We got to race and relax at the Hell or High Water Event on the Petawawa River. One of the fastest growing races in paddlesports the HOHW Event brings in hundreds or kayakers, rafters, canoeist and spectators from all over. Check out some of the action and find out how the event started and why it matters to so many people.
A review of the Duluth Packs Monarch traditional portage pack from Canoeroots & Family Camping magazine.
Duluth Pack perfected the olive drab canvas canoe pack in the 1800s. Since then, the brand has become synonymous with traditional portage packs. After years of making custom modifications to their original packs, Duluth built the 95-liter Monarch—a full-featured pack that doesn’t abandon time-tested materials or compromise craftsmanship. Constructed of rugged 18-ounce canvas, it has padded leather shoulder straps and a removable waist belt, tump and sternum strap. The pack sits low to accommodate the carrying of a canoe. Adopt Duluth’s liner system to get the most out of the Monarch. Start by inserting a folded sleeping pad into the rear inner sleeve, providing extra cushioning. Then, pack the included 6-mil poly liner to protect items that need to stay dry. Finally, stuff the inner pockets with other loose items like saws, tent poles and rain gear. Outer side pockets provide quick access to smaller items.
This article originally appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Spring 2012. Download our freeiPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
A review of the Granite Gear Superior One portage pack from Canoeroots & Family Camping magazine
The Superior One uses a harness reminiscent of a high-quality hiking backpack mounted onto a bag that’s sized for a canoe—a rare blend in portage packs. Its padded back panel forms for comfort and distributes weight evenly with help from wide, contoured shoulder straps and a cushy, interchangeable waist belt. Choose from two sizes to customize torso fit. Top load the colossal 121-liter capacity using dry bags for optimal protection—the Superior One is water-resistant, not proof. The Cordura and ballistic nylons used in the pack’s body bottom do, however, stand up to being dragged, snagged, tossed and sat on better than dryer, vinyl alternatives. The pack’s side pockets and lash points, features absent on lower-end models, make carrying loose items easy.
www.granitegear.com | $220
This article originally appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Spring 2012. Download our freeiPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
There were strict rules. The most important rule: Announce your cast. When I heard, “Casting Daddy,” I was on full alert. In the bow of the canoe, my three-year-old son sat swinging a wooden minnow armed with razor-sharp treble hooks.
Fishing with children is a long-term investment. Successful investors know that to achieve higher returns in the long run, you have to accept short-term risk. Like, say, a hook in the arm.
The fishing industry also knows the value of investing in children at a young age, and the earlier the better. Someone who comes to fishing at age 10 will spend far more over his lifetime than someone who takes up fishing in his twenties. The earlier you have a rod in your hand, the more avid you’re likely to be and the later in life you’re likely to fish. Not to mention you will be more likely to take your own children or grandchildren fishing—investing in another generation.
Both my kids have had their own rods and tackle from an early age. One of their favorite parts of fishing is sorting and choosing lures. So far, five-year-old Kate chooses her hard plastic baits by color. She’ll ask me to put on the cute pink one or little Blue Betty. Sorting and organizing their tackle is part of the experience. Sure it’s expensive, but still cheaper and better money spent than Wii Hooked! Real Motion Fishing.
Throwing blue and silver minnow lures into shady eddies on our home river isn’t like feeding worms to sunfish on a cane pole. In the beginning, Doug would hang onto his rod for a couple turns of the reel but never long enough to get a frisky smallmouth bass anywhere near the gunwales. “Dad… Dad… HELP!”
Fishing with kids can be tedious and stressful. But with vision and patience, there are huge paybacks. And not everything along the way needs to be reinvested; there are certainly dividends, payouts worth more than cash, stock or property.
Last summer, when Doug was six, we stumbled on the best river bass fishing I’d ever experienced. Bass were jumping at our lures dangling over the side of the canoe.
Rules be damned. Without warning, Doug fired a perfect cast to the far side of a large, deep eddy. A smallmouth hit his Rapala and shot out of the water shaking furiously. It was pretty clear to Doug, and to me, he was in for the fight of his little life.
I set down my rod and began to crawl over the canoe packs, tackle trays and blue barrels, expecting him to hand me his rod. He was losing line faster than his fingers could reel it in.
“Pass over your rod, Doug,” I suggested.
He jammed the butt of the rod in his belly button below his PFD, leaned back bracing his feet against the gunwales and started cranking like an offshore fisherman battling an angry marlin.
“No way, Dad. Get the net, I’m going to land this mother!”
This article first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
Seventeen feet of old-school canvas and cedar makes you think differently about portages. I’ve carried relatively lightweight kevlar and Royalex canoes for hundreds of kilometers, but my big green prospector is different. It weighs an honest 82 pounds bone-dry and considerably more after a few days of travel.
Luckily, the legion of trippers who’ve lugged such waterlogged beasts in Temagami and the North Woods of Maine have come up with a clever way to bear the weight—one that’s equally effective on lighter contemporary canoes.
Maybe you’ve discovered the advantages of the tumpline on your favorite portage pack—the way it transfers weight from shoulders to spine and enables you to move massive loads. Rigged on the center thwart or carrying yoke of a canoe, the tumpline has similar advantages: a properly adjusted tump positioned just above your forehead actually lifts the canoe off of your shoulders and eliminates the pressure points of portaging. When your head and neck become fatigued, slipping out of the tump moves the weight back onto your shoulders, providing some respite on long carries.
Look for one with a two-inch-wide head strap measuring about 15 inches long that’s securely riveted to five- to seven- foot tails. It’s also possible to build your own with leather, canvas or nylon webbing.
On canoes with carrying yokes, wrap the tails of the tumpline on either side of the contoured portion of the yoke and secure them with a simple hitch near the gunwales. The tumpline will only work if it fits tight; for me, this means fastening it to the yoke as close to the headpiece as possible.
It’s easy to use your paddles to create a carrying yoke on canoes equipped with straight center thwarts. Tie a thin cord permanently to the thwart with spaces for the paddle blades and enough room for your head in between. The blades should be aligned with your shoulders. Loosely secure the grip ends of the paddles on a seat or thwart. Then attach the tumpline, wrapping the tails so that the paddles can slide in and out of position without the need to remove the tump.
Once you’ve lifted the canoe (unfortunately a tumpline won’t help you there), slip the tump over the crown of your head and feel the weight of the canoe levitate from your shoulders. It helps to hold the tump near your jaw with one hand; use your other hand to keep the canoe resting level.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
I really don’t know what made me want to explore the world, let alone in a canoe.
I grew up in a Chicago suburb where Wisconsin was considered somewhere far-off and foreign. Maybe it was my inexplicable interest in African wildlife; I visited Chicago’s stately Field Museum of Natural History, with its immense African Hall, every chance I got. Or maybe it was my penchant to devour classics like Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Even the Mississippi River was exotic and enthralling to a city kid.
But, digging deeper, I believe it was my discovery of canoeing that helped rock my sheltered world. Seeking a means to commune with nature somewhere closer to home than Africa, I purchased an Old Town Tripper and ventured—often blundered—through places I had only imagined up to then: the Florida Everglades, Missouri Ozark rivers, spectacular canyons of the Rio Grande. My horizons quickly expanded far beyond the urban jungles and cornfields of Illinois.
Since then, I’ve been fortunate to canoe in 25 countries and on all seven continents, but I’m still humbled by how big our planet is and how precious little of it I have visited. Running my index finger over the smooth curve of a globe in my living room in central Colorado, my mind begins to wander. I dream about canoeing far-flung places with challenging waters, unfamiliar cultures and more unknowns than knowns: Botswana, Tasmania, Peru, Ellesmere Island, Vietnam, Moldova. The list goes on and on.
I like that about traveling, about paddling. Once you slip your bow into the current and let it usher you downstream, everything is possible, or seems to be.
When everything clicks on a paddling trip, I find not only the rugged wilderness I am seeking, but also a new way of appreciating the world. An appreciation of the unique qualities of the country I am visiting—its history, culture and the people I reach out to and meet along the way. Traveling by canoe allows me to discover my internal compass as well as be guided by an external one. By going with the flow, not fighting it, I find myself floating through life and oftentimes laughing along the way.
Following the path of the paddle these past 35 years, my passion for travel still burns as bright today as when I was that youngster fantasizing about tripping down Ol’ Man River.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
Wading through my gear stash last spring, my eyes eventually settled on the protective case that contains my video camera.
As an outdoor filmmaker, I feel a certain obligation to bring the camera along on any extended trip and attempt to craft a work of engaging cinema. Creating art from the wilderness experience is a Canadian tradition made internationally famous by emissaries like Emily Carr and Bill Mason. Inspired by these icons, I’ve done my small part through the medium of film by sharing stories set within the context of remote self-propelled expeditions.
More often than not, I travel by canoe. This summer, the plan was for my friend Todd McGowan and I to paddle through the deepest heart of Ontario’s Boreal forest via an 1,120-kilometer route that would span the length of Wabakimi Provincial Park and then continue north, eventually ending at the mouth of the Winisk River on Hudson Bay. But this trip would have one important difference: for only the second year in about a decade, I said no to filming.
Once committed to making a film, any situation on trip that is hard, beautiful, interesting or relevant demands that I pull out the camera and start recording—an all-encompassing task that inevitably changes the personal experience within the journey. After making back-to-back documentaries, it was time to let my artistic outlet lie fallow and rejuvenate. This summer the canoe trip itself—not the filming of it—would be front and center.
I grovel up a side gully to reach the top. Peering over the edge, the looming gap between my precarious perch and the distant water takes my breath away. I inhale, step into space and let out a hoot before exploding into the liquid below. Under the surface, I look up through rising bubbles at the cliff as it bends like a Dali painting in the expanding ripples.
Experiences like this accumulate like dirt and calluses over the course of a canoe trip, eroding the thin veneer of a modern, vicarious iPhone life to reveal a basic, animal core that exists in each of us. They are moments of pure freedom.
Painters are naturally drawn to certain processes and mediums—some choose oil, some acrylic, others go for watercolor. The key for the artist is to find something that feels right, the method and result that satisfies the creative self.
Similarly, individual canoe trippers approach the wilderness journey in their own unique ways. Some like to paddle to an island and chill out for a week. Others linger in camp, put in a few hours on the water and then linger in camp again. The beauty of canoe tripping is that it reflects the style of the individual and no matter how you go about it, the rewards are rich.
Typical days on this journey have been 10 hours long with perhaps a half-hour break for lunch. We average almost 47 kilometers daily for the 24-day trip, including upstream, downstream, portages and dragging. I only sleep five hours a night because I’m so energized by every paddle stroke and aspect of this fresh environment that I want to jam as much action as possible into each moment.
Todd is setting up camp when I double-back along a rough 1,100-meter portage on the Witchwood River. I hop fallen logs and zigzag through the forest as fast as I possibly can. It’s a game to test my speed and agility and see how quickly I can retrieve the last pack. Turning a corner, a knobby spruce branch wedges perfectly between my front and back leg, catapulting me headfirst into the moss. I curse the branch and look down to see a long, deep laceration on the calf of my left leg and an ugly gouge on the shin of my right. Blood pours instantly from both wounds.
I get up and continue to run, first at a hobble and then at a steady, rhythmic clip. My clenched teeth relax into a smile and everything clarifies. Blood, moss, spruce and movement in the heart of the Little North. Life is simple and I am extremely happy.
I’ve been affected by a strain of madness perhaps, but on reflection it makes perfect sense. People are hardwired for this—to physically struggle and push our bodies in nature for extended periods of time. Our ancestors ran down prey and traveled under their own power for most of the million years or so of human existence. If time is a gauge, we are only a blip apart from that way of life—a blip filled with La-Z-Boy chairs and cheesecake, but a blip nonetheless. Much like the artist whose need to create is passed to them from the DNA of prehistoric cave painters, our genetics retain that need to move. Canoe tripping is a portal that allows us to tap into this tribal call.
Todd and I are in the Cree village of Peawanuck waiting for our plane to come and return us to urbana. In the meantime we’re hanging out at the house of the local Northern store manager, who generously offered us accommodation. I’m in the dining room hunched over a detailed map of Ontario, tracing a line over the blue veins and blotches of our completed route. I step back and admire the curves of the fresh line with a visual record of every campsite, lake and river etched in my mind.
I love making films about canoe journeys, but I realize now that making a film is simply adding another artistic layer to a thing that is itself utterly original and creative. Like an artist who is compelled to produce a painting on a blank canvas, the canoe tripper is compelled to step into a blank landscape, emerging at the end with the ultimate experience of a vision realized. If a film or painting is considered to be art then canoe tripping is, in every sense, art.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
In 2011, Becky Mason toured Europe for six weeks celebrating the release of her third film, Advanced Classic Solo Canoeing. Bridging the cultural gap with canoes was an enlightening experience 11 years in the making.
Q: It’s been 11 years since you released your last film, but this one feels like it’s built on a lifetime of experiences. Tell us more about the person in the famous red cedar-canvas prospector.
A: I’m a creative artist. That’s what i say when people ask me what I am. But there are lots of other hats that I wear in life. I’m a watercolorist. I love the creative side of canoeing, just doing all those gorgeous strokes. and, now, filmmaking—I’ve done three films. I do what makes me tick.
Q: Instructing must make you tick, then.
A: I love teaching. I love sharing knowledge with people—how to go canoeing and how to go canoeing efficiently. People’s eyes light up when they see that they can make the canoe move more efficiently without much effort.
Q: Your path is similar to your father Bill Mason’s career in canoeing, filmmaking and fine art. Do you feel overshadowed by his legacy?
A: I miss my dad. People ask if it’s hard following in his footsteps and I say no because it’s really special. I have some characteristics of his and I’m good with that. When I was 18, I found it a bit difficult handling the whole fame thing. He was having dinner with the Queen, he was traveling, the phone was always ringing. People would come up to me and say, “You’re Bill Mason’s daughter, I can’t believe I’m meeting you.” I always thought to myself, “Yeah, but I’m a person too, in my own right.”
When I turned 19, I came into my own and realized that I could either divorce myself from his legacy or accept it and build on it. And that’s what I do. I’m building on his skills that he taught me.
Q: You share some of those skills in your new DVD.
A: Since I completed my last film, I’ve been building on that knowledge and my teaching technique has changed and improved because I’ve had a lot of interaction with people.
Every stroke covered—all 18 of them—I broke down into parts: first, an introduction covering why people need the strokes; then, I break them down in detail; the last part includes additional information like why I love the stroke and why people think it’s special. It is a neat way to cover the strokes. You’re getting a lot of information but it’s also enjoyable to hear the stories behind them.
You also get to see the thread of the stroke. It’s very important in advanced paddling to see the continuation of where you’re going and how the movement of your body and the blade are interacting.
Q: Not only do you package each stroke and present it well, the images are extremely pleasing to watch. How has your filmmaking evolved?
A: I really wanted to shoot my last film in 16mm, but it was too expensive in 2000. For this one, the digital age is upon us, so it was cheap. I filmed in high definition with a camera I rented. The color was beautiful, and I was able to pick the light levels. I’m a traditional filmmaker. I love picking light levels and letting the scenes breathe.
Location is the most important thing for a movie. I really felt strongly that i wanted to go up to Lac Vert in Quebec. When you look down, you can see up to 60 feet deep, clear as a bell. I wanted to capture that in underwater shots. It was amazing to pick a location that inspired me to get the underwater shots.
I tried underwater shots in my first movie. I dragged Jerry, my editor, around Meech Lake on a rope with a SCUBA diving apparatus and it just didn’t work. The camera blew up right when I was about to edit. This time around, I was bound and determined to get underwater shots. It’s just so beautiful to see underneath and above.
Q: Does that enhance your ability to teach the stroke?
A: I’ve had so many comments from people who now understand what the blade is doing because they get to see it from below.
I also wanted to inset the canoeing in nature. With the underwater shots you see the beautiful white-bottomed lake. The calcium carbonate just shimmers. And then you have all the fish swimming in the lake. It’s great to show nature interacting with the strokes.
Q: This time around, you chose to launch your film in Europe first. How did that come about?
A: When I’m out canoeing, I dream a lot. It’s really beautiful canoeing at home on Meech Lake, but I like to share my skill, my love of canoeing. I get lots of requests from around the world asking me to come and teach. So, I went online to a European paddling forum and said I’d like to come to five countries and welcomed paddling clubs to invite me. Within a day, five paddling clubs piped up from the netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and italy.
Q: Your reputation preceded you. Is there an established canoeing scene in those countries?
A: It was great! We were concerned there wouldn’t be enough paddlers in the netherlands, but I planned two classes during the day and a presentation at night, and we were able to go and teach in their beautiful country.
The Italians all knew Bill Mason’s Path of the Paddle. I teach a lot of people who have only learned from my dad’s books and it’s quite charming because some of the interpretations get a little interesting. They were so fixated. They thought the only canoe in the world was a prospector because Bill Mason said so. They followed his words to a T.
Q: Not too much culture shock then?
A: It was a good stretch. I learned to use pantomiming to teach canoeing. Canoeing is a universal language. I really learned that on the European trip because I was going through all the languages—Flemish, French, Italian, German.
The whole of Europe was so generous and kind to us. In France they laid out a huge long table with white tablecloths and champagne flutes. We were drinking champagne and eating paté all afternoon. It was great.
Q: A far cry from a bagel with cream cheese and a bag of GORP. So what’s next?
A: My husband Reid, who coproduced the DVD with me, doesn’t know this yet but I’m going to go across North America this summer. I did it in 2006 and it’s about time I go again. I’ll take my DVD and do what I did in Europe, buzzing along the border between the U.S. and Canada, visiting all the clubs. I don’t know when I’m going to tell Reid. I’ll spring it on him; he tends to do better that way.
Interview by Scott MacGregor. Edited by Michael Mechan.
The 43-minute film builds on Mason’s wildly successful instructional film Classic Solo Canoeing, taking paddlers for a spin in her cedar-canvas canoe on the crystal clear waters of Lac Vert, Quebec. She shares 18 expert strokes and maneuvers along with stories of nature, heritage and her past. Stunning underwater camera angles provide a unique view of techniques like the Canadian stroke, the Indian stroke and the Northwood—a stroke not covered in depth on video until now.
Special features include a six-minute bonus musical paddling video with folk artist Ian Tamblyn, outtakes from the main production and Mason’s complete original film, Classic Solo Canoeing.
Advanced Classic Solo Canoeing won the Best Instructional Paddling Film award at the 2012 Reel Paddling Film Festival.
Purchase the DVD online from redcanoes.ca
This article first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
A fabulous new book called The Canadian Canoe Company and the Early Peterborough Canoe Factories (Cover to Cover Press, 2011) has got me thinking about reincarnation.
According to author Ken Brown, canoe building in Peterborough, Ontario, effectively died in the early 1960s with the Canadian Canoe Company ceasing operations in October 1961 and the Peterborough Canoe Company declaring bankruptcy soon after. But the presence of this book and a quick cruise on the World Wide Web indicates that the products of these venerable canoe companies are still very much on people’s minds.
Companies that had skillfully grown from an emerging 19th century cottage and craft activity into seven or eight canoe-building factories with robust domestic and international markets, struggled after WWII. Aluminum and fiberglass building techniques—innovations honed in wartime aircraft manufacturing— lent themselves naturally to canoe building. But tooling up for new materials and new
Building techniques was expensive. And training or retraining a skilled woodworking labor force to make canoes out of plastic or metal was also costly. It was only a matter of time before the wooden canoe companies floundered.
Yet Peterborough thrived through nearly a hundred years of uncommon industrial success. Ken Brown tells us that in a country bordering three oceans, in 1930 a quarter of the 778 Canadians involved in the building of small boats were employed in the landlocked center of the continent by Peterbor- ough area firms, generating a third of the annual $2 million sales in this area of the economy.
After WWII, this tapered back and, after the closure of the Peterborough companies, passed to the skilled hands of later genera- tions of small builders and hobbyists who continue to keep the tradition vibrant.
Reprints of old catalogues are available for sale in hard and soft cover. The iconic company logos are available as decals for the growing corps of builders and rebuilders from Pacific to Atlantic and Arctic to Caribbean who still love Peterborough shapes in their shops.
And then there are the T-shirts and calendars, and the advertisers who for the past 50 years have freely employed canoe imagery. Selling charcoal, beer, milk or maxipads with canoe imagery cashes in on the fact that from explorers, surveyors, itinerant clergy, police and fur traders to modern day hunters, anglers and recreational paddlers, Peterborough canoes have been involved in just about every aspect of life beyond the fringe in North America. They are part of Canada’s heritage and, as Ken Brown reminds us, part of the history of the U.S., U.K. and countries even farther afield. Advertisers know that consumers are drawn to canoe imagery because this vessel—the Peterborough canoe in particular—is part of who we are.
James Raffan is thinking of coming back as an explorer, writer and executive director of The Canadian Canoe Museum.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
I’ve become that guy. I realized it last spring when I turned down a paddling trip to stay home and cut my lawn. It wasn’t turning 40 that did it—nothing that abrupt or clearly defined.
It was a gradual transition from the condition I used to call freedom, to a different condition others call middle age. I know I am not alone.
Middle age is not represented by a particular number of birthdays celebrated. It is not about age at all. Middle age happens when life’s responsibilities, urgent or otherwise, start to dictate the amount of time you have to dedicate to paddling. My desire to paddle is stronger than ever; my time to do so, however, has diminished.
Riding a lawnmower, one lapses into a state of mindfulness. The earmuffs dampen the drone of the Briggs and Stratton engine and slowly there is a separation of body and mind. My foot maintains steady pressure on the hydrostatic pedal and my hands turn the steering wheel in increasingly tighter circles. Meanwhile, my mind drifts to my overflowing bucket list of rivers.
Freedom, I remember, came in bursts between school and seasonal jobs. It came at Christmas holidays and spring break—the large chunks of time before something else important began, time when I used to plan my expeditions and go on road trips to far away places. Freedom meant crossing new rivers off my list. Those large chunks of time are gone.
I’ve wanted to paddle a western canyon river for a long time. I’d heard the Green River in Utah could be run in four days. I reasoned that I had time enough to paddle but not plan. I could travel, but it had to be on my schedule—I couldn’t leave at the drop of a hat, after a phone call from a buddy with an open spot on a permit. I had only a narrow six-day window in August.
They’ve won a myriad of travel and tourism awards and are voted best of something by somebody important almost every year. I recognized them from the role they played in the breathtaking IMAX film, Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk. They offered to carry our gear in the rafts, allowing us to paddle our own boats. Most importantly, they had a trip down the Green River through the Gates of Lodore leaving their base camp in Vernal, Utah, on just the right day.
O.A.R.S. regular clientele, Steve Markle the director of sales and marketing tells me, are everyday folks. They are people with real jobs and busy lives who probably left home with dirty dishes in the sink. O.A.R.S. has taken their share of celebrities down the river, but Markle says most are groups very much like ours.
Busy lives aside, Dan and I are the exception. Both of us are raft guides. I was pushing rubber and flipping rafts when Russell Schubert, our trip leader, was still in grade school. I’d given his pre-trip safety briefing hundreds of times, almost word for word, albeit on a river 2,000 miles away. He didn’t know this of course and I would have been leery about a journalist and his camera man parachuting into one of my trips. Bruce Lavoie is the group’s logistics guy based in Vernal. When I confirmed my booking, he called me up to feel us out. It felt like we were playing a game of go fish. “Have you paddled the Green?” he asked. Go fish. “Have you paddled any canyon runs?” Go fish. “Are you likely to swim?” Now there’s a loaded question. On summer trips down the Green, O.A.R.S. doesn’t run safety kayakers to pick up rafting clients or open boating magazine editors.
It is a three-hour drive from Vernal to our put-in at a ranger station above the Gates of Lodore. Out the dusty windows of our minibus is ranch country. Junipers, pinion pines and dry grasses look for moisture in the rocky terrain. It is a landscape once loved by outlaws and then western screenwriters. It was a sort of no man’s land straddling the Wyoming, Colorado and Utah state lines. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would only need to cross the nearest border to escape pursuing lawmen. Just after we crossed from Utah into Colorado, we stopped at Christie’s Liquor. It was only 8:30 a.m. and Christie didn’t open until 11 on Sundays, except for busloads of whitewater rafters on their way to hideout for a few days on the Green River.
Fees and river permits are required for private boating trips on the Green and Yampa rivers within Dinosaur National Monument. In 2011, the National Park Service received 4,780 applications for 300 high-use season launches. Your odds of winning this lottery are better than getting on the Grand Canyon, ranging from a three percent chance in June to 37 percent in late August. All it takes is filling out a one-page form and a 15-dollar non-refundable application fee due the first of February. 
Said Bob Smythe, and he should know. Bob is a retired resource consultant and former presidential advisor from Maryland, along on the trip with his grandson. “The act allowed a president to set aside valuable public land without the bother of getting Congress’ approval.” President Woodrow Wilson used this act in 1915 to establish Dinosaur National Monument to protect paleontologist Earl Douglass’ 350 tons of fossils. We have President Franklin Roosevelt to thank for enlarging the monument in 1938 to include the Green and Yampa River canyons.
Deep in Lodore Canyon, the coffee call was at seven a.m. The guides had been up inflating rafts and prepping breakfast. It was bright but we couldn’t see the sun. Without a compass, I couldn’t get my bearings. Russell said that deep in the canyon, we wouldn’t feel the sun on us until mid-morning.
At breakfast, 24-year-old Charlie pulled out a smoking jacket and fuzzy bunny ears. This was his last trip of the summer guiding on the Green. As far has he knew, he was off to Whistler to help his brother develop a website for dirtbags. “It’s not corporate or anything, it’s about the things you and I’d want to know,” Charlie said. On the third day of our trip, with the desert sun high in the sky, I traded Charlie a bottle of Crown Royal Reserve whisky for a half-tube of Banana Boat SPF30. The desert, I realized, makes you do funny things.
Self-supported kayaking trips are better than diet pills. There’s a 100 percent guarantee you’ll lose weight living on oatmeal, Cliff bars and salty noodle packages. Raft support with O.A.R.S., on the other hand, is better than eating at home. Even in my canoe there is little room for watermelons, steaks, shrimp and fresh eggs. The guides bring propane burners, griddles, folding tables and four galvanized wash buckets—yes the kitchen sink. They don’t bother repacking into smaller bags—food goes directly from the grocery cart into aluminum boxes and coolers built into the raft frames.
The day our guides have been waiting for. We paddle Disaster Falls, Harp Falls, Triple Falls, building up to Hell’s Half Mile. Hell’s is the longest and most challenging rapid on the Green River. Dan and I scramble across the bouldery debris to set up cameras. I choose to eddy hop down the right side, ducking behind smooth red boulders that have rumbled down from the opposing ravines and landed conveniently above Lucifer’s, a left-of-center pour over. The more technical but drier open boat line, I figured, is right to left. The rafts run right for the big hit. Dan dances with the devil and boofs the corner of Lucifer’s. We make short work of Hell’s Half Mile that isn’t really a half-mile at all.
Skiers in Utah will remember the winter of 2011 for its record-breaking snowfall. Snowbird had a whopping 775 inches. Just 47 miles upstream of the Lodore Canyon, the third largest dam in America struggled to hold back the spring melt. “The engineers were afraid that if we had a warm, wet spring, the Flaming Gorge Reservoir would spill over the top,” Russell tells us, pointing to historic water-lines stained on the canyon walls. The Green peaked at 8,500 CFS with another 26,700 pounding in from the undammed Yampa River at the confluence, known as Echo Park. “I have not seen the river that high and neither had most of the crew. All the big rapids were almost unrecognizable.” The State Park Service had an astounding 162 permit cancellations. In late August, the Green was still running at 2,400 CFS, more than double its normal flow. “It was a good summer to be a raft guide in Dinosaur,” says Russell. “We may not see water like this for a very long time.”
For the most part, the Green is wide and always moving. A swim would be a long one. We moved in a loose rolling cover, like a big game of leapfrog down the river. The biggest hazards are the undercut canyon walls, which we don’t need to be anywhere near. On the Green, the paddling is secondary to the scenery and river life.
On our final day, we stopped for lunch on the sand bar at the entrance to Split Mountain Canyon—the beginning of a seven-mile run of class II–III water and the end of our trip. “You guys are going to love this section,” Russell tells me while making a roast beef on rye sandwich. “You can play just about any thing, just stay off the canyon walls.”
And so, for the first time in four days, we put away the cameras, forgot where we were and we ripped down the last seven miles of the run, 2,000-foot canyon walls and tomorrow’s middle-age obligations be damned.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Rapid Magazine.
