American Festival

Yo, props to Jacob for his big win at the Reno Collegiate! Sweet dude. Yeah, I didn't fair quite as well at the American, but managed to throw some mini air blunts and back stabs on the micro green wave where the event was held. The top three were locked in with Stephen Wright, Kincaid, and EJ and I battled it out with Dave Garringer for fourth place, but he ended up defeating me, so I took fifth.

So, on Sunday, Stephen and I decided to go run Golden Gate on the South American. I borrowed Stephen's Super Hero, which is fast and handles well in the big stuff. There was only one hitch in our plan... neither of us had run it before, so we didn't know how to get there (or how to get down it for that matter). Anyhow, we eventually found a boater with a guidebook and got the directions. We got a late start, but figured we would try to make good time and scout efficiently. After the shuttle was set we got on the river to see a VERY healthy flow which happened to be rising with the rain. Basically, a long, difficult, semi-epic ensued, resulting in my first swim in eight years! To keep it short, we were reading and running the first couple miles... I found my way into a rather large hole, didn't have enough speed to punch it, got worked violently for a while, breathed in some water, then got worked a little more before I decided to bail out instead of trying another roll. Stephen rescued my stuff (thanks dude). It was a little disheartening since we were only a mile or two into our 10 mile class V+ journey and all of the biggest rapids lay downstream.

We ended up meeting up with a crew from World Class at the first portage and paddled the rest of the day with them. Well, we snuck and portaged the rest of the run with them. So, the water was pretty high, and in my humble, playboater opinion the rapids were really large and steep and some of them downright frightening. Anyhow, at some point, once the daylight started running out, the World Class guys decided it would be faster to just start portaging every major horizon line instead of trying to scout and then go back and run it. Probably a good policy. There were tons of rapids in there, and it would be nice to go back at slightly lower flows with an early start and run some of the bigger stuff. After the final portage around the very mean looking F111, darkness was on its way. We finished out the last couple miles of IV+ at a pretty quick pace racing to get out before dark. We reached the takeout right as things were getting pretty gray and dim. It was dark by the time the boats were on the car. Whew!

The story ends with a hilarious quarter mile hike down a rutted dirt road, that my car couldn't manage, in complete pitch darkness to retrieve Stephen's truck at the putin. 20 minutes of stumbling over rocks and feeling out the edge of the road got us to the truck and finally put an end to a day that seemed unwilling to end.