Before the accident, Yak Van Dam built his life around whitewater. Growing up in rural New Zealand, he discovered river running through an outdoor course. “I was never going to make an office job,” he says. Once he went rafting during his guide training, he knew immediately what he wanted to do with his life.
Inside Yak Van Dam’s radical return to river
Van Dam, 43, spent 16 years guiding and chasing rivers. He paddled in New Zealand’s North Island, with classics like the Kaituna and runs near Huka Falls close to home. Six years ago, while working on Switzerland’s Vorderrhein, he and three friends drove to Italy on a weekend off to go canyoning. On the second jump, he slipped while launching from a 42-foot ledge and hit the cliff on the way down. The fall left him paraplegic.
Van Dam spent six months in a hospital in Switzerland. Because his spinal injury was low and he retained some hip movement, he believed kayaking would still be possible. “I thought, kayaking is going to be easy because you just use your hips,” he says. The hospital had a swimming pool, but when he got back on the water and tried to roll, Van Dam fell out and realized it wasn’t going to be straightforward.
The realization was brutal, he says. “Kayaking, which I was going to do in my head while lying in bed, was just gone.” And for a time, whitewater disappeared from his thinking.
Five years later, Van Dam tried packrafting. At first, he saw it as a safer way to get on the water with friends. But in his Alpacka raft, Van Dam quickly crossed an eddyline, did some eddy turns and ferries, and discovered he could climb back in if he capsized.
“It got bigger and bigger until the finale was running a class III section [of the Upper Buller]. It blew my mind where we took it. It was game on. All because we were in packrafts, which cater to what I need to be on the whitewater,” Van Dam says.
“There have been a lot of tears being in a wheelchair and missing out on a lot of the stuff I used to do. I was worried that would be the case again. But it was the opposite. It was just celebrations, high fives, such great moments, and you just keep ticking goals off and achieving stuff.”
Packrafting didn’t just return Van Dam to the river, it also put him in touch with a new community. The calls started again. “We’re going packrafting. Do you want to come?”
While Van Dam jokes he’s finally “got the shoulders I always wanted,” what’s changed most is his perspective. “Having that taken away—the freedom of just being on the river, looking at nature—and then going back to it, I’m appreciating it so much more.”
A film about Yak Van Dam’s packrafting journey, Riverbound: The Story Has Just Begun, won the Spirit Award at the New Zealand Mountain Festival and is touring in the 2026 Paddling Film Festival. Find a screening near you at paddlingfilmfestival.com.
This article was published in Issue 75 of Paddling Magazine. Yak Van Dam back in action. | Feature photo: Dylan Gerschwitz
