Flow is good, and Jose's going with it

MOAB — Jose Tejadais wearing the kind of smile that can't be faked.

The kind you'd be wearing, too, if you'd bought a river-running company this past April and then experienced one of the best river-running summers in history.

"An incredible year in a lot of ways," says Jose.

Let him count them.

"Cooler than normal," he says, "wetter than normal and higher than normal."

That about covers it.

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Tejada isn't the only happy river-runner in Moab. There are 22 companies stationed here, and after a wet winter made its ample deposits, every one of them enjoyed improved conditions after five years of drought.

But for sheer good timing, nobody had a better summer than Tejada's Sheri Griffith Expeditions (www.GriffithExp.com), the company he bought from Sheri herself last April (Sheri Griffith is still in Moab and still guides the occasional river trip; and she still more or less owns the town, although not her company).

Business was up marginally this year — about 5 percent over 2004, Jose estimates — but the really good news is the momentum shift. Since the Utah drought began in 1999, and water levels started to steadily drop, interest in running rivers similarly dropped.

"It was going down, down, down. Then this summer the trend started back up," says Jose. "It's not quite the good old days yet, but we're getting there."

For people who have been around Moab as long as the 54-year-old Tejada, the good old days can be traced back to 1983, the "flood year," when record runoffs turned the Colorado and the Green into raging rivers.

That was the year Jose arrived in Moab and got a job driving a shuttle van for Sheri Griffith Expeditions. It was about as far off course as Jose could get from the engineering degree he had received just a few years earlier at Colorado State University, but Exxon Oil laid him off during the oil shale fiasco and he needed the work.

As happens more often than not around here, he fell in love with the river and never left.

His timing was perfect then, too. "My first three years, I thought 10,000 was low water," he says, referring to the cubic-feet-per-second measurement used to calculate river flow. During the high-water summer of 1983, the Colorado hit as high as 90,000 CFS in Cataract Canyon.