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.