The Arkansas River is back on course after a diversion last week to recover the body of Kimberly Appelson, a 23-year-old Breckenridge woman who fell out of a raft on July 11 and had been missing ever since.
It happened two miles north of Buena Vista at a spot known as Frog Rock Rapids. Beneath Frog Rock is a “sieve” — a chamber through which water can pass, but little else. Divers found her body trapped amid debris about a dozen feet below the surface.
The location had been suspected since the accident. Fellow raft passengers saw where she fell out, her body had not appeared downstream, and cadaver dogs had picked up scent in the area.
Image of Arkansas River courtesy Flickr user ilovemypit
Earlier efforts to recover the body had failed on account of too much current for divers to maneuver safely. This time, during a season of low water, a rock cofferdam was constructed upstream with heavy equipment, so most of the flow went around the Frog Rock sieve. Divers from Colorado Springs were able to find and recover the body on Oct. 27, though it took several tries.
The recovery crews took pictures of the course before building the cofferdam, and on Oct. 29 removed the cofferdam and restored the river to its previous course.
There was some talk of dynamiting Frog Rock, site of several fatal accidents in recent years, to improve river safety — a conversation that has also occurred about other streams.
However, Stew Pappenfort, senior ranger at Colorado’s Arkansas Headwaters State Park, was reluctant to join that conversation. There’s an inherent danger in whitewater, just as there is in climbing mountains, he pointed out, and yet nobody proposes toppling summits just to make them safer.
Further, along most of its 150-mile course, the channel of the Upper Arkansas River has been substantially altered by debris from railroad and highway construction. Around Frog Rock, though, “it’s one of the few stretches of natural channel we have,” he told me last summer, “and we’d like to keep it.”
And the channel has been kept, although there will be new warning signs on the banks above Frog Rock.
Ed Quillen is a freelance writer in Salida, Colorado.
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