Whitewater Rafting on West Virginia's New and Gauley Rivers

by Jay Young

  By October, Arnold, the Proctors and another guide named Kevin “Catfish” Whelan were looking for land. By November, they were working with somebody on their brochure. “We were in motion,” said Arnold. “I think we incorporated in December.”

  “You gotta put yourself back in that time period,” Arnold continued. He and Jeff Proctor had taught kayaking in North Carolina and had worked with Breuer and Bob Morgan once before in Canada, so they had knowledge of river current and how to propel a boat down it. It was knowledge few others had. Breuer and the Dragans had started to introduce these concepts to local people and train them on how to run a river, but those people were still the minority.

  Wildwater rafts run Miller’s Folly on the Lower New River, circa 1971. Note the French-made Flother Chok life jacket, which was not Coast Guard approved, on the men at left. Tom Evans, West Virginia Department of Commerce Collection.

  “There were no restrictions,” Arnold said, as he shook his head. “There were no closed permits. The only thing to stop you from getting a license was twenty-five dollars.”

  Soon enough, however, “the state recognized that it could be five hundred outfitters if they didn’t do something,” said Arnold. Concerned about the carrying capacity of the New and Gauley Rivers, and that numbers were growing too rapidly and were apt to get out of control, the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources (DNR) began to refuse to grant new licenses.

  Records are spotty at best in explaining precisely when this occurred, and outfitters’ memories equally so. What appears to be the case is that the West Virginia state legislature granted the DNR’s Whitewater Commission power to control licenses in 1981 and to limit the numbers of customers any one outfitter could carry down the rivers on any given day. In 1999, the legislature made the moratorium on new licenses the law of the land.

  According to records held by the West Virginia Professional River Outfitters Association (WVPRO), there are currently twenty-six licenses in existence, which seven companies now own between themselves. Arnold recalls the number of licenses being somewhere closer to thirty-seven at its peak, but some of those may only have been valid on the Cheat River, and it’s not inconceivable that some of them also dissolved when the companies that owned them folded. The state’s records are likewise unclear on the subject.

  Licenses are like gold now to the industry. It is unlikely that any more of them will either appear or disappear. Even if another company folds, a larger company is likely to purchase its license. Indeed, when one raft company purchases another, items like permits and equipment are usually the deal’s prime fodder. Other assets, such as land, are often left out of the equation entirely.

  Together with existing outfitters, the Whitewater Commission also created a degree of parity among licenses. Larger permits stayed the same, but smaller units, which once had various numbers from as low as 40 attached to them, enlarged dramatically. A license, for example, that was previously worth 40 people per day on the New River became worth 120 overnight. Parity gave companies that owned multiple licenses free reign to grow precisely when the industry was experiencing its most rapid spurt—and it ensured that no new competitors could join the fray. For those fortunate companies, it was like adding oxygen to a fire. Other companies that, for example, owned one permit that was already good for 112 people only saw an 8-person-per-day increase. For them, it was like sucking the air out of the room.

  Understandably, as outfitters, bureaucrats and politicians wrangled over license allocations, disagreements ensued. Present and former outfitters still sometimes refer to that time as the allocation wars.

  “I think Keith Spangler [of New & Gauley Expeditions] got the last permit,” said Arnold. “Outfitters, guides, legislators…a bunch of people realized that if we didn’t do something, the river could be too crowded. The business model could fall apart. You only have to look at the Arkansas River to see it. At one point, the Arkansas had eighty permits or something.”

  One company that would go on to make a huge mark on the industry was ACE Raft, which incorporated in 1979. ACE’s name is an acronym that stands for American Canadian Expeditions. Strangely enough, the acronym came first, and its owners decided later what it stood for. They chose “ACE” for the sole reason that it would appear first in the phone book. “That’s one of the best things we ever did,” said Ernie Kincaid, one of ACE’s principal owners. They chose American Canadian, because, originally, they fully intended to also run trips on the Ottawa River in Ontario. They never did paddle a stroke in Canada, but the name worked for them, and they kept it.

  Kincaid was born down the road from Oak Hill and is one of the few remaining “local” raft company owners. “I moved here when I was born,” he laughed, “down in Page-Kincaid area.”

  In 1969, Kincaid and two friends were driving along in Fayette County, which even then was becoming a hotbed of whitewater activity, when one of them said, “Let’s get canoes!”

  “I went home and told my mom, and she said, ‘The guy I work for has some kayaks in his office.’ I ended up getting a C1.”

  Kincaid paddled hard boats often and only guided rafts a handful of times before starting ACE. “I guided twice for Rivermen…when they begged,” he laughed. “But I was never really a guide.”

  Then, in late 1979, Kincaid jumped into the fray with both feet. He purchased four used boats from Wildwater and then quickly realized that he needed paddles, too. “You have to have helmets,” he rambled. “You have to have trailers to haul it all and trucks to pull them. And then you have to have insurance. The more stuff you buy, the more people you have to haul to support it. The more people you haul, the more stuff you have to buy. It’s never-ending.”

  ACE started out as just Ernie Kincaid and a partner, Doug McKenzie, sharing the load 50-50. The pair bought an old school bus at auction, which didn’t actually run. “I had it up at the local garage,” recalled Kincaid, who worked as a mining engineer in Nicholas County, the office of which was just uphill from the Gauley River.

  The bus sat idly in the garage for several months, until finally ACE’s first trip was scheduled for the next weekend. The mechanic at the garage told Kincaid, “I can get the motor back in it, but I can’t get it bolted up for you. But, I’ll leave an extension cord for you to use out the bottom of the door.”

  Kincaid grabbed a friend, who was a mechanic, and headed for the garage. “We got the motor all bolted up. It was like three in the morning when we finally got it done. We had everything ready to go—and it wouldn’t start!” After much hemming and hawing, his friend determined that the culprit was the bus’s distributor coil.

  “I ran down over the hill to the coal company,” said Kincaid, “and stole a coil off one of the company trucks in the parking lot. I took it back over, and the bus fired right up.” A few hours later, Kincaid was hauling guests to the New River in a bus with stolen parts. “That was the first ACE trip ever,” he said.

  That’s not the only bizarre story centered on raft and guest transportation. Raft buses in general once tended to be heaps of rusting metal and cobbled-together parts. Many of the earliest weren’t buses at all but gigantic dually trucks with a bed in the back covered by Conestoga wagon–style hoops and a tarp. Wildwater hauled guests around on benches in the back of such a truck.

  Pretty quickly, however, nearly every company bought one or more old school buses at auction. Michael Ivey began working as a raft guide in 1980 for a small company called Drift-a-Bit. “You started out in this industry in a bus that you might have helped paint from a yellow school bus to another color,” said Ivey. The chances were excellent that bus had gone to auction because some Ohio school system decided it wasn’t safe on surface streets anymore. That bus then spent a whole other bus lifetime on the most treacherous roads imaginable, with hairpin turns and cliffs; sometimes they were half washed away dirt roads. “I always knew that was going to be the end of me,” said Ivey. “I paid special attention in first aid class and CPR because I kne
w there was going to be a massive bus wreck. We all had that hanging over our heads.”

  A Wildwater raft runs Lower Railroad, Lower New River, circa 1971. Those who have been here recently may notice differences. This is prior to the rock at river left breaking off to choke the bottom of the channel. Dragan Collection.

  When talking about how far the whitewater rafting industry has come, Dave Arnold is quick to admit:

  I’m not sure we were as smart as I like to think we were. It wasn’t as orchestrated as it seems.

  There were some people who got permits who didn’t have a clue what they were doing. They weren’t whitewater people. They weren’t businesspeople. If the plan was to create a business that grew into something that was good for West Virginia—great tax base, jobs—those kind of companies never work out. Now, sometimes these little start ups out of garages can turn into Microsoft, too, so it’s a balancing act.

  When I look back, though, it worked really well. Just enough outfitters to create competition for the consumer, but not so many that it created chaos and anarchy in the industry.

  “Outfitters in West Virginia sort of smile,” concluded Arnold, “because the state has done a really good job of helping the industry grow. They regulated but weren’t stifling. That’s not the norm.”

  THE BOATS

  Though Bob Morgan’s Turkey Raft was largely an evolutionary deadend in and of itself, the Frankensteinian little boat was actually ahead of its time. In his quest to build a functional, inexpensive raft, he didn’t just peg two innovations that would eventually change the face of whitewater rafting on the New and Gauley Rivers. He nailed them.

  Morgan installed stern-mounted oars on his second Turkey Raft, which was a distinct departure from the western-style center mounts he used to push the first funny little boat down the Lower New River. Center-mounted oars make rafts more maneuverable by nature of simple physics—the pivot point is in the middle of the boat. Morgan, however, was seeking other advantages. Of the Turkey Raft’s first attempt on the Lower New River, Bob Morgan said, “I’m a canoer; I like people to paddle. Why can’t we have people paddle?”

  It was to make space for those paddlers that Morgan moved his oars back. “That’s really where we developed the stern-mounted oar frame with people paddling in front,” explained Paul Breuer. “When he bought the old army-surplus bridge rafts, he put the frame on the rear. He wanted people to participate and paddle.”

  Those bridge rafts weighed a ton. “They were vulcanized,” said Breuer, “and the seams were double. They were just incredibly heavy, but bombproof.”

  When Breuer and other Morgan disciples opened Mountain River Tours, they brought that same stern-mount concept with them, and the technique quickly caught on in commercial West Virginia rafting. Of course, the vast majority of rafts on the New and Gauley Rivers today are pure paddle rafts with no oar rigs at all. Many former MRT guides, however, still prefer a stern-mounted rig as a hybrid that gives them more direct influence over the boat’s speed and angle but still involves others in the raft as more than just ballast.

  “That ten-foot oar equals about three or four Norse paddles,” explained Doug Proctor. “So do you think you’ve got a lot more control?”

  “The industry here was maybe 50 percent oars,” he continued. “Us, New River Scenic, Whitewater Information, Mountain River Tours, New & Gauley Expeditions, we were all running oars. And AW, Wildwater and NARR were all running paddle boats.”

  “It somewhat defies science,” said Dave Arnold. “Meaning, oars are a great way to run a boat, but because there were more people running paddle boats than oar boats, there was more marketing that said people who run oar boats are weenies and wimps, and the only way to really do it is a paddle boat.”

  Perhaps marketing that shames people into doing something that might be more dangerous than the alternative simply works. Perhaps paddle boat companies were running more guests down rivers than companies that used oar rigs and could talk the technique up to more people. Whatever the reason, the paddle boat momentum became a ground swell. Potential and returning customers began to view oar rigs as a sort of carnival attraction, during which the guide did all the real work and they were just along for the ride.

  It soon became obvious to Class-VI that there was a war of opinion being waged and that oar boats were losing badly. “In ’87, we documented five or six hundred people that did not run with us,” explained Proctor, “because we didn’t run paddle boats.”

  But the companies that were responsible for such marketing and had already adopted a paddle raft program felt there was more to the equation than just opinions. “You give me a set of oars and I don’t give a shit what the customers want to do, I know where the boat is going,” said Imre Szilagyi. Paddles created a difference in the relationship between the raft guide and the customer, and if the rafting company knew what it was doing, it inherited the benefit of that relationship. “If you put a set of oars on a boat, the focus of the trip is on the raft guide. Take away the oars and make the raft guide coach, then the focus becomes the customers. That’s what we did,” said Imre, “and it took Class-VI and Paul and Keith a good long time to figure that out.”

  “Every night when I lay me down to bed,” he continued, “I knelt down and thanked god that Class-VI was still using oars.”

  While oar rigs were arguably safer, it certainly wasn’t true that paddle boats were inherently unsafe. Companies that used oars listened to their constituents, and slowly but surely, the industry drifted toward paddle boats.

  Mob Morgan hiking out with the remains of the first Turkey Raft after its catastrophic flip in Middle Keeney, 1969. Bob Lynn.

  The shift angered no small number of guides. “We said to our staff in ’88, this year you have to go half and half, and we actually lost a couple guides,” said Proctor.

  Oars…paddles…it’s all academic now because the battle is well and truly over, and paddles trounced oars.

  The Morgan innovation that is most intriguing to raft nerds, however, has nothing to do with locomotion. It is the self-bailing boat.

  With the possible exception of some catarafts, every inflatable on every river in America in the 1970s was non-self-bailing. It would be a long time before modern self-bailing rafts became an everyday sight on the New and Gauley Rivers, so it’s unlikely that the Turkey Raft is their direct precursor. It is, however, undeniable that Bob Morgan—perhaps unintentionally—made a leap in whitewater technology that West Virginia raft companies would not make again for nearly twenty years.

  The first company to recognize the inherent superiority of the self-bailer was ACE Raft. In 1986, ACE leapt ahead of its competition by switching its fleet to all self-bailing boats. It did so by proclaiming loudly and clearly, on the river, that self-bailers were not just safe but also inherently superior to their older brethren. “We painted ‘SELF-BAILING’ on the side of each raft,” recalled Ernie Kincaid, “so we’re going down the river and all the customers from other companies are going, ‘What does self bailing mean?’ They’re over there with a five-gallon bucket dipping it out, and our people are relaxing, having a good time. We grew dramatically due to those rafts.”

  Rivermen was not far behind ACE. After somebody vandalized its entire fleet of boats in 1990, other outfitters joined together to loan it boats to finish the season, and it used its insurance money to upgrade to self-bailing boats.

  Despite a new colorful nickname—“bucket boats”—non-self-bailers did not go quietly into the night. Old school rafters, especially those who plied western rivers, like the Colorado, resisted mightily. “They were saying, ‘Self-bailers are dangerous. They flip too easily. They can’t come out of a hole,’” said Dave Arnold. “You get stuck in a big hole with a bucket boat, they fill up, they get weight and they wash out.” Traditionalists wrote entire articles about how unsafe self-bailers were. Now, of course, every commercial outfitter in West Virginia runs them 100 percent of the time.

  “One of the fir
st times I had access to a self-bailer was on a Grand Canyon trip…and I didn’t take it,” Arnold continued. “At the put-in we had a couple self-bailers and some bucket boats, and I didn’t want one. I thought, I’ll flip. I don’t want to flip. It’s cold! Halfway down the canyon, I’m bailing water and watching whoever it was in the self-bailer, thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m so stupid.’ That’s when the light bulb went off in my head.”

  The first time Arnold ever ran in a self-bailer was on the Upper Gauley River, “and I can still to this day remember realizing how sloppy I could be and get away with it! I remember both Insignificant and Lost Paddle with a self-bailer and being almost giggly.”

  Lost Paddle is the longest rapid on the Gauley River. In fact, it’s so long that people mostly think of it as multiple rapids stacked up on top of one another. First Drop is fairly straightforward, but the waves are big—certainly big enough to add significant water weight to a bucket boat. One wave at Second Drop, also known as Hawaii Five-O, makes those waves seem like ripples in a puddle. If a bucket boat wasn’t completely filled by the time it got through with Hawaii Five-O, it certainly was after Third Drop. “When you ran Third Drop in Lost Paddle in a bucket boat and you’re heading toward Tumble Home, and you stand up and the water in your boat is up to your throat, that was a scary moment,” explained Arnold. But in a self-bailer, “you could get into the lunch cooler and get a sandwich before you hit Tumble Home. You had all the time in the world!”

  Today, less-than-fond memories of bucket boats abound throughout the industry. “The old Green River rafts,” remembers Tom Dragan about One Paw and Two Paw, “the floors weren’t attached to the cross tubes, so when you filled up, you had two to three thousand gallons of water to bail. You could swim underneath the cross tubes.”

  “It was very exciting when something went wrong,” said Bob Underwood. Bucket boats rarely flipped because, filled with water, they’re heavy and stable, to say the least. However, “if you got one of those things wrapped around a rock, which occasionally happened, you had ten people in the water,” continued Underwood. “We carried a lot of rope and pulleys. Occasionally, we had one go all the way over. That was bad news. Once you had them completely over, there was a good possibility that somebody was going to be under it.”