Kinetic in Stasis

2009 Upper Cherry Creek Hike

2009-08-27T11:13:00.000-07:00

Shallow-water soloing en route to the mouth of the canyon in Five Ten shoes.

I nominate this beach for Best Alpine Beach in California. In my backpack, I have a massive towel, the best athletic sunblock, and a phenomenal book.

A brief stop at a nearly-dry Dead Bear Falls, with a refreshing pause to enjoy an electrolyte drink.

So clean it's brought to you by Dr. Bronner's!

Steep friction climbing at sunrise. No joke, you really do want Five Tens for this.

Shepherd, Harrison, and Kearsarge

2009-07-23T08:42:00.001-07:00

This is our first night's camp, and it's the only photograph I have of the first day. Here are some possible reasons why Shepherd Pass left me too haggard to fish my camera out of my backpack:
1) I am out of shape.
2) I spent too much time at sea level this spring.
3) Shepherd Pass has nearly 7,000 feet of elevation gain. For a point of reference, Mount Whitney, the tallest summit in the contiguous United States, has only about 6,100 feet of elevation gain from the trailhead.
4) My hiking companions were rangy East slopers who casually discuss 50-mile day hikes and try to do crazy things like break the speed record on the John Muir Trail.

Jen looks for a route down the north side of Harrison Pass. In a sun dress.

Our best option turns out to be the snowy chute in the foreground.

Just another whack day in California.

Stone cold marmoting on a Tuesday afternoon. Lazy marmots are the best marmots.

Overexposed metaphotography on the north shore of East Lake. After seeing K. Smith and Jen enjoy constant protection from the hammering High Sierra sun, I am considering adding the parasol to my ever-expanding list of goofy-looking but functional recreational gear. I am a little concerned that if I get overzealous with the zinc oxide the overall effect will be Hiking Geisha.

The view from Kearsarge Pass.

Tenaya Creek

2009-06-29T12:16:00.001-07:00

Below the notorious slide that Scott Lindgren first filmed for Aerated, Tenaya Creek cascades into a canyon that is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful infrequently-visited places in the Yosemite Valley.

There are good reasons for the limited traffic: the route-finding can be challenging, the "hiking" is all off-trail and frequently on sketchy unsettled talus, and there's some wading, semi-technical rope work, and down-climbing once you hit the heart of the canyon.

But if you're comfortable with all of that, the payoff for the effort is incredible.

I forgot to put a quarter next to the slide to give you a sense of scale. Instead, please see the tree in the upper lefthand corner of the picture, Scott Lindgren's classic kayaking movie Aerated, or Evan Garcia's blog.

Before the Burn, before the H3, before the Microbat, there was... the Butt!

Kevin Smith looks across the canyon at our destination.

Bushwhacking our way down into the canyon, we discover an old airplane engine with a piece of the prop still attached. If I had to describe the whole Tenaya canyoneering experience with an extended movie analogy, I'd say that it was a lot like the cool parts of The Goonies minus One-Eyed Willie's treasure, crossed with that one scene in Jurassic Park where Sam Neill and Laura Dern look out into a valley and there's a herd of Apatosaurus munching on leaves. Plus mosquitoes.

Kevin and Sarah pause to recreate a scene from Return to the Blue Lagoon at the base of the Pywiack Cascade. Kurzweilian futurist prediction: in a hundred years, kayakers will have bulkheads that dissipate impact energy as heat, and someone will run this cascade, sending a giant plume of steam rising out of the Tenaya Canyon. Assuming, of course, that there's any water left in California in a hundred years.

Just another whack day in California.

Kevin rappels through a waterfall. Not pictured: me getting slammed against the wall and mercilessly spun around.

K. Smith relaxes at the mouth of Yosemite Valley before we begin the semi-grueling off-trail hiking to the valley floor.

Piute Creek

2009-06-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

After last year's terse write-up of the Upper South San Joaquin, A Wet State author and professional rocket scientist Daniel Brasuell left this comment:

I hiked all the way up that drainage, and up Piute Creek to the pass some 15 miles up the trail when I was a kid... always wanted to get back there to boat it... looks like a fun run...

As it turned out, Culley Thomas had hiked Piute Creek, come to a similar conclusion, and rallied Sparkle Motion for a good old-fashioned trans-Sierra hike-in.

The promise of a few days in the High Sierra with some good dudebros was too enticing to pass up, and I came off the couch to sherpa food and warm clothing and shoot some pictures.

Nathan McDade, fresh off a trip to the infrequently-paddled Middle Cherry, prepares his carry system for a grueling hike over Piute Pass.

Nathan "the Hunk" Hunkapiller hits the snow line.

The most noble and majestic creature in the High Sierra. Fat marmots are the best marmots.

The second and third most noble and majestic creatures in the High Sierra: C.T. and Tumblesworthy share a tender moment and a steaming cup of oatmeal drank in the alpenglow.

Chris Tulley checks his watch during some early slides. The time? Awesome o'clock.

Macy Burnham boofs into the top slides of Giraffe!

Chris Tulley holds it together on Giraffe!'s rowdy double drop immediately downstream.

Ladies and Gentlemen...

...I give you...

Macy Burnham!

Tumblesworthy in the Baby Fantasy Falls zone. Finnegan's Playpen? Finnegan's Playground?

Piute Creek got more slides than Raging Waters. Best bring your oversized towels, flippy-floppies, and big sunglasses!

Sparkle Motion charter members Macy Burnham, Taylor Cavin, and Chris Tulley consider their options as Piute Creek goes Richter.

Review: Pyranha Karnali (Medium)

2009-03-18T20:23:00.000-07:00

[Editor's note: See my write-up of last year's trip down the Humla Karnali to see where this kayak got its name.]

Over the last few months, I've paddled Pyranha's Karnali down a handful of classic California runs: Ben & Jerry's Gorge on the West Branch of the Feather (steep, creeky), Chamberlain Falls on the North Fork of the American (mellow, social), and 49 to Bridgeport on the South Fork of the Yuba (classic, higher volume).

After some good lines, some marginal lines, and a lot of great days on the water, I've developed the following report:

Why You Might Want a Karnali

It's the most stable kayak I've ever paddled.
It's easy to roll.
It ferries well, holds a line, and is predictable.
Its long lines make it very fast relative to other boats in its class.
When you hit small waves and holes, you hardly feel them.

Why You Might Want a Different Boat (e.g. a Burn or an Ammo)

The Karnali doesn't have a lot of bow rocker relative to its length; if you're hitting big rock smears or pillows, you've got more hull to drive over the feature.
If you suffer from stubby legs syndrome and you're going to do some gruesome hikes with your kayak, you might opt for the Burn, with its smaller length:volume ratio.

What does this all add up to? A phenomenal river-runner. A great fleet boat. A stable platform for paddlers to advance their skills without worrying about whether they're going to catch an edge or flail around on an eddy line.

If you frequently find yourself saying things like, "I wish my boat were more stable, easier to roll, faster, less prone to getting messed around by small features, and more predictable", this might be the perfect boat for you.

In short, the Karnali lives up to its goals:

A truly forgiving, high volume river runner that has such a predictable ride it will keep you inspired to get back out on the water and progress from your very first days to long into your paddling life.

With a remarkably stable hull, soft, round edge profile and generous rocker, the Karnali puts your mind at ease and allows you to concentrate on the river ahead rather than what's happening underneath you.

For more detailed specs on the Karnali, check out the Pyranha website.

Many thanks to Darin McQuoid of Jefferson State Creeking and KayakPhoto for allowing me to use his photographs in this review.

Have any questions about the Karnali? Fire me some comments, and I'll respond to you directly.

Jordan had his tongue, I apparently have my Grumpy-Faced Boof. The Karnali gets airborne, even without a Two-Finger Smile.

Havin' a sweet Wednesday afternoon on the South Fork of the Yuba.

Joshua Tree

2009-03-09T10:59:00.001-07:00

Things to do in California When You're Not Kayaking #5: Go Live in the Desert and Climb

I spent a full day stumbling around The Wonderland of Rocks, looking for a semi-legendary climbing area called The Bighorn Mating Grotto, and doing no actual roped climbing.

Some tags that might be appropriate for this YouTube video include: ass-lost, stabby bushes, exposed climbing, gullies, cactus, gulches, parched, boulders, discomfort, fun.

Lisa Foy, working on finding her way out of the Wonderland of Rocks.

Random dudebro, who found his climb, ascends one of the Freak Brothers.

About six hours into The Bighorn Mating Grotto Day, I get stabbed by an aggressive Yucca. There is a warm rush down my leg and I am momentarily convinced that I have wet my pants. My thought process goes: "What? How did that plant make me piss myself?"

Whitewater helmets that do not have prominent brims and mouth guards can make effective climbing helmets. You might look like a biker in manpris, though.

Leon Davis leads a beautiful line on the right Banana Crack.

...it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock.
- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Panther Creek into The Devil's Nose

2009-01-22T09:34:00.000-08:00

Things to do in California When You're Not Kayaking #3: Freestyle Water-assisted Tobogganing

Timeline:

8:30 A.M. — Receive call from Culley. Discover that Jared has rallied him to run a creek near Jackson. Agree to meet them at Tiger Creek Reservoir at 11:30 A.M., since I know Jackson is about two and a half hours away. Establish that he and Jared will wait until 12:00 P.M.

Begin to question the advisability of not having a cellular phone, even if it's temporary.

8:30 A.M. to 8:55 A.M. — Quickly stuff my kayaking kit in the back of my truck. Grab leftover fragments of a roast chicken from my refrigerator for breakfast and lunch.

8:55 A.M. — Pull up Google Maps and determine that Tiger Creek Reservoir is about three hours and twenty minutes from my house.

9:00 A.M. — Peel out of my driveway.

9:30 A.M. — Hit traffic. Lament the fact that I've opted to stick it to Verizon by not renewing my cellular service.

9:35 A.M. — Sit in traffic. Begin constructing plausible, but negative, late-arrival scenarios in my head.

9:45 A.M. — Motivate myself to press through traffic and drive to Tiger Creek Reservoir with half-remembered soundbites from Churchill's speeches. "We shall not flag or fail..."

9:50 A.M. to 12:03 P.M. — Speed.

12:03 P.M. — Arrive at Tiger Creek Reservoir. Ask dam maintenance worker whether he has seen any kayakers. Get concerned when he reports that he hasn't seen anyone.

12:03 P.M. to 12:20 P.M. — Drive around the shores of Tiger Creek Reservoir.

12:20 P.M. — Start the long drive home.

12:21 P.M. — Meet Jared and Culley who are running a little late, but on their way down to the reservoir. Eat a fragment of roast chicken to celebrate.

1:30 P.M. to 5:00 P.M. — Surprisingly fun tobogganing.

Check out Jared's short video for some footage.

Culley Thomas works his way down to Panther Creek.

Jared Noceti on the bottom slide of a Skyscraper-esque rapid right at put-in.

Owens River Gorge

2009-01-19T08:56:00.000-08:00

Things to do in California When You're Not Kayaking #2: Stare Wistfully at Dry Rivers and Climb in their Gorges

Wistful staring. No, you would never kayak it.

Climbing in the Owens River Gorge: it's tuff. Geology puns are the best puns.

Taking the "creative" approach to the Upper Gorge, all swaddled up like a babe in a manger.

Leading Step Right Up, a sweet and gentle face-to-hand crack/arete. Now the knickerbockers make sense, right?

Help me out here, geologists. What is this?

Yosemite National Park

2008-12-31T21:34:00.000-08:00

Things to do in California When You're Not Kayaking #1: Ski and Snowshoe around Yosemite

Humla Karnali

2008-11-16T14:12:00.000-08:00

The Source
Mount Kailash, a 6,638-meter peak in southwestern Tibet that is sacred to Buddhists and considered to be the home of Lord Shiva in Hinduism. Four of Southeast Asia's biggest rivers begin life at foot of the mountain: the Karnali, the Indus, the Brahmaputra, and the Sutlej.

The Length
385 kilometers; one of the longest self-support whitewater kayaking trips in the world. 10 to 14 days of non-stop paddling, depending on how fired up you are about kayaking for fitness.

The Difficulty
Frequently class V, with miles and miles of read-and-run III and IV. Only about 200 kilometers of flats. Granted, that means that you're paddling flat water for almost 125 miles. But it also means that you're paddling the goods for more than 100 miles.

The Wait
I'm not going to dwell too much on the week that we spent in Nepalgunj and Surkhet, waiting for flights to the Humla Karnali and negotiating with less-than-totally-honest middlemen who were looking to capitalize on our obvious desperation to get to the river. I think I can sum it up with one choice anecdote:

Scottish Sean fell into a liquid sewage swamp up to his knees. Fortunately, Sean's disposition is good enough, and he had downed enough beer, that he was actually laughing while he was getting hosed down by a bunch of Nepalis. I might have written the leg off and started looking for a Gigli saw.

The lost week spent in Nepalgunj: laughing while being covered in mess.

The Team
Dan Noblett, England.
Fun fact: Has a longer wingspan than Michael Phelps.

Simon Tapley, England.
Fun fact: Masterminded the first whitewater expedition to Greenland.

Max Kniewasser, Germany-Quebec-Canadia.
Fun fact: Is secretly a cyborg: he completed a heinous portage on the second day about an hour before the rest of us, confidently charging down hideously steep 150' landslides with a 90 lb. loaded boat on his shoulder. The rest of us had to rope our boats down.

Jon Combs, Alaska.
Fun fact: Third-generation bush pilot. Unanimously voted "Most Likely to Survive if Abandoned in the Tundra" by the rest of the team.

Me, California.
Fun fact: Once ate thirteen doughnuts in one sitting.

The Locals
At one point, we came around a corner and there were hundreds of people on shore, standing in front of threadbare lean-to shelters and staring wordlessly at us. They were emaciated, with high, windburned cheeks and arms like thin sticks. They wore tattered rags in spite of the winter chill, and their hair was tangled and matted. They didn't wave, they didn't yell namaste, and they didn't throw rocks. They just stared, and we just floated by; taking a picture would have felt so wildly inappropriate that it didn't even cross my mind.

It was unsettling, since they were so obviously different from anyone I had seen in Nepal, and I had no idea why. My first thought was that they must be refugees. My second thought was that the upper reaches of a remote watershed would be a very unlikely location for a refugee camp.

I later found out from Mikey Abbot that they were probably Raute, a nomadic ethnic group who have lived in Nepal for centuries, if not millennia. There are fewer than 700 of them left, and they live almost exclusively in the Karnali and Mahakali valleys. They don't do labor for anyone, and they don't have any permanent settlements. To survive, they gather wild potatoes and fruits, supplementing their diet with langur and macaques, whenever they can catch them.

There were times when the Humla Karnali did not feel quite as wild as you might expect; we could buy bottles of Indian Coke at the put-in, we frequently saw small huts even in the most remote areas, and packaged biscuits were occasionally available in hillside settlements on the second half of the run.

But there's still a group of nomadic people living in the Karnali valley, and they still hunt, butcher, and eat wild monkeys just to survive. So there's that.

Special thanks to Max Kniewasser for the awesome photography; this write-up would be mostly "lifestyle" shots if it weren't for his dedication to getting amazing pictures of the rapids.

Photo:Max Kniewasser.

Dan Noblett, Jon Combs, and Max Kniewasser, stoked to be in Simikot.

Porters carrying our boats down to the river. One of the sketchiest moments of the trip came when a porter started tumbling down the hillside with Jon's boat strapped to his back. Fortunately, he self-arrested before falling off a cliff.

Simon Tapley executes a beautiful draw behind a ledge to cut above a sequence of sieves. Alongside Taylor's almost absurdly perfect boof on the Middle Kings waterfall portage, my favorite single move of the year.
Photo: Max Kniewasser.

Shrine at the confluence of the Lochi and Humla Karnali, the most beautiful campsite of the trip.

I can pretty safely say that we're cooking rice and canned chili tuna for dinner. Why am I so sure? We had rice and canned chili tuna for ten straight nights.
Left to right: Dan Noblett, Simon Tapley, David Maurier, and Jonathan Combs.
Photo: Max Kniewasser.

Dan Noblett and Jon Combs rise and shine from an abandoned goatherd's hut at the confluence with the Mugu Karnali.

Once we were past the confluences with the Lochi and the Mugu, we were as baby ducklings, loosed in a sea of thundering waves and crashing holes.

Si Tapley makes a hairy ferry, skirts a few holes, and greases some high-volume nucky-gnar.
Photo: Max Kniewasser.

Danny's face and Simon's boat sum up the pushy-but-fun rapids on the last few days of the Humla.
Photo: Max Kniewasser.

The team at the take-out in Chisapani. Left to right: Max Kniewasser, David Maurier, Danny Noblett, Jon Combs, and Simon Tapley.
Photo: a Nepali guy using Max's camera.

Gnomebaby.

Thule Bheri

2008-11-06T14:12:00.000-08:00

The Thule Bheri drains Dhaulagiri, the seventh-tallest mountain in the world. Its waters are strikingly pristine, carving through a series of gorges in an arid high-alpine environment as they fall toward the jungle, join the Karnali, and drive down to the low-lying plains separating Nepal from India.

The backdrop of snowcapped Himalayan peaks, the flawless turquoise water, and the ineffably familiar dry pine country combine to create an otherworldly atmosphere that is somehow comfortable, but profoundly uncanny. And the mystical feeling that emanates from the flora and geography is consonant with the spirit and the history of the region; the few inhabitants are still largely subsistence farmers or herders, many still practicing Bön, the animistic Tibetan religion that preceded Buddhism in the Himalaya. Until a few decades ago, the region was completely closed to westerners, except for the occasional scholar.

Earlier this year, Sparkle Motion co-chair and lifestyle role model Culley Thomas was working on rallying a trip. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of a degree in Resource Economics, and couldn't commit to the two-week effort. Culley, normally a positive influence, fired me a write-up of the run which contained a choice quote from Doug Ammons, who was on the first descent alongside Scott Lindgren, Gerry Moffat, Charlie Munsey, and Danielle Christ: "day after day we just went and went and went, from put in to take out, with solid fun, interesting rapids, and immense amounts of good class IV to IV+."

Culley's and Ammons' endorsements were enough to motivate me, but in the end, I was committed to finishing my degree, and I shelved the trip in my mind for a later date.

A short seven months later, I was on board a Polish-made twin-prop transport plane, on my way to the river.

The quote from Ammons turned out to be spot on; day after day just went and went and went. We'd reach a horizon line and linger at the lip, and the rapid would be just on the sunny side of being boat-scoutable. We'd drop in, and after a few meters, the crux would be totally visible, and we'd charge for the line. Every once in a while, the river would keep us on our toes with a legitimate technical class V.

As world-class as the whitewater was, it was the place that made the trip: setting up camp in the pines, watching the sun set over the immense golden walls of the canyon. Drinking pots of sweet milky chiya while we prepared the evening's slop over the campfire and picked cheatgrass out of our socks. Sitting around the fire and bullshitting until it was time to curl up in our sleeping bags. Lying under a tarp and staring at the perfect clarity of the stars as the nighttime chill of the Himalayan winter settled in the valley. And the whole time, the feeling that we were in a magical place that was very different from anything I knew, and yet somehow completely familiar.

Check out Doug Ammons write-up for a compelling account of the first descent.

If you negotiate with a military transport plane, you may find yourself asking whether you just displaced bags of rice.

Max Kniewasser carries his boat and seven days worth of gear down the deceptively long path to the river from Juphal.

The Golden Canyon at sunset.
Photo: Max Kniewasser.

Jon Combs on a blind corner with an awesome boof-to-melt at the end.
Photo: Max Kniewasser.

Max Kniewasser lines up a classic rapid.

Me, a little further downstream on the same stack-up.
Photo: Max Kniewasser.

If you're kayaking in some of the most remote populated regions in the world, you're going to get accustomed to hundreds of people standing two feet away from you and staring wordlessly. Even if you're at sites that are inaccessible without a kayak, the crowd forms across the river, regardless.

Jon "Alaska" Combs, on some characteristic Thule Bheri gold.

It isn't crazy big and it's never going to make a magazine cover, but it can go for days. You know what I'm talking about.
Photo: Max Kniewasser.

Ngadi & Marsyangdi

2008-10-31T14:12:00.000-07:00

Gastric Scenes from the Ngadi and Marsyangdi Mission

Scene 1

The morning we are planning to leave, Jon develops a slight fever and a mild case of nausea. I don't mess around with any secondary symptoms and cut straight to chumming into a wastebucket, which I relocate next to my mattress for a boot session. An hour into the gastric genuflection, I begin to grow concerned that my condition may affect my enthusiasm for the day's mission.

Scene 2

Team Cultural Ambassador Nick "bin" Abrams goes to haggle with the guesthouse owner; the bathroom in our shared five-man dorm hasn't worked for days, and it seems fair that we shouldn't have to pay for the privilege of having a non-functional bathroom, even if it is technically en suite. The hotel owner strongly disagrees and threatens to kill Nick with a knife, dispelling any illusions we might have about a pervasive Buddhist ethic in Nepal and effectively advancing our check-out time by about an hour and a half.

Scene 3

We relocate to the courtyard of a nearby guesthouse where we had previously stayed and the owner hadn't threatened to kill us. Standing in the garden, I scratch "throw up into a bucket" off my day planner, and pencil in "throw up into some bushes." While the rest of Team Gastric begins loading boats onto a jeep, I vacillate about whether I should make the journey. I know that if I don't leave with them, I'll miss out on three or four days of classic whitewater. I also know that if I do leave with them, it will mean more than five hours of riding in a jeep with a suspension like a Huffy bicycle over marginal roads that a mountain goat would find difficult to traverse.

Scene 4

I pour half a bottle of water on the small puddle of chunder I have left in the garden. I then load my kit into the jeep and hop into the front seat. I close my eyes and visualize my Happy Place. Sunny pine forests. Clear lakes with surfaces so still they're reflective. Bubbling creeks. Bears. California. I throw up again.

Scene 5

When I come to, we are casually cruising past an Annapurna Conservation Area checkpoint towards the Ngadi Khola. The nausea seems to be waning and we've passed our first major potential obstacle; I'm stoked for a few minutes. And then I notice that the road ahead looks completely washed out, which a small scouting party confirms. We'll either have to go back past the checkpoint that we just blatantly disregarded, or start hiking toward Ngadi. Jon's morning fever has progressed to the point where he is sprawled across the backseat like a patient in an infirmary. I throw up again, but only in my mouth, and only a little bit.

Scene 6

It is getting dark, and it is starting to rain. We decide that going back past the checkpoint might jeopardize the whole effort, and none of us are keen to spend the night in the last town we passed, Bhul Bule, which looked only marginally more inviting than a pit filled with rats. We're not really sure how far away Ngadi is, but we shoulder our boats and start walking down the trail as the sun disappears over the horizon. I throw up some more. At one point Jon asks me to see if he has a fever, and I take a break from retching to place the back of my hand on his forehead. It feels like a small blast furnace. I throw up some more. The walk only turns out to be a few miles, but it feels like an eternity.

Coda

Eventually, we make it to Ngadi. The healthy members of Team Gastric down a quick round of dal bhat, and Jon puts down some soup. I pass. I don't feel like eating, but I don't feel like yakking, either, and I'm trying to keep it that way. Jon retires upstairs to bed, and the rest of us stay below in the covered "patio" to play a few quick card games before bed. Suddenly, we hear a multi-stage banging noise on the corrugated tin roof overhead. It sounds like a small animal has fallen onto the roof and is tumbling its way down. Except it's taking way too long for it to be a falling animal; the roof isn't very long, and the banging just keeps going and going. And then we notice the yut cascading off the end of the slanted tin roof: an Iguazu formed by partially digested rice and soup. Jon's gastric has arrived.

Check out the The Last Descent project for less spew and more of an in-depth look at the Marsyangdi and the hydroelectric project which will devastate the lower reaches of the river.

Alex "Alan" Kilyk makes boof on the Ngadi Khola.

Tom Mclay is strictly business. Except on Fridays, and then he's strictly business casual.

An Open And Extremely Brief Letter To Werner Paddles:

Dear Werner Paddles,

I can't offer you exciting shots of me "hucking" enormous waterfalls, since I rarely run them. I can, however, offer you this: phenomenal product placement shots, featuring your paddles (visible in the background), and a small child that has either fallen in, or deliberately played in, what looks like mud, animal waste, or some combination of the two. I'm not sure how Babies Covered in Mess play into your marketing plans for 2009, but let's just say my people are waiting to hear from your people; I think there's a kayaker-as-next-Anne Geddes angle here that we can work with.

Sincerely,

David Maurier

Elizabeth "Eli" Embick acclimatizes to the push of the Marsyangdi after paddling in on the Ngadi above Bhul Bule.

Welsh Tom shows the local kids how you make an already dangerous Dasain festival swing even more dangerous.

Upper Modi Khola

2008-10-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

Alongside the Marsyangdi, the Upper Modi Khola is one of the most classic day runs in Nepal.

In two short days, it offers the complete Nepal experience: trekking in zip-off pants towards an intimidating but ineluctably magnetic mountain, feeling intrepid and then slightly ashamed when you spot a person half your size and three times your age carrying twice your weight, drinking inconsistent chiya in teahouses that might more accurately be called dal bhat houses, cajoling recalcitrant porters through smoke breaks, and kayaking amazing whitewater while locals of all ages scream "bye bye!" and make inscrutable, but unmistakably interrogative, hand gestures in your direction.

This is Shangri-La.

I hate to admit it, but after a High Sierra summer, it felt good to watch someone else carry my boat.

Tramadol: a great way to make international friends. Nick Abrams earns a new pen pal.

Hokkaido Andy takes a break from snowboarding and sushi for some whitewater.
Photo: Jon Combs.

Matt Bew, a barely visible red helmet, and a far-off view of the Annapurna Sanctuary.
Photo: Jon Combs.

Dropping into the top part of the Landslide Rapid.
Photo: Jon Combs.

Rapids made by landslides are usually dirtier than my thermals, but the top part of this one boated marginally better than it looked.
Photo: Jon Combs.

Tamur

2008-10-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

Over the course of its last few miles, the Sun Kosi picks up three major tributaries as it becomes the Sapta Kosi and spills out onto the low-lying plains separating Nepal from India.

As I was cruising the flats at the end of the Sun and passing the confluences with the Dudh Kosi, Arun, and Tamur, I couldn't help but look at each tributary and daydream about the whitewater that lay upstream in the valleys draining Everest and Kangchenjunga, the tallest and third-tallest peaks in the world.

As two of the most logistically daunting rivers in Nepal, the Dudh and the Arun made unappetizing prospects, and it was too early in the season for either of them, but the quality of the whitewater on the Tamur and its proximity to the take-out for the Sun Kosi made it a perfect adjunct to the eight days we had already spent on the Balephi, Bhote, and Sun.

So we took off the Sun on river left and headed into the town of Chatra, which the guidebook sells as "the toe-jam of Nepal" and another write-up describes as feeling like a one-horse town where someone has just shot the horse.

If these seem like harsh characterizations, Chatra's dubious reputation among river runners is probably deserved, and may owe to its network of price-fixing jeep drivers. As we arrived in town, we began haggling over the cost to get the put-in for the Tamur. Initially, we were getting reasonable estimates. But as we spent more time in the village, people began to renege on their original quotes, and the prices increased until all the drivers' prices converged on an exorbitant and suspiciously consistent fare.

It felt a little bit like being a protagonist in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style movie; I'd go to talk to someone who had previously been friendly and helpful, and their eyes would be a little glazed over, and they'd be a little distant and evasive, and then they'd be insistent on the same comically high price as their friend across the street.

In the end, we took a jeep to the nearest town, rather than the put-in for the Tamur. Outside of Chatra, the competition was a little more stiff and the price-fixing a little less organized, and we found a second jeep to take us to the put-in for the one-day Tamur for a reasonable price.

After wasting time on the intense haggling session, we arrived well after dark, and were forced to camp at a small riverside shrine before our blitz of the high-volume class IV the next day. I don't think I've ever done another run where I spent more time haggling to get to put-in than I did paddling the river, but the whitewater was quality and in the end, it was worthwhile; we had paddled a river running off the faces of the steepest mountains in the world.

And there was more to the Tamur than profoundly frustrating haggling and good whitewater: sleeping under a small riverside shrine at the put-in while a mostly toothless and mostly drunk old man mumbled and made spastic hand gestures at us, the massive bat cave near the end, and the bus ride back to Kathmandu that was so rough that it literally left one of our team members pissing blood for a few days.

Sacrilege by necessity: eating our rice-based breakfast slop in our pagodashelter at the put-in for the Tamur.

Photo: Jon "Alaska" Combs.

Sun Kosi

2008-10-15T04:55:00.000-07:00

Our take-out for the Balephi Khola was a small stone shrine built onto a peninsula at the end of the run. The shrine's floors were smudged with ash and littered with banana leaves filled with crimson-stained rice, and we used the sanctuary to take stock of our situation.

We were just upstream of the confluence of the Balephi and the Bhote Kosi, looking at the put-in for the Upper Sun Kosi. 188 miles of high-volume class I - IV white and not-so-white water waited downstream, tempting us with a compelling alternative to another coccyx-bruising bus ride back to the 'Du. We had our overnight gear, and aside from a lack of credible food, we were all theoretically prepared for another seven days of paddling. After we weighed the pros and cons of returning to Kathmandu before putting on the Sun Kosi, we realized that the advantages (being able to buy high-quality chocolate and medium-quality oatmeal in tourist-oriented markets) were overshadowed by the disadvantages (possible renal failure from jarring bus rides) in our collective imagination.

That settled, we dispatched a provisioning team into the nearby town of Balephi, initiating a time-consuming, but entertaining, sequence of haggling over staples while wearing ridiculous, but practical, outdoor sportswear that would become increasingly familiar over the course of the next week. When the provisioning team returned half an hour later, they were armed with enough noodles, rice, biscuits, and chocolate to sustain a six-man team for a few days, and we set off down the Sun Kosi.

With no deadlines, no responsibilities, and only big splashy wave-trains to concern ourselves with, our days were low-key. On a typical morning, we'd all wake up around dawn, fire up a few big pots of milky tea, and eat rice pudding until the sun broke over the hillside to dry the dew from our tarps. Fortified by sunshine and sugar, we'd paddle at a leisurely pace for a few hours before stopping in a rural riverside village for another round of dal bhat, intercultural exchange, and biscuit-provisioning before the afternoon's paddle to camp.

The highlight came around the third day, when we decided that noodles and rice left something to be desired, protein-wise, and docked in a small village to barter for some meat. As we walked into town, whenever we saw an edible animal, we asked the locals for a price check. In the end, we haggled with a mostly toothless old woman and settled on a mutually agreeable price for 3 beers and a rooster.

Unfortunately, it was too early in the day to camp, and we didn't want to kill the animal and have the meat spoil, so Matt "The Israeli" Bew stuffed the rooster in a small black plastic sack, head-out, and then put the bag in his lap, creating kayaking's first live-cock wet-exit-impeder, and prompting a lot of speculation about ball-pecking and jokes about The Israeli finally having one between his legs. The plucking and butchering later that night were strictly amateur, but it made a fun project for the evening, and Albert the Rooster was delicious, despite his seasoning in the front of Matt's Jefe for a few hours.

Brief Postscript on Nepali Biscuits

Nepali biscuits are biscuits in the English sense, which means they're basically crisp cookies. Like everything else in Nepal, you always pay for what you get, but you don't always get what you pay for; you can count on five rupee biscuits having the flavor profile and texture of pre-masticated construction paper, regardless of the marketing copy on their packaging, while the ten rupee packs more reliably taste like sweetened wheat flour tinged with their advertised contents (Butter Cookie! Coconut Crisp! Pineapple Cream!).

Matt "The Israeli" Bew, Jon "Alaska" Combs, and Nick "Bin" Abrams: world-class chicken pluckers.

Elizabeth Embick dodges the toilet bowl at Hakapur.

Sunset on the Sun Kosi.

Bhote Kosi & Balephi Khola

2008-10-09T20:09:00.000-07:00

I've had some bad ideas in my day. There was a two day stretch early in high school when I wore ski pants even though there was no snow in sight. I once prepared pork chops and added them to my morning breakfast of oatmeal to create a culinary abomination I called "meatmeal." During a late-December pitch-black hike-out of a flash-flooded Middle Yuba, I suggested to my walk-out partners: "Let's just dig a hole."

In my defense, these ideas always seem sensible at the time. The snow pants were warm and comfortable. Oatmeal is low in protein. And the hike-out really was dark, and we were going in circles, and people were getting near hypothermic, so the idea of digging a hole and piling together for warmth wasn't totally far-fetched.

A few weeks ago, I added another bad idea to the life-long list.

Nepal was in the midst of Dasain, a fifteen-day festival celebrating the victory of the goddess Durga over a demon disguised as a water buffalo. For the Nepalis, Dasain is like Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one giant holiday; towering bamboo swings are erected in public parks, families receive a crimson smear of tikka (rice, yogurt, and vermillion) on their forehead as a blessing, and everyone feasts on home-slaughtered meat.

I spent one morning of the festival watching a goat get sacrificed. The head of the household tied a visibly perturbed goat to a stake, took a short sickle-shaped knife out, gave some curt benedictory hand gestures, and whacked the goat's head off in one clean stroke. Surprisingly, the moment wasn't visibly charged with any particular significance, and the family attended to it with the same sort of low-key semi-secular bonhomie that you might decorate a Christmas tree with.

I'd never watched a large animal get decapitated before, and the gouts of bright red arterial blood and jets of green bile were more gory, but somehow less off-putting, than I was anticipating. The twitching and spurting corpse looked like a victim in a horror movie, but the family dealt with it with no fuss, boiling water and shaving and butchering the goat with the practiced efficiency of workers on an assembly line. Every splash of scalding water onto the goat's hide caused its nerves to fire, and the headless body kicked and writhed as they pulled the hair from it in matted clumps.

Grisliness aside, I probably should have spent the rest of the festival taking in sacrifices, swinging, and getting blessed.

Unfortunately, Team America's arrival coincided perfectly with the heart of the festival, and I was determined to go paddle. For some reason, I thought that the locals' warnings of costly journeys and crowded transit were probably overblown, and I hatched a scheme to paddle some rivers east of Kathmandu.

Suffice it to say that the locals' warnings were legitimate, and traveling on the most important day of Dasain turned out to be a ski pants to school-, porkchops in oatmeal-, let's dig a hole- style bad idea. The price of the ride was inflated, our boats were crushed under the weight of dozens of Nepalis desperate to get home for the holiday, and the sea of bodies added a frantic and claustrophobic air to the proceedings as we rode on the roof of the bus toward our destination.

Once we were there, though, the Bhote Kosi and Balephi Khola were phenomenal.

The Bhote was clean continuous IV-IV+ with a few standout rapids and no major teeth.

The Balephi was its III-III+ counterpart.

Overall, the quality of the whitewater more than made up for the quality of the journey and redeemed the mission, but my advice would be to stall until the day after Dasain's tikka.

Stay tuned for the next update, in which our heroes do some animal decapitation of their own, spontaneously decide to turn a 2-day overnight trip into a 9-day overnight trip, and eat way more cut-rate Nepali biscuits than is probably healthy.

[This space reserved for beautiful pictures of continuous class IV and classy lifestyle shots of a goat getting its head cut off. Also: riding on the roof of a bus.]

I probably looked at this picture thirty times before I noticed the little kid C-walking in the foreground.

The Bhote Kosi in a nutshell; Elizabeth Embick and Mo Kennedy do it to it.

Sean Ziehm-Stephen leads a spicy one. Photo: Jon "Alaska" Combs.

Matt "The Israeli" Bew (background) surreptitiously sketches Sean Z.-S. (foreground) as he wakes up. Meanwhile, I (not pictured) photograph the whole scene.

Two (Hundred Thousand) Steps Closer to the Abdominal Snowman

2008-10-04T19:53:00.000-07:00

Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion...I go to them as humans go to worship. From their lofty summits I view my past, dream of the future and, with an unusual acuity, am allowed to experience the present moment...my vision cleared, my strength renewed. In the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn.

- Anatoli Boukreev (January 16, 1958 - December 25, 1997)

Like all good addictions, whitewater kayaking is a fickle mistress.

One week, everything is going well. You're high on life, receiving praise and curious questions from family and friends, and excited about every sunrise, since it means another day of running adrenalizing rapids.

The next week, you're living in a forest, eating unheated refried beans straight out of a can.

And so then you find yourself doing something like soloing the totally flat Engelbright run on the Yuba with a bike shuttle in the middle of the winter, just to see a new stretch of river. And you know you've hit rock bottom; you're like a junkie who has tapped out all his good veins and is now resorting to shooting up under his tongue or between his toes.

Fortunately, there's a simple way to bring back the buzz and fall in love all over again: go cold turkey for a little while.

After the last mission, which involved more than ten hours of flat water, twenty-three sleepless hours of bus transit, and about three hours of good kayaking, I realized it was time for a break.

And so I was sitting down to my fiftieth plate of dal bhat with the Welsh Toms and another guy from the U.K. and trying to figure out what to do until the dudebros from Team America arrived, and one of the Toms suggested that I go trekking. The immediate consensus was that none of us were actually into hiking unless there was a sweet river at the end of it. There were references to the futility of fighting gravity, and the word "hate" might actually have been used.

But I remembered that Mike Fentress (notable for: exploratory descents of rivers around the world, killing it at First Threat, still paddling class V California creeks that he did the first descents of thirty years ago [and paddling them better and faster than cowboys half his age]), had specifically mentioned that the Annapurna Sanctuary was one of the most beautiful places he had ever seen.

So I cut the liner out of my running shorts to prevent long-term chafing, loaded my backpack with my camera and iPod, and set out for nine days of walking around the Nepalese countryside by myself.

And at first, it was exactly what I thought it would be.

There was that familiar feeling of total freedom that I get when I'm traveling in rural areas of foreign countries on my own, that significant sense of total insignificance that comes from being alone in a wild place and knowing that no one knows where I am.

And the kinesthetic aesthetic was also initially familiar from my experience with cross-continental bicycling; it was less about mental absorption in the task at the time and more about that perfect physical fatigue that suffused every joint afterward and made me content to attend to basic needs like getting clean and sleeping and made even the simple act of eating feel somehow regenerative. Instead of feeling broken I just felt satisfied and well-used, like my body had been put to its intended purpose, like I was a hammer that had just pounded a thousand nails, or a match that had just torched off a massive bonfire.

Then I got two bamboo walking sticks, and the aesthetic changed entirely. I could start pole-vaulting small steps, jumping down gaps using the sticks for support, and running on the trail, using the bamboo poles to propel myself forward and keep myself from breaking my ankles on the frequently-dodgy path.

I could go on forever about how fun and mentally engaging trail-running with poles actually turned out to be, but suffice it to say that it completely contradicted my preconceived ideas about trekking poles, the people who use them (zip-off pants, wide-brimmed safari hats, overabundance of khaki and zinc oxide), and the advisability and appeal of trail-running. On the trail, I had the wide-eyed zeal of the recently converted, and I'm pretty sure I skeeved some people out by how earnest and repetitive I was in exhorting them to try running with poles.

In terms of the beauty and the majesty of the Annapurna Sanctuary, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think I took about a thousand pictures. I don't think I'm capable of writing a million words, so I'll save my breathless descriptions of the Annapurna Base Camp and being surrounded by some of the world's tallest mountains for a later date, and let the pictures do the talking when I get home.

P.S.
If you cut the liner out of your running shorts and wear a slightly too-long t-shirt during the day, it's no big deal.

However, if you cut the liner out of your running shorts and remove your slightly too-long t-shirt because you're running through a humid-ass jungle and you're getting almost unbelievably sweaty and clammy and you're male then there will almost certainly be some grandfather-clocking and you'll pass by large groups of Nepalese women who will titter and the first three or four times you'll probably wonder why and maybe chalk it up to your bare chest, and then finally someone will kind of point and you'll figure the whole thing out and feel slightly embarrassed, but decide it's probably really no worse than wearing a banana hammock to the beach.

Demuredonkey.

Blah blah blah the Middle Kings blah blah blah I am a superhero for carrying my kayak for twelve miles blah blah blah.

Even on a trip that was ostensibly about "trekking", most of my pictures turned out to be of water. The Upper Kali Gandaki above Tatopani, a random waterfall, and the Upper Modi Khola above New Bridge.

Daybreak in the Annapurna Sanctuary.

Modi Khola, Kali Gandaki, Badi Gad Grab Bag

2008-09-20T18:37:00.000-07:00

We recently paddled the Lower Modi Khola into the Kali Gandaki, ran the Kali Gandaki down to its confluence with the Badi Gad, took a bus up the Badi Gad, and then paddled the Badi Gad back into the Kali Gandaki, and all the way down to Ramdi. Here are some notes on the whole thing.

Fun Fact
The Kali Gandaki river is named after the Hindu goddess Kali, whose name literally means "black", but has come to be synonymous with the force of time and change.

Things That Are In The Watershed Drybag That I Use As A Man-Purse, Also Known As A Murse, And The Reason They are There

1 stick Banana Boat brand lip balm with sunscreen
(lots of sun exposure riding on top of buses for six hours a day)

1 microfiber travel towel
(blanket, padding for camera, jaunty and decorative sash; note: has never actually been used to dry anything)

1 Pentax Lumix DMCTZ5 digital camera
(documentation of rapids, people, scenery, and the strictly amateur professional kayaker lifestyle)

1 copy 'White Water Nepal' by Peter Knowles
(fun to daydream about the Thule Bheri, Arun, and Humla Karnali while i bounce along profoundly marginal roads on top of bus roof racks and acquire my fiftieth case of what is probably best described as 'waffle ass')

1350 Nepali Rupees
(bus fare, dal bhat, police bribes)

1 Oral B toothbrush with rubber gum stimulators
(if i can't be clean, at least my teeth can be)

1/2 roll double-ply toilet paper
(i have yet to find a single rural squat toilet with any kind of soap next to the 'left-hand' faucet, and i'm not about to wander around with a less-than-clean hand since i'm not used to it, and would probably end up using it to eat, absently wipe sleep stuff from my eyes, pick my nose, etc.)

1 Mountain Hardware Phantom 32 degree bag
(warmth, head rest)

1 copy of Carl Hiaasen's 'Double Whammy', a novel about bass-fishing and murder
(crucial when you're doing a lot of 2-man overnighters with no fires, unless you're keen on staring at your paddling partner for hours on end)

1 Petzl headlamp
(peering into the inky jungle looking for leopard, peering into the inky jungle looking for snake, peering into the inky jungle looking for hippopotamus)

Things I Am Planning To Add To The Above List:

Ciprofloxacin
(stomach no-no's and 23-hour bus rides don't mix)

Tinidazole
(see above)

Valium
(23-hour bus rides suck)

Brief Notes On The Kali Gandaki

Ka-li-ma! Ka-li-ma! The cultural (eating monkey brains?), religious (tearing someone's heart out?), and racial (Doctah Jones! Doctah Jones?) insensitivity of Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom aside, the overall vibe of the Kali Gandaki river is best captured by comparisons to the movie.

There are monkeys. There are rotting wooden swingbridges missing every second plank. There is jungle. There are vines. There are massive cliffs. There are the ruins of an abandoned palace with intricate stonework terraces on a bluff overlooking the river; it is easy to imagine an ancient artifact locked up away inside it. At night, there are fireflies. There are also monsoon rains, with winds strong enough to tear tarp stakes out of the ground and leave a corner of the shelter flapping in the breeze.

There are bodies burning by the river on small funeral pyres, surrounded by groups of mourners. There are shaven-headed men in white robes with small tuft-like topknots, looking ascetic and reading small scrolls and placing offerings in banana leaves. There are small crews of men wearing large boxy home-made wooden packs and carrying woven nets and long poles and who look like a low-budget version of the Ghostbusters but are actually using car batteries to fish.

There is silt. So much silt that the water has the visible Brownian motion and opaque surface of unmixed paint, and where other rivers flow into the Kali, undulating tendrils of its thick brown water flow for hundreds of feet up into the tributaries like the tentacles of a diseased kraken.

One-Line Summaries of the Three Rivers

Kali Gandaki: Mostly flat, a few big-water rapids, beautiful.

Modi Khola: Steep, semi-technical, read-and-run IV-V.

Badi Gad: During the monsoon, goes richter near the confluence with the Kali.

How Not To Get Back to Pokhara From The Kali Gandaki

1. Scramble to board still-moving bus, based on vague gestures of elderly woman running a tea house. Straddle kayaks as you strap them down and the bus careens around corners, tossing you around the roof. Do not independently confirm that the bus is headed in the right direction to begin with.

2. Comment that you appear to be heading south and that the distance markers to Pokhara are actually increasing, but don't do anything about it.

3. Trust the driver's reassurances that you are headed towards Pokhara, but will have to change buses.

4. Arrive in Bhutwal four hours later and discover you're near the Indian border. Realize you've been a stooge at best and duped at worst.

5. Wait two and a half hours for night bus to Pokhara.

6. Ride night bus for six hours, taking care not to look out the window at the yawning black chasm about eighteen inches to the left of the bus wheels.

7. Stretch out across back seat when the night bus stops since there might be a road-block ahead. Writhe uncomfortably.

8. Get hopeful when the bus begins moving again, five hours later. Stop a mile short of the now-clearly-not-dismantled road block, and abandon all hope.

9. Jeep to actual road block. Discover said road block is approximately 1 foot high and made of pebbles, but people are still unwilling to drive around it.

10. Carry loaded kayaks for two miles past road block, past vigil for slain motorcyclist which is taking place on the road and apparently the cause of the road block, and past the forty riot police who apparently attempted to break up the road block but were beaten back by the mob.

11. Jeep to mystery town to pick up bus to Pokhara.

12. Bus to Pokhara.

13. Taxi to lakeside.

14. Reflect.

Total transit time: 23 hours.
Total sleep time: 2 hours.

On the roof of the bus, en route to the Modi Khola.

Our first campsite in Nepal: the Upper Kali Gandaki.

...and our first campsite visitors in Nepal. For those of you who haven't spent time in Southeast Asia, the hand gestures are the traditional greeting namaste, which has been variously translated as:
1) "I honor the place in you in which the entire Universe dwells, I honor the place in you which is of Love, of Integrity, of Wisdom and of Peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One."
2) "I honor the Spirit in you which is also in me."
3) "Those biscuits look delicious, can I have them?"

Upper Seti

2008-09-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

Every day, The Kathmandu Post features a one-panel political cartoon called 'O Tempora! O Mores!!' The surprisingly apposite title belies the ham-handed content that makes light of Nepal's social problems with all the nuance and subtlety of a man torching off a hornet's nest with a homemade flamethrower.

In today's panel, a man in an official-looking police uniform is seated at a desk, facing two policemen. In front of the captain is a newspaper, which reads: "Police Beat Man to Death." The comic-newspaper's typesetters are apparently amateurs; the overlay text runs off both the top and bottom of the rough square that represents the newspaper.

The punchline underlays the panel: "From now on, when you're carrying out checks, keep your questions verbal, understood?" Ha-ha! The Far Side, this is not.

And so the Seti tumbles off the south face of the Annapurna, its waters the grayslateblue of glacial streams everywhere. Before it reaches Pokhara, it cuts through valleys that are lush and wet and loamy and terraced with almost overwhelmingly bright green rice fields, and the jagged peaks of Annapurna tower behind the jungle, their snow-capped peaks a massive climatic and chromatic contrast to the vivid valleys that they dwarf. The overall effect is like being in a giant terrarium, like something tried to cram as many natural features and as much beauty into as small a piece of the world as possible. And in most places, a river's gradual erosion of its bed is basically an abstraction, taking place on a geologic time scale that is easily imagined, but not fully appreciated. But the valley here is so soft and so obviously eroded in places that it looks like a giant has been at it with a massive knife, cutting rectilinear slabs off the terraced hillsides like so many slices of earthen bread.

Kayak Nerd Trivia:

Length: 8 miles starting at Tatopani, or 4 starting at The Bamboo Bridge near Hyangja

Gradient: Maybe 70 f.p.m. in the upper 4 miles? 50 f.p.m. in the lower 4.

Flow: ~ 4,000 to 5,000 c.f.s. this early in the season

Grade: IV

Shuttle: 1 + 1/2 hrs. to Tatopani from Pokhara, or 30 minutes to The Bamboo Bridge. 20 minutes return.

Character: Continuous read-and-run class IV for eight miles. Supposedly becomes a mellow class III play run, post-monsoon. Logistically, one of the easiest and most convenient day runs in Nepal.

The truth is, I don't have any pictures of the rapids. The run was too continuous and too straightforward to have any standout shots of whitewater. Instead, please to enjoy this photograph of Matt "The Israeli" Bew and some goats.

During the monsoon, it's almost always grimly humid and overcast. Sometimes, however, the clouds break, and it gets absurdly beautiful.

In Search of Samsquanch

2008-09-08T02:59:00.000-07:00

Saturday's Leo Horoscope in the Kathmandu Post:

Push yourself on the edge of things today - great energy perfect for trying new things and surprising people (in a good way!) Someone is definitely ready for you to say something.

Saturday's Kathmandu Post Headlines:

Haliyas Emancipated
Police to Curtail Capital's Night Life
Top Maoist Rues Failure to Anticipate Change

I am in Pokhara, having fled Kathmandu after two brief days jam-packed with touts, traffic, and information-gathering sessions. By the end of it, I had hustled so much and spent so much time beating the streets that I felt like a Raymond Chandler private eye, or at least like one of those guys who stand outside of gas station convenience stores brandishing self-made albums while a collaborator reclines on a small van which is freshly airbrushed with a bombastic and incongruously multi-part nineteenth-century English-lit title like: "The Fantastic Life And Times Of NEFF: Chase The Cheddar To Get The Cream."

In short, Nepal in early September is not an easy place to kayak. The guidebook offers few tips on post-Monsoon-season boating, flow information is less Dreamflows-internet style and more carrier-pigeon style, things are high, there are few other boaters around, and the air has the constant humidity that can only evoke comparisons to greenhouses, unwashed post-athletics armpits, and Houston. But it looks like there are options. I'm headed to the Upper Seti today, and looking at trips down the Kali Gandaki, Lower Modi, Badi Gad, and Lower Marsyangdi for the next week or two.

This early in the season, the touts are intense, whether you're in Pokhara or Kathmandu. The small number of tourists places locals on the same urban-artist-style hustling program that I'm on, albeit with different goals. It's easy to get frustrated and discouraged by the seemingly-constant preoccupation with making a buck; by my second day in Kathmandu, I had already adopted the policy of ignoring anyone that tried to talk to me on the street, and I maintained a half-glazed-I'm-focusing-on-a-spot-six-feet-behind-your-head expression to broadcast disinterest. Which was working well. But late in the day, a small half-naked boy who couldn't have been older than six came charging past me shouting "Hello!", and I figured it was worth matching exuberance with exuberance. As I finished my own "Hello!", the boy quickly spun on his heels and charged back to me, brandishing an array of business cards, and asking, "Trekking? Rafting? Smoke? Hash?"

But it's easy to check my disillusionment and frustration over my inability to make a non-transactionary connection with the locals with some quick reality-assessments. For example:

Currently, my biggest problem is that I forgot a crucial cable for my iPod Nano, and I'm unable to charge it.

By contrast, the practice of serfdom was just abolished in western Nepal about three or four days ago, and that abolition is, I'm sure, only in theory for the foreseeable future.

Regrettably, it appears that the series of tubes that comprise the Internet in Nepal are not broad enough for me to upload any pictures of the kayaking that will kick off today, so this will become a text-only blog until I return to the sunny shores of California. If you're in it for the kayak porn, you can safely wait until early December for a compelling and media-rich UPDATE.

Prayer wheels at Swayambhunath, the Monkey Temple.

Swayambhunath isn't exactly representative of Kathmandu at large, but it's not entirely unrepresentative, either.

In terms of religious activities, I have no idea what's going on here. In terms of Kinetic in Stasis becoming a fashion blog, I can safely say that brightly-colored kurtahs and saris are going to be huge in Nepal in 2009.

The Box - The Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone

2008-08-19T23:01:00.000-07:00

If you played a Family Feud-style game and asked one hundred random people to describe their ideal beach, you would get relatively uniform responses: white sand, limpid water, palm trees, coconuts.

But one of the most amazing things about running rivers is that there is no single Platonic Ideal of a river. If you asked one hundred people to describe their perfect river, their responses would be inextricably intertwined with and informed by their local geography.

In Thailand: raging brown rivers coursing their way through the jungle, turbid with silt, teeming with giant carp and catfish.

In New Zealand: water the color of sapphires, ferns, schist boulders, and massive pieces of unpolished greenstone.

In the Sierra: polished granite slabs, rainbow trout, the resinous smell of pines.

The Box Canyon of the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone is remarkable not because it embodies the realized ideal of a Montana or Wyoming river, but because it is more majestic, more staggering, and more representative of the unique geography of the region than any individual's imagined ideal could ever be.

I think Stephen King wrote this rapid.
Photo: Zak Shaw.

Brian Fletcher goes balls to the wall in Balls to the Wall.

We might as well get this over with and do the linguistic trivia segment of today's kayaking update. This rapid is called Snollieguster. This paddler is called Henry Munter.

I'm not going to speculate about where Henry got his name. But Snollieguster may derive from Snollygoster, which means "a shrewd, unprincipled person." And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Snollygoster may have come from the German schnelle Geister (literally: "fast ghost"), which was a bogus half-reptile half-bird that was used to spook small children and threaten ex-slaves to keep them from voting.

Kinetic in Stasis: your source for linguistic trivia and top-notch mediocre kayaking.

Photo: Zak Shaw.

Ryan Casey reaches for the first crux of Deliberation Corner.
Photo: Zak Shaw.

Looking back up at the Leap of Faith. Immediately after this, the whole river plunges into the Sunshine Sieve.

Steam vents in Yellowstone National Park.

Tetontetontetontetontetontetontetontetontetontetontetonteton.

North Fork of the Payette

2008-08-08T23:02:00.000-07:00

The North Fork of the Payette has been called the world's best big-water training ground; it's roadside, it's warm, it's challenging, and it's one of the most fun, but most unforgiving, runs in the world.

Since its first descent, legends like Rob Lesser, Scott Lindgren, Walt Blackadar, Doug Ammons, and Gerry Moffatt have cut their teeth on the North Fork's fifteen miles of nearly continuous whitewater before tackling intimidating big-water expeditions like the Stikine and the Yarlung Tsangpo.

With that in mind, Zak Shaw and I set out from Lotus with two kayaks, high hopes, and no directions to the put-in. Nevertheless, we eventually found our way to Banks, where we spent a day warming up on the Bottom 5 before tackling the harder stretches upstream.

Like the Little White Salmon and Cherry Creek proper, the North Fork of the Payette is a bread-and-butter run for locals. But like the L-dub and Cherry-oh-so-Very, it doesn't mean it isn't awesome, world-class whitewater.

Thanks to B-Real, Ryan Casey, and Brian Fletcher for showing us the money lines, and to the North Fork of the Payette for being incredible.

Things Kayaking the North Fork of the Payette is Like

Bare-knuckle boxing against a small bear.

Barfight.

Running from The Terminator.

Things Kayaking the North Fork of the Payette is Not Like

Seeing Cats on Broadway.

Eating 13 Krispy Kreme donuts in one hour and subsequently throwing up in the planters' boxes in front of the establishment.

Grabbing a Cinnabon at the food court and then taking a trip to Macy's to shoplift some Axe Men's Body Spray.

Wide-open sky in Nevada.
Photo: Zak Shaw.

Looking upstream at a small slice of Jacob's Ladder.
Photo: Zak Shaw.

B-Real and James McLeod fight it out for all the glory at the Second Annual 80's Rodeo. High-scoring tricks included shudder rudders, pirouettes, and massive paddle twirls.

The crowd waits for another huge endo.

Middle Fork of the Kings

2008-07-15T17:25:00.003-07:00

A few months back, I was having a conversation with Taylor Cavin and Culley & Karrie Thomas about how we each decided whether or not to run a rapid. Of the four of us, Karrie had the most well-thought out criterion, which she summed up with a simple question: "Will running this drop bring me closer to nirvana?"

While I was running the Middle Kings, I admittedly did not apply the Karrie Thomas acid test. My internal monologue when evaluating rapids was a little more direct: "Is there a good chance that this will maim me?"

But in the end, running the Kings turned out to be all about nirvana.

Because the Middle Kings is hard. And I don't mean hard in a challenging-but-manageable Csíkszentmihályi flow-state kind of way. I mean the kind of hard that can make kayakers question whether they're really into back-to-back-to-back-to-back days of class V+ paddling in the wilderness, or whether they secretly prefer mellow class V.

So at some point in the Bottom Nine, notoriously one of the most taxing days of kayaking in the world, I was starting to flag. I had just received a healthy, public, and well-deserved hubris-induced ass-kicking in a hole that I had dismissed, and even though I didn't swim, I was getting haggard. So haggard, in fact, that I half-assed a non-optional boof a few minutes later and got surfed again at the base of a small falls, which was not how I wanted to be paddling in the Bottom Nine.

A few short rapids later, Taylor paddled over to me and said, with no trace of irony, "Dudebro, isn't this awesome? We need to hold on to these moments!"

And as uncomfortable and as tired and as sick of being on edge as I was at the time, two days later we were eating burritos in a strip mall in Fresno, engulfed in a cacophony of jarring conversations and tinny pop music and cars and crowds and Panda Express and cellphones and comfort and safety.

And Taylor was right; when I sat in the strip mall, all I could think about was being back on the Middle Kings: the contrasting brutality and beauty of the hike, the sharp hunger, the moments of weightlessness, the draining fatigue, the lingering heat of the campfires, the stark fractal granite, the bitter cold of the afternoon thunderstorms, and above everything else, the river.

I'll be back next year if I can manage it. And when I'm in there, I'll probably be tired. I might even fantasize about a steak a few times. But instead of anticipating the reprieves, I will be focused on the moment, looking for nirvana again in the Middle Kings.

For more on Team Rawdog's trip, check in with Willy Pell or Taylor Cavin.

And for my mental soundtrack to the Middle Kings, check out Boyd's Journey by Damon Albarn, MMMMBop by Hanson, ~~REDACTED~~ by Mickey Avalon, and Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads. The first two are hiking songs, the third is a I-Just-Stuck-My-Line song, and the fourth is just about me liking the Talking Heads.

Days for shuttle: 2
Days for hiking: 2
Days for paddling: 5
Total days: 9
Miles hiked with kayak: 12
Miles hiked without kayak because we neglected to get a wilderness permit and got sent back to the trailhead: 12
Vertical distance hiked: 8,000 feet
Weight of kayak: 70+ lbs.

My first clue that the trip was going to be difficult: figuring out what I was going to eat was a legitimately taxing process.	Last minute cell-phone session, Chinese Fire Drill, and total logistical screw-around in Manteca. Welcome to Team Marginal.
Refining my carry system the night before the hike in true marginal style.	Stacey applies some kind of hiking-pain prophylaxis to Thomas.

The members of Team Marginal, ready to roll out. Left to Right: Taylor Cavin, Carleton Goold, Willy Pell, Me, Lizzy English, Jared Johnson, and Thomas Moore. Yeah, I'm bringing knickers back.

Two things about this photograph are strange. One: the combination of the weight on my shoulders, my exaggerated hunch, and my PFD make me look like a sway-necked camel. Two: I'm smiling.

Hiking up to the pass proper. To quote Taylor, "the hike in to the Middle Kings makes the Upper Cherry hike-in seem like a pleasant jaunt, one you might take on a lazy afternoon with a picnic basket."

Ranger Keith Waterfall, the agent of our downfall. No, I am not making up that name, or that slightly smug I-just-busted-me-some-kayakers look. Yes, he made us hike all the way back to the trailhead, get a permit, and come back the next day. Yes, that means we hiked a grand total of 24 miles into the Middle Kings. Yes, it was still worth it.

Lizzy English post-holes her way up Bishop Pass. Fun fact: Lizzy weighs only a hair more than the loaded kayak on her back. If by some improbable series of coincidences there is ever a steel cage match between Lizzy, a velociraptor, a polar bear, and a great white shark, I am not sure I will know who to bet on.

Making my way across the surface of the moon.

The inestimable Taylor Cavin makes the Squeeze Play.

I admit that I stole this shot from Taylor, but up-and-coming professional kayaker Dudebro von Brohelm needs all the exposure he can get, even if it's redundant.

Thomas fights out of a wicked weir.

L. English sets safety while I run a classic, if slightly sieved-out, drop.

Thomas Moore in the top third of I Don't Know What This Rapid is Really Called. It seems like it should be called The Devil's Washbowl, but if hikers are to be believed, that name is taken by the waterfall in a below picture.

I'm including this shot to establish that I occasionally, if not consistently, throw in a stroke as I'm going over a drop.

Okay, I also stole this shot from Taylor. But I feel like it's justified. Here's why:
1. I took the picture.
2. It's a rad picture.
3. This gorge almost never gets run. There's a rumor circulating that Taylor may have the second and third descents of this 30-footer at the mouth of Rawdog Gorge. True or false, internet kayakers?

Obligatory "lifestyle" shot. Realistically, an accurate lifestyle shot might depict me with a small tub of ice cream, a superhero movie and a pair of sweatpants. The filthiness is probably representative, though.

Humbled in the shadow of Tehipite Dome.

Thomas scouts some cruisy warm-up for the Bottom 9.

After the Bottom 9, Team Rawdog found itself at a damp, rocky patch of ground I mentally labeled Suck Camp. I think it says something about the Bottom 9 that I was actually stoked to be sleeping in wet sand like this.

Upper Cherry Creek

2008-06-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

There isn't much left to say about Upper Cherry Creek; since its first descent, its polished granite slides and waterfalls have been photographed, filmed, and hyped with so much frequency that it has almost become synonymous with California kayaking.

But no matter how many photographs you see, and no matter how many times you make that hike up Styx Pass, you can't help but be humbled and awed by the landscape. The sweeping granite domes are impassive, and their faces are shockingly devoid of any visible life, but the river and its canyons hum with a tangible and intensely vital energy.

Corey Boux and Scott Baker looking back upstream at the Double Pothole stack-up.

Is Alan Speering getting ready to hand-paddle Kiwi in a Pocket? No, my camera just sucks.

Chris Tulley and the Sparkle Motion crew returned a week and a half later for a low-flow run. Not content with the "sissy line" on Cherry Bomb Falls, Chris decides to throw a Donkey Helix. Amazingly, he stuck the landing.

West Cherry Creek

2008-06-21T17:24:00.000-07:00

West Cherry always sounded like exactly the kind of run that I wouldn't want to do: big drops with shallow landing zones, unpolished rock, and a hike-in through some manzanita. But after returning to civilization after the San Joaquin missions, it was clearly on tap.

After a few calls to experienced paddlers who are also on the Sense and Sensibility program, I had a bunch of mixed beta.

One described it as a High Sierra backpacking trip with a boat. Another suggested that there were some big and gnarly drops, and it was a good place to go if you wanted to be all Stunt Rock with it. But the overwhelming consensus was that at minimum, even if you were going to be a complete pansy, it was worth doing just for the chance to run the last few gorges of Upper Cherry at higher-than-standard water.

So we rallied. With four collective prior trips among our crew of seven, we nevertheless boondoggled, and failed to find put-in until late in the afternoon. I can't pinpoint the exact moment that it stopped feeling like a bad-ass whitewater expedition and started feeling more like a shenanigans sequence from a Little Rascals movie, but I think it might have been around three in the afternoon, during a mid-trip redirect to Tuolumne City for gas and fried chicken.

Nevertheless, once on the river, the relaxed put-in slides quickly became rowdy drops, and my skepticism about the cleanliness of the rapids was replaced with awe. All the reports about big drops, shallow landings, and bumpy slides were legitimate, but the crew was fired up and everything was going relatively smoothly.

And then, after portaging a nasty pothole thirty-footer, we arrived at a benign-looking double cascade. Taylor immediately began portaging, which was my first cue that the drop was sketchier than it looked. My second cue came when Bryce greased the line but still did a full boat-halting-body-as-cracking-whip piton on the second tier of the rapid. As Bryce paddled over to shore, it was obvious that something was wrong, and my final cue to walk manifested when Bryce flopped out of his boat and started crawling up the shore.

To make a long story and a long day short, I'll summarize the rest of the trip: what followed was simultaneously the most wretched and the most bad-ass thing I have ever seen in person.

Despite having two badly broken ankles, Bryce spent the afternoon probing the remaining class V rapids, crawling on slick granite around mandatory portages, and cracking jokes about his predicament.

I'm pretty sure if I were in his position, I'd have pulled a Tennessee Fainting Goat and fallen to the ground bleating, but Bryce somehow managed to beat most of us to take-out and maintain a sense of humor the whole time. Even when Mother Nature decided to up the ante with some massive mid-epic thunderstorms, forest fires, and slick, rain-soaked granite for him to crawl around on, Bryce was undeterred.

Anyway, West Cherry is definitely worth doing, especially if you're feeling fired up. I wouldn't even say it's significantly less clean than its more notorious next-door neighbor. But it definitely has its dirty moments.

Will Pruitt at the confluence with a high-water Upper Cherry Creek.

S.T.M.W.A.T.M.B.A. thing I've ever seen in person: Bryce portages around a messed-up drop on Upper Cherry Creek with two broken ankles.

Taylor put together a little video of the West Cherry extravaganza, including my tardy-boof-to-minor-piton line on the Charlie Beavers' Super Rapid. Check it out!

Upper South San Joaquin

2008-06-20T20:05:00.000-07:00

San Joaquin Drainage Trip Three: Upper South San Joaquin

First Descent: No.
Miles Hiked Upriver: 4
Miles of Whitewater Paddled: 3
Miles of Flatwater Paddled: 8
Good Rapids: A handful.
Portages: None!
A Bad Idea Because: It's a little bit of work to paddle across Florence Lake, hike up the length of the run, and then paddle back across Florence Lake.
A Good Idea Because: It's really pretty, and it's non-stop not-really-boat-scoutable-but-kinda class IV - V for all three miles.

If I don't make it as an amateur professional kayaker, I'm going to try out for the Baltimore Ravens.

It's like Upper Cherry with trees.

The last rapid before the lake. This picture doesn't do it justice... it's splashy fun.

Upper Mono Creek

2008-06-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

San Joaquin Drainage Trip Two: Upper Mono Creek

First Descent: No.
Miles Hiked Upriver: 4
Miles of Whitewater Paddled: 3
Miles of Flatwater Paddled: 4
Miles on a Motorboat Ferry: 4
Good Rapids: 2
Portages: A handful (logs and mank).
A Bad Idea Because: I brought my playboat to make the hike easier. Using a playboat in a very low-volume, not-always-bedrock creek is really stupid.
A Good Idea Because: The hike is very pretty.

Are you out there, Red Bull? If you sponsor me, I can provide you with high-quality shots like this that showcase the preparedness and spunk that your product can bring to an extreme lifestyle.

Kevin Smith is smiling, obviously undaunted by the prospect of yet another hike in to yet another potentially marginally-boatable waterway. Kevin Smith once hiked the John Muir Trail (200+ miles) in 5 days, though, so it's difficult to say whether he's:
a. a masochist
b. in good shape
c. crazy about being outside
d. all of the above

I did not run this rapid in my Medium Rev.

Kevin Smith slaying a mini-gorge.

Luke on a great double drop.

If you've run Fordyce Creek, you're probably familiar with The Hole That Ate The Donner Party. This is The Hole That Ate The Hole That Ate The Donner Party.

Bear Creek

2008-06-18T19:13:00.000-07:00

While waiting for the Cherry drainage to swing in, Carleton Goold enticed me down to the San Joaquin drainage with hopes of a second descent of Bear Creek and rumors of a possible first descent on Upper Mono Creek.

Mammoth local Kevin Smith and his buddy Luke, fresh off a run on Dinkey Waterfalls, were in Shaver Lake and psyched for some San Joaquin missions, so we arranged to meet them up at Edison Lake the next day.

Shortly afterwards, Carleton called me back to report that he had probed Rick Smith for beta, only to discover that Rick had paddled Upper Mono years ago. Coincidentally, I checked in with Culley Thomas for beta from his first descent of Bear Creek, only to discover that he had also been in Upper Mono with his wife, Karrie, just the week before. So much for our first descent.

But bailing on the mission just because it had been done before seemed like a lame play, so we forged on, but decided to do Bear Creek before Mono, with a possible third day on the rarely-run Upper South San Joaquin.

In the end, the theme for the trip was Hiking with Your Kayak To Boat Marginally Runnable Waterways, with a secondary theme of Paddling Flatwater With Your Kayak to Boat Marginally Runnable Waterways, and a tertiary theme of Discovering Why There Isn't More Hype Around These Runs.

San Joaquin Drainage Trip One: Bear Creek

Miles Hiked Upriver: 5
Miles of Whitewater Paddled: 5
Miles of Flatwater Paddled: 0
Good Rapids: 6.
Portages: Many (logs and mank).
A Bad Idea Because: See above.
A Good Idea Because: There are some big clean rapids, and it's gorgeous.

Welcome to California, where even our take-out parking lots are polished bedrock.

The first descent crew put in about seven miles upstream of these twin slides. We put in here, since they reported only a handful of good rapids upstream. Both sides go, and both sides are sick enough to make Pasteur concerned.

This rapid was being filmed for the Boating from the Backseat chapter of David's Half-Assed Strokes and Concepts: Volume 1.

Luke below a fun, smooth, slide.

A week after we got off the run, a few members of the team that did the first descent returned for a repeat visit. After talking with them, they reported that the creek was a little less boatable than they remembered. That said, there are definitely some sweet rapids in here.

Fantasy Falls

2008-06-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

I went to Fantasy Falls in search of unicorns, and I found them.

There were intimidating gorges created by massive granite domes. There were long portages. There were small and hideously manky rapids. There were huge and surprisingly clean rapids. There were calm stretches that slowly wound through shadowy primeval forests.

All photographs come courtesy of Andrew "Mo" Kennedy, team photographer and probe unit, who came off the couch to slay it.

Brad Brewer's solution to mank: fly over it.

The author demonstrates impeccable form on the drop just downstream of the first night's camp. I've filed a patent on this sub-to-air-brace move; look for the tutorial in the upcoming David's Half-Assed Strokes and Concepts: Volume 1.

Sometimes, even class V+ has to take the day off.

The best way to appreciate a High Sierra multi-day is to go in without anyone who has done the run before. That way you can spend plenty of time scrambling around on big granite domes trying to peer into foreboding gorges. In this shot, David and Skux establish that the gorge looks "sick."

English Simon, a.k.a. The Guinea Pig, a.k.a. The Probe, a.k.a. The Canary in the Coalmine, fires off a boof.

Brad Brewer prepares to demonstrate the dry-face line on Fantasy Falls.

After discovering that it's possible to get hammered at the base of Fantasy Falls, I stomp its little brother in a merciless act of revenge.

English Simon enters the lead-in to the Island Drop. All I can say is that it's busier than it looks on video.

Kiwi Pete on a no-name slide.

Dropping into the top of The Thing.

The middle of The Thing. Not pictured: the soul-crushing hole at the bottom and the eponymous fugly hydraulic at the top.

Arahura

2008-06-10T17:41:00.000-07:00

From a chronological standpoint, this post is misleading. I didn't actually paddle the Arahura recently. But my friend just flew in from New Zealand and he happened to have some pictures from our Arahura trip last Christmas, so I thought I'd put them up.

It's interesting doing a little compare-and-contrast with the South Silver pictures I posted earlier today. Both runs are beautiful and both runs are classic, but in very different ways. The pictures hardly do credit to the otherworldly beauty of the Arahura, but I feel like I should mention that I didn't apply any kind of blue filter; the water really does look like liquid sapphires, and it's the kind of place where you wouldn't be that shocked to see a unicorn.

Anyway, I finally broke down and got a breakdown paddle, thanks to The River Store, so it's time to go look for some local unicorns on Fantasy Falls.

Dando and the Hughes.

A double dose of everyone's favorite Slovak. Mike Kobzik and Curtain Call.

Scouting the notorious Dent Falls.

Tongue twister: Sissies set safety sur sieves. In this photograph, a big sissy prepares to shove Nick Herrald away from a sieve in case he blows the line.

Is it a boof? Is it a J-lean? Hard saying, not knowing, but whatever it is, I'm doing it.

South Silver

2008-06-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

Every time I've paddled South Silver it's been different.

The first time I ran it, I had basically paddled six runs: Electra, Chili Bar, The Gorge, Chamberlain Falls, the Cresta reach on the North Feather, and the Goodyear's Bar run on the North Yuba.

So South Silver was an eye-opener. The word "boof" was not in my vocabulary, and Boof, Boof, Slide went more like Flip, Grunge, Grunge. Most class V paddlers talk South Silver down, but Bogus Thunder was one of the hardest rapids I'd ever seen, so the rush I got when I dropped into the Skyscraper felt like mainlining meth.

My sister caught the whole thing on video. I came screaming down Off Ramp, pulled into the eddy, and my eyes were bigger than dinner plates; I wasn't winded, but I was still gasping for breath.

A few years later, it's still sweet!

Thanks to Katy Siquig for the photographs.

First Annual South Merced Boat Cleanup Jamboree

2008-06-01T20:42:00.000-07:00

Like all good weekends, last weekend began with rampant speculation. After hemming and hawing, Kevin Smith, Taylor Cavin and I finally settled on Dinkey Waterfalls as our target. Unfortunately, en route to the Dinkler we realized that putting on at a high-ish flow at four in the afternoon without anyone who had done the run before was probably a recipe for an epic, and diverted to the South Merced.

The last couple of times I've paddled the South Merced this year, I've gotten all worked up over the abandoned boats. Kevin Smith, the team pragmatist, decided that rather than just bitching about environmental irresponsibility, we could bring in a fold saw and solve the problem ourselves.

Between the three of us, we managed to get half of a boat out. Thanks to Pyranha for manufacturing The Monster out of pure #3 plastic, making it totally recyclable.

There's still a boat and a half in there. Go get some sweet rapids and pieces of boat before it drops out!

(For actual pictures of the rapids, you're probably better off with Chris Korbulic's blog.)

Kevin Smith, slaying a Pyranha Monster once and for all.

It's important to wash behind your seat.

Preparing the final tiles for shipping via the whitewater express.

South Branch of the Middle Fork of the Feather

2008-05-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

I could go on for pages about the South Branch of the Middle Feather, but I'll be succinct: the South Branch is one of the best waterfall runs and one of the most beautiful places in the world.

In fact, it's so beautiful, and so awesome, that it was voted Most Likely to Be Blogged in the 2007-2008 California Kayaking Yearbook, edging out annual favorites like Big Kimshew and Upper Cherry Creek.

If you're not convinced, check out Darin's write-up or Team Pyranha's. Or Evan Garcia's. Or Chris Korbulic's. Or Zak Shaw's. Or Josh Neilson's.

If it seems ridiculous that so many people are writing about it, it's because up until this year, it has been relatively unknown. But the lid is off, the word is out, the cat is out of the bag, and Pandora's Box has been opened.

Thanks to Darin, the Knight brothers, and Korbulic et al. for being super friendly and giving us some beta along the way.

All images are courtesty of Zak Shaw, and shouldn't be reproduced, borrowed, or stolen without his permission.

In this picture, I am falling off a waterfall.

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I'm a rocket maaan
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

Taylor Cavin is one lanky bastard with one impeccable power box. If that box were any more perfect, you could use it to ship apples.

After my visor rotated down in front of my face, I tore it off in a fit of pique. Now it looks like I have little devil horns.

Zak Shaw, intent on dialing it like a telephone number.

Carleton Goold, Dark Horse Kayaker.

Banzai.

#247 in the Humbled, Awed and Amazed series.

Note the significant loss of gradient between the foreground and the background of this picture. Unless you're doing the two-day or you're wearing a wingsuit, you should take-out before this point.

Upper & Lower Clavey River

2008-04-28T19:41:00.000-07:00

The Clavey was whack. So whack, in fact, that I decided to stop kayaking. But I can't stop writing, so Kinetic in Stasis is now an Urban Fashion blog, dedicated to bringing you the latest in styling trends. So send me pictures of your "fits" and I'll get them out there! In the meantime, enjoy these! Credit goes to Hel-Looks and Hypebeast for the shots.

He is going deer hunting amidst California's little-known Tartan Oaks. He will be nigh-invisible.

Grills-as-orthodonture: the future of suburban dental care.

Sure, it seems a little ridiculous now, but come the Fall, this is what everyone will be wearing under their drysuit.

Fuck. I actually like this outfit.

Anyway, none of that is true, except for the part about liking the outfit above. The Clavey is not whack, and this is definitely not going to become an Urban Fashion blog. In fact, the Clavey is one of the most amazing stretches of whitewater that I have ever paddled.

Unfortunately, my waterproof camera decided to off itself by inhaling a lot of water, so I don't have any pictures of the Clavey, which is a shame, because it's gorgeous. Just as Upper Cherry embodies the stark and barren beauty of the polished granite of the High Sierra, the Clavey embodies the soul of the Sierra foothills: its gorges are formed by warm, rolling hills dappled with glacier-polished boulders and wildflowers. In our first hour on the water, we saw a black bear charging up a slope, oblivious to our presence, and downstream, we watched a golden eagle bank and glide along the hillsides in search of prey.

Seeing the beauty of the Clavey, it's difficult to believe that anyone would want to jam a four-hundred-foot-tall dam into it and drown its gorges in stagnant water. What does it say about a person's spirit that they are willing to sacrifice one of our state's last great undammed waterways for the sake of a few dollars and the energy to power a few more air conditioners and washing machines?

Bonus Non-Judgemental Story

During the paddle out, I saw a baby snake floating in the water. It was motionless and face-down, its milky scales exposed to the sun as it drifted in the current. For a moment, I was torn. On the one hand, I wasn't fired up about the prospect of handling a snake. On the other hand, I couldn't watch it drown. So on the off chance that it might not be dead, I picked it up by its tail and put it on the deck of my boat, where it stayed motionless for a moment. And then, as the warmth of the sun brought it out of its torpor, the snake started writhing back to life and flipped over.

I was surprised to see it moving at all; it looked like a corpse when it was in the water. But I was even more surprised when I realized what it was. Its head was triangular, its tail had the unmistakable nub that would soon turn into a rattle, and its back was thatched in sandy scales: black, mottled brown, and white. For a moment, I was paralyzed, and then my bow rose over a wave, some spray caught me in the face, and the snake started weaving towards the grab loop on my deck.

I spent about ten seconds trying to analyze whether the baby rattlesnake would be able to creep under my spray deck, and then I started paddling as quickly and steadily as I could for the shore. When I was a few feet off, I scooped the snake up onto one paddle blade and winged it gently onto the beach.

Kayaking!

South Fork Merced River

2008-04-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

The South Merced is one of the best multi-day, super high quality and difficult runnable class V runs in the world...

It's like doing Cherry Creek back to back four times in a row without having seen it before only every time it's different and harder.

- Lars Holbek

I've heard stories about the South Merced for years: a near drowning of a California legend between innocuous-looking rocks in the comparatively mellow run-out, ridiculously competent Kiwis hiking out and resorting to some potentially ill-advised urine-swilling sessions, and broken boats haunting the banks of the river, serving as shattered reminders of failed descents.

My favorite one, though, is the story about the guy who went and climbed El Capitan and then ran the South Merced in a single day. I can't find a single reference to the feat in writing, but it's one of the most awesome things I've ever heard.

Simply climbing El Capitan and running the South Merced in one's lifetime would be impressive enough; counting Lars Holbek and Royal Robbins, I think you could probably tally all of the people who have pulled that off on two hands. But he tapped into two of the most breathtaking landmarks and physical challenges in Yosemite, in two wildly different disciplines, and did all of it in a single day.

Anyway, the South Merced is all it's cracked up to be. It missed out on the marketing blitz that the High Sierra runs enjoyed(?) a few years ago, but it's one of the most incredible runs in California, and arguably one of the best class V runs in the world.

Unfortunately, during our trip, we counted at least three broken kayaks that paddlers had abandoned in the lower stretches of the canyon. I could understand if the boats were unrecoverable, but they're all sitting happily on the banks of the river. It's a deep gorge, and a hike out with a boat would be horrible, but that's what makes it a committing wilderness run.

Rather than get myself even more worked up, I'll just offer the following definitions:

la·zy
adj.
1. averse or disinclined to work, activity, or exertion; indolent.

trav·es·ty
n.
1. A debased or grotesque likeness.

In the meantime, since there's no Broken Boat Fairy to collect all of the derelict kayaks and being shrill and indignant doesn't actually dissolve plastic, consider entering the South Merced armed with river knives, fold saws, and ample space in the stern of your boat. Since the majority of the damaged boats are towards the end of the run, past the nucky-gnar, it would be relatively straightforward to dissect them, distribute chunks among team members, and paddle the pieces out.

Carleton "Sea-Worthy" Goold evaluates baked goods with the same discerning eye he uses to evaluate rapids. In this photograph, Carleton looks for the line on a delicious cinnamon raisin bagel.

Abbot and Costello. Laurel and Hardy. Fred and Ginger. David and Carleton. A modern-day dynamic duo enters the Super Slide gorge.

Punching the curler leading to...

Super Slide proper. The speck in the upper left corner is Chris Tulley. The camera was so scared it closed its eyes.

Fact 1: kayaking the South Merced is so fun that you won't be bothered by the fact that you're sharing a campsite with a baby rattlesnake.

Fact 2: there are many, many, rapids on the South Merced.

Fact 3: Lars Holbek is right; the South Merced is one of the best class V multi-day whitewater trips in the world.

3 paddlers, 3 different ways of pushing The Button. But who is taking the picture?

Upper Middle Cosumnes

2008-03-28T12:57:00.000-07:00

After the Devil's Canyon, I rounded out my spring break with some laps on the Upper Middle Cosumnmes.

For better or worse, the Upper Middle Cosumnes is everything the Devil's Canyon is not. The shuttle is short but weird, there's a hike in, the major drops are big and sometimes semi-junky, and even if you're fired up for mank, you're going to be getting out of your boat at least once. Amazingly, it's just as classic as the Devil's Canyon, even if it's classic in a different way.

Thanks to Joe Bosquin and Aaron Stabel for showing me down the first time, and to Jared Noceti for getting the good word out on the run. Now that we've got it sorted at lower flows, I'd be stoked to get back in there with a hundred or two hundred more c.f.s.

Joe Bosquin washes off the poison oak from the hike-in.

Aaron Stabel enters the warm-up slide.

Taylor Cavin in the midst of Tony Hawk.

Scouting the cleanest boof on the run.

Ben Zupo in the mix on the double drop.

Todd Anderson lines up the split falls.

Keith Kishiyama sorts one out.

Joe Bosquin takes his boat through its paces on the Cheesegrater falls.

Devil's Canyon | Middle Fork Feather

2008-03-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

I don't want to sound like a broken record, but The Devil's Canyon of the Middle Fork of the Feather is one of the most classic self-supported multi-day runs in the world.

As I said last year, there aren't any huge sheer vertical drops, and with a handful of exceptions, the lines typically aren't that tight. So while there are plenty of booves, there are few moments of truly lingering weightlessness, and the shots of adrenalin and relief that come with stomping a narrow line are tempered by the recognition that the rapids are low-consequence relative to their difficulty.

But there's a lot to be said for the flow state that you can get in with thirty-four miles of completely runnable whitewater: for peeling out into a current, feeling the snug catch of ineluctable momentum, and tapping the flow to weave around huge hydraulics in massive granite canyons.

Which you get to do in the middle of the wilderness, for three days straight.

Colorado Christian, The Newt Whisperer: unafraid of whitewater, and unafraid of warts.

Camp on night two. It's hard to say whether the highlight of the night was finding a few six-packs of aging dynamite or huddling in my sleeping bag and praying that it didn't dew up and turn into a popsicle again.

Tom Janney scouts the run-out of the final rapid above the frequently-portaged cataract.

Christian in the midst of it in the Devil's Canyon.

Just downstream on the same rapid, cruising left to avoid getting trundled by the final hydraulic.

Christian goes airborne in Helicopter.

With gold at $1000 an ounce, it might be time for me to stop studying resource economics and start studying how to look dapper with a sluicebox, plenty of denim, and a wide-brimmed hat.

Obligatory Middle Feather Church of Asia shot. Somehow strangely appropriate, in a kayaker-as-Highlander kind of way.

Bald Rock Canyon | Middle Fork Feather

2008-03-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

Bald Rock. Bald Rizzy. The Rock of Ribaldry. Whatever you want to call it, Bald Rock is a legend in California whitewater. From the convoluted mechanics of the shuttle to the slightly-but-not-too sketchy ferry above Atom Bomb Falls, every aspect of Bald Rock feels larger than life.

If you want to drive yourself crazy, though, listen to Welcome to Jamrock before paddling the Canyon. I think the hardest moment of the day was dropping in to Four Deaths and scrambling away from sieves while my brain kept singing "Wel-come to Bald Rock!" in a wildly unrealistic Jamaican accent instead of focusing on the task at hand. I'm pretty sure Tommy Hilleke doesn't have to deal with this kind of nonsense.

Desperate to see another California Condor after the Sespe, Taylor Cavin tries his Condor call. Sorry Taylor, Condors don't live here.

Step 1 of the infamous Atom Bomb Falls portage.

Wild and Scenic? Wild and Scenic.

Keith "B-52" Kishiyama prepares to bomb off Curtain Falls.

It doesn't get much sweeter than this. Accelerating down the face of Curtain Falls.

Taylor Cavin and the first third of Four Deaths.

dmaurier: that is the lead-in

Ashley: hm. ok.

dmaurier: then there is another big manky drop, and then it ends in a big f-ed up tubing hole. i ran it and was okay. 0 deaths was my score.

Ashley: hurray1

! i am so glad.

Floating serenely into the final move on Four Deaths.

See if you can guess where the high-water mark on the reservoir is. The amazing thing about environmental devastation is that it's aesthetically consistent; whether it's a river that has been drowned by its own waters, a mountain that has been blasted into submission by hydraulic mining, or a forest that has been stripped bare by clear-cutting, the Earth looks sick and damaged. You're never like: "You know what? It's actually prettier this way."

Yes, those are sardines packed in mustard. Carleton, keeping life extreme both on and off the water.

The Church of Asia has a lot of things to say about a lot of different things...

...like NEW QLeeR WARp...

... and dead cats? The Skull-and-Catbones aside, if services were held in Bald Rock Canyon, I might consider being part of the flock.

Confluence to Coffee Camp | Tule River

2008-03-03T12:32:00.000-08:00

The Tule has some of the most mixed beta of any major watershed in California. An online guidebook calls it V+, I think Holbek and Stanley call it a V or a V+, and word-of-mouth will sell it as a IV - V. For what it's worth, it's at least on par with Hospital Rock, and possibly a little more technical.

Not to knock the Eagle Mountain Casino, but the Tule River arguably has better slots. Fresh from a morning run on Hospital Rock, Culley Thomas tries his luck.

Bad lighting conditions aside, this falls is sweeter than agave nectar.

On the plus side, if you decide to put on an unfamiliar class V river late in the afternoon, you might get to see an incredible sunset wash over your friends like a blushing nimbus. Taylor Cavin and the yucca: God's little lambs.

On the minus side, if you decide to put on an unfamiliar class V river late in the afternoon, you might get to stumble around in total darkness with your aforementioned friends, looking for a way out of a steep gorge.

After a morning of coffee, a phone call to Greg Speicher, classic speculation about flows, unsuccessful attempts to track down members of the Tribal Council, concerns about having our shuttle vehicle set on fire, a futile search for a mysterious man known only as "Big John", and a few trips to the Eagle Mountain Casino, our South Fork Tule adventure ended here. We returned to the Main Tule for a shot at redemption and the chance to paddle the last quarter mile.

Eric Giddens, holding it down for Kernville.

Eric and Kevin Smith bomb off a sequence of waterfalls.

I guess it's positive that graffiti artists are taking the time to hike in to rivers and experience the outdoors. Just the same, I hope they get eaten by a bear the next time they set foot in a forest.

Taylor after the first move of Quadruple Drop, right before take-out.

Winter in California.

Hospital Rock | Kaweah River

2008-03-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

The first time I ran Hospital Rock a few years ago, I was completely out of my element. I had just finished up some runs on the South Silver, and after a few laps on Skyscraper, I felt like I was ready for anything. I think my reasoning went something like:

A. Skyscraper is a very big rapid.

B. I have run Skyscraper.

therefore

C. I can run very big rapids.

While items A and B were unequivocally true, item C turned out to be debatable. The first rapid we ran, V-Drive, was a 20' slide that faded left into an ugly crack, with a kicker off a 8' drop on the far right. I came flying off the kicker, plowed into the right wall, and got hammered against the cliff face in an eddy. After a handful of rolls and slams against the wall, I performed a wet exit. When I came out, I was spitting blood; it felt like I had been sucker-punched in the jaw.

My crew was surprisingly supportive. Instead of making comments like 'The road is right there, bro.' (it was), they said things like, 'That was a total fluke!' (it wasn't), which made me think, 'I'm not hiking out. I've got this.' (I didn't.) Even though I didn't swim again, I plugged every drop between put-in and take-out.

A few years, seven countries, and a hundred rivers later, I went back to Hospital Rock for the first time.

It's a lot more fun with a boof.

Lining up the slide on V-Drive.

Taylor Cavin lives on the edge.

Taylor and the Mousetrap.

Desperate for a first descent, the group begins evaluating the left side of 0 to 60.

Ceci n'est pas une boof.

49 to Bridgeport | South Fork of the Yuba River

2008-02-24T20:35:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, Keith Kishiyama and I rallied for a low-water run on 49 to Bridgeport. There were only 450 c.f.s. in the river, and I was skeptical that it was going to be runnable. Fortunately, the whole thing went, except for a marginal and extremely rocky drop that's typically portaged anyway. After a manky-but-fun descent of the Sespe and an aborted descent of the Tule, it felt good to be back on a proper river, getting thrown around by curlers and boofing over holes, even if there weren't any sweet sandstone boulders and endangered condors.

Today, I went back to the South Yuba to cap off the weekend's double-header and check out the the upper end of the runnable range. As we put-in, we figured we had about 1,100 c.f.s., and by the time we hit the gauge at Jones Bar a few miles downstream, we reckoned we had 1,400. With the continued rains, by the end of the day, we were riding on 2,000 c.f.s. of pure California H₂O on one of the best runs in the state.

Sean Manchester and Jared Noceti look a lot less like twins than this picture might suggest.

Looking upstream at Mr. Squiggly.

Mid-Sunday chat about what we read in the New York Times that morning. Taylor's pick: Rising Inflation Creates Unease in the Middle East.

Actually, I made that up. We were scouting this ten-foot ledge where the the whole river forms a massive recirculating hydraulic. As far as I know, Taylor does not enjoy the New York Times, or anything related to inflation, unease, or the Middle East.

Sespe Creek

2008-02-18T19:29:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of weird things about Sespe Creek.

For one, the turn-off for the creek is right before Six Flags Magic Mountain. There aren't a lot of multi-day wilderness river trips in California that use an amusement park as a landmark for directions.

For two, the take-out is in the middle of Fillmore, a typical Ventura County suburb. Towards the end of the creek, you're paddling through the backyards of nondescript tract houses, in what basically looks like a drainage ditch at that point.

For three, despite all of the above, while you're in the thick of it, the Sespe is one of the wildest and most beautiful places I've been in California. It's frequently compared to the High Sierra runs, and while that's a reasonable comparison in terms of the scale of the undertaking, it doesn't do any justice to the Sespe's unique character. Within thirty-three miles, there are perfectly stratified layers of sedimentary deposits, huge sandstone boulders, tar seeps, hot springs, massive slabs of red rock, waterfalls, and fissured faces of bone-white limestone that look like cliffs as envisioned by mad cubists. If there are other gorges like this in California, I've never seen them.

Some of the beta on the creek seems a little out of date, or slightly inaccurate. The Holbek and Stanley write-up calls the Sespe a IV - V, with "many" portages. We made about five portages, and I think it felt more like a V.

Based on some beta from a local, we put on with extremely low flows registering on the Fillmore gauge. Holbek & Stanley call for 400 c.f.s. as a minimum, and we had a little over 250 as we put on. We found the rapids painfully manky at times, but overall, the quality of the gorge erased most of the pain. We all agreed that we'd be stoked to paddle it again with between 500 and 800 c.f.s.; the guidebook-recommended maximum flow of 1,000 c.f.s. would make boat-scouting the majority of the boulder-choked drops nearly impossible, and wouldn't necessarily do much to clean up the rapids.

Although all the trip reports we read suggested budgeting at least three or four days for the trip, we managed to get it done in a day and a half with some extremely aggressive boat-scouting and unrestrained optimism. At higher flows, this probably wouldn't be feasible. In any case, this is an under-hyped California classic; if it's ever flowing and you're somewhere between Guadalajara, Mexico and Portland, Oregon, it's worth checking out.

Trepidation was high as we prepared to put in on the almost absurdly low creek.

Macy Burnham and Luke Liebsch starts the slightly taxing paddle in to the Sespe gorge.

Taylor Cavin and the four-layer cake.

Taylor and Luke tending a campfire that we found. Despite daytime temperatures in the high sixties, the night was cold enough to frost over the sand on the beach. Nevertheless, a self-support mission in mid-February is hard to beat.

Luke in the midst of a semi-typical minor drop.

Luke and Macy drive downstream.

Macy small, rocks big.

Taylor prepares to drop in to one of the most consequential runnable drops; just past this falls, the river plunges over another shelf, creating a ledge that's backed-up by a big rock.

Taylor works a Goonies-style spelunkportage. Did he discover the secret of One-Eyed Willie? Only he knows.

Even at low flows, the river occasionally channelizes just enough to create some sweet ledge boofs.

Shirttail Creek

2008-02-01T20:21:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to lie. I was nervous about Shirttail. It probably had something to do with running Chamberlain Falls for years and hearing rescue stories from A-Teamers. As it turns out, it is stout, but at low flows, totally manageable. For 400 f.p.m., it boats really well. Rumors of huge waterfalls are slightly exaggerated; the biggest waterfall on the run probably has about twelve feet of free-fall with a sweet four or five-foot entrance ramp that sets you up nicely for the boof.

We had it about as low as you would want it, and maybe a tad lower. There were some bony lines and fu-rocks that a few more inches would have cleaned up a lot. For a first-time flow, though, it was perfect.

Looking upstream at the start of the 400 foot-per-mile stretch.

Culley Thomas with a righty boof.

Razor's Edge isn't a big drop, but unless you nail the boof, you're going to take a hit off the river-right wall or the river-left rock.

Culley slides into the start of a junky-but-fun drop.

View of the complete rapid from downstream.

This rapid is really weird. It looks impossibly tight from upstream; all you can see are these two curtains of water fanning into the middle of the river, and it looks like you're going to boof into a wall of water. And then you take a big stroke, and it's like stepping though a bead curtain, and it's fantastic.

Upper West Branch Feather & Butte Creek

2008-01-27T23:52:00.000-08:00

Sometimes kayaking is awesome because it's remote. Sitting around a campfire, next to a river, days from any sort of civilization, it's hard not to feel blessed.

Other times, kayaking is awesome because it's not remote. The only thing that's as good as being in the middle of nowhere is being in the middle of somewhere, but seeing it in a way that people ordinarily don't.

The West Branch of the Feather River falls into the second category of awesome. Tucked into the hills behind Paradise, California, the W.B.F. carves its way down thousands of feet of steep granite before arriving at Lake Oroville (fact: Lake Oroville isn't actually a lake). Along the way, it picks up the infamous Big Kimshew Creek, runs through a handful of gorges, and cascades down Ben and Jerry's Gorge all the way to the reservoir.

On the way to put-in, we weren't really sure what part of the West Branch we were looking to bite off. Both the Upper and Ben and Jerry's looked like they might be in the right flow range, but after a quick call to local Taylor Robertson, we decided that with the recent heavy rains, ice cream wasn't in our future. I'm not going to pretend I was heartbroken.

Holbek & Stanley call the Upper West Branch Feather IV - V, but I don't think that's totally accurate since there weren't really any class V sequences of moves. At our moderate flow, it was more like class IV - IV+ with some mank and a handful of sieves. We had plenty of daylight left after the run, so we went up behind the hospital to scout Ben and Jerry's in case we decided to do it on Sunday.

When we woke up the next day, the weather was menacing, and we spent at least half an hour drinking coffee and waffling over whether we wanted to chance that the incoming rainstorm would tag us and turn the day into an epic. In the end, we decided that we would all rather come back and do the gorge in warm weather off spring snow-melt. Our Plan B, which turned out to be Plan A-quality, was Butte Creek.

Were it not for the two-mile hike-in, I think Butte Creek would easily compare with other bread-and-butter classics like 49 to Bridgeport and Cherry Creek. Even with the two-mile hike-in, I think it probably still does. Fortunately for us, we didn't have to deal with it all. As we prepared to shoulder our boats and start the walk, a PG&E employee pulled up to the gate and gave us a ride to put-in.

For a great write-up with some pictures of Butte, check out: Days on the River.

Bear Creek & Cache Creek

2008-01-25T22:32:00.000-08:00

It has been a weird week in California. A storm has been camping out over the majority of the state for the last week, but few of the rivers have come up. The North Coast has been relatively untouched. The Eel drainage, which is ordinarily prone to flashing during even minor winter storms, has been mellow. On the West Slope of Sierras, home of the iconic California High Sierra runs, everything has been locked up as snow, even at the lower elevations.

But some things have been flowing, and flowing big. Strange runs near the Bay Area. Awkward drainage ditches in the foothills. Seldom-run South Coast runs near Los Angeles. Arroyo Hondo. Arroyo Mocho. Piru Creek. Sespe Creek.

Los Angeles and the Bay Area were looking like big drives for a Friday, so we decided to stay local and get on an infrequently-paddled, arguably not-at-all-classic run, Bear Creek. Every county in Central California has at least one Bear Creek, just like every county in Northern California has at least one Clear Creek. Yolo County's Bear Creek is near the unincorporated little community of Rumsey, California.

I checked a few write-ups, looked at the forecast for the day, and took one last peek at the gauge before leaving the house. The flow chart showed the river hitting 1,000 c.f.s., with a subsequent spike of unknown magnitude; the graph was nearly vertical. The write-ups were suggesting 500 to 600 as optimal, but to be honest, I dismissed them. My reasoning was that the Tuolumne has roughly the same gradient as Bear Creek (70 feet per mile), and the Tuolumne just gets more awesome when you put more water in it.

Of course, there was a flaw in my reasoning. The character of the two rivers is nothing alike. Bear Creek is abnormal for a California stream: it loses most of its gradient in weird, pretty much river-wide, ledges. At low flows, they're low-key. At high flows, they're sticky and unforgiving.

After I got home, I checked the flow graph again, and it looked like we had around 2,500 c.f.s., or roughly five times the suggested level. It was an interesting first-time flow, but if I were looking for the class IV that Bear Creek typically offers, I probably wouldn't go in there above 1,000 c.f.s.

Strangely enough, the last five miles of the run on Cache Creek remained class II - III.

Daniel Brasuell is excited about flood-stage kayaking. Yes, that's the snow line above him, somewhere around 500 feet.

Nick Abrams, a lot of water, and very few rocks. For the water literate: check out the neat whirlpools, boils, and pseudo-eddies.

This isn't actually a tributary. I mean, it was on the day that we paddled Bear Creek, but it ordinarily is a cliff, not a creek.

Nick Abrams, a lot of water, and a few rocks (the second image in the Nick Abrams With Water and Rocks series).

Upper & Lower Kakapotahi

2008-01-08T21:32:00.000-08:00

Most of the rivers on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island have three things in common: flawless sapphire water, towering granite and schist boulders, and plenty of sustained gradient. Classics like the Arahura, the Perth, and the Whitcombe are all so stark, immaculate, and otherworldly that you feel like you're intruding on something.

The Kakapotahi, in contrast, is dark and uneven. After rain, it rises quickly to fill its lush narrow gorges with thick green-and-brown water. While other coastal rivers feel like they've been carefully arranged by some divine hand, the Kakapotahi feels hewn and roughly carved, like it's fighting for every foot of its descent to the sea.

Looking upstream at Postman's Falls - a ten-foot sliding falls into a narrow slot.

The view immediately below Postman's Falls.

Sending Air Mail, the second major drop on the Upper Kakapotahi.

Air Mail leads directly into this slightly sketchy-looking portage.

View of the semi-mandatory portage from the must-make eddy directly above it.

The gorge of the Lower Kakapotahi.

Waitaha

2008-01-06T14:44:00.000-08:00

Alongside the Kokitahi, the Waitaha is about as full-on as West Coast fly-ins get. There are harder rapids and more committing gorges on the South Island, but there are few bigger days. After miles of countless class IV and class V drops, the Waitaha passes through the completely unreal Morgan Gorge, necessitating a grueling bush-whack portage. The portage can take anything from an hour and a half to four hours; if you haven't done it before, it's very easy to lose the narrow and infrequently-traveled "trail".

I also just read on Zak Shaw's blog that the New Zealand government is considering damming the Waitaha. If that happens, it will be a tragedy; New Zealand will lose an irreplaceable national treasure. Flying over the Morgan Gorge on the way to the put-in is awe-inspiring. Even from hundreds of feet up, the Morgan Gorge is beautiful and visibly powerful in a way that is difficult to describe, but profoundly humbling. Watching the river course down the gorge, it is easy to see why it has never been successfully descended: it is one of the wildest river canyons in the world.

In California, nearly one hundred years ago, we sacrificed the Hetch Hetchy Valley for the O'Shaughnessy dam. O'Shaughnessy now provides the energy for two tenths of one percent of California's annual power consumption. We lost a place as beautiful and numinous as the Yosemite Valley for 0.2% of our current energy needs. Even if the dam were decommissioned, studies have shown that the Hetch Hetchy valley has been irrevocably changed; dense forests would grow in place of the meadows that once lined the valley floor.

Hopefully, the growing international enthusiasm for ostensibly "green" energy will be tempered by a look at the past, its legacy to the present, and the realization that although hydro-power may not produce carbon emissions, it can still have devastating and irreversible impacts on some of the world's most beautiful places, like the Waitaha River and its Morgan Gorge.

This river is flawless.

Past the technical boulder gardens, past Nikki Kelly's drop, the bigger discrete rapids start to come into play; this one links directly into a sweet double boof.

Mo Kennedy pulls the trigger.

The lines on the Waitaha rarely look horrible, but they're usually tight. Swedish John and Mo play hide-and-go-sink.

A welcome and extremely temporary respite.

Halfway through the most stacked-up gorge, Zak Shaw, Matthew Shearer, Ben Jackson, and Mick Hopkinson from the New Zealand Kayak School catch up with us. Zak Shaw drops into the second big rapid of the beefy gorge.

After seeing a few people grease it, I underestimate the lead-in, fail to scout from river right, and take my worst line of the trip. Fuck.

Ben Jackson dials it, riding high on river right along a tight seam.

A few hundred yards downstream, back on the stick, and heading straight for the iconic cave rapid.

Finishing up the boof beneath the cave.

Waitaha class IV.

Starting the portage. In the overexposed part of this picture, the whole river hits a wall and makes a hard ninety-degree turn to the right. Since an A-teamer broke a rib trying to run it, the portage is an easy call.

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do...

Standing on the narrow footbridge above the Morgan Gorge, about to begin the portage.

Peering downstream, into the awe-inspiring Morgan Gorge.

The portage looks something like this.

Or like this.

Distracting myself during the portage by taking pictures of my knuckles. Oddly enough, Zak Shaw's write-up of the NZKS trip also has a knuckle-evaluation shot.

Standing on a three-foot wide ledge during the portage.

I'm thinking about trying out for America's Next Top Foot Model. Thanks, sandflies! I'm not going to say that my feet are ordinarily hotter than, say, Gisele Bundchen, but I promise I don't normally look like I have a cankle.

Wanganui

2008-01-04T20:10:00.000-08:00

Of the West Coast runs, the Wanganui wins the Dark Horse award; it doesn't get a lot of press. There are a couple of reasons for that: it doesn't ride shotgun in the nucky-nuck truck with the Upper Hokitika and the Waitaha, it's not as consistent as the Whitcombe and the Perth, and it's outside of Bruce Dando's typical fly zone. Nevertheless, it's a solid day of kayaking and a worthy run in its own right. At 200 f.p.m., the first two miles are as steep as the steepest sections of Cherry Creek, and the Wanganui typically pushes between 1,000 and 2,000 c.f.s., making it juicy river-running at its best. It tapers off to gentle class II - III for the last few miles, with some choice dig-your-own-pool hot springs just before take-out.

The single scariest experience of the trip: cowering between the skids of a moving helicopter and hooking a net of boats onto the underbelly. I'll take sketchy drops over a tail rotor any day.

A unique perspective on another crew.

Nick Abrams and Nick Herrald take a look at the Upper Wang.

Aussie Alex plants a textbook boof. California David backseats it, but looks like he's doing something cool.

Alaska Jon scouts Slip Rapid, the last major drop on the run.

A photo of Mo Kennedy from last summer, post-Slip Rapid. Both Mo and the pink-helmeted paddler look remarkably chipper, given the circumstances.

Perth

2008-01-02T21:07:00.000-08:00

The Perth is unquestionably a world-class run; it's challenging and technical, but honest. All of it is runnable, most of it is boat-scoutable, and all of the drops are easily portaged if need be.

There's also a flow gauge on the Internet. If you check the flow for the Whataroa, the Perth contributes about 40% of that; if you have between 100 and 140 cumecs in the Whataroa, you're probably good to go. If that's not an enticement after listening to locals vacillate about the levels in the Kokitahi and the Upper Hokitika, I don't know what is.

There are no huge, especially photogenic drops, but it doesn't let up; the river can handle anything from 1,400 to 2,200 c.f.s., and at one point, the gradient is nearly 260 f.p.m. Even when the river eases off into a gorge for some class IV run-out, the rapids are still high-quality.

In terms of continuous, challenging, and fun boating, this is one of the best runs on the South Island. It's also really pretty.

Scone Hut. If the weather is nice, the water is high, and you're in the mood for some more nucky-gnar, you can have the pilot drop your overnight gear at the hut and fly another 3 k.m. up the Perth. That 2 miles will probably take you the better part of a day. For an example of this escapade, see John Grace and Nikki Kelly in Amongst It.

Alaska Jon in the thick of it.

Alaska Jon sets safety above a log-choked sieve while I paddle away from aforementioned hazard.

If this rapid were food, it would be a bacon cheeseburger with a vanilla milkshake.

Nick Abrams: man or Superman?

Alex Kilyk airs it out on a typical Perth rapid.

Our one walk for the day. Sieve-y lead-in to more sieve-y shenanigans to this final sketchball drop. It's definitely runnable, but Alex Kilyk summed it up with: "Hey guys, if none of us dies, we can all go get ice cream after this!"

This is slightly misleading, since it's not actually the crew that went into the Perth, but it's a good example of what it looks like when kayakers don't die and get ice cream instead: triple scoops, for real. Left to right: Nick Abrams, Alex Kilyk, Nick Herrald, Alex Pentony-Vran, Mike "Slovak" Kobzik, Me.

Maruia Falls

2007-12-30T23:04:00.000-08:00

I'll try to keep my description as straightforward as the falls:

Maruia Falls is a Park and Huck.
It's close to Murchison, the hub of class II-III kayaking in New Zealand.
It's where Rush Sturges threw the first full front loop off a waterfall.
It's supposedly 33 feet tall.
It's probably the softest 33-foot drop you'll ever run.

Tucking like a mothertucker.

Alex Kilyk and Nick Abrams - Baby Blue Angels.

Alex Kilyk and Nick Abrams figure the timing out. The mom in me doesn't think that simultaneous runs on 33-foot waterfalls are a good idea, but they make for pretty pictures.

Whitcombe

2007-12-29T22:17:00.000-08:00

The Whitcombe River is named after the 19th-century kiwi explorer John Henry Whitcombe, who blazed one of the first trails from the Canterbury region to the West Coast. Along with his partner, Jakob Lauper, J.H.W. found a path through the Rakaia valley before stumbling upon a fortified Maori settlement, attempting to ford the flooded Taramakau River, and drowning. According to kiwi legend, Lauper later found Whitcombe buried head-first in a sandbank; only Whitcombe's boots were showing.

Ironically, when we ran the Whitcombe River, the water level was a little high, and a member of our party took one of the longest swims I've ever seen. Fortunately, we found him standing on shore and not buried head-first in a sandbank.

According to the guidebook, the river starts creeping towards Kiwi class V around 1,00 cumecs (approximately 3,500 c.f.s.). According to me, we probably had somewhere between 90 and 100 cumecs when we did the run. I wouldn't want it a whole lot higher for a first time down, but it was a great flow, and provided a lot of extremely continuous, big-water-ish, class IV - V rapids.

Bruce Dando and his fantastic Hughes 300.

Gettin' some.

Mo Kennedy, the only taker on this big drop, psyched to be in the run-out.

Considering options with Nick Abrams.

Alex Kilyk thinks about life.

It's almost too bad that the whole West Coast is consistently this beautiful, because you almost start to take it for granted. It's like when your polypro smells really, really, badly and you're so completely used to it that you can't even tell it's smelly any more but your friends tell you that it smells like something died and then rolled around in your clothes. Hypothetically.

Almost home free... Nick Herrald puts in the last strokes on the final long rapid.

Turnbull

2007-12-26T20:20:00.000-08:00

The view from our Christmas night campsite.

Some rivers in New Zealand have been afflicted with Didymosphenia geminata, an aggressive microscopic algae, a.k.a. Didymo, alias rock snot. Didymo makes things slimy. In order to prevent the spread of Didymo, when traveling between rivers, you have to soak everything you own in a 5% cleaner solution. This includes your boat, outer layers, and inner layers. Say goodbye to dry thermals. Having to (de-)Didymo your gear sucks, but so does the idea of slimy algae all over some of the world's most beautiful and pristine waterways. Nick Herrald gets down to business.

Access to the Turnbull is restricted by a gate with no fewer than six padlocks on it. Going on some sketchy Treasure Island-style beta that there's a key behind a tree fifty paces past the gate, we head to the Turnbull with high hopes. We find the key, but it doesn't fit any of the locks.

After unsuccessful attempts at sweet-talking a handful of farmers into opening up the gate to the Turnbull, we begin to discuss hiking in. While everyone else waffles about whether to sack up, Nick of Arabia has a tender moment with a horse.

Just as we all make the decision to hike the six miles into the Turnbull, a couple with a key to the gate pulls up in a huge blue truck and offers to drive us to the put-in. Kismet? A few weeks later, I find out that the same couple gave Zak Shaw and his brother Elby a ride to the top when they did the run.

Alex Kilyk unloads a boat off our savior's truck. Mystery half-carcass in the foreground. I'll buy you a beer if you can tell me what the heck kind of animal that is.

The Turnbull, looking for realsies at the put-in.

On a scale of 1 to boof: Lazy 7?

Nick Herrald amongst it on the Turnbull.

Tutoko

2007-12-24T23:16:00.000-08:00

The Good News:
The Tutoko is just half an hour out of Milford Sound, which is arguably one of the prettiest places in New Zealand.

The whitewater on the Tutoko is so continuous, so boat-scoutable, and so high-quality that you won't really have the time or the inclination to take any pictures.

If it has been raining and the Tutoko is flowing, the Cleddau is probably going too, which makes for a sweet day of kayaking. You can rally out of Milford, run the Cleddau, and then nab an afternoon run on the Tutoko.

The Bad News:
There's an intense two-hour walk-in that starts with a narrow muddy track and finishes with bushwhacking down a creek. You'll be stopping to catch your breath, which should give you plenty of time to take pictures.

Cleddau

2007-12-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

The Cleddau River begins life as braided cascades that stream down the steep faces of the mountains encircling Milford Sound. As the cascades meet and the Cleddau grows, it feeds into The Chasm, a sequence of mostly-unrunnable tiered waterfalls. Supposedly someone has abseiled into the gorge, run the cleanest of the large waterfalls, and then climbed out.

As far as I know, the first successful descent of the biggest of the drops was by an Australian girl a few weeks before we showed up.

Seriously, she fell into a whirlpool above a seventy-foot-ish drop. Yikes.

She didn't actually run the main falls; she ran the sinkhole-funnel-behind-the-falls-line, went through a tunnel, and fell out into a small cave on river left. She was uninjured except for a small bruise on her leg.

The Cleddau becomes mostly runnable past The Chasm. There are a handful of manky drops in the first few kilometers, but afterwards, the Cleddau eases to continuous class IV with a kilometer of flat water before it empties into Milford Sound.

Because we were lazy and not stoked about mank, we decided to put on where the road passes near the river, somewhere in the midst of the IV stuff.

The view at put-in. Jimmy the Sea Kayaker takes a break from guiding tourists around the Sound.

Jimmy the Sea Kayaker is stoked that he does not have to allay tourists' fears about kayak-eating sharks today.

Nick Abrams and Alex Pentony-Vran direct traffic down the Cleddau.

Looking upstream towards the end of the rapids.

Cruising downstream towards Milford Sound. There aren't many runs in the world where you can put in close to the headwaters of a river and then paddle out to the ocean in a few hours.

Falls Creek & Marian Creek | Hollyford River

2007-12-22T21:31:00.000-08:00

The Hollyford is solid gold. A quick drive from Te Anau or Milford Sound, it offers at least four quality runs, ranging all the way from class II to class V+, and all set against the backdrop of Fiordland's snow-capped peaks. We spent a few days on the Hollyford, waiting for rain in Milford Sound, and they were some of the best days of paddling that we had in New Zealand.

Falls Creek is a great run. It's not particularly challenging, but it's stacked with fun little moves like this. You can bomb it in twenty minutes, or you can spend almost an hour and catch every eddy, rail slide every rock, and boof every small pour-over. Either way, it's fun.

Mike "Slovak" Kobzik, Nick Herrald, and Jeorg Hackinger show us their boof faces on Falls Creek. You know what I'm talkin' about. Click on faces for source pictures.

In 1950, Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, proposed a seminal test for machine intelligence: a human judge engages in a written conversation with a machine and a human, each of which are trying to "pass" as human. If the judge cannot tell which is which, then the machine can be called intelligent. Since Turing proposed it, The Turing Test has been debated by some of the world's foremost philosophers.

In its place, I offer The Maurier Test, which is slightly more simple. It goes like this: if you don't find the Hollyford River beautiful, congratulations, you're a robot.

The most technical drop on Marian Creek. See the second photograph in the sequence for evidence of the mythical draw-boof; unlike chupacabras, Bigfoot, and unicorns, the draw-boof really exists.

Laying down a rail on the Burn and carving into an S-turn.

Alex Kilyk probes one of the crux rapids on Marian Creek.

The crew, left to right: Nick Herrald, Nick Abrams, Joerg Hackinger, Mo Kennedy, me, Alex Kilyk, Mike Kobzik, and Alex Pentony-Vran.

Rallying in towards Milford Sound.

Kayakers and gypsies have a lot in common: they work odd jobs, they're scrappy, and they're capable of creating shanty towns wherever they go.

Bowman Creek

2007-12-11T15:05:00.000-08:00

Bowman Creek : A One-Act Debacle, Presented Through Choice Quotes

The content from this post comes mostly from Zak Shaw; I would have taken pictures and quotes, but I was too busy trying not to pin.

I just scouted this sweet class IV creek in Auburn. It's pretty continuous... there aren't any eddies, but it looks like a hoot!
Corey Tucker, on Monday

Most of the trees are vertical, so...
Me

As far as rivers go, that's about as dangerous as they get.
Zak Shaw, after scouting the creek

What does Zak know, anyway? It's not like he's a professional kayaker with first descents on four continents.
Me

I've had a lot of time in my boat lately, and I'm not feeling desperate for an adventure. It looks like there are some good pictures in there. If I were running it, I'd want someone on shore with a bag.
Zak Shaw

I'm out. I was on the fence, but after hearing Zak's pep talk, I'm out. I'll be on shore in my 501's with my lifejacket and two throw bags.
Josh Mahoney

Look at it this way, your situation got a whole lot better now that I'm on the bank with a rope.
Zak Shaw

So, Josh, if you could be waiting ten yards above the weir, ready to grab our boats, that would be awesome.
Me

I'm not sure if I have the authority to stop you.
Random PG&E Employee

We just spent an hour scouting it, and we have two guys doing safety for us. I think we'll be fine.
Me

I just talked to my boss, and the sheriff's going to arrest you if you put on.
Random PG&E Employee, to Corey

Let's go.
Me

You know, dude, I dreamed my way down this run last night. There was no interaction with trees. No pins. How did things change so quickly?
Corey Tucker

You actually swam in the best possible spot.
Josh Mahoney

You know what the biggest surprise was? When we looked at it, I was like, "those trees aren't in play." But the trees were totally in play! I hit three out of the three that I came to.
Corey Tucker

If it weren't for the pin, I would have made it to take-out with my hair dry.
Corey Tucker

At the put-in, I felt confident, but I also felt like we were running from the law.
Corey Tucker

Maybe next time.
Corey Tucker, on Tuesday, to the sheriff who came to arrest us for running the creek, but decided not to when we hiked out following a hideous pin

The creek looks like this for about a mile and a half. Note the gradient between the top of the picture and the bottom of the drop.

I'm about to fade off the right side of the drop into a backed-up hole, which I'm going to work out of. Corey is about to pin. It turns out it's trickier to work out of a pin.

The Burn is very light, which makes hiking out of a creek really easy.

I'm not sure what I'm saying here, but I'm pretty sure it's stupid. Since when do I have a mullet?

Good thing we had to hike out, or we might have been arrested.

[All pictures courtesy of Zak Shaw]

Ramsey's | North Fork of the Stanislaus

2007-12-03T13:34:00.000-08:00

As soon as Spicer started spilling last Wednesday, I started trying to rally people for a weekend run. I wanted to get a head start since I figured it might take a few days to convince anyone; the Saturday forecast called for twenty m.p.h. winds and temperatures in the high twenties. Wednesday rolled by, and then Thursday, and some time around Friday afternoon, I started to realize that most of the people I was trying to rally thought it was a really bad idea.

So when one of my roommates invited me to an Iron and Wine concert in Oakland, I abandoned Plan A. Instead of freezing my ass off in some remote granite gorge, I was going to settle for some good music and a few rounds of Spot the Hipster.

Iron and Wine is great, but extremely down-tempo and kind of a downer. In low doses, it's a downer in a good way, like nostalgia and really shitty weather, but I wasn't sure if I could handle a few hours of it live. Fortunately, the show was awesome, and I won the first round of Spot the Hipster for noticing four guys in cycling caps, heavy scarves, and thick-rimmed glasses standing next to each other.

The next day, I charged over to the River Store to meet up with Mahoney for a run down the S. Fork of the American. It was almost ridiculously cold, which kept the line at First Threat short and made wave wheels a lot more exciting, since going underwater felt like a sure road to facial frostbite. Things were a little dicey by the time we reached Old Spooky and Gremlin, but we managed to make it to take-out before one of us lost a nose.

I was enjoying the post-run afterglow, about to do some reading on the international salmon trade, when Karrie and Culley stopped by and started talking to me about heading to the North Stanislaus. Unfortunately, the Highland Creek gauge had stopped reading on Friday night, so we had no idea if it was still flowing or not. In the end, we decided we'd wake up at 5:00 A.M., haul ass to the take-out for Hell's Kitchen, and then we could make it back in time for Chili Bar if the North Stanislaus wasn't still running.

Amazingly, when we showed up at the Sourgrass Bridge the next morning, there was water in the river.

For the kayak nerds:

With the high-elevation granite-gorge atmosphere and the short hike in, it felt a lot like a scaled-down High Sierra run. I was surprised by the quality of the first granite gorge; it was short, but comparable to other amazing granite like Devil's Canyon. Culley and I both have broken our waterproof cameras, so we didn't grab any pictures, but Darin's site definitely does it justice. There were a few great boofs, some fun slides, and a handful of technical multi-move rapids. We did a lot of aggressive boat scouting, and the few times we had to get out of our boats, it was because it was hideously manky. At 200 c.f.s., there weren't any heinous hydraulics; pins, pitons, and body hits from rocks were more of a threat than beatdowns.

A lot of the bigger rapids were basically single moves and felt IV+, but the day felt very V overall. It's hard to say whether this run is harder or easier than things like Cherry Creek or 49 to Bridgeport since it's such lower volume, and it's hard to compare it to a lot of creeks since it has a lot of boulder gardens. Fordyce is probably the closest comparison - some not-fun-but-runnable mank, some manky-but-fun rapids, and a handful of really clean, really classic drops.

Overall, it was a great run, and definitely worth doing this late in the year when nothing else is running. It would clean up with another 50 or 100 c.f.s., but even at 200, it's better than anything else in the state right now, and I'm stoked I got on it. Big thanks to Karrie and Culley for re-motivating me to make the effort and being awesome to paddle with; it's pretty rare that you get a couple trying to talk you into a high-elevation class V run in the winter.

There are directions to the alternate put-in in Holbek and Stanley, but the gates to Ramsey Road have been locked for years, and people have been taking another route lately. Thanks to Nate Hunkapiller and Keith Kishiyama for good beta. I haven't seen directions for how to get to the put-in anywhere else, so here they are:

Cross the Sourgrass Bridge and follow the road onto the river left side. It will keep going downstream for a minute or two, and then cut back upstream. The road stays paved for a surprising amount of time before changing into a halfway-decent logging road. There are a few forks; when in doubt, stay left.

After about eight miles and change of driving, you'll make a semi-hard left down onto a slightly sketchy-looking road. There might be pink flagging. If you've made the correct turn, you'll pass a small bridge over a tiny creek within a few hundred yards. The road has a few big washes and rocks, so it's nice to have a high-clearance vehicle, but you don't need 4-wheel drive. Follow this road to an obvious dead-end, and there will be a poorly-defined trail marked by some pink flagging. It'll probably take about half an hour of semi-off-trail hiking before you hit the river.

Chop Wood, Carry Water

2007-11-15T21:23:00.000-08:00

It's dry in California.

I haven't paddled anything except Barking Dog and the Chili Bar in three weeks; Hell's Kitchen came in, teased us for three days, and then dropped out when the weekend rolled around.

The days are short, I'm in graduate school, and I've got a full month before I get to go to New Zealand for some creeking. How am I staying sane?

1. Matrix Algebra

Sure, Conklin is in Nepal. Josh and Corey are in Veracruz. Kat and Taylor are in San Luis Potosi. Ben and Zak are in Kathmandu. Whitney and Mauricio are in New Zealand. Whatever. Fine. No big deal. I'm not jealous.

I'm in Davis, I'm studying matrix algebra, and I'm okay with that. As anyone in California can attest, Davis is a charming town, and as anyone who has studied matrix algebra can attest, matrix algebra is more magical than unicorns.

After all, Davis has The Davis Co-op, a co-operative grocery store. Where else can you buy hemp milk and homemade hummus in a soothing atmosphere that somehow manages to be reminiscent of both dirtbag hippies and clean-cut socially-minded Scandinavians?

Also, Davis has at least five yoga studios, including a Bikram studio, if you're into getting half-naked and sweaty with strangers. God knows I am, and God knows I'm thankful that I've finally found a socially acceptable outlet for the impulse. My favorite part, aside from the inevitable guy who definitely isn't the instructor but who nonetheless looks like a furry version of Tarzan wearing a diaper, is Bhujangasana, the Cobra Pose. Just kidding. My favorite part is actually wheezing and feeling like I'm fat for an hour and a half.

Anyway, the two things that Davis doesn't seem to have a lot of are:

A) Multi-day Class V runs
B) Impishly-cute impoverished children that want to borrow my kayak

So it doesn't look like I'm going to get any "sick" "footie" for my kayaking movie (tentatively titled "No Great Paddlers 1: Shit You Might Actually Run") any time soon.

But, I did just learn the Implicit Function Theorem, the Slutsky (seriously) equation, and the fatal flaw of Brander and Spencer's analysis of export subsidies. All of which information, I'm sure, is really going to come in handy someday soon.

So next year, if you find me in the back of my truck, eating dry oats out of a paper cup and waiting for a run to come in, do me a favor and ask me about the Slutsky equation. It'll make me feel like I got my money's worth.

2. Eating

Nothing keeps the seasonal "blahs" away like a good old-fashioned eating binge. As a bonus, if I eat enough, I figure I can save on insulating layers when the winter boating season rolls around. My favorites for fall-winter binge-eating include Nutella, chocolate chip cookies, and chocolate chip cookies dipped in Nutella.

3. Sleeping

My logic: the more I sleep, the faster the rainy season will come.

4. Hatching New Schemes

Scheme I:

Buy a goat for my parents (Merry Christmas!), befriend the goat, and periodically borrow the the goat to use as a pack animal in order to hike into remote parts of California. Possibly with a kayak.

After discussion with Greg Speicher, I discarded the final step (eat the goat) on the grounds that it seemed a little unfair, both to the goat and to my parents.

Scheme II:

Go to Portugal, buy a van, and use the van to drive to Norway, stopping at all of the rivers on the way, and some rivers that might not be on the way. Definitely with a kayak.

Scheme III:

Mongolia. Horses. Kayaks. Bicycles.

Of course, all the schemes sound hare-brained and improbable, but so did bicycling from Albania to Turkey, and that worked out so well that it created a successful sub-scheme that incorporated Oktoberfest, a bicycle, and the Rhine river from the Switzerland to the Netherlands...

So you never know. A lot can happen.

But for the meantime, I've got a Master's degree to finish, and until that's over with, I'll be doing matrix algebra and praying for rain.

Relaxing on a roadside recliner somewhere near the Adriatic last September. No math in sight. Yes, my legs are disproportionately thick.

My friend Arthur standing in a field of sunflowers, somewhere in Bulgaria. Nutella-covered chocolate-chip cookies or no, reminiscing about a moment like this can make you less than 100% keen on sticking around to see how this whole Slutsky equation thing turns out.

Slab Creek Negotiations

2007-10-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

Hilde Schweitzer sent me a notice about an upcoming meeting about releases on the Slab Creek run near Placerville. To make a long story short, there's a meeting with FERC coming up next Monday, and if you're anywhere near Placerville, you should attend.

Reasons you might be interested in showing up:

1) You are, or might become, a paddle-sports enthusiast, and want to see flows on a beautiful and challenging stretch of whitewater that has been unnaturally de-watered.

2) You have, or might someday have, a kid who is, or might someday become, a paddle-sports enthusiast with an appreciation for water that is white and the out-of-doors.

Reasons you might not be interested in showing up:

1) You've hated being outside and having fun ever since you were picked last for capture the flag in fourth grade.

2) You have, or might someday have, a child who also hates fun and the outdoors.

The point here is that dams don't come up for relicensing very often. In the case of Slab, it looks like it's going to be another 50 years before anyone has a chance to influence what happens to all of the beautiful water that is being locked away up there.

To make a long story short, what happens with Slab in the near future will not only affect you, but your children. Hilde and others have done a fantastic job of negotiating releases, but the agreed-upon releases are being called into doubt by some inflated cost figures that SMUD has thrown into the mix. Take two hours out of your evening and come help make the case for the value of recreational releases; you can Tivo NBC's hit show Heroes, and that case of PBR in your refrigerator is not going to take it personally if you stand it up for one night. I promise.

The only thing that's almost as awesome as kayaking is showing an interest in your local watershed. Tell your friends.

Date: Monday, November 5, 2007
Time: 7:00 - 9:30 p.m. (PST)
Place: Best Western Placerville Inn: 6850 Green Leaf Drive, Placerville, CA.

First Annual Icehouse Race

2007-10-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

Winners of the 2007 Icehouse Race
Team Mostly Chicks:
Katrina Skarda, Ashley Maurier, David Maurier, Wendy Sue, and Josh Mahoney.

2nd Place:
Team Early-to-the-Put-In:
Fuchs, Van Hout, The Rizzler, Eric Wright, et al.

3rd Place:
Team Playboat:
Alan, Sean, Thomas, Eric

It was looking close for a little while, but there were three decisive factors that propelled Team Mostly Chicks to victory:

1) Team Playboat got out after the triple drop and relaxed.

2) Team Early-to-the-Put-In had a swimcident right above the last massive river-wide log, resulting in a broached boat.

3) We are a bunch of sissies, and when it got cold, we started paddling for the take-out as fast as we could.

I should probably also add that I don't think any of the other teams knew there was a race going on.

Anyway, we did the whole run with two portages, which are in pretty quick succession after one another, about a third of the way into the run. There are three other significant logjams; you can boof over two of them and ride the third one out in the bushes on the right. There's also a sweet river-wide log that you can flip to clear if you're not super flexible, or, if you've been practicing for that Cirque Du'Soleil audition, you can just tuck forward.

Representative rapid on the Icehouse run. Notice the lack of hydraulics and the abundance of trees in the streambed. Notice to "Green" energy enthusiasts: de-watering a river to generate power may alter the ecosystem.

Working title: Wendy, Two Logs, and A Small Rapid.

Fortunately, Katrina Skarda's massive shoulders do not prevent her from passing safely underneath the log.

(Photos courtesy of Josh Mahoney)

Gutters of the Earth

2007-10-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

Taylor has a new kayaking blog. He runs rivers that challenge even the most dedicated enthusiasts of paddlesports and doesn't take himself too seriously. With some ambitious paddling in Mexico and Guatemala to come this winter, it should be interesting.

Check it out at:

http://guttersoftheearth.blogspot.com/

Cali Burn Fest

2007-10-14T20:34:00.000-07:00

Downriver races are awesome, mass starts are awesome, Burnt Ranch is awesome, seeing a bunch of paddlers from all over the state is awesome, and Rita The Local is awesome for hosting a bunch of random-ass kayakers.

Thanks to Paul and all of the rest of Caliproduct for organizing a sweet event.

How do you warm up for the Burnt Ranch downriver race? If you're this guy: kegstands. If you're me: drink a few beers and try to fall asleep in the trunk of a Subaru.

Wendy is dancing. Taylor is dancing. Katrina is drinking. Conklin is drinking.

Whitewater kayaking is fun for guys and girls. Welcome to the pre-race Bro-deo.

Entering the gorge before the race.

Spectators spectating at #2, the finish line.

Finished kayakers watching and waiting for carnage above #3.

The Crack Gets Run

2007-10-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, a couple of kids fired up the last un-run rapid on the South Fork of the Feather. A few years ago, Rusty was the first (and last) to do the 30-footer onto the rock shelf, and Charlie ran the sieve. A few days ago, Taylor fired up the hideous crack at the end.

Ironically, the first time the drop got run, it was an accident, and it was about two minutes before Taylor ran it. Someone wasn't really paying attention, fell out of the last-chance eddy above the drop, and unintentionally fired it up. Taylor presumably took guy's survival as a positive sign, and decided to give it a shot.

Apparently Taylor ran the drop the next two days, too...

As anyone who has looked at the crack can attest, it looks extremely messed-up. People who run Gorilla on Upper Cherry don't even think twice about portaging the S. Feather Crack. Now Taylor just needs to give it a name...

Mank Fork Feather

2007-10-08T21:19:00.000-07:00

Every time I have paddled the South Fork of the Feather, it has been epic.

For example:

1) Freezing-Ass Remote Hike Out vs. Blind Descent of An Unfamiliar Run - You Choose!

Chris Tulley and I put on with two other boaters. None of us have done the run before, and the other two paddlers are expecting more class III-IV and less class IV-V.

It takes us approximately six hours to reach the crack portage. The sun sets, and the already frosty gorge begins to look less like a fun place to kayak and more like a good habitat for emperor penguins.

The other two boaters decide to hike out.Tulley and I are not convinced that hiking out is the better option; we are deeply concerned about becoming peoplesicles. Instead, we decide to paddle the remaining three miles in complete darkness.

We may as well be blind. When we hear a really loud rapid, sometimes we try to get out and walk on the shore, but this proves nearly as dangerous as running the rapids blind. Tulley is remarkably calm. I am terrified out of my mind.

2) An Epic in 3 Acts

I. One paddler gets stuck in a room-of-doom eddy-cave with no clear exit except for a sieve. He dry-exits his boat and free-climbs the forty-foot chimney that forms the eddy.

II. A different paddler decides to run a commonly-portaged rapid based on some sketchy beta that "Charlie Center ran it" (note: this is never a good reason to consider running a rapid. In fact, it should probably make you think twice). He vertically pins, quickly pops his skirt, stands on his backband, and executes an amazing broad jump past the sieve and into the relative safety of a pothole eddy. His boat is immediately sucked underwater into the sieve, where it stays. He hikes out.

III. A third paddler becomes stuck in a shallow ledge hole right above the crack portage. His paddle breaks, and he swims. We rope him to safety while his boat continues downstream, through the portage, and on to parts unknown. He hikes out.

Needless to say, I went in with mixed expectations this last weekend. It's definitely a fun run with some quality rapids, but there's some weird voodoo around it; it sees a lot more carnage than your typical class IV-V run. And last weekend was no exception.

So, without further ado, here's the carnage count for the past weekend:

Boats dropped during the initial mankportages, resulting in broken hulls and (unmanned) descents of the 30-footer: 2

Hikes out: 1

Rafters that obtained the first raft descent: 4 (way to go Guy, Melissa, Kathy, and Ben!)

Rafters that hiked out of the freezing-ass canyon up to the ridgeline and spent the night sleeping in the woods, huddled around a makeshift fire, wishing they had brought more food and some sleeping bags: 4

Swims through hideous sieves: 1

Swims due to logs: 1

Swims due to waterfalls: 1

Swims due to funny water in narrow slots above twelve-footers: 1

Number of times I pitoned: 6

Number of times I felt like I broke my right ankle: 2

Number of times I actually broke my right ankle: 0 (fingers crossed!)

Number of times I have pitoned before in my life: 0

Number of times my paddle got chocked in a narrow slot and ripped out of my hands, forcing a hand-boof on a six-foot drop: 1

Erick Conklin nailing the boof beneath the 30-footer.

I was waving at a squirrel downstream. Fortunately, I didn't swim.

(Photos by Zak Shaw)

The Dog Hog

2007-09-30T17:27:00.000-07:00

I've been paddling around Lotus for four years, but I just started sessioning The Dog this year. Before, I always felt like Park n' Play was kind of a cop-out; sitting in one spot, throwing ends and spinning around for hours without a change in scenery seemed like a hobby for:

a) stoners
b) people with an advanced case of OCD

I'm still convinced that most good playboaters definitely have some elements of a) or b), and preferably both, but I'm starting to appreciate how much fun it can be, and how much I was missing out on. For one thing, it's incredible practice. For a long time, I came with the attitude that the best practice for river running and creeking was river running and creeking, but after focusing on playboating for a little while, I'm pretty sure that's not true.

Early in the spring, I was paddling Cherry Creek at a pretty high flow and a bunch of the Kiwi boys, fresh off Worlds, came flying past us at Unknown Soldier. Sam Sutton bombed down the right side, got hit by a big curling wave, his boat went airborne, and he started to flip. I was pretty sure he was going to ride the rest of the rapid out on his head, but he committed to the momentum and turned what would have been an ugly line into a low-elevation but completely aerial airscrew. I wish I had it on video.

It turns out freestyle is good, downriver freestyle is better, and completely improvised downriver freestyle is probably the most awesome thing anyone can do in a kayak. For another good example, check out Dave Fusilli's loop on Yule Creek in Colorado.

To make a long story short, I'm over my hang-up about Park n' Play, and whenever the goods aren't going in California, I'll be at Barking Dog, trying to develop some playboating OCD.

Summer's Over

2007-09-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the summer, Joe Bosquin mentioned that he had camped out at Cherry Creek one year and pulled off almost thirty runs over the course of a few months. For some reason, even though I wasn't working and I was motivated to paddle, I'd never even thought about doing that.

So when July rolled around and the rest of the state was dry, it seemed like a good time to borrow a page from the Book of Joe. The water in Washington was dropping out, and it was still early for most of the B.C. classics. I loaded my truck up with a lawn chair, a cooler, and a borrowed two-burner propane stove, and headed for Casa Loma.

Over the next six weeks, I got the chance to paddle with almost every motivated class V paddler in the state of California; with nothing else running, people converged on The Creek like kids rallying to an ice cream truck. In more than thirty runs down The Creek, I never had to set shuttle down Lumsden Road, I only had to do a handful of solo runs, and it seemed like I only had to cook dinner every second or third night. As one Kiwi put it, "The Creek provides." Which is true.

But The Creek doesn't only provide; it delivers. With almost nine miles of semi-continuous class III and IV, the occasional V, and no portages, it's the perfect mid-summer run to session; you can't be sloppy, but once you have the lines sorted out, it's not extremely high-risk relative to the quality of the rapids that you get to paddle, and you never have to get out of your boat.

Not that it's a pushover. While I was on The Creek this summer, a bunch of people had heinous experiences. There was a dislocated shoulder requiring a helicopter evacuation [Mushroom], three trips through heinous sieves (one nearly fatal) [Mushroom, Christmas Tree, Flat Rock], a subluxed shoulder [Unknown Soldier], a hideous out-of-boat-recirculation [Richard's Hole], two destroyed boats [Flat Rock], a bad vertical pin [Catapult], one hike-out [Guillotine], and more than twenty swims [nearly every single rapid on the run].

Sometimes driving other people's cars out of Lumsden Road doesn't go well. I promise you, it's not our fault; the racks were loose.

The scene at Casa Loma.

Ben Jackson checks out the right side at Flat Rock (hint: it doesn't go any more).

Hanging out at The Dust Bowl at sunset, waiting for the next day's run.

We had the last release of the season today, and it feels like Fall is on the way in. Forget about the autumn equinox; Summer ends in California when Cherry Creek stops flowing.

B.S.B.S.E. Addendum

2007-09-13T19:18:00.000-07:00

Update:

According to reliable sources in Groveland, the original account was a little off.

The killer actually appropriated the kayaking gear directly from the victim, which suggests that the victim was the kayakthief.

Evidence of a fast-acting overzealous karmic agent?

The Best Stolen Boat Story Ever

2007-09-09T19:38:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, a photo-boater on the Tuolumne left his boat and his gear at Ward's Ferry, the take-out for the lower run. Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication, the gear was left unattended, and an opportunistic tweaker decided to carpe the diem and steal all of the photog's stuff and throw it into a nearby ravine.

Ordinarily, the story would stop here: Tweakers 1, Kayakers 0.

However, a few weeks later, a Tuolumne County local allegedly decided to kill someone, and then allegedly put the corpse into a car. Guy then rolled the car into a ravine and torched it off to dispose of the evidence. Allegedly, when the car didn't burn quite like he was expecting, he went down into the ravine, where he discovered the kayaking gear and hit upon the brilliant plan of paddling the kayak across the reservoir to freedom at Moccasin Point.

Fortunately, the police were waiting for him at Moccasin Point, and they took him into custody along with the kayaking gear. It looks like the photo-boater will get all of his stuff back after the trial.

How crazy is that?

Road Trip #3: B.C. | Fraser Canyon and Home

2007-08-30T15:24:00.000-07:00

Our last run before heading for the Fraser Canyon was the Upper Birkenhead. In general, I had agreed with the local ratings for runs, despite the rumors that everything in B.C. was generally half a grade harder than stated. It didn't feel like anything was sandbaggy, it was just a departure from California ratings; a lot of times in California, if a class III run has a single class IV rapid on it, it'll get a class IV rating. In B.C., runs that were rated class IV were actually mostly class IV rapids, which seems fair.

The Upper Birkenhead was the one exception. Word on the street had it as class IVish, but after paddling it, I can't endorse that. At lower flows, there's some continuous, extremely manky IV+, and the run ends with a long class V gorge that terminates in a wicked logjam. Still, grade aside, it was a fun run, and I'd love to see it with more water.

The crew gets ready for the Upper Birk.

After the Upper Birk, we rounded out the trip with some play runs on the Fraser and the Nahatlach Canyon, before completing the thousand-mile drive back in a single twenty-hour push, with a break in Bellingham for food.

Next summer, I'll probably start on the east side near Lytton and then work my way around north back towards Whistler. It seems like the stuff on the east side, like the Nahatlach, the Stein and the Cayoosh, have an earlier season, while the Whistler stuff goes at a variety of flows. It'll definitely be interesting to see what happens to the runnability of the Ashlu...

Road Trip #3: B.C. | Skookumchunk

2007-08-26T15:22:00.000-07:00

With my Ashlu hunger sated, it was time to go to Skookumchuck to check out the wave. Neither of us are super-motivated playboaters, but we had a 4twenty handy, and if you're in B.C., you can't skip Skook. We stopped off at my buddy Billy's place in Vancouver for a little bowling and a pub mission before heading for the ferry the next morning.

Note on the ferry: if you can manage to keep your vehicle with a low (like, average truck size) clearance, you'll be stoked, since it'll keep you from having to pay an extra $20 or so.

Seeing seals, starfish, and seaweed next to a big play feature was definitely a trip, but the biggest surprise for me was the crowd of tourists that come out to see the rapids.

Surfing Skookumchunk with a new friend.

Wow, crowds at a play spot.

Road Trip #3: B.C. | Squamish

2007-08-24T15:13:00.000-07:00

After paddling around Whistler for a few more days, we headed down to the Ashlu. After reading about some of the controversy surrounding the river (see Bryan Smith's The Range Life blog or watch his video), I was pretty motivated to get on the Mine run, since I knew it could be my last chance before the dam goes in. Fortunately, Stookesbury, Evan Garcia, Austin Rathman, and Lizzie English were motivated to get on it.

I had heard that it could be pretty full-on, but it was exactly the kind of river running that I like; plenty of water, pushy, and some big moves. The sketchiest part of the whole thing was actually the mandatory portage, which is this messed-up affair involving balancing on your boat right next to an undercut, grabbing for some slippery rocks, and hoping you don't wash downstream into the class VI mess. Kudos to Austin for leading it and Stookesbury for having the good sense to stabilize people's boats from a narrow shelf in the eddy. It would be awesome to have a rope there.

English David fires up the right line on Last Tango, the last rapid of the Mine (photo by Bob Wilkerson).

Looking upstream at 50-50, the start of Commitment Canyon. If you're running the Mine, you should probably get out at the bridge visible upstream (photo by Bob Wilkerson).

Road Trip #3: B.C. | Whistler

2007-08-20T15:06:00.000-07:00

After a day or two on the Nooksack, we got some beta from the Bellinghamsters and motivated to finish the drive to British Columbia. We headed straight for the takeout of the Upper Cheakamus, which is theoretically a day-use area, but in practice is the informal campground and meet-up spot for Whistler boating in the summer.

There is so much good whitewater up here.

The paddling in B.C. was awesome. The runs tended to be short but continuous. Within the first day or two, we had already knocked off the Triple Crown (the Soo, the Callaghan, and the Upper Cheakamus), all short, but all great class IV/IV+ runs. If you were motivated, you could definitely do all three in a day.

Blueberries growing wild? This is truly the land of milk and honey. And whitewater.

Me tucking to prevent the reportedly mysteriously hard hit on the fifteen footer (taken by Bob Wilkerson).

Oh god please don't run it this way (taken by Bob Wilkerson).

Scouting the 25-footer on Callaghan (taken by Bob Wilkerson).

Unidentified paddler giving the late righty boof (taken by Bob Wilkerson).

Up around the Lillooet. Fun big-water play, hot springs, and interesting driving. It was like we were filming a car commercial, only there were fewer women, fewer cameras, and everything smelled like wet feet.

Road Trip #3: B.C. | Washington Eddy

2007-08-15T23:35:00.000-07:00

Where do you go in late August when California starts to dry up?

I'll tell you where you go. Someplace cold and wet. A place where the beer flows like maple syrup, and the whitewater never ends. Where bearded men and kayaking dirtbags instinctively flock like the Salmon of Capistrano. I'm talking about a little place called Whistler.

On the way up north, we decided to stop in Bellingham to visit some friends Amy and Eric. I was concerned about paddling with them, mostly because I thought they might try to get revenge; about a year and a half ago, Bob and I rallied them for a play run on the Middle Yuba. Then the ordinarily-mild Our House Dam run flooded, raising from a fun flow of 2,000 c.f.s. to more than 12,000 c.f.s. while we were on the water. Needless to say, we pulled the pin, which meant we spent our night in pitch black, wandering around the canyon until we found an old logging road out. It was so dark we literally numbered off and kept saying our assigned numbers to make sure we hadn't lost anyone. At one point, I remember suggesting: "Let's just dig a hole."

Anyhow, Amy and Eric apparently decided to let bygones be bygones because they didn't abandon us in the forest somewhere. Instead, they motivated us to paddle the North Fork of the Nooksack, a sweet class IV run right outside of Bellingham. It's short, but it's mostly rapids, and the shuttle only takes ten minutes.

Bench Drop on the North Fork of the Nooksack (taken by Bob Wilkerson).

Fun run, fun rapid. SAT on the North Fork of the Nooksack (taken by Bob Wilkerson).

Cherry Creek Race

2007-08-04T23:25:00.000-07:00

After paddling Cherry Creek a solid twenty-six times in the few months since I first paddled it at the start of the spring, I felt like I might be ready for the Cherry Creek Race.

I was mostly wrong. To start with, Scott Lindgren was starting behind me, and the starts were only staggered by two minutes, which pretty much suggested I was going to get lapped and totally demoralized.

I didn't get lapped, but it was a near thing. At a few points during the race, I turned around, and I could see Scott, gaining on me. You know how in horror movies the hero is always running as fast as he can, just totally charging, and somehow the monster is gaining on him, even though it looks like the monster is barely moving? That's what it felt like to paddle in front of Scott.

Anyway, Lindgren, completely off the couch, annihilated me by a one-minute margin and a random Italian named Alberto Vitari edged me out by thirty seconds to land me in third place in the short boat class. If you ask a lot of people, winning third place in the short boat class is a little bit like graduating magna cum laude from a community college; it's totally positive, but maybe not super competitive. But as the only non-professional-kayaker to place, I'll take what I can get.

Peeps getting suited up at the put-in.

Running Lumsden Falls at the end of the race.

Hiking Upper Cherry Creek

2007-07-14T23:18:00.000-07:00

I've been camped out at Cherry Creek for a few weeks now. They shut off the water every other Sunday, so Joe Bosquin and I decided that we'd try to hike in to Flinstone Camp on Upper Cherry. In Joe's words, we were "looking for the girlfriend route." We didn't find it. At Lookout Point, we cut straight down, off-trail, and climbed over a bunch of granite domes, manzanita, and scree slopes. I cleverly decided to wear Converse All-Stars (I need to buy some real shoes), which resulted in the destruction of both my feet and my shoes, and almost caused me to break my ankles. Twice.

Nonetheless, it was totally worth it.

This place is unreal, even when it's not running.

Teacups at the base of Cherry Bomb gorge.

Joe and the granite.

Road Trip #2: California (Klamath)

2007-07-02T23:12:00.000-07:00

On the way back home from the Little White, I stopped off near Happy Camp for a Fourth of July-family rafting trip down the Klamath.

Someone was trying to tell me that Happy Camp actually used to be called Murderer's Bar, and then it changed its name to try and get some better P.R. mojo. True or false?

The moms and the dads.

My twelve year-old cousin Jesse, who styled his first class III that trip.

Row, row, row your boat...

Road Trip #2: Washington (Green Truss, Little White Salmon)

2007-06-25T23:00:00.000-07:00

Washington was so good that I couldn't stay away. When I found out that a couple of my ~~Hobbit~~ Kiwi friends were going, I got right back in my car and drove back up.

We got on the Truss this time, but I can't say I was totally impressed. Double Drop felt like a complete dice roll, and Big Brother wasn't as clean as I like my 25-footers. Little Brother and Zig Zag were fun, but there was wood in the lower Zig Zag that forced a pretty wicked portage.

The Little White is definitely the more classic of the two.

S-Turn is good, clean, fun.

Ben Jackson getting ready to nail the fifteen-footer on S-Turn.

Josh Neilson of Whitewater Koa greasing Spirit.

Brendan Bailey with a sweet launch off Little Brother on the Truss.

Road Trip #1: Oregon (Clackamas)

2007-06-19T10:12:00.000-07:00

After the Little White, it was time to head back towards California. But not before we dropped in on the Clackamas to check out the play run. Nate and Matty decided that the run might be a little too scenic for them, but I'm always stoked to get on a new stretch of river and check it out.

The Clackamas is scenic for sure.

Kayaking!

Class II - III has never looked so rad.

Or has it?! Ashley nails a boof.

Road Trip #1: Washington (Cooper, Little White Salmon)

2007-06-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

After Idaho, it was time to begin moving towards the raison d'etre for the trip: The Little White Salmon.

But first, we stopped off to run the Cooper river near Cle Elum. We ran into Leland and Andrea of Brushy Mountain Publishing, hooked up with a big crew, and set out. Aside from a few stouter drops near the bottom, it was mostly fun and interesting class IV, with a lot of discrete drops and a few longer rapids. It felt like it a small step up from Pauley or Lavezolla in California, but similar in character.

Woop Woop! Low-stress creeking.

This drop is bigger than it looks here. I swear.

Nate, Matty, and Ashley ask: why is Washington so goddamned cold in the middle of the Summer?

Local performs a magic trick.

After a few days on the Cooper, we were stoked to head over to the Little White. Leland and Andrea mentioned that they were going that direction, so we met up with them. The run, though low according to locals (2.6 on the stick gauge), was everything it's cracked up to be. Whatever kind of rapid you like, it's in there, from technical boulder gardens to ledges to small slides to bigass waterfalls. It's no wonder you find a lot of great boaters around Hood River and Portland.

None of us had run it before, and Leland was an amazing guide. You know how some people give you way too much beta, and it just ends up making things harder? Like, "well, you're going to go right, but not too far right, because there's a strainer there that killed a guy last week, and then there's a little one-and-a-half meter-wide microtongue that you want to ride but be careful because on the left side there's a room-of-doom backed up by a death sieve and there's a hostile rhino in the eddy who has been trapped there for two weeks and he's sure pissed-off about the whole situation."

That's not Leland's way. He gave us exactly enough information to make the moves; not too much and not too little. If I make it down to the Southeast, I'll probably camp out outside his house and try to get him to take me down the Green for the first time.

Matty fires up the infrequently-run right side of Boulder Sluice. After this incident, he carved L and R into the respective sides of his boat.

Andrea in front of Sacriledge. Cave visible on river-left behind her.

If you mess Sacriledge up, your view might look a little something like this. (Photo courtesy N. White)

Looking upstream at Wishbone. It was a little low for the river-left flake, so I just penciled it in like a bubble on a Scantron.

Andrea drops into the mini-gorge above Horseshoe.

Leland and Andrea are awesome people with an awesome car.

Road Trip #1: Idaho (South Fork Clearwater, Lochsa)

2007-06-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

With California starting to dry up, it felt like a good time for a road trip. The North Fork of the Payette dropped out just before we left, so we rallied the South Fork of the Clearwater and the Lochsa.

The South Fork of the Clearwater had some fun, super-continuous class III-IV.

The Lochsa had some incredible big-water rapids and play. Why don't we have any consistent big play runs like that in Central California? Oh, that's right. Everything's dammed.

A loaded Subaru is a beautiful thing.

Nevada can be a depressing place.

Surfing Pipeline on the Lochsa; yes, I'm wearing a full-face helmet and paddling a Dragorossi boat. When I'm front surfing, I try to go big or go home.

Surrealistic Pillar | Lover's Leap | 5.7

2007-05-31T18:44:00.000-07:00

How many people get to boat Lover's Leap and climb it in the same two-week period?

Surrealistic Pillar was my first multi-pitch trad climb, and probably one of the single most terrifying things I've ever done. At one point, Eunice reaches the next belay station, up above an overhang, and I can't see her or talk to her. And then a thunderstorm kicks in. So I'm hanging out, the granite is getting slick, and there's no guaranteed protection between me and a hundred-foot fall. I finished up the climb, and it was fine, but the exposure when you're kayaking and the exposure when you're climbing are definitely two different things.

Climbers be crazy.

Eunice getting rad.

Scurred or not scurred?

Cherry Creek | Tuolumne River | V

2007-05-28T18:02:00.000-07:00

My first time Cherry Creek was a little bit of a debacle. I knew 2,200 c.f.s. was probably high for the run; the average gradient is more than 100 feet per mile, and there are spots where the gradient goes over 200 feet per mile. But I had just finished up the Lower Tuolumne Chick Trip, and I felt like two days of solid class III - IV was a totally rad warm-up for nine miles of classic California V.

We put in on the Early Intake stretch beneath Hetch Hetchy. It doesn't get boated very often, and it's a pity, because it's awesome. With more than a 1,000 c.f.s. running down it, it was definitely spicy; it felt super-continuous and challenging, and it had me a little concerned about what the run was going to be like.

There were four of us, and none of us really knew the run, so things definitely got spicy from Jawbone on. We scouted Mushroom, Unknown Soldier, and Lewis' Leap, but the rest was pretty much just flying downstream, trying not to get annihilated by the monster holes. My luck ran out at Christmas Tree, where I did a perfect slide-back right into the Christmas Tree Hole, and proceeded to get worked as 2,200 c.f.s. funelled directly onto my head.

Anyway, things turned out alright, but I definitely wouldn't recommend 2,200 as a rad first-time flow on Cherry Creek.

Looking downstream during the Miracle Mile.

Lewis' Leap, looking burly at this flow.

Kiwis are a lot like Hobbits. Especially when they set up campfires and cook meals on the street in downtown Groveland.

Lower Tuolumne | Tuolumne River | III - IV

2007-05-26T18:00:00.000-07:00

I've paddled the Lower Tuolumne a few times now, and my perspective changes each time I paddle it.

The first time I ran it, it was pumping at 12,000 c.f.s., I'd only been paddling whitewater for about a year, and I was totally gripped. None of us really knew it. At one point, three of us were simultaneously getting chundered in the eponymous hole at the top of Gray's Grindstone. Basically, we were pretty lucky that none of us flush drowned.

Last year, we rallied for a 4,000 c.f.s. trip that was, as old-school guidebooks put it, "a hoot." Rusty Sage was on the water, or at least paddling with us. It seemed like most of the time, his boat was actually airborne, and I was desperately trying to paddle out from under it. There was great play, the rapids weren't particularly rough, and everybody had a good time.

This year, my sister and her friends decided to do a Chick Trip: a fun early-season overnighter. The flow was around 2,000 c.f.s., and everything was a lot more mellow than I remembered it. It seemed like there was a lot of flat water between rapids, but there were still a lot of opportunities for fun little boofs, and it was fun just to be messing around on the water.

Team Chick: Ashley Maurier, Tona Leisith, Tera Muir, and Leah Wilson.

Ashley Maurier throws some big strokes in on Clavey.

It's like that movie Ladybugs, only instead of soccer, it's kayaking.

South Silver | South Fork of Silver Creek | V

2007-05-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

Tell an out-of-state boater that you're from California, and their first question is almost invariably about South Silver. For good reasons: it has a lot of photogenic drops, the moves are fun, and there's only a little bit of mank.

Some people sandbag this run and will say that it's class IV. I think that's misleading. There are a lot of class IV moves, a few class V moves, and class V consequences throughout.

I'd done South Silver a few years ago at lower flows, but coming in at high flows early this spring was a definite eye-opener; Autobahn was silly fast, and the teacups linked up with Skyscraper pretty directly, except for a small eddy on river right right above the drop.

Zak Shaw checking out Skyscraper.

Zak Shaw getting it done on Skyscraper.

We went back a week or two later, and it was still chugging pretty good. For a low-water season, it seemed like it had a big window this year.

Matty Shearer drops in on the Off Ramp.

Lover's Leap | South Fork of the American River | V

2007-05-11T17:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure where I got the idea that this run was hideously manky. Every time I heard people talk about it, I pictured this log-choked, rocky, shallow mess, and it didn't sound like something I wanted to run. It's definitely all of those things, but it is rarely all of them at the same time, so it's actually pretty fun.

Erick Conklin lines up the crucial shallow boof.

Someone else apparently penciled it and decided to leave their boat.

Fortunately, most of the logs are having a logparty in the middle of the run.

Devil's Canyon | Middle Fork Feather | IV-V

2007-05-10T09:49:00.001-07:00

Holbek and Stanley call Devil's Canyon "the best self-supported wilderness trip in California." Coming from guys that pioneered runs like Devil's Postpile, Fantasy Falls, and the South Merced, that's a strong endorsement.

What makes it awesome? It's a low-stress multi-day in the middle of one of the wildest places in California, stacked with fun rapids. In three days, we paddled more than thirty-two fun miles, we only walked three or four times, and none of the walks were wicked.

In short, it's all the fun of the High Sierra runs, without the nuck factor. There aren't a lot of opportunities to go big, but there are a lot of opportunities to go awesome.

With about twelve hundred C.F.S. according to the (supposedly malfunctioning) gauge at Milsap, the first day was a little manky, but days two and three were awesome. The river never gorges up too badly, and the Vs seemed like they could be portaged relatively easily; we'd heard rumors about a semi-mandatory class V- called Helicopter, but it seemed like if you were really motivated to get around it, you might be able to sort something out on river right. Then again, it wasn't ugly, and portaging it is probably much more of a hassle than paddling it.

We put-in the day before Cinco de Mayo, which we celebrated by buying fifty corn tortillas and a whole lot of cheese. Quesadillas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Towering granite walls. Beautiful clean rapids. It doesn't get much better.

Somewhere in Franklin Canyon.

Long, sweet, boat-scoutable, class IV rapids.

Rad-looking weir made out of rebar-studded wood.

Looking upstream at the portage, halfway through the third day.

I'm, Like, the Unofficial Scuba King of St. Bart's

2007-03-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

As of about a week and a half ago, I knew nothing about SCUBA diving.

In fact, before arriving on Utila, what I didn't know about SCUBA diving could have filled a large book. The chapters might have included: Do Fish Bite? and What Is Decompression Sickness? and What's The Point?

Now, what I don't know about SCUBA could still fill a large book. But the chapter headings would hopefully be a little less basic.

Before diving, I'd always associated SCUBA with goggling at tiny brightly-colored fish. Ironically, while goggling at tiny brightly-colored fish was a big part of the experience, it wasn't what made diving interesting.

What made diving interesting was the feeling of being a very insignificant dot in a very large and very alien environment. When you're walking around on land, your field of view is always obscured by occluding objects; whether they're trees, walls, buildings, or mountains, you rarely appreciate the vastness of the space that you're in. When you're drifting along in the sea, with the cobalt blue stretching away from you as far as you can see in any direction, and thousands of tiny little creatures are drifting by your mask, and hundreds of fish are carrying on as if your presence in their neighborhood is nothing special and there are towering electric- blue and purple sponges rising from the walls of coral like props from a bad science fiction movie and the sponges are filtering in the tiny creatures from the water and the algae in the coral are photosynthesizing and the fish are nibbling on the coral and being chased by bigger fish and you get the sense that this is all happening all over all the oceans and the seas of the world, constantly, even when you're sitting on your couch watching television at home, it's an immediate and powerful reminder of the environment at large, a perfectly functioning ecosystem writ in miniature that you necessarily have to view through the tiny window of a mask, in which the connections and the interdependencies are all nonetheless immediately on display, and in which you quite visibly have no place.

And of course there's the physical, proprioceptive aspect, where you're basically weightless and every breath feels just a little bit strange and you're regulating your movement along the z-axis with the depths of your inhalations and exhalations, and maybe if you go a little deeper you find that the nitrogen is having an effect on the way you're thinking and you get kind of giddy and dumb, and then when you finish your dive you're tired, but not exhausted; you just feel like you need to sleep.

Anyway.

Swimming with the whale shark was the closest I got to the classic gawking-at-fish preconception that I had of SCUBA, and ironically, it didn't involve any SCUBA gear at all.

Periodically, between dives, the captains of the dive boats will cruise around in the open water, out past the reef. They're looking for boils of fish, which look exactly like they sound; as a whale shark feeds, the water around it turns into a frothing mass as thousands of other fish join in on the frenzy. You can't necessarily see the fish distinctly, but you can definitely see the boil, easily a hundred feet in diameter. When the captain spots a boil, there's this intense few moments where you, and all the other swimmers, slide off the back of the boat in a hurry like paratroopers. And then you're in the water, swimming four or five feet away from the world's largest fish, which doesn't seem to care that there are eight or nine muppets thrashing around in the water next to it. It's pretty awe-inspiring to be next to a fish that big, especially one that basically looks like a giant spotted shark, and its overwhelming indifference to your presence can only confirm your suspicion that it's really not concerned about you at all.

And it's kind of comforting and humbling to know that something this big, and this cool, is out there, all the time, doing it's thing, even and especially when you aren't there to gape at it, which I guess makes the whale shark a pretty solid metaphor for most of the places and people you see while traveling.

So, tell me true, are you guys for SCUBA?

2007-03-20T08:11:00.000-07:00

I snag a bus from Leon to Tegucigalpa. The border is swarming with men on rickshaw-like bicycles. All of them are shouting, trying to get my attention. To be fair, I choose the first one to shout at me. He has sidekick, who insists on accompanying us on the ride to the border. Their relationship is fairly obviously love-hate: the sidekick loves, my border guide hates. At one point, my border guide actually slaps the sidekick upside the head and tells him to shut up. It's less hostile, and more loving, but it still makes me like my border guide less.

I change money before I cross the border. The initial rate is ten lemps to the dollar. I know this is not correct, and even though I feel like a knob, I pull out my Lonely Planet and consult it for the approximate rate, which turns out to be around 18 lemps to the dollar. I end up getting 17.5.
There's a river demarcating the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. Gangs of naked families are swimming in the coffee-brown water. It takes me a moment to realize that this is actually kind of different; I begin to think I may be getting jaded. Just before Honduras proper there is a large sign with a shrimp on it. The shrimp is wearing a huge smile, a pleated Spartan skirt, and a helmet with a large bristle. The overall effect is Gladiator Prawn. The shrimp looks excited, and is saying something like: "Welcome to Honduras! Larva!" Somehow this sign strikes me as weirder than the families skinny-dipping in water that looks like it has been dredged from the bottom of a marsh.

Both the Honduran and Nicaraguan officials request a few dollars. I am pretty sure the Nicaraguan request is bogus.

On the collectivo to Choluteca, I tell a man that I am from the state of California, near the city of San Francisco. The largest, most heavily-tattooed gangmember on the bus offers: "The Gay City! Not that I'm saying you're gay, of course." The jailhouse tattoos notwithstanding, he turns out to speak decent English, and be extremely polite. The Honduran border police harass him as we leave the border, making him take off his shirt to see the extent of his tattoos.

From Choluteca, I take a bus to Tegucigalpa. Tegucigalpa is a mess. I have heard from scads of other tourists that it's a good place to get shanked by a glue-sniffing homeless child. I am eager to leave. Unfortunately, my bus drops me off in the middle of a warren of tented kiosks. They sell fruit, cookies, and soda, but do not have suggestions about where I can pick up a bus away from Tegucigalpa.

Eventually, I find my way out onto the street, grab a cab, and before I know it, I'm being frisked by a policeman as I board a bus to San Pedro Sula. Like Tegucigalpa, SPS is a pit. I arrive at 9 P.M., grab a cab directly to my hotel, and pass out.

The next morning, I take a bus to Copan Ruinas. A Bostonian girl who is working on water purification projects in the area directs me to a nice hostel. I meet a Canadian woman who is into things like Reiki and Craniosacral Therapy and 10-day meditation retreats. She has the perpetually glassy-eyed look of people who spend ten days meditating without speaking, but she's friendly. We play a lot of cards, and she explains the difference between a whist game and a rummy game.

It turns out to be the town's annual festival, and we visit the fair. There are Honduran carnies. We ride the ferris wheel, which turns out to be less lame in Honduras than it might be in other places, since they can turn it into a pretty exciting ride just by revving the engine up. Fireworks are going off over Copan as the ferris wheel spins.

Later, in the town plaza, we are watching the show for the evening. The M.C. tells the kids in the audience that they'll win a big price if they bring back a live animal. Every kid in the audience runs off. Five minutes later, they start to trickle in, carrying cockroaches, anorexic-looking cats, and watdogs.

I visit the ruins with the Canadian woman the next morning. It takes about two hours to walk around the whole site. We make up stories about the kings, who have bad-ass names like Smoke Jaguar, King Smoke Shell, and 18 Rabbit. I decide that my first son's middle name is going to be Smoke Jaguar.

The Canadian woman takes a bus back towards Guatemala. I meet a Japanese girl. We spend the rest of the morning talking in Spanish. We meet two more Japanese women. We spend the afternoon drinking coffee and talking in Spanish and Japanese. It hurts my head, but it's interesting.

That night there are mariachis, beer, ponche (eggnog), an almost insanely fat and overenthusiastic eight year-old named Elvis (think Tommy Boy), and more Japanish.

The next morning, I leave for the Bay Islands. Two buses and a ferry ride later, I am in Utila. I am hanging out with a Quebecois named Dave, who I met on the ferry. He is a SCUBA nut and a kayaker of fourteen years. On the island, there are a lot of Caucasian sunburned people with the red apricot noses of alcoholics and thick, thick, Carribean accents. It's a strange inversion of the normal tourist tropes: the tourists are tanned and fit, and speak unaccented English; the locals are frequently pasty but sunburnt, and are almost indecipherable when they talk.

Dave and I go to Alton's Dive Shop, which a member of Team Sweden recommended to me. It's amazing. They have a long pier, rooms overlooking the water, and an artificial coral reef that has attracted thousands and thousands of fish to their waterfront. We have dinner with some of the dive instructors and some students who have just completed their Open Water certification. We go to a bar that consists of a series of amazingly intricate treehouses. Every surface is covered with mosaics: small shells, tiles, marbles. The men's bathroom looks like the ruins at Copan. The woman's bathroom is blacklit and neon, and looks like a stoner's college dormitory. The rumor is that the owner spent seven years putting the place together.

At the end of the night, I discover that I have locked myself out of my room. I talk with the night watchman for a while, before falling asleep on a stack of mattresses beneath one of the raised dormitories. When I wake up, my right eye is swollen shut; I deduce that the mattresses must not have been clean. Fortunately, the swelling quickly subsides.

I begin an open-water SCUBA course the next morning. I watch videos and take quizzes with a friendly Australian couple. We don't get in the water until the next day...my time at the Internet cafe is running out...more later.

Remember Nicaragua?

2007-03-18T08:53:00.000-07:00

A few decades ago, the United States engaged in a little state-sponsored terrorism, and indirectly motivated the deaths of tens of thousands of Nicaraguans.

According to Noam Chomsky, as a proportion of their population, the number of Nicaraguans that died during the conflict is greater than the combined number of Americans that died in the U.S. Civil War and the subsequent World Wars.

So you might think there would be some lingering resentment towards the United States, and U.S. citizens. You might think that the country would be a mess. You might have vague mental images of men holding rifles, standing in front of bombed-out colonial buildings. You might feel slightly guilty, even if you were only a small child when Ollie North and Reagan were pursuing their policies that now seem ludicrous and unconscionable.

You might be mostly wrong.

If there's lingering resentment, it's mostly not apparent. If the country is a mess, it is mostly an economic mess. If there are men holding rifles, it's mostly in Managua. If you feel slightly guilty, it's mostly inappropriate, as long as you didn't vote Reagan.

So if Nicaragua isn't about bombed-out colonial buildings, guerillas, and post-state-sponsored-terrorism resentment, what does that leave?

Enormous lakes. The world's only freshwater sharks. Volcanoes. Crater lakes. Vast swaths of untouched and mostly inaccessable jungle in the east. The super-Carribean Corn Islands. Beautiful Pacific beaches. Friendly people. Colorful colonial architecture. An inexplicable mix of cole slaw, boiled yucca, and pig skin called vigoron. Some of the most mellow and seemingly remote-but-actually-accessable destinations I've ever seen. A beautiful sunset view from a church belltower in Granada, looking down over hundreds of old colonial homes, each with its own lush courtyard, each overrun with flowering vines.

As of yet, it doesn't have a lot of tourist infrastructure. You're not necessarily flying around zip lines, checking out butterfly farms, riding horses across the landscape, or whitewater rafting. It's all possible, but tourism doesn't rule Nicaragua like it rules Costa Rica. It's more about going to a remote finca or hacienda, walking around a few volcanos, taking some Spanish lessons, learning to weave hippie bracelets, and taking the speed of life down to a crawl.

From Knullruffs to Noruffs

2007-03-11T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what makes me decide to go to barbers in foreign countries.

In fact, before leaving for Albania, I purchased a set of thinning shears and scissors, explicitly so that I wouldn't have to.

But sometimes, there are no backpackers around that I can count on to knock my hair back, so I suck it up and go to a barber.

The results are always depressingly comical.

I got a haircut on the streets of Hanoi in front of Ho Chi Minh's tomb, and ended up looking like a Vietnamese Marine.

I got a haircut in Freiburg from a Romanian woman who took my smart-ass comment about wanting a Romanian haircut too seriously, and gave me the most heinous mullet I've ever had.

And yesterday, I got a haircut in Grenada. The young man was brutally efficient. His first move was to take a razor and knock my shag well above the ears on one side. The back followed with wide sweeping strokes of the razor, before I had a chance to get a word out. At that point, it was obvious that I had two choices: I could end up with a Nicaraguan two-layer bowl-cut, or I could preserve what was left of my hair in front, and rock an intense anti-mullet.

I chose the anti-mullet, based on the theory that I could always cut my bangs myself if things got too ludicrous.

So picture a pageboy on the sides and back, pulled a centimeter above the ears (business), with shaggy bangs in front (party). That's the anti-mullet, and that's what I'm rocking right now.

I sent my family an e-mail with this picture to illustrate my awesome new style:

Knullruffs

2007-03-09T15:35:00.000-08:00

I spent my first solo traveling day back in Costa Rica.

After abortive attempts to check in to the apparently too-popular Pangea and Tranquilo backpackers, I returned to my sketchball home-away-from-home near the Coca-Cola bus terminal: Hostal Elvis. Strangely enough, the same character that had been using Elvis' computer to check out Costa Rican dating services on December 1st was there on February 28th, still signed in to the dating website, still apparently unsuccessful in his quest for extranational love.

In one of the many other cases of freakish serendipity that would characterize the following eight days, it turned out that Hostal Elvis was conveniently across the street from the bus terminal servicing Nicaragua, something I hadn't even noticed in December. The next morning, I just needed to walk across the street, buy a ticket, and I was set for my ride to Rivas.

Aside from meeting a Nicaraguan karate instructor and speaking some passable Spanjapanglish, the bus ride was uneventful. I followed some savvy-looking Dutch through the process of immigration, and they invited me to rally to the Isla de Ometepe with them. On the ferry, I met an Austrian guy and his Polish girlfriend, who was tall and skinny and whose mannerisms were so Eastern European that I can't even explain it. They, in turn, met a group of nine young Spanish medical students who had just graduated, and we all hired a van to drive us to Finca Magdalena on the far side of the island. I spent the night sitting on the porch of the hacienda, relaxing and bullshitting with the Spaniards. I was impressed by their wherewithal; I could never imagine a group of nine American students, of any stripe, independently rallying to visit a developing country halfway across the world.

I spent the next day hiking up the volcano with Austria and Poland. The trail was steep and muddy; not quite as bad as the put-in for the Lower Jondachi, where I was fully sinking up to the tops of my thighs, but slippery enough that I did a lot of windmilling and grabbing for lianas and roots. The crater lake at the top of the volcano was foggy and the visibility was all of four or five feet, but it was sweet to go on my first significant hike since getting ass-lost trying to hike around the rim of Quilotoa in Ecuador.

The next day, things took an unexpected turn for the awesome. I spent the morning relaxing, but in the afternoon, I overheard a girl mention that her butt was sore from riding a bicycle all day. If there was anything I had been missing for the last few months, it was being saddle sore. So I asked her about it, and it turned out that there were bikes available for rent, and that her two Swedish friends were actually going to rent bicycles the next day and ride around the island. From there, things turned into a full-moon party on the other side of the island with four other Swedes, a Welsh girl, a Canadian girl, a Guatemalan-born Dutch girl, an Australian guy, a few bottles of Flor de Cana, a bonfire, and a bottle of the aptly-named and petrol-similar Caballito (lit. "little horse"), which prompted me to realize that any alcohol that is characterized by comparisons to an animal is probably best consumed by animals.

Post full-moon party, I was invited to become an honorary and temporary member of Team Sweden, which invitation I had to consider for maybe ten seconds before I accepted it, sending me away from my planned destination of Grenada, and towards the small beach town of San Juan del Sur.

We spent our time in San Juan del Sur getting in some crazy good bodysurfing, hanging out on the crazy windy beaches, talking to crazy drunk fishermen, getting crazy mugged at knifepoint, cooking crazy abundant vegetarian meals that recalled Hare Krishna Thanksgivings, and having a crazy amount of fun. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end; Team Sweden slowly dissolved as some of the members headed north to continue Peace Monitoring in Chiapas, and the core headed for the shadier climes of Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, where Ashley and I spent Christmas together. It's not all bad though; two members of Team Sweden fly to South America at the very beginning of April, so there's a good chance I'll meet up with them again at the end of March.

I'm at The Bearded Monkey in Grenada right now. It's the most stereotypical backpacker's hostel I've ever seen: a beautiful courtyard with palms and hammocks and swing chairs and candlelight tables, a small nook for computers, a book exchange, peopled crashed out on mattresses on the floors of dormitories, screenings of documentaries every night, etc.

I've got two options: I can either spin out here for a week and take some Spanish classes and guitar lessons and enjoy the mellow atmosphere of this awesome hostel, or I can fire it up and head directly north for Honduras and SCUBA diving on the Bay Islands. If I do the former, I almost definitely won't have time for Guatemala, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing; I can get the SCUBA in, and then spend the last few days relaxing in Costa Rica instead of taking a mess of international buses.

It's My Way Or The Hemingway

2007-02-24T14:46:00.000-08:00

Carnival was awesome, and totally unlike anything I was expecting.

I figured I was looking at a few days of thongs, feather boas, booze, samba dancing, and crazy masks (in rough order of anticipated prominence).

Instead, I got a bullfight, a fruits-and-flowers-themed parade, and a water fight that spanned four days (in rough order of rad).

On Bullfighting

Over the course of the last few years, I've been to some intense fights that doubled as legitimate cultural experiences: a sumo tournament in Tokyo, a series of Muay-Thai bouts in Bangkok, and the eternal struggle between Man and Goat on the streets of Tirane.

None of them hold a candle to bullfighting.

Hemingway was right; nothing compares to the blood and the dust, the grace of a fluid pass, and the raw machismo of a man staring down 460 kilos of bull while wearing a too-tight suit studded with pink sequins. It's enough to make me reconsider my stance on other favorite Hemingway pasttimes like alcoholism, big game hunting, and Cuba.

Each fight begins with a man walking around the ring, holding an enormous chalkboard listing the name of the matador, the name and weight of the bull, and the bull's breeder. Once the title card and its carrier have removed themselves behind the wooden barrier surrounding the ring, the bull is released. He charges out of his gate and begins a circuit around the ring, attracted by the capes of the peons, who stand convieniently close to wooden barriers on the periphery of the ring, and function as mobile bull-distractors/rodeo clowns/mini-matadors for the duration of the fight.

Now, you might wonder why the bull charges out of the gate, and why he is so immediately hostile to the peons. The answer is simple: he has been stabbed before he even enters the ring. A small dagger adorned with pieces of ribbon has been thrust hilt-deep into a presumably tender spot at the base of his neck. So he's understandably angry from the start.

When the bull has circled the ring and made a few game attempts at the peons, the matador steps in. At this stage in the fight, the matador's passes are reserved. He is gauging the bull, who is presumably still trying to figure out who the heck has stabbed him. Sometimes, in order to remind the bull that the neck-stabber might still be in the vicinity, the matador shouts and advances on the bull with carefully measured strides, invariably led with the pelvis. This renews the bull's interest.

Once the bull and the matador have evaluated each other, the brass bland blows a brief tune to signal the arrival of the picadores. The two picadores position themselves on opposite ends of the ring. Everything about them is impossibly and inexplicably round; they resemble nothing so much as gourds wearing vests and sombreros. They are astride enormous draught horses, which are draped in equally enormous blankets, and whose eyes have been covered with a blindfold. Somehow, the bulk of the horses does not dwarf the picadores; instead, the picadores seem larger somehow, as if the mind expands the girth of the man in response to the magnitude of the horse he rides. Each picador carries his trademark tool: a long spear with a short and stubby, nearly-equilateral, triangular blade at the end.

At this point, reality again divereges from expectation. I always pictured picadores as stab-happy polo players; they would charge, the bull would charge, and they would stab the bull while galloping around the ring. This is not at all how things proceed. Instead, the matador begins edging the bull to the periphery of the ring, drawing it closer and closer to one of the picadors. Close Picador, who is typically nearly up against the wall, hauls off and starts stabbing the bull in the neck with his spear.

The bull takes this poorly. Turning his attention from the matador, he charges the picador, ramming the draught horse full in the gut. The horse, with its heavy blankets for protection, is surprisingly placid about getting rammed by a one-ton bull. The picador, also seemingly unpreturbed, continues to stab the beezejus out of the bull's neck until the brass band strikes up again, signalling that it's someone else's turn to stab the bull. The peons draw the bull off the picador, or more accurately, the picador's horse, and both picadores exit the ring.

Two things are happening now:

1) Blood is gushing out of the bull's neck in visible spurts, sometimes partially coagulating before it hits the ground, creating a cascade of crimson cottage cheese.

2) The three banderilleros are entering the ring, each one more or less dressed like a matador, and each one carrying two small sticks festooned with colorful crepe paper. Between the flashy suits and pretty sticks, they look like members of a male drill team, but if you look closely, it becomes evident that each colorful stick terminates in a wicked-looking barb.

What follows is probably the craziest part of the whole crazy fight. While the peons shake their capes and try to keep the bull's attention somewhat divided, a banderillero squares off opposite the bull and waits for it to charge. With the bull rushing at him, the banderillero lunges, stabbing both sticks into the bull's neck, and using the force of the impact to propel himself out of the bull's path. It's easy to create bad metaphors for what it's like, but the best description is the most direct: it's like watching a one-ton extremely pissed-off bull charge a small, flamboyantly dressed, and seemingly totally screwed man, only to have the man not only somehow avoid being gored and trampled, but precisely plant two barbs into an area of skin the size of your wallet. When the banderilleros are finished, one side of the bull looks like it has been attacked by an overgrown porcupine. There is more blood.

The matador returns, armed with a narrow sword and the classic cape. He fixes the sword into the cape, creating a rigid spine, and the passes begin again. Now they are more aggressive, more balletic, more graceful. Sometimes the matador simply pirouettes slightly, as if rotating with the gust of air that follows the charging bull. Sometimes they are so close during a pass that the matador's arm kisses the bull's flank and comes away stained red.

With each pass, the bull becomes increasingly worn. The heaving of its chest slows, the ribbons of drool flying from its mouth wane to a trickle, and it begins to stare placidly at the matador's cape as often as it charges. At this point, the matador walks to the side of the arena, trading the thin sword that he had fixed into his cape for a thicker sword. The matador coaxes a few more cursory passes from the bull until they are facing each other, perfectly opposed and only feet apart. The matador cocks his sword arm, and with a quick lunge, smoothly sends a few feet of steel into the base of the bull's neck.

Yet again, reality and expectation diverge. I had always imagined that the matador's sword decisively killed the bull; the sword would go in, and the bull would roll over and die.

Instead, the bull gets a last burst of violent energy, and the peons rush out from behind the barricades to distract the bull and keep him off the matador.

Two things can happen at this point, and whichever happens, it essentially colors and defines the entire preceedings.

In scenario the first, the bull fights for a minute, then quickly sinks to its knees. A special peon, the puntillero, comes out with a dagger, and with a powerful jerking motion, severs the bull's spinal cord. It rolls over onto its side, its legs already going stiff.

In scenario the second, the bull fights for a minute after being stabbed, and then begins to slowly walk around the ring, periodically nuzzling the perimeter or pausing at a break in the fence to try to force his head through. The peons and the matador shout and wave their capes, hoping to entice the bull into another charge that will leave him on his knees, exhausted, and ready for death. But the bull is disinterested in fighting any more. He doesn't even face his antagonists as he staggers around the ring, looking for a way out.

Suddenly, the whole event seems brutish and unconscionable. The bull looks beaten, tired, and confused. He looks like he is looking for an escape, or at least a quiet place to die. It is heartbreaking. When the bull finally stumbles to his knees, the puntillero comes out from behind the fence and begins stabbing it at the base of its head, sawing through connective tissue while the bull shudders.

Of course, all of this is only a rough outline of the way the fight can progress.

In the first fight we watched, the Spanish matador placed his own banderillas. As he was placing the second pair of barbs, he tripped, and was trampled, gored, and tossed four feet into the air. As he tried to run away, his legs, which were obviously wrecked, gave out beneath him, and a group of peons had to carry him off the field while another group of peons distracted the bull.

Five minutes later, he returned to finish the fight, seemingly unfazed except for a slight limp in his left leg. He completed the final passes with no sign of fear; at one point, he dropped to his knees, turned his back on the bull, which was no more than five feet away, and directed three thrusts of his chest to the crowd.

The bull got the last laugh. As the matador delivered the coup de grace, he failed to get out of the way, and the bull's horns caught him squarely in the thighs, and again tossed him four or five feet into the air.

When he came back for his second fight of the day, the Spanish matador was sporting no fewer than four thick bandages on his legs, including one that obviously patched a wound to the junk. The man sitting next to me said something about the escroto, which is one of those magic words that needs no translation.

Now, you can say what you like about football players or rugby players being tough bastards; they definitely are. But after watching this little matador get trampled, gored, and flung by a one-ton bull, only to return to finish the fight, get gored again in the thighs and escroto, and then come back for a second fight after all that, as far as I'm concerned, matadors are about as bad-ass as it gets.

Also, for the curious, the three matadors we saw all dressed to the left.

I'm Going, Going, Back, Back, to Quito, Quito

2007-02-16T06:44:00.000-08:00

From Canoa, it took 11 hours to get back to Quito to meet up with Kat and Erick.

An hour or two into the trip, we stopped at a town called Chone to change buses, where we were mobbed by locals who apparently hadn't seen foreigners with enormous plastic boats before. Of the thirty people crowded around us, about ten were talking at any given time, and the interrogative monologues ran from the normal: "Where are you trying to go?" or "How much are these boats? Ten dollars?" and "Papas? Chifles? Papas? Chifles?" to more bizarre questions like: "Would you like to eat Galapagos tortoise eggs?" and "Do you like to do cocaine?"

Fortunately, we were able to extract ourselves from the crowd without divulging the price of our boats, purchasing cocaine, or eating Galapagos tortoise eggs.

From Chone en route to Quito, the bus driver's assistant tried to pull the classic west-Ecuadorian shenanigan of waiting until the bus ride was half-over, and then trying to charge us a crazy amount for our boats. If the price was low enough we had been sucking it up and tossing the guy a buck for each boat. In this case the guy tried to shoot for $5 apiece, which was an obvious attempt to line his own pockets. At first, we all played dumb and brandished our tickets at him to suggest that we had already paid.

But he didn't give up, so I resorted to bitching him out in Spanish. I pointed out that none of the other passengers had been charged for their cargo (true), that we'd never paid more than a dollar per boat the whole time we'd been in the country (true), and that when we rode from Quito to Chone we had only been charged a dollar (false - we never rode from Quito to Chone), and that it didn't make any sense for it to cost five times as much to come back (false - predicated on false premise). I also threw out that it looked like an impuesto para los gringos (true) and we weren't really into paying it (true).

By this point, all the other passengers were watching. It turns out that watching bus drivers' assistants try to dick other passengers is a national spectator sport in Ecuador; just before the guy tried to hustle us, he had tried to screw another passenger out of their change, and after he finished haggling with us, he tried to overcharge an extremely elderly woman sitting behind us. Each time, the rest of the bus just turned around and watched the exchanges without saying anything.

In the end, homeboy came down to a dollar per boat.

The next day, we woke up early and headed for the Otavalo market. As Ecuador's largest handicraft market, it's an enormous gringo magnet, and in the span of two hours, I saw more other tourists than I had in the previous seven weeks.

There were some unspectacular and nationally-unspecific goods on sale, like Siemens t-shirts, incense-holders carved into the likenesses of celebrities, and bootleg copies of pre-self-destruction Michael Jackson albums. But there were also amazing pieces of jewelry, some beautiful artwork, and clothing woven from Alpaca wool.

As we wrapped up our shopping, one of the many extremely elderly indigenous beggars came by, hat in hand. He had about three teeth, four feet and eight inches of height, and one good eye. We offered him a dollar to take a picture with us, but he wasn't interested. A shopkeeper standing nearby suggested that the wee indigenous man might have declined the photograph because he was worried about having his soul stolen by the camera. Ten seconds later, the man came back and offered to take the picture for two dollars.

That night, we met up with Kat and Erick and went out for some drinks and dancing. On the way to the salsa club, we were in the process of passing a large woman wearing an astonishing amount of make-up and a tight red dress when she pulled out her left breast and started licking it vigorously, a move I'd only previously seen at the Coloma Club. I made the mistake of saying buenas noches post-lick, which she apparently took as a sign of approbation, because she grabbed my arm and started pulling me in for a more intimate assesment of the goods.

Kat had her own magic moment an hour later when a young man she had been dancing with pulled her into a corner of the salsa club "where her friends couldn't see" and confessed that he was "burning with an intense desire" for her and he could see the "fire in her eyes" and knew she was into it too. I've got to hand it to the locals; a lot of them know how to be almost comically and unnaccountably sexually aggressive, without even being drunk.

The next day, I headed back to Baeza with Josh and Mark to wrap up our boating. Our first day there, we fired up a low-water run on the Lower Papallacta (170 f.p.m., 7 miles, 350 c.f.s.), leading into the Cheesehouse and Bridge to Bridge runs. I was nervous about getting on the Lower Papallacta; although the gradient and flow weren't out of control, the river is boulder-choked and continuous, with few pools between rapids, and I knew at least two kayakers had died on it in the last few years. Mark described it as the Topo, but with eddies between the rapids instead of pools, which turned out to be pretty accurate.

The run went well until the rapid that separates the Papallacta from the Cheesehouse. I had been planning on walking it all day, since I knew that better boaters had gotten thrown off-line, but it didn't look as bad after the scout and I decided to run it. I asked Josh to shoot some video with my camera, got in my boat, and paddled to the eddy right above the crux drop. As I went for the center boof, I had a moment's hesitation about whether I wanted to go left or right off the drop, and I dried up on the boof rock. I slid off to the right, down a chocked channel, backwards. I managed to stay upright, only to piton my stern like crazy at the bottom of the drop, do a backflip onto my head, and then roll just in time to drop into the frowning hole at the bottom, get trashed, and join Mark and Josh in the Ecuadorian swimmer's club.

Fortunately, there was a huge recovery pool, and the rest of the run down the Cheesehouse and the Bridge to Bridge seemed super-mellow in comparison.

The next day, we were planning on doing the Oyocachi, but it seemed like it would be way too low, so we opted for an easy run down the Cheesehouse and the Bridge to Bridge. They were a little lower than the day before, but both runs were surprisingly fun at low water. The only rapid that changed for the sketchier was Piggly-Wiggly on the Cheesehouse, which got pretty manky and shallow. One of us, who I'm not going to call out by name, had a spectacular broach on some of the class II-III runout on the Cheesehouse. He was locked in tight, and for a moment, we thought we were going to have to rope him off, but with the help of some kung-fu-esque shouts and grunts, he managed to fight his way off.

I'm in Quito now, popping prophylactic anti-parasite pills, eating Snickers, bagels and Indian food. Basically, I'm completely eddied out, but I'm going to go to Ambato tommorow to meet Kat and Erick for Carnival, which should be rad.

The Oregon Trail

2007-02-10T15:25:00.000-08:00

Erick has giardia.

Replacing Frequency With Volume

2007-02-02T16:54:00.000-08:00

After we all recovered from our respective illnesses, we decided to move on from Tena. By the time we left, we had run most of the local rivers, acquired most of the local parasites, and been to most of the local restaurants; we felt like it was time for new runs, new parasites, and new food.

But before we left, we had to paddle the Upper Jondachi again. We rallied a small crew of five: me, Mark, Josh, Eric Nies, and Jay the C-1'er from West Virginia. Eric and Jay were planning on catching a bus to Baeza that night, so they hatched what seemed like an ingenious scheme.

Eric and Jay's Scheme-Reasoning

We want to run the Upper Jondachi today.
We want to go to Baeza tonight.
The Upper Jondachi is on the way to Baeza.
We can't carry all our stuff down the river.
A bus bound for Baeza will pass the take-out for the Upper Jondachi.
We should hide all our stuff in the jungle near the take-out bridge, paddle down, retrieve our stuff, and get on the bus.

As with most schemes, there was a major flaw in the plan, which I'm sure most astute readers will spot. It didn't have anything to do with the river, though. The run was incredible. It was about 3.5 on the gauge, which was an awesome moderate flow. I thought it was a little easier at 3.5 than it was at 1.5; it was definitely more pushy, but the drops cleaned up, and it felt less bony.

As we finished paddling the last rapids leading up to the take-out, Josh spotted some kids on the river bank and shouted at Jay: "Hey man, I think they're wearing your clothes!"

He was kidding, but when Jay and Eric went into the jungle to get their gear, one of Jay's bags was missing, and he was short his passport, credit cards, and driver's license. There wasn't much we could do, so Mark, Josh, and I grabbed a bus back to Tena while Eric and Jay collected what was left of their stuff and prepared to rally to Baeza anyway.

That night, Eric and Jay showed up at the hostel in Tena. After we got on the bus, they found a posse of local kids near the river, and offered them a few bucks to try and track down Jay's missing bag. The kids dispersed into the jungle, and two and a half hours later, the Rascals Pequeños returned, all muddy and scratched-up, but with Jay's bag. In the end, he only lost his cell phone. Based on their experience, we developed our own scheme:

David, Kat, Erick, Mark, and Josh's Scheme-Reasoning

We want to run the Upper Anzu on our way to Baños.
Eric and Jay's hide-stuff-in-jungle plan didn't work out so well.
We should hire a shuttle driver to take us to the put-in, leave all of our travelling gear in his truck, and have him meet us at the take-out to drop off our stuff.

With this pretty much perfect plan, we assembled a crack team of paddlers:

SOTAR:
Kat "la gata" Skarda
Sascha the gargantuan Swiss canyoneer
Toby the local raft guide

Shredder:
Jeff from Colorado
Heidi from Colorado

Kayak:
David
Erick "Ridonkaconk" Conklin
Mark
Josh

The Upper Anzu was unspectacular, but it was good to check it out. It took about two hours to drive in on the rocky and unpaved roads, and we had a low flow; the streambed easily could have handled twice the amount of water that we had. There were a few miles of flat water on either end, punctuated by a handful of class IV rapids, with one V- to spice things up in the middle. It's definitely worth doing if you're in Ecuador for a few months, but the Upper Misahualli and the Upper Jondachi are so much more accessable and so much higher quality that it's hard to see doing the Upper Anzu more than once.

Except for the part where our shuttle driver showed up late to the take-out, leaving us with only two minutes to unload all our stuff from his truck before the last bus to Baños showed up, our scheme went off without a hitch.

We spent our first day in Baños mobbing around on four-wheelers. After about five minutes on the highway, we decided that the unpaved road leading up the mountain was probably the way to go, and charged up the side of the volcano. We ended up meeting a local farmer who took us up to his friend's treehouse, which had a fantastic view of the volcano and the whole valley beneath it.

The next day, Erick, Josh, Mark, and I rallied to run the Topo river. Despite its relatively mellow gradient of 150 feet per mile, it was the most challenging run I've done since I left California seven months ago. Most of the people we had talked to described it as the Upper Jondachi's big brother, and it was easy to see why they made the comparison: it was nine miles of non-stop pool-drop class IV and IV+ rapids with only a few hundred feet of flat water on the whole run, and a handful of solid Vs. There was an exciting two minute period where it looked like I was going to take a wicked beating in a monstrous hole, and then Mark narrowly avoided being sucked into a wicked sieve on the same rapid, but on the whole, there wasn't any significant carnage.

All told, we spent about six solid hours paddling the Topo, and we agreed that it was the best river any of us had run in Ecuador. Which, in a way, is kind of tragic, since the Ecuadorian government is planning on damming the Topo next year. Matt Terry organized an initially successful legal campaign against the dam, but the case was appealed, and the Ecuadorian Supreme Court overturned the local court's decision.

The case against the dam is pretty solid: there are endangered endemic species that live in the river gorge, the people who live in Baños don't support the project, the feasability study extrapolated the average flow of the river by taking the mean of the maximum and minimum flows, and the only Ecuadorians who will benefit from the dam will be the bureaucrats who are paid off to make it happen.

It's a little bit of a bummer.

After paddling the Topo, it was time to say a temporary goodbye to Kat and Erick. Josh, Mark, and I jumped on a bus to Santa Domingo, while Erick and Kat went back to Tena to take one of the free jungle trips they won in the Rio Napo festival.

Before we went to Santa Domingo, we knew it was probably going to be a quick in-and-out mission to hit a lot of rivers in a short amount of time, since the word on the street was that Santa Domingo was totally charmless. The word on the street turned out to be totally accurate; our hostel for the first night had roaches scurrying across the floor, and was situated directly on a roundabout in the center of town, right across from a major indoor mall. The mall had light poles in the parking lot like any other mall, but there was a guard tower at the top of each pole, with two security guards armed with assault rifles, giving the mall a pretty distinct prison-where-people-go-to-shop vibe. To make a long story short, Santa Domingo is a complete pit, especially when you compare it to mellow mountain towns like Baeza, or relatively low-key and convienient towns like Tena.

Fortunately, we met up with the folks from Colorado the first night we were there, and we rallied to run some rivers over the next few days.

Day 1: The Damas (260 f.p.m. - 100 c.f.s. - 3.5 miles - continuous and manky creeking)

Mark and Josh and I decided to run this steep creek just outside of Alluriquin while Colorado went to check out a more raft-friendly run on the Toachi. After spending a solid half hour trying to find a small truck to run the shuttle, we managed to get a driver to take us up to what we thought was the put-in. The first hour was a complete mank-fest through some of the junkiest rapids I've ever run. I felt like a pinball as I slammed my way down a mile and a half of complete garbage. Once we were halfway down our run, we reached the bridge that was the recommended put-in, and realized that we had run an additional mile and a half that wasn't suggested by the guide-book. From the legitimate put-in, things cleaned up a little bit, but we were still boofing onto rocks, wedging boats in narrow cracks, and generally beating our way down the creek. The only decent rapid of the day was a sweet, clean, 10' drop about two rapids up from the take-out.

At low flows, this run is not worth doing, and at higher flows, I think it would get full-on: no eddies, some mank, and a few significant drops. I'd say it's one of the few times the Small World guidebook has let us down at all.

Day 2: The Upper Mulate (140 f.p.m. - 250 c.f.s. growing to 800 c.f.s. with tributaries - 10 miles - pool-drop, remote creeking)

Unlike the Damas, the write-up for this made it sound like a decent candidate for rafting, so Colorado rallied for it with their Shredder. Getting to the put-in was a total bastard. It took about two hours, and most of that time was spent on muddy unpaved roads in the hills. I don't think we would have made it if it weren't for Tex, the manager of the Tropical Inn, who graciously offered to drive us. His friend Cody had been part of the crew that first ran it in December of 2005, so he had some inside beta on how to get to the put-in.

The run started out manky and continuous like the Damas, but quickly cleaned up as a few tributaries came in, and the character shifted to fun pool-drop creeking. There were a few IV and IV+ rapids, but nothing too wicked. In a lot of respects, it reminded me of the Hollin: beautiful scenery, fun and relatively straightforward rapids, and a remote jungle atmosphere. It was definitely a cool feeling to be on a run that only a handful of people had ever done before.

Day 3: The Middle Pilaton (140 f.p.m. - 9 on the gauge [around 950 c.f.s.?] - 7 miles - continuous class IV rapids with one V- in the middle)

I paddled this run in my travel underwear, having unintentionally left my totally rad Ecuadorian swim trunks at the take-out for the Upper Mulate. It was continuous from put-in to take-out, with no flat water. There were a few big holes, and the gradient and flow combined to make some extremely long rapids. We were a little stressed about taking out in the right spot since shortly after the take-out, the river narrows to about five or six feet wide, and there are a series of class VI drops, which none of us were too psyched about running. Fortunately, the Petro-Commercial bridge was easy to spot.

As the guidebook suggests "a swim would be extremely unpleasant here", but "if you're comfortable in class IV water, it's a hoot!"

I'm in Canoa now. It's an extremely mellow coastal town with one main street, a sweet beach break, and a handful of hostels and restaurants. The first morning we were here, Josh and I helped a fisherman push his boat into the ocean, using a series of logs as rollers. Aside from that, we've spent all our time hanging out in hammocks, eating seafood, messing around in the ocean, throwing rocks at hostile feral dogs, hanging out with the town drunk, meeting Canadians, and marvelling at the inexplicable number of Icelandic girls who are here with Ecuadorian boyfriends. I've never met someone from Iceland before in my life, and in the last day, I've seen at least four seemingly unrelated girls from Iceland, all with a local surfer boyfriend.

List of Lists

2007-01-22T07:18:00.000-08:00

Lessons Learned On the Hollin Overnighter

1) Canned tuna fish for lunch, dinner, breakfast, and lunch is about as good an idea as it sounds like.

2) You should probably scout waterfalls, even if they're only twenty feet.

3) Rapids that run through caves can be both beautiful and high-quality, even if they look sketchy as all get-out.

4) Packed wet sand does not make a fantastic natural mattress.

5) Plastic sheeting can be purchased at Ecuadorian hardware stores at the rate of $1 a square meter, and does make a fantastic waterproof tarp.

6) If you see a good beach and it's late and you don't know the run, it's probably a good idea to stop; there may not be another one downstream.

7) There are a whole lot of moths and butterflies in the jungle.

8) A bottle of rum is not a legitimate sleep aid.

Places I Have Not Been Bit By Insects

1) My right armpit

2) That little valley above the upper lip and below the nose

Most Popular Musicians in Ecuador, Extrapolated From the Selections of Our Shuttle Drivers for the Past Three Weeks

1) The Gypsy Kings

2) Reggaeton remixes of The Gypsy Kings

3) Ace of Base

4) Reggaeton remixes of Ace of Base

5) Coolio (specifically, Gangster's Paradise)

6) Daddy Yankee

7) Men at Work

8) James Blunt

Places I Am Planning on Going Before I Leave Ecuador

1) Vilcabomba (hippies and multi-day horseback trips)

2) Quilotoa Loop (hikes and hostels)

Places I Am Not Necessarily Planning on Going Before I Leave Ecuador

1) The Coast

2) The Galapagos

Side Dishes That Inevitably Come With Every Ecuadorian Meal

1) French fries

2) Rice

Strange Kayaking Coincidences

1) We meet Phil and Mary DeReimer in a hotel in Costa Rica. It turns out they live across the river from my sister, and had met Kat at a whitewater symposium a few months earlier.

2) We meet some kids from Dartmouth in Costa Rica; one has heard of Scott Cushman.

3) While we're paddling with Phil and Mary, Ashley has dinner at their house in Coloma with their housesitters.

4) My stolen boat appears in the basement of the Hotel Interamericano.

5) While sitting in a restaurant in Turrialba, Ashley and I spot a very familiar-looking woman. We spend about ten minutes telling each other that she looks familiar before asking her where she's from. When she says she lives in Perth, we figure we must be mistaken, but after a little more discussion, we realize she has been to Rich and Keri's house, and we met her there a few years ago.

6) When we arrive at a hostel in Tena, we meet some good friends of the West Virginia crew that we hung out with in Costa Rica.

7) Everyone from the southeast knows Brad Brewer.

8) The Oil and Water Project ( http://www.oilandwaterproject.org/blog/index.php ) guys stayed with Whitney and Mauricio in Costa Rica a few weeks before we did, and subsequently showed up in Baeza while we were there. Kat had paddled with them on the Middle Yuba in California last spring.

Coolest Things About the Rio Napo River Festival

1) The Balsa raft-building competition - watching locals assemble balsa rafts out of machetes, planks, and vines, and then race them down the river.

2) Sitting on top of a biodiesel-burning Chinese fire truck, watching my second beauty pageant in a month.

3) Having a small boy huck a small, dead, and extremely ugly fish at me.

4) Erick winning two downriver races, earning him a four-day jungle tour with an estimated value of $400.

5) Matthew Terry, the organizer of the festival, and the head of the Ecuador Rivers Institute (http://www.kayakecuador.com/ERI_Home.htm). Badass paddler and passionate activist. Similar, in some respects, to Minor Camacho, the reknowned Tico herpetologist.

Favorite Runs in Ecuador So Far

1) Upper Jondachi

2) Oyocachi

3) Lower Jondachi

4) Upper Misahualli

5) Hollin

6) Bridge to Bridge

7) El Chaco Canyon

Paddling Trips I Want To Take

1) The Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho

2) The Salt in Arizona

3) Chile & Argentina

4) New Zealand

5) B.C.

6) Nepal

7) Idaho, Washington, and Oregon

Non-Paddling Trips I Want to Take

1) Long-distance iceskating on The Baltic when it freezes over.

2) Mule-, llama-, or goat-pack the Pacific Crest Trail for a few months.

3) Sail to The Galapagos, Japan, or China.

4) Row or pedal the Aegean.

5) Long-distance seakayaking in Alaska.

People I've Been Paddling With For The Last Week

1) Erick Conklin

2) Mark and Josh, raft guides from the Southeast

3) Jeff and Heidi, raft guides from Colorado

4) Val, a raft guide from Montana