Race Day

Get left get left get left, right stroke, lean, lean, move right, catch the corner, lay into the boof, stomp it down, keep it moving keep it moving. get the bow back downstream. pump pump pump. Good line.

Racing is a fight against the current to work with the current. You can always find a line that feels like it is propelling you forward, it is just a matter of how you see it. I have taught many people a little bit about kayaking but a few people have taught me a lot about kayaking.

1. Always stay on the edge of eddies, stay away from wavetrains. Every time a wave crashes over your boat you lose two seconds and you need three strokes to get back to full speed, wasting speed and energy.
2. You only really make up time in your lines. I have never passed someone in flatwater. Practice your lines.
3. Do NOT land flat, land at a 45 and use that transition to speed yourself up. Landing flat takes away most of the speed and does not transition it into forward moment.
4. Strong core. You paddle from your lower abdomen, so make sure you have been doing your crunches.
5. Keep your chin up. This one sounds silly but as you close your chin to your chest you are curling your back, keep an upright back by keeping your head high.

That is enough. The most important is to know the lines, but knowing the lines means that you are avoiding any hits and laying down boofs.

See you at the tobin race... if my shoulder has healed.

Kokatat

Release

Commit

Fly

Slide

Splash

ummmm...

Fordyce.

Kokatat

Three words

Simplicity at it's finest:

 The words humbly are chalked into a beam across the training center on Donner Summit at Sugar Bowl Academy. Each day new slogans are marked on a board, but this one stays. It is the most challenging. It applies to everything, to every moment. We need these three words. We cannot let them slip away. But they do, the simpler something is the more ease we have in misinterpreting it, or passing it off as meaningless. But on this day it has meaning.

It means push on.

It means gather yourself and think only of the next movement, the next physical challenge. Forget class, forget the meeting at 3:15 when you will dearly want to go home, forget your endless search for connections, for love, forget trying to understand the meaning of sport, of courage, of heart and truth and pain and suffering. Let it go. You are in this moment and it is suffering. Endurable, progressive, willed even. And come back tomorrow. Don't think about that yet though, there is much to come before that.

These figures. These inert objects of sizable mass, of painful momentum sit idly. They are chipped by the change and evolution of the human body, of the scars of growth. They know of the path to health, the path to confidence and success, but they do just as a good oracle does: They allow you to find it yourself. They are boring. They push nothing upon you, they allow you to find it yourself. Only few will know their majesty, their prestige. That is okay. The fierce, the ones searching, the ones digging deep will find them, will appreciate them. Those who do will find communion in a moment, those who do will be here now.

- a thank you to Candice and Douglas Brooks for allowing me to come in and work out with the kids and them.

Desperation

The water is low and the drive down the canyon is long and slow, winding through bands of rock, red and grey. The river fluctuates in flow as concrete barriers squeeze through turbines to generate precise amounts of power. Minimum flows allow for life to scrape by in the riparian environment.

 Humans have their hands in everything, fastidious in their attempt for control. Not us, we  don't have delusions that the river is ours, that we can tell it what to do. We merely work with it to move downstream, always asking it's permission for passage.

Here our boats displace water and hold our bodies above the fluid. The rocks lay sprinkled in the river by a hand much bigger than ours. As you pass through the boulders and fall into the water it is better to keep your hands at your sides, just as you were taught as a kid. The boulders have a tendency to punish those who get too frisky. They frown upon improper behavior. Tuck in your skirt, keep those legs covered, and always look downstream. 

 It's a maze of beige with the winner coming out unscathed. These rocks know things. They sit and watch as small, frenetic beings splash around them. They wonder, "Who are these creatures of such curiosity playing in my waters?". But they let us pass, even though sometimes you just tuck up real tight and think happy thoughts.

Sometimes we dance with the rocks and sometimes we are wallflowers. Either way the river teaches and we learn. 

MF Feather

This trip was for Rivers For Change: 12 Rivers project. Rivers for change is a non-profit organization that is raising awareness of our watersheds through community events and running 12 rivers source to sea with coverage by Canoe and Kayak. 

The Story:

"I am out of shape and all I have is a t-shirt" the shuttle driver says. Eric loads back in the car to take our mortified shuttle driver back out of the canyon. It is hailing and the road into the Middle Feather is steep and treacherous(if you want to put in at the PCT). The shuttle driver started showing signs of weak nerves as trees brushed the side of the truck. "Are those going to knock the paddles off?" he wondered aloud as he checked his phone for the fourth time. As the road gets steeper and steeper it becomes increasingly clear that our shuttle driver is scared. We step out of the car at the bottom of a challenging section and Eric announces that he will be returning to the take out with the driver. "My friend, my responsibility" he says,  so we were down to three... Apparently being overweight and wearing a t-shirt makes you a bad candidate for driving MF shuttles, so beware of that. 

I follow the boys down the steep hike to the water. 

We make it part way, but still 1 mile away. Which way is the Trail?

The rare overhead shot

Rivers for change is trying to protect little guys like this. 

It never gets ugly.

This time down Galen and I ran a rapid I have been dreaming about for years: The Portage.

Down through bald rock

No one hates clean thirty footers

Potomac

As your boat slides into the Potomac, the mirror reflection waves up and reverberates all the way across the 600 foot wide pool. The moist, warm air settles on your skin and the water drips off of your hands as you paddle. The perfect reflection ends in a long flat horizon line, where it looks like the end of the world, like looking out to sea. But it reflects the sky perfectly. You cannot tell what is below until you fall over the horizon. As you look up the six foot tall dam runs across the entire river, giving it a manicured feeling of false perfection. 
Past the dam, the river runs through a field of boulders until the falls. It splits and braids into dozens of channels, where hundreds of feet before it was a slow moving reflecting pond. Soon you are above the middle channel.

The rock is abrupt and ungainly. The water thrashes against it to make its descent down to the next pool, and no concessions are made in its path. There is no easy way down. The landscape is baked. The few plants that live on these islands of rock have been thrown there from floods, or exist in the marginal space between regular flow and flood level.  Grace under Pressure.

Craig Kleckner

Galen Volckhausen

Craig Kleckner

Soon the river runs into itself and slows down. The walls of rock lift up around the riverbed and create a corridor for the tranquil Potomac to slowly move toward the sea. The float out settles the river back to the reflecting pond it was when it began, and your mind can return to contemplating what happens in congress only a few miles away...

Talullah Gorge, Georgia

The hike into Tallulah gave me extra time to think on this particularly warm day in April. Here is a shot of the Put-in for the Tallulah, which is earned after 540 steps down a well maintained staircase. 

This great run only has water 8 days a year, a huge staircase and only room for two people to put on at a time. It makes for a long wait. The 90 minutes it took to get down to the water was more than enough time to get to pondering. On this particular day I was thinking about the past, as we are always wont to do. What choices have I made?  What could be different? We have a tendency to have some remorse about past decision sometimes, we repeat decisions in our head and try to play out the alternative scenarios. 

This kind of thinking is dangerous, it gnaws at us and pulls us away from our current situation. It has been shown that people who tend to ruminate are more likely to suffer from depression. We can't spend a lot of time questioning our decisions of the past if we want to be happy now. 

We need distractions from these thoughts, to break the cycle.

Oceana provides this kind of break.

We have to reconcile with the moment, and not the what ifs. It is not that we need to forget these decisions, in fact we must remember them and learn from them. But we must move past it, incorporate it into our self and move on.

This is what the Tallulah brought me back to. Oceana cleared the slate on the past and let me flow through to now. We have made the decisions we have and all we can do is learn from them and push forward to make the best decisions we can for the future. What we have is right now, what we have is effort in this present moment, to make the best of what is around, which is beautiful. 

The questions we ask

There is a moment, at the end, where we evaluate what we accomplished. It could be our dying breath, it could be when our name is called on graduation, but there are definitive moments in our life where we can’t help but think back and wonder: Did I do the best I could?

We can struggle with many things in this life: drugs, money, family, community, art, spirituality, mind, media. Do we choose correctly? When we lie on our death bed, will we think and wish “I should have watched Cinderella one more time” or “if I had only smoked weed one more time I would be happy” or maybe “I should have taken that job as a corporate exec to I could own a second house right now”. 

No. We will not think of those things. I heard a professor at UC Berkeley discuss this topic once, there have been studies on what people think about the days before they pass. 

The questions that they ponder are: Did I help others? Was I a productive member of my community? Did I tell the people that I cared for that I loved them.

At each end, each transition, we have thoughts like these. The above questions need answering when we end this life, but each phase has questions. I have already finished many things in my life, and with each, questions arise.

The reality is that we have to answer these quandaries of the future in the present moment. We must understand our future regrets and overcome them now, we have to fight for what we will believe was important. Push yourself, both physically and psychologically to improve. Care for others, push your boundaries, contribute to your community, meditate in the company of a kayak, paddle, and friends. Find ways to break through your barriers.

I think of the end of things often. One day I will no longer be a kayaker, one day I will no longer be a teacher, one day I will no longer be alive. I think to the moment before those things end and imagine how I will perceive the time that I am spending now. Am I doing it right?

I work at New River Academy

Rio Negro

We got stuck in the town of Hornopiren(Snow Oven) because of an issue with flat tires. But we did get to run a waterfall on the Rio Negro. There were a few more drops but  taking photos of them wasn't in the cards. I walked back up for another lap but on the way had a back spasm that lasted six hours. I was on the verge of puking, passing out, pissing myself, and defecating for the worst six hours of my life.

 The picturesque campground:

A short hike led to this:

Casey tango and I ran laps on the drop

Since it was easy to hike, and a hard lip to do well, we did a few extra

Then we headed home, tired from our trip to Cochamo and Hornopiren, we caught a ferry to break up the drive. 

I work at New River Academy

The result of decisions

The decision to do the Cochamo never seemed to be ours. We were going, despite mixed information provided by people within somewhat hidden agendas. We had two main sources. One that said "Stout as fuck. Siphons upon Siphons with logs mixed in" and another that said "It is so good in there, you have to go". The guidebook called it one of the best steep creeks in Chile. Curiosity overwhelmed all other motivation. How could a creek have such an impact on people? What mixture of water, rock, and apparently logs could lead people to say such things?

The trip was tinged with off beat group dynamics. We had a powerful voice in our group drop out the night before because of a nagging injury. This may seem moot but the way that people interact is highly dependent upon the people present. It worried me. The group made sense with the four of us, somehow the  ingredients matched and now there seemed to be an imbalance, too much spark. These things keep me up at night. It isn't the water, it is't the sieves or the hike, it is the people. It is something someone said, a sentence of worry or doubt that sticks in your head. Sometimes I wonder if it is our doubt that kills us, that sets us up for failure. Nick Murphy was on the trip with Allen Satcher, who passed away on Upper Cherry earlier this year. Nick said that Allen had expressed sentiments of doubt and homesickness while on the trip. These kinds of expression make me weary. They linger in my mind. We were going, so I tried not to dwell on my worries. We made our way to the Cochamo.

As we descended into the gorge, our past decisions caught up with us. We had little food and put on late, 11, ignoring advice to start early. We made our way through the first gorge, the steepest of the run. We sat down after the gorge for some food, then continued downstream.
We started a portage. We had to climb up and over some boulders,  I pushed my boat down into a a pile of rocks. The nose glanced off and was rejected back into the current, it immediately filled with water at the bottom of the drop. I walked out to it and casually started pulling it out. It came free. The current started taking it and I realized immediately that a boat full of water weighs about 700 pounds. I had to either choose to hold onto a 700 pound object floating down a river or let go. So down the boat went on its own journey as I stood on shore.

The boat turned the corner and dread set in.  "I am never going to see that boat again". As I contemplated the epic I was about to have I ran around the corner. The boat was pinned again, cockpit facing the force of the current. This time we did it right. I swam and jumped my way out the boat, we attached a pulley to the grab loop and used it as a 2 to 1 mechanical advantage to pull the boat to shore. They threw me a rope, I roped it through the pulley and threw it back to them. Then I was stuck in the middle of the river. They threw me a rope and brought me to shore through a combination of jumping and swimming, with Gordon pulling and Tango grabbing me.

I lost my throw bag in the mix. I got back to shore and was happy to have everything else. We started paddling and my boat was really heavy and I felt like I was sliding around. My confidence was gone. I started getting scared and wanted out. My boat was doing a wheelie down rapids and I felt out of control. We got to another scout and I started emptying my boat. My drybag was completely full of water, drenching my sleeping bag, pad, and down sweater. Also, my seat had been ripped from the shell, making it slide around while trying to paddle.

At this point it is a no brainer, we are getting out of here. Unfortunately Casey had already run another rapid by the time I figured out all that had happened to my boat. He was 200 yards downstream with no possibility of getting back to Gordon and I. We got ourselves out of the canyon, but Casey was walled in. Rope skills came into play again. We set up an anchor, a belay station, and Casey made himself a harness. First we roped out his boat on a 2 to 1 and then set him up on a munter hitch and got him out.

90 minutes later we were at the takeout.

Mistakes
I let go of my boat, I should have had a flip line
Not enough food, take enough food, it is a big stresser, an extra meal at least, two if you can.
I did not have my throw bag tied in because it is hard to access and we were scouting a lot, so I lost it.
I used a rafting dry bag(Bill's Bag) and I took out my center pillar to get it in there. This left my seat vulnerable to shifting and my stuff vulnerable to getting wet.
Split the group without consulting, harder to get Casey out

What we did right:
Hiked out at the right spot, right when we figured out I was screwed.
Proper training, knew how to use a 2 to 1, how to make a harness, munter hitch, make an anchor
Knew where a trail was and how to get there.

Cochamo Valley, Chile

The beauty of this country never ceases.

Typically, sitting and drinking wine near the ocean does not lend itself to a kayaking trip, but Chile is different.
The Cochamo runs through a valley guarded vigilantly by rock giants.

There is only passage from the east and west, Chile and Argentina.

Only Horses and people pass through this canyon, occasionally people with kayaks. The trail is a maze that has been dug out by thousands of horse passages. When one became too muddy, they started another one, only to dig another hole.

A night in this valley makes you realize how perfect this place is for both kayakers and climbers. Huge walls tower above.

 We made a late start into the gorge of the Cochamo.

A bunch of big boulders and paddle strokes later the "Clean section" started. Gordon Klco on the entrance.

A portage and a seal launch later. 

And it was clean.

Casey Tango on the last drop in the series.

Then we had some problems, more on that later. 

I work at New River Academy