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.
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.
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.