Dolores River

About the River

The Dolores River begins high in the San Juan Mountains near the old mining town of Rico at roughly 11,000 feet and flows some 240 miles northwest through a series of increasingly dramatic canyon landscapes before joining the Colorado River near Moab, Utah. Below McPhee Reservoir, completed in 1984, the river cuts through some of the most remote and spectacular desert canyon terrain in Colorado: layered sandstone walls, juniper-pinon plateaus, occasional ponderosa pine forests, and slot-canyon tributaries carved into the Colorado Plateau.

The Dolores below McPhee Dam is a release-dependent river, which defines everything about planning a trip here. McPhee, the second-largest reservoir in Colorado, captures the snowmelt-driven spring peak that once made the Dolores naturally runnable. Today, paddlers watch Bureau of Reclamation release schedules closely: the window for a viable trip typically opens in March or April when releases exceed 800 CFS and closes by late May or June. In drought years, the Dolores can go entirely unrunnable. In wet years, sustained releases push flows through June and create ideal conditions on all three canyon sections.

The river is managed as three distinct multi-day sections, each with its own character. Ponderosa Gorge is the most accessible and family-friendly: a ponderosa-forested canyon just below the dam with Class II-III rapids. Slickrock Canyon is the technical heart of the river, including the notorious Packing Box drops where the canyon narrows dramatically at Class IV difficulty. Gateway Canyon is the broadest and most desert-like section, with towering red-rock walls, Ancestral Puebloan rock art, and a long float to the Colorado border at Gateway. The primary flow reference is the USGS gauge at Bedrock (09169500), which captures cumulative flow through the upper and middle canyon sections.