Delta Kayak designer Stuart Mounsey explains what makes the new Delta 15 special. Designed for a smaller fit, the kayak has a number of redesigned features, including cockpit size and new seat materials. Delta is also debuting a new hatch system using press on lids with minimal extra steps. These improvements along with other nice touches help bring the weight quite low for this style of boat.
Daily Image: Island Exploration
Sander Jain photographed a sea kayaker gliding along the cliffs of grice bay’s indian island on a dark, unnaturally still January day. “The bay is a popular feeding ground for grey whales, and the scandinavian homes on indian island are a local landmark,” says Jain, whose Tofino home is just minutes from the put-in.
– Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia
Behind the Scenes at the Canadian Canoe Museum
The Canoeroots magazine crew headed down to Peterborough, Ontario for a unique, behind-the-scenes tour of the Canadian Canoe Museum. Check out this video tour of the main building as well as a few looks at what they have in the warehouse out back.
Bridging the Water Gap
It’s easy to get wrapped up in all the Olympic fanfare and it’s impossible to miss Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt but you probably don’t know any sprint canoeing heroes. Relative to the deeply entrenched canoeing culture in North America, top-level racing has a weak following.
With marathons, outriggers, war canoes, even dragon boating, there’s no shortage of competitive spirit amongst recreational single-blade paddlers in North America. This has not, however, been translating into more and better athletes canoeing at an Olympic level.
Pam Boeteler is the president of WomenCAN International, a collective focused on gender equality in canoeing at the Olympics—an issue that she suggests is partly behind the waning interest in elite canoeing events. “There are no women’s open canoeing events at the Olympics,” says Boeteler. This despite the fact that 36 countries have established programs for women at various stages of development.
“On top of that, nobody just goes out and high-kneels recreationally,” Boeteler points out, referring to the trickier stance that elite sprint canoeists use to gain power. “We have a population who want instant gratification and don’t necessarily have the time to learn an entirely new skill.”
Paddling, unlike most elite sports in North America, doesn’t have a recreational stream to draw from.
“I started looking at the industry as a whole and over time there was this disconnect between recreational and elite paddlers,” says Wade Blackwood, executive director of the American Canoe Association.
“When the ACA and USA Canoe/Kayak (USACK) split in the ‘90s, performance dropped off, medal counts dropped off and participation at the elite level dropped off.”
As a result, the ACA is once again working together with USACK—the national governing body for paddlesports racing and a member of the national Olympic committee—in an effort to reduce the obvious disparity.
The ACA has 5,700 instructors and Blackwood hopes that by introducing the idea of competitive canoeing into beginner courses, people will become aware that they can get involved in elite paddling disciplines.
In the end, both Blackwood and Boeteler agree that increased exposure and support for local competition are the keys to bridging the gap between recreational and elite paddlers. Extending the canoeing culture leisure paddlers love into the competitive sphere is healthy forboth camps.
This article first appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine.
Behind the Scenes at the Canadian Canoe Museum
“We like to do a bit of a test whenever we bring guests out here,” said Jeremy Ward, Curator for the Canadian Canoe Museum and one of our three hosts for the day. “We get a pretty good idea of how much fun we’ll have judging by how wide-eyed you are when you first walk through the door.”
He was only half joking. Apparently some of the people they take through the museum’s archives don’t even bat an eye as they cross the threshold. They go right on talking as if they have just strolled into a Walmart, and walk out barely noticing the significance of the collection.
Wondering how one could be anything less than floored I asked, “How’d we fare?”
“You guys looked pretty amazed.”
From the exterior, the 30,000-square-foot warehouse is nondescript. It used to serve as a factory for Outboard Marine, a motor manufacturer and part of Peterborough’s long boat building history. After the industry faltered in the ‘60s, the company eventually went under and the building and all the equipment inside were essentially left to collect dust.
“When we first moved in, all the boats were stored wrapped in plastic and sealed off to preserve them from exposure to the dust and decay of the rest of the building,” said John Summers, the museum’s General Manager. “It was quite a process to get it to where it is today.”
After the remaining forgotten factory equipment was removed, the local fire department came in and literally hosed the building’s interior down, floor to ceiling. A small army of volunteers made up mostly of university students on their summer holidays whitewashed the walls and resealed and painted the sprawling concrete floor.
Today, natural light washes in from the rooftop windows, bathing the hundreds of boats in soft sunlight. Ancient-looking dugouts line one outside wall on shelves rising up 20 feet. Racks loaded with some of the museum’s 500 curious paddles of all shapes, sizes, materials and ages sit near the warehouse’s entrance. Along another wall is a drop sheet, hung to create a makeshift photo studio for the cataloging of each piece in the collection. Twenty-foot wood-plank boats and fragile birchbark war canoes on dollies crowd aisles lined by rows of stands on wheels. Each stand holds nine canoes in various stages of repair and preservation, each canoe with its own manilla tag stating a name and item number.
Ward pointed out the Starkell’s Orellana of Paddle to the Amazon fame; then, a canoe carved by First Nations to commemorate the Hudson Bay Company’s 300th anniversary that required painstaking attention to detail in fabrication but had apparently never actually seen water.
Ward shared the history of the gold medal-winning K1 from the 2004 Olympics in Athens; a miniature decked Fijian outrigger outfitted with a crab claw sail; and the Père Lallement—a 22-foot cedar canvas Chestnut canoe that capsized almost 35 years ago on a school trip in Timiskaming, resulting in the death of 12 boys and their master.
Each of the dozen-or-so canoes I recognized had such incredible stories behind them. And there were hundreds more boats with stories I could only guess at.
“In each story is a lesson of cooperation between people,” explained the museum’s Executive Director, James Raffan. “They’re all about people’s relationship to place, and about remembering.”
Like an inquisitive child, I jumped around from boat to boat, asking about their origins, the most peculiar looking ones really catching my attention. There is a definite international flavor in the materials, shapes, designs and techniques used to build many of the boats.
“What I find very exciting as we look at canoes from California or from Samoa, from Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands or South America, is that only a certain portion of each canoe is functional,” explained Ward. “Of course it needs to perform, it needs to paddle, it needs to be maneuverable or strong-tracking, but so much of each boat is just the artistic, the cultural art form of the community it came from and it’s so distinct.”
“There are some strange looking watercraft in here,” he added, “but they all have a family resemblance. Each one has its own individual story but, as an aggregate, they all link together.”
He and his team use these links to create the imaginative exhibits in the museum’s main display area. “This is an idea factory,” Ward beamed.
Like his colleagues showing us around, he could happily go on all day, revealing details of workmanship, design and history. We would happily follow.
At the risk of sounding ignorant, I had to ask about the many racks holding dozens of what appeared to me to be run-of-the-mill cedar canvas canoes. Ward smiled, knowing what was coming before I could even get the question out. It’s clear he’s passionate about the eccentricities of every piece, but all three of our tour guides acknowledged that there is some replication in the artifacts.
“There are some strange looking watercraft in here but they all have a family resemblance. Each one has its own individual story but, as an aggregate, they all link together.” —Jeremy Ward
“The collection is filled with the idiosyncrasies of its founder, Kirk Wipper,” said Summers. “Because it started as a private collection, it was really just his collection of boats. He didn’t necessarily have the same bigger-picture outlook that we need today to run the museum.”
In 1957, at a summer camp north of Minden, Ontario, a friend presented camp owner, Kirk Wipper, with a dugout canoe from the 1890s. Ten years later, his collection had grown to over 150 boats housed in log buildings and dubbed the Kanawa Museum.
As Summers suggested, Wipper’s collecting habits were very organic. Friends would keep him informed of interesting watercraft as they became available. He would scoop up a freighter or a cedarstrip as they would cross his path. He would take on debt to invest in truly unique artifacts.
Through it all, he was guided by a feeling of responsibility to continue collecting in order to share the whole story of canoeing and kayaking, and their relationship to the environment and the history of North America.
His dedication was tireless. No Haida dugout canoe had been carved within living memory until Wipper commissioned one in 1968. He negotiated the $150,000 purchase of 44 canoes from New York’s Museum of the American Indian. He transported a 53-foot dugout canoe from British Columbia to Ontario on the roof of his pick-up truck.
By the ‘80s, the Kanawa Museum had outgrown its home. After hearing that Wipper was looking for a new home for his 600 boats, a group from Trent University set out to bring the collection to Peterborough, home of the famous Peterborough Canoe Company.
In 1989, a board of directors was formed and by 1994, after several summers spent transferring the collection, the artifacts were in the hands of the newly established Canadian Canoe Muesum. The doors to the current location opened to the public July 1, 1997.
As our hosts sealed up the archives and we made our way back to the museum’s main building—the one with all the exhib- its—conversation turned to the present.
While this museum is truly one of a kind, its inception really isn’t that out of the ordinary. “A crazy collector is behind the founding of a lot of museums,” said Raffan,
“A crazy collector is behind the founding of a lot of museums, look at the Smithsonian. What’s not so well known is the fact that this is a living, breathing organization.” —James Raffan
“Look at the Smithsonian. What’s not so well known is the fact that this is a living, breathing organization.”
Raffan, Ward and Summers manage the collection with a clearer mandate as far as accepting artifacts goes, but they also continue to reflect Wipper’s goal of telling the entire canoeing story.
Over 100 boats are on display in the main exhibit area, along with hundreds more artifacts. In the warmth of muted museum lighting, visitors explore a salon dedicated to cedar Chestnut and Peterborough Canoe Company boats from the heyday of recreational canoeing in the early 20th century. Around the corner, behind glass, sits Pierre Trudeau’s iconic deerskin coat across from a screen playing Bill Mason films.
Upstairs, Hudson’s Bay blankets, casks and muskets are arranged in a birchbark canoe; plaques describe life as a voyageur during fur trade times. A group of middle school students sit in a circle on the floor nearby amidst skin-on-frame kayaks, learning about the primitive materials and craftsmanship from a volunteer. “The museum isn’t just about the past,” explained Summers. “It’s about what people do with their families today.”
“The canoes are physically old, but the things that make them what they are, are as fresh and new today as they were when the boats were first made,” he continued. “One of the things we like our visitors to come away with is how connected this all is.”
In contrast to the birchbark and cedar is a polyethylene Dagger freestyle boat hanging from the ceiling—a prototype from the days when whitewater paddlers were parking cars on the bows and sterns of their boats to flatten them out to improve performance in a hole.
In another corner, there is a fully operational workshop where Ward and a crew of volunteer artisans build and repair boats, paddles and other paddling paraphernalia while visitors watch, ask questions and even participate.
“It really is amazing that we’ve created all of this from next to nothing,” said Raffan, referring to the fact that the museum continues to run exclusively on funding from private sources and membership. “We truly are a world-class museum destination and there continues to be no funding from the federal government.”
This has caused some instability over the years. In 2003, they were forced to close their doors due to financial problems. The following year, an anonymous donor stepped up and paid off two-thirds of the museum’s debt. Under this momentum, they were able to bolster membership and reopen the world’s largest collection of canoes and kayaks.
Financial hardship may seem like an economic reality inevitable in the world of special interest collections. But if you put the museum into context, it becomes clear that someone has dropped the ball when it comes to public funding.
The canoe is inextricably linked to North American history.
The Canadian Canoe Museum chronicles the evolution of a civilization as much as it does boats and paddles. In 2007, the canoe was votes as one of the Seven Wonders of Canada as part of a reality TV series. In commemoration, the museum has established National Canoe Day, celebrated every year by thousands of people across Canada and around the world.
Today, the museum has a staff of nine, and a crew of 120 active volunteers who Raffan credits as being at the heart of a lot of the day-to-day operations. The artifacts, facility and events have been established as world-class without the help of any significant government backing. Working under this reality has forced raffan, Summers and Ward to be creative.
“Take five zeros off the budget of a big museum,” said Raffan, “then take 10 percent of that and it would make a huge difference to what we do.”
Still, members get some wonderful perks beyond the usual gift shop discounts and unlimited admission. Among other benefits, Raffan recently announced a members-only online exhibit—a unique, exclusive web museum filled with content visitors to the bricks and mortar museum can’t access.
They are also optimistic looking into the future. Raffan and Summers share medium-term plans of moving the museum from its current location just off the highway, bookended by plazas and industrial parks, to Peterborough’s picturesque waterfront, giving them the opportunity to offer an on-water component to the museum in a purpose-built facility.
As we wrapped up our behind the scenes tour, we shook hands and promised to return soon. Exiting through the foyer, we were thanked by the retiree volunteers manning the museum’s front desk and gift shop.
We all know that canoeing is about more than just boats and paddles and this museum reflects that.
Raffan’s words summed it up perfectly. “These are lessons that I think go forward—lessons about paddling together, about working together so that we can make sense of what’s happening today and chart a course for tomorrow.”
For more information on events, exhibits and how to become a member of the Canadian Canoe Museum, visit canoemuseum.ca.
This article first appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
Time Travel
We’ve all been one or know one. Memorized the impossible, seven-syllable names (try saying Archaeornithomimus three times fast); pretended the backyard was Jurassic Park (and known that, to be perfectly correct, it really should be called Cretaceous park); slept between dinosaur-motif bed sheets. Yes, I’m referring to the part-time paleontologist, the fearless fossil hunter in your family. Whether it’s you, your son, grandson, sister or dad, a fascination with the creatures that walked, crawled, swam and sprouted long before we appeared can inspire a fun theme for your next family adventure.
Badland National Park, South Dakota
South Dakota’s White River Badlands are to the study and understanding of ancient mammals what Alberta’s badlands are to dinosaur research. Since 1846, paleontologists have uncovered the remains of camels, three-toed horses, saber-toothed cats, rhinos, rabbits, beavers and more, providing the most complete snapshot of mammalian life in North America during the early Age of Mammals 36 to 28 million years ago. But that’s not all. The extensive erosion that has produced this landscape of buttes, pinnacles and spires amid the prairie has also revealed even more ancient fossils dating from the cretaceous. During the Age of dinosaurs, however, a warm shallow sea covered the great plains. Since dinosaurs were land creatures, none have been found here. instead fossil hunters have unearthed giant marine lizards called mosasaurs, along with fish, turtles, nautiloids (shelled mollusks) and ammonites (ancient squid).
STAY AWHILE: Bison, bighorn sheep and prairie dogs may be seen from the park’s trails. hike 1.5 miles to the notch, a dramatic overlook of the white river valley—watch your step, the trail climbs a log ladder and skirts drop-offs.
INFO: The park is 75 miles east of rapid city on route 44. Badlands national park, 605-433- 5361, www.nps.gov/badl/
Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, Newfoundland
Newfoundland is world-renowned for its fossils. Long ago set adrift from what is now Europe, the rock’s sheer bounty of, well, rock is home to ancient marine organisms spanning 320 million years of geologic time. Most famous of these fossil beds is Mistaken Point, a wave-battered crag that takes its name from the deadly result of sailors mistaking it for the safe harbor of cape race. Buried in fine volcanic ash 565 million years ago, the creatures now exposed here in tennis court-sized slabs of sea cliff are not only the most ancient deep-water marine fossils in the world, they’re also the oldest diverse collection of complex organisms ever discovered. And they’re controversial, too. Only a handful of the frond-like, leafy forms resemble known living animals— most are so radically different that some scientists insist on assigning them to their own completely separate kingdom.
STAY AWHILE: Reached by dirt road and a six-kilometer hiking trail on the tip of the Avalon Peninsula, Mistaken Point has an edge-of-the-world feel that’s worth visiting even if you’re not a fossil buff. Between June and September, don’t pass up a whale- and puffin-watching boat tour 90 minutes north in Witless Bay.
INFO: The point is two hours south of st. John’s, off route 10. Meet your guide at the interpretive center in the coastal village of portugal cove south for a daily tour (departs 1 p.m., May–October, 3–4 hours). 709-438-1100, www.env.gov.nl.ca/env/parks/wer/r_mpe/ index.html
Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta
When dinosaur fanatics dream of Nirvana it looks a lot like southeastern Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park. Here the Red Deer River Valley carves through Canada’s largest badlands, revealing haunting hoodoos, isolated mesas and the greatest concentration of Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils ever found. Every known group is represented, including favorites like Triceratops, Hadrosaurus, The Lost World’s battering ram Pachycephalosaurus and, of course, the terrifying Tyrannosaurus rex. Seventy-five million years ago, this was low swampy country with a steamy subtropical climate, and the dinosaurs rubbed shoulders with fish, turtles, crocodiles, amphibians and even marsupials. Since the first paleontologists began digging here in the 1880s, more than 23,000 fossils have been collected, including 300 dinosaur skeletons. Some of these now reside in museums around the world, but the greatest collection is housed just a two-hour drive away in Drumheller, Alberta’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology.
STAY AWHILE: explore the stark beauty of the badlands on the six-kilometer Great Badlands hike. Join one of the park’s paleontologist-led family or kids’ day programs, including an authentic dinosaur dig, prospecting hike or dinosaur day camp.
INFO: The park is three hours east of Calgary, off route 544. Dinosaur Provincial Park, 403-378-4342 ext. 235, www.albertaparks.ca/ dinosaur.aspx
Burgess Shale – Yoho National Park, British Columbia
The word Yoho comes from the Cree language. Probably the best translation is “wow”. Native peoples and modern visitors exclaim at the stupendous Rocky Mountians, emerald lakes and 833-foot Takakkaw Falls (another Cree word meaning magnificent). But it is likely that paleontologist Charles Walcott also breathed “wow” in 1909 when he discovered the fossil bed now known as the Burgess Shale. in seven years, Walcott collected more than 65,000 fossils, many of which were unknown. Declared a World Heritage site in 1981, the Burgess Shale is still regarded as the finest site for Cambrian age fossils. Join a daylong guided hike—the only way to view the park’s two fossil beds—to learn how these half-billion-year-old marine animals hold important clues to evolutionary understanding. Mount Stephen’s famous trilobite beds are accessed via a nine-kilometer hike, while walcott quarry is a strenuous, 22-kilometer round-trip to a spectacular subalpine ridge.
STAY AWHILE: There’s no shortage of things to do in Yoho. View some of the park’s abundant wildlife and lofty peaks while hiking one of the dozens of trails, canoeing on aptly named Emerald Lake or staying at a historic backcountry lodge.
INFO: The park is a short drive west of Lake Louise on Trans-Canada Hwy 1 and borders Banff National Park to the east. Yoho Visitor Center, 250-343-6783, www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn- np/bc/yoho/natcul/burgess.aspx
What is a fossil?
Think of fossils and the first thing that comes to mind is probably a dinosaur skeleton. But fossils come in every shape, size and age—the oldest fossils are 3.5-billion-year-old stromatolites while the youngest are just 10,000 years old.
Mold and Cast Fossils form when a skeleton is buried by sediment. Over time, the sediment turns to stone and the entombed bones begin to dissolve, leaving a cavity in the shape of the original skeleton. Water rich in minerals enters the cavity and the minerals deposited in the mold form a cast that has the same shape but none of the internal features (or DNA) of the original skeleton. Most of the fossilized bones, shells and leaves we find are mold and cast fossils.
Replacement Fossils are made up of minerals that have taken the place of the original organic material while preserving the internal structures. For example, petrified wood is actually rock—silicon or calcite crystals have replaced all of the organic matter down to the last cell!
Whole Body Fossils are unaltered, intact organisms like mammoths caught in ice or tar pits, or insects trapped in amber.
Trace Fossils record the activity of an animal, rather than the animal itself. These include footprints, tracks and coprolites (fossilized poop!).
This article first appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
Betcha Didn’t Know About… Matches
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Sweden is the world’s leading exporter of matches, manufacturing around five million boxes daily—the equivalent of about 250 million matchsticks.
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The original matches—small sticks of pine impregnated with sulphur—were first used in china in the sixth century.
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Matchbox collectors are called phillumenists.
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“Third on a match” means bad luck. The superstition dates back to WWI when it was believed that if three soldiers lit their cigarettes using the same match, a sniper would see the match strike, take aim at the second soldier lighting up and pick off the ill-fated third.
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Five hundred billion matches are used each year.
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A lawsuit was filed against Match.com in 2005, claiming that the dating website secretly employs people as bait to send fake messages and go on as many as three dates per day to keep paying clients returning. Both the suit and the plaintiff’s love life failed to ignite.
- Up until the early 1900s, matches were made using toxic amounts of white phosphorous, causing an epidemic of a deadly bone disease known as phossy jaw.
- The safety match separates reactive materials, with red phosphorus on the matchbook’s outer striking strip and potassium chlorate on the match head, making undesired ignition virtually impossible.
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Most wooden matchsticks are made from aspen or white pine with a single tree yielding anywhere from 400,000 to one million sticks.
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If all of the three-inch Matchbox toy cars ever built were parked bumper to bumper, they would stretch around the equator more than six times.
This article first appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
An Ode To Shuttle Rigs
Without one, your brand-new, auto boof, never-flips-but-easy-to-roll kayak is useless. That $375 paddling jacket—so dry the only way water gets into your boat is through your nose—means nothing. Your hydrokryptonite, triple torque, modified crank, guaranteed-to-make-you-bounce-higher-on-a-wave paddle, just a lifeless stick. As paddlers we all use them, need them, hate them and love them.
That’s right, I’m talking about our beleaguered, beloved shuttle rigs.
An ode to shuttle rigs
It’s a strange relationship we have with our river rides. When they are doing their job (getting us to the river) and not breaking down (costing us money), we rarely think twice about them. We drive too fast down logging roads, push the suspension well beyond the manufacturer’s recommendation and assume the liter of oil burnt every month counts as regular oil changes. We watch impotently as scaly rust advances like leprosy and tell ourselves grinding Doritos into the carpet adds character.
Some of us, though, understand what an important role the shuttle rig plays in our dirtbag boater lives.
You never forget your first love
Touring river to river in New Zealand, our 1988 Isuzu Bighorn was more than just a shuttle vehicle. It was our living room, bedroom, dining room and, unfortunately, once or twice our bathroom. Even after splitting it four ways, the Bighorn was the only thing I owned of any real monetary value. For the first time, I truly appreciated and, well, loved a shuttle vehicle.
Most folks don’t ever develop such a strong bond with their metal steeds—such a close relationship, the self-help authors tell us, requires months of intimate contact. When the inevitable happens and something goes wrong, the blame for the breakdown falls unjustly on our poor, boat-burdened beasts. “Why is this P.O.S. pulling to the right? I was only going 60 when I hit that stump. Stupid car!”
Spirits of shuttle rigs past
Thinking back on all the shuttle rigs I’ve owned and the rivers they’ve delivered me to makes me a little nostalgic. Breaking down on the way back from Mexico and sleeping in the Automobill’s parking lot in Arkadelphia, Arkansas while awaiting repairs. Driving at night with no lights, dodging unseen sheep when the Isuzu’s alternator fried. Changing two flat tires at the same time in a torrential downpour on a Vancouver Island logging road.
At the time, it seemed like the world was against us and vehicles were the worst contraptions ever invented. Thinking back, though, it was probably just our rides reminding us to show them a little love now and then. Air out the trunk, change that sludgy oil, Bondo the rust holes. Heck, maybe even run a tank of high-test through her system. Because without your trusty shuttle rig, you’d just be another hiker.
Dan Caldwell has been writing for Rapid since the Summer 2007 issue. Starting in 2012, he took on multiple roles at Rapid Media, including media sales and Paddling Film Festival coordinator.
This article was first published in the Summer/Fall 2012 issue of Rapid Magazine and was republished in the 2023 Paddling Buyer’s Guide. Wing and a prayer down 65 / Five best friends on four bald tires / I can still see Billy smiling / When we finally made it —“Talladega,” Eric Church | Feature photo: Kalob Grady
Scouting Niagara Falls
When Rafael Ortiz became the second person to kayak over Washington’s 186-foot Palouse Falls last spring, extreme whitewater boating was reinjected into mainstream headlines. “You get some attention after doing something like this,” says Ortiz, who received both praise for pushing the envelope and scorn for being careless and stupid. Then, after the hype died down, people asked, “What’ll they try next?” That’s when talk of an attempt at Niagara Falls started to recirculate.
“If someone were to run Niagara Falls safely and successfully, it would indeed be an amazing feat and the publicity would be insane,” says Tyler Bradt, who set the record for highest vertical drop when he ran Palouse in 2009. “It would be quite a fine line,” he cautions, “because the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful descent would reflect the sport either very positively or very negatively.”
Running Niagara Falls has always been somewhere between a heroic feat and cliché publicity stunt. Since the original pickle barrel hucksters of the 1920s, just 16 people have survived the drop, none in a kayak.
In 1991, 28-year-old Jesse Coombs died attempting to run the Canadian falls in a converted Perception C1. Many say ego got in the way of better judgment—Coombs refused to wear a helmet so his face would be visible in photographs. Those close to him point to his stellar paddling record and suggested that if anyone could have run Niagara at the time, it was him.
JAILTIME AND A FINE FOR THOSE WHO ATTEMPT NIAGARA FALLS WITHOUT PERMISSION
Even if a paddler was to manage the combination of skill and sheer luck needed to survive the plummet, there’s still the law to contend with. Nik Wallenda spent years planning and negotiating with authorities on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border to complete his tightrope walk across the brink of Niagara this past June. Despite his success, officials have clearly stated that such pro- posals will only be considered once every 20 years.
While a handful of crews have poached an illegal kayak run down the class V+ gorge below the falls, anyone caught initiating a stunt that may draw a crowd to Niagara Falls without first getting permission faces a fine of $10,000 and up to six months in jail.
Despite the safety and legal risks, hucking huge is an expanding part of the sport and it’s garnering a lot of outsider attention for whitewater kayaking. This might make the timing for a Niagara descent more opportune than ever. If they’ll sponsor someone to skydive from 120,000 feet or drive Formula One on an ice circuit, why shouldn’t Red Bull—who just happens to be one of Ortiz’s sponsors—send a kayaker off of Niagara Falls?
Ortiz admits he’s scouted Niagara, which measures up a VW microbus shorter than Palouse. “There is a line, no doubt,” he concedes, but says the famous falls are far from ideal for a first decent. “The main difference with Palouse is that you can’t run Niagara dirty,” Ortiz explains. “Your life relies on a couple of strokes you take looking 170 feet down.” Still, he admits, “It’s there—the Holy Grail of waterfall hucking.”
This article first appeared in the Summer/Fall 2012 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.
S-Turn Rapid Technique
This whitewater kayak technique article originally appeared in Rapid magazine.
S-Turn is one of the most famous and celebrated rapids in Mexico. It is the crux rapid on the notorious Roadside section of the Rio Alseseca, dropping 20 fast and twisty feet before ending in an eight-foot-wide mini gorge.
As with any steep, tight drop the first requirement for hitting your line is staying upright. The real trick to nailing S-Turn, however, is to get river right during the first slide. Although it looks like a bad idea, starting left is the way to go. Then the water will take you back to the right at the correct time.
[1] Enter the rapid on the far left with your bow pointed slightly right. This will look intimidating since there is a menacing rock wall on the left that if feels like you are going to crash into. In reality, you will slide down four feet, hit the angled rock on the left and deflect back with right momentum.
[2] Take a hard left stroke to pull yourself as far right as possible onto the ridge of dry rocks that form the top bend of the “S”. Your bow should launch off the rock, sending your boat into the air. This move is key, as it sets you up for the next turn. If you don’t make it all the way right, your bow will drop and could piton the left wall, which will most likely result in a flip. Avoid this at all costs!
[3] Once you have launched off the rock and are aerial, lift your left knee. This prevents you from flipping when you land on the large boiling curler coming off of the left wall.
[4] Brace as required to stay upright and take a powerful right stroke to keep your bow pointed left as you enter the final kink of the S-turn. If you fail to keep your bow left here, you risk spinning out into a micro eddy on the right or spinning sideways and pinning in the narrow alleyway below.
[5] After you have snaked through the sliding S-turn, you drop into the super cool mini gorge. This alleyway is about 70 feet long with 15- to 20-foot-high walls. Make sure to stay pointed downstream because, at just eight feet wide, the gorge is the perfect size to pin sideways if you get careless. Enjoy the view as you drop out of the alley into a calm pool.
[6] When you realize that this is one of the coolest rapids EVER, you can eddy out on the left in the bottom pool and hike back up for another run.
– Nick Troutman was a member of the first team to make a full descent of the Rio Alseseca. He swam three times and considers himself lucky.
This article originally appeared in Rapid, Fall 2012. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
