A 65-year-old man is missing after the raft he and his son were in on the Colorado River in Glenwood Canyon capsized, Garfield County Sheriff officials said on Monday. The son was able to swim to shore.
Glenwood Springs firefighters on Sunday searched both sides of the river from Grizzly Creek down to Two Rivers Park in Glenwood Springs. A search and rescue team assisted, but stopped searching at 8 p.m., officials said in a news release.
The sheriff’s office now is treating this as a missing person case while working with search and rescue workers to continue the search, officials said.
The man and his son put in at Grizzly Creek on Sunday afternoon with plans to raft down the river to the area around New Castle, officials said. Shortly after they began rafting, their raft capsized, officials said.
The missing man was last seen wearing a grey shirt or hoody and white-and-yellow gloves. It was unclear whether he was wearing a flotation vest.
Whitewater river rafting in Colorado this year has been perilous amid fast and high flows as mountain snowpack melts. Around the state, authorities have reported more than a dozen fatalities.
On Sunday afternoon along the Colorado River, a 51-year-old woman from Kremmling died Sunday after a rafting accident — upriver from Glenwood Canyon in Grand County. The raft she was in flipped, and efforts to resuscitate her failed, according to a news release from the Grand County Sheriff’s Office. She was pronounced dead where rescuers pulled her out of the river at the Radium Recreation Area campground about 20 miles west of Kremmling.
A week ago, a 60-year-old man died during a commercial rafting trip along the Arkansas River in the Royal Gorge south of Canon City.
The stretch of river between the wide beaches at Grizzly Creek and Glenwood Spring has been considered “the perfect family float through gorgeous scenery with great opportunities for wildlife sightings” — unless water levels exceed 5,000 cubic feet per second, according to the rafting industry advocacy group American Whitewater. Commercial rafting companies frequently take groups through that area.
On Monday, data from a U.S. Geological Survey gauge showed the water level in the Colorado River just below Glenwood Springs at 13,000 cubic feet per second.
