Lugs, Chains, and Paddle Blades

With these three modes we explore the natural world around us. The lugs of our shoes, the chains of our bikes, and the blades of our paddlecraft.

This is our archive of amateur exploration.

Enjoy!

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Whitewater Decrescendo


Spring Break 2016. Shavers Fork of the Cheat River.

I've begun to feel that if you want to really experience a river, paddling it is only part of the game; you should spend a night with it, too.

The right combination of water level, free time, and partner availability provided an opportunity for a river trip several years in the waiting: 35 miles of whitewater and wilderness on the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River through the Monongahela National Forest, US 250 to US 33. Right up my alley. Finally I got my turn.

It takes about 8 hours of paddling to complete this trip but it's a four-hour drive to get there, followed by a one-hour shuttle. With a 6:30 pm sunset, this stretch of Shavers Fork is an overnighter. I left home at 7 am on a Tuesday and we launched at noon.

It would be, as all trips are, a gradual fall. But not only in terms of elevation -- all rivers flow in the same direction: downhill -- but also in terms of temperature and, in my case, confidence, which is not something to be losing slowly on a trip such as this.

Of course i's easy to start a trip; finishing is the accomplishment.

My friend, Bill, and I arrived at our starting point where Shavers Fork, narrow and slow, drifts past the Cheat Mountain Club. The sun was beating down on us for an uncharacteristically warm first day of March. "S'posed to get cold tonight; maybe as much as 8 inches up here," warned Gladys, the club's caretaker. "High winds, blow down, they say it could get pretty serious," she continued, as if questioning our muster, but I insisted we were prepared for it. I hope I didn't come off too cavalier, but if I did there was probably something to it: I knew what I was getting into but didn't expect to find it so tough.

Parked next to the historic log and stone cabin, I pondered Gladys's warning as I loaded my boat with gear and food. It was then that I started really thinking about what I was about to do. I had everything I'd need, but the whitewater below loomed as heavily as the forecast.

In 2013 a friend of mine was selling a kayak called a Prijon T-Slalom and when I saw it I had this river trip in mind. A T-Slalom hasn't been manufactured in decades, so I got it cheap. After picking it up, I modified it by adding a hatch in the back and small foot stops up front, just so I could more easily stow gear on a long trip. It's been waiting.

Into the T-Slalom went dry bags filled with warm, dry clothes and camping equipment. Small, ultralight camping accessories. Dehydrated meals. When each of these items was initially acquired, Shavers Fork Trip might as well have been penned on the packaging.


We dragged our heavy kayaks across the club's lawn, launched into the clear water, and began the first leg: the cruise. We knew that it would be over ten miles before any significant rapids and so navigating the river was simple; flat pools interrupted by some low-water rocks and shoals. The air was hot and the sun reflected harshly off the water, so I splashed the snowmelt-cooled water on my face. Bill removed his helmet and did the same. The railroad was above us on the right bank, and Bill wondered out loud if we'd hear trains all night long.

Clear waters, sunshine and wide grins
It wasn't long before we fell into a groove on the meandering stream. One stroke after another - with a little bit of effort in order to establish a reasonable pace - pushed us past a bare, wintered woodscape with signs of the cold all around. A few hearty geese and ducks were about, early for the season.

For three hours we moved along calmly, enjoying the scenery and water. We mused about politics and family life, striking a few sophisticated disagreements among many agreements about the former and enjoying the contrasts in the latter (Bill's kids are a bit older than mine).

Right around mile 20, the Shavers Fork got Appalachian on us as we met the first big rapid. The section we were now in would consist of roughly 5 - 8 miles of technical whitewater. We knew of this ahead of time, and primarily of three big ones. The first of those, a 15+ foot waterfall called High Falls of the Cheat, was disconcerting mostly because we were both paddling long boats (i.e., difficult to maneuver) loaded down with heavy gear (i.e., difficult to launch over the lip).

It was obvious when we came upon High Falls because of an observation deck on the right bank, a landmark created by a local tourist company that runs daily train trips from a nearby town to this point, and back, in the summertime. Bill had been here before and knew how to paddle the falls safely. So, we grabbed the heaviest of our bags and walked them around the falls. This spot was in a deep canyon and so there was still snow on the ground. I stepped out of my boat into 6 inches of crusty snow and the cold hit me instantly.

From the bottom, the line is simple to see and I had done falls like this plenty of times, but I still muttered, "Okay, I'm scared," under my breath. 

Pondering gravity post-drop
(line is on the right side of the photo, land in the green spot) 
A few minutes later, Bill and I were below the falls, this time sitting in our kayaks. I don't actually remember a thing. I closed my eyes as soon as I took that last stroke over the lip of the falls, like a damned amateur.

The fear associated with High Falls was important because after I had successfully paddled over the falls came a dose of warming, inspiring adrenaline. It was getting late in the day, and I had been starting to get chilly. When that happens, my confidence begins to slip, my technique gets sloppy, and my movements more rigid. A good line over High Falls kicked all of that to the wayside, warmed me up, and got me hungry for the whitewater I knew lay below.

We repacked our boats and headed downstream.

Railroad Rapid
(from www.americanwhitewater.org)
The miles ticked past and the sunlight waned after High Falls, and a sharp decrescendo began as soon as the adrenaline wore off. It got colder. The rapids were delightful, but two scary ones were downstream. With temperatures dropping, Bill and I had hoped to camp below those rapids. That way, paddling in cold temperatures on our second day would be safer (swimming from a loaded boat, or even carrying it around a rapid, can both be frostbite-inducing endeavors when the mercury is below freezing). At last we came to a bend in the river with two successive railroad bridges. We knew that beneath the second bridge was the second of the three big rapids, the one called Railroad.




We found a side channel to paddle, up against the river's right bank, avoiding the intensity of Railroad, essentially "sneaking" the rapid, and looked skyward. It was getting dark. We abandoned the prospect of getting through our last big rapid today and our gaze now concentrated on the banks. We were looking for a flat spot to camp. Our next host of concerns filled my thoughts. It would rain overnight. We knew that. It would turn into snow. We knew that, too. It would be windy. Right. It would be really cold by morning. Got it.

A far cry from spending spring break in Cancun. Or Florida. Or home for that matter.

The upshot was this: anything left outside overnight be frozen solid by morning. When your tent is no larger than your sleeping bag, that means nearly everything must be left outside. Anything that I would need to be dry - but that wasn't already soaking wet - had to be placed in a dry bag overnight. I became concerned the minute I pulled the skirt off my kayak, shifting operation mode from downstream progression to survive the night.

We immediately started a fire and then put water on the stove for rehydrating our food. I changed out of my wet clothes and pitched my tent. We strung up a tarp to some trees to give us a bit of shelter from the coming rain. All good; no problems. Nice and toasty.

Dinner, chat, a little booze. A little drizzle.

At 8:20 pm it begin raining in earnest so that the tarp was no longer sufficient. Bedtime.

I fell asleep quickly. At 10:30 I woke up in a panic.

My tent, brand new and never-been-used, was wet. It wasn't leaking, though. Rather, moisture had condensed all over the interior. Not a single panel that I could see was dry, not that I could see much. And it was raining hard. And it was going to get much colder. And the sun wasn't due up for 8 hours. And this tent was small. Really freaking small. So small, in fact, that the roof panel was 8 inches in front of my nose as I lay there, and it sagged down to touch my chest.  I was in a cocoon only marginally larger than the hood of a sweatshirt. Claustrophobic memories of being inside caves began to surface. And I had to piss.

Making it through the night required a mixture of emotional stamina, clever water-absorbing and heat-conserving techniques, and positive thoughts about my wife and kids. All of these were my primary focuses though my backup plan was a 2-mile hike down the railroad tracks in freezing rain to a village called Bemis, which consists primarily of cottages that were, given the weather and time of year, unlikely to be inhabited on a Tuesday night.

It felt like a long, long night and I slept very little.

Frozen neeners
On Wednesday morning I was greeted by clothes that were frozen stiff: wetsuit, drytop, helmet liner, life jacket, pants, base layers, mid-layers, shoes, mittens. More than that, it was all coated with ice. My shoes and mittens were my greatest concern and I began to accept the reality of frozen toes and fingers. Coffee, to warm me up from the inside, was my first priority.

Bill came out of his tent - an enclosed hammock - singing the praises of a good night sleep and at this point the disparities of our scenarios became abundantly clear. Bill's kayak had a properly manufactured hatch for stowing gear. My DIY hatch leaked throughout the day and got me wet. His paddling apparel, a single-piece jumper that keeps him completely dry from toes to neck, had been under his hammock overnight and was ready to wear. My gear was frozen stiff and I spent the next two hours warming water on my campstove and then pouring it on each piece of gear to loosen it up enough to put on. Outer layers were placed in pools by the bank to thaw. One piece of thawed, wet gear at a time I slowly dressed to paddle the remaining ten miles of river. At the very end of the process, after eating and packing up, I dragged my boat to the water and used the last pot of warm water to thaw my mittens and shoes. Putting them on felt like a test. I barely passed and now had fully numb digits. I was shivering.

I've gone paddling in the cold before. In the very cold. Usually, though, I start off warm and dry. And I generally avoid challenging whitewater when doing this. All of this because paddling through liquid water at a temperature when it turns into solid ice can be dangerous, not to mention really unpleasurable. But this is exactly what I was doing as I shoved my heavy boat into the current. If only we'd made it past the last big rapid yesterday.

It had dropped 45 degrees since we launched the prior day. We had at least one big rapid to negotiate. The wind was blowing flurries around us. I felt like I was in a really cruel snow globe.

"You cannot swim. You MAY not swim," I told myself as we moved along in harmony. Bill had his own cold hands to deal with (my mittens were the only piece of gear superior to Bill's; he wore pogies) and so we silently moved along, looking out for the rapids we knew were below.

This is actually normal, talking to myself. I do it a lot when I paddle whitewater, reminding myself of what I should be doing ("take a big gulp of air before this next drop in case you get some downtime and need air before rolling" or "this move is important; don't mess it up."). When it gets really intense, I sing to myself. (Springsteen's version O Mary Don't You Weep, for some strange reason, has been at the top of my mental playlist for over a decade).

I was up front, but Bill had told me what to expect. A series of 4 or 5 river-wide holes, likely created by ledges of bedrock, stacked right on top of each other. About 50  yards long and dropping about 30 feet overall. In a smaller, lighter boat, maneuvering would typically be a zigzag down one of the sides. He also told me that the bottom hole was big. So, I knew it when I saw the river disappear from vision. I paddled to the side.

I really wanted to "boat-scout," which means to paddle into the last possible eddy on the side, point upstream, and look over my shoulder into the rapid. If it was safe to do so, I'd stay in my boat where I was least exposed to the cold. From this vantage point, I'd be able to either step onto shore, ferry to a good line to take into the rapid, or even paddle back upstream and try the other side.

The first drop was clean to the far right. I nodded to Bill, letting him know that I would soon leave the eddy and that he could take it, and then spun around and dropped toward the right side of the first hole.

One down, several to go, and a healthy dose of some adrenaline to aid in my comeback.

Again, looking over my shoulder I saw a second similar line into another eddy just below me. I replicated the move I'd just taken while Bill followed my first in nearly perfect synchrony. I was now past two holes and looking over my shoulder I could see very well that I was at the end of a reasonable run of the rapid. The next two holes were too risky and I was right next to an easy portage. I motioned to Bill that I'd be walking. He followed my lead and did the same.

Soon we were at Bemis and had either 7 or 14 miles to paddle, depending on which guidebook you choose to believe. One more fairly technical rapid gave way to our final leg: another cruise. Class 3 rapids mellowed into class 2, and class 2 rapids mellowed into class 1. Feeling safer, I began to paddle harder to knock the shivers off; sensation in my feet had terminated around mid-foot long ago. An upcanyon wind made paddling harder and colder. Spray hit my face and froze my eyelashes together. I've never had to use the muscles in my eyelids, but on this day I was forcing open frozen eyelids. Ice crystals formed on my eyebrows and eyelids, limiting vision. Bill, similarly restricted by ice and frozen hands, hoped that the guidebook that said 7 miles was the correct one.
At the take out

Fortunately it was. We paddled less than two hours that morning through a cold front that blew down trees all over the area.  Serendipitously we'd chosen a campsite that was protected by steep canyon walls.We found our take-out just past Bowden, WV just before 11 am. While I carried my boat across the floodplain to my awaiting car, the wind was blowing it like a sail. My legs, previously wet but mostly warm inside my boat, were covered in ice in seconds. My helmet was frozen to my head. The zipper on my life jacket was entombed in ice. My hands were inoperable. I turned on my car and sat in it, sheltered from the wind, as it warmed up. Eventually Bill joined me. We didn't talk much; cognition was delayed.

Some friends of mine paddled the Grand Canyon in winter a few years. When they launched it was more than 20 degrees below zero. They paddled for 12 days. By comparison this trip was nothing, but it felt hard, and I left something behind on the bank of the Shavers Fork. I can only imagine what they left in the Canyon.

Git r dun.