Swept Away: A Tubing Tale of Being Lost in the Flow

“Mom, this is scary!” said Skye as we floated on inner tubes around yet another bend without sight of our campground. The lazy Yampa River stretched out as far as we could see with no sign of civilization. Towering Cottonwood and Aspen trees reached their spindly limbs over the large boulders and rocky riverbanks.

“What if we picked the wrong fork back there?” I thought to myself, while forcing out a joyful laugh as to not alarm my 8-year-old companion. Instead, I said, “This isn’t scary, it’s an adventure! Plus, I know it’s just ahead.” I didn’t know, but as the adult in the duo it was my job to figure it out.  

The Yampa River in Steamboat Springs is a popular spot for lazy river-type tubing in Colorado. It can attract 60,000 to 70,000 visitors in a season, which is usually mid-summer when the river drops below 700 cubic feet per second, through August.

When Skye and I entered the river at downtown Steamboat Springs, we were comfortably surrounded by other tubers, mostly on rented tubes from one of the city’s outfitters. Safety in numbers, right? The current occasionally flung us into each other or spread us wide apart, like nature’s bumper boats.

We had our own tubes with the goal to float past the exit point for rented tubes and float down to our campground on the river. An employee at the campground said it would take about an hour to float from downtown to the campground.  In the first section of the river, we leaned into the fun of the mild rapids and the slow-moving, relaxing stretches.

But then we passed the exit for the rented tubes, and the river changed. Gone were the fun rapids peppering the ride with excitement. Gone was the inviting riverbank to easily pull over and take a break. Gone was the current to help move us along. In their places was deep, brown, unmoving water flanked by tall grasses on the riverbank. The sun baked overhead, cooking anything in its path to the Earth.  

“Paddle Skye!” We cupped our hands and flailed our arms with little impact. The river was lazy, but we were not, as we inched our way down the river, and in and out of the pools and eddies.

My imagination went wild. What if we picked the wrong fork back there and we’re slowly floating to a plunging waterfall? How far will we have to walk in the thick weeds filled with snakes to find a road? What if we encounter someone from The Hills have Eyes? What if we run out of WATER in this dangerous heat?  

After we narrowly escaped the deep abyss without encountering a Loch Ness Monster, we scraped our derrieres on protruding rocks in shallow areas that eventually demanded that we carry our tubes over the rocks that threatened to break our ankles with every step.

Yes, I did have a cell phone safely stowed in double Ziplock bags inside a leaky waterproof bag strapped to my tube. It was time to dig it out and solve the mystery before a piranha had us for lunch. I identified a part of the riverbank that had the least amount of brownish green sludge covering the rocks and paddled us over to unpack the bags.

I was shocked to see that one hour and forty minutes had passed. This trip was only supposed to last one our total! Surely, we were approaching the town of Craig, 47 miles downriver. But Google maps proved otherwise as the campground was quite a bit farther down the river. It took us 40 minutes to cover the distance of a football field, which takes an average person about 20 to 30 seconds to run.

“Oh my gawwwwd, when are we going to get there? This isn’t fun anymore” lamented Skye. “It’s just around the bend up there!” I cheerfully said, 10 more times.

We finally came around the right bend, passed two boys fishing from their campsites who eyed us curiously as we grinned like early Jack-O-Lanterns, and paddled furiously to the riverbank. Our muscles screamed from doing the boat pose for almost two hours, but we were alive!

Skye was ready for more, so she and Cody set sail the next day, only they exited the river with the rented tubers. The exit is there for a reason!

Read Skye’s tips for tubing the Yampa River here so you’re more prepared than we were.

Check out Skye’s tips for tubing the Yampa River to be better prepared than we were.