This article originally appeared in Canoeroots and Family Camping magazine.

Four years ago, when then 15-year-old Angulalik Pedersen left Kugluktuk, Nunavut, to attend high school on full scholarship at Upper Canada College in Toronto, he brought with him a dream that one day he could take some of his southern classmates north to visit his hometown on the Arctic Ocean.

In the summer before Pedersen’s final year, with the help of his geography teacher at UCC and the Kitikmeot Inuit Association, he finally pulled it all together—a canoe trip on the Coppermine River that would end at his house on July 9, Nunavut Day.

The goal of the expedition—named Atanigi, “when two things come together” in the language of Kugluktuk—was to bring together Pedersen’s new classmates with youth from his home in the North. Because paddling is part of the extra-curricular program at UCC, Pedersen had no trouble drumming up interest for the trip in Toronto. Back home, however, extra- curricular activities involved powerboats, snow machines and ATVs…but not canoes.

With the infectious enthusiasm of Kugluktuk High School counselor cum recruitment officer Kenny Taptuna, however, half a dozen northern youth signed up. They found a canoe and the will to start learning strokes. Unfortunately, it was May and nearly everything was still frozen. As a result, when the group gathered as a whole for the first time on Air Tindi’s wharf in Yellowknife, half had no real paddling experience on flatwater, let alone preparation for whitewater.

Incredibly, the northerners surmounted their inexperience with natural athleticism and a seemingly near-genetic familiarity with boats in general. Aided by the skill and determination of three wilder- ness guides, the group practiced strokes and maneuvers on the first hundred or so kilometers of calm water near the Northwest Territories/Nunavut border.

By the time the crew turned north at Big Bend and started into the current and class II–III rapids for which the Coppermine is known, cross-cultural paddling teams were working like reasonably well-oiled machines. On the more difficult rapids, lead guide Colin Smith lashed two canoes together to make a pontoon boat— a.k.a. the “party barge”—which created a super stable, almost relaxing whitewater experience for novice paddlers.

At the Coppermine campsites, Taptuna taught nightly lessons in Inuit language and traditional games. Others started string games, throat singing lessons and impromptu inukshuk-building workshops. Traditions from the north and south blended in the common experience of paddling to the Arctic Ocean under the midnight sun.

When the paddlers arrived cold, wet and happy in Kugluktuk on Nunavut Day, they were celebrated for coming together to accomplish something remarkable. Pedersen and the other northerners were recognized by the town as the first people ever from that community to arrive via the river.

Equally significant was the realization of one young person’s dream to make this land just a little bit smaller by bringing people together in canoes.

James Raffan hopes paddlers will be inspired by Pedersen’s example to use their canoes to connect with their country and each other. Don’t forget: National Canoe Day is june 26, www.nationalcanoeday.net. American canoeists are encouraged to celebrate as well.

This article appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Late Summer 2011.

Montana’s Doug Ammons has a paddling résumé that reads like a life list of rivers. Best known for a generation of pushing the boundaries of class V expeditionary whitewater, Ammons pioneered first self-supported (with Rob Lesser) and solo descents of the Grand Canyon of the Stikine, as well as descents of the Yukon’s Alsek River, Alaska’s Susitna and many other seldom-paddled rivers. Also a psychologist and author of The Laugh of the Water Nymph, Ammons has made another first descent of sorts—whitewater paddling literature. His newest book, Whitewater Philosophy explores the deeper meaning gained from a lifetime of paddling difficult rivers (available from Water Nymph Press, 2009, dougammons.com).

One of your overriding intentions is to try to capture the whitewater experience in words. Why is there a need to articulate this experience and put it into words?

There is no need to articulate what the experience means beyond my own desire to understand, and my own sense of clarity and inspiration. It’s important to me as a personal process, but I don’t presume that it is important to others. The sport is action-oriented, even hyper-action-oriented, rather than reflective—so most people get all the pleasure and understanding they want when they get on the water with their friends.

Is there something inherent in paddling that limits its written interpretation?


Yes. For most people, action is the meaning. They want to be immersed directly in the water; they aren’t interested in reflecting on it. If they were reflective, it would create a meditative, even mystical, approach to experiencing one of the great powers of the world—but mostly [the experience] doesn’t seem to be that deep.

As far as writing goes, the problem to solve is: how does one make these experiences accessible to everybody? Beyond that, how do you infuse the writing with the energy and power felt in the river, stated so it infuses any reader with the same inspiration?

You write often about the incredible gifts to be found paddling whitewater rivers, especially from your experience on extremely difficult rivers. Is that where the gifts are?

The door is always open to everybody. However, the more intense experiences create more vivid and dramatic images. They cut deeper and people seem to find them more interesting.

I think it is a fallacy that class V will teach you everything. If it did, there would be a lot of wise kayakers out there. But take it from me, the class V dudes are as weird and quirky and as messed up as anybody, and no wiser.

To paddle hard whitewater, all it really takes is a lot of motivation, physical skill, time in the boat, some aptitude for understanding water and a desire to do hard things. It is goal-oriented, which leads to trying to capture the goal rather than to understand living it. None of these are qualities that reward you with gifts. It takes a humbler state of mind to recognize gifts.

Are these gifts free for all who paddle?

I think there are probably different grades of experience as the stakes get higher, but the gifts are there for everybody. Interestingly, in my experience, most beginners and intermediates are more aware of the gifts and are better at expressing them than are the highly experienced, professional kayakers. They have a freshness, humbleness and excitement that [make them open to] inspiration.

The only problem is that most people tend to leave the message on the river, when it’s actually a profound life-encompassing perspective—a lesson that potentially affects everything they do. It’s up to you to apply [the lesson] in a meaningful way beyond your paddling, or to see that your paddling has brought you a gift that is rich beyond the river.

So what are these gifts?

The river gives beauty, danger, risk, excitement and challenge, and we answer with motivation, skills, control and action. These things are all very compelling [in and of] themselves, but more than that they are doorways [framing] something beyond themselves. In this sense the river is like a Zen master pointing at the moon. We paddlers are the disciples—some of us are just staring at his finger and some are aware he is pointing at something greater and far beyond us. If you are able to use the awareness difficult paddling gives you as a tool in the rest of your life, especially for understanding yourself, then that is something worthy of the gift the river has given.

Jeff Jackson is a professor of Outdoor Adventure at Algonquin College in Pembroke, Ontario.

This article originally appeared in Rapid, Spring 2010. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.

Usually we don’t have to defend our reasons for paddling because it is so obvious to us why we do it, but a funeral is different. Some time ago a friend of mine went to a funeral for a young man who had been a fellow kayaker. The man had been caught on a log on a difficult run, trapped, and drowned in his kayak. My friend tried to say a few words about him. He found himself talking about how much the man enjoyed kayaking, how he celebrated his time on the river and how much fun he had there.

He thought he’d done a good job explaining, until afterwards several members of the family cornered him and challenged him in an attempt to understand their grief.

How could taking such risks be worth it when it ended this way—a smart 22-year-old with his whole life ahead of him, gone, drowned doing something for fun?

My friend struggled for answers, and slipped into clichés, “At least he died doing what he loved.” At which the mother broke down in tears and said, “I miss my son. Dying isn’t loving.”

Tongue-tied and embarrassed, my friend did the best he could, but later confided to me, “They kept asking questions and I didn’t know what to say. Looking at the mother, I said all the things we normally do but it sounded stupid with her standing there crying.”

When somebody dies paddling, the entire house of cards—the laughter, exhilaration, friendships and good times—suddenly collapses. We’re left with a feeling of pain that is utterly foreign to everything that seems so special about the sport.

We need to try to find answers and dump the clichés in the trash where they belong. Clichés are thoughtless denials whose purpose is to save us from facing the disconnect between what we want to believe and the death that is staring at us. Statements like “that’s the price of pushing the envelope” beg a lot of questions: Why is this envelope so important that its price is death?

I don’t hear many answers on any of today’s blogs or videos. If someone thinks that this cliché is an answer, then he should try it out on the mother of a friend who has died. Hopefully before the words escape his lips, he’ll realize how dumb the statement really is.

We choose to go on the river of our own free will; we don’t have to be there. We aren’t saving our family or waging war against an evil empire. We aren’t doing anything that has value in the outside world. However, we are doing something that can have huge personal value, suffuse our lives with energy and challenge and beauty. But little of that is expressed in the usual reasons that people give, and it certainly isn’t expressed in any cliché I’ve ever heard.

Please, from now on if you hear somebody saying 
a cheap, unthinking cliché, ask him what he really means. Demand an answer. If we’ve got our finger on the pulse of this wondrous thing called a river, and if we are going to go places where death is a possibility, then we need to think more deeply about why we’re there. Because when you add death into the equation, the answers change.

Doug Ammons has been a world-class kayaker for 25 years, and is a PhD in psychology, musician and martial artist. He was recently named “one of the ten greatest adventurers since 1900” by Outside magazine for his audacious class V solo expeditions.

This article originally appeared in Rapid, Early Summer 2010. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.

When Alison Howard front-crawled into Port Edward, B.C., last August, she was completing not just her 28-day source-to-sea swim of northern British Columbia’s Skeena River, but the circle in a longstanding river tradition. In raising awareness of threats surrounding this beautiful and pristine watershed, Howard enthusiastically volunteered for what so many of us enthusiastically avoid—swimming.

Twenty years on, I still have a mark on my jaw from when it hit the bedrock ground beside the Ottawa River. After briefing us on our ultimately futile, high water Coliseum rookie attempt, our raft training guide simply jumped in. To us, the rapid was a mess of roaring white and certain death. He disappeared in the first wave and surfaced somewhere below, indignantly waving for us to get in the boat and get on with it. Later on in my rookie guide years, I would commonly come upon a senior guide, on a day off, swimming the river for fun.

For many paddlers, those who swim rivers— whether for a cause or for pleasure—defy reason. Kayakers view swimming with contempt (if they are good) or humiliation (if they are not), and canoeists are typically terrified of the very idea. Raft guides, always the realists, take swimming for what it is—insignificance while immersed in a tremendously powerful, uncaring force of water and gravity.

The swimming ethos can trace its roots back to 1955, when footloose former servicemen Bill Beer and John Daggett swam the Colorado’s Grand Canyon on a whim, more or less, and became daredevil media darlings. Dragging two 80-pound army surplus dry bags each, they swam the 200-plus miles in 26 days—with no plan, no backup, and no idea what they were doing.

Amazingly, they hauled a film camera with them, and for a time Beer made a living touring with his movie and telling his story. His memoirs are subtitled The True Story of a Cheap Vacation That Got a Little Out of Hand (We Swam the Grand Canyon, 1988, Mountaineers Books). These two single handedly shattered the certain death mentality that early river runners carried with them, and they likely also opened the door to public acceptance of whitewater rafting as a carefree means of having some fun on the river.

This river swimming subculture persisted for many years, and in many places, but came to an abrupt end in 1993 when Stan Hollister—the same guide who willingly swam Coliseum, scarring my jaw—died while swimming Colorado’s Cataract Canyon.

Among guides, Cataract is considered significantly more difficult than the Grand Canyon, and above 60,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) is the hardest commercially run big water in the world.

Hollister swam it at 110,000 cfs in 1983, covering the standard two-day whitewater section in one hour. In 1993, the flow was 65,000 cfs and Hollister was 52 years old. He saw some friends above the Big Drops—notorious for their massive pourovers, chaotic and churning flow and grip- ping speed—and was later found drowned below them. No one knows what happened.

Swimming fell out of favor, even though canoes still swamped and rafts still flipped. For a time, raft guides were even trained without intentional swimming.

Then in the early 2000s, during the heart of the kayaking boom, river rescue training—with its strong focus on swimming—finally gained acceptance among the rapidly expanding ranks of mainstream paddlers, knocking back the certain death mentality once more.

Today, it is not uncommon to again see rookies bobbing down the main lines of commercial rafting rivers. Sometimes just for fun.

Jeff Jackson is a professor of Outdoor Adventure at Algonquin College in Pembroke, Ontario.

This article originally appeared in Rapid, Early Summer 2010. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.