Golden Age Nostalgia

After reading Luc Mehl's guest blog at the Alpacka web site I indulged in some nostalgia from 2009-2010.

If you're reading this, then you really should go read Luc's post. I found it flattering and a bit of a vignette of what I, self-centeredly, consider the Golden Age of packrafting.

Golden in that it was a big leap forward. Golden in that Brad Meiklejohn urged us into Embick's  Class IV and V creeks. Golden in that real boaters Tim Johnson, Paul Schauer, and Thai Verzone led us down and plucked us out. Golden in that I started hitting whitewater centers beyond Alaska with the boat born in Alaska and now ready for the world: NZ, Grand Canyon, Australia's Franklin, Appalachians.

But the world was not ready. Haters were everywhere and even Alpacka wanted nothing to do with thigh straps.

"Why would a packrafter being going down a class 3/4 river like this, ever? Not only that, these guys are wearing drysuits because the water is cold - and I can't imagine a lightweight hiker wanting to bring one along on his trip. 

Seriously, I think you've missed the point of this video completely. It's about paddling in big groups that have sufficient resources to perform a rescue and using the skills that are taught in whitewater rescue classes properly. It's not about boat design.

I've kayaked big water for years and backpack/hike and the combination of packrafts and big water is a bozo no-no in my opinion. It seems like the packraft community is rediscovering everything the ww kayak community has known for years about the dangers of ww kayaking. Please stick to class 1 rivers and ponds for your own safety, and don't paddle in cold water without the proper thermal protection."

And a kayaker's response to thigh straps and packrafts in 2009. 

 ‘In a packraft, at least IMO, they seem like more than is necessary even at the upper end of whitewater. IMHO if you feel you need thigh straps you should probably think about improving your technique or further developing your skills. Weather it be reading the water better and seeing the clean lines and hitting them or simply spending more time in the raft, one needs to have skills. Given their design, there are just certain things that will be difficult no matter what you do. eg big holes on big water. These things are already about as idiot proof as it gets. Don't get me wrong, there are probably a hand full of people that could really push what is possible in a packraft with thigh straps, but for most it will simply be a substitute for skill and ultimately not help them in the long run. In fact I'd be willing to bet that most packrafters would not be able to roll a raft even if they were glued into the thing. It is certainly more difficult than a kayak by a long shot. Not to mention much harder on one's shoulders as well.’

But maybe like bad brush and cold water, some of us just felt that these nasty-grams were challenges to overcome and now that they are overcome, I find myself sitting back, older, and trying to just get out of the way.

1. My Packrafting! book is out of print.
2. Falcon Guidebooks sells a new book about packrafting.
3. Thor and Sarah Tingey have transformed Alpacka with a boat for every kind of water and even a mountain bike boat.
4. There are maybe even a dozen other packraft manufacturers.
5. My testosterone has drained away leaving me somewhat flacid when it comes to whitewater.
6. But it doesn't matter because there are plenty of bad-asses out there, 
• including former kayakers and
• hard-core packrafters-first who now use kayaks to improve their packrafting.

It's been great to watch and even greater to be part of it.

My own history with whitewater in packrafts can be covered in six videos. The first couple of videos are sort of accidental. But starting at the end of  2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 I posted on You Tube the greatest hits I'd been involved with each year. 

2008 was the year of whitewater discovery. 
2009 was the year of whitewater exploration.
2010 was the year of thigh straps that made us feel like real boaters.
2011 was the year of extended sterns that felt like cheating.

(January 2000) Taking a Sherpa Packraft down a stream in Pumalin Park, Chile before I'd actually got my butt in an Alpacka.

(January 2008)  Hermit to Havasu with Gordy and Cody Roman in the Grand Canyon. Up to say 2008, Cody Roman and I going down Ship Creek's canyon repeatedly and sniffing out some other runs elsewhere, was about it for whitewater. Then I started paddling with Brad.

(2008)  was the year I finally found someone other than Cody Roman who wanted to do Ship Creek more than once. The music was Radiohead's National Anthem, a song and band Roman introduced to me and the song captured the hectic feel of the early days of whitewater in packrafts. But YouTube stripped the song....so now it's the canned version of what they offer.

(2009) By the Fall of  2009 the packrafting revolution was getting started with Brad, Thai, Luc, Gordy, Tony, Becky, JT and others hitting it hard in Southcentral AK. It was when Tim Johnson and Paul Schauer and Thai Verzone, Class V kayakers all, joined us.

These guys, as Mike Curiak recently wrote, made me feel as though they were "participating in an entirely different sport -- one filled with grace and control and poise, where by comparison I feel like I just bludgeon and hack my way through while trying to survive."

This one doesn't play on phones, I guess because nobody's made enough money yet off the half-century old Beatles classic, Revolution (although it plays on computers in the US). It's worth watching on a 'puter, by the way, with the sound track.

(2010) Ah yes, the struggle with Alpacka over thigh straps. We were the Devil:  dangerous, reckless, a real pain in the butt-boats of Alpacka, but in the end we were right. Maybe, just maybe, our devilish ways got the "Witchcraft" started, a black boat you might catch a glimpse of in this next video somewhere, and that is the ancestral boat of Alpacka's Lips and Gnarwall boats. Or maybe it was really the handful of "Media Feliz" paddlers down in CO that motivated the development. Still, I like to think it was us, the 20 or 30 people in Alaska packraft-paddling Six Mile and Little Su and Ship Creek and Bird that pushed whitewater boat development at Alpacka. But again, probably just my narcissism playing tricks on my ego!

(2011) With the new long stern boats of 2011 it was almost a new sport. It was like in the 1980s when sticky rubber (particularly the Fires) hit rock or when foot fangs and plastic boots hit ice, or when leashless tools hit both rock and ice, whenever that happened. We had the new longer stern boats that erased bandersnatching as a concept and instead launched us out of sticky holes, leaning forward into the modern boats we've known for years. It also ended my year-end video making recaps, as then Luc Mehl and Mike Curiak were there to pick up my stringy end of the tapestry and weave it with finer artistry.

And there we have it. Six footnotes to "Show up and Blow up: Alaska"!

Adrian Crane: AMWC 1986, Mentasta to McKinley

From November 1986 issue of Ultrarunning:

"In our last issue we carried a report on the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic...200-250 miles through the Alaska backcountry, carry all your food and gear....[a race that] has always struck us as about the toughest race around. Adrian Crane and Tom Possert ran together and finished in a bit over 6 days, barely losing to some equally tough and talented Alaskans.

"After this competitive event was over, Adrian Crane's conclusion was rather surprising:

Is this the longest, toughest, roughest or hardest? The beauty of it is that at the finish no one knew or cared. Every competitor was left with indelible experiences, challenges accepted and honestly won or lost. Each had started with a clean slate and had accomplished every step in the wilderness through their own efforts."

Little has changed in the intervening 20 years but the pace of the racers.

2009 Classic: More Unofficial Results

By six o’clock on Saturday Rob Kehrer of Anchorage/Eagle River (perhaps?) finished with Steve Taylor and Forrest Karr, both of Fairbanks. Besides the first eight finishers, everyone else but John Lapkass had dropped out, most by the first checkpoint at Donnelly.

I’ve heard from a reliable source that this was considered the hardest course in years, despite the fact that the stretch from Donnelly to McKinley Village was its own course from 1994-1996, with 100% finish rate in 1995, the first and only time in the 27 year history of the race. This year’s prelude of 40 or so miles -- whether covered on ATV trails and roads north of Granite Mountain, over Granite itself, or through the tundra and gravel bars of the Gerstle-St Anthony Pass route – sucked the life out of a dozen starters. The rest, save Andrew Skurka, hobbled to the finish. Skurka finished with feet as good as when he started -- that's what 700 miles of walking in June and July through SC AK will do for you, I guess.

Yesterday, nine full days after the start, John Lapkass limped into McKinley Village on feet he said were the worst they’ve ever been (this after completing 17 Classics), having run out of food, fallen prey to the morass of willows and alders that is the east fork of Dick Creek, inadvertently swum the Wood River, and had the only rain cloud in miles “surgically strike” his drying gear with rain.

It sounds like this was his toughest race in years, too. But something tells me we'll all be back again next year. That's the nature of the event: it hurts so good.

6 Million Words on the Wilderness Classic

My Optio W60 shoots 30 frames per second. If a picture's worth a thousand words, then this 3.5 minute vid of the Wilderness Classic offers up a lot of verbage.

AMWC 2009 Start Photo

There are 28 people here, 29 if you count Britney, held tenderly by Chunk, Bobby, and Forrest.

Alas, she made it no farther than this.

Wilderness Classic Report – unofficial results

There were 28 starters, or maybe 29, hard to say as people showed up within minutes of the start on Sunday morning near the Gerstle River south of Delta Jct. They flew off in all directions, all combinations, all ages.

Forrest McCarthy of Jackson Hole, WY, hot off the couch and on his vacation left with me.

We took a rather straight line (green on the map); others took more circuitous but faster routes (red lines). The winners, PJs Chris Robertson and Bobby Schnell teamed up with pro-hiker Andy Skurka, and finished in 3 days and 18 hours at 4 AM on Thursday.

Forrest and I limped in later that night, 7 PM, for a finish time of 4 days, 9 hours. Our route is about 170-175 miles.

Six hours later (4 days 15 hours) Brad Marden and his Vermont partner Eben Sargent beat Luc Mehl who finished solo, by about 30 minutes. They’d been trading places for days, suffering, like we did, across the soft "sponga" and hard glacial moraines of the north side of the Hayes Range, and enjoying the fast floats on the flooding waters of the Wood and Yanert Rivers.

The weather had been hot and dry, thankfully, as none of these finishers carried sleeping bags, bivy sacks, or shelters of any knd save for some who carried one-use space blankets. We slept around fires ourselves in dry socks and the clothes we'd hiked in

At least a dozen racers dropped out after the initial 40 mile prelude to Donnely. One team, Craig “Chunk” Barnard and his partner Jordan of eastern Oregon, dropped out at the unlikely point of the Denali Hwy’s Susitna River Bridge. The duo had walked up the Black Rapids Glacier, dodging the continuing rock fall of the 2005 earthquake slides there, then crossed over to the East Fork Susitna Glacier, trading crampons for packrafts as they paddled down the ever steepening East Fork. At one point they both piled into a big hole in Class IV waters, Jordan bumping Chunk out of the hole. Unfortunately Jordan, on his second-ever packraftng experience, lost his boat, his paddle, and his right shoe, thirty miles from the road. He said his PFD saved his life in the river and his foot on the tundra, as he made a makeshift shoe from the PFD's foam.

Using his mandatory sat phone Chunk called his girlfriend to say they were OK, but heading out to the highway. Walking downstream Chunk spotted the raft in an eddy, retrieved it and in the process found Jordan’s paddle, too. They floated down to the Denali Hwy and called it quits there.

Just another day of the adventure in the Classic. It will be interesting to hear what else went on out there.

More as I find out.