With the Green and Colorado rivers in the neighborhood, it's not surprising that the Yampa River that flows through Dinosaur National Monument is overlooked. And that's not a bad thing.

Famed for being the last major tributary of the Colorado that hasn't been dammed, the Yampa flows best during spring runoff. By the time July rolls around, the river has thinned greatly, revealing rock gardens that snag rafts time and again. As a result, the river becomes the playground of kayakers and confident canoeists while rafters head to the bigger waters of the Green and Colorado.

But from early April into mid-June, the Yampa River is a highway for oar- and paddle-powered rafts. It's a river that quickly enamors those who float its pools and channels and buck its rapids, all the while surrounded by magnificent Western scenery. Faults and folds of geology are revealed in the canyon walls the river has cut down through the ages. In the lower sections of the river ruddy sandstone walls rise more than 1,000 above the river's currents, dwarfing those bobbing along.

Some years ago Page Stegner, son of Wallace Stegner and a passionate rafter, told me his favorite river was the Yampa, and it shows in the section on the river that he included in his book, Adios Amigos.

Descending at an aveage rate of 11 feet per mile, it terminates at its confluence with the Green River in Echo Park, smack dab in the middle of the monument, and some 46 miles and 533 feet below Deerlodge (where ther is no lodge, by the way, unless you happen to be a deer.)

But what a magnificent 46-mile descent it is. True, the Yampa is a geezer's delight, mild, gentle, benign, hospitable, without a rapid worthy of designation except Warm Springs. But having personally reached the age of geezerdom at the time of this adventure (May 2001) I am more than happy to scootch back against the duffel behind my rowing seat, prop the oars under my knees, and just let the raft float lazily with the current.

Sometimes I see where I'm going, sometimes where I've been, sometimes nothing but the shadow of floaters on my retina, which the opthalmologists describe as a breakdown of the vitreous humor, though I don't see what's funny about it.

I observe no tongues of slick-water leading into channels choked with rocks, no sebaceous downriver humps indicating submerged boulders hiding boat-eating holes, no snags, sandbars, keepers, bottom rivers, forever eddys (or at least none that I remember). As David Bradley remarked in his chapter "A Short Look at Eden" in This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers, "The Yampa is of the desert, a long Canyon de Chelly blessed with the magic carpet of moving water."

Come ashore from that magic carpet ride and you'll find sandy beaches, benches with junipers, and comforting forests perfect for pitching camp. There are side canyons that harbor refreshing waterfalls, steeply ascending trails that take you to the rim of the river corridor high overhead, and puzzling pictographs. And, if you're an angler, cold streams laden with fat trout. Come nightfall the sky becomes flocked with stars, while the murmuring river serenades you to sleep.

Floating lazily, as Page Stegner notes, down the Yampa is a worthy endeavor for killing five days. No electronic tethers to bind you to that you left behind. Only mile after mile of sublime landscape that frees your mind to wander and wonder.