Game Over 
Run With the Devils
A two-day trip down the state’s wildest river was exactly what I was warned it would be: difficult, frightening, and unimaginably beautiful.
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It took us the better part of eight hours to get to our campsite, which was just downstream from a monstrous set of springs that come crashing straight out of the rock riverbanks at 22,000 gallons a minute. The camp turned out to be nothing more than a limestone ledge along the small section of the riverbank that belongs to the state: Devils River State Natural Area. There was nothing else there. The only way we could tell that we were even in a state park was a sign bearing one of the strangest warnings I have ever seen. It read “Don’t linger at Dolan Falls.” Dolan Falls is the largest waterfall, by volume, in Texas and the featured attraction on the Devils River. The Devils River State Natural Area staff cannot, of course, prevent me from lingering by the falls, and indeed I had full rights to linger by the falls as long as I stayed in the navigable river. Still, the rangers apparently couldn’t resist helping the landowners shoo us away. The Devils is like that: You get the feeling you are not wanted. Imagine such a sign in Big Bend or Yosemite national parks.
We pitched our tent, then decided we would try to catch some fish. What happened next was almost humorous, a Disney cartoon version of what a very good day of fishing might look like. Fish were striking our spinning tackle just moments after it hit the water. Kenny landed three 3-pound smallmouths on his first five or six casts. I caught fish on two of my first three. This went on for a while. Suddenly, the old man’s wild fish story seemed perfectly reasonable. As the sun set, the wind died and the river went dead calm, and its surface came alive with millions of diaphanous white insects that looked like dancing fairies—until the lunkers rose to snatch them. With darkness came a minor symphony of wheezings, squawkings, thrashings, and belchings, all punctuated by a sound that I can only describe as the noise produced by a twelve-pound bowling ball hitting the water after being dropped from a height of about three feet. Kenny and I had no idea what caused this. We assumed these were the giant gar striking flying insects. Whatever it was, it was not small. We went to sleep gazing at the brilliant sky. All that weird, croaking, unidentifiable noise around us seemed a perfect soundtrack to the vast, spinning universe above us.
OF COURSE WE WERE worried about Dolan Falls, which was a mile or so downriver from our campsite. Was it marked? Were there signs, as you might expect there to be on, say, the Niagara River in upstate New York, warning you to leave the water? From our camp we could hear the falls booming. Dolan is described in Steve Daniel’s book Texas Whitewater as “a twelve-foot vertical drop that, at high water, contains nasty hydraulics.” The latter term refers to water that churns backward upon itself, meaning that the swimmer or boater can be held under against the base of the falls and drowned. A canoe going over the falls would undoubtedly be smashed up, but that would just be the beginning of our trouble.
One of the things you learn as a white-water boater is how benign the worst river hazards can look when viewed from upstream. Example: If you are looking downstream toward Niagara Falls, the drop-off would appear as a perfectly flat horizon line. You would see no white water, no hint of the falls’ descent into seething, frothing death below. Twenty minutes after pushing off from our campground the next morning, the river’s gradient suddenly became steeper, and we found ourselves in a section of shallow, white-water rapids. We stuck to the middle channel, which was getting progressively deeper and faster moving. That was when I saw the horizon line ahead of me. I yelled to Kenny, and we paddled hard for the bank. We beached the boat, walked downstream twenty yards, and indeed found the big, scary, violent hydraulics of Dolan Falls. There had been no warnings of any kind. Of course there hadn’t. Another fifteen seconds and we would have gone over. We wondered how many other guideless river-runners had done that, and what had happened to them.
Since Dolan was both unrunnable and unlineable, we had to portage it, which proved to be the most difficult part of the trip. Though the distance was no more than one hundred yards, it took us nearly two hours to drag, push, and carry the canoe and equipment through the steep, dense, boulder-strewn, thorn-infested riverbank. But I am happy to report that once we had lugged the canoe down, we did indeed—and in contravention of a specific directive from Texas Parks and Wildlife—linger at Dolan Falls. We didn’t know whose land we were on. After scratching, scraping, sweating, and stumbling our way through pricker patches and over huge misshapen rocks, we did not much care. It is a spectacular place where gigantic plumes of white water cascade into depthless, transcendently clear blue-green pools. The day was cloudless and windless and 80 degrees. At the bottom of the falls, we ate lunch on a limestone ledge, dived off the lower cliffs, and swam in the river’s powerful, swirling eddies. We lingered some more, watched a belted kingfisher hunt the shallows, then finally packed up and headed off on the final eight miles of river. (We later discovered, and this may be our karmic punishment for having lingered, that all the smart boaters portage the other side of the river, where it is much steeper but less jungle-like.)
As muscular and violent as the river had seemed yesterday, today the scale of everything was much bigger. The volume of water in the river, pumped up by springs like the one near our campsite, seemed to have doubled. The more we moved downstream, the deeper, broader, and more powerful the river became. We were increasingly watchful as we approached the drop sections of the river and ever more apprehensive when we entered blind canebrakes at high speed with no real idea of what was on the other side and no way to pull the canoe out in any case. As before, we ran most of the rapids and lined the ones we thought too big. One of those, we later learned, is known as Three-Tier Rapid, a nice, long class III that I would have had fun with in my kayak but which we believed would have been impossible for us to run in the canoe. On the other side of the rapid, we found out that we had been right. There, stranded on a shoal, was a badly smashed canoe with a small fishing motor on the back and a ripped life jacket trailing forlornly in the current. A little farther downstream was a pile of camping and boating gear that had apparently been abandoned in haste. It was a sobering sight: our worst fears, neatly summarized. We inspected it, theorized about what had happened to the people, and pushed on, more attentive than ever to the booming rapids ahead of us.
Our trip ended at the home of Gerald Bailey, who is the only local river guide for the Devils River. His house was easy to find. We needn’t have worried. He is a big bear of a man with a walrus mustache and a ponytail who throws fifteen-foot canoes around as if they were kindling. We boarded his old F-250 and headed back on a two-hour drive to Baker’s Crossing on one of the roughest, most alarmingly vertical jeep roads I have ever traveled. We asked him about the smashed canoe. “I had to go get them,” he said, with a wry smile, then told us that the wreck had happened a few days before. The panicked canoeists had hiked out of the canyon and had been lucky enough to find a nearby ranch house and begged Bailey to come and rescue them. “They didn’t even want to go back and get their equipment,” he said. “I guess they had enough.” Kenny and I just looked at each other and laughed. Sitting in the comfort of Bailey’s pickup truck, now on a paved road and headed north, this was a very funny story. It was downright hilarious.
The Devils Made Me Do It
You can run it too.
>> Anyone wanting to run this primitive river should contact the river’s sole local guide and leading authority, Gerald Bailey, at 830-395-2266. He can provide equipment as well as shuttle service. He also specializes in fishing trips.
There are two recommended places where you can put a canoe or kayak in the river. The farthest upstream is Baker’s Crossing, located on Route 163 about sixty miles south of Ozona. For a fee you can camp there or leave your car while you paddle. Contact Mary Baker Hughey at 830-292-4503.
The Devils River State Natural Area offers to boaters both primitive camping and a place to put canoes and kayaks in the river. To get there from Del Rio, travel 45 miles north on U.S. 277, then turn left on Dolan Creek Road and go 18 miles to the park. (Note: Park regulations allow you to put boats in here but not to take them out.) For camping reservations, call Texas Parks and Wildlife at 512-389-8900. To make reservations for canoeing or kayaking, you must call the rangers at Devils River State Natural Area at 830-395-2133.
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