SALED — Sarina Perret takes her place on a concrete block next to a tall, glassy wave on the Arkansas River. A friend holds the nose of her surfboard as she plants her feet and begins to stand. She glides over the wave, carving smooth turns on the flowing wedge of green water. The line of waiting surfers cheers.

“You’re a surfer!” someone shouts as she returns to the line at Scout Wave on the Arkansas River in Salida.

It’s Perret’s first day on the Scout Wave. This is her first season of river surfing.

“I grew up in Colorado, so it’s not like I grew up thinking, ‘I want to be a surfer.’ I mean, I watched surfing in movies, but that’s about it,” says the Evergreen physical therapist. “It’s so cool to be a part of the river surfing culture that has exploded here in Colorado. Everyone is so supportive. It’s such an awesome sport.”

About a dozen surfers line up at Scout Wave on a recent Monday morning. The previous weekend, dozens waited their turn. At night, surfers drag battery-powered lights onto the shores of the Salida Whitewater Park and make their way through the darkness on Scout Wave. Even in winter, surfers flock in, strapped in thick wetsuits.

The Salida Whitewater Park was conceived in 1999 by locals: paddler Mike Harvey, restaurateur Ray Kitson, excavator Fred Lowry and businessman Jerry Mallet. They eventually enlisted Recreation Engineering and Planning, the pioneer of river park design in Colorado, to build a river park that has transformed Salida and inspired dozens of other communities.

“When they decided to turn around and turn to the river instead of turning our backs on it like everyone had been doing for the last 100 years, everything changed,” said Mike “Diesel” Post, Salida’s parks and recreation director and a former Buena Vista high school administrator.

Post stands among the wave riders, their heel-edge notches sprinkling the crowded banks with curtains of mist.

Evergreen’s Sarina Perret surfs the Scout Wave at Salida Whitewater Park on the Arkansas River on July 22, 2024. It was Perret’s first day surfing the Scout Wave. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)

Post will get a debrief this summer on how the revamped wave has worked so far from its designers: engineers Harvey and Spencer Lacy of Recreation Engineering and Planning. Lacy’s father, Gary, started the company in the 1980s.

Last year, Harvey and Lacy scrambled through June and July to tame the Scout Wave as the Arkansas River’s current spiked, turning the wave into a violent, boat-flipping hole when the flow crept above 1,250 cfs. They used a crane to dump 4,000-pound bags of sand into the river to adjust the river’s flow over the concrete slab they built into the riverbed in 2022 as the second iteration of the Scout Wave, which they originally built in 2010. What could have been a disaster for Salida turned into a gem when Salida officials gave the wave sculptors another chance to refine the Scout Wave.

Last fall, Harvey and Lacy removed the sandbags and made permanent changes to the riverbed for the third time, creating what everyone is calling Scout Wave 3.0. And then they held their breath when high water levels on the Arkansas River in Salida in June exceeded 4,000 cfs.

After last fall’s modifications involving giant concrete blocks and rocks, and the remodeling to build a boat slide on the left side of the river for paddlers in smaller boats who want to avoid the turbulent high-water gap, the third version of the Scout Wave is pretty much perfect.

“It’s the best river wave in the world. Period,” says Denver musician Eric Halborg, who spent several weeks camping and staying in hotels this summer so he could surf Salida for a few hours a day. His favorite time: 5 a.m. under the lights “when the line is the shortest.”

Last year, when Scout Wave was unsuspended for two months during peak flows, the city counted 9,000 people with cell phones on the riverbanks. So far this summer, the city has counted 20,000 cell phone pings from the river park. On a recent Monday morning, guided fishermen and commercial rafters bobbed through the wave. Upriver, tiny tots surfed Kindergarten Wave on bodyboards under the watchful eyes of mothers standing on the bank. Visitors donned life jackets from the riverside rental station and swam near the kayak hole.

And a growing number of boarders are flocking to Scout Wave 3.0. The wave is the equivalent of a ski resort for a mountain town, where people come from far and wide for a playful vacation. Just a few decades ago, Salida had a long, high wall in Riverside Park that kept people away from the river. Now, the river is “the lifeblood of the city of Salida,” Post says.

“We’re a river town. We’re about as OG of a river town as you can get. This has been a whitewater park for 25 years… kind of a kayaking surf spot that we called a whitewater park,” Post says. “But eight years ago we started seeing people on tubes, people on little boats and stand-up paddleboards and now surfboards and all of a sudden it became a park. And now with this wave, it’s all coming together in such a beautiful way that everyone can see it and recognize it.”

Record high water levels this season on the Arkansas River

Last year’s high currents gave Lacy and Harvey a good lead for a second modification of the Scout Wave. They modified the boat slide and worked on permanent ledges — boulders and concrete blocks on either side of the wave, which was designed as a “surfing treadmill,” known as a sheet flow wave with carefully directed river water flowing over a smooth slab of concrete.

But as with most wave-making features built in moving water, it was unclear exactly how the wave would shape up this season as the river rose. Post, Harvey and Lacy had more than a few sleepless nights as they waited for daylight to check the live webcam and make sure the feature would survive the night’s rising currents.

The advantage of June’s record high flows is that we know now, Harvey says.

The wave “is a lot less gnarly this season. If we had a (smaller) spike like we’ve had in the last few years, we’d still be wondering,” Harvey said. “We’ve definitely ripped the Band-Aid off.”

Harvey and Lacy stroll through the sweaty surfers and explore the sidewalk downstream with Post. Springs along the river leak under the concrete steps. A few years ago, the springs would simply muddy the banks, but now that thousands of people have come, the seeping springs are a problem. In the winter, surfers and those who like to sit by the river to watch the surfers must navigate the ice. The park’s designers are thinking about dog owners and river rangers as much as they are about the surfers.

Recreational Engineering and Planning considers the Salida park “definitely our star project” out of the more than 100 river parks the firm has designed across the country, Lacy says.

“Salida is the project where people come to us and say we want what Salida has,” Lacy says. “And we continue to lead the way.”

The energy around river surfing is growing. Two parks on the South Platte in metro Denver have adjustable flaps that create surfable waves in a variety of currents. A new surf break atop a demolished dam on the Arkansas River near Pueblo’s City Park is drawing surfers this summer. The surf break at Glenwood Springs on the Colorado River offers big-water surfing when the current exceeds 10,000 cfs.

Harvey and Lacy plan to renovate a wave at Buena Vista River Park this fall to accommodate a wider range of currents.

Park planners and local communities across the country are clamoring for surfing opportunities in their city-center rivers. Parks are evolving to accommodate the new wave of river users. Designs designed for kayakers—a sport that requires a basic level of expertise (like how to roll) and a large investment to even get started—are being adapted to accommodate the much more accessible sport of river surfing.

“There are cities all over the country where this could just be a huge thing. This sport attracts more women, more children, and just attracts more people who have never really spent time in rivers,” Harvey said.

There’s a level of trust surrounding Salida’s whitewater park that’s unusual. Harvey has lived in town for decades and has overseen every step of the park’s design. His son, Miles, is considered one of the world’s best river surfers. Badfish SUP, the company Harvey and his friend Zach Hughes founded more than 15 years ago, makes some of the best boards in the sport, and the downtown surf shop is always busy. (Almost everyone at Scout Wave rides Badfish boards.) City council members ride the wave. Or their kids do.

Larry Sherwood, the longtime owner of Lowry Contracting, has spent countless hours moving tons of rock — at deep discounts — to sculpt the river park and Scout Wave. Harvey and Lacy often work for free on their hometown river park. Harvey founded the Arkansas River Trust in the late 1990s to raise money for park improvements. The park builders have a close relationship with local leaders.

These relationships allowed the park’s designers to modify a feature that most other cities would have chosen to remove, due to complaints of soaked boaters overturning the churning feature during high tide.

“It’s hard being the light on the bike, you know,” Post says. “We get a lot of bugs, but the view is really great. It’s great to be up front, but you get a lot of shit. But this is what we do as a river town — we try it out.”