I have been a member of American Whitewater since I started paddling long ago, and have always felt good about sending them money. The Journal is fun, and AW has been a huge advocate for rivers around the country since the 1960’s. Last year they indulged me to do a series on packrafting, and this year I did a piece that described some good (South) American whitewater: a trip we did with Rocky Contos and…
1 CommentAuthor: Tom
The Marsh Creek start to floating the Middle Fork of the Salmon has never had much appeal for me; its reputation is that of a swift creek with lots of wood (ie trees that have fallen across the entire span of the river) and few eddies to suss out what’s downstream and escape the river to avoid said wood. Rafts in particular have a tough go, since rafts aren’t as nimble as kayaks/pack rafts and…
1 CommentWhile Jeff Creamer is a bit of a wunderkind packrafter (he’s never really paddled a hardshell boat before, yet has paddled some of the most difficult whitewater in the West) by his own admission his skiing is not necessarily up to the level of his paddling. But his obsessive map researching and subsequent good route development capabilities are definitely class 5, and he’s a bloodhound on CalTopo, which I can only begin to decipher. Jeff…
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Most of us like to play in the mountains, and most of us like to play in the rivers as well. Intuitively, of course, we know that the are interconnected: snow falls in the mountains, melts, and flows into creeks that join to become rivers, and even mountains that don’t retain enough snow to feed rivers with runoff generate cloud lift that in turn creates rain that feeds rivers. But despite their connection, we as…
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Once again I feel a little self-conscious about talking about MY early COVID tale, but again it is a tale that I’ve retold a few times on skin tracks and such, so -in the spirit of sharing good tales – I’ll go ahead and share it here. Before I went to France I found out that the New England Canyoneering Team (the Hanlons) were coming out to Utah for their annual canyoneering fest for their…
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So it’s been a year since the world came crashing down on us with the advent of COVID-19, as I’ve been reminded by the media over the last couple of days. Little did we all know on March 11, 2020 what our world would be like for the next year. At best it’s been a bit awkward, at worst – as I heard on a story on NPR – there are people who haven’t been…
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Ah, a New Year! Of course, this one is more of a “thing” than most New Years; the common consensus, of course is that 2020 was a bad year and that any new year past that has got to portend better days. But equally “of course”, the coronavirus doesn’t give a shit what day, month, or year it is, and there is no doubt that 2021 could indeed be worse. Certainly it has started out…
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It was Memorial Day on the Tuolumne river near Yosemite National park, normally a very busy time. But that year had a nice big snowpack in the Sierras, and “The T” was running at about 8000 cfs, which is pretty high for that river; certainly too high for the commercial raft companies that haunt that river, and thus it was pretty empty. I had been on a trip with some other folks but we had…
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Parts one and two of the Patagonia Fishing Boot tale described the quick initiation of the project and the research that we did to lay the groundwork for the design of the boots, which is always the funnest part of projects. The hard part comes next: what do to with our newfound knowledge? Can we actually create a product that fulfills the needs that we’ve identified, and if so, can the even more difficult task…
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