On July 19, 1978 I was approved to run commercial whitewater trips on the Stanislaus River by O.A.R.S. I also turned 21. I spent the next several summers rafting the Stanislaus, as well as other rivers in the west. But the Stanislaus was the first river I ever loved, and I wasn’t alone.
The Camp Nine stretch of the Stanislaus was the premier family-friendly rafting river in California, if not the nation. It offered a near-perfect stretch that could be rafted in either two days or one, depending on where you stopped. Towering limestone cliffs framed a canyon vibrant with a diverse ecology of plants and animals. There was a year-round creek that offered swimming, sliding, and sunbathing on smooth rock. There were caves that could be explored. It was, in other words, one of the best outdoor experiences you could have, and it was close to Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area.
It was also threatened by a dam.
Many people worked for years to save the river. An organization, Friends of the River, was founded for this very purpose. The woman who would become my wife co-founded the Santa Barbara chapter and moved up to the Stanislaus in the summer of 1980 to run a riverside operation to help river passengers write letters to their congressperson.
In short, we lost. The river was flooded by the dam and commercial rafting of it was no longer an option. Even in years when the stretch I rafted was exposed I could not bring myself to boat it. I wanted my memory of it to remain intact.
I also wanted the memory of it, and the fight to save it, to remain intact on the Internet. Thus was born the Stanislaus River Digital Archive.
Over the last several years I have chipped away slowly at building this virtual library. First I went through my own slides and digitized what little I had. Apparently I was too busy guiding to do much photography, unfortunately. Then I reached out to others who had been involved in the fight with whom I still communicated and added some of their material. I was also in communication with a friend who has been seeking to make a movie of this fight and was negotiating to gain access to one of the largest photographic collections of the Stanislaus that we knew about.
Finally, after years of work, that collection fell into our lap. But by an amazing coincidence another collection about which we were ignorant also became available around the same time. So I have spent much of my free time over the last three months digitizing slides and negatives. One of the collections, which consists of nearly 250 images, has already been added. I am still working on the other collection, which is up to nearly 400 images, and that will be added when I am finished. It’s possible it will eventually number close to 500 images.
This will bring this virtual library up to about 1,000 items all related to this one stretch of river and the fight to save it. What makes it virtual is that there is no “real” collection — the physical items are dispersed all over. I only had short opportunities to digitize the materials and give them back to their owners. But that’s all I needed to create an online memory of a special place and time.
We will never forget.