Clear Creek tube run and whitewater park

On the north bank of Clear Creek in Golden, across the street from Lions Park, the creek bed has been rebuilt into a run of boulders, drops and standing waves. The City of Golden says the course spans about seven city blocks. Visit Golden, the town’s visitor bureau, gives its length as one-quarter of a mile, and on the same page as 800 feet, built with natural boulders. Anyone may drop in without a fee. No one supervises the course, and every paddler enters at their own risk. The city asks that boaters be proficient on fast-moving, cold water, particularly during high flow season.

Three sections below Lions Park

The course is laid out in three parts. The top is a series of drops and pools for different experience levels, with some fast eddies. The middle has flat, broad, shallow surf waves set among huge random boulders, which the city calls “a prime workplace for gates.” The bottom has more extreme surf and wave drops. The Vail Daily, writing in 2010, described the Golden features as a series of waves that pour into a river-right hole, running well from about 300 cubic feet per second upward.

Recreation Engineering and Planning, the Boulder firm that built the course, says it cut a deep low-flow channel through it. That channel keeps the park in use late in the season, after other Front Range rivers fall below minimum flows, and it gives fish habitat year round. The Golden History Museum records rainbow and cutthroat trout in the creek’s deep holes, and belted kingfishers and American dippers feeding along it. Peachleaf willow, narrowleaf cottonwood and the rare yellow lady’s slipper orchid grow on the banks.

The firm says the course has hosted international slalom races and pro kayaking events, and that between competitions it serves training athletes, recreational boaters, tubers and waders. A 2015 newspaper report listed the Clear Creek Whitewater Festival and the Eddie Bauer National Championships among its events, drawing about 2,000 spectators a year. The same report put the number of kayakers at about 13,000 to 14,000 annually. In 2010 Brook Aitkens was a fixture at the park, spending much of his time teaching beginners and intermediates the moves, etiquette and ethics of kayaking. “It’s a pretty amazing community feeling,” he told the Vail Daily. “Everybody’s watching out for each other, and you always run into people you know.” The crowd, he said, reached past the boaters: “People come jogging by, sit around on the rocks; there’s canoers and (the other day) there was even a guy snorkeling in there.”

Flags, tubes and the dam at Vanover

In summer, tubers fill the creek. Colored flags posted along the corridor show its condition:

• Double red: the creek is closed to all users.
• Red: the creek is closed to swimming and tubing. Only experienced kayakers and other vessels belong on the water, wearing protective gear and able to self-rescue.
• Yellow: the creek is considered unsafe for children under 18. Other uses stay open with heightened caution.
• Green: the creek is open to all.

According to Visit Golden, flag tracking begins in June, often with red flags, and the flag typically turns green for the official creek season in late June to mid-July. The bureau warns that cold water, blasted rock, undercut rocks and strainers are present all year.

Walkers and tubers take the trail on the north side of the creek. Cyclists use the south side, and must slow to 8 mph or less on the north. On Fridays and weekends through the summer, City of Golden staff called Creek Ambassadors are stationed at the Clear Creek Parking Lot, at Vanover Park, near the Lions Park ballfields and at the west end of the Clear Creek RV Park. They hand out trash bags, and some sites have inflation stations and Spanish-language help. Flaggers stand at crossings such as Ford Street on busy days.

Adventure West and Golden River Sports rent tubes. Adventure West also runs a public shuttle between Vanover Park and the Gateway Trailhead, at $15 for two rides upstream. Inflated tubes are not allowed on the town’s free Ore Cart shuttle. Everyone on the water, tuber or kayaker, must get out no later than Vanover Park. A dam lies immediately beyond the takeout, and the bureau calls it an extreme danger.

A city ordinance bars a long list of goods from the creek and its banks, among them lawn chairs, cots, coolers, slides, bicycles and radio-controlled boats. Because the creek is busy year round, Golden Fire Department staff certified in swiftwater rescue practice and train near the history museum several times a year.

Cannon Ball Creek to Clear Creek

“Clear Creek Canyon…The grandest scenery in the mountains,” Isabella L. Bird wrote in A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains in 1879. She described canyon walls “nearly perpendicular.” The history museum states that the valley lies within the ancestral homelands of the Núuchiu (Ute), Hinono’ei (Arapaho) and Tsistsistas (Cheyenne), among others. More than 180 plant species here have documented Indigenous uses and names.

A marker on the Washington Avenue Bridge records the creek’s names. The French called it Cannon Ball Creek, after the size and shape of the river rock on its bottom. Trappers came for the animals in the 1700s. In 1832 the name changed to Vasquez Fork, also called the Vasquez River, after Louis Vasquez, a fur trader who built his fort north of the creek’s meeting with the South Platte. Around 1859 people of the region began calling it Clear Creek, for the clarity of its water at that time.

That same year prospectors came looking for gold. They found scant gold dust, and the area’s true mining value came instead in clay and coal. Smelting, brickmaking, brewing and flour mills followed along the creek, and Coors Brewery was founded in 1873. Since 1934, Colorado School of Mines students have used the creek for tug-of-war matches and cardboard-boat races during the school’s Engineering Days each spring. During the 1930s the Works Progress Administration built the automobile highway up Clear Creek Canyon, now Highway 6, replacing the railroad. A 1939 painting of the road crews hangs in Golden’s downtown post office. The Washington Avenue Bridge, where the markers stand, was built in 2003 to carry the town’s worst floods. One of its markers lists “kayaking, tubing, and canoeing on the race course of Golden’s ‘Whitewater Park.’”

A pitch to the city council

In 1996 Gary Lacy stood before the Golden City Council, trying to persuade reluctant officials to put up $170,000 for a kayak park on Clear Creek. “I told them I thought it would be a nice little amenity for a little community,” he recalled to The Denver Post in 2005. Lacy had founded Recreation Engineering and Planning in 1983 after working under Bill Taggart, whom the Post called the godfather of whitewater-park design. At that time, the paper wrote, rivers were the ignored, industrial backyards of cities.

Visit Golden gives 1998 as the year the park was dedicated. The 2015 report also gives 1998, at a cost of about $200,000. REP’s own project page lists the cost as $200,000, elsewhere on the same page says $170,000, and gives the completion date as fall 2002. Features were added in 2004 and 2010. According to the 2015 report, studies found $1.4 million to $2 million in economic impact in the park’s first two years, when an average of 175 kayakers a day used it during the paddling season. REP puts the figure at about $2 million a year, from a park that charges nothing.

Lacy went on to design the parks in Boulder and Salida as well. In 2013 he told The Denver Post that for many of his later projects, “the catalyst most of the time was a paddler or visitor who saw Salida or went to Golden.” Asked in 2010 about the Golden course, he called it “More successful than I ever thought it possibly could be.”