Eric Thomas spent the 1980s and ’90s surfing waves off Florida, California and Hawaii, with other stops around the Bahamas and tropics in what became a professional career on the oceans.

Then he looked to a land-locked state. “I wanted something totally different,” Thomas said.

He was done with waiting for waves that would sometimes form and sometimes not after hours of longing. He was done with the “localism,” as he called it — tribes that would claim waves when they did form, sometimes enforcing by fists. “West Coast cool” could often feel anything but.

In his search, Thomas found himself in rivers carving Colorado’s mountains. He found himself carving as well, his board cutting across whitewater that was more frequented by kayakers and rafters than people like him standing upright with no paddle.

But over the past decade, Thomas has seen many more like him.

“My motto is ‘surf where you find it,’” he said, “and I have a feeling these things are gonna be blowing up.”

By “these things,” he means waves specifically built for river surfers, whose ranks have been rising with those rolling, glassy waters around the state.

Take it from Mike Harvey, one of the pioneering builders of these waves: “I’ve been involved with whitewater sports for over 30 years now, and I’ve never seen anything that’s as hot as river surfing is right now.”

It’s obvious from his view of Scout Wave, his creation along the Arkansas River flowing through downtown Salida. Nearby is Badfish Surf Shop, which Harvey started out of a garage in 2009,

right around the time an earlier version of the wave was taking shape. Harvey opened Badfish with a friend, Zack Hughes, a former ocean surfer who designed a shorter board ideal for rivers.

Flash forward to today, following a revamp that has enthusiasts calling Scout Wave the finest river surfing wave in North America.

“It’s absolutely blown up,” Harvey said. “We have people coming from all over to surf in Salida. We just rented some boards to these Brazilian guys that came this week.”

Scout Wave has attracted pros like Thomas and newcomers like Gunnar Tande. Over the summer he regularly traveled to Salida from his home in Golden, where a couple of years ago he noticed people surfing Bingo Wave along Clear Creek Whitewater Park.

In Salida, “it can be a little intimidating, because everyone’s watching,” Tande said. “But everyone is so kind, and they’re helpful. They hold your board while you’re getting on. They’ll give you some pointers. They cheer you on. It’s different than the West Coast surf community.”

As Thomas is pleased to say, while also saying a truth that widens the eyes of his coastal friends: “I surf more inland than I ever did on the ocean.”

Waves may or may not form on the ocean, and when they do, the ride lasts a matter of seconds. That’s an epic thrill, of course, rooted in legend. But Thomas is satisfied by much longer rides on waves reliably forming on rivers where they’ve been specially engineered. From his home in Fruita — the western Colorado desert, of all places — Thomas takes his pick from not-far whitewater parks in Glenwood Springs and Montrose.

And yes, he ventures to Salida. Though, he worries about crowds there, the campers claiming first dibs and lines extending.

A new wave in southern Colorado promises to spread people out.

“I almost like Pueblo better than Salida,” Thomas said.

The debut summer of Waterworks Park was a hit, Bob Walker is happy to report. The Pueblo resident of 60-plus years owns The Edge, the shop selling and renting gear for winter and summer sports.

“If you were to say there was gonna be a surf shop in Pueblo that thrived five years ago, I would’ve laughed at you,” Walker said.

Indeed, a new line of business has boomed with the new surf wave. It’s the first of its kind in Pueblo, a “high-performance” kind designed by Harvey’s team at Recreation Engineering and Planning (REP). But the Waterworks Park wave is not the first wave around town that has drawn surfers, however once smaller in numbers.

About 15 years ago, Walker recalls counting on two hands the surfers who came to a competition he organized around a wave elsewhere along the Arkansas River around town, around features installed for a previous whitewater park. Walker had tested the wave on a boogie board, inspiring others to follow.

Harvey took notice back then. That previous whitewater park in Pueblo was also REP’s doing — among others that helped birth an industry. Harvey knows Colorado as boasting more whitewater parks than any other state, starting with the nation’s first in the late 1970s: Denver’s Confluence Park.

Tubing and kayaking was always the idea. As for surfing, Harvey said, “I’d definitely never seen it on a feature I had built on a river” until that scene in Pueblo. “That got my wheels turning.”

The result was a rolling set of submerged, sloping concrete that formed Scout Wave back in Salida. Construction was similar for the latest and greatest at Waterworks Park, also carefully accounting for high and low flows.

“I’ve probably sold more surfboards in the last year than I had in the last 15,” Walker said at his shop.

Translation: “Build it and they will come,” said Ben Nielsen.

So he’s seen at Sheridan’s River Run Park since 2017, since the start of the surf wave he envisioned there.

The vision went back to 2009, when the young surfer and engineer out of California found himself in the offices of McLaughlin Whitewater Design. This was the firm of Rick McLaughlin, who had overseen Confluence Park in the ’70s and would become known as a “whitewater godfather” along with Gary Lacy of REP.

McLaughlin had developed a technology called Wave-Shaper “primarily for kayaks,” Nielsen said. “With my passion for surfing, I was like, Hey, this Wave-Shaper is a really amazing technology for creating the types of surf waves that people want, which is big, tall, fast and shaped in a way that you can ride short boards and you can carve and do different maneuvers.”

This, Nielsen thought, could be proven as part of a restoration project in the works for a stretch of the South Platte River. Along with Sheridan and other local governments, River Run Park heavily involved the Army Corps of Engineers.

“Really, nothing like this had ever been done before in an Army Corps of Engineers project,” Nielsen recalled. “You can imagine they were like, ‘What? You want to put surfing in a river?’ It took years of convincing them that this was gonna work.”

The WaveShaper’s steel, hydraulic flaps would be installed to slightly carve the river bottom, manipulating flows in favor of surfers. The flaps would adjust according to a small control center operated by data-equipped volunteer “shapers,” who would turn knobs accounting for flows and safety.

Thomas volunteered to serve as “a crash test dummy” during construction, he said. He’s seen River Run Park become “a game changer” — driving Front Range populations to the sport he sees becoming less niche.

Thomas oversees a Facebook page, Colorado River Surfers, that has grown to more than 5,600 members. He started it, he said, “to build a community and keep people safe.”

It’s a cause shared by Tande, the Golden man who has become an advocate in his early years of surfing. He’s an advocate for the sport impacting people like him: “I play in a lot of different ways, from mountain biking to snowboarding, and surfing has been one of the funnest things I’ve ever learned to do,” he said.

And he’s an advocate for the sport impacting communities. Tande points to Pueblo, where he overnighted with his family this summer to extend their surfing at Waterworks Park.

“I’m down there any given day talking to people,” Walker said at his local shop. “It’s people saying they came down from Boulder or Fort Collins, and they say, ‘We never got off the highway in Pueblo before.’”

More will pull off, just as more whitewater park managers are calling about wave upgrades or additions, Harvey said. He said he’s recently been in touch with managers in Buena Vista, Eagle and Durango, towns with well- established outdoor recreation economies.

“But I really think these things can serve as anchors for new economic development, in places needing to discover a new path toward economic viability,” Harvey said.

And for individuals looking for a new path, just as an ocean surfer was years ago. Yes, Thomas is surfing more than ever in land-locked Colorado, this unlikely place that was just the place for a record pursuit once.

“I surfed a wave for six hours straight,” he said. “That was the most zen thing ever.”