| Road Trip: Paddler to the People |
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| Friday, 01 July 2005 05:28 |
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3,000 miles, 162 hamburgers, hotdog stealing bears and more! If only we could be so lucky. This spring Paddler sent blessed souls Dan Piano and Kevin Fisher on the road to headline the first-annual Paddler to the People Tour. Twenty-odd stops later—including river festivals, retailers, colleges and even the Nike World headquarters—our road-weary dynamic duo had lived a paddling adventure on par with Endless Summer. “I think the sponsors got a lot of bang for their buck,” says Fisher, who, along with fellow rep Dan Piano, subsisted on Honey Stinger Energy Bars and specialty cheese packs. “Plus, it was my best month of paddling ever—with California going off, we were at the right place at the right time.” The Tour is part of Paddler’s effort to spread the paddling gospel. As such, Fisher and Piano pitched the Paddler revival tent and promoted sponsors’ wares at river festivals throughout the West, including the Kern and American River festivals in California, the Oregon Cup and Reno River Festival. The roadies plied the faithful with free hot dogs and magazines and demoed playboats and other gear along the way. Early on, it looked as if Fisher would be watching from the sidelines after cracking his creek boat—and a toe—with a piton on Brush Creek on the Tour’s second day. “That’s what you get for boat-scouting Class V,” he says. Apart from that—and the fact that the Tour’s pre-paid credit cards never arrived, forcing our brave adventurers to subsist on Tour-sponsored hot dogs—things went as smooth as polished Sierra granite. After Kernville and a wet (read: soggy hotdog buns) American Festival, our intrepid adventures headed north to the Oregon Cup, surviving on fast food in a traveling approximation of Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me. “We sampled every fast food joint known to man,” says a bloated Fisher. “Burger King and Carl’s Junior now make us sick, but Pig and Pancake is pretty good.” At the Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., our roadies spent two hours bleaching bug-encrusted boats—as well as themselves after not showering—before putting them in a squeaky clean fresh water pool. Fisher took another washing of his own a few days later at the Canyon Creek Extreme race, where he finished dead last. “I only paddled it once before the race and forgot about the line everyone told me to take,” he confesses. In the process, he also put a good-sized ding in Piano’s boat, bringing the Tour’s creeking casualty count to two. (“Hey, it’s a creekboat,” he maintains. “It needed to be broken in a little.”) From there it was on to a BoaterCross event on the East Fork of the Lewis River before heading to Portland’s Multnomah Athletic Center (The Mac) for a boat demo spearheaded by Sam Drevo’s ENRG kayak school and Next Adventure retail shop. After selling 20 subscriptions at an impromptu bar stop, the dynamic duo skipped to the coast for a quick surf kayak session at Indian Beach. Then it was a quick swing through the Watermark headquarters (“Hey, can we borrow your bathroom?”) before discovering that the Bob’s Hole Rodeo on the Clackamas had been cancelled. “What should we do now?” they phoned, with five days to kill before Reno. The answer was obvious: back to California, which is enjoying one of its best paddling seasons ever. Sure, a marauding bear absconded with the Tour’s hot dog buns at their Yuba River camp, but it was five more days of Sierra heaven. Then the duo dashed to the Reno River Festival where cartwheeling pros resembled the whirling of slot machines and the crowds looked ready to bet on the next great thoroughbred. Nearly 17,000 spectators came through over the weekend, cheering and rabble-rousing between turns at the blackjack table. While Piano was suffering hotdog flipper’s wrist, Emily Jackson stole the show by finishing second in the pro bracket after qualifying in amateurs just the day before. Danger, adventure, drama and constant change—all par for the course for these two battle-tested warriors on the Paddler to the People Tour. And with all that, what was the biggest change they looked forward to after getting home? “Changing clothes,” admits Fisher. “The truck got this foul aroma that followed us like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown everywhere where we went. People started recognizing us by our smell.” —Visit www.paddlermagblog.com for details on the Tour’s stops in Colorado. Originally Published, Paddler July-August 2005 |
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