Not long ago most whitewater kayakers evolved from whitewater tripping canoeists. This is not a Darwinian rant about kayakers being a more evolved species. My point is that if early kayakers wanted to explore a river that didn’t have roadside day-trip access they would, or at least could, have jumped back into a whitewater tripping canoe. In fact many were canoeists for their vacation and kayakers on the weekends to just go out and play.
I’m not so sure the new-school paddlers of kayaking’s boom era will ever bother to learn to tandem canoe. They could of course,not much is different. The moving water principles are the same and kayakers more or less know the strokes. But they are kayakers. They own kayaks and kayaking equipment. In some psychological way, two blades fit better with their collective self-image than one.
It is unfortunate however that this new type of paddler may never know adventure, may never see a remote river or pore over topographic maps, tracing and one day paddling a thin blue line miles from SUV access.They may never know their physical and mental limits, work as a team or the grander notion of river travel and exploration. Park-and-play whitewater is many things. Accessible. Exciting. Competitive. Social. It is leading the snowboarding crowd to whitewater paddling. But in all its glory no one can say it is adventurous.
At our family Christmas dinner I found a book that must have been my grandfather’s— Blackflies and White Water by A.Tony Sloan, an accomplished canoe tripper of the late ‘70s. I have paddled many of the rivers Sloan writes about. Except I drove in and played only at the good sections, out in time for a greasy spoon dinner on the way home. My stories about the rivers would include dusty gravel roads, cartwheels and fried cheeseburgers. Sloan’s were about wilderness adventure, campfire camaraderie and the unparalleled thrill of negotiating and conquering treacherous rapids.The last thing a park-and-play paddler negotiated was an eddy line-up, and the last thing conquered was a Super Big Gulp at 7-11.
Expedition kayaking—packing all your gear into your whitewater kayak and going for more than a day—is whitewater kayaking with an adventurous spirit. It doesn’t have to be on a crazy-ass river, in a deep canyon or a far-away country, although it can be. Expedition kayaking is whitewater’s answer to ducking the boundary tape and escaping the lift lines into the back- country. It is whitewater canoe tripping without the cappuccino maker. I hope this issue’s feature “Romancing the Thin Blue Line” inspires some of you to dig out your old boats, the big boats that you haven’t been able to sell, stuff them full of gear, and explore. Buy some topo maps and paddle new rivers. I hope you sleep under the stars and put the spirit of adventure back into whitewater paddling.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of Rapid Magazine.
