by Jay Young
Wildwater was growing quickly, so the Dragans added more boats, this time New River rafts, which, like the Green River rafts, were Rubber Fabricators creations. At twenty feet long, sporting twenty-four-inch-diameter outer tubes and four sixteen-inch-diameter cross tubes, the New River rafts were humongous. “Depending on how many people you had and their weight,” said Underwood, “it was almost like loading an aircraft. If you had a whole bunch of people that were a little overweight, you would have to distribute that weight around just so you could paddle the boat down the river.”
Wildwater guides at the Caperton House in the Caperton ghost town of the New River Gorge. Jon Dragan made sure that all his guides knew as much as possible about the cultural history of the New River. That practice continues at several raft companies today. Butch Christian Collection.
Wildwater developed a two-guide method to muscle the behemoths downstream. The stern guide—also known as the long-range person—was responsible for looking downstream, assessing the level of the water and the rapid itself and lining the boat up far before it actually arrived at the rapid. He or she needed to set the boat’s angle correctly and put it in the flow so when it entered the rapid it was in the best location relative to the current and pointed the right way. The bow guide was the short-range person. He or she moved the boat through the rapid itself. “If you were lucky enough,” said Underwood, “you had two up front.”
Before adding the big boats, the company was still being stymied by occasional high water, which the Dragans viewed as too dangerous to run. “Safety was a priority to Jon,” said Melanie. “When the river got above five feet, we didn’t run it. So he tried to figure out ways he could take people down and experience the trip.” The New River rafts weighed 450 to 500 pounds. “The tubes got bigger because they figured they could run at a higher level.” The new boats increased Wildwater’s cutoff from five feet on the river gauge to nine.
It was only the beginning. “We tried triple rigs, which were three Green River rafts lashed together side by side, and a person sat in the middle with these two huge oars,” recalled Melanie. “But what happened was, when you get in someplace like Keeney’s Creek, the middle boat goes into a hole and the outer boats would buckle, and you had no control! So, we never ran commercial trips in triple rigs. The guys tried lots of methods, and that’s when they came up with the pig rigs.”
Pig rigs were pontooned catamaran rafts with aluminum frames strapped atop, seats and even a railing to keep people in. They also sported fifty-horsepower Mercury motors—no paddles necessary. “We did trips in the wintertime when we got those, and we were also able to walk into the old towns then because we didn’t have to worry about snakes.” Pig rigs could haul sixteen people. The motor did all the work.
The water level would determine how high upstream they put in with the pig rigs. When the New River was high and fast, “we would go to Prince or Sandstone or wherever, so customers got the whole day on the river,” said Tom. “Sometimes we’d combine that with a trip to the expedition mine, and then Prince to Thurmond, eat lunch at Thurmond, then to Fayette Station, so when people made the effort to come, they got a full day’s entertainment.” Wildwater eventually had five pig rigs, which it also began to rent to other outfitters. “We only flipped one. Jeff Proctor [a principal owner of Class-VI] was in it. I think the Park Service bought one. Chris had one. I think he even still has one left.”
The company even experimented with mule trips in the winter. “Jon tried all kinds of new ideas to bring people into the area. It was hard in the beginning, because people didn’t know what whitewater was. Jon was always trying to find a new idea to build an industry,” said Melanie. “He was always looking for ways to make things better. He was very innovative. He was the idea person.”
Nick Rahall, the Democratic congressman from West Virginia, interacted with Jon often after he was elected to office and had begun to work on creating the New River Gorge National River. He remembers Dragan as “a determined individual! Very persistent. He was responsive to every question that was raised of him and not willing to take no for an answer. A dogged determination that has benefited our area untold number of times over.”
There was, however, “no grand scheme, despite what some people think,” said Tom. “Class VI, MRT, they might be different, they might have sat down with a business plan. We were just doing things we liked to do, and it worked out.”
“We didn’t have much at Thurmond base camp until the early ’80s,” said Tom. “I mean, it was a horse field.” They kept the grass cut and hung oil-filled lanterns in front of tents, in which many of their customers slept. “And everybody just hung out and had a good time,” continued Tom. “We’d get up at seven in the morning, have breakfast, do the safety orientation and put in on the river.” Wildwater trips were on the river at ten minutes to 8:00 a.m. every day. They didn’t take out until 4:30 p.m., sometimes 5:00 p.m.
At the time, there was no midpoint access at Cunard. “I don’t care if the water was eight feet or two feet or minus two,” said Tom. “You put in at Thurmond, and you beat your brains out getting down there. You swam, you paddled, you told jokes, you told history. It was as laid back and outdoorsy as you could get.”
Wildwater’s first commercial Gauley trip was in September 1971. Melanie remembers it well, because “we were supposed to be married the weekend of the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of September. Then they received word from the Corps of Engineers that they were releasing water, and I had to change my wedding date to October.”
Those early Gauley Wildwater trips were also two days long but, curiously, didn’t involve much camping, other than at the put-in. Trips paddled halfway down the river, and then Wildwater hauled them out, picked up guides and guests at Panther Mountain and took them back to camp at the dam. “We would literally move our base camp from Thurmond to the dam,” said Melanie. “After a while, we figured what the heck, we’ll just stay in a motel, and we spent a lot of time eating at Country Road Inn. That became just as much a part of our trip as the river.” Guides and guests alike wined and dined all evening, and then Wildwater hauled everybody back to the river the next morning to complete the trip.
“Every day was an experience,” said Tom. “There were no rules. There were no books. You could do whatever you wanted, as long as nobody got hurt.”
“Unfortunately, it did evolve into a business,” said Tom. “When it evolved into a business for us, that’s about the time other people started to come along. And then—I’m not saying it wasn’t fun—but there was another aspect to it that we didn’t necessarily buy into for whatever reason: the competition.”
Before West Virginia built the New River Gorge Bridge, a commute to and from the Gauley River from Thurmond was a major affair. Wildwater dodged the problem by camping at the dam, circa early 1970s. Butch Christian Collection.
As new companies began to join the fray, Jon’s personality, which some viewed as coarse, would again come into play. Jon would eventually find himself at the center of the New River rafting industry’s biggest controversy, which revolved around Wildwater’s ownership and control of Fayette Station, a convenient takeout point upstream of a grueling flat-water section called Hawk’s Nest Lake. That was not, however, the only time he was at odds with others on the river.
“Jon would normally put in early,” said Paul Breuer, owner and founder of the New River’s second (or is it third?) rafting company, Mountain River Tours (MRT). “We’d never see him.”
One day, however:
We had an early trip for some reason. We were on Jump Rock, and here comes Jon with eight or ten rafts and he surrounds us. We couldn’t jump! Jon got on my raft and said, “That’s my rock! Get off my GD rock!” I said, “I don’t see any signs, and by the way, you’re on my raft. Get off my raft!” And that was basically the start of our conversations for another ten years.
Breuer remembers another Dragan story that involved his friend Bob Morgan, who is himself a maj
or figure in New River rafting history. A Morgan trip camped at Stone Cliff, intending to put in again the next day, but overnight, the water rose to an unacceptable level, and the group had to cancel. Dragan was there that day, and Breuer left him and Morgan at Stone Cliff while he shuttled customers back to MRT’s base in Hico. When he left, the two men were calmly discussing how to run the river. “I remember coming back and seeing both men standing on rocks or trailers,” said Breuer, “not on the ground. One was trying to get higher than the other, arguing about how to run the river. I could hear them from a quarter mile away. It went on and on, and finally I said, ‘Hey guys, I want to go home.’”
Despite his sometimes abrasive nature, Jon continued to lead Wildwater into successful currents. Neither he nor Melanie and Tom, however, were completely happy with the competitive state of the industry. “We did really well in the outfitting business, until about the early ’80s,” said Tom.
That’s when I think it got competitive. Even in the late ’70s, Class-VI came along, and things were going pretty good. And then all of a sudden, to me it got, not cutthroat, but it was probably more important to get people to come to your facility to take them down the river, so you could make more money, than it was to just go out and run the river.
By 1984, the Park Service began to make offers to buy Wildwater’s land so it could add the parcels to the park. “And for me,” said Tom. “I was ready to get out, because I wasn’t interested in competing with all the other outfitters and to cut corners just to make more money. So, we found other things to do.”
In 1990, Wildwater sold three pieces of land to the National Park Service, including thirty-odd acres at Stone Cliff above Thurmond, five acres at base camp and five or six acres at Fayette Station. “We had been talking to them for about seven or eight years, telling them no, no, no,” said Tom. “They finally came up with a price that was more than fair. At that point, Jon and I probably knew we were getting out of it. I had two sons and a wife, and rafting takes a lot of time for seven months out of the year. It was an easy decision for me.”
After cutting the deal with the Park Service, the Dragans began to look for a buyer for the company. Jon, Melanie and Tom sold their interests in Wildwater in 1990. “Chris decided he had plenty of time left,” said Tom, “and he became part of the new Wildwater.” The company continued to operate out of Thurmond for two more years, before moving operations downstream to Lansing.
What Jon, Melanie and Tom left behind was a thriving industry rapidly approaching its peak and running tens of thousands of happy people down the river each year. Tom is still adamant that none of it was planned and that from his family’s perspective, everything was for the most part done spontaneously. Of Jon, however, he also said, “Once he set his mind to something, he did it. It all was his idea, without a doubt.”
Jon Dragan, who was larger than life, outspoken, dedicated to the history of the New River and the father of the West Virginia whitewater rafting industry as we know it, passed of stroke in February 2005 at the all-too-young age of sixty-two. I never met him, but I feel like I know him just a little, and I miss him.
Interlude
THE TURKEY RAFT
To the soundtrack of a growing roar in the chilly, soggy October air of 1969, a small raft floated ever closer to a collection of three rapids that would eventually become known on the New River as the Keeney Brothers. Jon Dragan’s Wildwater Unlimited had been in operation for only year, and the New River was virtually devoid of traffic.
The little raft floated effortlessly through the first drop, Upper Keeney, but as it passed to the right of a house-sized boulder called Whale Rock, it was obvious to the crew that part two of those rapids, Middle Keeney, would not be as easy as it looked when they had scouted it from shore—and it had actually seemed quite difficult. The water was low that day, and the powerfully built, clean-cut Bob Morgan worked the oars furiously to control the boat’s angle as Jim Jones and Paul Breuer paddled hard at the bow to keep the raft in the flow and off the many exposed rocks. At six feet, three inches and 240 pounds, “Big Jim” Wahlke weighed down the stern.
Their efforts were not up to the task. The boat slipped over a partially submerged rock and fell from a pour-over in midstream. It flipped instantly, dumping all four of its crew into the frigid water.
Morgan, who owned a burgeoning canoe livery business in Fort Ancient, Ohio, on the banks of the Little Miami River and who led the team, invented and oversaw the handcrafting of the boat, whose crew had christened it “the Turkey Raft,” two days earlier.
To an observer today, the Turkey Raft would look curious indeed. Compared to kayaks and even canoes, today’s whitewater rafts are not exactly the picture of sleekness and aqua dynamics, but this boat was in a whole other league of ugly. “We cut a piece of circular plywood, big enough that it wouldn’t fit through the hole,” described Breuer.
We ran four ropes at twelve, three, six and nine around the tube and through the floor, so we could stand inside.
We basically got the inner tubes free. They were earth-mover, tire-sized inner tubes. Bob had old oak flooring left over. He said hey, that’s strong stuff. It doesn’t cost me anything, except for the horns to hold the oars. Those were made out of half-inch rod. He hinged it in the middle, which was kind of funky, how it all worked. It was based on the western design—everything was center mount.
“It was the first self-bailing raft, I think,” proclaimed Breuer, “because water just drained out. That’s my claim and I’m sticking to it.”
From front to back, Jim Jones, Paul Breuer, Bob Morgan and Big Jim Wahlke mere moments before capsizing in Middle Keeney on the Turkey Raft’s maiden voyage in 1969. Bob Lynn.
Morgan, Breuer, Jones and Wahlke had arrived twenty-five miles upstream at 2:00 a.m. in a fifteen-degree morning two days prior to their flip at Middle Keeney, with four other people and another, more standard raft. Morgan’s wife, June, and eleven-year-old son, Dirk, were along, as were Cincinnati journalist Bob Lynn, who was there to chronicle the expedition, and his wife, Millie, and Don MeDert, who worked for the Morgans in Ohio.
Lynn later wrote that Morgan led the expedition,
following a dream: to offer people in the East whitewater rafting—à la Colorado River rafting so popular in the West.
A man who for eleven summers has taken boys on canoe trips on whitewater rivers in Canada, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, Morgan wanted to know if rafts could traverse the New River’s famous Lower Gorge.
The small flotilla started near the town of Prince, West Virginia, so they would have many miles of relatively unchallenging water in which to familiarize themselves with their boats. Before setting off that first morning, Dirk found a collection of wild turkey feathers, “and—presto,” wrote Lynn, “our craft was dubbed the ‘Turkey Raft’—ugly, but game as hell.”
Lynn and the Morgans rode the Turkey Raft, while Breuer, Jones and Wahlke rode a more conventional model. MeDert’s role was to ferry camp supplies along the road and run shuttle.
They had minor doubts about the Turkey Raft’s ability to navigate the exposed rocks in the current. “The water was really low,” said Breuer. “And Bob Lynn said, ‘This is crazy. This is the lowest I’ve ever seen this river.’”
Lynn, a reporter for the Enquirer magazine in Cincinnati called the Army Corps of Engineers, which controlled the Bluestone Dam, to find out why the water was so low. “They said, ‘There’s a fishing study, and we’re testing the fishability of different flows,’” said Breuer. “Bob said, ‘Oh, you can’t do that! We’re doing this rafting trip and blah, blah, blah. We want more water.’ I think that was the first request for more water. We didn’t get it, of course. It was about 870 cfs.”
Nevertheless, the group set out. “Morgan’s booming voice, echoing off the mountain sides with the clarity of hammer to anvil,” wrote Lynn,
became a familiar sound above the roar of the rapids. ‘Ferry left…back paddle, everybody back paddle�
�watch that rock…forward, forward, forward…ferry right…that’s it…beautiful, just great.’
And as we bobbed successfully into calm water, a wall-to-wall grin spread across Morgan’s handsome, youthful face. The turkey raft was proving to be amazingly maneuverable and capable.
The team knew, however, that the most difficult rapids of the Lower Gorge lay ahead. They ended their second day on the water at the town of Thurmond, and MeDert shuttled everybody to Fayette Station, where they made camp. The next day, Morgan, Breuer, Jones and Lynn piled back into the Turkey Raft at Thurmond to have at it. Wahlke hiked alongside the river and scouted the rapids from shore, and the rest of team waited at camp downstream for the little boat to arrive.
“As we bobbed down the river,” wrote Lynn, “the waving party on shore grew dim in the drizzling overcast.”
Melanie Dragan also recalls the Turkey Raft. “It was funny, because when they’d get to the major rapids, they would wait until we ran first, and then come through. We’d stop for lunch, and they’d stop. You’d look out there and see these rafts stacked up on a frame. They looked like Tom Sawyer.”
Above the Keeney Brothers rapids, Wahlke and Lynn traded places because Lynn wanted to shoot movie film from shore. It was a choice Wahlke would regret, as mere minutes later Morgan and crew were in the icy water at Middle Keeney.
Lynn described what he saw through his camera lens:
In one horrifying instant, I saw Morgan, Jones, Breuer and Wahlke spilling into the water as the raft turned completely over on top of them…I got a jerky strip of, first Morgan, then Wahlke being swept down through the rapids…The raft was torn apart, one tube already having been swept away. The other was hung up on another rock with the framework. Perched like crawldads [sic] on top of the inner tube were Jones and Breuer…Breuer, a gangling six-foot-five-incher, reached into the water and cut the tube from the wood frame. Hanging on for dear life, away they went, spinning and pitching crazily down through the frothing rapids.