Home 
Destinations Promised Land
Destinations Promised Land
| Promised Land |
 |
 |
| Written by Joe Carberry |
| Friday, 01 September 2006 07:41 |
|
Idaho’s North Fork of the Payette I remember when I realized the North Fork of the Payette could kill me. I was running late to meet my paddling buddies to float the Lower Five. The Payette was pumping at 5,500 cfs, and the whole river rumbled over Hounds Tooth like a tidal wave about to destroy a beachfront. At this early stage in my paddling career, I still thought I was cool. Bumbling through the back of my truck, I scrambled to get my gear on and catch my friends, who were making the “scary ferry” above Hounds Tooth. I decided to run the sneak route between a pair of boulders to save time. I snapped my sprayskirt onto my black Pyranha Razor and floated toward the chicken line. The term “sneak” is often misleading. Like so many others on the North Fork, this line rewards the inattentive with dire consequences. The water threw me into the small corridor between two boulders, where I banged my right edge on a submerged rock and dump-trucked near the thrashing recirculation of the crux. Something clanked against my paddle. As I rolled up, the shaft split, leaving me with splintered canoe paddles in each hand. I grabbed the one in my right grip and struggled toward the bank, but an enormous hole swept me into its maw instead. I tried one awkward roll and was shut down again. Struggling for breath, I pulled my skirt, exiting into the vastness of the North Fork’s powerful grip. Driving up Highway 55 next to the North Fork on this fine spring day eight years later, the memory of that soul-searching swim comes racing back. The water is only slightly lower now—around 4,500 cfs—and the lines look just as unsettling. I can feel my breakfast pressing against my esophagus, and the butterflies I felt so often in my youth during this same trip. So many paddlers have made this fluttery shuttle before me. “The North Fork of the Payette is as big it gets,” says Scott Lindgren, who spent two seasons here in the early ‘90s. “It’s one of the most radical big water runs in the world, even at 2,000 cfs.” Doug Ammons, John Wasson, Rob Lesser, Lindgren, Gerry Moffatt. Legendary paddlers who share a similar relationship to her: one of awe, humility and self-searching. Cascading 15 miles from Smith’s Ferry to Banks through a tight maze of road construction and railroad debris, the North Fork features three sections of varying Class V difficulty. Most locals approach the river with caution, getting to know the Lower Five with the Tooth, Otters Slide, Juicer and Crunch before heading up river. Once locals have worked up enough moxie to go “upstairs” they try the Upper Five miles with Steepness, a long rapid into a steep crux, Nutcracker—this section’s premiere drop—Disneyland and S-Turn. Big Eddy, the North Fork’s only real flatwater, separates the Upper from the Middle. The Middle defines the North Fork with the most powerful, continuous whitewater. Jacob’s Ladder was the last rapid run during the summer of 1977, when kayakers first probed the river’s upper 10 miles. In itself, “Jake’s” isn’t the longest or most difficult rapid on the river. It’s the half-mile of nonstop chaos lurking below—Golf Course—that magnifies its scale. Generations of boaters have used the North Fork as a testing ground. In the early ‘70s, Walt Blackadar and Tullio Celano ran the Lower Five miles in fiberglass boats, breaking and battering first their kayaks and then their bodies. In the latter part of that decade, another group of ambitious paddlers invaded the North Fork, pushing the envelope even further. Lesser, Jon Wasson, Rick Fernald and a handful of others started moving up river, first running the top five miles and then lining out the Middle. Surprisingly, a group of Louisville boaters led by Dr. Bob Walker completed the first descent of Jacob’s Ladder while Lesser was having surgery to repair a broken nose. “I always question the scheduling of that procedure,” Lesser says. In the ‘80s Doug Ammons joined the fold, further upping the ante by running the river at higher and higher levels. Ammons estimates he made more than 15 trips a summer from his home in Missoula, Mont., marathon driving the six hours when he got off work on Friday. “You just can’t find anything like the North Fork anywhere,” says Ammons. “Warm water that comes off the top of a dam, a season that lasts well into the fall and a road running beside it the entire way. It’s a fantastic training ground.” Ammons has perhaps pushed the river’s envelope with the most vigor. When he’d learned the North Fork’s lines, he started running three 1,700-vertical-foot, top-to-bottom trips in a day, a feat coined the “vertical mile” by Bob McDougal, who first completed it in 1988. When that wasn’t enough, Ammons donned hand paddles, finishing the vertical mile without a kayak blade. He even tried doing two vertical miles once but came up short at five top-to-bottoms. Total count: 8,500 vertical feet of Class V in one adrenaline-addled day. “Doing things like that tweaks your mind,” he says. “It forces you to look at barriers differently, and not to accept what other people define as limits. It’s the birth of freedom.” Bridging the gap between generations was Charlie Munsey. An expedition paddler from Oregon, Munsey spent a decade on the Payette drainage, working as a raft guide and photographer while training for Himalayan expeditions on the Payette’s steepest section. “Living and working on that river changed the way I looked at whitewater,” he says. Munsey joined the likes of Conrad Fourney and Scottish expedition paddler Gerry Moffatt, who had come to Banks, Idaho, to guide rafts. In 1985, Steve Jones opened Cascade Rafting, the first commercial company in the area, and the North Fork boating contingency changed forever. Long-haired guides started showing up for more than just tips. By the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the North Fork’s reputation as a gnar-boating Mecca had spread. Beat-up Toyota trucks and VW vans adorned area parking lots, dreadlocks became en vogue and dogs named Brider and Aspen were everwhere. The river stared to feel more like Utah’s Alta Ski Resort, where ski bums come from all over to clean dishes and ski Wasatch powder. That’s the scene I encountered when I first started running the North Fork. I used the river as an escape from the monotony of city dwelling in Boise. Working in restaurants and attending a commuter school was daunting; I was caught in the rush-hour and happy-hour of urban life. The North Fork was a place where everything else in the world disappeared, because it demanded my total attention. I knew that if I wasn’t fully focused I could lose more than my boat. After getting off the river I would retire to one of the many encampments hidden along Highway 55, where my nomadic friends set up their homes for the summer. They’d sleep under camper shells or in cheap tents once the weather turned stable in late June. They cooked over open fires, occasionally concocting Dutch oven desserts. Russell Kelly, or some other character, would wail on his guitar while we gathered around the fire sharing stories from the day: getting beat down in Jaws or surfing Juicer Hole. One friend, a refugee from a relationship gone bad, camped on the Payette for an entire summer. The North Fork wouldn’t have hosted these experiences were it not for Lesser. In 1979, Idaho Power proposed a pipeline that would run from Smith’s Ferry to Banks, pulling some 2,700 cfs from the river to power hydroelectric turbines. The North Fork might have become a mere shadow of itself; a weed-choked desert for all but a few weeks each year. The electricity would have gone to fuel nearby Seattle’s growing demand. No one gave a thought to where the paddlers would have ended up. Lesser, together with Roger Rosentreter and Jeff King, changed that. They founded the Idaho Whitewater Association to oppose the hydropower project, and they appealed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for help. “It turns out Idaho Power didn’t analyze their data very well,” says Lesser. “By the time you piped the water and sent it out for electricity, there wasn’t much of a cost advantage.” In the end, irrigation trumped electricity. The North Fork provides valuable water to the farms of Idaho’s arid southern plains, and powerful agricultural interests joined Lesser’s ragtag group of boaters in opposition to the project. The hydroelectric plan died a quiet death, and the North Fork is currently under state protection. That status must be renewed every five years. The Whitewater Hall of Famer and his friends essentially saved the most continuous big-water Class V run in the country. The North Fork’s considerable reputation is built on that continuous nature and the carnage it creates. My swim was no exception. I’d only been in the water for a matter of seconds when I glimpsed a yellow boat peeling out of an eddy to rescue me. It seemed very far away, and for an instant I doubted whether I had the strength to reach it. Doubt festered and turned to panic. I thought I knew the North Fork’s power, but now that I was within its clutches the river revealed to me its full strength. I was helpless against its force. The waves crashed on me one after another, and the yellow boat struggled to reach me. Doubt and helplessness are natural emotions when confronting the North Fork’s full fury, and even the best boaters are not immune. Ammons faced his north Fork demons when the river was flowing at a monstrous 6,000 cfs. He and a friend had paddled most of it without incident when they came to Jaws, where powerful holes punch boaters at the top of the rapid and don’t stop, even as the river makes a 90-degree turn 100 yards downstream. Ammons didn’t give his friend enough space and they became entangled in the meat of the rapid. “I rolled and felt a crush,” he says. “I separated my shoulder, dislocated my collarbone and ripped muscles from bones in my neck and back. It was gruesome. I came close to getting killed on the river I knew best, even when I was in great condition and paddling at a high level.” His right side was useless, and the North Fork, as always, was unforgiving. Exploding waves blurred the horizon line. Ammons limply made it into a “geyser eddy” on river right above Hounds Tooth. The road was a few feet up the bank and he barely had enough energy to crawl up for help. He was lucky. Other people have taken lesser beatings and not survived. Deaths happen on the North Fork, and for reasons often unknown, most of them aren’t locals. Thoughts of these accidents, like Lucas Turner’s death in 1998 and Richard Carson’s in 1999, make you think twice about leaving the road. I let the idea of watching from the highway slip into my head for a moment as I pull into the lot just below Smiths Ferry. “I’ve made the drive. Time to get it on,” I think to myself as I get out of the car. Forty-five hundred cfs is a powerful number on the North Fork. The river feels as if the Grand Canyon has been forced into a river bed one third its size with 15 times the gradient. I rise up on house-sized waves and fall down the other side. My stomach feels as if I’m in an elevator. At one point in Steepness, I can’t see. I’m surrounded by white, sliding down what feels like a green face. I’m stuck, unintentionally grinding a huge, pounding wave. My next trip to the top, I stab my blade into the downstream side and the current grabs, sending me hurtling through the runout. We safely run Nutcracker, Disneyland and S-Turn. I’m boating with three other locals, Fourney, Jared Alexander from McCall, and Dave Simonaitis from Boise. All have one thing in common: They’re Stikine veterans. On its own, the North Fork would be one of the world’s finest Class V runs. The fact that more than a dozen North Fork regulars also have traversed the hallowed walls of Canada’s Grand Canyon of the Stikine only adds to the North Fork’s legend. Ammons says the connections between the North Fork and Stikine are threefold: “First, the North Fork is the best, longest, and most easily accessible Class V in the world, and it runs from spring through fall. Second, it’s the stomping ground of Rob Lesser, who provided the link between the Stikine and Idaho. The third part is comprised of the rest of us, who by gravitating to the North Fork, met and were influenced by him.” The North Fork is a training ground that has, for decades, attracted kayakers preparing for big water runs all over the world. Long before tackling Tibet’s Tsangpo, Lindgren would paddle the North Fork with a loaded boat to get used to maneuvering a heavy kayak in unpredictable water. Other rivers with long seasons and difficult rapids, such as North Carolina’s Green, serve as training grounds to elite expedition paddlers. But none compares to the North Fork, Lindgren says. “Because of the size of the rapids, you can’t even mention the Green in the same conversation as the North Fork,” he says. “There’s absolutely nothing to compare it to out there.” I reached out for the yellow boat, grasping desperately for a life-saving handhold. Rocks pummeled my legs and waves washed violently over my head, again and again. I grabbed the stern, then lost my grip when a hole devoured us. The paddler in the yellow boat rolled, and I made a last bid for shore. I swam hard for an eddy, barely reaching it. I sat there for a long time, panting like a half-dead dog. That swim has stayed with me throughout my boating career, helping me along like a voice of reason. Nowadays, when I’m home and paddling the North Fork, I don’t always feel that the river will kill me. But I know and respect its power, and am reminded that it has made and broken some of the planet’s greatest paddlers. Originally Published, Paddler September-October 2006 |
Share This Page!
