My friend Paul Futcher has been trying to talk me into doing a white-water kayak trip for quite some time. He has gone on a few ocean kayaking trips with me, so I had to be polite and return the favor. I've jokingly referred to white water kayaking as "down hill kayaking". Unfortunately Paul usually calls me Friday evening before going to some river Saturday morning. My weekends tend to get planned months in advance so I have never been able to go. Recently he told me 4 days in advance about a trip he was planning to the American River on a Monday. Since it was not a weekend the only thing I had planned was to try and get some work done. That can often be put off, so I finally agreed to go on this trip with Paul.
We drove up to where the American River empties into a lake near Placerville, west of Sacramento California. It was a long hot drive on a record-setting hot day. The end of the river was calm and flat. We left my car there and drove a reasonably short distance up the river to a campground in the town of Lotus to put our kayaks in the water. While I was in the rest-room, Paul and a friend of his, named Alex, went into the campground office and asked them if they knew how much water was flowing in the river. The flow was 1800 CFS (Cubic Feet per Second) which is considered medium to high. So Paul and Alex came out and told me that the flow was a mere 500 CFS which (if it had been true) would make this paddle a milk run for a beginning white water kayaker like me. Unknown to them or I, PG&E decided to dump a bunch of water into the river so the flow peaked at 3800 CFS while I was there. That made this a very rough day on the water.
Paul told me that my bracing skills from the ocean would work perfectly here. I demonstrated my roll to them and they were pleased. I had been told that one thing ocean kayakers often get in trouble with is bracing on the upstream side of the boat. In the ocean, you should brace towards a wave but other than that you can brace on either side of the boat. In a river, however, if you brace on the upstream side of the boat, the current will push the paddle under and flip you over. Paul said that you should treat standing waves in the river the same way you do waves in the ocean. The only difference is the waves are standing still and your boat is moving towards them. He assured me that my instincts would serve me well.
The first half of the trip didn't give me any indications of the roughness to come. The river was wide and the rapids were manageable for someone with my level of experience. We calmly paddled down the river and went through a series of mild rapids. Paul and especially Alex tried to surf the standing waves behind every submerged rock. I had heard of this trick and tried it out on a milder river in Montana last year, so I was able to do this myself a few times and impress the whitewater guys with how quick a study I was. During this part of the trip, Paul and Alex kept talking about several rapids that we would have to pass through. "Satan's Cesspool" was one that they assured me would knock me out of my boat. I expected to be out of my boat today and was wearing a three millimeter wetsuit to add a little extra padding for bouncing off rocks.
Paul and Alex watched the landmarks and we pulled over to the side of the river just before the rough stuff was supposed to start. We sat down on the shore which gave my tired legs a chance to recover from being "pretzelized" inside my boat. Paul and Alex chuckled about lunch being my last meal. They gave me contradicting stories about how I should deal with several of the upcoming rapids.
When we started up again my legs were still tired from being cramped in a sit-inside boat. I started having more trouble with upwellings, and talked to Paul about them. The water would run into underwater obstacles that we could not see and boil up to the surface. What would look like a calm section of the river would grab the edge of your boat and try to suck you over. Paul said this was a common event and described it as feeling like a shark grabbed your boat and tried to pull it under. Eventually one of these caught me off-guard and I fell over. I tried to roll up on my left side and failed, then rolled up on my right. Paul and Alex were impressed with the double-sided roll.
We went through a few larger rapids and I felt right at the edge of control. It wasn't a lot of fun for me and I felt like I was just working hard to stay upright and survive. Paul would whoop and holler when he went through the roughest water. One time he got far behind and I could hear him yelling. It almost sounded like he was in trouble but I figured trouble would start with his head underwater and silent, so he must be OK. Alex got the most maniacal look of glee in his face between rapids and said that this was why they came here. He had a tendency to turn around in the middle of a rapid and try to stop and surf the standing waves. Because I felt so out of control I worried about running into him and lost more of my thin edge of control trying to avoid collisions. I tried pulling ahead but Paul worried about me and told me to stay back and let them scout places out.
Eventually we approached "Satan's Cesspool". Paul said that there was a place to pull out into calm water on the right, but there was no place to go but down from there and I would just get more anxious. He said it would be easier to just go for it. As we approached I saw the calm pool and dithered about trying for it but the water pulled me to the left. I decided to follow Paul's advice. The water was falling smoothly down and to the left then making a 90 degree turn to the right. As it turned it looked like it boiled up into a sideways tornado of water. How can you NOT get sucked underwater by this? It looked like the smooth flowing water dove under the white water on the right so I wanted to be farther to the left. But I wanted the nose of my boat pointing in the direction I would eventual have to go and this meant pointing more to the right. Before I could make up my mind the water did something unexpected under me, I lost my balance and fell over.
My first thought was "Oh Great! I'm going to do Satan's Cesspool upside down". Rolling up seemed a meaningless exercise but I set up for it anyway. To my surprise I came up and caught my balance again before finally going over the edge. Then as I had originally expected I got sucked under and over and around and around. I set up for another roll and came up in the standing waves downstream from the falls. But I could hardly see and I fell back over when I bounced over one of these waves. I tried to roll up several more times and failed. Eventually I had to bail out of the boat and come up without it.
I saw Paul catch my boat a little farther downstream and started climbing over the rocky shore to catch up with them. Four people in a raft offered to give me a ride, so I jumped in a calm section of water and tried to climb in. The raft was very difficult to get into and my camera in my PFD pocket caught on the rubber sides. with 2 people pulling and my hands finally finding a foot brace inside to hold onto I made it on board. I decided that it would have been easier to swim. Then with my paddle (which I had held onto when exiting my kayak) I helped paddle the raft into the next eddy where Paul was dumping the water out of my boat.
Paul and Alex both thought that Satan's Cesspool was especially bad this day and congratulated me for almost making it. They then proceeded to chortle and give me contradictory advice about the next rough rapid, called Bouncing Rock. Paul told me to keep as far left on this rapid as possible. But I watched both Paul and then Alex go down the middle of the river and let the water push them to the right. I figured I was safest doing what they were doing. What I think was happening to me was I was this: I was afraid to brace into the waves, figuring that my desire to brace behind the direction I was moving would be worse than not bracing at all. So I went nose first through every rapid trying to paddle as hard as I could and keep the boat balanced. Paul went past Bouncing Rock sideways, paddling to the left as hard as he could. I ended up going straight over the submerged rock and falling straight down into the hole behind it. I hit a wall of water bouncing back up and was blinded. I couldn't see or feel what happened next but I was apparently tossed into the air and fell down to tumble out of control.
I waited and waited for things to calm down so I could roll up. I reached up with my paddle to try to find some air to roll up into. My paddle kept reaching only water. Where was the air? My boat was apparently being pushed along a curved rock surface and pushed down at an angle. I couldn't roll up into the rock and the angle kept me from being able to reach the air. If I could have waited a little longer I would have made it past the rock wall and might have rolled up. But I punched out of the boat and went looking for something to breathe. When I finally found the surface I came up between the boat and the rock wall. The waves slammed the boat into the back of my helmet and my face slammed into the rock. I thought I heard a SPAING noise and felt a blow to my face harder than I have ever been hit in my life. The boat and I separated and I failed to catch hold of it. The boat went downstream to be caught by Paul and I managed to swim to shore and crawl out on the opposite side of the river with blood dripping down off my chin. I ended up almost loosing a tooth, with cuts on my upper and lower lips, bruises and a black eye on the right side of my face.
Alex worked his way back up the river then came across to help me. We threw my paddle, which I had hung onto all this time, across the river for Paul to catch and collect with my boat. Then Alex towed me across and I was able to put everything back together. I asked Alex: "You are going to tell me that the rough stuff is over now, RIGHT?" He and Paul agreed that Bouncing Rock was the worst and it was a milk run from here. Neither of them mentioned the next rapid, called The Hospital until we were upon it.
I managed to plow straight through The Hospital and keep my boat upright. It looked worse than Bouncing Rock but was in fact a lot easier because there weren't any holes to fall into. Then there was one final long section of bumpy water called The Recovery Room and we really did make it to the flat water backing up from the reservoir at the bottom. Because the water was so high we had to paddle a fair distance to get to the take-out spot. Paul mentioned that I have an advantage at the end of the trip where we all have to actually paddle the kayak because Sea Kayakers are used to having to paddle everywhere they go. By the time we made it back to the parking lot I was feeling well enough to dig my Greenland Paddle out of my car and demonstrate some rolling tricks to Paul and Alex. I drove them back to the put-in to Paul's car and then it was time for the long hot drive home.
Did I enjoy my first introduction to down-hill kayaking? Not especially. Even if you don't count the bad luck of coming up between my boat and a rock. Will I try it again? Perhaps. But it is going to take some calmer water or a lot of smooth talking from Paul.