Rafting Guide SchoolLearning to run rivers
Question 14: What is Roger’s Rule of Thumb?
It was after sunset Sunday night, the last day of Guide School, and I came to this question on the short “final exam” that was the last step to graduation. Most of the learning and the testing had already come on the river and on the shore during the previous 9 days. The Roger of the question was Roger Lee, the owner of Wilderness Adventures, and the head instructor for the guide school session that I attended. His learning philosophy, in a nutshell, was to keep tossing the students in the river until they eventually floated to the surface while giving instruction along the way. I knew the question had something to do with how to run rivers, but if a particular piece of advice had ever been referred to as his Rule of Thumb, I had missed it. We had been dumped, flipped, tacoed, wrapped, surfed, washed and flushed through multiple runs of three rivers. I had been lacerated, bruised, banged, scraped, dunked and knocked square in the jaw by an oar during a week when we were on the water (or sometimes mostly in the water) every day. Considering this, I instead remembered something Roger had said around the campfire one night, rum and coke in hand:
“You’re going to mess up a lot in life. It might as well be on a river.”
I wrote this in, hoping the humor value and the weight of its truth might forgive my lapse of memory or attention. The final question on the test was who I thought among the students was the best all-around guide. Who was Top Gun, the question asked? The student who got the most votes from the other students would get a slot rowing a raft through Grand Canyon this summer. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or a good start to a new river running career. Either way, that student was one lucky dog. Roger quickly finished grading the exams. “Everyone passed,” he said. Then he stuck out his hand to one of the students. “Congratulations, you’re going to the Canyon…”
North Fork
We started the Guide School close to my home, on the North Fork of the American River, a canyon where I hike frequently. I had also run the river as a passenger on a commercial trip. Neither the hiking nor the previous run prepared me one wit for the three days on the river. One thing Roger likes to teach in his school is not just the ability to swim whitewater rivers, but to be comfortable swimming whitewater rivers. One of the major rapids on the stretch we ran is Chamberlain Falls, where the river, at moderate flows, splits in two between a center rock and spills 8 feet or so in twin falls. We stopped to scout the rapid, leaving the boats tied while we clambered along the shore and stood above the falls.
Roger turned to Rachel and asked “You going to swim it?” She immediately replies “sure,” and starts to make her way down to the river. I thought he was joking. I thought he would call her back or she would call his bluff, but she just walked down to the river and jumped in. Rachel is about 5 feet 4 inches, blond and quiet. 100 pounds of pure faith and confidence. “Keep your elbows in!” Roger yells. She floats and slips down the chute and goes under the foam for three seconds. She surfaces, catches the strong eddy on our side of the river and climbs up on the rocks, ready to go again.
Well. I guess I better try that myself. I follow her through and find it to be not scary at all. You just have to hold a breath and blow out both mouth and nose as you are washing-machined at the bottom of the drop, something that I find I did naturally. Just like getting rolled in big surf. We are wearing helmets and full wetsuits, and they buffer us from the cold water and the rocks. “Anyone going to try the far side?” Roger asks. This time, I move toward the river, jump in, and swim over to a point where I will be sucked into the far chute. It has a shallower angle and takes more water from the river than the near side chute. I tuck my elbows in hard, my hands cupped over the top of my PFD. They ones watching say I look like I am going down a water slide at a water park. I again do the The Blow during the wash cycle. The time under water seems just as short as the other, but this ride bumped my side against polished bedrock, and the worry of a sharp knob catching a bone probably made it seem shorter. I surfaced, apparently, about 7 seconds later, far down the river, just as those watching were beginning to get worried. I caught the very lower reaches of the eddy and rejoined the spectators.
Later that day we learned to swim and beach ourselves on a small rock in the middle of a rapid. If you had told me before the class that I would be doing such things I would have thought you crazy. I thought we would avoid being in the water. White water is dangerous. What I learned in the class is that most whitewater is not to be feared, but highly respected. The respect comes from experience, and Roger’s goal was to give us as much experience as possible.
Fear
Wrestling black terror. The water moves, the water falls. Faith falters. A focus on the water. An obsession with focus. The world ends here at this sharp separation of water and sky. Beyond is another belief. Nothing can bring you back but the leap.
The student will not get back in the boat. Rapid ahead. Her mind spins and the knot twists, tangling. Catches on the narrow places that fear built, and chocks solid. The water pins her mind there and tears flow. We speak to her and offer comfort, but her feet will not step from the solid ground. Roger tries the same and she finally agrees to ride in a boat with him at the oars.
Useless paddle in hand, she shivers at every splash. Next rapid. Roger makes a mistake. The boat traps and slowly turns over, shedding people. Over the brink and into the drink. Her voice wails panic and her nails take skin in their mad gripping for something not fluid. Failing, she is paralyzed. Afloat, but out of her senses.
We approach and I try to pull her from the water but her mind is madness. Water boils and steep rocks close the gap between raft and wall. I push off but lose her in the pushing. Alone she is not much more than adrift. I jump. She swims toward me, eyes electric, and I toward her. On a crumbling wall we find a grip. I encircle her with what security two arms and soothing words might muster. We wait. She shakes, talking in a language that speaks fear.
…and Loathing
Eventually we coaxed her off the rock and into a boat and got her to a rocky beach. She was still shivering and in tears and we sat her down on a log to calm and warm her in the sun. Like answering a curtain call, a student stepped forward and asked: “Is there any analgesic in the First Aid kit? My head is killing me.” It was Clueless, king of self interest, looking out, as always, for #1.
“There’s always someone in a group that gets under everyone’s skin,” I tell my housemate before the class. “My problem is that I am usually the one to step up and let them know how they are acting. It seems my destiny. I take on the stress while everyone cheers me silently.” And so it was. In the Guide School that person came in the form of a student who was a lawyer, one of the more common manifestations of the Clueless syndrome. While the other students cooked and cleaned, he chatted around the fire. While we rigged oar frames into boats, he spun fancy strap-and-paddle devices to help hold himself in the raft while he guided.
Of course, lawyers take a lot of raft trips, and there was much to be learned, tolerance-wise, from this one. A river guide who couldn’t graciously handle Clueless lawyers found themselves without either paddle power in a critical rapid or without an end-of-trip tip or both. Some days I succeeded and others, when I didn’t drink enough water, I failed. But I certainly learned, and that is what the class was about, I kept telling myself. Kept telling myself. Kept telling myself as I was by chance or some vengeful cosmic power assigned to the same boat as him almost every day. The instructors and other students were not trying to keep us together, I concluded, it just seemed to happen that way.
One of the worst was in the middle of the trip, on a relatively mild river with a few larger rapids. We had just finished “running” a rapid with him guiding the boat. We had spun out of control from the start, caroming off rocks, running backwards, while Clueless shouted commands that took us farther into danger. Eventually we rode up the edge of a rock next to the big drop and everyone on the raft was dump-trucked into the roaring foam. We had all made such mistakes already, and making mistakes was the basic point of the class. I won’t fault him for the learning process.
We had collected boat and paddles and were all cheering at taking yet another spin through the wash cycle, when Clueless proclaimed “What a great run! We were spinning in perfect control until Paul paddled too hard and ran us into that rock above the drop.” Paul was one of the instructors paddling in the front of the boat. He smirked at the oxymoron of ‘spinning in perfect control’, though Clueless couldn’t see his face. Feeling river water in my stomach and up my nose, I couldn’t hold back, even though I had been trying to remain positive all day. “You are blaming Paul for paddling too hard?” I asked. “Well, yeah, “ he said, “we had it made until then.”
I shook my head. “We were out of control from the moment we entered. You are not going to learn anything if you think that was anything but a disaster. What do you think paying customers would have thought?” His brow darkened. “It was a fine run…” he began, coughing on water sent down the wrong pipe, but an instructor interrupted. “Shut up. Both of you.” I realized I was out-of-line, but comforted myself with the hope the I was at least not Clueless.
Freight Train
The final river of the class was the California Salmon. There has been a film made of rafting mishaps on the river titled “The Slammin’ Salmon.” The Nordheimer run on the river officially has 12 Class IV rapids and a Class V thrown in for spice. A common definition of a Class V rapid is Teams of Experts Only. We might argue the team part, but experts we were not.
“Wanna follow my line?” We are in a small eddy above the biggest rapid we will see all week. Class V, although the instructors disagree because the lowish flow might notch it down a little. The question comes from Roger, who is rowing the lead boat. We have just run Last Chance rapid (Class IV) without knowing that we were running it, cheating somewhat by mistakenly sneaking through on its rocky right flank. We are still breathing heavy from the effort.
I nod. I am “on the stick”. In the rear and steering. Five paddlers sit in front of me in the 14 foot raft, ready to respond to my commands. I don’t have time to whip up the fear that I thought would come before this drop. We have not scouted the rapid. We had looked down scared upon it from the road the night before. From above, it was all froth and sharp snagging teeth. Roger is throwing another challenge at us. You can stare at a rapid for a half hour, plotting and dumping adrenaline, but the actual run usually only takes a few seconds.
I take a quick nervous breath and call “forWARD!.” The rapid starts shallow and slow, and we must dodge exposed stones. We snag and slowly spin, then pull loose. We snag again. Careful, careful. This is not a safe rapid to swim. The sharp rocks might bust you, and the foaming maw at the bottom would flush you through its pipes with no breath in your lungs.
We start the middle of the rapid backwards. “Right turn!” The raft turns quickly. “Forward!” We pull right to avoid a horn rock with a raft-flipping wave shooting from its side. I take a quick look to see the line that the lead raft takes. I look for rocks and see only haystacks. “Left turn! Forward!” The lead raft drops off into the froth. I am inexperienced, so I focus only on the next obstacle. Like a new chess player, I see only as far as my next move. It will have to do for now.
“Stop!” I call. I draw hard on my paddle to turn the boat straight for the drop. I see ahead. All is a chaos of wave and foam. We drop and flow, barely eluding the grip of the hole. Water fills the raft as it is pushed left and sucked deep. In the front, a paddler falls backward and all I can see of him is his legs still stuck in the foot cups on the raft floor. Someone grabs him and pulls him back from the froth. Good. The raft shudders and twists, and I struggle to keep it straight to the V of focussed waves.
The river is full of grace today, I think to myself at the time. Everyone knows when the water becomes safe enough again, even as it still spills over the sides. We raise our paddles in celebration, and our whoops are full of dissipating nervous energy, just like the river. We clumsily bump the side of the chute at the bottom (2 points off for bad style) and find the big eddy at the bottom to watch the following rafts.
Two days later I returned, full of renewed nervousness, to run Freight Train again alone at the oars.
Two Guns on the Upper K
The Upper Klamath begins in Oregon. A reservoir diverts a flow of water and keeps it level, burrowing through mountains as the river bottom tumbles away steeply through the canyon. When the difference between the diversion and the riverbed is 1000 feet or so, the diverted water is piped down and run through turbines before being returned to the channel. There are two turbines which can be spun with a variety of water flows. Sometimes only one turbine is run. At night, they are shut off completely. On warm days, to provide power for air conditioning, they turn on both turbines full bore. Two Guns, the slang goes. We stand on the riverbank in the morning, ready to put in. The day promises to be hot. Smoking, in fact.
The guide school is over, and I am tagging along on this trip for the experience. This is a training trip for the experienced river guides, I am told, so I assume that I will be doing little or no actual river guiding. Roger says “I want Chris on the oars and Rachel guiding the paddleboat. I want them to run all the big rapids.” Gulp. Time to jump in the saddle again, and put what I learned to use. The boats are full not of students, but guides who will twitch and recoil when your timing is wrong or your mistakes are imminent.
Many rivers are what are called pool-drop rivers. That is, there is a pool, then a rapid, and then another pool at the bottom of the rapid. With a few exceptions, all of the rapids we had run were of the pool-drop variety. Pool-drop rivers are nice because rafters can easily collect gear and wit and courage after a big drop in preparation for the next. Not the Upper K. Its grade is so steep that there are few pools. One rapid has hardly stopped foaming before it drops into the next. Eddies are few and thin. The rocks are volcanic, sharp and abrasive.
The river is challenging but not big until we hit the first big rapid called Caldera. After a nervous scout, the river remembered to me now is one long string of foaming waves. I run Caldera rough but safe, I remember. The rapids after are just holes and barely covered boulders and watery wash. I mastered the technique of sticking a boat in a hole. Upon entry to a hole, a boat will try to spin and surf deeper into it. An oarsman must use both oars to stick and hold the boat straight, fighting the force of the water and pushing the boat through and out of the hole. On the Upper K there are so many holes that most are not avoided, they are just run. Paying customers, in fact, want the excitement and challenge of looking into the gaping mouths of them and being swallowed by their tailwaves. The river kept rising something like 2 feet (!) an hour as the day continued to heat.
Somewhere in there we stopped for lunch, and then immediately dropped into Hell’s Corner, a long stretch of continuous rapid more than a ¼ mile long. Rocks that were above water when we stopped were now covered with white flow. Holes, waves, wash. Oars popped their locks and I slammed them back into place. Another raft got too close and I had to try to run part of the rapid while trying not to knock people off the other raft with my oars. I rode one oar up over the other raft and then dropped, bending the oar, but not enough to make it unusable. The guide riding in the front of my boat called the name of the next rapid as we passed some indefinable border between each, but I remember none of the names except the first.
When it was over, I felt I had been truly tested. I was green. I need to look farther downriver, past just the next obstacle. I have much to learn about efficiency, how to save strength and apply it to greater advantage. I had guided each day of the class plus the extra river, making mistakes, but never flipping or wrapping a boat, and putting only one person in the water for all of those days. I feel like these were experiences missed, mistakes I should have somehow managed to make in order to learn what to do when they eventually happen. I have much to learn, period. I have been many things: engineer, husband, fool, hiker, traveler, knave. But now I believe I can, with much trepidation and a little confidence, also call myself River Guide.
The hand that Roger shook after the final exam was mine. I can already feel the nervousness that will tickle my stomach as I row a baggage boat into first of the rapids in the Grand Canyon, where all rapids are by definition, big.