter down there. And then it was just the two of us up here, Rocky Mountain Expeditions. And then Four Corners rafting. And then 77 was one of the worst drought years on record. We had a couple of outlets who would book trips. And to give you an idea of how dry it was, Browns Canyon. We only had one week in Browns Canyon, and it was too low. And so what we were able to go downstream. And I. I secured a couple contracts with church camps and dude ranches and stuff. So even though we didn’t get a whole lot of walk in business, we got quite a bit. For a first year, we, you know, we probably didn’t lose any money. And I was able to hire two guys that I’d worked with down in Durango, and. And so they came up and spent time.
The woman who worked at the school in Mancos, she came up for the summer and drove our van. And then these. So there were Four of us that first year on the water, we had a house on Baylor. That’s what we operated on, a house out of Baylor.
[00:29:03] Adam Williams: The neighborhood that’s by the school, that whole little school. I would not have guessed that that’s been around enough years to.
[00:29:12] Reed Dils: Those houses were pre built and they just about finished up most of the houses that had been, that had put in there in 76. But the interesting thing about that was when we moved here, there was only one paved street and that was Main street and that had only been paved a year or two prior to us coming. And so all the rest of the streets in town were dirt. And the developer said, I’ll pave the streets of my development once we’ve sold all the lots.
So maybe three or four or five years later the street got paved. And then by that time, and I don’t know exactly what was going on, but you know, a lot of the other places in town were getting paved. Talk about a weird happening. We were unemployed for a year. Karen had a full time job, I had no full time job. We come here, we qualified for a house, no down payment.
[00:30:09] Adam Williams: Yeah, that’s very, very different than where we are now, isn’t it?
[00:30:11] Reed Dils: Oh yeah. Well, the house was $28,000, but we–
[00:30:15] Adam Williams: Are talking, I guess mid and going into the late 70s. Man, that’s just, that’s, that’s almost unthinkable. So you could drive by that exact house now, like it’s still standing. The neighborhood is there and that same house would go for, you know, 20.
[00:30:29] Reed Dils: Times, probably 400,000 at least, at least 350 if it’s been well taken care of.
[00:30:36] Adam Williams: I, I, I think it’s, it’s well above that at this point.
[00:30:38] Reed Dils: Yeah, it could be.
[00:30:39] Adam Williams: Yeah. Let’s go ahead and get to some of the, the water matters because I’ve not talked with anybody on this podcast who I think has this wealth of knowledge that you do. So this is an educational opportunity for me and certainly going to be for some other listeners who just really aren’t aware of what the history with rafting maybe in particular. But it’s the, it’s the conservation matters and the management of the river and all of these things that have made this tourism industry possible in the way that we know it now, but also extends to, I think probably so much more. So where would you like to go with, you know, I know this is of interest to you too.
[00:31:17] Reed Dils: Well, this is, this all ties in with the creation of the, the two outfitter organizations because basically, so we’re here in 76, we’ve. We met Al McClellan, you know, and it wasn’t cutthroat back then. You know, we became friends. We went to parties at his house. I mean, and we knew dick a little bit. Dick scar. But when we started in 70, well, when we did our first commercial trip on the Arkansas, which would have been 77, there were. There was no. You didn’t need to get a permit, you didn’t need to get a license. You didn’t need to get insurance, you didn’t need to train anybody. You didn’t need to do anything except put out a brochure or whatever and start getting people to come. Now. That changed quickly. And so, so by. And then. So 77 was a terrible year. 78 was a great water year. 79 was a great water year. And so by 79, a lot of us in the industry realized there’s a need for both a statewide organization and an Arkansas organization. And I. I’m thinking back on this a lot of the. So I led. I met.
When I went to these Western River Guides meetings, I would meet other outfitters from other parts of Colorado. So we all been briefed on, you know, what’s going on, how do you run a business and that kind of stuff. So we were seeing the handwriting on the wall, and a few things caused that to happen. I helped create both the Colorado River Outfitters association and the Arkansas River Outfitters association, and they were created in the same year. Colorado River Outfitters association was created in October of 1979. Auroa was created in November of 79. And so some of the reasons why we felt why we needed to create these organizations was something called the Emmert decision, which I’d like to talk about a little bit in detail. But the Emmert decision basically said a guy in 76 was arrested for floating through private property.
He was arrested by the sheriff, and instead of paying the fine, he decided to take it to court and he lost.
And so we were under the impression then that you can’t float through private property in Colorado. And so that was one. One big issue that needed to be addressed. So that was important for both organizations.
[00:33:36] Adam Williams: Did you feel like that set a precedent then that, or that was just your interpretation, or who was deciding that you couldn’t float through private land?
[00:33:44] Reed Dils: Well, back then there was confusion about the law. And because in. So this happened in 76, the trial was in 77, the interesting thing was the judge said at the end of the trial, there’s enough case law here for you guys to do this correctly. And so that’s what happened. So the legislature, to Nobody’s knowledge in 77 passed a law that basically said you cannot be prosecuted criminally for floating through private water. You could still be charged civilly if you basically got out of the river and went up on the bank or went up on a rock or whatever.
[00:34:26] Adam Williams: So charged for trespassing.
[00:34:28] Reed Dils: Right. And so we had that issue, which it takes a while to get resolved. And then we had on the Arkansas, we had BLM issues. You know, by 79 we were being managed by the BLM and basically we needed to get a permit from them, probably needed to have insurance. And the problem was they weren’t doing anything. They were just taking our money and sending it off to Washington. And so they didn’t have any additional money to do any management. So that was a big thing on the Arkansas. And the other things were like on the Arkansas, you know, 40% of the river was private.
And so we didn’t have any put ins in council. Well, it ended up being the only put ins and takeouts we had were go to somebody’s house and make a deal with them to put in. And then Hecla Junction was the only. Which is blm, that was the only really public takeout on the upper river. And then we found out that it wasn’t just here, it was the entire river. If you were going to run it, you had to. We needed to form this organization to basically start leasing property. And so that’s one of the things in the early years is we leased a lot of property.
[00:35:42] Adam Williams: When we say 40% was privately owned, what I’m picturing, just to use round numbers, let’s say it’s a 10 mile stretch, 4 miles, which could be scattered in any number of ways in that math, are privately owned, which means you’re frequently trying to go through somebody else’s owned water.
[00:35:58] Reed Dils: Right. So if you want to jump ahead, we can do that. Because it is important that this whole emirate thing, because we got the thing resolved, it took a while. We ended up hiring an attorney who worked at Denver University. And this is like 83. And we basically. They did all the research and they found this law that had been passed that nobody knew existed. They went back and read all of the hearing stuff about so you could find out what the actual intent of the rule was. And they did all that and basically they ended up taking that to the attorney general. And the attorney general said, yeah, we have a law now that protects you guys and it was created that the year after the lawsuit that the guy lost.
And so what that basically said was there’s no criminal test pass for floating through property. The only issue that you have now is if you. If you get out of the water on private land, you can be charged with a civil trespass. So what that. And it’s still that. That’s the way it is today. So what that basic did. We didn’t have to worry anymore about being able to float through private property. But we still have. And we today, we still have that issue about. About getting out of the boat. And so that’s why you see, if you float down the river, you’ll see flying. You’ll see a sign that says entering, entering private property. You know, don’t get out or take out or put in here.
[00:37:27] Adam Williams: I was going to ask if you could identify where those lines were as you go now.
[00:37:31] Reed Dils: Pretty much, yeah, unless the signs have been taken down. But yeah, it’s pretty much, you know, there’s maps out there, and most people have. They’ve got it all figured out. And the other. The other side of the coin, too, is if you’re in a dangerous situation, let’s say you’re. You’re on the lower river and it’s in flood and you flip a boat, you know, obviously you swim to shore, well, then you’re not going to. You’re not going to be prosecuted for doing that. You know, nobody’s going to do anything about that.
[00:38:01] Adam Williams: Right. Okay. You’re also part of creating the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area.
[00:38:05] Reed Dils: Right.
[00:38:06] Adam Williams: Right. You’ve been involved in many things. You mentioned Browns Canyon. Were you part of ultimately that being designated as. As a national monument, by the way, 10 years ago I was. Okay, so, I mean, you’ve been very involved in all of this.
You know, you can take that whichever direction you’d like to next. But just in terms of, I guess, yeah, establishing this history for those of us who have come in years far more recent than when you did, and there’s I don’t know how many rafting outfitters now. It’s a lot more than just a few. Back when you started, you know, from that place where you started where there was just a few and you owned one of those outfitters to where we are now, what else is it that you would like people to understand has been this process and progress?
[00:38:52] Reed Dils: The park was a long time in coming. And basically, in the early days, one of the things we worked on once we got the emirate decision solved was we wanted to make sure. That, you know, sheriffs weren’t out there resting people, or they weren’t shutting the river down, which they technically couldn’t do things like that. But in 79, 78, there might have been 10 outfitters on the river. By 83, there were 59.
[00:39:18] Adam Williams: Wow.
[00:39:18] Reed Dils: 59 outfitters. And so we had already pretty much realized that that was a problem and there was no regulation. The other thing that was going on was that we had the flow issues and then we had a problem with the BLM because they wouldn’t do anything. They finally put in the first put in at Fisherman’s Bridge, and they did a little gradient of the road down to Hecla Junction, but that’s the only thing. And they basically came out and said, by federal law, we can only touch on what’s going on on our property, so we can’t really manage you. How many businesses do you know that go to the state and say, we want to be regulated? And that’s what we did. Both the outfitter associations.
And we did that because a lot of things were happening. Like you get an outfitter show up. He didn’t have workman’s comp. He didn’t have insurance. He didn’t, you know, he didn’t have employees. So we. And we saw the handwriting on the wall because, you know, somebody in a commercial raft trip and somebody goes over and they die, and nobody’s had any training or anything. So we got state parks involved in 84. And so we got legislation passed to basically require to have an outfitter’s license to do minimum amount of training. You have to have insurance, you have to. You have to have employees. And so that was a big. That was a big deal.
[00:40:44] Adam Williams: Why did you have to have employees as opposed to how you and your wife started where it was just the two of you? Why couldn’t you be that small of an outfitter?
[00:40:51] Reed Dils: Well, you could be an outfitter. It’s not precluding you being an outfit. It’s precluding you from saying that your employees are not employees, that they’re independent contractors.
[00:41:01] Adam Williams: Oh, gotcha.
[00:41:02] Reed Dils: So what happens there is there’s no responsibility for them to get workman’s comp or unemployment insurance or anything like that.
[00:41:09] Adam Williams: Okay, I understand.
[00:41:10] Reed Dils: So we’re trying to protect our employees as much as anything, and we want to level the playing field. So everybody’s playing by the same rules.
[00:41:19] Adam Williams: They could have taken down the whole industry had, you know, if this continued to be the wild west, with no sorts of rules or boundaries or expectations. Of how a business functions. It could have affected you all if there were dangers that were taken and people were hurt or died.
[00:41:32] Reed Dils: Oh yeah.
[00:41:33] Adam Williams: And. And then suddenly there’s, you know, even if it’s just bad pr, right. Nobody wants to come out here and raft the Arkansas because, you know, something bad might happen. How would you know as a customer who’s legitimate, who’s not, who’s skilled, who’s not.
[00:41:47] Reed Dils: You’re just picking up a brochure.
[00:41:49] Adam Williams: Yeah.
[00:41:50] Reed Dils: So, you know, that was getting, getting in bed, so to speak, with, with the state, which was at that time was parks, because parks and I mean recreation, wildlife and parks were separate back then. We spent a lot of time on that and you know, we. Most of the work that was done was by both of our associations. I was one of the persons who did, particularly on the Arkansas did more, most of the stuff. There’s another guy who still lives here, his name’s Pete Macross. He owned Buffalo Joe river trips and he’s still around. He sold it. He sold before we did. But so Pete and I basically when it came time to represent the outfitters to create the state park, we did that. So moving ahead quickly. So In December of 85 we convinced the BLM to start working cooperative with state parks. So in 86 we started taking raft trips for politicians and parks people. And then 86 the BLM said they started talking about doing a cooperative agreement with state parks. And so that was the beginning of that actually happening.
We ended up hiring Jerry Mallett, who you probably don’t know. Jerry Mallett lives. He was the head of the Western River Guys. He was the hired hand for Western River Guys at time. Since then, Jerry moved to Salida, became a county commissioner for one term and he’s still here. But anyway, we hired Jerry because he had lots of connections, both statewide and federal to work for us to help get that happen. So the outfitters association hired him and then everything got approved in 88 for the state park. And so in 89 they created a 22 member advisory board to basically write the plan for the park. Every entity was represented. Whitewater rafting, kayakers, landowners, water providers.
[00:43:50] Adam Williams: Did you find a lot of cooperation back then across say, the different interests, the different politics, the different, maybe financial interest?
[00:44:01] Reed Dils: No, not as much as you see today. But bringing all these people together helped because you’re looking at a live person when you’re sitting in a room with 22 people. You know you’re not just going to. If some organization has a bad reputation about this or that you’re going to be talking to a real person. So what’s the real person saying? The biggest issue we had, when they wrote up the plan, they basically left the flow issue out of it because they knew it was going to be really contentious. But in writing the plan, that was the start of row versus wade. R-O-W. So you’ve got the boaters against the fly fishermen and the waders.
I mean, that became the cup buzzword, no matter whose side you were on. You know, this is another place where these things happen that you don’t really have control over. You know, like, how did I end up here? Well, it’s kind of bizarre, but I did. How did we get flows in the river? It’s kind of bizarre. I started working on flow issues in 82. In 89, the reservoir had been enlarged. Twin lakes of the reservoir had been enlarged probably in 76, 77. But they decided in 89 they needed to go back and they had to work. They wanted to build a campground and they had to work on the dam. So they were originally. They were. The bureau wreck was going to. Originally.
In fact, we need to be clear here. The Bureau of Reclamation operates all the dams on the Arkansas. And so they were in charge of how the flows were being released. And our big issue was you got all this water up here and you’re releasing it in the wintertime. And we want water through August. We’d like to have it through the whole month of August, but we’d really like to have it through August 15th. And so we were working on that at the same time as we got the state park.
[00:45:51] Adam Williams: Why were they releasing it during winter?
[00:45:53] Reed Dils: Because evaporative loss if they. If they. If we release the water during the summer and it’s sitting in Pueblo Reservoir, when it’s not being used, there’s more water that’s actually being evaporated off. That was the main reason they were moving. So basically what happened in 89? We had this concept of flows being released for the benefit of recreational boating, both rafting and kayaking. We had that idea for a long time. It was just how were we going to implement it. We learned that we couldn’t afford to own water, but Colorado law allows water to be moved from point A to point B without owning it.
And so that year they started out, they came out and said, bureau rec said, well, we’re going to release water, but not when you want it. And so we. We said, why not? We pulled together some meetings. And it wasn’t just the outfitters. We got the fishermen involved and some of the landlords and stuff. And we basically talked them. That was kind of a drought year. And we talked them into actually releasing the water in July and August. And we said, well, we want a thousand cfs. And of course the waiting people didn’t like that.
But this was kind of the weird thing. In the early days when we were fighting over flows, Trout Unlimited was okay to a point. And I mean, they didn’t fight it very hard. 89 we had this test run and it worked. Now we have state parks because 90 is when state parks came and started running things. So now we have state parks and we’ve got the ability to do it. So we started working out an actual flow release for north, 1990. And it was like, it was a test. We put together a plan, we gave it to the Department of Natural Resources, which basically said, you know, you have these late flows. So that would have allowed flows through middle August. And so we did that. Everything was fine.
Then the row versus wade got ugly the next year because Trout Unlimited went from, we don’t like it, but we can live with it. Two, we don’t like it and we can’t live with it. And so we got another year approved for basically the same flows. But they ended up suing and there was a restraining order placed. Fortunately, the season was almost over, but there was a restraining order placed on releasing that water.
So at the end of that season, we really knew we needed to get more cooperation. And one of the things that they did was BLM says, well, we’re going to do a six year study on water flows and we’re going to have Department of Natural Resources be in charge of that study, basically the wildlife portion. And so they did that. And in the interim we were able to keep those flows the same. And we actually went back in court after that and they threw the case out. They said that, you know, you don’t have any standing in this. So basically TU couldn’t sue anymore and they had to work with everybody on getting flows.
But where the row versus wade comes in, this is the interesting part. We all thought in the early, like at the end of the 80s, they were pissed off about more flows because they thought it might be harming, actually harming the fish. And that wasn’t their argument at all. Their argument was they didn’t like rafts. They didn’t like people floating by them in rafts and kayaks. Now over the years that changed from just being the fact they didn’t like other people being on the water to more of an environmental issue. But– So that’s how that row vs. wade got in there over the years. By the time that I retired, pretty much had a yearly deal. So we’ve had this voluntary flow program.
It’s even better than it’s ever been. Now there’s a lot of cooperation. There’s nobody’s, you know, Trotter Lemons getting along with the outfitters, and there’s really no conflicts anymore. The other problem, which we talked about a little bit earlier, was why did they originally move the water during the winter? And we talked about evaporation. Well, the other part of the deal was the state has agreed to compensate the owners of the water conservancy districts by paying for the evaporative loss or providing for the evaporative loss. So let’s say you have 1000 cfs of evaporative loss in the reservoir. That wouldn’t have happened if they’d have kept the water upstream. The state will provide the actual water that has been lost, so there’s no net loss. So that way you’ve got the. You’ve got the water providers happy because they’re not being dinged by this program.
[00:50:40] Adam Williams: It took some time to develop these processes. It sounds like decades ago. Do you feel like there are any challenges now?
[00:50:47] Reed Dils: The problems that we’re going to have now are basically climate change issues. And remembering that the water that we’re using is West Slope water. It’s coming from the West Slope. You know, there’s this big push now because of climate change to there could be instances where the water, it’s not available for the Arizona and California. And so they’re going to make a call on the river, which is going to mean that some of the water that normally comes over won’t come over. It’s not just the Arkansas. It’s almost every Front Ridge city in Colorado is using. The West Slope water is basically what they’re using. And so that’s probably the main concern that we have now is will in the next 20 years, will there be sufficient water to maintain the flows at the rates that we’ve become accustomed to?
[00:51:45] Adam Williams: Do you feel like with these different organizations you’ve been part of, you’ve helped establish things like the state park, the national monument, There’s a lot of conservation effort that you have been involved in for basically 50 years. Do you think about this in terms of legacy and what it means that you have been involved in? That’s going to live on well past all of us as we go in the future?
[00:52:09] Reed Dils: Well, yeah, I’ve thought about that a lot and I’ve thought about even writing a book, but I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen. Maybe the best that could happen is I could write historical articles for the newspaper because they have so much information. I mean, it’d be nice to get more recognition in some way. But the important thing is what we’ve done is really good thing. And it points to how when I was on the Colorado Water Conservation Board for a term and talk about people with different demands for water, the thing that blew me away about that was when we were in that room, we were all for the greater good of the state of Colorado.
You know, we might have had a guy from north park who just, you know, all he cared about was irrigation and he could care less about anything else. And you might have somebody from Denver Water Board who’s got other issues. But you know, when we sat in that room and hashed out things, I mean, I can’t remember a time where there was a shouting match or anything. We just did the best we could do and I think that’s continued. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that some of these boards that people are on in the state.
[00:53:22] Adam Williams: Are really valuable in retirement. Now if we circle this back to your childhood. You started off with fishing. Fishing has been a part of things throughout the years. Is that a primary activity for you now, especially as it relates to getting out on the water?
[00:53:36] Reed Dils: Oh yeah. We’ve gone from a white water boating to float fish fishing mostly. And we’ve become real small stream aficionados. We, you know, for a lot of reasons it’s not that important to catch really big fish anymore. It’s more important to be somewhere where, you know, it’s not crowded and you’re in a beautiful place.
[00:53:57] Adam Williams: Do you feel like you were part of bringing crowds here?
[00:54:00] Reed Dils: You know, you know, it’s interesting. The time period we’re talking about the river was heavily polluted. You know, an average age for a brown trout was four years. You know, a 12 inch fish was a big fish. There were a lot of people, environmental people. I mean, the list is huge. Bureau of Reclamation. You know, we had a terrible spill about 85 where the river turned orange and killed all the fish in the river. We’ve pretty much solved the pollution problem on the Arkansas.
[00:54:30] Adam Williams: How did you continue rafting during that period? I imagine that that pollution lasted for many years. How do you continue to have tourism on that? I would have thought that would have been unhealthy in various ways because because.
[00:54:45] Reed Dils: All those structures were built in the early 90s and surprisingly enough there were not many people doing commercial float fishing trips. Hardly any.
[00:54:57] Adam Williams: Was it only the fishing that was affected in that way. Like to to be a human being rafting, to fall in, to swim. No issues.
[00:55:04] Reed Dils: Never concerned about water quality. You have to remember the heavy metals that were in there that were causing problems for fish. When that water got down to Pueblo Reservoir, half of it was used for municipal purposes. And so, you know, they had to have a way of making sure that what was in that water wasn’t going to harm their public. So that was that part of it was had been solved quite a while ago. So there was and there was never an issue about the pollution that was in the Arkansas was not the kind that you would if you went in, you fell in, you’re going to get sick basically because the stuff that’s going to hurt you is if you started drinking the water out of the river on a daily basis.
So the pollution issue as bad as it was, I mean now we’ve got a gold medal trout stream and which is another plus. And a lot of different people were involved in that. I mean just because it takes a lot of entities to clean up a river.
[00:56:00] Adam Williams: Thank you for sharing all this history, Reed.
[00:56:02] Reed Dils: You’re welcome.
[00:56:02] Adam Williams: And for sharing something of your story. This is really interesting. I know we could have gone down well, to use a pun, many streams and you know, really talked about a lot more. But I appreciate what you’ve shared.
[00:56:13] Reed Dils: If you need any more info, just give me a call.
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[00:56:22] Adam Williams: Thank you for listening to the We Are Chaffee Podcast. You can learn more about this episode and others in the show notes at wearechaffeepod.com and on Instagram at We Are Chaffee Pod. I invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I also welcome your telling others about the We Are Chaffee Podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation. The We Are Chaffee Podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health.
Thank you to Andrea Carlstrom, Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment and to Lisa Martin, Community Advocacy Coordinator for the larger We Are Chaffee storytelling initiative.
Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer and photographer for the We Are Chaffee Podcast. Till the next episode, as we say at We Are Chaffee, “share stories, make change.”
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