A FEW YEARS AGO, fresh from 21 days of kayaking the gigantic waves of the Colorado River, I returned to my home state of West Virginia to paddle the Cheat River, where I’d been a raft guide for the previous three springs. It was May, just after flood season—and I was feeling badass. In a moment of bravado, I followed a friend into the meat of Class V Coliseum Rapids, the toughest on the river, and whompf—a huge wave clobbered me and everything went dark. Lesson one: The grand old western rivers have nothing on these eastern monsters.

West Virginia is frequently overlooked by East Coast urbanites, who tend to flock to the closer and more pastoral Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley of Virginia—or fly right over on their way to Rocky Mountain highs. But this inattention has been a blessing in disguise. Since coal mining started its big decline in the 1980s, the state has been spared from heavy development and sprawl. And with 4,000-foot mountains, thundering rivers, 45 inches of precipitation per year, some of the best crags in the country, and miles and miles of rooty, rocky singletrack, it’s beginning to enjoy a new cachet as a recreational oasis. Need I mention the 910,155-acre Monongahela National Forest (“the Mon” to locals), which includes the Otter Creek, Dolly Sods, Cranberry, and Laurel Fork wilderness areas and takes up practically the entire eastern third of the state? Perhaps West Virginia has been misunderstood because of its rustic personality. True, the state passed a law in 1998 making it legal to collect (and, presumably, eat) roadkill. And, should you drive down a road to nowhere through the steep and leafy “hollers,” you’re likely to end up in a forgotten coal hamlet that brings to mind 19th-century sepia-tone photographs—all part of the state’s real-deal backwoods charm. I lived in West Virginia for six years, sharing a cabin bordering Coopers Rock State Forest that rented for $190—and we had a hard time coming up with even that tiny sum because we were too busy biking, hiking, and kayaking.
Since I left, in 1997, West Virginia has averaged a 4 percent increase in tourism per year, and an adventure infrastructure has developed with it. So now you can rent mountain bikes, pick up a river shuttle, buy essential climbing gear, and hire a guide to take you wherever your heart desires. Here’s a guide to the best of the Mountain State.

Rafting

Crash course: rafting the Gauley River

Rafting the Gauley River
Come fall near Summersville, in south-central West Virginia, the hardwood forests turn bright orange, the air cools, mist gathers in the steep canyons, and raft guides start to get butterflies in their stomachs. At a time when the rest of the country’s rivers have dried to a trickle, hundreds of river rats pack up their VW buses and head to the 107-mile-long Gauley, where the annual fall drawdown of Summersville Lake feeds whitewater rafting’s biggest frenzy. Don’t come here looking for a placid float. The Gauley’s Class V rapids—which combine high volume with steep, boulder-choked runs—are jammed with rafts.
HOW TO GO Wildwater Expeditions (800-982-7238, ) runs one- and two-day trips on the Upper or Lower Gauley (your choice—there are five Class V rapids on the 12-mile upper section and a dozen more Class IV and V rapids on the lower 12 miles) from $90 to $250. Or do the entire 24 miles in one long day for $200. Rent wetsuits and paddle jackets for $15 per day.
LODGING Opossum Creek Retreat (888-488-4836, ) sits off a classic serpentine West Virginia road. Seven hot-tub-equipped cabins in varying sizes fit four to 20 people and can be rented for $120 and up per night or $800-$2,000 per week.

Mountain Biking

Singletrack of champions: mountain-biking the Davis Trail, near Davis

Mountain-Biking the Monongahela National Forest
The tiny town of Davis (pop. 624), on the northern edge of the Mon, is home to not one but two members of last year’s U.S. World Mountain Bike Championship Team, Sue Haywood and Nick Waite. Surprised? Don’t be. The town is a launching pad for hundreds of miles of technical, slick, and muddy mountain-bike trails. And the locals have the appropriately masochistic attitude to tackle them—the same outlook that, in 1992, gave birth to the first 24-hour mountain-bike race, the 24 Hours of Canaan (which has since been moved and renamed the 24 Hours of Snowshoe). If you have time for only one route, try the Mon’s 25-mile Plantation Trail system. It tunnels through thick rhododendrons, over creeks, rocks, vines, and moss, in a rainforesty wonderland reminiscent of Vancouver’s North Shore.
HOW TO GO Blackwater Bikes, in Davis (304-259-5286, ), rents Kona mountain bikes for $25 per day and sells the Canaan Valley 国产吃瓜黑料 map ($8), the most reliable and up-to-date trail resource.
LODGING Bright Morning Inn (866-537-5731, ), next door to Blackwater Bikes, is a lumberjack boardinghouse turned bed-and-breakfast. Rooms range from $75 to $85, biscuit-and-eggs breakfast included.

Fly Fishing

Fly-Fishing the Elk River
An eight-mile section of the Elk cuts a lush, remote canyon through the southern Mon Forest, actually diving underground for stretches. These detours keep the water a chilly 50 degrees throughout the summer, a major reason why the Elk is one of the only mid-Atlantic rivers that supports wild trout. The Gauley Divide, which rises 2,000 feet above the riverbank, helps, too—it’s the first mountain ridge to snag all that rain that skips the Great Plains en route to the East. Then there’s the river’s limestone bedrock, which neutralizes acid rain, keeping the fish healthy. All of these forces conspire to produce feisty 20-inch-plus browns and rainbows that would trick an angler into thinking he’s in Montana.
HOW TO GO Elk River Touring Center (866-572-3771, ), located on 150 acres on Old Field Fork, one of the headwaters of the Elk, provides maps, rental gear, water levels, local hatch and fly information, and a guide, if desired. Guided outings for experienced anglers are $195 a day, or rent a rod and waders for $60 a day.
LODGING Stay in one of the five guest rooms at the Touring Center’s inn for $75-$100 per night.

Climbing

Smorgasgorge! Climbing at the New River Gorge

Climbing the New River Gorge
Rumor has it that the 352-mile-long New River is the second-oldest river in the world, dating back approximately 320 million years. Geologists go round and round on that figure, but everyone agrees that one 15-mile section of the 60-mile New River Gorge, which is 1,200 feet deep in places, offers spectacular climbing—it regularly draws the likes of Lynn Hill and other first-tier climbers. More than 2,000 mostly bolted climbs follow the rim. The draw is the very durable Nuttall Sandstone, with beautiful horizontal fissures and climbing that ranges from dime-edge face climbs to fist-size cracks. If you need a break from the one-pitch 5.11’s and 5.12’s of the New, you can head up to Seneca Rocks, in the northeastern corner of the Mon Forest, a 400-foot fin of sheer quartzite that offers long, classic routes in the moderate range of 5.2 to 5.8, with several others rated 5.10 to 5.12.
HOW TO GO Hard Rock Climbing Services (304-574-0735, ), in Fayetteville, offers guide service for $120 per person per day. At Water Stone Outdoors (304-574-2425, ), also in Fayetteville, you’ll find the latest edition of the area’s bible, New River Rock, by Rick Thompson.
LODGING Country Road Cabins (888-712-2246, ), located just north of the gorge, rents log cabins, complete with front porches (and the requisite swings), that sleep up to three people for $125-$235 per night.

Hiking

Hiking the Cranberry Backcountry and Wilderness
West Virginia has more than 1,500 miles of hiking trails, including the Allegheny Trail, a 300-mile north-south path, mostly in the Mon Forest. If you can’t spare a month to take it on, head down to the Cranberry Backcountry and Wilderness, a little-known 62,000-acre wildlife oasis with more than 100 miles of remote trails. Start with the Cow Pasture Trail, which flanks the Cranberry Glades, a bog where orchids grow. From there, head north and hike to spruce and hemlock forest on Trail 102 along the South Fork of the Cranberry River before heading east (Trail 271) along the Williams River. The entire wilderness is a black bear sanctuary, but keep your eyes peeled for mink and bobcat, too.
HOW TO GO You don’t need a permit to hike or camp in the Cranberry. There are three-sided Adirondack shelters along the South Fork of the Cranberry that are free to use on a first-come, first-served basis; tents and good navigation skills are required. Information and free trail maps can be found at the Cranberry Mountain Nature Center, just down the road from the town of Mill Point. Stock up on bug spray and stove fuel at Appalachian Sport (304-799-4050, ), in Marlinton.
LODGING Off trail, check out the funky, restored pre-Civil War cabins at the Jerico Bed and Breakfast (304-799-6241, ).

Cycling

Cycling Along the Cheat
John Denver didn’t get it all right in “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” his 1971 ballad to the byways that wind through pastoral West Virginia. The Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River mentioned in the song are actually found in Virginia, not the mountain-mama state to the west. But the rest is true: These undeveloped areas offer smooth and empty roads for cyclists. Monongalia and Preston counties, along the Cheat River, offer pure rural countryside. Don’t plan on finding a prepackaged inn-to-inn tour, but Whitetail Cycle and Fitness, in Morgantown, can set you up with a hilly 100-mile loop from there to Kingwood, then south along the Cheat River. Be sure to stop for the banana cream pie at Mary’s restaurant, in Kingwood. Another option: Down south in Lincoln County, follow county roads 214 and 3 to the town of Mud and the 6,000-acre Big Ugly Wildlife Management Area. This is bona fide Appalachia; you’ll see wheelbarrows parked next to residents’ personal coal mines.
HOW TO GO In Monongalia and Preston counties, find spare tubes and route information at Whitetail Cycle and Fitness (304-291-2270, ). For the Lincoln County ride, Charleston Bicycle Center (304-925-8348) has county-road maps, equipment, and advice.
LODGING For the Cheat River ride, the Preston County Inn (304-329-2220, ), in Kingwood, has rooms for $65-$125. While lodging is scarce in Lincoln County, just north, in the friendly capital of Charleston, is the Brass Pineapple Bed & Breakfast ($89-$139; 304-344-0748), a short ride from local delicacies at the Capital Street Farmers’ Market.

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LONG A FAVORITE DESTINATION among canyoneers, the French colony of R茅union, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is nicked with dozens of tumbling whitewater slots that run from 10,069-foot Piton des Neiges, the island’s highest point, to the coast. But until Brad Ludden, fellow pro paddlers Ben Selznick and Seth Warren, and a crew from extreme-sport film producer Teton Gravity Research showed up, apparently no one had yet thought to bring along a kayak. For the R茅union sequence of Valhalla, TGR’s second kayaking film—which will tour the United States in April—the trio of twentysomething boaters spent three weeks last December clambering over huge, slick boulders and rappelling 500 feet down into fissures such as Takamaka Canyon to scout and reach long, cascading water slides and waterfalls.

Ben Selznick in Trou Blanc Canyon

“A lot of the time we were totally focused on kayaking, so we didn’t think about the height,” says Ludden, who would ordinarily have no trouble pointing his boat over a 30-foot waterfall. “But sometimes we were so scared that we didn’t think about kayaking.”
To put in to R茅union’s Class VI rivers, Teton’s production crew coached Ludden, Selznick, and Warren—none of whom were expert climbers—down sheer cliffs to narrow ledges. They carabinered kayaks to their harnesses on the way down to the water; once there, they gingerly stepped into their boats and sealed their skirts before unclipping from the ropes and shoving off. Landings were trickiest in Bras Rouge Canyon, on the west side of the island, where pools below the falls turned out to be just five feet deep. After one Hail Mary off of a 40-foot-high cataract, recalls Selznick, “I landed OK, but then looked behind me and saw all this sediment rising up from the river bottom. I was like, ‘Whoa. That was close.'”

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THIRTY YEARS AGO, if you wanted to run a river, you steered a 60-pound barge and prayed. But today, a serious boater owns a quiver of vessels, from a Royalex canoe to a rodeo kayak. Here’s a salute to the designers who built the rides.

In the late sixties, Los Angeles fireman and amateur paddler Tom Johnson spent more time patching fiberglass than running rivers. Then Johnson and his buddy Don Carmichael, an employee at the plastic-trash-can manufacturer Hollowform, convinced execs to start producing plastic kayaks. Boating was soon transformed: In 1973, Johnson designed the canary-yellow, 13-foot-long River Chaser, and the age of California-style steepcreeking was born.
Tired of watching rocky Appalachian Rivers play Humpty-Dumpty with their canoes, structural engineers Bob Lantz and Bill Griswold journeyed to Warsaw, Indiana, to visit a company that built crude canoe hulls out of a new firm and foamy plastic called Royalex. By 1974, Lantz had founded the Blue Hole Canoe Company, the first business to mass-market durable Royalex rides.


Bill Masters, owner of the fledgling company Perception, became the king of kayak manufacturing in 1978 by designing a rotational molder and oven to mass-produce plastic kayaks. Then he offered a precedent-setting one-year warranty on his boats. By 1998 he was selling 50,000 per year.


In 1979, Nolan Whitesell set out to prove he could do anything a kayaker could do—in an open canoe. He developed an effective whitewater roll, invented inflatable float bags, and became the first canoeist to tackle dozens of Class V-plus rapids. Whitesell’s canoe design, the Piranha, helped: He reshaped and widened a typical hull by three inches for stability in rough water.


Kayaking used to be a 2-D sport—paddlers floated on a river and reacted to its surface currents. But in 1981, Jesse Whittemore and former Olympian Jon Lugbill started slicing bows and sterns underwater in moves dubbed squirts, cartwheels, and blasts. Paddler Jim Snyder got wind of their antics and began designing skinnier boats, which set off the squirt-boat revolution.


With their creation of the Crossfire kayak in 1991, former Olympian Chris Spelius and designer Steve Scarborough touched off the boat-design wars. The Crossfire’s curved ends and shorter length made it turn on a dime. Dagger, Scarborough’s company, carved out a secure place in an industry that had been dominated by Perception for a decade.


And the innovations go on: Corran Addison arrived at California’s 1994 Pacifica Surf Contest with his Fury, a strange new breed of rodeo kayak that had a squarish hull built to plane over the water rather than sit in it. Today, almost every new kayak features his boxier profile, making Addison’s signature moves—air-blunts and air-screws—mandatory components of every pro rodeo boater’s bag of tricks.

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Chilko River
Southern British Columbia
Twenty-three miles from its source, the relatively calm Chilko squeezes into 11-mile Lava Canyon and becomes a roller coaster full of towering waves, house-size hydraulics, and jagged boulders. The canyon's sheer walls prevent paddlers from scouting several Class IV-V rapids, making the run even more harrowing. Distance: 40 miles; 2 days Gradient: 50 feet per mile Season: June-August; best in August Do It Yourself: Put in at Chilko Lake; take out at Tsieko Junction. No permit required. Guided Trips: Chilko River Expeditions (250-398-6711) offers weekend raft trips ($300 per person) that include two runs through Lava Canyon.
Upper Youghiogheny River
Western Maryland
A run on the Upper Youghiogheny (known as the “Upper Yock”) begins in lush, wild-ginseng country with a peaceful, one-and-a-half-mile float. But don't get too relaxed: Once you hit Bastard Falls, the Yock rages, with more than 20 successive Class IV-V rapids that exhaust even expert rafters and kayakers. The real test: Miracle Mile, which drops 140 feet and ends in a maze of cabin-size boulders. Distance: 10 miles; 1 day Gradient: 114 feet per mile Season: April-October; best in May. Do It Yourself: Put in at Sang Run; take out in Friendsville. No permit required. Guided Trips: Precision Rafting (800-477-3723; www.precisionrafting.com) runs one-day trips for $105-$115 per person.

Easy Drifting

Labyrinth & Stillwater Canyons, Green River
Southeastern Utah
Your only concerns as the Green zigzags through the red rocks of Canyonlands National Park? Taking a few paddle strokes now and then鈥攁nd admiring one jaw-dropping view after another. Distance: 120 miles; 6-8 days Gradient: 1.6 feet per mile Season: Year-round; best in September and October Do It Yourself: Put in at Green River State Park; take out at Spanish Bottom. For a permit (required) call Canyonlands National Park, 435-719-2313. Canyon Voyages 国产吃瓜黑料 Company (800-733-6007; www.canyon voyages.com) rents canoes and rafts for $32脨$75 per day. Guided Trips: Moki Mac River Expeditions (800-284-7280; www.mokimac.com) runs six-day canoe and raft trips for $995 per person.

Eleven Point River
Southern Missouri
This Wild and Scenic River blows off most of its steam high in the Ozarks. By the time it reaches Thomasville, in a valley rimmed with dolomite and sandstone bluffs, it musters up little more than a few Class II riffles鈥攑erfect for an easy canoe or float trip through the Mark Twain National Forest and the Irish Wilderness. Distance: 35-44 miles; 4 days Gradient: 5 feet per mile Season: April-August; best in May Do It Yourself: Put in at Thomasville or Cane Bluff; take out at Missouri 142. No permit required. Richard's Canoe Rental (417-778-6186) rents canoes for $35 per day. Guided Trips: Doug's Outdoor 国产吃瓜黑料s (616-468-5203 ) offers two- to five-day canoe trips for $135-$300 per person.
Grande Ronde River
Eastern Oregon
You can paddle this river in four easy days just by letting the gentle Class I-II current carry you from the Wallowa Mountains through Umatilla National Forest. But the riverside campsites鈥攕haded by Douglas firs and carpeted with pine needles鈥攁re so cush you'll want to tie up your boat and dally at least a week. Distance: 46 miles; 4 days Gradient: 20 feet per mile Season: Year-round; best April-June Do It Yourself: Put in at the confluence of the Wallowa and Minam Rivers; take out in Troy. No permit required. The Minam Store (541-437-1111) rents rafts for $65 per day. Guided Trips: Little Creek Outfitters (541-963-7878; www.oregonrivers.com) runs four-day raft trips for $250 per person per day.

Expeditions

Nahanni River
Northwest Territories, Canada
Carve the Grand Canyon a bit deeper, plunk it down in Canada's Mackenzie Mountains, and you've pretty much got the Nahanni. The Class II-III route plunges past 5,000-foot mountains and through 4,000-foot canyons. Distance: 180 miles; 14 days Gradient: 8 feet per mile Season: June-early September; best in September Do It Yourself: Put in at Rabbitkettle Lake; take out at the Laird River. For a permit (required), call Nahanni National Park Reserve, 867-695-3151. Nahanni Wilderness 国产吃瓜黑料s (888-897-5223; www.nahanniwild .com) rents canoes for $21 per day. Guided Trips: Nahanni Wilderness 国产吃瓜黑料s runs 14-day canoe trips for $2,130 per person.

Noatak River
Northwestern Alaska
You'll likely see caribou and grizzlies鈥攁long with stranger-looking creatures like long-billed dowitchers and musk oxen鈥攁s you paddle the Class I-III Noatak from Gates of the Arctic National Park to the wetland tundra of Noatak National Preserve. Distance: 340 miles; 24 days Gradient: 13 feet per mile Season: June-early September; best in September Do It Yourself: Put in at Pingo Lake; take out at Noatak village. No permit required. Brooks Range Aviation (907-692-5444) rents canoes and rafts for $25脨$50 per day and offers float-plane service to put-in and take-out points. Guided Trips: Equinox Wilderness Expeditions (877-615-9087) leads 24-day canoe trips for $3,600 per person.

Hayes River
Northeastern Manitoba
Think of the Hayes as a wide, meandering highway (with a few Class II-III rapids and a portage or two thrown in for good measure) through the vast boreal forest of the rocky Canadian Shield. About 50 miles before the river dumps into icy Hudson Bay, you'll start spotting playful ring seals. Distance: 225 miles; 14 days Gradient: 4.5 feet per mile Season: June-August; best in August Do It Yourself: Put in at Oxford Lake; take out at York Factory. No permit required. North River Outfitters (204-778-6979) rents canoes and kayaks for $20 per day. Guided Trips: Wilderness Spirit (204-774-2140, www.wildernessspirit.com) runs 14-day canoe trips for $2,750 per person.

One-Day Blasts

Cache la Poudre
North Central Colorado
Leave the fancy French pronunciation at home: Locals know this Class II-IV river, which twists and churns through a 2,000-foot gorge just north of Rocky Mountain National Park, as “The Pooder.” Duck as you race through the Class IV Death by Dismemberment. Distance: 19 miles; 1 day Gradient: 60 feet per mile Season: May-August; best in June Do It Yourself: Put in below Poudre Falls; take out at the Narrows picnic area on Colorado 14. No permit required. Poudre River Kayaks (970-484-8480; www.poudreriverkayaks.com) rents kayaks for $20 per day. Guided Trips: Rocky Mountain 国产吃瓜黑料s (800-858-6808, www.shoprma.com) runs one-day raft trips for $82 per person.

Tygart River
Central West Virginia
Thought waterfalls were only for adrenaline-crazed hair boaters? Not so. Spend a day on the Tygart and you'll get the hang of it. The Tygart's half-dozen four- to 15-foot-high waterfalls, all Class II-IV, are runnable in a kayak (all summer) or raft (May-July). Distance: 9 miles; 1 day Gradient: 27 feet per mile Season: May-August; best in June Do It Yourself: Put in two miles west of Arden; take out at Cove Run. No permit required. The Riversport School of Paddling (814-395-5744; www.shol.com/kayak) rents kayaks for $25 per day. Guided Trips: Wilderness Voyageurs (800-272-4141; www.wilderness-voyageurs.com) leads one-day raft or inflatable-kayak trips for $65 per person.
Dead River
Northwestern Maine
In May, there are about as many crashing waves on the Class III-IV Dead River as there are moose staring out from the forest along its banks. In June, when the waves shrink to shoulder height, beginners take inflatable kayaks and canoes all the way to the Kennebec River. Distance: 16 miles; 1 day Gradient: 20 feet per mile Season: May-early October; highest water in May Do It Yourself: Put in 23 miles west of U.S. 201; take out in West Forks. No permit required. Three Rivers Whitewater (207-663-2104) rents inflatable kayaks for $25 per day. Guided Trips: Unicorn Expeditions (800-864-2676; www.unicornraft.com) leads one-day raft trips for $79-$104 per person.

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ONE MUGGY JULY evening in Vermont, I met my friend Billy Nutt on a leafy bend of the Connecticut River. Billy had spent five years on the U.S. Kayak Team, and now he paddles for sheer fun. The current swept into a rapid called Sumner Falls, in the middle of which was a honking, glassy wave with a curling top.

Dropping in: Burnt Ranch Gorge, on California’s Trinity River

We surfed. We took turns windmilling up out of the eddy and onto the wave’s smooth face, getting kicked to the top, spinning and skipping down fast into the trough, the whole motion arcing and quick like the dive of a swallow. We played for hours—blowing enders, rolling, yelling. I didn’t realize it had gotten dark until a south wind blew a warm rain over the river and the sky rumbled. A thread of lightning cracked the night and in the instant’s glare I saw leaves blowing over the water and the far hills, and felt the whole river slipping with tremendous speed under the shivering kayak, and I thought, There is no more than this.


And there isn’t. Rivers and boats are God’s compensation to man for all the really dry stuff—like taxes and work and August. Americans are discovering this in astounding numbers. Between 1995 and 1999, the number of us whitewater kayakers increased by nearly 40 percent, to five million paddlers. Seventeen million people canoe; nine million like to raft. And what a place to live and boat: From the glacier-fed, grizzly-haunted rivers of the Yukon to the icy, bell-clear streams of California’s Trinity Alps, from the desert canyons of Utah to the steep, lush ravines of West Virginia, North America is particularly blessed with rivers of great beauty and wildness—and kick-ass whitewater.
This summer, as the mercury rises and the days parch and curl, don’t get mad. Get in a boat. Cool off and splash around. Get a bunch of snow-melt up your nose. Here are 国产吃瓜黑料‘s favorite runs in every part of the continent and for every taste—wilderness expeditions, raucous Class Vs, perfect day runs, gentle family canoe trips. But be forewarned: River running is a terminal condition. It gets in the blood and makes you do dumb things, like take annual canyon trips in blizzards. Like quit your job, and neglect your pets and your piano lessons. So paddle at your own risk.

Class V: Enter the White Room

Get lost in the froth of Colorado’s Gore Canyon

There’s no place like foam: Gore Canyons Tunnel Falls

JOHN JAYCOX’S ’71 Volvo is a river runner’s machine, cluttered with paddles and congenitally musty with the smell of damp polypropylene. He gunned it up the broad-pastured valley of the Blue River, beneath the rugged escarpment of the Gore Range. It was late July, and a furnace wind poured through the open windows. Everywhere, the creeks and rivers were low, showing their bones. But not the Upper Colorado.
Gore Canyon is a six-mile chasm with a half-dozen distinct drops packed into about three miles. It’s quintessential, accessible Class V, and relatively remote—the only things keeping you company are the railroad tracks bedded high above the river.


We parked by the tracks—they smelled of creosote and scorched sagebrush—and put in off a high rock. I just followed John, the undisputed Lord Gore. One of the best boatbuilders in the world, he won the upstart Gore Canyon Race six times in its first eight years. He even built a kayak just for the event: the Gorepedo. We flew over the first big drop, Applesauce—a ten-foot fall cascading into an ugly foam pile. John hammered for a tiny gap in a horizon line strung with boulders—Gore Rapid. He disappeared and I launched off the Shaq-high ledge into a pocket eddy hemmed in on one side by rock, on the other by a tearing, funneling current. I took a deep breath and peeled out hard, slamming into a curling haystack. I shook the water off my face and yelled with pure glee.
The next two hours were filled with unremitting speed, and the strange joy of moving rhythmically in a world comprised completely of dark rock, boisterous water, and a swath of sky. In the gentling tailwater, John paddled next to me and grinned. His hair stuck out of the holes in his homemade helmet. He never tired of this. We paddled out past ponderosas, willows, a single fly fisherman, and the sudden, surprising swales of green ranch land.
DETAILS: Put in at the confluence of the Blue and Colorado Rivers near Kremmling; take out at the Pumphouse Recreation Area. No permit needed. Timberline Tours (800-831-1414; www.timberlinetours.com) runs full-day raft trips through Gore Canyon for $155 per person, from August through October.

Easy Drifting: What, Me Paddle?

Pack the cooler, then float and bloat on Montana’s Smith River

The mild river: slow mo on the Smith

IT’S 58 MILES from the Smith River’s Camp Baker put-in to the Eden Bridge take-out—a lazy five-day float, if you want it to be, which I always do. That’s because halfway through the canyon in a kayak or raft or canoe or inner tube, after two and a half days of bumping off rocks and drifting in circles, of casting for brown and rainbow trout, something mysterious begins to happen.
Five days of laziness requires a bit of surrender. On day one, while the river bends through cottonwood groves, I crack open a beer to prepare. In a few hours, when the canyon swallows us, there will be no turning back. Rock walls rising 500 feet soon sprout from the river’s edge. We pass high caves and trees rooted in ledges. We see red cliffs and gray cliffs and cliffs growing crystals, like thousands of white teeth, in their fissures. In places the river widens and ripples over fist-size rocks, and then collects itself in deep turquoise pools. If I’m guiding, I suggest tossing a fly there. Or maybe here, in the big boulders. We pass clearings in the thick Douglas firs, boat camps, an occasional cabin. The river turns and braids, and we can pull over and hike to see ocher cave paintings left by the original Smith River floaters.
Or maybe not. The river can quiet your ambition. This is how it works: I once guided a woman from southern California who’d just turned 40. She liked to catch fish, and she did, but for the first few days she was lonely. She said she missed her children, she missed her husband, and when it got chilly and the wind blew, she wondered aloud how she ever got here. But late on the fourth afternoon, when half the canyon lay in blue-green shadow and the caddis flies were hatching so thick they looked like mist coming off the water, I found her lying on the bank, curled up in the grass. I asked her if she was all right.
“Yes,” she answered. “I’ll be ready in a moment. I’m having a really big feeling right now.”
DETAILS: Montana Outdoor Sports in Helena (406-443-4119) rents rafts and canoes for $27-$29 per day. For a permit, call 406-454-5861. Lewis and Clark Expeditions (406-449-4632) offers fly-fishing trips on the Smith from May through July.

Expeditions: Lewis and Clarking It

Discover the real frontier on Quebec’s Bonaventure River

AHH TABERNAC, I swore, as my boat ricocheted from one rock to the next, pinballing its way down the snaky headwaters of the Bonaventure River. It had been less than an hour since the put-in, and already I was spinning 360s and popping water-wheelies in my solo canoe. “Tricky little devil, eh?” said Claude, one of the two French-Canadian brothers who were my guides. “Look dar,” he said, pointing. “An eagle.”
Sure enough, a bald eagle with a wingspan the length of my paddle was glaring at me from a low stump. I swear the bird cackled when, in the nanosecond I took my eyes off the river to watch it take flight, I heard a thunk and was whipped over the gunwales. The next thing I knew, I was bobbing boatless through Class III froth. They don’t call it the Bonaventure, or Good 国产吃瓜黑料, for nothing.


True, you’ll find more harrowing whitewater on, say, Quebec’s Magpie or Rouge, and the Feuilles has bragging rights to the most Arctic wildlife. But the Bonaventure lays claim to an eerie timelessness; you half-expect to see tepee settlements from 16th-century Mi’kmaq Indians lining the shore. I felt almost silly in my fire-engine red canoe and wanted to trade it in for a birchbark version. In the six days it took to paddle 76 miles to Chaleur Bay, we passed only 12 other humans: seven fishermen and five paddlers. And that’s a crowded week. Fewer than 100 people paddle the Bonaventure River each year.
By the fourth day, I had reached the most Zen-like state of blissed-out harmony I could achieve while still being lucid enough to paddle. The river lacked the things that can turn canoe trips into heinous nightmares: mosquitoes, portages, and hypothermic weather. But it still proffered up enough of the raw elements—icy whitewater, old-growth forests, and guides who stood up in their boats while navigating the fray.
Other than my clumsy canoe exit, the only catastrophe was losing four bottles of chilling chardonnay to the swift current. The loss would have put a dent in cocktail hour that night, but Ulysse, the other brother, pulled out a bottle of cognac left over from the chocolate flamb茅 he’d prepared earlier in the trip. “You gotta have that French taste on this of all rivers,” he said, winking.
DETAILS: Quebec 国产吃瓜黑料s (888-678-3232; www.quebec adv.com) runs six-day canoe trips on the Bonaventure from May to early July for $995 per person.

One-Day Blasts: Workman’s Comp

New Mexico’s Taos Box, a better way to spend your 9 to 5

I FIRST HEARD about the Box at the end of a cold, rainy Gauley season in West Virginia. Six of us river guides were sitting under a tarp in a rafting company’s gravel parking lot, playing poker and talking about rivers we were dying to run. At the top of most everyone’s list was the Rio Grande through the Taos Box, a sheer, 800-foot-deep canyon cutting 17 miles through a lava plateau west of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. We agreed to kayak it the following summer, but three years went by before we actually made it to New Mexico.
We put in at the crack of dawn and let the silty water carry us past blooming cholla cactus and sage. After several miles, the riverbed constricted and the rapids began dropping steeper and faster, now Class III-IV. We corralled in the calm water above Powerline Falls, a 14-foot cascade, to hear instructions from Jake, who’d run the Box before (“Start center. Angle right.”), and again above three-quarter-mile-long Rock Garden (“Look for the munchy hole in the center, halfway down.”). And we cleaned ’em. With four miles to go, the canyon walls had turned almost black in the afternoon shade, and we charged the continuous rapids Blue Angel-style, hopping between eddies and boofing small ledges without stopping.
In the final half-mile, the Rio squeezes through one last channel, rounding a sharp bend. I entered the rapid and, with no eddies to catch, aimed blindly downstream. Harv, a 200-plus-pounder who favors tiny kayaks, took it straight on, just to the right of me. Midway through, he dropped over a surging pour-over and disappeared. “Harv!” someone yelled from upstream. I turned, fighting the current. But within seconds, Harv popped to the surface, helmet askew on his big round head, grinning and cackling. The Box will do that to you.
DETAILS: Sangre de Cristo Mountain Works in Santa Fe (505-984-8221) rents kayaks for $25 per day. Kokopelli Rafting 国产吃瓜黑料s (800-879-9035; www.kokopelliraft.com) runs one-day raft trips through the Box for $95 per person from May through July. The World Outdoors (formerly The World 国产吃瓜黑料) runs a six-day multisport trip in New Mexico, including a day on the Taos Box, in June, August, and September, for $1,650 per person (800-488-8483; www.the worldoutdoors.com).

Urban Renewal: Escape from New York

…and Boston, and Chicago…Six wet weekend getaways

Three hours from Boston:
The Saco River, New Hampshire

Tiny rapids, miles of sandy beaches for swimming and camping, rope swings, excellent fly-fishing—PG-rated family entertainment. Contact Saco River Canoe and Kayak (888-772-6573, www.sacorivercanoe.com).
One hour from Atlanta: The Cartecay River, Georgia

Smaller, less-crowded, and, uh, safer than the Chattooga, the Cartecay snakes through rolling pastures and thickets of flowering mountain laurel. No banjos anywhere. Contact River Right Outfitters (www.riverright.com; 706-273-7055).


Four hours from New York City: The Deerfield River, Massachusetts

The city’s closest big-water fix. Don’t miss the four-mile Class III-IV section between Monroe Bridge and the Dunbar Brook Picnic Area. Contact Zoar Outdoor (800-532-7483; www.zoaroutdoor.com).
Three hours from Chicago:
The Lower Wisconsin River, Wisconsin

The Lower Wisconsin hosts nearly 300 species of birds, more than 45 species of mammals (river otters, badgers, and the occasional bobcat), and myriad fish (from walleye to American eel). Who cares if it’s only riffles between Spring Green and Boscobel? Contact Bob’s Riverside Resort (608-588-2826; www.bobsriverside.com).
Two hours from Portland:
The White Salmon River, Washington

Flows from dark to light in ten miles, from BZ Corner bridge through shadowed, 150-foot lava cliffs to Northwestern Lake in the high-desert sun of the Eastern Washington plateau. Contact River Recreation (800-464-5899; www.riverrecreation.com).
Six hours from San Francisco: The Trinity River, California Must-make moves on eight- to ten-foot chutes and falls test your agility on the ten-mile Class V stretch from Cedar Flat to Hawkins Bar. Contact Tributary Whitewater Tours (800-672-3846; www.white watertours.com).

Schools: Current Curriculum

Immersion course in kayaking, rafting, and canoeing

Otter Bar Lodge
Forks of Salmon, California

Otter Bar’s weeklong whitewater kayaking programs are held on California’s remote Salmon River—but comfortable cabins and gourmet meals obliterate any sense of roughing it. All-inclusive courses start at $1,790 per person (April-September). Details: 530-462-4772; www.otterbar.com.
Nantahala Outdoor Center
Bryson City, North Carolina

Like some addled university sponsored by Red Bull, this place has it all: courses in kayaking, canoeing, and raft guiding on rivers like the Nantahala and Ocoee—plus cozy cedar cabins for recovering from the day’s lessons. All-inclusive two-day canoe or kayak classes cost $380 per person; four-day classes, $750 (March-October). Details: 800-232-7238; www.noc.com.
Madawaska Kanu Centre
Barry’s Bay, Ontario

Canadians know canoeing. Let hotshots from the international whitewater canoe circuit show you how it’s done on the Class III-IV Madawaska River. Two-day canoe courses run $225-$245 per person, including shared accommodations and meals; gear rental starts at $13 per day (May脨early September). Details: 613-756-3620; www.owl-mkc.ca.
Zoar Outdoor
Charlemont, Massachusetts

Zoar is based in the bucolic Berkshires, but their kayak and canoe courses on the Class I-IV Deerfield River are anything but laid-back. Two- to five-day programs run $255脨$525, including lunch and equipment (April-October). Details: 800-532-7483; www.zoaroutdoor.com.
Canyon River Equipment Outfitters (REO) Flagstaff, Arizona

Some of the country’s top rafting guides are graduates of Canyon REO’s expedition-style courses on the Upper San Juan and Chama Rivers. Six-day courses run $550 per person (in May and, when demand is high enough, August). Details: 800-637-4604; www.canyonreo.com.

Tickets to Ride

When there’s only one thing between you and your dream river: permission

Trying to score a permit for a restricted-access river? You’ll up your chances if you aim for weekdays and keep your group size small. Consider having a permit party with potential tripmates in December (most applications are accepted from December through February). Each of you fills out an application; if even one person gets lucky, everyone can go. Here, the country’s hardest river permits to land.

The post Into the Flow Zone appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

ONE MORNING in late August, about 70 gravity addicts will take elevators to the 73rd floors of the Petronas Towers—identical skyscrapers soaring 1,483 feet above downtown Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. There, they will step out a window onto a five-foot-wide platform and take in the view from the tallest office buildings on earth. Then, one after another, they’ll chuck themselves off.

Might as well jump: Californian BASE jumpers Brian Chopin and Henry Boger step off the Menara Kuala Lumpur tower, February 2001.

The Malaysia International Championship of Skydiving, scheduled for August 27 through September 2, is only the latest high-profile event in a string of state-sanctioned group BASE jumps from the Malaysian capital’s landmarks (which also include 1,381-foot Menara Kuala Lumpur, the world’s fourth-tallest communications tower). Last January during the Malaysia SkyVenture World Record Xtreme Skydive, 15 parachutists celebrated New Year’s by simultaneously jumping from the Petronas Towers and landing gently in a downtown park, where they were presented with medals for “bravery” by Mahathir bin Mohamad, Malaysia’s prime minister. His message: Malaysia, a nation best known for its Buddhist temples, is setting up shop as the global mecca of BASE jumping, a deadly offshoot of skydiving that is vilified in the United States and many other countries because its 2,000-odd practitioners commonly trespass on, and then leap off—frequently with tragic results—rooftops, bridges, radio towers, and cliffs. Devotees insist that with proper equipment and training, the risks of BASE can be made manageable, but since the late seventies it has killed at least 50 people—including Carl Boenish, who in 1978 first popularized the sport when he pitched himself off Yosemite’s 3,604-foot El Capitan (he perished six years later during a leap off a 5,400-foot cliff in Norway).
So how did an activity that first caught headlines in California’s High Sierra find its way across the Pacific to become a Southeast Asian monarchy’s extreme sport du jour? Credit Canadian mechanical engineer and skydiving instructor Martin Dumas, 32, who relocated to Kuala Lumpur in November 1998 to help build a rapid-transit system, but soon found himself planning the country’s first organized BASE jump with two Malaysians, sales and marketing exec Aziz Ahmad, 44, and Rahmat Omar Tunhanif, 34, who owns a furniture factory. Since then, more than 70 of the sport’s disciples—hailing from as far afield as Iceland and Saudi Arabia—have merrily, and legally, flung themselves off Kuala Lumpur buildings.


Of course, it’s a different story in the States, where BASE is infamous for clandestine rooftop sorties and sensational screwups. In the past year, more than a dozen jumpers have been arrested, including Harry Caylor, who last fall leaped off the top of downtown Denver’s Embassy Suites Hotel, only to catch a gust and crash through a window into an unoccupied room. (Bleeding profusely, he walked out of the lobby and called an ambulance, but the cops arrived first and arrested him.) In October 1999, professional stuntwoman Jan Davis perished before 150 spectators when her borrowed chute failed to deploy in an illegal leap off El Cap (BASE jumping is still against the law in America’s national parks). Ironically, Davis’s jump had been intended to memorialize Frank Gambalie III, who only four months before had drowned in the Merced River while fleeing park rangers after his own illicit leap from El Cap (see “,” October 1999).


While short on 3,000-foot cliffs, Kuala Lumpur does not lack for lofty launchpads—the city has 14 buildings over 500 feet high. Further, Malaysia aggressively courts extreme sporting events, and has hosted the Asian X-Games and the World Hang Gliding Championships. “If we didn’t take risks, we’d still be in caves,” says Ahmad, who, with 14 launches under his belt, is the nation’s most experienced BASE jumper.


To a country like Malaysia, where tourism is the third-largest source of domestic revenue, the specter of deaths like those in the U.S. is apparently outshoneby the dazzle of dollar signs. As of early summer, the management of the Menara Kuala Lumpur tower was jockeying with SkyVenture Productions—the promoters of the events at the Petronas Towers. Both want to ink lucrative broadcast contracts with America’s cable networks. But to one veteran jumper, this is a sport that will never, by its very nature, neatly lend itself to prime time. “The accident rate is a natural deterrent,” says Oklahoma geologist Mark Herndon, 40, who logged 100 leaps in the 1980s but packed away his parachute after his son was born. Plus, he says, “Illegal is nice because it keeps the riffraff away.”

Search and Revenue

Injured mountaineers find themselves in the crosshairs of cost-cutting lawmakers

SIXTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD Georgian climber Lev Sarkisov was not thinking of his pocketbook last June as he cradled his broken ribs. Having taken a 20-foot fall on Mount McKinley’s West Buttress route, he watched the approaching U.S. Army Chinook helicopter sent to pluck him from a camp at 14,200 feet. Like the 13 other climbing parties that had to be rescued from McKinley that season, Sarkisov was more concerned with getting the hell off the mountain than with the $13,294 the National Park Service and U.S. Army were spending to save him. But a report commissioned by Congress and scheduled for release this August may have future McKinley climbers checking their credit lines before strapping on their crampons.


Since 1998, when two Brits were choppered off the summit to the tune of $221,818, Alaska Republican Senator Frank Murkowski has argued that evacuating injured climbers from the slopes of McKinley is an unfair burden to taxpayers. Public Law 106-486, authored by Murkowski and signed into law last November, requires the Park Service to suggest ways to recover the costs of emergency evacuations. The new congressional report may recommend that climbers be forced to carry insurance and agree to foot the cost of potential bailouts–which could serve as a precedent for adopting similar practices in other rescue hot spots such as Washington’s Mount Rainier and Northern California’s Mount Shasta.
Mike Gauthier, chief climbing ranger for Mount Rainier National Park, contends that alpinists on McKinley are being unfairly picked on. Of the 1,200 people who attempt McKinley each year, an average of 11 require assistance, a small percentage of the 5,000 or so recreationists the Park Service extracts from the wilderness every year. “As a group, mountain climbers aren’t the most expensive to rescue,” says Gauthier, who points out that more money is spent on tracking down lost hikers. Not surprisingly, the idea that climbers should have to foot the bill for their helicopter ride home doesn’t sit well with the American Alpine Club. “If people think they’re paying for their rescue,” says executive director Charley Shimanski, “they tend to delay calling for help.”

Andrew McEwan

Meet the ruler of the nation’s gnarliest paddle sport

Wild thing: McEwan at the Potomac River near Seneca, Maryland, May 2001

Age: 21.
Hometown: Germantown, Maryland.
Years kayaking: 15.
Years “wildwater” racing, a sport that involves steep 20-mile runs down Class III+ rivers: six.
Odds someone will beat McEwan when he defends his title in the National Wildwater Championships on the Pigeon River in eastern Tennessee this month: near-zilch.
Reason McEwan keeps winning, according to teammate Chris Hipgrave: “He’s got a paddling gene the rest of us don’t.”
Length, in feet, of McEwan’s wildwater kayak, the Esox: 14.9.
Length, in feet, of the ’87 VW Golf he uses to cart it around: 13.5.
Width, in inches, of Crack in the Rock, the fastest channel on the Class V Upper Youghiogheny racecourse, where McEwan took first last year: 24.
Width, in inches, of the Esox: 23.6.
McEwan’s prerace nutritional regimen: a large Butterfinger and medium Heath Blizzard from Dairy Queen.
Why dominant European wildwater racers have it made, according to Middy Tilghman, 2nd ranked U.S. wildwater kayaker: “They’re sponsored, so they don’t have to work. They can lift weights, paddle, then just sit around playing video games.” Why McEwan can’t afford to sit around: “American paddlers get very little outside financing. We work to support ourselves.”
Why the work is worth it: “Wildwater is so dynamic. It’s kind of like downhill mountain biking, only the mountain is moving too.”

Loot

国产吃瓜黑料 Essentials, To Go

Gear: The Kestrel 4000 Pocket Weather Tracker from Nielsen-Kellerman keeps you dialed in to ten meteorological must-knows, including temperature, wind speed and windchill, barometric pressure, humidity, and heat index. It’s like having Willard Scott in your pocket–minus all the babble. $329;

Video: From the boys who brought you the outrageous Kranked series comes the latest fat-tire masterpiece, Search for the Holey Trail. Watch as ballsy mountain bikers huck their way off buildings and cliffs in Morocco, Switzerland, Australia, Mexico, Spain, France, and Canada. $25;
Book: Alpinist Ed Webster chronicles his five-year tangle with the Goddess Mother in Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest. The self-published book includes an account of his oxygenless, unsupported ascent of the Kangshung Face in 1988. $30;

Web site: Readers of the newly minted Mtb Journal nominate for coverage news and gossip tidbits from across the singletrack universe. Though “reader-generated content”is a dotcom cliche, in this case it actually works.

Reverse Corps

A dam-happy federal agency begins undoing its own legacy

Just add concrete; Washington State’s Green River, circa 1915

“THIS IS STILL a viable river. It isn’t worth throwing away, really.” A few hundred yards from a Boeing factory and the truck-clogged Port of Seattle, Army Corps of Engineers biologist Patrick Cagney gazes over a stretch of the Green River. He’s admiring a newly constructed side channel full of woody snags that the Corps has installed next to a meat-processing plant in a $113 million effort to “rewild” the river. Cagney hopes the calm, debris-filled channel will provide a resting area for the fall salmon run. Like many urban waterways, the Green has been carefully sculpted over the years–the river has been straightened, diked, riprapped, and made into a well-behaved, navigable ditch. In short, the life has been engineered right out of it. But this summer, a century after the river was first overhauled, the agency that brought you the Snake River dams is attempting to breathe life back into an ecosystem it spent generations subduing.


And that’s just one example. Over the past two years Congress has authorized 50 restoration projects in 25 states, including funds to revive wetlands along the Ohio River and $1.4 billion to resuscitate the hydrology of the Everglades, putting the Corps, known primarily for building large-scale public-works projects, in the business of ecosystem rehabilitation. But enviros are cautious about entrusting habitat remediation to an agency often seen as an environmental bogeyman, especially after last year’s debacle in which the Corps cooked its books to gain support from lawmakers for a dubious $1 billion lock-widening project on the fragile upper Mississippi River. To Melissa Samet, senior director of a Corps-reform campaign at the conservation group American Rivers, some of what the agency labels restoration is plain old engineering. Nevertheless, she hopes that with guidance the Corps can create naturally self-sustaining ecosystems: “We’re making sure that what the Corps does with its restoration is real restoration.”

The Sweet Music of the Line

Saying good-bye to one of the nation’s greatest ski mountaineers

Saari in Peru, June 2000

ON THE MORNING OF May 8, ski mountaineer Hans Saari and photographer Kristoffer Erickson, Saari’s ski partner, hiked to the top of the Mont Blanc du Tacul for an attempt on the Gervasutti—a 3,000-foot couloir near Chamonix, France. Keen to put a new twist on the run, the two bypassed the usual entrance to the chute in favor of a steeper and more challenging route. A few turns down, Saari, in the lead, slipped on a hidden patch of ice, and then tumbled an estimated 1,500 feet.Despite the quick response of a rescue crew, he died of head trauma. He was 30.


A year before the accident, Saari and Erickson had skied another chute—this one in Montana. They’d dubbed it the Patriarch, in honor of the late Alex Lowe, their climbing partner and mentor, who had perished in an October 1999 avalanche on Tibet’s Mount Shishapangma. One of the nation’s premier ski mountaineers, Saari, a key player in 国产吃瓜黑料’s feature on the commercial and peer pressures of his sport, was also a talented writer. His lyrical account of that Montana descent could well serve as his epitaph. “To carve turns deliberately and skillfully down the throat of the peak from summit to base creates the line,” he wrote several months later. “The vibrancy of the line means everything. Like a cello, there is no sound until the string is taut. The more you struggle, the tighter the string, the greater the music.”

Smokey’s New Wheels

As another drought-fueled wildfire season looms over the West, a new 27-ton Tonka truck is set to roll into the flames

Inferno machine: the Proteus Fire Master

YOU’RE A FIRE boss, right? Well, step on over here and feast your eyes on this baby—the Proteus FireMaster, built right here in Missoula and ready for action anywhere you need ‘er. She’ll grab a burning pine, cut it down, give it a good soaking, and drop that bad boy on the safe side of your firebreak—all on a 35-degree slope! She’s also got a helicopter-refillable, 3,000-plus-gallon water tank, a telescoping water cannon, an eight-foot dozer blade, and a boom-mounted grapple claw and 18-inch bar saw.


Not sold yet? Hell, this puppy’s got—all standard features, y’understand—an onboard weather-radio system, outboard video cameras, CD player, air-conditioning, three escape hatches, GPS, and a fire-suppression system that’ll flood the engine compartment and hydraulics with halon gas at the touch of a button on the dash.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Wildfire fighting is about tactics,” you’re telling yourself. “That thing between my ears is called a brain, and that’s the most important tool out on the line—not some 27-ton, $350,000 behemoth.” But what you’ve got here is a mechanical army. Last summer, we rolled a Proteus prototype into the Lost Trail Fire, a resort operation right here in the Bitterroots. That burn was sure enough marching down the ski hill. A team went after it with Proteus and a fleet of helicopters, and we stopped it in its tracks.


Now, we both know things are gonna be bad this summer. Last year more than seven million acres went up across the country, and with the drought still hanging on, things aren’t looking much better this season. Hotshots are in short supply. Proteus here is the answer. Just sign this leasing agreement, and we’ll get you set up for just $475 an hour. Wait… Did I tell you about the optional undercoating?

The post Cleared for Takeoff appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

THE SUBY, AS THE BOYS CALL IT, looks like a giant Hot Wheels, a big toy with a roof rack bristling with kayaks. The shiny black Subaru Outback Limited is “loved by cops and women both,” according to the champion freestyle paddler who’s usually in the driver’s seat, a sardonic 19-year-old from Bigfork, Montana, named Brad Ludden. Freshly minted from the factory, the wagon’s a shade upmarket for the task at hand. It smells of its cush leather seats鈥�”the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in a boater vehicle,” says Ludden’s pal, his buff and reticent copilot Steven Byrd, 18, a former wrestler from Martin City, Montana, who’s out on the freestyle circuit for the first time. Although he’s only a year older, Ludden is already a four-year veteran of the six-month-long freestyle kayaking circuit and the winner of a silver medal at the 1999 Freestyle World Championships. He won the medal in the junior class and is breaking into the senior pro level this year.

Ludden needs a haircut, and he has a nasty cold he caught in Morocco last week, but he’s still excitable about the Suby. He and Byrd are on a two-week stint, crammed in the car along with wet neoprene, PFDs, helmets, sleeping bags, Eminem CDs, a beer-and-babes magazine, boat bags, paddles, alarm clocks, a laptop, Airwalks, and a few Big Gulps (some empty, some full), as well as a third passenger, Chris Emerick, who’s making a video featuring Ludden and two other pro freestylers. A 28-year-old from Parkersburg, West Virginia, Emerick, who has done this tour four times, quit competing last year in favor of making kayaking videos. Despite the age difference, the former Alta ski bum jibes well with Ludden and Byrd.

Cramped as it is, the Suby is a young athlete’s dream car. It’s a freebie loaner from Dagger, one of the world’s largest kayak manufacturers, based in Harriman, Tennessee. Dagger hopes that Ludden represents the Next Big Thing. Also known as rodeo kayaking, playboating, surfing, and cartwheeling, freestyle kayaking involves launching your boat into agro tricks on river waves, rocks, and holes鈥攖he latter being swirling pockets filled with turbulent whitewater. Maybe, the marketing team at Dagger figures, freestyle will be to whitewater what snowboarding has been to the slopes鈥攖he catalyst for a cultural shift in the self-serious world of kayaking, the agent of a classic new school/old school rift that has already transformed rivers all over the United States into a series of holes, also known as hydraulics, with lines 20 kayakers deep. To goose the new school into a high-growth market, Dagger and two other top kayak makers, Wave Sport and Perception, are dangling some amazingly sweet perks in front of the most promising talent.

It’s not a bad business bet. Even though it hasn’t made it into the X-Games yet, the sport draws hundreds of spectators to competitions in places like Durango, Colorado, and Kernville, California, as well as Switzerland, Norway, and Japan. There’s a world championship every two years and a “PreWorlds” on off years, both administered by the UK-based International Freestyle Committee. (The next Worlds will be held in Spain in 2001.) Aside from the competitions, there are also scores of Web sites and e-zines about where to huck ends around the globe.

Ludden’s Suby is just one more harbinger of the shock of the new. The first time I set eyes on the vehicle, it’s perched at the top of a steep trail leading to the Caney Fork River in Rock Island State Park, about a hundred miles or so east of Nashville, Tennessee. The Caney boasts the plushest hole in the East: the Rock Island wave. Ludden, Byrd, and 108 other paddlers are here for the first of three competitions to be held on three consecutive weekends, a new series sponsored by kayak clothing manufacturer Immersion Research鈥攈ence the name, the Immersion Research Triple Crown. The Rock Island wave has been the site of the U.S. Freestyle Team Worlds and PreWorlds selections for two years running. (This year’s trials were held at Smiley’s, a man-made hydraulic in Tennessee’s Ocoee River, about a hundred miles southeast of Rock Island State Park.) But this weekend’s event is also notable for the cash prize鈥攖he biggest yet in the U.S.

True, the $5,000 purse isn’t huge money, especially when you realize that the five grand gets divvied up among the top three finishers in four classes. Still, it suggests that this niche sport is having a season of the sort that snowboarding had in 1988, when, after several years of championships that nobody attended, the fever took hold. Freestyle kayaking probably won’t have it that easy; the United States has approximately one tenth as many car-accessible hydraulics as it has ski resorts. But if you stage 40 kayak rodeos, as sponsors are doing in the United States this year, and you stir in the ambitions of several hundred aspiring stars, there’s no telling what could happen.

YOU CAN HEAR THE WATER before you see it, a sound not unlike a freight train. A thin, 30-foot waterfall is cascading from the dammed lake above the Caney Fork River, and dead center on the river sits the Rock Island wave, a riot of white foam exploding ten to twelve feet high, a “big stompy feature” in Ludden’s words, with steep shoulders on either side and a deep sweet spot that seems like it’s made for flipping the ends of a kayak over and over. It’s here that the paddlers, in heats of ten, go one by one to throw cartwheels and spin their boats using their torso as an axis. Ludden, jet-lagged but determined, puts in at a crowded eddy adjacent to the explosive wave.

Most old-school kayak competitions involve flatwater sprints of 500 and 1,000 meters, and slalom, in which the object is to thread gates as you paddle through rapids. In freestyle kayaking, the object is to do as many tricks as you can in 45 seconds. Ten judges score each ride. Three count every 180-degree rotation, assign it a “technical score” (one, two, or four points based on how vertical the kayak’s end gets), and call out the results in rapid succession; two more judges assess the “variety score” by identifying and calling each distinct trick. These have preassigned values based on difficulty. The remaining five judges transcribe the points as they’re called out. At the end of the heat, all the raw scores are brought to a crash-prone laptop and crunched. Each competitor’s total technical score is multiplied by his total variety score. To this is added a “style score” based on a percentage (zero to ten percent) of a paddler’s total number of points. At Rock Island, a score of 356 will get you into the finals. (If this leaves you scratching your head, you’re not the first).

At Rock Island, three bleach-blond junior paddlers sit on a podium holding flags tied to branches that someone must have just pulled out of the woods. The green flag means start your 45-second run, yellow means 15 seconds left, and red signals time’s up. You can understand why they call it a rodeo: The object is to stay in the hole, which, in the preliminary rounds, nearly all of the competitors fail to do.

According to the American Whitewater Affiliation, the first freestyle competition was held on the Salmon River near Stanley, Idaho, in 1976. Before then, most paddlers went into holes only by accident, often backward or sideways while paddling frantically to escape. A technique for getting out of a hole yielded the first freestyle move鈥攖he ender, pushing the nose of your boat into the water and waiting for the river to spit you out like a pumpkin seed.

Back in the late seventies, kayaks were 13 feet long, fiberglass, and often homemade. They were fast but hard to turn. To improve maneuverability, boats were shortened. Meanwhile Easley, South Carolina鈥揵ased Perception popularized kayaks made of durable plastic. Unlike the fiberglass shells, the plastic ones can take serious gymnastic abuse.

As boats have made tricks easier, the maneuvers that a rodeo star must perform have multiplied. Witness the air blunt, a 180-degree twist off the crest of a hydraulic; the pinwheel, which involves flipping end over end off a waterfall; the kick flip, launching off a wave into a jet-fighter spin. Different conditions favor different moves. At Rock Island, variations on the cartwheel theme are the bread and butter of the 45-second ride.

A colorful lexicon of wipeouts has developed along with the sport. To be “windowshaded” is to drop your upstream edge only to be rolled over again and again at the speed of a window shade that’s been pulled down, let go, and is flapping at the top. To be “chunkered” is to get flipped and washed out the back end of the hole like you’re being flushed down a toilet. “You start agro,” says Ludden, “and then about two-thirds of the way through you become more conservative because you’re out of breath, swallowing water, and you start to worry about getting worked.”

Ludden doesn’t do so well at Rock Island. He manages mostly flat spins, failing to get the tips of his kayak vertical鈥攖he difference between scores of one and four points. Though he stays in the hole for 35 of the 45 seconds, he fails to make the finals.

These are held the same afternoon. Ludden watches from shore. It comes down to Jimmy Blakeney, 28, the chairman of the U.S. Freestyle Kayak Committee; Dan Gavere, 30, a ten-year rodeo veteran; and Dave Garringer, a 21-year-old from Ramsey, West Virginia. Gavere flushes out almost immediately but scrambles back up into the hole to rack up more points. Garringer flushes out too but can’t get back before the red flag; he finishes third. Blakeney survives his first ride, and in the ultimate round he and Gavere put on a mesmerizing show. No one in the crowd can tell who won, but the judges give the victory to Blakeney.

“I used to judge, but now I wouldn’t feel comfortable,” says Ludden, who feigns nonchalance about that morning’s performance but admits it was “below average, a tough one to start the year with.”

For now, Ludden can afford to shrug off missing the finals. Freestyle has no official rankings, and weekend to weekend any one of 25 paddlers may win a gold medal, something the obscure scoring system guarantees. Ludden’s sponsorship has as much to do with cleaning up nice and being a role model as it does with winning. And yet that may be the very thing that changes if the sport blows up.

THE FIRST FREESTYLE TOUR began with an old white pizza delivery van, a gas card, and 20 bucks per diem. It was 1996 and Chan Zwanzig, aka Daddy Wave, founder and owner of Wave Sport, a small kayak company in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, gave four boaters the keys to the van and a video camera and told them to go to every whitewater rodeo they could. One of the guys in the van was Chris Emerick. “We were so budget,” remembers Emerick. “There were no expenses, but it’s not like we could afford a room. There were other teams, but no one was really getting set up.” By this time, there were 15 rodeos to crash. It had taken awhile鈥�20 years鈥攂ut playboating didn’t burn out or fade away.

“Paddlers have a tight network,” explains Rob Lesser, one of the original Stanley organizers. “It doesn’t take long for ideas to cross-pollinate.” At AWA fund-raiser festivals, rodeo is almost a tradition. At last December’s worlds, in New Zealand, 22 countries were represented, including Nepal and Togo.

Along with competitions and sponsored paddlers, it’s hoped that man-made holes will bring freestyle to the masses. Already, manufactured whitewater parks exist in Ducktown, Tennessee; Salida, Colorado; Denver’s Confluence Park; and South Bend, Indiana, and Wausau, Wisconsin, the sites of two new August rodeos also offering prize money. Each uses various combinations of concrete, wood, rubber, and fiberglass fastened to the river bottom. Not all playboaters are impressed. “They haven’t yet developed sites that are quality,” says Emerick. “But it’s going to happen.”

Emerick took up the job of video documentarian right from the start, in the pizza van. Now, with two instructional videos to his name (Play Daze and SOAR), he’s been hired by Dagger and Outdoorplay.com, a kayak retailer, to chronicle this year’s tour, featuring Ludden and rival paddlers Jay Kincaid and Javid Grubbs. Byrd, who is lucky to be tagging along, will star as well. The working title: Full Circle.

Ludden grew up next to the Swan River, in Bigfork, which is less than two hours from the glassy waves of the Kootenai River. At age nine his parents taught him to kayak on Idaho’s Lochsa River, his favorite still. He began racing slalom by the time he was 12, attending junior nationals when he was 14. A year later he took up freestyle, made the U.S. Junior Freestyle Team, picked up his first sponsorship (from Riot, then a new kayak company in Montreal), and won a bronze medal at the 1997 Worlds, in Canada. After the Worlds in Taupo, New Zealand, last year, he used the rest of a round-the-world ticket to paddle in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Ludden, Kincaid, Grubbs, and Byrd all personify the new school. They spend hours at a single hole practicing stunts. Old-schoolers run rivers from the put-in to the take-out; they quickly find their way into wilderness that would take days to reach on foot. Critics see freestyle in much the way that backcountry skiers see resort skiing: It’s too limited; it has nothing to do with self-reliance or appreciating nature. “My pet peeve: The fact that everyone I meet on the rivers these days (under age 30) is sponsored,” Bob Woodward, editor of Snews, an opinionated outdoor industry newsletter, wrote last March in a letter to the American Whitewater Journal. “They can barely read water and they’re ‘like, sponsored by Boof Daddy, Boof Mommy and, like, Anarchist Paddle Gear.'”

“I think [our critics] are kind of jealous,” counters Ludden. “The new school people make money and do what they want to do. I’ve just found a way to kayak more than 100 days a year.”

ONCE DURING THE WEEKEND at Rock Island I find the hole deserted except for Ludden and Byrd, who are trading a green boat between them, taking turns while Emerick videos. They’re trying to invent a new trick, a kayak version of a 180-degree rail grab, using the wave like a skateboard ramp. After some trial and error they hammer out “the limerick”: catching air in a half-twist and landing nose-first back in the hole, before resuming cartwheels.

When the boys aren’t competing, they’re often as not still on the water creeking (kayaking down steep, boulder-chocked creeks) or looking up water levels to figure out where to go next. Water can rise and fall in a single day, and it’s easy to miss.

Word of a storm spreads all weekend. So on Monday they drive two hours east to Harriman, Tennessee, to pick up new boats at the Dagger factory and meet up with Kincaid and Grubbs. These two are also set up with a Suby, and the wagons convoy for two hours to Bear Creek, an infamous run in Georgia. There they connect with 37-year-old freestyle pioneer Marc Lyle.

In the Bear Creek parking lot, Byrd pulls his drysuit top over his head and hasn’t even given the run a second thought when Emerick asks, “Dude, how’s your creeking?”

Byrd doesn’t know.

“This really isn’t the place to find out,” Emerick says.

When you drive four hours through rain to get to a creek, it’s not so easy to pass it up. Wisely, Byrd does, but Ludden won’t be denied. Lyle, who lost a best friend creeking in February, is concerned.

“I’ve paddled with both of you and I know that your skills are there,” Lyle says to Emerick and Ludden. “Question is, where’s your head?”

“Uh, on top of my shoulders,” Ludden replies. Smartass.

In their four-mile run, the group loses two paddles, and Grubbs takes a nasty four-minute surf in a section called the Gnarr. Ludden rescues him with a rope. Lyle runs a blind drop and collides with a log, which holds him for a few terrifying seconds before releasing him. At the end of Grubbs’s rescue, the group notices that the rock they parked a boat on earlier is nearly submerged. Bear Creek looks like it might “flash”鈥攁s in flash flood. They paddle like hell to get out of there.

“It was death,” Ludden says later. “But not entirely a bad experience.” The contrast of the weekend at Rock Island and the thrills and scare at Bear Creek helps Ludden keep the circuit in perspective. “We’re not kayaking for sponsorship,” he says. “We’re sponsored so we can kayak.”

There’s a saying among the members of kayaking’s new school: “Rodeo for dough, creek for fun.” The weekend competitions are the office days; the weeks between are the weekends. For Ludden, it’s certainly a sweet spot in time. Either the sport will stall out and freestylers will be back to selling nose plugs and hitching rides, or they’ll face the greater demands of commercial success. Until then, they’ve got the Suby, gas money, free boats, and time, bountiful time enough to drive hundreds of miles out of their way in search of the next plush ride.听听

Cristina Opdahl is an associate editor of 国产吃瓜黑料.

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