High-Water Mark

The red dirt road that dead-ends into the office of Tom Goynes’s Pecan Park Retreat near Martindale was wet two weeks ago, soaking up the downpours that put much of Central Texas under flash flood warnings. It was, Goynes said, the first substantial rainfall his part of the state had seen in 60 days. The cloudbursts tended to drive away the campground business that provides his income, but Goynes was happy to see it anyhow. Goynes has spent 20 years managing and owning campgrounds in this yellow-light town just south of San Marcos, but he’s spent even longer paddling canoes.

And while the rains don’t drastically affect Goynes’s home river, the San Marcos, they do impact other popular recreational waterways, from the lower Guadalupe to the Blanco, which flows into the San Marcos not far from Pecan Park. As Goynes drives through the splatter to lunch, he slows at a bridge crossing the lower Blanco and looks for a rise in the water level. For now the Blanco is still flowing at an almost negligible 35 cubic feet per second — hardly enough water to float a canoe. A week later, the rain-swollen river spikes to 1,000 cfs, a level at which hot-rodding whitewater kayakers turn out to play in the rapids, and then up to almost 3,000 cfs — flood stage, where the rapids are washed out.

Weather is perhaps the single biggest factor affecting canoeing and kayaking in Texas, a regional pastime more or less marginalized by the seesaw between dry creekbeds and dangerous floodwaters. River recreation activists just wish it were the only one.

Goynes has served as president of the Texas Rivers Protection Association since its inception in 1990. For ten years before that, the weathered and wiry redhead led a predecessor group, the still-active Texas River Recreation Association.

“I feel,” he says, “kind of like the pope.”

Goynes may have a pontiff’s tenure, but until recently, his organization hasn’t had much power. River advocates including TRPA, the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society spent the better part of the 1970s and 1980s trying to pass various forms of wild and scenic river legislation to prevent unwarranted changes — dams, for instance — on the state’s dwindling natural waterways. But “no matter what we called it, the landowners heard something bad,” says Goynes. Having failed session after session, TRPA turned its energies toward legislative protection of individual waterways, one at a time. Again, opposition from property-rights zealous landowners and quasi- governmental river authorities blocked the efforts.

“In all the years,” Goynes says, “we never passed a river protection bill. That’s why we were founded, but we finally shifted to fighting outside the legislature.”

There’s plenty to fight. The news around Texas, for human-powered boaters at least, has been almost unrelentingly bad. Dwindling aquifers and overdevelopment in the Hill Country, where most of the state’s best clear-water streams are located, make Goynes fear that “we’re killing the goose that laid the golden egg.” Never mind that drought conditions have placed increasing burdens on remaining water supplies for uses like municipal drinking water and agricultural irrigation.

The TRPA — with about 300 “strongly faithful” members drawn mostly from canoeing and kayaking circles, an annual budget of approximately $20,000 and institutional overhead composed entirely of the computer that sits on Tom Goynes’s desk — has had its choice of fights to pick. Recently, it appears, it’s been picking them wisely.

Of most concern in the last year has been Hidalgo Falls, a 200-yard stretch of rapids on the Brazos River near Navasota. Hidalgo Falls is somewhat unique for having any rapids at all in this part of the state, and for almost always having enough water to run them, even in the arid dead of summer. Whitewater canoers and kayakers from Houston to College Station to Louisiana came to think of Hidalgo Falls as their home play spot.

Tanie Orlando enabled that proprietary feeling by operating his nearby riverfront acreage as a public fishing camp and boat launch. But when Orlando died last September, his heirs — bothered by drug dealers and beer guzzlers attracted to the isolated stretch of river — closed the campground and locked the gates. Since the only other public access points to the Brazos were either 20 miles upstream or five miles downstream, Hidalgo Falls’ recreational viability dried up overnight.

Enter Steve Daniel, expert kayaker, philosophy professor at Texas A&M and author of Texas Whitewater, a guidebook to little-known river-running opportunities. Daniel had been a frequent visitor to Hidalgo Falls, and he took it upon himself to attend Orlando’s funeral. He learned from the widow that the family had noted the relatively good behavior of boaters, and that parts of the 50-acre tract soon would be up for sale. Daniel started thinking about passing the collection plate among the boating community to buy a chunk of the property to preserve access.

But the logistics of multiple buyers with differing levels of investment became too complicated. So Daniel took his idea to the TRPA, which served as an umbrella for interested parties. Contributions from individuals (Daniel was one of several who kicked in over $5,000 in cash) and from organizations, including the Houston Canoe Club and Bayou City Whitewater Club, eventually bumped the kitty to over $65,000. In early April, TRPA took title to just over ten acres of land near the falls, with a perpetual access easement to the water. It remains private property off limits to the public, but TRPA has instituted a certification procedure to allow canoers and kayakers access to the water.

“I don’t know of this ever having been done before, at least in Texas,” Daniel says. “With this purchase, a precedent has been established.”

With Hidalgo Falls access safely preserved, the TRPA turned its focus back to the Hill Country. The group already has spent over $10,000 in legal fees fighting a water rights permit application that it fears would drain the already temperamental upper Guadalupe to dust.

The Southerland Properties Inc. developers filed an application with the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission several years ago for the right to withdraw 350 acre-feet of water per year (about 114 million gallons) from the Guadalupe upstream of the Canyon Lake impoundment. The proposed use: irrigation of a golf course in a residential resort. Goynes’s organization, along with a landowner group called the Guadalupe River Association and the Water Oriented Recreation District, are fighting the permit on several complicated technical fronts. The basic objection is that Guadalupe water is already overappropriated.

John Hohn, board member of the San Marcos River Foundation and the lawyer for TRPA, points to TNRCC guidelines that permits should be granted only if computer models estimate that 75 percent of the allotted water will be present in the streambed 75 percent of the time. Establishing hard data for stream flow is difficult in the feast-or-famine fluctuations of Texas rivers, but Hohn says the numbers just don’t add up. “The water,” he says, “is there less than 10 percent of the time.”

Goynes sums up TRPA’s position in his summer 2001 newsletter: “It is our opinion that we simply cannot afford to use any more water from the rivers of central Texas for the irrigation of golf courses…It is possible to play golf on native grass or even on dirt…On the other hand, it is not possible to paddle a canoe through dirt.”

The TNRCC has set an October hearing on the issue. It could deny the permit or grant it, which would lead to further litigation costs. But Goynes thinks the golf course application presents a good chance for TRPA to notch another win after years of failing to pass the kind of legislation that might have prevented the fight in the first place.

Perhaps, he thinks, the drought is ending. And as the storms pounding down on his campground attest, when it rains, it pours.