The San Juan River, October 29, 2026.
Whoa, I’ve seen fire, and I’ve seen rain…
— “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor, 1970.
Walking past the San Juan River, now that the water has receded somewhat, I noticed a couple of things had gone missing during the October 23 flood event.
Hard to tell at this point, but it appears that some of the Town-built ‘whitewater’ features constructed over the past 20 years have been deconstructed by the flood.
The very popular Town-built Hippie Dip across the river from the Visitors Center seems to have been been washed downstream. The structure had included several geothermal pools, available to the public free of charge.
The popular user-built and user-maintained Hippie Dip on the east side of the bridge had likewise disappeared.
This, in a quarter-mile stretch of the river.
It’s difficult to imagine how many other changes to Archuleta County have been wrought by the flood.
A friend contacted me the other day, proposing to organize a petition effort. The signed petition would be sent to our Congressman, Jeff Hurd, encouraging him to work at obtaining FEMA funding from President Donald Trump, to help address damage from the recent flood event in southern Colorado — the second damaging flood event in a 12 month period here in Archuleta County.
FEMA did not provide assistance following last year’s flood event.
I had to smile at my friend’s idea. If Congressman Hurd is not already trying his damnedest to get an audience with the President, I doubt a petition from a few hundred Pagosa residents is going to do much to provoke him.
But I get it. We want desperately to help our neighbors, in a time like this. And help is definitely needed.
According to an article on the Colorado Public Radio website, a non-profit called Pagosa Springs Friends of the Wild has been providing food, water, and other supplies to the community since Sunday.
The Pagosa Springs Friends of the Wild has set up Pagosa Flood Relief to help displaced residents…
“I have been delivering food personally to people who have been displaced here this morning,” said Rachel Suh, the president and co-founder of the Pagosa Springs Friends of the Wild. “We have been getting large donations from the local city market in order to help us get food and supplies over to our amazing food pantry that is regularly helping low income families here in the community, and they will be dispersing our donations through them.”
So far, Suh said her organization has received 45 requests for assistance and is needing more donations. She said they’ve raised $30,000 since starting the program. A large donor has even offered to match 100 percent of the donations. They will also be helping with the clean up…
Numerous other organizations are asking for donations and working to help with cleanup and distribution of food and supplies. We posted links for some of those resources last weekend, here.
About 100 people showed up on Tuesday, October 27 for a brief presentation of current conditions, hosted by a few of the government agencies involved in the recovery effort.
We knew the flood had been bad. But we wanted to know just how bad.
The presentation took place in the Archuleta County Fairgrounds Exhibit Hall, where — a few months ago — some of the same government officials had been reporting on efforts to contain the Rio Blanco Fire in the Lower Blanco River area. That crowd has been somewhat larger.
Sheriff Le Roux gave much the same presentation as he’d given at the joint Town Council -Board of County Commissioners meeting the night before, running through the timeline — beginning when a pending storm and possible flood were first predicted, deputies knocking on doors to warn residents in low-lying areas, filling 1,000 sand bags (which proved relatively worthless as the storm progressed), requesting help for state agencies, rescuing stranded people with helicopters, delivering supplies, making an inventory of damaged roads, and so on.
Commission chair Warren Brown then stepped up to the microphone to remind us what a resilient, supportive community we live in, and assuring us that we will come out of this catastrophe even stronger. Eventually.
One curious comment from the commissioner.
“Very few have come forward to save us, so we have to save ourselves. And if I had to bet on a community that was capable of saving themselves, it would be ours. Please reach out to the resources that we have — there’s a table full of documents back there — if you have questions or comments, reach out. We care; we’re just up to our eyeballs. But we’re never too busy to take the call and offer you the resources that we have as a County.
“Recovery is likely to take years.
“Many of us may be dead by that time. Sadly.”
Sort of puts the situation into a certain perspective?
We then heard from Josh Peck, District Ranger with the Pagosa Springs Ranger District, to summarize the impacts in the San Juan National Forest — a federally administered landscape that covers about 50% of Archuleta County.
Josh Peck:
“We’re about 98% through the process of looking at all the [Forest Service] roads and seeing where people are trapped…”
Second rifle hunting season started on October 24, so we know that many hunters were already out in the forest when the flooding occurred on October 23, and some Forest Service roads are now impassable.
“We’re finding opportunities to use our equipment to try and extricate people without having to call in aerial resources and some of the other specialized resources… We’re also looking at places where we’re seeing imminent points of failure within the forest system… before we get winter runoff this coming spring…
“We currently have 13 of the Forest Service roads closed. Of those, we anticipate that 8 of those are going to be closed for a long duration. All of those have significant failures on them and will require a lot of resources to fix.
“Of those 8 roads, we think there’s probably four that have people trapped behind them, currently. We’re working with the Sheriff to work on plans to try and extricate those people…”
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can't seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.