by Jay Young
Published by The History Press
Charleston, SC 29403
www.historypress.net
Copyright © 2011 by Jay Young
All rights reserved
First published 2011
e-book edition 2013
Manufactured in the United States
ISBN 978.1.62584.228.2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Young, Jay, 1970-
Whitewater rafting on West Virginia’s New & Gauley rivers : come on in, the water’s weird / Jay Young.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
print edition ISBN 978-1-60949-246-5
1. White-water canoeing--West Virginia--New River Gorge National River. 2. White-water canoeing--West Virginia--Gauley River. 3. Rafting (Sports)--West Virginia--New River Gorge National River. 4. Rafting (Sports)--West Virginia--Gauley River. 5. New River Gorge National River (W. Va.)--Guidebooks. 6. Gauley River (W. Va.)--Guidebooks. I. Title.
GV776.W42N499 2011
797.12209754--dc22
2011016279
Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
Prologue: Sweet’s Falls, Part I
Ere There Was Rubber
Interlude: Broken Rose
The Rodman Expedition
Wildwater Unlimited
Interlude: The Turkey Raft
The Rise of the Outfitters
The Boats
Protected Water
The Rubber Room
The Score
The Rise of the Resorts
Epilogue: Sweet’s Falls, Part II
Bibliography
About the Author
PREFACE
The problem with writing a history book is that you never know if it’s complete. During the researching of Whitewater Rafting on West Virginia’s New and Gauley Rivers, it was common to walk away from one interview with a list of multiple people with whom I should also speak. Unfortunately, there’s always a clock ticking. There will always be people with whom I should have spoken but never did, and there will always be stories that should have been told but are now either lost to the past entirely or hiding just low enough under the surface as to be unnoticed.
To all those people who have all those stories, I apologize profusely! I wish I could have done better by you.
There is, however, one subject of note that I purposely left out entirely—death on the river. For months, I wavered about whether or not to put a chapter in devoted to it. And if I did, how would I approach the subject? I decided—tentatively—to go ahead and do it. I figured the best way to start was probably to pay homage to the first person who died on a commercial rafting trip, so I called Tom Dragan, who was there when it happened, and asked if he would tell me about it. Tom has been a huge help to me throughout this process as both an interview source and a gateway to other interviews.
Tom’s initial answer was a flat, “No.” He went on to explain a bit about why he didn’t want to talk about it. In short, he felt it would be disrespectful to the person who died and to all the people who were there and live with the memory every day.
In refusing to tell me about that death, Tom helped me one more time. He convinced me once and for all that not having a chapter devoted to death on the river was a better idea. It will have to suffice to say that it happens and that the people involved carry an unimaginable burden with them for the rest of their lives. It is thankfully rare, though, and those who have seen it firsthand do an admirable job of remembering all the reasons why they love to run rivers.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I always thought that the most difficult part of winning an Oscar must be walking on stage and thanking everybody who needed thanking. I mean, my God, what happens if you walk off stage and suddenly remember you forgot to thank your mom and dad? How horrible would that be?
I’m not quite in that spot right now. For one, this isn’t an Oscar; plus, I get considerably more than two minutes to remember everybody who helped me, encouraged me, reminisced about the old days with me and spent their own time researching various tidbits of history with no hope of reward. But it’s a two-edged paddle. I’ll feel terrible for life if I still manage to forget somebody.
If you helped me and you don’t see your name here, words cannot express how profoundly sorry I am. Boy, do I ever owe you a beer.
Thank you to: Elaina Smith at New River Mountain Guides for forwarding me the timely e-mail that kicked off this whole project. Porter Jarrard, Erin Yakim, Belinda Fowler, Jamie Holt, Daniel Groves and the rest of the folks at the Vandalian Restaurant for letting me sit there and write after closing so I didn’t derail my trains of thought. All my interviewees (who are listed in the bibliography) for pouring their hearts, souls and knowledge into my recorder. The National Park Service (NPS) folks at Glen Jean and Sandstone for being so excited about and behind this project. Adventures on the Gorge/Class-VI River Runners for hiring me to guide rafts and thereby setting me on this path—and for being such great interview sources. I also want to thank especially Mark Lewis from WVPRO, David Fuerst and Richard Altare of the NPS and Charlie Walbridge, all of whom helped me get a handle on the context of the whole thing early on. Thanks also to Maura Kistler, Dave Arnold, Tom Dragan, Paul Breuer and my sister, Kristan, for pre-reading this thing and offering suggestions.
Thank you tons to my loving wife, Wendy, and our dog, Louis, but not our cats. They never really supported any of this. My mother, father and sister, Dana, on the other hand, supported the heck out of it—thank you!
The psych from my editor, Joe Gartrell, at The History Press, people in the rafting industry, the National Park Service and boaters in general has been a huge source of energy for me throughout this project. Other than as mentioned in the preface, never—not once—did I bring up this book to someone or ask somebody to sit for an interview who wasn’t willing to talk and who wasn’t excited that somebody was going to write down the sordid tale before it’s too late. I fed off that encouragement like a tree in the sunshine, and I can’t thank you all enough. There are also those who helped a ton, maybe not through recorded interviews but by pointing me in the right direction and telling me, sometimes emphatically, what they felt this book needed to include. Thank you also to Jaime Muehl at The History Press, who had the misfortune of copyediting my hackery. That sentence this good is is because Jaime. Heh.
Lastly, my time on the water and the friends with whom I’ve spent it have enriched my life immeasurably. Hopefully, with this book I can begin to repay some of that.
Prologue
SWEET’S FALLS, PART I
Sometimes you get to see a show. Other times, you are the show.”
A grizzled veteran raft guide told me that once, as I sat dejectedly in Chetty’s Pub at Class-VI River Runners watching the video of the day’s raft trip on the New River.
In the video, I—a first-year guide as wet behind the ears as a baby fish—am falling out of my own raft, abandoning, as it were, my paying guests and leaving them to the mercy of the raging water. But hey, at least they’re still in
the boat. On the Jumbotron, I flip backward over the side of the raft, and my feet point to the sky as if to say, “Hi clouds!” In an instant, I disappear into the murky depths, doomed to spend the next few seconds wearing a dunce cap in Davey Jones’s locker. The video boater who shot the stunning footage was kind enough to reverse its direction, so onscreen I pop out of the water and back into my seat, only to relive it again and again.
Everybody in the bar—and it was mercilessly crowded—roared with laughter. As is the tradition, I swam, so I bought a round of beer for all the other guides on the trip. It was while hoisting one of those in toast that my venerable friend uttered his words of wisdom.
Oddly enough, I found it reassuring. It means, essentially, that anything can happen to any boat in any rapid on any river. Every whitewater boater, no matter how experienced, is at constant risk of becoming the show.
Map of the New and Gauley Rivers region. National Park Service Collection.
Months later, my friend’s counsel replayed itself in my mind as I perched safely on Video Rock on the left bank of the Gauley River at a Class-V rapid called Sweet’s Falls. Sweet’s is a fourteen-foot-tall, forty-foot-long slide. The normal raft line down the falls is actually pretty easy to run, but the water drops so steeply that it’s difficult to judge where you are until it’s almost too late. If a boat misses to the right, it slides into the Energizer Hole—a roiling, recirculating, aerated pile of whitewater. Miss it to the left and the boat will slam into Dildo Rock, so called because when a boat hits it, that boat is, well, let’s just say it’s in trouble.
I had just run Sweet’s Falls myself, but in a private boat—not guiding. Thankfully, I was not the show. Giddily, mischievously and perhaps a bit guiltily, however, I hoped to see one.
I was not alone. Around me, above me on the rocks and across the river there were hundreds of other onlookers. They were hikers, raft guides, other private boaters, raft guests who were thrilled to have survived thus far and, like vultures, video boaters. We didn’t want anybody to get hurt. That would be horrible. But it would be a lie to say that the vast majority of us didn’t want one thing: carnage. Mayhem on the water sells videos, and most video boaters work at least partially on commission, so they especially longed for a good show. Thankfully, there is no shortage of carnage at Sweet’s. Google it if you don’t believe me. It’s all there.
From my comfy seat, I watched a flotilla of boats approach.
The first few made it through the falls cleanly, but one of them, a sixteen-foot raft, wasn’t so lucky. Slamming into the unstable water at the bottom of the drop, three of the nine people fell right out.
The slide was past, but the fun was just beginning. In the wide swath of current immediately below the falls, there’s a rock called Postage Due, so named for a raft’s tendency to get stamped and stuck on it if it hits broadside. The cleanest line is to the right of Postage Due, but deprived of almost half her boat’s power and distracted as she attempted to pull her guests back into the boat, the guide seemed oblivious that she, her boat and her guests were all headed left into a tight channel with a ninety-degree turn called the Box Canyon. A sixteen-footer can make it through the Box if it manages to squirt to the right of a boulder in the center called Pyramid Rock. The move there, however, is technical. It takes a very well-timed paddle stroke from the guide, who just then wasn’t paying attention. She missed it. From there, it’s a fairly safe bet that a boat will get stuck in an eddy from which it’s quite difficult to escape. In a fleeting moment, the guide and her boat were there.
Sweet’s Falls, Gauley River—too far left. Whitewater Photography.
By that time, there were more paddles under and around the boat than in it. She tried in vain to push the boat out, but it was a lost cause. The cameras were rolling. The video boaters smelled cash.
Upstream, a boat hit Dildo Rock head on. The raft folded in on itself like a giant rubber taco shell, and people exploded from it in all directions, like sparks from a skyrocket. Nine people, all of them in the water, drifted left toward the Box Canyon and our first boat, which was still stuck there.
It wasn’t the worst-case scenario, but hey, the moment wasn’t over. Several swimmers drifted under the raft, which is about eightish on a one-to-ten scale of bad. There is no air under the raft. Up until then, it was all just good clean fun.
Video boaters frantically screamed instructions to the stuck guide. “Get them! Get them in the boat!” She reacted quickly, and soon everybody was safe. Some swimmers made it into the boat, while others were flushed under it and through a body-width slot in the rocks called the Poop Shoot.
The crowd roared like Romans in the Coliseum.
Rafting on the New and Gauley Rivers in south central West Virginia sure didn’t begin that way. In the earliest days of rafting in the region, a boater could get downright lonely out there. And as one might expect, the journey from those days to now is an odd one, as turbulent and thrilling as any raft ride.
So how exactly did we get from there to here? I blame George Washington.
ERE THERE WAS RUBBER
On the morning of November 29, 1812, U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall climbed into his boat, a sixty-foot bateaux, and shivered against the chill. Long, lanky and clad in a mix of skins and wool, his belly still full from breakfast, Marshall peered ahead past the islands, among which the team had camped, and into the New River Gorge in what is now southern West Virginia.
Almost three months earlier, Marshall had begun his expedition with high hopes of finding a navigable waterway between Virginia and the Ohio Territory. The roots of the expedition can be traced to George Washington himself, who viewed the Ohio River Valley as only tenuously, if at all, tied to the fortunes of the United States. To remedy the situation, Washington urged strong economic ties to Ohio.
Such ties would require a commerce route, and Washington had two in mind: the Potomac and James Rivers. Waterways were king for moving goods because they often required little improvement, and boats were, relatively speaking, high tech compared to available forms of overland travel. A boat could move bigger loads more quickly. In 1785, again at Washington’s urging, the young nation spawned two companies to explore such possibilities: the Potomac Company and the James River Company.
Marshall served in the Continental army under Washington and was also his trusted friend and advisor, so it is unremarkable that he shared the president’s vision.
Of course, this doesn’t quite fully explain why the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court decided to lead a dangerous expedition down what is today still considered a challenging run, especially against the backdrop of the War of 1812, which Congress declared only three months prior to the voyage’s start. It may, however, be helpful to consider what is conspicuously missing from Marshall’s River Commission Report—namely, that very same war. Its absence is especially odd, considering the obvious military advantages such an artery would yield. Perhaps, rather than embarking on his journey because of the war, he went in spite of it.
After all, Marshall was so personally invested in the endeavor that it’s likely that even the war couldn’t hold him back. Not only had he been behind Washington’s vision from the get go, but he was also a major stockholder of both the Potomac and James River Companies. So, when Virginia’s General Assembly chose commissioners to survey the headwaters of the James, Greenbrier and New Rivers, it’s probable that Marshall, even at fifty-seven years of age, leapt at the opportunity to exert his political clout for an appointment.
As he sat and waited for his first glimpse of the mighty New River, Marshall may have reflected on his journey up until then. The expedition began on the first of September in Lynchburg, Virginia. The team made its way up the James and then the Jackson River to the mouth of Dunlop’s Creek at what is now Covington, Virginia, surveying all the way. At the mouth of Dunlop’s Creek, the expedition loaded its boat and supplies onto wagons and pulled them over the Allegheny Mountains to the mouth of Ho
ward’s Creek on the Greenbrier River, where even now there is a bateaux landing.
A loaded bateaux drafted only up to eighteen inches of water, but even so, the expedition had trouble in the shallow waters of the Greenbrier. In his River Commission Report, Marshall laments the water level:
The season had been remarkably dry, and the water was declared by the inhabitants to be as low as at any period within their recollection…The labour of removing stones, and of dragging the boat over those which could not be removed without implements provided for the purpose, was so great that your Commissioners at one time were enabled to advance only three miles in two days, even with the assistance of a horse and of many additional laborers.
Almost at once, it was obvious to Marshall that he and his team would not experience similar problems on the upcoming leg of their journey. When he saw the much higher water of the New River, Marshall may have even wondered if the bateau was up to the task. It would have been a smart thing to ponder. Bateaux had plied the waters of the New River upstream of the Greenbrier confluence before, but never had such a boat even attempted to run the Lower New River Gorge, which is still considered a challenging run by today’s standards.
Other than that both are boats, a bateau is nothing like a modern raft. Made of wood planks with cotton stuffed in the cracks, bateaux leaked like sieves and required constant bailing. In the neighborhood of sixty feet long, seven to eight feet wide and pointed at both bow and stern, bateaux are poled in shallow water and swept and steered with a broad rudder in deep water. Narrow walkways along each gunwale accommodated a bateau’s two polemen. Standing on the walkway near the boat’s bow, a poleman would plant his pole among the rocks at the bottom of the river and then walk sternward with the pole braced on a rawhide chest harness. A captain stood constant watch near the bow to guide the sweeper with hand signals. Some bateaux also had a smaller sweep near the bow, so the captain could affect a quick turn if necessary.