A 22-year-old Grand Junction man was lost in the Gunnison River on Monday and presumed drowned after a search was called off at nightfall, authorities said.
The man, whose name was not released, was wading in the relatively shallow river on Orchard Mesa in a rural part of Grand Junction when he apparently fell off a shelf and got caught in the wash below a low dam.
“They were just fishing and swimming in the river right there,” said Sgt. Richard Acree of the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office. “They just got down in an area below the dam, and the current caught him, and he just couldn’t get out of it.”
Search teams scoured the river downstream of where the man disappeared, and divers made preliminary efforts to check the 15-foot-deep pool below the dam until darkness made their efforts too dangerous.
They will resume the search today, Acree said, but they don’t expect to find the man alive. “We’ve checked. We’ve run boats up and down the Gunnison in that area, and we weren’t able to find anything,” he said.
The man, who reportedly has a wife and two children, was on a family outing.
