Whitewater Rafting on West Virginia's New and Gauley Rivers

by Jay Young

  Once in the lower pool, they were almost swept into the next rapids (ones twice as dangerous), but by staying with the tube, finally made safely to the opposite shore.

  The group later came back with a modified Turkey Raft and was successful; in 1970, Morgan and Breuer also made attempts on the Upper Gauley and Lower Meadow Rivers in half Turkey Rafts—one tube and no frame. Neither of those trips was successful, but Breuer was in love with these rivers.

  In May 1970, Lynn’s article on the maiden voyage of the Turkey Raft appeared in the Enquirer magazine. “Wild Trip Down Wild River” eventually led to the first boom in commercial whitewater rafting on the New River, as requests for such experiences flooded into Morgan’s canoe livery in Ohio. Though Morgan himself was too wrapped up in his booming canoe business and in raising his young family to participate directly, he sold Paul Breuer and Paul’s partners the rafts upon which they floated the foundation of the second raft company in the New River Gorge—Mountain River Tours.

  Or were they the third?

  THE RISE OF THE OUTFITTERS

  In 1970, Wildwater was still the only game in town, and the Dragans basked in the glow of solitude from their isolated base camp in Thurmond. People were already calling West Virginia whitewater rafting an “industry,” but how much of an industry can you have with only one company?

  “There were like four outfitters on the Yough and us down here,” said Tom. “I’m sure there were others, but it was so small scale. It just wasn’t a big deal.”

  It was not to be that way for long. Two more companies would rise quickly from obscurity, but which of them can rightly claim the title of second is at issue, especially to their founders.

  Without making any claim that Mountain River Tours (MRT) was the undeniable second company to take paying customers down the New River, let’s start there.

  Together with his business partners, Paul Breuer (of Turkey Raft fame) incorporated MRT in 1973, but “we actually ran two years before that. I did it just in summer with a guy named Rick Wry and another guy,” said Breuer. The three of them brought people down on weekends from Ohio to raft the New River. “I think we did maybe six trips or something.”

  “We came down here and basically bootstrapped it,” he continued. “None of us had much money. In fact, I had none. Mine was sweat equity. I didn’t want to sit behind a desk or be tied down or anything else. It was incredibly difficult—where’s your next dollar coming from? How can you get food? I was living in an old garage in Hico for the first year…that’s how we ran the business.”

  Breuer moved to the region full time in 1973 to put all his effort into MRT. The company’s first customers came from the Cincinnati area and Bob Morgan’s Fort Ancient canoe livery. Bob Lynn’s article in the Enquirer about the Turkey Raft expedition stirred up no small amount of interest there and resulted in what Breuer described as thousands of requests to Morgan for raft trips in West Virginia.

  Soon, MRT was running large numbers on the New River and a growing base on the Gauley as well. But Gauley access was spread wide. Rafts could put in at the dam and take out at the town of Swiss, twenty-six miles downstream, which made for a long day. If boaters wanted to split up the trip, they needed to camp or brave a long, steep walk out at Panther Mountain. Breuer was the first to develop midpoint access on the Gauley, when MRT purchased property on river left at Wood’s Ferry. It is difficult to find anybody, in fact, who doesn’t credit Paul Breuer with developing the rafting industry as a whole on the Gauley.

  Wildwater guide Roy Hugh Barrett guides from the bow on Upper Railroad, Lower New River, circa 1971. Dragan Collection.

  For MRT, the future began to brighten significantly in the mid-1970s. “It was ’76, probably ’77, when we were looking at expanding,” said Breuer. An acquaintance of his, Michael Tousey, who worked as an attorney for the Sierra Club, also wanted to get involved. “He moved to North Carolina at the French Broad River. That’s when we started up Carolina Wilderness Adventures. Then we went over to Kentucky and had Cumberland Outdoor Adventures for a number of years.”

  Breuer and his good friend Imre Szilagyi (pronounced IM-ruh sill-AH-jee), who founded Appalachian Wildwaters about the same time MRT formed, argue often, politely but vehemently, about which man’s company plied the rivers of West Virginia for money first. “I was first,” said Breuer. “He says other things, but boil it down to Department of Natural Resources license number. He won’t go there!”

  “That’s absolutely a phony argument,” countered Szilagyi in his deep voice and Hungarian accent. “It’s just the first year they were giving permits,” which didn’t occur until 1979. “It’s just in the order in which you applied. He’s full of shit. There was nobody on the rivers except Ralph McCarty on the Cheat and Jon Dragan on the New, and there was no sign of Paul Breuer. I think the record is clear.”

  “I can prove that I took something down that was commercial, no bones about it, in 1972,” continued Szilagyi. “He didn’t even own any rafts in 1972.”

  In 1970 and 1971, Szilagyi, a mathematician by both vocation and avocation, also worked as a raft guide on the Lower Yough. “I followed some lady into whitewater in about 1970, and the lady left, but the whitewater stayed.” Szilagyi then began guiding to support his whitewater habit. The deal netted him twenty dollars for a day’s work, plus a free lunch and shuttle. Gas was twenty-five cents a gallon, “and that covered my gas money and provided me an audience for showing off.”

  He guided rafts, however, from a kayak. The approach, called “self-guiding,” was common on the Yough. “You put a guide in the first raft to make sure nobody passed you,” explained Szilagyi, “and a guide in the last raft to make sure everybody was in front of you, and then you had two kayakers that picked up pieces. We were basically sheep dogs, making sure people didn’t get stuck.”

  “On Class-III or lesser water, the raft guide was a herder. On Class-IV-plus water, the guide was muscle. He was a hero and a river god. The customer was ‘cargo,’ ‘carp’ or a ‘touron.’”

  Though Appalachian Wildwaters (AW) took its first commercial trip on the New River in 1972, at the time, customers were few and far between. “You could probably count them on one hand,” laughed Szilagyi.

  To Szilagyi, the problems with self-guided rafts were numerous and obvious, and he founded AW with a more customer-centric approach to guiding. He had experience teaching mathematics as a graduate student at Ohio State University, and he noticed then that new students weren’t learning well with older, outdated teaching methods:

  When you teach a mathematician, you give him the facts and let him figure it out, and a whole lot of the Ohio State students, you couldn’t do that. Instead of calling them names, you had to try it differently. This is a huge problem at large land-grant universities; how do you teach non-mathematicians enough mathematics so they can function effectively, so they can use statistics with some integrity.

  Szilagyi and his co-teachers examined what they felt were the reasons why their students had such a difficult time grasping calculus. “We found that by not screaming at them and calling them bloody idiots that they would eventually perform.”

  This became one of the keys to AW’s guiding approach. “I think we changed what guiding was about,” he said.

  We looked at the guide as a coach, as a teacher and a psychologist and a social worker. The question was, could the customer be relied on at critical points? Particularly at Whale Rock, would they freak out on you and push you into losing control at Middle Keeney? Or at Double Z, when you made the turn behind Devil’s Tooth, would they screw up your run and push you into the undercut at bottom left?

  Szilagyi thought that with his approach to guiding, it wouldn’t be an issue. Today, that approach is not just common on the Lower New and Gauley Rivers, it’s the norm.

  “We trained and taught the customers how to react appropriately,” he said. “If somebody was afraid, you worked them through their concerns. The customer was a participant,
and he was part of the crew.”

  The bonus in the equation was that changing the relationship between the customer and the guide also changed the relationship between the customer and the company. To AW’s customers, it was obvious that the company valued them as people and relied on them to perform. It brought about a mutual respect, and AW’s customer count soared.

  “I think the guide who saw himself as a river god had contempt for the customer,” mused Szilagyi, “And the only thing that covered up that contempt was an attempt to suck a tip out of them.” By 1985, AW was the largest river outfitter in West Virginia—50 percent larger than number two, which was North American River Runners.

  Butch Christian and crew plow into Surprise, circa mid-1970s. Unseen in this photo: most of an eighteen-foot-long raft and at least eight other people. Butch Christian Collection.

  However, also in 1985, factors beyond Szilagyi’s control conspired to knock his company from its perch.

  In founding Appalachian Wildwaters, Szilagyi initiated a business model that included three rivers. They ran the Cheat River in the spring, the New River in the summer and the Gauley River whenever the Corps of Engineers, which controlled flows at the Summersville Dam, had scheduled drawdowns of Summersville Lake. They executed that plan successfully and with single-minded focus until, on November 5, 1985, torrential rains sent an immense flood roaring through the Cheat Valley. “We experienced massive damage,” Szilagyi lamented. “We lived on the Cheat. All of our equipment was stored in our outpost and got carried down river.”

  Overnight, AW went from running eighteen thousand customers on the Cheat, New and Gauley Rivers combined to being incapable of taking any at all.

  “Our documented replacement cost was, I believe, three times our net worth,” said Szilagyi.

  Much like Jon Dragan, Imre Szilagyi has a reputation for occasional gruffness but also for intelligence and determination to succeed where others might not. After losing everything in a day, anybody else would have hung it up, tossed in the towel, rolled over and died. He did the exact opposite. “The only way I thought we could remain competitive was to grow very rapidly, and that’s when we bought out companies in Tennessee and North Carolina, on the Tygart [in West Virginia] and in Texas.”

  His actions saved Appalachian Wildwaters, but it also spread the company thin geographically. AW would never be number one in West Virginia again. “My story is that I got distracted in Tennessee and North Carolina, and Class-VI and ACE passed me,” he laughed.

  The 1985 flood decimated more than just AW’s operation. It essentially spelled the near demise of commercial whitewater rafting on the Cheat River in general. Over the course of the next ten years, the industry on the Cheat lost around 10 percent of its business every year. “In 1985, the industry took down over thirty thousand customers,” explained Szilagyi. By the turn of the millennium, “I doubt we took down more than a couple thousand.”

  Long before floodwaters erased AW’s operation on the Cheat River, a fourth outfitter (and several others, for that matter) sprang from MRT’s loins in an infamous and tumultuous 1977 event that old-timers affectionately call “The Guide Strike.”

  Dave Arnold, one of the principal owners of Class-VI and now Adventures on the Gorge, was an MRT guide when the Guide Strike went down. He looks back at it as a tipping point. “No question, the Guide Strike started four or five companies: Drift-a-Bit with Randall Ballard, New & Gauley Expeditions with Keith Spangler, Class-VI and even some other ones, like Beauty Mountain. We went from three outfitters—MRT, AW and Wildwater—to a bunch of outfitters real quickly.”

  He is, however, very careful to point out that the Guide Strike was not actually a strike, per se. “Even though it’s called the ‘Guide Strike,’ for history’s sake, there was never a strike. There was never a work closure.” That perspective contrasts starkly with the legend of the strike, which, if it is to be believed, shut down the entire industry for a month.

  The strike began as not much more than a joke among MRT guides, who were putting in hard hours for Paul Breuer and crew. “To put it into context,” explained Arnold, “we put in at Thurmond every day. It didn’t matter if the river was running nine hundred cfs, and we went all the way to Hawk’s Nest, sometimes with a boat tow.” Going all the way to Hawk’s Nest involves a stretch of the New River called Hawk’s Nest Lake, a four-mile expanse of flat water, which is the rafting equivalent of carrying a loaded boat up four miles of thirty-degree uphill slope. “Some of us lived in Oak Hill,” he continued, “and this was pre-bridge.” MRT guides had to leave Oak Hill, wind their way down Route 82 past Fayette Station, cross the little bridge at the bottom of the New River Gorge, go to work in Hico (a few miles north of the gorge) and check in with their guests. On a bus with guests, they then had to wend down Route 60 to Hawk’s Nest Park, climb around Cotton Hill and drive to Thurmond, where they put in fourteen miles upstream. Then they rafted to Hawk’s Nest, including four miles of lake, and hopped on a bus from Hawk’s Nest back to base at Hico. Once they waved goodbye to their guests, they still had to reverse the morning commute to get back home.

  “It was insanity!” said Arnold.

  Breuer’s guides asked him for ten dollars more per day. “We were working a lot of days, and if my memory is right, we were making seventeen dollars a day,” said Arnold.

  “I remember eighteen dollars,” said Doug Proctor, another former MRT guide and current principal player in Adventures on the Gorge.

  “We didn’t really think we were asking for that much,” Arnold added.

  The movement started approximately three weeks prior to the Fourth of July weekend, when MRT had three full days scheduled. “There was just a lot of bitching about not making enough money,” said Arnold. “Somebody said, ‘We need to form the United Brotherhood of Whitewater Workers.’ We actually had a T-shirt: UBWW. There were crossed oars on them. We were just being goofballs as much as anything, and then it started to take on some seriousness.”

  MRT guides told management that if they would not comply with their request for more money, they would not work on the Fourth of July weekend. “But we never walked out,” said Arnold, his finger in the air. “I consider it more of a negotiation.”

  “I’m sure it was also very tough on the owners,” he added. “Paul was fairly willing to listen, and Mike Marine and Mike Tousey, being outside businesspeople, took it, in my opinion, too seriously.” Breuer’s partners weren’t on site and didn’t know the guides, and that gap between their perspectives turned the situation from something that nobody took to be entirely dire into something quite serious.

  While Arnold and Jeff Proctor, Doug’s brother and now also a principal in Adventures on the Gorge, maintain that the legend of the Guide Strike is overblown, Breuer, himself now high in the Adventures on the Gorge chain of command, views it as a low point in his career as a raft company owner. “It was like two cars coming at each other head on, and who’s going to chicken out first?” he said.

  “I thought the wages were fair for that time,” he continued. “There were some longer days, and maybe there was some need for an increase.” No doubt, the company was growing rapidly at the time as well. In 1977, it was running 250 customers downstream a day, which was unheard of.

  Breuer is quick to take responsibility for the role he played; perhaps too much so. “It was partially my fault in not communicating well enough with the staff. Maybe I hadn’t matured enough as a manager to sit them down and say, okay, let’s talk. I rarely got on the river then, except to train, and that wasn’t good.”

  One guide in particular, whose name nobody seems to remember, was the most vocal. “He just came up one day, it was July Fourth weekend, and said we want a ten-dollar raise per day. There was no way.”

  “Well,” the guide scolded Breuer, “then we’re not working.” He told Breuer that he and the rest of the guides would be at the garage if he wanted to come and talk.

  “They were over there having a big par
ty,” said Breuer.

  He discussed the situation with his partners, but it was clear the financials of a ten-dollar raise wouldn’t work out. “We made them an offer of a couple dollars,” recalled Breuer, but they turned him down flatly.

  “I asked, who’s in this? And they claimed everybody was,” said Breuer. It turned out, however, that most of the part-time guides had no inkling what was happening.

  MRT was booked solid for three days and looking down the barrel of a loaded financial loss. “I didn’t get any sleep that night,” said Breuer, who talked back and forth with the partners. “About one or two in the morning, I was so frustrated. I saw the company as my whole life going down, and these guys weren’t being reasonable. I couldn’t negotiate with them.”

  When the next morning dawned, Breuer made a final proposal of five dollars more per day, “and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that!’”

  And then the part-time guides showed up for work. Breuer shook his head as he recalled the morning. “They said, really? We’re getting a five-dollar raise? No way! How did that happen? I was like, what? You guys didn’t know about this?”

  “I was just a first-year guide,” agreed Doug Proctor. “I just walked in on it. I didn’t care. I just wanted to guide.”

  “Still, sometimes,” said Breuer, “I have to look back at it as a learning experience.”

  Though they recall talking about starting their own company prior to that weekend, there’s no doubt that the strike was a milestone in the inception of Class-VI River Runners. None of the strike leaders, including Arnold and Jeff Proctor, were invited back the next season. “I got a letter that said, ‘Hey, we heard your brother and Dave and them are starting their own company,’” said Doug, “‘but if you want to come back with us, feel free to.’ They didn’t know I was part of it.”