Gluten-Free Birthday on the Green
| River: | Green |
| Skill: | Advanced |
| Trip Date: | 08/02/2016 |
Level: 6"
Paddlers:
- Marc Harkness (Coordinator)
- Dennis Huntley
- John Mattox
- John Manley
- Lydia Cardinal
- Chris Wing
- Jason Serres
“It’s a pleasure and an honor, M-F-er’s!” — Gandalf.
There comes a time to bite the bullet and accept the cold, hard fact that you’re turning 47. It’s an odd number, and a prime number. Not really a milestone number — unlike 18, which I marked by going out for pancakes with my grandparents, or 21, which was welcomed in a college bar, or 40, which I celebrated by running that amount of kilometers on the C&O Canal followed by brunch. A prime number birthday calls for a prime experience, and for me it doesn’t get much more primal than running a lap of challenging whitewater with a solid crew, so that is what I did.
Initial plans for this trip included having birthday cake at Sunshine Rapid. Apologies to those of you who went based on the promise of cake alone — I couldn’t convince my wife, Emily, to hike to Sunshine carrying both our newborn and a cake.
We met up at Fishtop, the takeout, at the appointed time. Chris and Lydia, who own and operate H2O Dreams, a whitewater instruction business, graciously provided their Suburban and trailer for shuttle, and we decided to add the Upper Green to the run for a warmup and to avoid the lengthy hike into the Narrows. The Upper was pleasant, but could have used some more water to get past the shallow, shoaley parts. Good lines were had at Bayless’ Boof — Chris displayed a fun double-boof move to the right of the usual line, and there is also an eddy above Wanda’s Hole that is a good challenge.
The group stopped for a break at the beach where Big Hungry Creek comes into the Green, marking the start of the Narrows. Dennis regaled us with stories about hiking down to scout the Narrows back before anyone was running that section. Then we started down the Class 2-3 boogie leading down to Bride of Frankenstein. We ran the classics — Frankenstein, Pincushion, Whale Tail, Boof or Consequences. Chris, John and Jason ran Go Left and Die, styling that drop, while the rest of us ran the sneak slide on the right. I approached Zwick’s with some new information — try taking a stroke on the right when punching into the top hole, Chris suggested — although intuition always told me to stroke on the left because of all of the current after that hole pushing you towards the big ledges on the left afterwards, the hole itself kicks to the right, so a well-timed right stroke helps to counter that force, and keeps you from over-correcting. This new beta worked for me and was one of the great discoveries of this trip; i got through the top Zwick’s hole and was in a good position to continue on the race line.
Chris and John Manley went on to run Gorilla, and we had a good moment after portaging Sunshine to sit, rest and relax and talk about… Sunshine. It rained, but that didn’t matter. I was grateful to be amongst a group of some of my favorite river people, and was enjoying watching many of them meet or paddle together for the first time. The runout of the Green was good, goofy fun, even with one of the Johns getting surfed at Blackwater Falls and the other John roping him out.
Afterwards: Green River Barbecue in Saluda, and time to head home for a good nap. Thankful to a great group of boaters for coming and celebrating with me. SYOTR!