A morning in Durango starts with the river—grey-green, moving with intent past old mills and railroad bridges. You meet your guides at Mountain Waters Rafting on West College Drive, boots crunching on gravel, helmets glinting in the sun. By midday you’re clipped into a zip line high above a pinyon-juniper slope, wind pulling at your jacket as the town and the Animas spread out below. The day alternates between two different kinds of flight: the quick, adrenal snap of zipping through the trees, and the buoyant, longer glide of a raft negotiating the Animas’s managed whitewater.