Editor’s Note. Excerpt from Paul Bauer, Ph.D. Emeritus Principal Geologist New Mexico Bureau of Geology & Mineral Resources, New Mexico Tech:
“If rivers represent the allegorical lifeblood of New Mexico, then Steve Harris has been the state’s unofficial cardiologist for the last 40 years. Steve’s familiarity with the Rio Grande, from source to sea, is legendary. He has explored it all. He understands its history, its hydrology and ecology, its special places, its former glory, its fragility, and its future potential. He has also explored, and advocated for, the other rivers of New Mexico, such as the Gila, Pecos, and San Juan. Steve is a rare combination of technical expert, motivated journalist, skilled educator, and passionate river advocate. His vision, dedication, and skill have irrefutably changed our perspectives and influenced priorities and policies in the progressive use and protection of the state’s water resources and the importance of healthy riparian ecosystems.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mark Allison: In the boating and river community, you are known as “Uncle Steve,” though I’m aware of one highly placed elected official who has referred to you as “River Daddy.” Let’s just stick with “Uncle,” though, shall we? How did you come to have that moniker?
Steve Harris: You have to be pretty old to know me as Uncle Steve. When I started boating out in California in the1970s, everybody had to have a nickname. You were Catfish or … a number of us became Uncles. The company we were working for on the Stanislaus (River), had a deal with the summer camp. Every week they got a new batch of fourth-graders and part of their program was to take them down the river. So, you’d start out trying to relate to the fourth-graders, “Hi, I’m Uncle Jim and I’m the leader of this trip. And that’s Uncle Josh and that’s Uncle Steve.” That kind of banter went on the whole trip. There are a number of us still out there that refer to each other as Uncle.
MA: How were you introduced to rivers and outfitting in the first place? Is this something that you did with your family growing up?
SH: I trace it back to when I was 10 years old. My mom took me to Gilcrease Art Institute in Tulsa, which is a great place to visit all full of cowboy art and Indian art and so forth. To get there, we had to pass the confluence of the Cimarron (River) and the Arkansas (River) in Oklahoma. It was flooding and we stopped and looked at that and it just made a big impression on me. It was just fascinating. That was really my first introduction to rivers. When I was 15, I had a neighbor friend who had a new canoe, and we went out and ran the Brazos and the Colorado rivers in Texas and I got the paddling bug that way.
MA: Your career was as a commercial outfitter, but you’re also well known for is being an advocate for rivers. How did your work as an outfitter lead to advocacy?
SH: It was a fascinating journey. I was a Forrest Gump in the ‘60s—party to a lot of things. One of the historic things I witnessed was that the river I found myself living in a cabin on was the subject of a dam project, and that’s the Stanislaus. The U.S. Amry Corps of Engineers was building New Melones Dam. There was a group of mainly river guides—college students, hippies—who decided to use the initiative process to try and stop the dam. So, I helped circulate petitions in supermarket parking lots in the Bay Area to get Save the Stanislaus on the ballot. Ultimately, I think the electorate wanted to save the river, but the initiative was written in such a way as “you want to save the river, you voted no.”
I was already a rookie guide on the river when this was going on and I really liked that lifestyle. Then the drought hit California in ‘74 and ’75, and I went back to my roots which is Oklahoma and Texas and New Mexico. My unfinished business—my bucket list—included running the Rio Grande in the Big Bend area. So, I did that, and one day I was out there with a friend of mine, and we were floating through the lower canyons on the third or fourth day. He said, “Boy, it would be great if we could do this all the time.” And I said, “Well, we could. I know how to be a river outfitter. It’s not rocket science.” And of course, quickly, once you become involved in a business, and especially one that’s really regulated, you don’t think as much about freedom of the wild as Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and Forest Service permits, which are a fairly demanding bureaucratic exercise. So, you become sort of an agency lobbyist—working within agencies on something that relates to their mission. Being an outfitter in that place, in that time, is pretty political and being an advocate on behalf of the river … I think it’s just like the ethical imperative. The river gives me so much, I ought to reciprocate a little bit.
MA: That story you told about losing the vote on the dam—do you think that that was related to how the ballot initiative was worded, and it might have been confusing?
SH: It was. There’s a lot of history behind this. There’s a whole book by Tim Palmer about the fight for the Stanislaus. The Supreme Court actually ruled that the Corps of Engineers couldn’t just fill that dam on their own because the state owned the water. So, the Supreme Court saved the river for a couple of years. My friend Mark Dubois (founder of Friends of the River), who’s still in the conservation game, chained himself to a rock in the path of the reservoir as soon as they declared that damn finished. He told one person where he was and wrote an open letter to the Corps of Engineers: “If you flood this river, you will drown me.” It was published in the Modesto Bee and the San Francisco Chronicle. So nonviolent direct action taught me about advocacy. It’s not something I would have gravitated toward if I had not had this life experience with loving your river and then seeing it jerked away.
MA: In your advocacy work as you’re talking to state legislators or through your outfitting business as you’re introducing people to their first ever float trip, have you noticed that there’s something that a lot of people really just don’t know or understand about rivers?
SH: Well, the classic one— every river guide’s got this story: You meet the people who are about to get on your boat and they ask, “When does the river get back to this point?” It’s surprisingly common. But my real answer to your question is that people don’t understand that it’s a deeper subject because rivers affect everybody. People think rivers are beautiful or exciting or terrifying but don’t really affect them. Everybody’s affected by (rivers) but not everybody understands them. I was once over by the University of New Mexico football field, and the lawn was being irrigated and water was flowing off the stadium grass and onto the street. Pretty soon, a maintenance guy came around and I said, “Hey you’re wasting water here!” He said, “Oh, it’s okay. We have our own well.” Those who understand elementary hydrology know that rivers and groundwater are intimately connected. But certainly, we don’t make water management decisions with hydrologic reality in mind. Rivers are such imaginary beasts and people are full of their own ideas of magic and wishful thinking. Rivers are just there. In a society like ours at this time, if you can exploit it and turn a profit then by golly, that’s what we’re going to do.
MA: You’ve introduced so many people—it must be thousands—to rivers, many of whom I’m sure have fond memories or even went on to be lifelong advocates. You have this reputation of being generous and patient and knowledgeable and certainly passionate. That is quite a legacy. What can you tell our readers about that?
SH: This relates back to all those debates in the years of trying to pass the Wilderness Act: “You’re going to spoil it by going there.” You’ve got this conundrum of love it or love it to death. That’s something I think about a lot. A lot of people are opposed to commercial outfitting on public water. But the river is not going to speak for itself. All it’s going to do is flood and dry up and flood and dry up and try to exist within whatever channel it’s allowed by us. I just feel personally so connected to rivers. I think it’s important to get them all the friends you possibly can. Because the trend even in New Mexico is toward more and more degradation, not healthier and healthier rivers but fewer and less healthy rivers.
MA: I want to talk about some of the things that you’ve done to address that. Can you talk a bit about the Connecting People With Rivers Program that you started?
SH: If you believe passionately in something, which is protecting rivers for me, but it could be anything, then you try and figure out, strategically, what can I do here? The biggest asset we’ve got is those boats and shuttle vehicles and the river itself. People in agencies and in elected office are making decisions about rivers without actually experiencing the river the way that a river runner would. They were receptive to getting out there to experience it. They’ll have a more realistic view of what they’re damming or diverting or dividing and perhaps be more receptive to positive changes and more friendly policies. So, we did that for years and some good ideas came out of it. I think the most important thing was getting working relationships with people. After three days floating with somebody, they’re kind of a close acquaintance or somebody you really connect with and that could help later on when you’re trying to pass initiatives.
MA: Talk about Rio Grande Restoration. What is that? Why did you start it?
SH: We started outfitting in 1979 on the Rio Grande. The way we knew how the snowpack was developing was the Wolf Creek Pass snow report. “We’re at 300 inches.” Well, at 300 inches, you’re going to have a hell of a good river season. If it’s 150 inches, maybe not so much. In 1988, they had a big snowpack, but it melted early. And Colorado was panicking. They were sending down as much water as they could in February, March and April before the tourists arrived. So, we learned that the management law of the river was the Rio Grande Compact and under the compact, we’re reliant on Colorado to deliver the water that the agreement specifies. That year, what promised to be a good rafting season was really a bust; people didn’t know that you could run low water and enjoy it yet. So, the outfitters were grumbling about this and they said, “We ought to just go to Colorado and buy water rights so we can keep water in the river.” So, we formed Rio Grande Restoration with that idea in mind. We were quickly disabused of that as a possibility. Colorado, foreseeing such ideas, had passed an anti-water export statute. This is really fundamental to understanding the way the Rio Grande is managed. If it crosses the state line, it rings the compact bell. It counts. It is a delivery. If Albuquerque wanted to respond to a prospectus for a 30,000-acre-foot purchase of a water right in the San Luis Valley, that’s fine. They could do that, but they wouldn’t get the benefit of the water. It would go to the compact recipients. It would go to the system downstream. So, the game was kind of blocked and still people say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get Colorado to send water on a more favorable schedule for New Mexico?” But I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re damn lucky that they abide with what they agreed to.
MA: In 2005, you were part of the effort that created the state’s Strategic Water Reserve, a program that we’re trying to make even better this state legislative session by making its funding more secure and allowing transactions to be used to support groundwater, for example. Can you say a little bit about what led you to work on the Strategic Water Reserve?
SH: The idea came out of Think New Mexico, a think tank that has a new initiative every year. They said, “We need to do something on water.” So, they asked around. (Think New Mexico Executive Director) Fred Nathan credits Paula Garcia (executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association) with coming up with this. The idea is that when you’ve got a drought year and you can’t make your compact deliveries and the endangered fish are all dying and the Feds are coming in and closing head gates, if you had a strategic water reserve, you could keep the system functioning. I worked with the state engineer at the time, Estevan López, as well as Norm Gaume (river advocate and water management expert). The New Mexico Farm Bureau got on board with this which contributed a lot to its success. Think New Mexico has an excellent way of lobbying. They’ll create bills that are bicameral, meaning a senator and a representative sponsoring, and bipartisan, meaning a Republican and a Democrat sponsoring. I think that’s one reason that the Strategic Water Reserve was successful. Then Estevan and Norm and I did a lot of work with the acequias and other agriculturalists that were a little bit oppositional. We passed it with two tries.
MA: Interesting about the Farm Bureau. What compelled them to support it at the time?
SH: This was collaborative conservation. You’d go and ask people, what do you hate about this? What can’t you live with? Here’s the idea. Save our rivers. Everybody wants healthy rivers. But yes, farmers are afraid of losing some or all of their water supplies so you had to give them assurances, and the assurance was that the transactions into the water reserve would be willing sellers only. So that was a huge hurdle. It explicitly says there’ll be no taking. We’re not going to condemn for this purpose. Also, recognizing that agriculture is the water user—80% of the Rio Grande and the San Juan and many of these Southwestern rivers is used on farm fields for irrigation. That use is legitimate and must be accommodated, and at the same time we want to keep the Feds off our backs and we want to enforce endangered species protections and keep the compact from throwing interstate comity into pandemonium. Then there was a little Trojan horse in there that we managed to slip by the Farm Bureau. I thought it was clever, but it’s often overlooked. In the bill, water can be acquired by the state for endangered species compliance or for compact compliance—or to prevent future listings under the Endangered Species Act—which to me is code for ecosystem purposes. The one remnant for river ecology and river recreation was that the reserve could be used to prevent species from becoming endangered.
MA: A few years later, you helped host and organize the first workshop around environmental flows in New Mexico. Environmental flows are also something that we think are really important as a tool and are continuing to work on. Can you tell our readers a bit about how you define environmental flows and what prompted you to do that convening?
SH: Here’s where I may go down a rabbit hole or two, but the backstory is important. This was Rio Grande Restoration’s idea and execution, so I’m proud of that. Bonnie Colby, an agriculture economy professor at the University of Arizona, invited me to a dinner one night and said the economics are such that you cannot save rivers and prevent over-diversion of rivers without an economic hook, and I think rafting is it. So, I read a lot of Bonnie’s material. She’s still an advocate of streamflow and she got me interested in becoming an advocate. Then (water law expert) Denise Fort called me one day and said, “Hey, the Legislature’s starting. You ought to go down there and see if you can do anything good for the river.” With the environmental flow workshop, we were funded by the Turner Foundation. We had a pretty good pot of money to do something like this, but things were different in New Mexico then. If you said instream flow, you were likely to end up face down in an irrigation ditch some night. Not literally, but the feelings were very strong. Some thought this was just an environmentalist idea of how to destroy farming. Because what you’re saying is, “The river doesn’t have enough water, it needs more water to function properly.” What a farmer hears is, “You’re using too damn much water and we’re going to take some away.” So that’s when instream flow stopped being characterized as instream flow and became environmental flows. It was just a PR idea in New Mexico. And there were a number of states that had made some strides. Colorado has an excellent program under the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Its instream flow program has a staff. They go out and assess, ideally, all the streams of Colorado and which ones are at least maintaining their baseline and which ones need more water for improvement, and they identify water rights and purchase the water rights. It’s under the broad Department of Natural Resources. So that’s explicitly about protecting flows and rivers. Our neighbor Texas, which as we all know is the paragon of progressivism, LOL, passed the Texas Rivers and Bays Conservation Act. It created a two-part approach. One was to get all the water stakeholders together. You have a municipal water supplier, a groundwater pumper, an irrigator and the Sierra Club, for example, review the problem and potential solutions. Then you have a science team that opines on what the flow deficits are and pins a number on what that stream should be flowing at any given time. It’s worked fairly well. We thought New Mexico should come up with something that’s uniquely New Mexican and that we could do it better than Colorado or Texas. So, we brought in other states’ game and fish folks, water managers and so forth for a two-day workshop and then got all the water community together. Events like this help forge all of these different water users into a community. We didn’t come out with recommendations or anything, but we planted a lot of seeds and made people less fearful. Yeah, we can do this. We can have healthy rivers with appropriate flows, the right amounts, the right time of year, floods and minimum flows, and a whole suite of parameters. You can tick all the boxes without harming irrigators or municipalities.
MA: It’s 2025. Rivers are facing more and more obstacles. Less snowpack, more drought, higher temperatures, more demand. How we should be thinking about river health and ecological function? Where do we go from here?
SH: I think about the overall water crisis that’s got people paralyzed right now, and it is exemplified by the infighting that’s going on around the Colorado River. If we’re honest with ourselves as a society, we’ve got to use less water, right? The tradition is to go out and find more water, so our first thought as a society is, “Is there another river basin that’s not using all their water? Can we get water out of the Great Lakes? How about the Pacific Northwest? Maybe the farmers in Colorado will sell us some of their water.” And that’s a supply side solution that’s not going to work. I’m 100% convinced that what we need to be thinking about is demand-side solutions. There are obviously a few pitfalls with doing conservation but it’s really the tool we’re going to have to unsheathe to deal with these water problems. If we’re going to meet our interstate obligations, if we’re going to not see all the little native fish as desiccated corpses in the bottom of dry stream beds, we’re going to have to use conservation. I think that’s super important. That’s job No. 1 but that’s only part of it because, of course, a lot of this is tied up with the economic system and the political power systems that are turning out to be horribly problematic.
We need to change our mind in a lot of ways, and I’m of the opinion that the river can do a lot of this teaching. I read Siddhartha (by Herman Hesse) turnand just being peaceful and meditating by the river, suddenly you see things about the laws of physics and the rest of the universe and the appropriate way to conduct your life, right? We’re uptrend now. There’s no doubt about it. We had a meeting yesterday on the two sectoral committees in the Rio Grande Basin study that the (U.S.) Bureau of Reclamation is operating, trying to deal with our own water conundrum here in the Rio Grande. It was between the tribal sectoral committee and the NGOs—World Wildlife Federation, Audubon, a lot of the wonderful advocates. And a lot of the meeting was hearing from Daryl Vigil (water administrator for the Jicarilla Apache Nation) who insinuated the 30 tribes in the Colorado River Basin into the solution. I think the unmistakable conclusion was that we don’t do water any justice. Part of it is because we have economic aspirations for the water. Part of it’s because we’re fearful about climate change and increasing diversions from other sources ruining our livelihood. But we need to address the water system systematically. And we’re not doing it yet. It’s not that it’s hopeless, it’s just that there’s a lot of psychosocial memes that have to be overcome to get a system that is worthy of wild rivers.
MA: That’s something that I think a lot about. I’m an activist, I’m an advocate. And I think that necessarily means that I’m an optimist and I think change can happen. But it’s pretty grim at times, including now in many ways from a conservation lens. Do you have hope that New Mexico can figure it out? Is there hope for rivers in New Mexico?
SH: New Mexico’s got dynamically beautiful rivers. New Mexico has wild rivers flowing through wild beautiful places. And so that always gives you hope. The idea that rivers are dynamic. Fossil Creek for example in Arizona—they diverted that and put it in a penstock and took the whole flow of the little river and put it through a power plant for 90 years. It was effectively a dead river, just a dry arroyo-looking thing. When they decommissioned the power plant and turned the water back into a river, where did the fish come from? Where did the amphibians come from? They came back. So that’s definitely a reason for hope is that these rivers are dynamic. We could look at Glen Canyon. Also, I think it’s hopeful that we’ve got a really strong environmental community, not the least of which is your leadership there at New Mexico Wild. People do care about rivers. We can mobilize that love of rivers. It’s not just New Mexico Wild or Rio Grande Restoration There’s a whole suite of young river advocates out there, I meet with them every Wednesday afternoon to try and pass improvements to the Strategic Water Reserve. That gives me hope that there’s another generation to carry on this kind of quixotic fight that didn’t seem to accomplish much for 30 years of effort. It took 150 years to screw up the Rio Grande. It’s going to take at least 75 to fix it.
MA: What can our readers do?
SH: I get asked this a lot, which indicates to me that they want to do something. I think it’s pay attention, learn about rivers. There’s a wonderful bunch of literature there, and we have these streams that aren’t the classic put an 18-foot boat out there and float from cozy sandbar to cozy sandbar but you can certainly paddle them in small craft and get to know the river. Know the river, fall in love with it, and I’ll bet for 50% of the people that spend enough time on the river, they learn things just from observing, just from things that happen that they can’t help but notice. I think that’s really important. Understand how rivers work, and there’s plenty of good books out there to read. “Life After Dead Pool” by Zak Padmore is one of the latest good books to read. There’s “Cadillac Desert.” There’s a whole classic library of things to learn about this. New Mexico Wild and the Sierra Club are teaching people how to advocate for this. You don’t have to be anyone special to advocate for the river. You just need to have enough passion that it shows and can convince people. Children, if they’re motivated. Young people have such innate enthusiasm and are actually the best advocates. I believe Native youth are going to save the river if it’s saved. They have a sense of what this landscape could be and should be. It’s in their traditions. We need to ensure that more Native wisdom gets infused into the system. But anyone can be an advocate if they have the passion—caring a lot, maybe caring just a little bit too much. I would add, being scrupulously honest. Studying your stuff, understanding points of view and facts and particularly history, to be able to share that. I was never pretty or charismatic or particularly effective, but I didn’t let it bother me.
MA: I agree that just showing up is key. I think there’s this mythology about lobbying, for example, and people feel insecure that they’re not experts. But invariably, if they go up to the Roundhouse, for example, and advocate for rivers or whatever other issue they care about, they’re going to know more about that subject matter than the elected official they’re talking to.
SH: Exactly. Especially since the elected officials don’t have staff. And they’ll admit that they depend on facts that they get from lobbyists.
MA: Right. And I’d add persistence. Virtually everything takes a long time and there are setbacks, and just not giving up has been a big lesson for me.
I’ve been really fortunate to spend many days doing many trips on different rivers with you, including the Rio Chama, the San Juan and the Gila. I’m not going to ask you to pick a favorite, but I’m wondering if you could say a few words about what makes the Gila River special in New Mexico.
SH: History teaches us that rivers have been industrialized and used. Even backcountry rivers have invasive species and changes that have occurred—salt cedar and other invasives, stuff like that. But the Gila has not been subject to too much of this degradation or change and it hasn’t been industrialized. There hasn’t been logging in its headwaters and not a lot of mining. Some, but not a lot of toxins pouring into the stream. And it is that rarest of birds, which is a free-flowing river. An actual free-flowing river. It doesn’t get its water from a dam release—it is what nature provides. I think all your readers know there’s something about wilderness you can’t quite put your finger on. Yeah, it’s beautiful. Yeah, we love wildlife. But there’s something elemental that doesn’t get accounted for that way. There’s something that a truly wild place does for you. It’s just primal. It’s dynamic. I took Jeff Bennett, who was the chief scientist at Big Bend National Park, through the Gila Wilderness section and he said this is what every Southwestern river once was. So, it’s the reference reach for people who are trying to restore other little rivers like the Verde or the Salt or the San Pedro or the Pecos. The Gila is hugely important in that way. Ecologically, that rich biodiverse aspect is part of what you feel when you feel like you’re in the wild.
MA: Say you’re on a river trip. What traits make someone good to have along?
SH: Competence and companionability. You’re a perfect example, Mark—you’re even-tempered, you lift things, you look for things to do, you contribute. River running is a team sport so that’s the set of skills that you look for.
MA: What is the flip side of that? We’ve all been on trips where it only took one person to change the whole dynamic and not necessarily for the good. What are those traits that you’d like to avoid in putting a trip together?
SH: It’s people who come in with their own agendas and they’re not open to laying them aside. The worst experiences have been with people who were on some kind of incomprehensible trek of their own. The young kid in diplomatic school at Georgetown who was looking for the river porpoise that didn’t really exist and felt that “We’ve paid a lot of money for the trip so we’re entitled to everything going right.” It shouldn’t really rain, etcetera—85% to 95% of people who come on a commercial river trip end up being wonderful companions. Moderate to wonderful. And the ones that aren’t have something that they hope to achieve, and you have no idea how to help them—other than maybe finding a therapist who can work with them.
MA: Pearls of wisdom. Speaking of, you collaborated with geologist Paul Bauer on two guidebooks, one on the Rio Grande and one on the Rio Chama. Both are helpful in introducing people to those rivers recreationally, and they also contain great history and context. If our readers aren’t familiar with those, they should definitely check them out. Really appreciate you taking the time to talk, Steve.
SH: Right on.
