AS WE PILE INTO A VAN for the drive upstream to the put-in at Alameda Bridge in Corrales, the conversation quickly turns to the river: How high is the water? Is it up or down from last week?
It’s down, but just a little. After issuing just a few effective paddling reminders, Corey Spoores, owner of Mountain, Stream, and Trail (MST) Adventures, leads a crew of six into the river for a weekly stand-up paddleboarding trip that’s built a diehard following. “Don’t be intimidated by the word ‘fitness,’ ” he tells me, referring to the “Fitness SUP” title of the six-week class I’m dropping in on. “It’s really a progressive paddling class.”
What I learn—or remember from last season—over four miles downstream is to use the paddle like a brace for balance while riding a tippy, inflatable board. Over two hours on the water, we see just one person—a dog walker along the river who offers: “That looks like fun.”
“It’s not a bad way to spend an evening,” Spoores agrees. He steers over to a tiny wave train running off a City of Albuquerque diversion dam, surfing for a moment on the turbulent current, then on downstream. Spoores, who estimates that he spends more than 140 days a year on the water, noted the first of the season’s migratory neotropical songbirds passing through and has been counting beaver dams. We spot the rodent’s knobby brown head nosing upstream along the bank, and the splash of a tail slap sends us on our way.
Try paddleboarding for a scenic and invigorating journey down the Río Grande.
Photograph courtesy of Mountain, Stream, and Trail Adventures.
The river feels enormous, a broad swath of water through a bright green corridor of newly leafed-out trees and full to the brim, up to the green grass and the lowest scraped bare tamarisk branches. When I catch the current right and avoid the swirling eddies and boils—places where the water tumbles over something unseen and responds with a hydrologic somersault—the river agreeably eases my way forward.
Most in the group are repeat attendees, not just in the sense of this being week three of class, but in that this is the second, or fifth, summer. Jamie Schwebach, who has been doing the course since 2018, says most people are shocked to hear she paddleboards the Río Grande.
A lifelong New Mexican, she was raised on the ad campaign that declared, “Ditches are deadly,” and was taught to fear the Río Grande as dangerous and dirty. Yet at the start of every summer boating season, this is her way of remembering that the river that runs through the heart of the city is here to be enjoyed.
Read more: Here’s where to raft, kayak, fish, swim, and enjoy our waters.
