| For Real |
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| Written by Christian Knight |
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If the weather and time of year is just right, Leavenworth, Washington’s Tumwater Canyon can be a pleasant stretch of big-water Class V. But like Rain Man, it can explode into a violent rage with very little deviation. On this day in May, Tumwater Canyon is mad as a cornered rattlesnake. Fourteen thousand cfs is gushing through its banks, swallowing the biggest chunks of granite, and burping out the most violent hydraulics. Water sprays in the air, like a geyser with no sense of rhythm. Nobody wants anything to do with this river when it’s like this. In fact, no one, according to local boater knowledge, has run all four rapids at this level. But today, five river-runners are pledging to run at least three of the four hardest rapids. Three are women. Two are men. One of those men, Aron Boyles, 32, is missing his right hip, some back muscle, and permanently walks with a limp, due to a Staph infection as a newborn. One of the women is 43-year-old Chris Jonason. She’s a former Gauley and Zambezi guide. In the spark of her middle-youth, she’d raft Class V+ Robe Canyon after breakfast and kayak through Icicle Creek on a lunch break the next day. But she gave up on that hard stuff long ago. Which doesn’t explain why she’s here, scouting a rapid at a level that even in the most audacious period of her river-running, she wouldn’t have considered. What does explain her intentions here is what she’ll be paddling: The Creature Craft’s Play Boat. This is one of four models created and developed by Darren Vancil, 43, a high-energy former bodybuilding champ from Grand Junction, Colorado. His newest Creature Crafts are the Rescue Boat and the Play Boat, both released this year. The main difference between the Creature Craft and the traditional raft—other than Velcro seatbelts for the paddlers—is the roll cage, which, Vancil asserts, eliminates the possibility of a disastrous side-flip and enables its paddlers to right it, like a kayak, and continue on with the rapid. This ability, says Vancil, allows him and his posse to paddle rivers and rapids normally considered off limits to most rafters. This ability is what has seduced Jonason back into Class V and gotten her to pondering the plausibility of running a Class V guide school. Before Creature Crafts, Vancil was a rafter. He’d started while he was on a wrestling scholarship at Grand Junction’s Mesa State University. Back then, he never quite understood why swimming rapids was so bad. In the three years before he designed his first Creature Craft, Vancil estimates he ?swam 100 times. “Flipping boats was no big deal,” he says. “People kept telling me, ‘You’ll get hurt if you swim that much.’ I just didn’t get it.” Pain is, of course, one of the natural world’s most effective mechanisms for teaching. But it’s a lesson that Vancil has never quite grasped. Not in his past, as a Division II wrestler. Not in his current day-job as a decoy for attack dogs. For $20 to $30 an hour, he’ll let any snarling canine—usually the Dutch Shepherds and Belgium Malionis who flunked out of Europe’s guard dog schools because of their bad attitudes—demonstrate the intensity of their viciousness. On some days, he’ll endure this for eight hours. He’s a tough dude for sure, but even his mettle has a limit, a boundary he discovered on his 99th and 100th swims. In 1997, he was training for Gore Canyon’s raft race. His six-man team hit a rock in Toilet Bowl. Vancil swam. Dislocated his shoulder. And recovered just in time to dislocate the same shoulder again downriver at Kirschbaum. While he was recovering from surgery, he started having those “what-if” moments, as in ‘What if I didn’t have to swim? Even on the biggest stuff?’ Vancil finished building his first Creature Craft that Thanksgiving weekend of 1998. Compared to the crafts his team is paddling today, his creation was quite primitive. The roll cage had no cross tubes, no T at the top that would make righting it simple. “We were like ‘Okay, that’s not going to work,’ ” he says. With D-rings, he strapped a pair of 24-inch inflatable balls to the roll cage to give it that extra buoyancy. That led to the eventual T design. By this year, he’s designed four separate models and built 74 crafts. He’s sold 52. Many of those, he built in his own garage. He and his team are showcasing four from the fleet on this Northwest tour, including the Play Boat that he and Jonason are paddling and the Rescue Boat. Vancil promises he will finish off this highest-ever descent of Tumwater with Exit Drop, an experience that would more closely resemble a Gitmo waterboarding torture than rafting—even to the most skilled kayakers. But he’s got to get there first. Quarter Mile is the first rapid. Any one of its countless holes or breaking waves could flip a raft, and give its former paddlers approximately 1,500 feet to sob the names of their spouses, parents, and children, and to question the merits of their own lives and eventually make peace with their fates But the four Creature Crafts that are running it today receive no such treatment. Oh sure, the exploding hydraulics affect them. They huck them to one side and then the next. But nobody swims. Where a traditional raft would have flipped, the Creature Crafts lazily lays to the side, then with an oomph from the paddlers, they flop back down on their hulls. They resume the rapid, bobbing, like rubber duckies in a bathtub. It’s almost anti-climactic They do this through Chaos Cascade and through the meat of POW’s bus-sized hole. But in the pool above Exit, even Vancil’s boat stops. “I didn’t see my line,” he says. Joe the Intern’s Take: It took me a while to shake off the feeling that I was boarding a whitewater version of the Titanic when I ran Robe Canyon at a level high enough to keep many—forget that, all but the sickest—Class V kayakers at home. “You won’t swim,” was the answer to every one of the series of nervous questions I had at the put-in. I didn’t swim, and while my feet got jostled out of the foot cups quite a few times, my tush remained snugly strapped into the seat that, my fear told me, would snap off the craft in one of our many violent surfs. I had a lot of trouble getting a solid back paddle in because the seat placed me considerably higher above the water than a traditional raft would. With four flips in solid Class V as well as my paddling partner Aimee’s help, I got pretty comfortable rolling the Craft. It’s a little dance with the low partner (the person getting trashed in the water) doing a sort of canoe roll while the high partner (the one five to six feet off the surface) aggressively wrenches his torso over the opposite side as far as possible. We practiced this twice in an eddy before dropping into the Class V+ canyon. The awkward shape and extra weight of the craft made the put-in and take-out more difficult, but I feel bad complaining about it in hindsight—I would not have made it out of that canyon with only sore muscles in a regular raft.
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