TRIP REPORTS: Gore Canyon

Passing the Test of Gore Canyon

Boof! A kayaking term for launching off the lip of a steep drop or waterfall with a hard forward stroke and simultaneous hip thrust to lift the front of your boat over the ensuing hydraulic at the drop’s base. The alternative, plunging vertical without speed (known as “plugging”) often results in one of kayaking’s least desired experiences: a washing machine or “chundering” in the hole below.

Boofing is what I did now as I launched over the ten-foot “sneak” route on Gore Rapid, the most infamous rapid on the entire Colorado River. For an instant as I plummeted over the lip of the drop, I seemed to hang weightless. It was a peculiar moment where the hands of time seemed to spin backwards and gravity had forgotten its power. Almost like the old Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons where the poor coyote, duped by the roadrunner into sprinting full-speed off some terrible cliff, fell only after looking down and offering a single mournful wave to the audience.

Pyrite Falls on Gore Canyon

But then gravity re-enacted and, like the coyote, I dropped. I splashed into the eddy below, smashing my elbow somewhere along the way. Adrenaline blocked pain signals from reaching my brain; it wasn’t until I was at the bottom of the rapid that I would discover the throbbing knot that would linger for almost a month. For the moment, my concentration remained fixed on the river, as I had only completed the first part of a long and dangerous class V rapid. Next, I faced a difficult move out of a swirling, walled-in eddy into the jet-blast main current, moving either a left or right around the jagged “Decision Rock” (perhaps more accurately called Indecision Rock) to the relative safety of class IV+ water below.

With a deep breath, I peeled out towards the rapid.

*          *          *

Paddling Gore Canyon was the culmination of a seven-year apprenticeship on the whitewater of the American Southwest. At the age of 11, my long love affair with the river was born after a canoe trip on the quiet, mellow waters of Arizona’s Verde River. A few months later my passion accelerated into obsession after back-to-back overnight trips on the Dolores River from Slickrock to Bedrock and the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument. I asked for a kayak for my twelfth birthday.

The river eventually brought me to Glenwood Springs, a veritable whitewater paradise with the Colorado, Roaring Fork and Crystal Rivers all within a half hour drive or less. I negotiated my way up the difficulty ranks, tiptoeing in to class III in my first years, easing into class IV during high school and flirting with class V by my senior year. I immersed myself in the world of the river rat. I wanted to know everything about it.

By the time I took a job at a local whitewater shop and worked my way into the role of lead instructor, I had memorized nearly word for word Dave Eckhardt and Gordon Bank’s classic guidebook Colorado Rivers and Creeks, known in kayaking circles as “The Bible”. Many sections of Colorado’s rivers of fell to my whitewater appetite: Slaughterhouse, the Numbers, Barrel Springs, Pine Creek, Bailey Canyon. But for me the ultimate river, the one by which all others were measured, was the Colorado, and the hardest rapids on the Colorado (as the cataracts below Hanging Lake in Glenwood Canyon were considered unrunnable in those days) were found in Gore Canyon. Eckhardt and Banks described Gore as Colorado’s quintessential class V run, and completion of Gore Canyon was a graduation of sorts in Colorado boating and a rite of passage/initiation into a somewhat exclusive club. For me it was even more than that. It was a personal challenge and a mark of growth, maturity and achievement.

Early pioneers such as Walter Kirchbaum and Fletcher Anderson were among the first boaters to explore Gore Canyon. These early kayakers ventured into the canyon in the days of folding, canvas kayaks having no idea what awaited them downstream. Decades later when I made my first descent down Gore, it was an era of rigid, plastic kayaks and website guides with page after over-detailed page of beta and photographs, many up-and-coming river rats made the pilgrimage to Gore to “graduate”. Gore Canyon, however, has a way of humbling many of these would-be graduates.

In 2002 I was 18, rogue, arrogant, and perhaps in need of a humbling. It was whitewater runs like Gore Canyon that gave me the modesty any post-pubescent teenager desperately requires.

With perfect boat angle I peeled out into the main current and knifed with the precision of a brain surgeon across the gaping cortex of Gore Rapid, clearing the malicious grasp of Decision Rock with room to spare. With skillful audacity, I clipped the corners of two enormous hydraulics and landed safely in a savior eddy at the base of the rapid. My friend and boating companion Noah joined me. We shared a high-five.

Below this most difficult rapid on the mighty Colorado River, we thought we could put our kayaks on cruise control through Gore’s class IV+ runout. We negotiated Scissors Rapid and eddied out above another steep horizon line: Pyrite Falls.

Noah, confident and arrogant just like me (particularly after a clean descent of Gore Rapid), paddled into the current, neglecting a scout, and sped towards the horizon line. The plan was to boof center. A little too casually, he paddled to the middle with a poor boat angle, botched his boof and dropped sideways out of sight into what I knew was a particularly nasty and dangerous hydraulic.

After a few tense moments Noah emerged wide-eyed but still in his kayak and upright, his own lesson in humility gained. Noah signaled for me to go farther left, and I paddled into the channel, angled farther and paddled harder and executed a perfect boof and landed safely in the eddy below.

Though we had several miles and numerous treacherous rapids still to go, we had successfully paddled some of the hardest whitewater on the Colorado River. When we reached the takeout, we celebrated the only way 18 year-old kayakers know: clandestine parking-lot beers with a group of girls we had just met. We were on top of the world. Thoughts of humility and respect could wait. We had graduated and joined the club. We were kayakers now.

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