This article originally appeared in Canoeroots and Family Camping magazine.

Aluminum was the material of choice for most canoe trippers until the late 1970s when a memorable Old Town Canoe Company advertisement changed the face of canoeing forever.

In 1978, Old Town touted the supreme durability of its 17-foot Tripper canoe by tossing one from the roof of its Maine factory. The canoe escaped unscathed. Since then, Royalex has been the go-to material for Arctic river trippers, summer camps and whitewater boaters alike.

Uniroyal Tire Company chemists designed the vulcanized plastic known as Royalex in the mid-20th century. The material consists of a single inner layer of heat- expandable acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) foam sandwiched between mid-layers of tough and stiff ABS plastic and exterior surfaces of ultraviolet-resistant vinyl. The material is designed to be heat-molded into complex shapes that withstand impact and retain their original form.

According to Old Town Canoe historian and author Susan Audette, the first canoe constructed of Uniroyal’s patented Royalex material was built by Maine’s Thompson Boat Company in 1964. Old Town became the first to popularize the material when it produced its 16-foot Chipewyan in Oltonar—its proprietary name for the material—in 1972. Vermont’s Mad River Canoe followed quickly with its explorer.

Today, canoe manufacturers order sheets of Royalex with customized thickness pro- files and colors from Indiana-based plastics manufacturer Spartech, who acquired the Royalex formula from Uniroyal in 2000.

The building process involves heating canoe-sized sheets of the material in a “humongous pizza oven” set at about 320 degrees Fahrenheit, explains Roch Prévost, sales manager for Nova Craft Canoe of Lon- don, Ontario. After about 20 minutes in the oven, the material is vacuum formed over a mold in a process that takes a team of builders only 10 minutes. The most time consuming part of building a Royalex canoe is out- fitting it with gunwales and trim. Prévost says Nova Craft can turn out 20 Royalex canoes on a good day and produces about 1,500 per year. Because of its petroleum-based origins, the price of a raw Royalex sheet is dependent on the price of oil—not to mention Spartech’s monopoly on production.

Prévost says the recent spike in oil prices has translated into about a 10 percent in- crease in material cost for manufacturers. These costs will eventually trickle down to consumers. In 1975, for instance, a 17-foot Old Town Penobscot in Oltonar sold for $775; today, the same canoe sells for nearly $1,600.

But due to its near-indestructibility, Prévost maintains that a Royalex canoe will al- ways be a good investment. “It’s something that can be passed down from generation to generation,” he says. “We see 20-year-old Royalex canoes all the time. The trim is broken and worn, but the hulls are fine.” —Conor Mihell

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

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.