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A Day in the Waves: Part 2

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The second half of my big wave kayak adventure on Lake Superior:

The rising seas sent waves crashing into sea caves, mortar rounds of spray flying out from the cliffs.

A large stone archway guarded the entrance to a recess in the cliffs. I watched the waves slam against the sides, thought about what it would be like to rag-doll against the walls. I wouldn’t try to go through this one.

The Manitou River fell from the cliffs in a frothing yellow fury. The upper falls slammed into the side of the canyon, whereupon the onslaught redirected into a second, even more spectacular drop. There was a zone of smooth water in front of the falls, where the river flow was strong enough to beat back the lake, Further, the water boiled. Lake swells rose higher yet as they crashed and exploded into the face of the current. Birch leaves whirled in the agitation, flashing in and out of the darkness like strange fish.

It was an extremely tempting, if terrifying, place to try and surf a kayak.

The way to do it, was to aim for an eddy behind a sunken gravel bar. It was a spot that was slightly smaller than a modest kitchen, where the water was almost completely calm, a demilitarized zone between the warring lake and river.

I struggled to set up a good approach, wrestling with the river continually trying to push me back and the waves breaking at my stern. I half-surfed a couple waves, stopping to avoid getting thrown sideways or pushed down into the river. After a long struggle, I caught a wave that pushed me over the gravel bar and into the calm place.

It was one of the strangest places I have ever sat in a kayak.

Looking straight up, I could see 100-foot walls, curved amphitheater-like above my head. The falls couldn’t have been more than two kayak-lengths aways. And then there were the rollers coming in, crashing through the arch to the left.

I finally had the luxury of giving the view my complete attention, with no worries about the next breaking wave.

After I punched the kayak back through the breakers, Dave and I continued along the cliffs.

Mercifully, the profile of the North Shore has many projecting points, which create shelter zones where there will be calm water.

Fenstad’s Resort had one such protective point. We took a tranquil beach landing.

We were making great time down the shore with the waves pushing us, and even with the gathering seas, neither of us wanted to hurry.

“The point of a journey is not to arrive,” Dave said.

I nodded. The bigger waves? Let them come! Hopefully, they wouldn’t.

A guy with a mirrorless camera walked up to us to chat. There was some couple he’d heard about, who got swept out into the lake by an offshore wind and couldn’t get back. They died of hypothermia. We told him, we were experienced kayakers, guides actually, and that we’d paddled in these kind of conditions before. That seemed good enough for him, and we ended up talking about wildlife sightings in the area.

It turns out that there was a bear cub in a tree nearby, no mom. She had probably been shot by hunters. leaving the little guy to fend for itself this winter. The cub was probably a yearling, the guy thought, not a good prospect for survival.

The bear had been stuffing itself with apples from the resort’s trees, but the guy left it a fish he had caught so the growing youngster could experience some other sections on the food pyramid.

When the three of us went to see the bear, we found it looking down at us from a tall spruce. After more people went to look at him, he climbed higher and to the other side of the trunk. Then and again, he would peep out to look at us.

There were bright red apples hanging off of one tree, greens on another. They were delicious.

Trout swirled about in two streams nearby. The water levels had come down, leaving them trapped in pools.

Dave thought he might snatch one and leave it for the bear cub.. The guide and I watched skeptically as he waded in, but when he started throwing stones in strategic places, he managed to herd them into one place. Dave might have tried to swipe one out of the water, then thought better of it.

The waves kept building, but weren’t quite at the point where we wouldn’t fool around.

We deliberately took on a couple surf spots above the ledges, usually, opting to get near the downwind side of the ledge to make it easier to steer out of there if we encountered something too big to handle.

At one point, I’d thought I’d missed a wave, only to have the lake drop out from under me. Suddenly, I was surfing sideways, paddle jammed in the water. The stabilizing maneuver, known as the high brace, reminds me of 19th century whaling. I jab the paddle blade at the oncoming beast, lean the boat in and stick it. A Melville quote would have been appropriate here.

“From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee!”

This particular breaker took me on a 30-foot sleigh ride before I swung out of the break zone.

At another point, we were kayaking near shore, when a huge wave suddenly reared up next to me.

“I’d hate to be you right now,” Dave called.

But the wave ended up grabbing him too.

We stuck our paddles and rode, until the wave threw us up on a cobble beach. Dave might have been pissed because his fiberglass kayak had just taken a beating, but he laughed.

“That. Was. Awesome!”

The waves kept building.

After another hour on the water, we didn’t fool around much.

Every now and then, a 10-footer would rear up by our kayaks. I would try to angle my boat halfway into them, leaving room to brace and avoid getting flipped over backwards. Most terrifying of all were those monster waves, that broke at the top (but didn’t roll completely over, thank God.) These waves made their own break zones. I found that these half-breakers were technically easier to ride out than the breakers on shore or those that went over a shallow ledge. They just happened to be scarier than hell. If these massive waves started rolling over all the way, I couldn’t imagine how I could stay upright paddling through them.

The northeasterly swells kept me looking over my left shoulder constantly, with little time to appreciate some of the rock formations on shore.

This was a shame because we were going past Tettegouche State Park, home to a massive sea cave near Shovel Point.

I glanced at the formation with some regret. There was no way we would kayak into the cave now with this crazy surf.

Instead, we focused on getting around the cliffs at Shovel Point. Spectators at the rail got to see us taking on the swells and reflector waves.

The waves beyond the point were smaller, if still powerful, giving Dave and I some long-distance surfs.

Then we decided to take a shortcut through a small boulder garden. This turned out to be a mistake for me, when a wave crashed early and threw my boat against a rock. I steered away from the obstacle, only to get thrown up against yet another. I was almost out of danger when a third wave, hit me and flipped the front of my boat on top of a boulder.

Shit.

I tried to flip, back over, but the boulder got in the way of my paddle. Next, I tried pushing off the boulder itself, but I had to take my hand out from the pogies to do this. Just as I was ready to right the kayak, a mother of a wave came and blasted me, ejecting me out of the boat through the spray skirt.

Getting the boat emptied out on the rocks took at least 10 minutes. Submersion in the cold water brought up an urgent need to pee, which I did as discretely as possible (not very discretely) in front of the bystanders watching from the cliffs.

Dave came around and helped me get the last of the water out of the filled-up boat and get me back in. We were determined to get off the lake via the Baptism River, which meant that we would have to surf waves in against the current. The river shot out in an offset angle from between a cobble bar and a rock cliff.

The big-ass waves were crashing everywhere now. I let Dave go into the river first, slowly side-surfing one wave at a time in order to hit the sweet spot. When he got into the slack water, I brought my boat to bear.

The stern lifted on the crest of a huge breaker. As I plunged the paddle in, the wave shot the boat to a wild left and bounced its nose off the  cliff.  I back paddled on the right.

Here came the second breaker.

Again, I stabbed the paddle into my assailant. This time, the shaft snapped.

Of course, the wave pushed me back into the cliff, and I had to shove off with my left arm.

I held both ends of the busted paddle and paddled them like mad for the river mouth. Fighting the current this way gave me just enough momentum to stay ahead of the break zone, but it was like running top speed up a tilted treadmill. I wasn’t going any further forward and eventually, I knew the current would feed the boat back to the carnage.

Dave had already beached his kayak and jumped in the belly-deep current. He grabbed the loop on the nose of my kayak and got me the rest of the way home. Saved my ass.

We threw our kayaks up on the beach, where there was a corridor of rock piles and some inexplicably well-dressed people milling about. Some of them started asking to Dave about our journey. I stumbled into the shelter of some ledges where I could be out of the wind.

It was around this time that I realized that I was dumb to keep flailing at the water with two ends of the broken paddle. If I had just taken one end and paddled with it canoe-style I probably would have gotten enough momentum to go up current and get onto the beach on my own.

Some of the well dressed contingent came over to spread the cheer.

“We saw you almost die,”

“We didn’t almost die,” Dave said.

“Well, can you please move your boats, we’re going to have a ceremony here.”

A wedding!

And if we had come in ten minutes later, well, both of us would have absolutely surfed right into the marriage ceremony. What? You didn’t get the RSVP? Sorry guys, but these boats are coming in.

I can understand why many of those on shore, might have seen this all go down and thought, ‘Wow. What a couple of idiots to be out in that.’ Maybe some readers feel that way.

I do take issue with people who make rote judgements of how dangerous/safe, something I am doing is is based on a cursory, emotional assessment.

I’ve had people approach me after I get off the water with this automatically superior attitude. They don’t necessarily say, “You’re dumb.” Usually, they relate some passive-aggressive story about somebody who died. Not that it matters that the other guy had no life jacket, no wetsuit and several drinks in the tank. Never mind that I practice kayak rescues, practice rolling, practice bracing and practice in big waves. I constantly ask myself if I am allowing my enthusiasm to cloud judgement.

I’ve also been that guy on the beach. I’ve told a group in a canoe that the waves were going to be much bigger when they got around the point and tried to discourage them from going out on the 40-degree waters in jeans and cotton shirts.

Still, these others, just by knowing that someone has died on the lake, have gained this incredible perspective that I must lack. Thank you, Concerned Bystander, for your considered opinion.

While I don’t always make great decisions, I do resent others lumping me with the yahoos who have no idea what they are doing.

Dave and I used some judgement when we looked back out at the lake and saw mostly big breakers going out to Palisade Head. We had four miles of lake to cover to get back to my car. Could we make it? I thought we could do it if we had to.

But maybe we shouldn’t. Constant bracing had taken a toll on Dave’s back. I was feeling tightness as well. The lake showed every indication that the waves would continue to build.

Dave took out a cell phone and called a friend to pick us up. We hauled the boats up the long steps away from the lake.

The waves stayed rolling in my head for two nights in a row. I felt that I was moving with the swells, bracing into waves, surfing them. Some kind of unconscious learning was happening. Surely, the neurons were making new connections, preparing me for the next trip on the big water.

Here was the trip I will remember years from now: two kayaks, beneath the cliffs, through the waves, staying up.

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A Day In The Waves: Part 1

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Lake Superior’s waves crash against the rocks in a red sunrise at Black Beach, near Silver Bay, Minnesota

Here was the red sky that we’d been warned about: a hot band of mango orange coalescing above the dark waves.

It was just past 6 a.m. and Dave and I were at Black Beach loading kayaks onto his truck for the 23 mile drive up the Superior shore to Taconite Harbor. That would the launch spot. Black Beach was, hopefully, the end of our expedition. I walked down to where the waves rattled the cobbles. Amber beads of spray caught the wind, shone briefly in the evil light.

I ran back to the truck.

“Sorry, I just had to grab some pictures.”

“It’s a beautiful sunrise,” Dave said, “You got everything?”

I went back to my car and double checked. Most of the stuff I would take on the drive to Connecticut was already loaded in there. My kayak guiding season was over, and it was it was time to pay a visit back east.

“I think I’m ready,” I said.

I got in the passenger seat and we rolled out on the gravel.

When I called Dave the night before, I got his voicemail.

“Either I’m kayaking or I’m kayaking,” the message declared. That sounded about right.

Dave, who cuts a wiry figure with a stern face offset by a silver goatee, has been in his paddling drysuit most times I’ve seen him. He goes out on the lake almost every month of the year, stopping only for when the ice gets makes paddling physically impossible.

He’ll be out there with a Greenland paddle in his hands, the traditional paddle of an arctic seal hunter. Such is his enthusiasm for the Greenland paddle that he has a “Rolling With Sticks” sticker on the side of his truck. which shows a stick figure executing an Eskimo roll with a Greenland paddle.

Dave told me he knows how to do 30 different rolls in his kayak, though I’ve never had the chance to watch this.

In fact, we hadn’t done a trip together yet. With me kayak guiding for a resort, and him at the nearby outfitters, most of our water time has been with customers.

Needless to say, neither of us get to take customers out for 20-plus miles in Small Craft Advisory conditions.

This was the kind of trip we hungered for as we wrapped up guided tours for the year. This was the Guide Tour.

We wanted to need our best technical skills, lake smarts and physical strength. We wanted to end the day beaten up — not from hauling boats or loading trailers — but from testing the actual, whoop-ass fury of the world’s largest lake.

Along the way, we were going to paddle a new section of lake for both of us, stretching past Sugarloaf Cove and out to the falls on the Manitou River. The Manitou is the only major North Shore waterfall that drops straight into the lake.  No convenient overlook and interpretive center parking lot here. Tall cliffs and private property keep this gem out of sight from the road. You have to paddle there.

Later, we planned to go past the sea caves at Tettegouche State Park, and then around the 200-foot cliffs of Palisade Head, which has its own tunnels.

I wondered how well I would handle playing in the big waves all day, also how I would stack up to Dave’s expertise. I hoped to show the kayak vet that I knew a few things too.

Orange light marched down the nearby trees and cliffs as the sun peaked above Gull Island at Taconite Harbor. Gull Island and its companion, Bear Island are linked by a long line of quarried stone, which creates a bulwark against the Superior’s waves. Further protection comes from a smaller ring of stones that creates an inner harbor around the small boat launch.

We put the boats down on the concrete and did a last gear check.

Crap! Where were my paddling gloves? Dave lent me some neoprene pogies — a type of glove that attaches to the paddle and you put your hands into.

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Dave in his drysuit, prepping for launch.

There were no ships in the harbor (there rarely are these days, now that most of the Taconite ore used to make iron goes out of Silver Bay.) Once upon a time, I stopped a tour near Gull Island to avoid crossing paths with the James R. Barker.  The Barker had just dropped off a coal shipment at the nearby power station.

The boat is over 800 feet long, and at least as tall as an eight-story building. It lurched, Leviathan-like out in front of our tiny kayak pod, trailing a brown line of haze from its enormous stacks.

Once upon another time, someone asked me just how much coal was onboard a moored barge. I paused in an attempt to calculate the size of the black mountains that pop up near the plant after every new delivery.

“That would be approximately one shit-ton,” I said.

Today’s wind gusts had whipped the outer harbor up with sharp little whitecaps.

The big swells came in from the northeast, cutting past Gull Island at an angle, and crashing into cliffs. Seen at a distance, these waves were slow, blue forms, squiggles on the pink horizon. Each paddle stroke brought us closer to them. Soon we began to feel the lake’s power.

Dave’s kayak appeared and disappeared beneath him between water ridges. As the waves built later in the day, Dave himself would flash in and out from sight as the walls of water crossed my vision.

We grinned wildly at each other. This was the ride we’d waited for all season.

Waves shattered up against 100-foot rock cliffs, broadcasting plumes of spray that dazzled in the orange light. The rhythm of the waves against the boats was offset by the counter-rhythm from the reflector waves bouncing back at us from the walls. Sometimes, one of the reflector waves would smack right up against one of the oncoming rollers and they would pop —their splashes flying into the air.

This dynamic environment required constant vigilance to keep the boat upright and going where it should. Body and mind had to mold to the movement of the water with fast micro-adjustments in the hips and with the paddle. I enjoy the trance-like concentration this demands. I would still feel myself bucking and rolling when I got off the water, would be going up and down the waves when I went to sleep that night.

A golden eagle (or was it an immature bald?) looked down at us from over the cliffs. We would see several eagles along the trip, more than I had seen throughout the summer.

A 20-foot rock nob jutted out from the shoreline in front of our kayaks. It was the point at Sugarloaf Cove, a beautiful piece of parkland where I had led hikes earlier in the year. I was finally able to get a look at a sea cave that I’d often wondered about, though I could never see it clearly from the land. I maneuvered through the reflector waves to beneath the lip of rock where I could see an alcove, maybe 10-feet deep beneath the overlook. I wonder how many hikers stand up there, with no idea of the enormous opening beneath their feet.

Near the alcove, there was a cool rock feature on the cliffs that sent up tall whirlwinds of mist as the waves crashed past. The water made a “shush!” like a mighty exhale.

A nearby mini cave in the rock would take a wave and fire off spray with the thud of a cannon, sending spray out 20 feet into the lake. It looked like a dragon fire.

In fact there was a kind of explosion happening. As an oncoming wave slammed into the air inside the rock hollow, it compressed it, causing the air  to blow out at high pressure, blasting shreds of wave with it.

Another natural phenomenon to look for was the surf spot. The Lake Superior North Shore is chock full of underwater ledges that create shallows. A big wave rises up and curl over, as it marches past. These make for fun/dangerous spots for kayakers depending on the size of the waves and the kayaker’s experience.

I look for these surf spots for fun on most days, seeking to ride a good-sized wave in my kayak. Now, these waves were massive, and curling in much deeper water. It didn’t seem like I was looking for surf spots. They were looking for me.

Whale-sized waves crashed on the ledges around Sugarloaf Cove. Dave and I gave them wide berth. The water on the other side of the point was less intense but there were smaller, breaking waves, that carried us long-distance over the shallows near shore.

This was the first place on the trip where I got rocked.

In the semi-shelter of the point, Dave and I had let our guard down enough to swap stories of our adventures kayaking the Temperance River, including Dave’s trip down an upper section I hadn’t tried yet.

“Is that really crazy?” I asked.

“No it’s not too bad, but you definitely need to stay on your toes.”

“Hey, speaking of which…”

The wave was stacked up about six feet high, approaching from our left and getting ready to break. As it curled over, we jammed our paddles into its side so that we could lean into it and brace against.

We were immediately sideways surfing a frothy stampede of water. Though my kayak wobbled in the melee, it stayed upright. And I got a massive charge.

Unfortunately, the wave had also pushed us closer to the rocks, and in a bad place for the next wave. Dave, who was slightly further out, managed to paddle out through it while it crashed over. Not an option for me. I tried to set a decent brace, but  before I got there, the wave knocked my boat over like a bath toy. Submerged in the cold water, my immediate thought was, ‘Don’t let Dave see you screw up this roll.”

I fought my blade to the surface and swept it over the water. I got high enough out of the waves to take a breath, but the roll was sloppy and I went back under.

On my second attempt, I took my time getting things right under water (even as I started to feel pressure building in my head) and swept the blade again, flicking my hips and rolling my body to the surface.

I pointed the nose of my boat into the waves and paddled hard, slicing through the next wave of breakers.

Dave congratulated me. Sure, flipping the boat over was a bit of a noob move, but the roll redeemed it. If only everything in life were that simple.

Our course took us past the canyon of the Caribou River and to a sheltered cobble beach where we took a break to eat and go agate hunting. A rough day on Lake Superior is always good for searching out these little geological wonders because it brings a fresh crop onto shore. You know the other rock hounds haven’t been over it. I’m not much of an agate picker. My best find, was a pea-sized pebble, which did have some cool alternating red and white mineral stripes. Dave, who sells agates for a side income, snapped up several, beauties the size of golf-balls.

We were making great progress down the lake, and neither of us wanted to rush the day. Nonetheless, even in the half hour that we spent out of our boats, the number of whitecaps on the lake were building.

Dave turned on his weather radio, which announced that there were 4 to 6-foot waves (Wait, I thought they were supposed to be 3 to 5-footers!) which would build to 5 to 7 footers by evening. Of course, all bets were off when it came to underwater ledges and random mutant waves that rose much higher than their brethren. The Weather Service had issued a Small Craft Advisory for the North Shore, which we already knew about.

“The Small Craft Advisory advises me to go kayaking,” Dave said.

Not far off the beach, we could see an indentation in the cliffs up ahead. This, we guessed, was where the Manitou River dropped into Lake Superior. Soon we could see brown river water that swirled with yellow leaves and flowed out into the blue swells. Could we get up to the falls without getting thrashed?

 

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On A Dark River

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Starting my trip on the St. Louis River on the rapids below Thomson Reservoir. Photos by LeAnn.

Between the razor edges of stone, through the labyrinth of dark canyons, there runs a river, treacherous and rusty brown, that thunders over falls and flies into narrow places that would crush a boat.

The St. Louis River is beautiful and sinister at once. Its water flows over a massive slate formation, exposing it in spiny rock projections that jut up at regular intervals and identical angles. This regularity, gives the rock a whiff of gothic architecture. It was not a little bit unnerving from the perspective of my tiny kayak.

The other rivers in Northeast Minnesota that I’ve paddled are glorified creeks compared to the wide and powerful  St. Louis, which winds through acres of carved stone. The water was strong enough to build the world’s largest freshwater sandbar (It measures 10 miles long divided between the Minnesota and Wisconsin sides) in Lake Superior, which created Duluth’s shipping harbor.

British and French fur traders, descending out of the north country on their way to Superior, used to portage their canoes around the big rapids, following trails built by tribes before them.

Later, kayakers and rafters found out that those rapids could be pretty fun, if dangerous. The St. Louis is probably the most popular spot for whitewater sport on the North Shore, popular enough so that many guests on my guided sea kayaking trips have asked me if I had tried them out. My desire to try the St. Louis only increased as I built some skills on other North Shore Rivers like Temperance, Cascade, Popular, Baptism, Cross and Lester.

The section I wanted to try went through Jay Cooke State Park, starting  at the dam below the Thompson Reservoir to the Swinging Bridge in Jay Cooke State Park, and thither down to Oldenburg Point if time allowed. This is the section where I’d seen kayakers taking on rapids during  my ultra marathon back in July.

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Put in below the dam. Check out the huge rooster tail of water coming off the rocks on middle right.

A storm earlier in the day had swollen nearby streams and increased the flow coming into the river. The sky hadn’t cleared, but left low clouds swollen overhead that felt like an oppression.

I drove out of Duluth with the boat on my roof and LeAnn sleeping in the passenger-seat. She was dozing after a 2 a.m. to early morning shift delivering newspapers for a friend. Although she could have stayed asleep at the apartment, she decided to be an awesome friend and go with me to shuttle the car and take pictures.

I was trying to get into the upbeat music coming from the college radio station. I couldn’t shake the feeling that what I was going to do wasn’t going to be fun exactly or that I was going through motions that somebody else had scripted.

As my third guiding season winds down, I have the same sense of malaise and uncertainty about what’s next. Some life questions were easier to push aside when every day was flat-out busy and planning for the future meant having boats and wetsuits ready for the next day.

It was already late, so LeAnn and I took an abbreviated approach to scouting. I checked out the falls near the dam, down to the Swinging Bridge and then went on to a section of river near Oldenburg Point. I parked the car on Highway 210 at one point to scramble along the rocks myself. The large fins of tilted slate made for tough footing; I found myself balancing on razor edges, slipping up and down rain-slicked slopes and into the puddles that formed between the ridges.

Moving with a kayak on one shoulder proved to be even trickier.

To make the sketchy hiking easier at the put-in, I attached a cam strap to my kayak and lowered it into the water, then I tugged it behind me like it was a reluctant dog on a leash. This made it easier to navigate the rocks than if I had the weight of the boat on one side.

The going was still slow enough that I decided to start my voyage in an eddy beneath the dam, rather than taking on some of the bigger rapids up above. Besides being convenient, this move may well have prevented me from getting smashed against boulders.

Downstream, a dark canyon loomed, with an overpass and railroad trestle perched above the troubled water. I had some feeling of unease that wouldn’t settle down. These were small rapids here. I’d gone through tougher stuff before. What was the big deal?

Lazy foam matted the launch eddy, cut sheer as it met the river current. I paddled easily through this with the kayak pointed 45-degrees upstream and let the river swing me around toward the rapids below. I navigated some standing waves and a couple of small ledges where the boat nose plunged into the angry water, bobbed up again.

I went past the rock outcrop where LeAnn took pictures, then went through the boogie-water beneath the overpass.

Even though these were small rapids, the boat moved in unpredictable jolts. Some of this was no doubt influenced by the weird, angular geology below the current. My low confidence, no doubt, amplified the feeling of vulnerability. I deliberately hit the meat of a couple smaller rapids in order to tune up for the bigger stuff down river and to break my funk.

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Beneath the Highway 210 Bridge

The canyon widened downstream, becoming skeletal landscape of slate outcrops. I felt that I was navigating something apocalyptic, the bones of the earth.

The rock formations consolidated into straight rows, like farmer’s furrows. When the rows were perpendicular to the river, they created still inlets of calm water, and sometimes dramatic drop-overs. When the rows ran parallel, they tended to split the water into narrows and create weird, sideways waterfalls.

Visitors to Jay Cooke State Park, get to see many different versions of this river, which exposes more geology when waters drop, and then takes new channels though the rock when the river rises anew. There were many empty channels along the river on the day I made my descent, indicating that the river was still low from the dry summer. The gauges readings posted on American Whitewater indicated about 1,800 cubic feet per second of flow.

Compare this to the massive floods that rocked the park in 2012.  55,000 cfs  stampeding down the gorge slammed into the Swinging Bridge, destroying its span. Even now, sections of the park and of Highway 210 are off limits because of flood damage.

I found myself on stretches of calm that gave way to shelves where I would drop three and four feet at a time. I hit plenty of rocks concealed beneath murky water.

One particular drop gave off a steady thunder as I approached. I had neglected to scout this section, (and forgot to bring the notes I had scribbled down based on the description on American Whitewater.)

I had decent momentum going, and was loath to get out of the boat for scouting. Fortunately, my wiser self got the better of me. I steered into a convenient eddy between two rock ridges  where I got out and hoisted my boat up.

I scrambled over the river rock formations to get in front of the rapid where I could look at it.

My first glance said, “No way.”

The water dropped into a narrow squeeze in the bedrock, where it raged in a frothy maelstrom of kinetic energy. The waves climbed higher downriver, indicating a powerful keeper hydraulic, maybe 8-feet of current flowed backward, toward the falls, meaning that after I flipped at the bottom, I’d probably get pulled back and sucked under, before popping up at the front of the hydraulic to start the cycle anew

This route was reassuringly fatal, in that I knew I could carry the kayak around it without feeling like a wuss.

But, then I had to go out further on the rock where I could see another channel. This one also looked freakin’ dangerous.

The moves started at the top of a divided falls. River left had a steep slope of high-speed water crashing down into a chasm, where it collided with a whitewater carnage train that fell down from river right and thundered out to where it exploded with the bedrock on its opposite side.

A paddler’s salvation depended on a very fast right turn, somehow maintaining stability while the water shoved against the cliff face and getting out of there. The likely flip foreshadowed a possible visit to the destructive keeper just  above where the current met the wall. And I had no idea if I could swim out of that mess.

Then there were those Red Bull kayakers I’d been watching videos of. Those dudes in a broad brimmed hats and perma-dopey expressions who shucked for a robot piss corporation could do these moves. That wasn’t quite the reason, I decided to run the rapid. It also happened because I decided to get into my boat and decide how I felt about things.

I paddled out into the current, caught another eddy, looked at the pour over. Got out of the eddy,  aimed my boat at the drop angling hard left. My hope was that the momentum would carry me through the carnage train and out of the rapid to safety. None of the planned route became visible until I started falling.

I don’t even know where I flipped, only that it happened very fast.

Next, I was getting thrashed around in high-velocity water, trying to do a roll, only one hard current or another to send me flailing. I feared that the current was carrying me toward the keeper zone so I bailed out. I popped up near a rock wall with no idea where I was in relation to anything else.

The water current was taking me downriver, and luck had kept me away from the keeper.

With upturned boat in one hand, and paddle in the other, I kicked toward an eddy between two slate ridges. Safety. My pounding heart felt like it would break my ribs and pop my skull. That would be the kicker, to swim out of the melee only to get zapped by a heart attack.

The eddy was filled with foam — fluffy, playful stuff that floated several inches above my head. I had to thrash my arm around to create breathing space. How heavenly and gentle the foam was, child of the hellish waters upstream. I was lucky to have ended up here.

I struggled with my water-filled boat to a ledge where I could flip it over and empty the contents.

If I hadn’t caught this eddy, I would have likely gone over the next rapid as a swimmer. I took a minute in my seat to get my breathing right and my head together, then pushed off.

When I made it through the drops and turns of the second rapid, the river mellowed to a slow boogie through the bone-fields, with small sunken rocks hiding beneath the murk.

LeAnn was waiting near the Swinging Bridge, and it had already me much longer to get there than I planned. I worried that she would be worried. It was already getting late and I decided that the bridge would be a great place to end the day. The rapids downstream from there had definite flip potential and I wasn’t feeling it.

There was one last rapid in the train, which featured a nice 14-ish foot drop into a pool.

I’d posted LeAnn near this edge to take photos.

I took my time setting up for the descent. There were some jagged rocks jutting out of the cliff where the water poured over. To avoid them, I aimed for a certain shrub on the opposite shore that I had scouted earlier, hoping that it was the correct trajectory.

Of course, I wouldn’t know if I got the approach right until I was falling.

 

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Made it! I did use a pretty bad habit of leaning backwards however, which increases back injury risk. It did  reduce the risk of breaking my nose when I hit the water.

There was that roller coaster tug in my guts as the kayak’s nose sank. The brief moment of weightlessness followed by the smack of water against the bow, sinking in up to my chin, then a desperate paddle flail to keep the boat upright. It worked.

LeAnn cheered as I swung away from the small keeper created by falling water.

I pumped my fist.

There was a beach beneath Swinging Bridge where I could bail out.

I thought about keeping on the river, and seeing how I stacked up to some of the big rapids downstream.

My appetite for rapids was less than my appetite for dinner, however. I headed for the beach.

“Are you sure?” LeAnn called.

I wasn’t. But I committed to the decision.

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Here is a shot of me from the Swinging Bridge that shows some of the bizarre rock formations in the river. Check out how all the slate is tilted to one side.

 

Further Reading:

Info on park geology and history from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_parks/jay_cooke/narrative.html

Info on rapid names and river levels from American Whitewater:

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_parks/jay_cooke/narrative.html

Info on 2012 St. Louis River Flooding:

http://www.twincities.com/ci_20940630/duluth-flood-water-levels-dropping-along-st-louis

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_parks/jay_cooke/narrative.html

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_parks/jay_cooke/narrative.html

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The Lester Test

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The first drop on my run down the Lester River. Photo credit to LeAnn.

The Lester River was the first stretch of whitewater that I’d encountered  in Minnesota.

I was just driving out of Duluth on the way to start my sea kayak guiding job last June, when I happened to look to the left side of the road to see an angry slice of high-velocity water churning through a   rock canyon.

“Whoa!”

I pulled my car into a puddle-strewn parking lot nearby and got out to look at the rapids.

The water ran reckless through narrow channels in the basalt, going over drops and throwing itself up several feet into the air whenever it encountered an obstacle. The late 2014 snowmelt fed the beast, as did the heavy rains of the last two days. I felt humbled but also energized by the river’s raw power. Just walking around the slippery banks, peering into the maw of one of the mean hydraulics gave me all the adrenaline I needed for one day.

It would be over a year later before I finally ran the section in a kayak.

Labor Day. The so-called last day of summer brought the crowds out to Lester Park. Situated on the eastern edge of Duluth, the park offers miles of trails for mountain biking, cross country skiing, running and hiking beneath tall stands of white pine. And then of course, there’s the river itself. The swimming holes beneath the falls were an attractive draw on a day when temperatures were in the 80s. Teenagers took to the cliffs for jumping, high enough to put a knot in my stomach and even more nerve wracking when they climbed up on trees so they could get higher yet.

I arrived with my friends LeAnn and Tammy, with whitewater yak cam-strapped with a cardboard sheet onto the roof of my ’93 Mazda Protege. Watch out world. Here comes the pro.

Since it was such a warm day, the three of us decided to take a dip in one of the pools. We opted to avoid the place with the crowds and found a smaller pool upstream that was below a falls. The rainfall during the last couple days had brought the river level up considerably, (though not as high as it had been on my first visit.) Brown tannins and sediment slushed together in the current, created a swirling eddy where we jumped in.

Rafts of foam spun around us. I gathered some into my beard. It smelled like dirty pine needles. I found out that I could climb to the top of a small falls and slide down on my butt. LeAnn and I took turns going over the drop, until I was so cold that I had to lie down on some black river rock to get warm again.

I did not volunteer to try any of the cliff jumps.

Finally, it was time for me to grab my boat. I did a quick scout along 3/4 of a mile of river, stopping to go out on a railroad trestle where kids were (again) jumping into the river. The gnarliest rapids were between Superior Street and the trestle and I spent a good time looking them over. Unlike the first time that I’d gazed upon them however, they no longer seemed impossibly dangerous.

There was a 6-foot drop before this, which looked fun, if not particularly hazardous to life and limb, and then there was a small drop after the main rapids, which I didn’t pay much attention. After that, the river smoothed out and flowed the rest of the way to Lake Superior.

I got LeAnn to volunteer with the camera, took the boat off my cardboard carrying rack and started walking up a trail along the river. It was hard to determine where to bring the boat down because the banks were steep and the further I went, the more tempting rapids I saw. Nonetheless, I knew I couldn’t keep everyone waiting forever, and ended up taking a fishing path down to a broken dam.

I put the yak down on some shattered rocks and eased myself into the water.

There were no big rapids yet, but the river moved fast. I shot between the pine trees on the banks, past boulders where the water pushed itself over the tops. There were a couple small drops that sent the water splashing up to my waist, up to my t-shirt. It was unbelievable that I was doing this in a cotton top instead of my usual wet suit and nylon splash jacket. The air and water were that warm.

Finally, I shot beneath a foot bridge and down the 6-foot drop into a pool. A crowd of onlookers cheered. I hung around in the eddy for a while so that LeAnn could get further downstream with the camera.

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Dropping off the with a convenient eddy waiting on my right side.

This was where the river got narrower, where it put the fear in me.

I tumbled over a concrete weir, paddling hard to get past any keeper hydraulics that might be waiting there. On the overpass ahead of me I saw LeAnn aiming the camera down to the river That was where the rapids started. The shadow of the bridge cast the river into a darkness, as if I were entering a gaping mouth.

I took a quick look up to LeAnn, and then put all my focus on maneuvering.

The sky disappeared. I steered my boat through the twists and drop-offs in dark water.

The light at the end of the tunnel was the sun glinting off the waves and foam of the big rapid. The one that I had spent long minutes staring at last spring, wondering if I could pull it off.

A nice thing about being on the water, is that once you’re moving, there is little time for morbid contemplation.

Here was the steep slope and narrow slope of water with a drop-off on the righthand side. Now I was going down it.

My trajectory was taking me straight for a massive wall, but I had planned for this. I paddled upstream and to the right, (overcompensating) and was briefly fascinated with the fact that I was trying to paddle uphill. If I could just muscle it a couple feet to the drop-off, I would be home free. Somehow, I got there. The nose of the kayak dropped away and sent me plunging down into the pool below. I went neck-deep in water, then bobbed neatly to the surface in a still patch of river.

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Coming out from the bridge and into the rapid, I need to turn right, and fast.
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I paddle for all I’m worth to avoid getting shoved up against the wall on my left side.
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Over the drop

I looked up at where I’d come from. It had been way to the right of the route, I’d planned originally, but it had worked.

I looked up to the bridge, and pumped my fist for LeAnn who was cheering.

I relished the moment, then turned to the last drop on the river which lay beneath the railroad trestle. It was a short little thing. No big deal. I lined up and shot over the edge.

I plunged into the water, expecting the momentum to carry me easily toward the finish line.

But, hey, that was funny. I wasn’t moving forward. Actually, I was moving backward. The rapid had fixed      a tractor beam on my boat’s rear end. I felt more annoyed than anything when I started paddling hard to get out of it. The next thing that happened was that the nose of my kayak went into the air, and I plopped backwards into the water.

Upside down in the swirling river, I had a moment to reflect on the value of staying vigilant. I also set my paddle for a roll, taking the time to get my paddle right so I didn’t screw it up. I dug with the blade and flicked my hips. I was back in the sunshine. The trestle jumpers were cheering. The keeper had relinquished its hold so I could float down the river like it was no big deal.

Beautiful willows sprawled out across the placid water here. The Highway 61 bridge framed the water of Lake Superior in a welcoming arch. I let the muddy current carry me out into the lake, where I could look across to the grain silos in Wisconsin, the tall buildings in Duluth’s downtown.

I got out on the beach, and walked the kayak up toward LeAnn, who met me by the road.

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Getting Rocked

I’m back out on the steely gray waves, looking to do some surfing in my whitewater kayak.

Dark clouds roll over Lake Superior, threatening more storm winds, or that the light drizzle falling now could become a downpour. The Weather Service has issued a small craft advisory.

I slop my way over four-foot rollers, staying well away from the rocky coast where the swells release their energy in detonations of foam and spray.

The buildings near my launch beach get smaller as I paddle away and become a part of the undulating waterscape.

My goal is a certain submerged ledge, about a third of a mile away. Even at a distance, I can see how the waves build on top of it, changing from round to angular, gaining height and breaking over themselves. The waves above the ledge behave similarly to the way that they would if they were coming into a beach, but because the ledge drops back into deeper water nearby, I will theoretically be able to cruise out of the break zone before the waves finish their kamikaze-run onto a nearby rock shelf.

I approach the feature with caution, observing from a distance where the waves start to break, looking from a couple of different angles. One of my favorite views of surf is from out on the water looking toward shore. The water climbs, loses its balance, falls over itself. Taut lines crease the water’s surface like cables trying to hold up the behemoth, but to no avail. It gives up its ghost in a beautiful spray of bubbles shooting upward through the water as the wave collapses.

It’s all to easy to be mesmerized and drift too close, inadvertently taking  a part in the drama, when the next act starts building up from behind.

My precautions include the whitewater helmet on my head. There is also a bilge pump and paddle float inside the boat, which would be my best hope of getting back in the kayak should I flop over far off land.

When I am finally confident in my survey, I get in front of the underwater ledge and look behind me for a good wave.

The key is to match the momentum of  the oncoming swell at the moment that it starts to lift the rear of the kayak. I paddle hard for one wave, but it’s moving faster than me, lifts my boat and trucks on past. That’s OK, because I got a momentum boost, which sets me up perfectly to catch the next wave.

The rear of the boat rises up; I ride down its slope like I’m a kid on a sled. The wave is curling over behind me, dropping the kayak nose toward the abyss. I lean back to counteract, paddle like hell to get out of there before everything breaks on top of me.

KAH-WHAM!

The wave explodes and the kayak flies forward on a carpet of churning foam. The rock outcrop looms in front of me, but I’m already oriented well to the right of it.

I lean on the right side and let the edges of the kayak help me carve away from danger. As soon as I’m spun around, I’m climbing on top of swells. I’m away from the ledge now and the waves aren’t breaking, thank God. It was a nice run. I wonder if I can do better.

I get back in front of the ledge, scan the waters for a new monster.

Big waves often come in successions. If there is one big wave, chances are another one is right behind it. I start paddling to catch the first wave in one of these chains, almost nab it, but not quite. I see the bubbly streamers go up beneath the kayak’s nose as the kayak tilt’s back in the wave’s trough. Better luck next time, old chum.

 I look behind me to see who’s next. It’s the first wave’s big brother, riding high and already pitching forward at a steep angle. It is not good that I have lost speed.

“Shit.”

I paddle forward hard as the rear of the boat tilts upward. There is immediate, awesome acceleration. If I can get in front of this, it could be my best ride yet. The boat is plunging down, 70 degrees, 80 degrees, 90 degrees — the Uh Oh Moment.

The world goes turquoise as the back of my kayak flips over like a falling domino. Water and bubbles are rushing past my ears. I’m still shooting forward, still surfing the wave, but upside down now.

I make a desperate attempt to set up an Eskimo roll, realize that a paddle blade is missing. I flip the paddle around and try again, but am too disoriented and uncoordinated to roll worth a damn. The spray skirt is already coming off the cockpit.

Finally, I give up and pop out from the boat. I curse the paddle, a take-apart, which I’d dropped  $130 on last month. While it has been convenient being able to separate the paddle in two pieces for transportation, the paddle has not been so hot at staying together — a rather important task.

Bobbing in the freezing water, I take stock of where I am in relation to the breakers. Fortunately, I am slightly outside the break-zone so I can bob up and down on the waves rather than getting thrashed inside them. I scan the water for the other half of my paddle, then I realize that the paddle didn’t come apart, it broke. The paddle end was snapped right off.

Once I get the kayak flipped over, it is completely filled with water, above the waterline only thanks to the air bladders within it. I reach to undo the bilge pump from its tether, decide it would be faster to kick the boat into shore and empty it there. My limbs are already getting cold. I kick hard with my legs to move myself and the hundreds of pounds of boat through the water, while I use my free hand to work the paddle. The confusion of waves makes it hard to gauge what, if any progress I’m making. I find myself dipping my head below the water for one wave that threatens to curl over, then I go back to thrashing and kicking.

At last, I feel the stony lake bottom beneath my feet so I can walk the boat the rest of the way toward shore, tilting water out of it as I go.

I had really gotten rocked, I think, laughing at how thoroughly the wave had overcome my feeble attempts to stay upright. Oopsy-daisy!, And there goes the tiny boat with me inside, ass over teakettle.

I empty the rest of the water out, scanning the water for the missing paddle blade. No sign. I walk out onto the overhang where the waves are breaking and look upon at the frothing carnage breaking against shore.

I smile, thinking of how I was completely owned, dominated, wrecked, rocked, by that wave. I don’t know why it should be so amusing, but it is. This could partly be a perversion of the fear response.

Then again, there is always something funny about the little guy making a stand and getting crushed. It reaffirms the cynic in us who never really believed the David and Goliath story, who got tired of everyone telling us to take risks — as if they weren’t speaking from inside protective bubbles of security and wealth.

Why were those “Messin’ With Sasquatch,” ads that came out a couple years back so satisfying? Because it’s fun to see some cocky little twerp try to strut and then get shut down, by Big Foot, no less.. One of my favorite scenes from Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” shows a group of gangly schoolboys pitted in a rugby match against full-sized men. The bigger team crushes the little guys mercilessly and with obvious pleasure. Then one of the boys escapes the scrum and almost makes the end zone, only to be tripped by one of his sadistic teachers from the sideline. The student looks up from the mud with understanding on his face: Now I see how the world works.

We get such a vicarious thrill for watching larger forces take down resistance that our language is rich with words that communicate dominance. I’ve already used several of them. Now think of how many ways I can say my team won the game.

“We owned them!”

“Smashed them.”

“Stomped them down.”

“Kicked their asses.”

“Slammed them.”

“We made them our bitch.”

“Dominated them.”

… and etc.

Such words are infectious because they affirm a sense of invincibility. People use them in mundane situations, sometimes for the laugh, sometimes because histrionics can be a more or less reflexive way of speaking, especially when you want attention.

“I seriously owned those dishes in the sink.”

“This veggie casserole curb stomps all other casseroles.”

Casual violence adds panache to otherwise dull language. Overused, it risks boorishness or arrogance, the equivalent of having a conversation scripted for WWE.

That said, there is still something pretty funny about hearing it from the guy who got hit (I mean, provided it isn’t your best friend  who just landed in a wheelchair.)

Knowing the story’s inevitable outcome by the time you’ve told us about your ski getting caught on a lump of snow only builds the anticipation. We’ve been there ourselves and we’re getting owned right with you.

Can a graphic account of someone being taken down by existential despair, weight-gain, aging, and an all-conquering cynicism about life be funny? Just listen a comedian like Louis C.K.. I laugh so hard that sometimes I can’t breathe.

Can I laugh at myself after the Sasquatch of waves flips my boat over like some cheap toy? Yes. And I’d laugh if it happened to you.

I get back in the boat and shove it off, using a pry stroke so that I can paddle on one side but keep the boat on a straight course. Having only one end of the paddle makes me more vulnerable out there because I can only play defense on one side at a time. I still make it back to the launch beach, OK, where I surf a medium-sized wave back onto the gravel.

Having come out of the ringer more or less unscathed but  down a paddle, I can think about ways I can be better prepared next time. My next paddle will be more expensive and more durable. I’ll have a paddle float clipped to my life vest so that I can use it to quickly get myself back inside the boat and the bilge pump will be in a place where I can grab it instantly. I will add a tow line to my gear so I can swim to shore first without having to tow the kayak with me. I will practice my roll more, so that I can right myself even in trying circumstances and I’ll be extra vigilant in break zones.

When the next killer wave comes, things might go differently. I might ride it expertly, effortlessly, flying down the carnage like an epic, avenging angel. But even then, the universe will own the facts, the enduring truth that I can never change:

That wave made me its bitch.

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Bikeyaking

Bikeyaking

I just wanted to take my kayak down the river and leave the car at home.

I do many things the hard way because I am stubborn. I was also convinced that with the right kind of trailer, I could use my bike to haul my whitewater kayak 8.5 miles to a put in on the Poplar River, do some whitewater, and bike back home. Why? Why not?

It was a different kind of challenge, one that I liked because it left my polluting car out of the equation while I was having fun.

A nice idea, but one that required technical knowhow that is beyond my ken.

Enter my friend, Jon the Bike Guy. A retired ranger from Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources, he sports a waist-length, braided pony tail and owlish glasses through which he diagnoses and prescribes remedies for faulty derailleurs, misaligned spokes and squeaky brakes. Woe unto anyone who borrows a tool from his organized bins and shelves and fails to return it to the proper place.

An expert level forager, he acquires and keep things until the universe reveals their utility.

There was a purpose for the old Burley bike trailer he’d hung onto. Meant for carrying kids, it could have a second life carrying my kayak around.

When I half-joked that I wanted to pull a kayak behind my bike, Jon’s eyes popped. He immediately thought of repurposing the trailer and began talking rapid fire about how it would come together. I could almost see the blueprints floating over his head.

Our first model looked promising until I started pedaling. The shock absorbing spring in the carrier caused it to buck wildly as I accelerated and decelerated. I grimaced every time I hit the brakes. After about a mile of lurching, terrifying riding, I turned around in defeat. Then, coming down a hill, the kayak took an enormous lurch and snapped the wooden handle that attached it to the bike. The boat rolled merrily down into a ditch where it landed in a mud puddle. It preferred water over pavement apparently.

I was far from given up and, unsurprisingly, neither was Jon. The bikeyak would ride. We went back to the design and scrapped the troublesome spring. Instead, John drilled a hole in the metal arm where I could insert the trailer pin. This model fared far better, with the only issue being a tendency for the sides of the hull to rub against the wheels now and again.

Fine-tuning and adjustment could wait however. Whitewater called. After a couple of trips to play around in the Temperance River (about four miles of travel from home to the launch area,) I set my sites on the Poplar River, which runs through a series of frothing rapids and drops that go through a ski resort and a golf course, before the canyon narrows into a log-choked death chute on the way to Lake Superior.

I planned to get out before this part.

One recent summer morning, I started biking with the kayak on the trailer toward Poplar. Puffy cumulous drifted through the crisp blue sky. The previous night’s rains steamed off the leaves and the sodden ground. The sultry air was rich with the smells of earth and life.

Pedaling my bike plus kayak through the humidity was slow, but the easy pace also meant I could look for wildflowers in the woods or listen to birdcalls. A few pedestrians shot furtive glances, then decided that it was best not to talk to the crazy guy.

“That’s an innovative transportation idea,” one walker told me.

He was the one with vision, obviously. When everyone else told those bike mechanics Orville and Wilbur their idea wouldn’t fly, he would have given them the thumbs up.

Everyone else was oblivious to genius.

I arrived at the Poplar River within 45 minutes. I ate some bread and stashed a dry bag full of clothes in some nearby brush outside a graveyard. I’d be back as soon as I dropped the kayak off at the put in.

This was the tough part. I had to climb at least 500 feet along the ski hill road and it’s steep.

The bike crawled along the highway shoulder. Cars and trucks sped past, some with mountain bikes on their racks.

Would I have been able to explain myself to them and, if so, would I believe myself? They’d probably file me under ‘loco’ long before I finished. Yet, everything I was doing had logic to it. It was the marriage of conflicting impulses that spawned the apparent absurdity.

On the one hand, I wanted to minimize unnecessary driving. Whitewater kayaking is a luxury, not a necessity.

However, if I skipped a kayak trip because of driving guilt, this would signal that my anti-driving philosophy placed a heavy tax on fun. If avoiding driving meant hanging around the house and not going out for some excitement, how could I sell it to people? Ergo, the trick was to find a way to take the kayak trip but not drive. Ergo, there I was crawling up the hill with a kayak in back of my bike, which, come to think of it, was not particularly fun.

After I reached the crest of the hill, I parked near a trailhead to the Superior Hiking Trail, close to the cascades I call You Will Die Falls.

I left the kayak in the  woods and biked back down the hill to the cemetery. Some may have considered it a bad omen that my kayak run was ending at the graveyard.

After I got the bike in place, I started back upriver on foot. I picked an arduous route along the river so I could scout the rapids and look for newly fallen trees. Any river canyon on the North Shore is exceptionally slow (or outright impossible)to explore on foot, because of the steep slopes. These tend to be populated by loose rock, slippery moss and dead trees that fall over as soon as you grab for one.

I scraped through briar patches, over spruce trees with impaling branches and under logs. Rarely did I put my foot down with any certainty that it wouldn’t slide or that the ground beneath it wouldn’t give way.

At two rapids, I placed stones so that I would see them on the way down. One of these markers reminded me to prepare for a series of drops, another to stay on the left side of the river and avoid a branch-choked channel.

I came out of the woods onto a golf course, where I walked down to a bridge above a Class V rapid known as Bilek’s Surprise on the American Whitewater website. The rapid is named after a paddler who had come around a corner not expecting to drop down a 100-foot-long chute of whitewater surging over jagged rocks. Surprise!

I didn’t plan to follow Bilek’s example, though I did spend some time looking at the namesake rapid, thinking about how to run it.

At this point, I skipped scouting any further upriver as I had already run by there the other day. Instead, I bushwhacked back to the road that I had biked up earlier and jogged uphill in my sandals.

My kayak waited at the top. I grabbed the end loop and began taking it down the treacherous slope to the river.

You Will Die Falls was in excellent form. The lines of ragged water plunged off the rocks in snowy gouts sending up the clamor of an express train. It was hard to look away from, brutal and beautiful at once, hypnotic.

I took a moment to confirm that the falls were a likely death sentence for a paddler. Some of the rapids at the base of the falls were more ambiguous. If I launched in one pool, I faced a decent chance of getting pinned up on a rock and sent for a battering ride down successive drops. Nah. I was there by myself, and freaked out by the risk.

Below, another pool, looked about as forbidding, but did feature a tiny eddy where I could launch my kayak. From there I would have to ferry against a full-throttle current in order to reach slower water on the other side, where I might be able to weave a path through some boulders and get set up for the six-foot drop that followed. If I was still upright at this point, I could look forward to several more drops and turns that would test my skills.

This launch plan had a high built-in fuck-up potential, especially because I didn’t know if I could resist the current long enough to get across and go through the rocks. I thought about it until I was sick of thinking and got in the boat.

My new neoprene sprayskirt is great for deflecting waves, but it is a pain in the ass to pull it over the kayak cockpit. I balanced on a narrow ramp of rock trying to get the damn thing to go all the way around without it slipping. Or the boat slipping. I almost fed myself to the river a couple of times, which would have been disastrous as soon as the first wave crashed into the boat opening. At this point I wasn’t even sure if I could get out of the boat without tipping in the river.  I felt tightness in my chest, blood rushing through my ears.

The final edge of the sprayskirt curled reluctantly over the cockpit edge. I looked up at You Will Die Falls and the angry serpent of water tearing downhill from its base. My hands pushed the kayak forward.

Go! Go!

The paddle clawed at the shallow water, digging for any momentum it could find. The current slugged the boat nose to throw it downstream. I tilted, got past it, swung around and paddled madly for the space between two boulders. The nose danced over a wave, came to the edge of the first drop and plummeted into frothing water. I had just enough time to brace and avoid flipping, but no time to congratulate myself before I was going over the next drop. I passed within half a foot of an outstretched branch

The water mellowed, but only a little. I picked my way through wave trains and rocks as I sighted the first bridge. It was a low one. I popped my head down as I went under.

A couple of gallons of water sloshed around the boat hull. What the hell? The new sprayskirt was supposed to fix that. I had a bilge pump with me, but there were no eddies in sight for me to pump myself. Finally, I found a place where I could park behind some scrub birches and pump water. I noticed that two screws that I had planned  (and forgotten) to tighten on top of the boat hull had completely rattled out. They left two holes about half the size of a ladybug right next to the cockpit for water to rush into.

I finished pumping and struggled my sprayskirt back on with much profanity.

The river widened out as I went, diminishing the current’s reckless force, but also exposing more rocks. I would try to swing around one rock, only to get hung up on another one that was partly submerged.

One of these unruly citizens caught my boat and turned it sideways so that the current began piling up on top.

‘Here comes the flip,’ I thought unhappily, preparing myself to be ready to grab the escape strap in front of the sprayskirt. ‘A real pro would be able to save himself with a hip snap.’

Then, I tried snapping my hips. The boat started turning back. I made a desperate slap at the water with my open palm and then I was back upright.

I paddled back into the current and found a place to empty the boat at the edge of the golf course near Bilek’s Surprise. I scouted the rapid, decided I really wasn’t going to run it, then started walking back to my boat. I hear a small crash and breaking branches. I whirled around in time to see a golf ball bounce onto the ground behind me.  A gaggle of silver haired business types looked down on me from the grassy knoll where their carts were parked.

Dangerous place. I was glad to be wearing a helmet.

Back in my boat I bombed a series of drops to beneath the last cart bridge before Bilek’s  where I swung into an eddy.

I portaged down the hill and into the woods and launched anew. The canyon re-narrowed so that the river was once again tight and powerful. I spotted a rock that I had left on a boulder earlier and swung my boat into another eddy to re-scout the rapid. After my run beneath You Will Die Falls, this section of river looked far less intimidating than it had earlier. I found myself making some quick moves, but also getting my boat more or less where I wanted it to go. Several of the drops sent water up to chest height, which was fun, though my boat started filling with more water.

Once again roaring water filled my ears. The river was about to plunge through its last canyon before Lake Superior. I was not.

I spun into an eddy near a cart bridge and flipped my sprayskirt up.

I pumped out my boat, got out, flipped it over and emptied the rest of the water.

The time I had spent on the river had been maybe 10 percent of the trip; the rest was biking and scouting, messing with cam  straps to get the boat on the trailer. Yet my work and Jon The Bike Guy’s expertise had meant that the trip had a certain style. I might well have executed the first bike/kayak run on the lower Poplar. Whether it was worth the trouble, well that’s another question. The thing had worked.

I hoisted the boat on my shoulder and walked it back to where the bike waited to take us home.

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From my Doorstep to Onion River Whitewater

My path was a narrow, windy one, closed in by thick stands of spruce and balsam fir.

On my right, 35 pounds of whitewater kayak hung off my shoulder blade, padded by a life jacket but an uncomfortable and awkward burden nonetheless.

To my right, the canyon dropped away, hiding the Onion River, which roared in the depths unseen. It was what I had come for. At least that’s what I told myself.

It would be good to know what I wanted, because, man, I had been carrying the kayak for a while now. Before that, I’d paddled it about five miles down Lake Superior, making slow progress in the short-hulled craft.  It had been built for maneuvering in tight places, holding an edge going into rapids. Long  distances over open water? Not so much.

The  idea for this adventure had been kicking around in my head long before I set out of course. The summer before, I’d glanced at the 12-foot drop into the plunge pool, and thought it looked scary, but doable. Since that time. I’d climbed up the Onion River Falls, gone skinny dipping there, ice climbed the falls in winter (http://tomsonthemove.com/two-ice-axes-one-bike-no-car-good-times/), and even cross-country skied down the canyon, taking skis off for the sketchier drops.

But I hadn’t kayaked anything yet. Thus, I had obvious motivation to take on the next adventure. Better yet, I wanted to make it a doorstep adventure, meaning that I would eschew motorized transport between home and the adventure destination.

Why throw in the extra miles of kayaking, very slow kayak miles at that, when I could  just drive to the parking lot at the base of the river and haul my kayak up?

It would have been too simple that way. I also don’t accept driving and flying as a matter of course when it comes to an adventurous lifestyle. Burning fossil fuel can be a necessary evil sometimes, or maybe just an evil which I can rationalize away in the face of an epic opportunity for adventure. However, when there comes an opportunity to go on an adventure without putting more pollution into our atmosphere, or enriching abusive oil corporations, I’m all for it.

We can lower our demands if we are not in such a hurry to get places. The road can be as exciting as the destination if we keep our eyes open for wonder just as there are all kinds of things that we miss driving by at high speed.

The sea caves on Lake Superior for instance.

After I biked down to the launch beach, I only needed to paddle a couple miles to come across some of these phenomenal openings in the basalt cliffs along the shore. These are probably only a quarter mile from Highway 61 as the crow flies, but they were a world away from all that when I bobbed the nose of the kayak beneath the overhanging ledges, listened to the slap of water echoing off the walls.

Some of the things I enjoy about these caves include that I can paddle backwards into one of them and let the walls create a frame for the Superior landscape. Miles of forests and cliffs stretch out along the shore until they recede at the horizon. The horizon often changes with distant fog banks and false islands. Much closer, I can admire the shimmery amygdaloids within the stones. These jewel-like nuggets are scattered throughout the igneous stone along Superior, a legacy of the ancient lava flow.

The caves hold wonders to match some of the most storied wonders of the North Shore, though I doubt even one-percent of the people who go on their long journeys to and from these places have any idea of how close they are to such an amazing destination.

It’s harder to write a rave review about the squadrons of pissed-off gulls living near the caves.

They dropped out of the air when I got near and went directly at my head. I flailed my paddle at them to fend them off. The gulls have chicks now, that look like dirty wads of cheeping drier lint. The parents are protective ones, and my kayak passing by provoked a keen sense of of stranger danger.

I had also been a target of aerial bombardment a week earlier when one attacker dropped a nasty payload that splattered against my sprayskirt. I should write a product endorsement: “It kept seagull crap off my legs!”

The worst part was I would have to go through the gauntlet again on the return trip. At that time, the wind picked up further out in the lake, presenting me with a dilemma, not unlike that of Scylla and Charybdis out of Homer’s Odyssey. I could avoid the wind and waves by staying closer to the rock walls but it would mean that I would once again become a ripe target for the squawking, aggressive birds.

I ran my boat aground near the mouth of the Onion River — about a mile from the caves. I took the time to eat some lunch and left some of the gear I wouldn’t need behind to pick up later.

I traded my floppy sea kayaking hat for an orange whitewater helmet, hauled the boat up to Highway 61 and looked both ways before I crossed. There was a lot of traffic, trailers and what have you bombing down the road in search of whatever kicks they had waiting for them.  My destination was only about a mile walk, though it would be start as  a steep climb.

The trail went passed the lower falls. People have run these fearsome drops in kayaks, one of which a writer on American Whitewater has identified as “Tears for Fears,” but that is above my skill caliber and risk tolerance right now.

Whether the upper canyon was within these categories remained to be seen.

I put my kayak down several times during the walk, trying to peer down into the canyon and get a sense of what I was up against. Mostly I looked for fallen trees. The narrowness of the canyon and the thick vegetation made it difficult to see anything, and sometimes scouting meant walking out on crumbly slopes above the abyss, reaching for support on dead trees with shallow roots.

The part of the canyon that really worried me were the narrows, where the canyon simultaneously squeezed and dropped, where the water roared through like exhaust through a rocket nozzle, dropping anywhere from 10 to 15 feet on a more that 45 degree angle. The water would slam into a wall. It seemed likely that I would too if I tried to go down the same way.

These sections came after the aforementioned 12-foot waterfall. That distance was intimidating to me, but I also remembered an experience from my time in Galway, Ireland six years ago when the kayak club guys pushed me over a bridge that was at least that high. Aside from a loose spray skirt and a boat full of water, the landing had gone just fine.

This particular drop was in an isolated pool, so if I ended up flipping out of my boat, I would be able to get to shore well before any downstream rapids.

The put in was worrisome, because I had to safely lower myself and my boat down a steep crumbling bank. I lowered myself on wet rock and loose dirt, then reached up as high as I could to grab the front of the boat. I could barely grasp it without toppling over backward into the river. I inched it forward gradually, taking care not to give it too much momentum and take both of us for a wild ride.

When I finally got the boat lowered, I placed it in a small eddy out of the main current. This was where I got in. I started in on attaching my spray skirt to the cockpit, though this was slow work considering that every  couple of seconds I had to bat the water with my paddle in order to stay out of the  current.

I had already rehearsed the moves, now it was time to see the execution. I paddled out against the flow, letting it whip my boat around as I braced with the paddle. There  was the problem of the tree across the river, but I ducked under pretty much where I had planned to.

Whoops! Hitting that submerged rock hadn’t been part of the plan. I recovered and sank a couple solid strokes into the river before it dropped from under me.

The instant of pleasant weightlessness gave way to the gentle deceleration of the boat sinking into aerated water. The foam came up chest high and then I was out.  A war whoop escaped my lips.

The next sections of river were far less dramatic. The low water meant that I was scraping rocks. At times, I used my hands as much as I used the paddle in order to crawl my way along the river bottom,  refusing to admit that it just might have been easier to get out of the boat in places.

The rapids in the narrows could have been hellishly, difficult in high water, but in these conditions, they were more like sledding down steep, wet rocks. The water would  pile up on one side of my boat and create a cushion between the wall and me, helping me steer away  from the wall before I hit it. Still, I ended up pushing off one wall with my hand.

The excitement of the day was definitely the fast kayaking moves needed to get through the drops.

I loved that feeling when the current brought me toward the wall and I felt my body move with its own will to make the right moves (oh so much can depend on those right moves) and I thought, “I’ve got this.”

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Hitting the Meat

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That’s me going over the last rapid in the Cascade River before it empties into Lake Superior. Photo courtesy of Chuck and Sheila Noel.

 

I’m still afraid of going under.

That’s what I realized as I sat at the edge of a gravel bar in my new whitewater kayak, studying the rapid in front of me.

It was pretty straightforward. Shove off, hit the waves beneath the bridge, aim right, paddle like a lunatic as the nose of the kayak drops out, hit the standing wave and hope that it doesn’t tilt the boat over, leaving me thrashing in the icy water of Lake Superior.

This was the end of the line for the Cascade River just west of Grand Marais Minnesota. Immediately downstream of me was the bridge where Highway 61 passes over. It created a beautiful archway, a frame for Superior’s cold horizon, just a hundred yards away. Upstream were the real falls: 20+ foot drops that real life lunatics actually run. So what I was doing was kids’ stuff basically.

There were no rocks to dodge at the last minute, no undercut canyon walls or gnarly branches to get hung up on. The boiling piles of water might have flipped a boat, but weren’t going to recirculate me and drag me under.

Still,  my mind was haunted by a primal sense of unease, as I waited on shore, an unwillingness to accept that I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen, and I would have to let myself find out.

It was just like how Tom Petty sings it, in his lame-ass song: waiting is the hardest part.

So I shoved off and embraced the irrevocability of the current.

“Remember, that you are actually doing this,” I told myself.

The boat passed beneath the shadow of the bridge, waves slapped over the cockpit. I steered right to avoid the strongest part of the hydraulic at the bottom of the rapid, what we called “the meat” during my summer of rafting two years ago.

Then the yak tilted downward, and I paddled for what I was worth.

Chunk!

The wave came up against my boat. The nose plowed through. But then the rapid pulled a dirty wrestling move, twisting the boat and jerking me sideways in the current. I slapped the water with a low brace and came back up.

Gentle waves from the lake lapped up against my bow as I bobbed along the current. The river created a brownish path through the Superior’s blue waters. This was the tannic acid dissolved from fallen   pine needles and leaves. This also created the tiny dancing bubbles, which make me thirsty for a pint of nitro stout.

I spun my boat around to look at the churning brown maw of the rapid.

“Chicken,” it said. “You didn’t hit the meat.”

“I’ll show you.” I told the river. “I’m going down again, but it’ll be when I’m good and ready.”

The second run, I also avoided the meat. I hung entirely to the right this time and hit the wave at the bottom straight on. This time the rapid didn’t even come close to flipping me.

There was no excuse to not hit the meat now. I was prepared to flip and had brought a paddle float along to rescue myself if necessary.

The kayak, went over the edge again. I aimed at a glistening wave in the middle of the river, bumped over it and went down, following the triangular tongue of dark racing water to the center of the meat. The white boiling water raged up and now it was ride or die baby.

Wham!

This time the water slammed up to my chest. As I pulled out of the wave, the kayak did a wheelie. For a second I was worried that it was going to dump me backward, but again, the river god had mercy.

A couple of RV’ers on the river bank had seen it all go down, asked me if I wanted to do another run and get my picture taken. Well, playing to my vanity seldom fails.

The run went much the same as the previous one, only I tilted a bit at the end and had to brace myself against a flip. Having photo evidence from the couple was another nice plus and I was glad they were gracious enough to stick around.  Of course, I seem to remember the rapid looking bigger and more terrifying than that. Funny thing, memory.

Having hit the meat, I knew that I could sleep easier that night. But, I still had another thing to take care of: I hadn’t flipped yet.

I needed some more practice with my Eskimo Roll. I grimaced and turned turtle in the 38 degree water. I leaned back, snapped my hips and thrust my paddle down. I was about 80 percent of the way there, when I felt that fiend gravity pulling my back. It was then that I felt my paddle blade connect with the stony lake bottom. The tiny shove was enough to send me the rest of the way upright.

I sat there with a colossal brain freeze thinking about how the roll didn’t count, how I cheated and needed to do another one with better form. Then I needed to paddle straight back to the meat and fight it and flip, fight it and flip and fight it until I became a real whitewater kayaker.

I considered this, and then thought, maybe next time.

I was done for the day.

*******

You want to see what some real courage in a kayak looks like?

I was moved to hear about the recent Paddle in Seattle against the Shell Oil rig which is in port now. The rig is Alaska-bound with the blessing of the Obama presidency, which just made the shameful decision to approve Shell’s oil exploration in the Chukchi Sea — part of the Arctic Ocean.

Many others have pointed out the irony that there is a rush to drill oil in the Arctic Ocean as the ice caps have receded due to the global warming, which is a direct consequence of — hold it — oil drilling. But you knew that already. And you probably already know that oil has a nasty habit of spilling, like that time in the Gulf of Mexico, also in California most recently. Oil has spilled a lot these last couple years in the midst of the oil boom, and I’m sure no one will be surprised if it spills a bunch more times, destroying a few rivers, ecosystems and peoples’ livelihoods along the way.

So I’m just here to say that I, like you, think that this arctic oil drilling decision sucks. The stupidity of the decision, like so much policy these days is rooted in incredible short-term selfishness that fills me with despair.

And now, to everyone who had the courage to get into the boats, I want to say “thank you,” because you help me turn back some of that despair and because I think it is a responsibility of folks who love the outdoors (including me) to stand up for these important places and ultimately the planet that we live and breathe.

You took up that responsibility by getting out on the water and surrounding the rig, letting the world know that it wasn’t welcome in your harbor. Some would argue that this was just a gesture. And yet, even if that rig ends up despoiling habitat and contributing to climate change, it would have been far worse for it to gone off unchallenged with approval by default from citizens like you and me.

I wasn’t there with you, but I feel like you were there for me, and for that, I owe you one.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/paddle-in-seattle-protesters-gather-against-shell-oil-rig/