Arkansas, Colorado, US

04. Railroad Bridge Launch to Buena Vista (Fractions/ Frogrock/ Milkrun)

Usual Difficulty	III (for normal flows)
Length	7 Miles
Avg. Gradient	44 fpm

Gauge Information

Name	Range	Difficulty	Updated	Level
ARKANSAS RIVER NEAR NATHROP, CO
usgs-07091200	600 - 3500 cfs	III	122d05h08m	296 cfs (rc= -0.1 )

River Description

Photo: Little Seidel's Rapid at 1400 cfs, by Brad Goettemoeller, courtesy of and copyright by www.allaboutrivers.com. Check out their description of this reach.

Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 on http://www.mountainbuzz.com by pablito
So here's the deal with frog rock, the kyakable lines are fairly easy straightforward, and not really to challenging. The danger of this rapid is the failure to make the move to the left at the end. The right side is bad news. It features two large undercuts with a sieve in the middle, I have heard of people swimming through this sieve and being ok, but unfortunately that is not always the case. Three people I know of have lost their lives to this hazard, all commercial rafters. One was a 12 year old boy who swam into the sieve after his raft flipped, and the other two were a couple of newlyweds who swam into the sieve after their raft flipped. Once in the sieve, little can be done to contact/recover the victims. In both cases of the fatalities, the water level was around 700 cfs and in order to enact the recoveries, water had to be shut off from upstream to a level of around 250 cfs. The hazard of this rapid is truly avoidable with proper skills, but most commercial outfitters in the valley tend to portage the rapid at lower flows due to the significant hazard. Right now would be a good time to go look at the rapid to see the featurtes I am taking about, and if it looks anything like it did last winter, the sieve/undercuts are full of debris, in other words a nasty place to be. Well, I hope this answers your question, but for the most part, it is an easy rapid with conqequences that can quickly become unsurvivable.

To Get There: The Railroad Bridge access is reached from Highway 24 mile 201.5. Turn off on County Road 371 down towards the river. Cross the river and turn right headed downstream. In 3.3 miles from Hwy 24 you will reach the Railroad Bridge access site (camping and picnic area also available). To reach the put-in return to Highway 24 or alternatively run your shuttle on County Road 371 which continues as a dirt road on river left before crossing back over to river right just before town. Either way it's 6.7 miles downstream to Buena Vista. Take the main street in town east toward the river, past the ballfield, and down to the public access on river right.

See Colorado Rivers and Creeks II, by Banks and Eckardt (The Bible), for info on this and most of the other kewl runs of Colorado.

Lat/longitude coords are approximate, from TopoZone.

See also Pinecreek (Class IV/V),
The Numbers (Class IV),
Fractions/ Frogrock/ Milkrun (Class III),
Buena Vista (Class III),
Browns Canyon (Class III),
Salida (Class III),
Rincon (Class III),
Pinnacle Rock (Class III),
Royal Gorge (Class III/IV).