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Adrift: Savoring and Suffering in the High Sierras
The Hike In Starting the hike in at 10 pm may not have been my first mistake. At least that was what I was thinking by midnight. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be there, I didn’t even know if we were on the right trail. Sage and mules ear flashed in and […]
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Absolved
Birthdays mark the beginning of life. Mine marked the end of Shannon’s. I arrived in the Great Falls parking lot for some race training and birthday laps, and I heard that something had happened. Things always happen: broken boats, broken paddles, bloody knuckles, and dislocated shoulders. It’s nothing new, just pieces of a story; war […]
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Linville Gorge: Triumph and Tragedy
Editor’s note: On April 28, 2018 a small team of kayakers paddled North Carolina’s Linville Gorge from Pine Trail to Lake James three times in one day. Linville is one of the grittiest runs on the East Coast. It is long, hard, and dangerous as a rattlesnake. The triple involved paddling 45 miles and dropping a vertical mile […]
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The Sandbags of Time
I look at the call list on my phone. Galen’s name alternates in red and black down the screen. Phone tag. I touch his name and finally get him on the line. He is asking my opinion on whether or not he can handle running Marsh Creek into the Middle Fork Salmon. It almost feels […]
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Ultra Classic: the Wayne Gentry Interview
At the 1991 Gauley Festival Wayne Gentry released Green Summer, his first whitewater film. While Bob Benner called Gorilla “the most bodacious rapid ever run by the elite eastern hairheads” in his book Carolina Whitewater, Gentry and his crew were dropping some of the biggest whitewater on the East Coast, Gorilla included, on a regular […]
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Housatonic Horizon Lines
If you are lucky, the summer you are eighteen something great happens to you. It is a warm and wet June morning. Everything is dripping new, like a city street the morning after it has rained and no cafes are open and everything is alive with possibility. Finally it has rained, and the Housatonic River […]
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A Fine Line
A fine line separates the good from the bad, the clean from the chaos. It is a finer line still that separates good judgment from bad judgment. And the line between life and death? That is only a thread. This would be the second time I have clung to that thread with all my strength. When we […]
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Falling
The modern world with all its traps is hard to escape. The smartphone by my bed beeps and I am awake. It is far too early. An email has arrived. Long time white water pioneer Doug Ammons is talking of the Stikine again-of the river that roars, and the feelings that echo, and the whispers […]
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Musings of the Mystery
“If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one-half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird.” -Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers The West Prong of the Little […]
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The Daniel Effect
Editor’s Note: Daniel DeLaVergne (3/5/1977-3/8/2006) was a whitewater legend and one of the founders of Lunch Video Magazine. He was instrumental in planning and executing the Seven Rivers Expedition and the first one day descent of the Stikine River in British Columbia. “Okay, here’s how we’re gonna do this.” That was a good signal to […]