Whitewater Rafting on West Virginia's New and Gauley Rivers

by Jay Young

  It’s always difficult to generalize, but if there are three traits that seem to characterize many river guides, they are the desire to make money; a willingness not to, as long there’s plenty of fun to be had; and the drive to party. That third trait has been constant throughout the history of the industry. There are only two types of motor vehicles in which it is still legal in West Virginia to carry open alcohol containers: limousines and raft buses.

  One company, Rivers, built its business around that drive. When Rivers decided it wanted to be a full-service resort, its owner, Fast Eddie Lilly, asked himself, what does a resort need?

  The answers were obvious. A resort needs a restaurant, a place to sleep and a place to drink. Lilly built rustic camping cabins, which were essentially wooden tents. Those cabins were Spartan to say the least. Guests had a modicum of privacy, bunks and perhaps a light bulb, but they were “cabins in the woods,” and who doesn’t want to spend the weekend in a cabin in the woods? Where Rivers really excelled was in the drinking, specifically in a bar, called the Red Dog Saloon, at its campus a quarter of the way into the New River Gorge.

  “It was packed full of energy,” Ivey remembered fondly. “There were people dancing on the tables. It was wild, man, just fun. And once in a while it was rough, too, because local people started invading, and they didn’t understand the river. They just came for the drinking. It became sort of this hybrid river bar meets local bar that got really crazy.”

  Somehow—nobody is really sure how—Lilly drew some pretty big-name rock ’n’ roll acts to his campus in the gorge. Blue Oyster Cult and Steppenwolf both played there, and neither was far past the height of its popularity.

  “The social phenomenon of the Red Dog occurred because Rivers had a clientele that was showing up to get ripped,” said Ivey. “It was the one amenity you could offer that was pretty easy.”

  Despite the glamour of guiding and the fact that there was a party pretty much every night in season, the ego trip that was driving a raft paled under the harsh glare of extreme poverty and body-breaking hard work. “It became a job,” he said. “I have friends now who are former professional athletes, and I wonder—what did that guy do at the same time I was running the river? Well, he probably made a couple hundred grand a year on his worst year, when I might have made ten grand on my best year, and I had peoples’ lives in my hands every day. Don’t get me wrong, that’s part of the draw of it, but where’s the social value?”

  As Ivey began to burn out on the guiding experience, he turned to other, related ventures, one of which was “Likes Your Ride, Tips Your Guide,” a seminar of sorts that he led during training time at various raft companies.

  There wasn’t a lot of money in a raft guide’s paycheck, but tips were a different story entirely. And yet it was strange, thought Ivey, how inconsistent tips were for most guides. Some raked it in. Others seemed not to do so well. Likes Your Ride attempted to analyze that incongruity, “and I realized,” said Ivey, “there was a way to up your percentage of tips and your income.”

  Ivey broke down tip potential into a simple equation: safety plus comfort plus value equals enjoyment. He knew that safety came from training and experience.

  Then came comfort. “I would always teach other guides to carry a little bigger dry bag and take some of your old warm clothes,” said Ivey. “Start going to thrift stores and buy cheap wool sweaters. Even if it’s little plastic ponchos that cost three bucks. And you carry little snacks, so you can boost them up. There’s nothing like a little bump of sugar or some peanuts or almonds or something.”

  “You’re the bronzed river guide,” he continued,

  because you’re out there every day, but you’ve got white people coming out of offices. How hard is it to spend ten bucks and buy a bottle of sun screen? Carry a little kit for customers. Make sure they’re warm. Make sure they have something to eat. I know some of these crews are partying hard and they’re hungover. So how great is it to reach down into a bag and pull out a couple bottles of Gatorade? Talk about the love!

  Value, Ivey reasoned, comes in knowing and being able to relate certain facts about the river, like history and botany, which was a revitalization of Jon Dragan’s similar philosophy. The ability to schmooze is a large part of it, too. Ivey realized that successful raft guides were social butterflies who told jokes, conversed with and got to know their guests. “It’s a lot more fun to go into battle with your friends than a bunch of strangers,” he said. “That kind of warmth is the hardest thing to teach. You can teach people to stock a dry bag, but can you get them to really care about those people? Those are the best river guides.”

  Congressman Nick Rahall agrees with the importance of a guide who is not just safe but also brings the value. “I can recall Hound Dog—and Sleepy was another one—and of course all the Proctors and Dave Arnold. I’ve been down with them all. Ymir, I think is retired now, Frank Lukacs…They can really tell some tales and tell some history at the same time.”

  Ivey also espoused the value to a guide of an educated and involved crew. Some guides made it a point of pride to take the fewest amount of paddle strokes per rapid or of moving the boat themselves, say with an oar rig. While that’s what some guests want, Ivey felt it was an inferior experience for the others. Guides all learn that there is a perfect line through every rapid. If the guide puts the boat on it, the river does all the hard work, and the guests are largely unnecessary to the run. “You can turn your own raft and set your own angles and keep your boat on that line,” said Ivey, “but it’s not nearly as much fun as hitting that wave as hard as eight people digging in can possibly hit it.”

  “This is one difference between western and eastern guides,” he continued.

  If you want to run like a western guide and act like you’ve got a center-mount oar rig on a pig boat and those people are just dead weight, then that’s what you do. It’s probably safe and it’s still going down the river, but that’s not eastern guiding. That’s not the way I came up with. You’ve got eight motors sitting in front of you, and there are so many places where it’s all about that raft going vertical.

  Ivey soon picked up other skills, in addition to training. He taught himself photography and design and was soon creating brochures for raft companies. Rivers’ brochure became the first of those when Ivey bumped into Eddie Lilly on a gambling junket to Atlantic City. “Hey, man, I might need some pictures,” said Lilly simply.

  Eventually, Ivey parlayed his experiences into a real career as a designer, photographer and filmmaker, which he still enjoys today, and that’s been a common pattern among West Virginia raft guides since the beginning. Many still live in the area and make their livings using skills, such as video production, marketing or management, that they never would have learned were it not for their lives in the rubber room.

  THE SCORE

  As rafters on the Lower New River wend their way northward, they eventually happen upon a long, calm pool. Sunshine floods the valley with warmth there, and people leap from their boats to grab a swim and drift in the lazy current. At the downstream end of the pool, visible from over a mile away, the New River Gorge Bridge towers above all, especially its tiny cousin underneath it, the Fayette Station Bridge.

  Tourists switchback their way down the steep north side of the gorge and cross the Fayette Station Bridge on their way to a parking area and gravel beach on river left. Fayette Station draws crowds of onlookers in the summertime because, one, it’s easily accessible by vehicle and, two, it sits just ashore of Fayette Station rapid, a cranking Class-III/IV train of haystack waves that deliver roller-coaster thrills for boaters and gawkers alike, even well into the low-water season.

  There are actually two beaches at Fayette Station. The first, a small sandy patch, is at the very end of the long pool, just upstream of the rapid. The second, a long swath of river-polished gravel, lies just downstream of the drop and serves as the primary takeout for private boaters and many of the commercial raft companies. To g
ain the lower beach and pick up their tired but exhilarated guests, raft buses and trailers pass by the upper beach, cross a small bridge over Wolf Creek and drive through the tourist parking area.

  At the start of 1972, however, the bridge over Wolf Creek did not exist, and the only viable takeout was the upper beach. Every boat on the river had a choice: take out just above Fayette Station and forego that last rapid or go for it.

  Unfortunately, the latter necessitated an extension of the day that included far more than just one rapid. The next place to get off the river was Hawk’s Nest State Park—past Hawk’s Nest Lake—which meant four more miles of grueling flat water.

  Where others might have seen an obstacle, Wildwater and the Dragans saw an opportunity. By purchasing the upper sandy beach, they could add the lower land into the mix, develop it and then have a takeout that would allow them to run Fayette Station. It would add a whole other rapid—a big one—to their standard Lower New River Trip. So, purchase it they did.

  The first obstacle to developing the land for a takeout was Wolf Creek, and the Dragans set to work building the bridge that still spans it today. They then went to work on the land on the far side. It was choked with boulders, so they brought in crews and heavy machinery and either crushed the rocks or moved them. Spending long, backbreaking days in the sun, they smoothed out a roadway and paved it with gravel.

  To enable trips in high water, Wildwater began using motorized “pig rigs.” Here, a pig rig plows through standing waves on the New River. The level is somewhere around fourteen feet, or forty thousand cubic feet per second. Butch Christian Collection.

  When all was said and done, Wildwater spent a small fortune to purchase Fayette Station and develop it as a viable takeout. Soon, other companies began to run the Lower New, and when they did, Jon Dragan saw how easily he could begin to recoup some of the money his company had spent. He began to charge a per-person fee for other companies to take out at his beach.

  Not every company bought in, however. In the beginning, Mountain River Tours and Appalachian Wildwaters refused to pay Dragan’s fees and instead braved the long paddle out to Hawk’s Nest. Class-VI started out that way, too, for the first three years of its operation.

  “From day one it was, when you ran the New River, Jon Dragan put on his big boots and said I own the [expletive deleted] river,” said Imre Szilagyi of AW. “He claimed to own all the put-ins and takeouts, so we found ways around him…He pretty well had Fayette Station locked up.”

  There were dozens of commercial outfitters rafting the New River then. Some ate Dragan’s fees. Some devised creative, but ultimately inefficient and sometimes unsuccessful, ways to take out near Fayette Station.

  Rivermen, for one, incorporated in 1980 without a way to get off the river. The company’s founder, Steve Campbell, wanted to sign a lease at Dragan’s property, but according to Jon, they were full. He would allow no more companies to take out there. Campbell called the West Virginia Department of Transportation, which maintained the road and bridge at the bottom of the gorge just upstream of Fayette Station rapid, for advice. He asked them if he could legally use the state’s right of way under the road to beach his boats and walk up public property to a waiting vehicle. The state saw no issues with the plan, so Campbell and his company began to exit the river on the tiny sliver of public land that defines the boundaries of the road.

  Other companies soon followed suit. Some of them even devised complicated pulley systems to haul their heavy boats up to the bridge.

  Rivermen continued to take out under the bridge for its first year of operation before finally signing a lease with another property owner just upstream on river right. As he made his way to his new takeout early that year, Campbell pulled in to find No Trespassing signs nailed to trees—facing the river. “I just assumed Jon didn’t think we had a lease on any of it,” he said. “I took the signs down and posted them on his takeout facing the river, so when his customers came in the next time, they saw those same signs,” laughed Campbell.

  In 1984, Rivermen finally signed a Dragan lease, but its four seasons prior to that were typical of how small companies had to operate—without a way to get off the water legally, they simply couldn’t run trips.

  Szilagyi made a deal to have a motorized boat meet his trips at the top of Hawk’s Nest Lake and tow his rafts to the takeout. When the arrangement worked, it worked well, but as West Virginia machinery is wont to do, the outboards didn’t always run, and sometimes the tow boat never showed. It was a less than optimal situation, but AW guides grinned and bore it. “When the river was minus four feet, and you got down to the lake and the tow boat wasn’t there,” recalled Szilagyi, “that’s a long, long way.”

  Even the most acidic well will eventually run dry, and Hawk’s Nest Lake was no different. When MRT incorporated in 1973, Paul Breuer also chose to paddle or tow to Hawk’s Nest. Once there, his teams would load their rafts onto the tourist tram that leads up to the rim of the gorge, board buses and head for the hills. That arrangement was the first to fail. “They got pretty upset about it,” said Breuer, “because it was getting the tram and the other people riding it all wet.” Hawk’s Nest told MRT they couldn’t use the tram anymore, so instead, they began to drive their buses all the way down to the river for the pickup. That was also a less than optimal situation. “It was a pretty scary drive. It’s a one-lane gravel road on the side of a cliff! You can’t pass but three or four places within a mile.”

  Finally, in 1980, the Hawk’s Nest State Park pulled the plug on the entire enterprise and told MRT that it would no longer be allowed to drive its buses on the road. “Where do you take out?” shrugged Breuer. “Jon Dragan.”

  Eight years after the purchase of Fayette Station, most companies paid Jon Dragan. Wildwater was firmly in control of access to and egress from the river, and that may have been the plan all along. “We did it because Jon had the foresight to buy property,” said Tom Dragan.

  That land purchase would prove to be the first of many by West Virginia rafting companies and a major factor in whether or not they would be successful down the road. The effects of Wildwater’s Fayette Station deal still ripple throughout the industry today. It quite literally changed the business model of most existing outfitters and many of those to follow.

  The first companies to learn the real estate lesson were those that were running to Hawk’s Nest or paying Wildwater’s fees.

  Even as egress at Hawk’s Nest turned less and less certain, the fee structure at Fayette Station also began to seem unsustainable. Companies that were paying for egress balked at what they perceived to be exorbitant fees and draconian rules for use of the land. “We spent ’78, ’79 and ’80 taking out at Hawk’s Nest,” said Doug Proctor of Class-VI. “Then we signed an agreement with Wildwater to take out at Fayette Station. We did that for three years, and the price was a buck fifty per person, two fifty, then three dollars—with an escalator.”

  “The price structure was all written down in the agreement at the very beginning,” Tom Dragan pointed out. “It started off at a dollar a head, so they could get used to it, because they were taking out at Hawk’s Nest for nothing.”

  “Plus there were all sorts of restrictions,” noted Breuer. “If your bus goes over fifteen miles per hour, you’re out of here. On and on and on.”

  “And on top of paying that amount,” added Proctor, “there was pressure to vote certain ways on various river access issues. Really, Wildwater was in control of the whole industry. So, we decided to look for an alternative, and that was going to be the Teay’s project.”

  After several years of paying rising fees to take out at Fayette Station, four outfitters said enough is enough. In early 1981, Breuer suggested building a takeout on the other side of the river and about a mile downstream at an old mining site called Teay’s Landing. “We were convinced,” said Breuer, “Frank Lukacs [North American River Runners], Imre [Appalachian Wildwaters] and I…Dave Arnold [Class-VI] and Jeff…t
hat we needed to do this. We needed to own our own fate because Jon was making thousands and thousands and holding us hostage.”

  The way the Fayette Station deal with Wildwater was structured, on February 1 of every year, the lease for takeouts renewed automatically. On January 31, unless a lessee had hand-delivered a letter saying his company was out of the deal, they were in for another year. AW, NARR and MRT all sent their letters. Catfish Whelan drove down to deliver Class-VI’s. Jon Dragan was there, and by the look on his face and the tone of his voice, it was obvious to Whelan that he already knew the outfitters were jumping ship. “That was the point of no return,” said Proctor. “We had to be successful.”

  There was an obstacle, however, between the old Ames mine site and the river: the CSX rail line. Even as the outfitters burned their bridges with Wildwater, they still didn’t have permission from the railroad company to cross its land. And getting that permission was far from a sure thing. The line was one of CSX’s busiest, and shutting it down for several days equated to a multimillion-dollar loss. And yet, the 1981 commercial raft season was mere months away. “We had cut off the limb,” said Breuer, “and we were falling to ground.”

  “The only way to get to the river was to put a tunnel under the railroad,” said Dave Arnold of Class-VI, “because the railroad was not going to let you cross it. One or two people walking across? They can close their eyes. But you have 100,000 people carrying rafts, and they’re obviously going to say cease and desist eventually.”

  Together, the outfitters knew enough people with landholdings at Teay’s to approach about a purchase. Breuer began work on the engineering of the tunnel along with a materials supplier, Armco Steel. Frank Lukacs had political ties to CSX because, apparently, one NARR guide’s father was high up in the company.

  By February 1, the team had already figured out much of the logistics of building the tunnel. The steel was lined up and ready to go, and the coalition easily obtained a $500,000 loan to pay for it all. “The irony of the whole thing is that it was bankable,” said Arnold. “Jon was charging us so much money, that we could go to the bank and finance a half-million-dollar deal because, look, we’re already paying it.”