Open a northern tourism brochure and there they are, along with pictures, heights and distances to the nearest city hall. Eleven waterfalls just sitting by the road in the Northwest Territories. All within a five-hour drive of each other, complete with parking, camping, toilets and boardwalks to scenic overlooks. Drops ranging from three metres to 33 metres. And only three had ever been run.
That left eight first descents, something that my pal Stu and I were determined to change. Out of money and with nothing to paddle all winter, we hatched a plan: Run them all, smallest to largest, with me learning as we went. We would get famous bagging the first descents, maybe even make some money. It was a plan bred of desperation and boredom. By the time it collapsed around us, my good friend Stu would be forever one centimetre shorter.
I’d learned to paddle on the Slave and the Ottawa Rivers and was pretty comfortable with churning masses of foam and two-storey waves. My “local river hero” mentality got a bit of a shock, however, when I went to B.C. and paddled rapids that didn’t have ten-metre-wide lines down the middle or monster eddies at the bottom. It was then that I realized I couldn’t creek for balls and, much to my regret, had never run a waterfall. Fortunately, Stu was quite the opposite, a true B.C. paddler. He knew steep and he knew continuous and he was willing to teach me.
By June the water was running and we were on our way up north. Stu took the opportunity to bring me up to speed on the fundamentals. He explained that you can go at drops in two ways: boof them or pin-drop them. Boofing involves landing your kayak flat or at a slight angle to the water. The term “boof” comes from the sound that the bottom of your boat makes when it hits the water: “BOOF.” Pin dropping is just that, Stu said. Dropping over the edge bow-first and falling…just like a dropped pin.
What dictates which way you go is a combination of waterfall height and water depth at the bottom. “You don’t want to land anything flat that’s over nine metres high. Imagine strapping a door to your ass, jumping off the high board at the local pool and landing flat on the door. Vertebrae compress, disks pop, things twist, other things snap, crackle and pop—not a pretty thought!” Stu noted that one may even want to reduce that nine- metre rule of thumb if getting on in years or feeling particularly brittle that day.
So why boof at all, I wondered. Well, I learned that boofing requires a lot less bottom depth than does pin dropping. I also found out that it allows you to retain some of your forward speed and gives you more con- trol over where you wind up at the bottom—a good thing if there’s a nasty hole or some obstacle below that you want to avoid.
The first two waterfalls on our list were close to Fort Smith on the Slave River and a logical place to start. While the Slave is renowned for its big water, the east side of the river is laced with small channels and two three-metre waterfalls of note: Slop Drop and Patrice’s Falls. There are smaller falls on the Slave but, to paraphrase Nealy, a waterfall is defined as a vertical fall over 2.5 metres in height. Anything smaller is just a ledge.
Slop Drop and Patrice’s Falls provided a good training ground for Stu to teach me how to boof. I learned how in order to get your kayak to ramp off a waterfall, you need to throw in a strong forward stroke just as you reach the lip. This boof stroke, combined with an upward pull by your knees and a slight forward movement of your torso, causes your bow to leap for- ward and up and initiate the boof. I practiced this stroke on flat water and perfected it on small ledges before hitting the bigger stuff. I learned that the tendency of water to accelerate as it nears the lip of a waterfall will affect the timing of the stroke, and to be ready for this or be doomed to screw up.
BOUND FOR FIRST DESCENTS
After our successful practice runs on the Slave we set off from Fort Smith on a three-hour drive bound for some first descents. In the process we drove past Little Buffalo Falls on Highway 5, a 12-metre ogre that required technical expertise that I didn’t have, at least not yet.
The highways of southern N.W.T. traverse vast dis- tances between the minute enclaves of iconoclasts that comprise the culture of the North. In this otherwise tedious landscape of tortured spruce trees and mosquitoes, ancient glacial action has created a huge escarpment over which pretty much all the region’s water tumbles. Government engineers bulldozed Highway 1 along the escarpment’s periphery. Tourism marketers named it the Waterfall Route. The road provides easy access to six waterfalls: Louise Falls at 15 metres, Alexandra Falls at 33 metres, the twin falls of Escarpment Creek at eight metres and 12 metres, Lady Evelyn Falls at 15 metres, and McNally Creek. Only Lady Evelyn Falls had ever been run.
Mileposts every two kilometres along Highway 1 mark off the kilometres from the Alberta border. McNally Creek Falls, at kilometre 120, is a seven-metre straight shot only 100 metres from the road. McNally Creek had a lot less water in it than when we had looked at it a few months earlier, but after a dummy run with an empty kayak we deemed it safe and Stu took the first shot. Unfortunately, Stu didn’t take as nice a line as did the empty kayak. He wound up hitting the large flake of rock that dominates the lip of this waterfall and was kicked to the right and rotated onto his side. The landing was brutal and the impact of the water onto the side of his head knocked all the foam out of his helmet.
It was here in my short but dynamic waterfall running career that I learned it is sometimes harder to go second. Assembling all the nerve I could, I charged straight ahead and hit a perfect boof, landing flat on non-aerated water seven metres below. It was also at this point that I coined the term “nut slap” and added it to the list of reasons not to boof, somewhere between compressed vertebrae and popped disks. Insulted ‘nads aside, I was chuffed at having bagged the first in what we were determined was to be a long series of first descents.
We chose to leave the other, more intimidating falls of the Waterfall Route for the end of our tour and explored up Highway 1 toward the Trout River, which crosses the highway at a place called Somba Deh, a territorial campground at kilometre 320. Armed only with a handful of tourism pamphlets, we went in search of Coral Falls, Whittaker Falls and Wallace Creek.
Whittaker Falls is an ungodly maelstrom that unleashes all of its fury right below the highway bridge and makes one never want to enter the water again. This evil beast is more of a monster slide than a falls and is pumping into a hole at the bottom so big that it ejects jets of water vapour 15 metres into the air. Petrified, we scratched Whittaker off our list.
Fortunately, one kilometre upstream from the campground on a well-worn river-right trail is Coral Falls, a beautiful four-metre drop into a nice deep pool. We ran that puppy ever which way from Sunday, if only to purge our fear of Whittaker Falls by excessively boofing everything in sight.
DARK AND INTIMIDATING
Drunk on the victory of our second first descent, we headed to Wallace Creek at kilometre 290, parking at a small rest area located by the creek’s bridge. A trail on river left leads to the falls, but we opted to paddle the two kilometres downstream, a pleasant class II with two two-metre boofs along the way.
When we got to Wallace Creek Falls we were a little taken aback. On the surface it looked to be no problem, about an eight-metre drop into a deep pool below. But it was hard to judge the height, as the creek dropped from an 18-metre-deep canyon into a 30-metre-deep canyon with overhung walls. Dropped might not be the right word; dribbled was more appropriate. There was hardly any water in the creek and I was reminded of the Bugs Bunny episode with the intrepid cartoon hero jumping off an impossibly tall tower into a tiny bucket of water.
We fixed a rope into the canyon above and rappelled in with a throwbag to measure the height. Turns out that the falls were more like 12 metres high. Standing at the lip, that glassy, non-aerated water far below looked pretty dark and intimidating.
It’s after these pivotal moments of your life that you look back and wish that you’d properly answered the question, “Am I more afraid of the waterfall or of my friends thinking I’m chicken?” Beside me, Stu’s mind was churning through the same testosterone-laden thought process. We looked at each other. “I’ll go first,” I heard myself say. The idiocy had begun.
NOT AS FAMOUS AS PLANNED
We fixed a rope below the falls and Stu rappelled down to provide safety and take pic- tures. I gathered my courage, drove myself over the lip and hucked my weight forward, putting myself into the kayaking fetal position with my paddle at my side. I knew that I didn’t want to land this one flat and that not too much could go wrong as long as I went in pointy end first. Eyes closed, I hit the water slightly over-vertical and got immediately ejected from my craft when my boat slapped into the water upside down. I bobbed to the surface with my stomach in my throat, a roaring in my ears and the faint echoes of Stu’s laughter reverberating off the canyon walls. Later, when Stu got the film developed, there must have been ten shots of me swimming around the base of the falls, looking pissed off.
Now it was Stu’s turn. Not wanting to hang up at the lip or over-rotate like me, he put in a bit of a boof stroke at the top. In my slow-motion, frame-by-frame recollection of the carnage, his kayak floated off the lip of the falls, flattened out, turned sideways and proceeded to flutter 12 metres down to the base of the falls. The hull made a hollow “boof” sound when it landed, flat as a pancake onto the black water.
Two kilometres from the road, 250 kilometres from the nearest hospital, at the base of a 30-metre-deep, overhung canyon, Stu was floating around in his boat with a broken back. We would later learn that it was a compression fracture of the T-12 vertebra, but to Stu at this moment it was a world of hurt. Fortunately, very fortunately, the only damage was to the bone and not to the spinal cord inside.
Stu would have nothing to do with my intricate plans for spinal boards improvised from paddles and kayak bottoms, let alone let me haul him up a 30- metre cliff with jury-rigged harnesses and mechanical advantage systems. In fact, Stu was able to ascend up the rope 30 metres, walk the two kilometres to the truck and rattle down two and half hours of dirt road to the hospital in Hay River.
And to such ignoble ends come the dreams of men. We are not famous as planned (although perhaps infamous in some circles, especially with our girl- friends) and certainly not rich. But I know a lot more about waterfalls. Stu, although forevermore a little less than his original 6’ 8″, was leading 5.10c rock climbs on gear by October. And there are still five first descents to be bagged in the Northwest Territories, just sitting by the road.
Keith Morrison runs the Slave Kayak Lodge on the Slave River in Canada’s Northwest Territories and has spent the past 10 years exploring the nooks and crannies of the Far North.
This article first appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of Rapid Magazine.
