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When the orange water of the contaminated聽Animas River surged聽into town a year ago, many in Durango worried it would leave behind a slime of not just pollutants but also stigma.

Would anyone ever want to raft or fish again in a river that looked, in pictures broadcast around the world, like fetid soup?

But today, one year after the breach of the Gold King Mine into the Animas, businesses in Durango that depend on the river say things are back to normal. The rafters are back. The fly-fishermen are back. The orange water is gone.

“After a year, it’s kind of been forgotten,” said John Flick, the owner of Duranglers, a fly-fishing store and guide service in Durango.

That’s the story upstream, at least.

But trace the Animas’ slinking path into the southwestern desert, where it merges with the San Juan River, and you’ll find considerably more worry about what the spill left behind.

The Navajo Nation continues to watch with suspicion a river it considers sacred, fearing that its waters could poison crops. Only this May did Navajo officials reopen a critical irrigation canal that pulls water from the San Juan, which itself turned orange last year after the Animas pollution flowed into it.

At a hearing this spring in Phoenix, Navajo farmers told stories of woe and worry over the pollution. Martha Curtis said she watched all the crops on her small 4-acre farm whither last year when irrigation was shut off. This year, she , her fields would go unplanted, just in case problems returned. The contamination last year alone cost her $10,000, and she still had not been reimbursed, she said.

“The secondary impacts of these economic losses are only just beginning,”聽LoRenzo Bates, speaker of the Navajo Nation Council, .

The Environmental Protection Agency has accepted responsibility聽for the spill, the result of a botched effort to clean up the Gold King Mine. In the past year, it has received 68 claims from people along the river looking to be reimbursed for damages, an EPA spokeswoman said. In a letter this month, EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus wrote that the agency is working with the U.S. Justice Department on a plan for the claims.

“[W]e hope to be responding to these claims in the coming weeks,” he wrote.

But, in the stories from upstream and downstream, it’s clear the spill’s economic impact聽was spread聽equally only so long as the water was orange.

In Durango and surrounding La Plata County, where the river features prominently in the region’s tourism, rafting companies and river guides for lost trips and days spent out of work. The river was after the spill. That those losses have yet to be reimbursed still stings, said Matt Wilson, the owner of 4 Corners Whitewater Rafting.

“We’re out thousands of dollars,” Wilson said.

Wilson’s company also saw a drop-off in preseason bookings this year and an increase in calls from people wondering whether the river is safe. But, come May, when聽the Animas flowed cold and clear with snowmelt, bookings picked up and the concerned calls stopped. Business is as busy聽as usual.

A recent Colorado聽 prepared by the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business concluded that the spill “will likely have little impact on the La Plata economy.” And聽Roger Zalneraitis, the聽executive director of the La Plata County Economic Development Alliance, said the numbers have borne that out. Sales taxes dipped earlier in the year 鈥� possibly because of聽a slowdown in oil and gas activity 鈥�- but all other signs are good, he said.

“This was like a six-day event from a tourism standpoint,” said Bob Kunkel, the executive director of the Durango Area Tourism Office. “It started, and then it was over.”

“People are funny,” he added. “They have short memories.”

Downstream, though, those who rely on the river in a different way are less optimistic. They fear their water wells and irrigation systems聽have been fouled for years into the future. They worry their economic and emotional losses could carry forward even longer.

This summer, the city of Farmington, N.M., announced that it temporarily because of turbidity in the Animas River. Tests the city conducted showed that, when the river was choppier, there were more heavy metals in the water, although it was uncertain whether that was the result of dormant contamination left on the riverbed by the spill or minerals occurring naturally.

Navajo officials, meanwhile, have begun talking about developing alternate sources 鈥� confronting the possibility they may one day again have聽to turn away from a river . Suicides increased on the reservation following the spill, Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said.

“The effects of this disaster,” Begaye wrote in for the Washington, D.C., newspaper The Hill, “will ripple through our communities for years.”