This summer A few friends and I have decided to up our paddling game and try to become better safer paddlers. Raul* and I were going to go down to Alberta in the spring to take a creeking course and paddle a few new rivers. Logistics and a certain individuals cheapness (mine) prevented it from happening but we decided to hire Kevin Daffe from Tatshenshini Expediting to put together a program for us. Tatshenshini Expediting is a local outfitting company that does local, single and mutli day rafting trips around the yukon and is pretty involved in the whitewater community.
The Course was held on the Tutshi River, A quick class 4+ run located in the mountains an hour outside of whitehorse. In the morning we started out on the lake and looked very quickly at rolling and paddling technique and started making our way down to the main river. On our way we also ran a little drop/chute that was alongside the road. this isnt part of the Tutshi so it was nice to get our hair wet with something a little smaller. since it was new we also totally over analyzed it :). Next we paddled down the lake to the main river ( it was a long way with plenty of opportunity to work on our stroke technique).
Once we hit the main river we worked on honing in our eddy turns, cross current movement and boofing. catching every little eddy is a lot of work!! it was good to review the finer points of these techniques because I found over time I wasn’t always catching my eddies but I thought I was doing everything right. working on them over and over made me realize what I was doing wrong for catching the smaller faster eddy turns. I’m still working on boofing but I’ll get them down one day. after about half an hour of these drills we were at our first drop, The Nozzle.
Up to this point I have never done the Nozzle without flipping over and smashing my knuckles on the rock opposite. There is a nice pool below it so it is not a bad roll but my pride was getting a little bruised. We all got out and discusssed how we would run it, kevin gave some fine points for us to try and I made It!! After the nozzle it was more eddy turns, some boofing practice and we were at our next drop which was the waterfall. The waterfall is a nice little ~6 foot drop that you have to move from right to left on and the only problems is you can’t see your landmarks until you are right on the lip of the fall and if you flip you have enough time for 1 very quick roll and if you dont make it you are dropping into a not very fun section, upside down. people have been hurt on this section so it makes me a little nervous. we all ran it and did fine, I wish I could say the same for the next day. I flipped over rolled up and dropped into doc’s rock backwards, not nervous I know what to do, but why isnt it happening the way I think it should? I’m stuck in a hole and I get flipped and pulled my deck ( i thought I was lodged against something, but I was just really stuck in that hole) any way I got out very easily but my boat proceeded to get hammered in the whole for about 5 more minutes I lost foot pads got a dent in my boat and I ended up walking for a kilometer to Final Rinse where i finally got my boat back. Thanks everybody for the boat recovery help.
After docs is No Show Off a very strong hydraulic that if you quit paddling before it it will flip you so quick. The first time I did the river I walked It because I watched a friend get hammered in their pretty good. anyway No problem this time and we are off to Final Rinse the last drop of the day. Final rinse has multiple lines you can run and is actually pretty fun but it has 1 or two really strong holes. Everyone did really good and we were all done for the day. Time to head home dry off the gear and get ready to repeat for tommorow.
Day 2 was pretty much the same, we had my boat rescue and we checked out a lower section run that most of us ended up not running as it was fast and little room for error. Maybe next year. I can’t remember what it was called cranium or hemmorage or something like that. All in all the course was very good and it was a lot of fun. I would reccomend taking the course to anyone even if you have been paddling for a while or if you were self taught it was a good refresher and I learned some good points as well.
So I bought a gopro session for this course and it was problematic so I never got footage of day 2 as the camera kept turning itself off on day 1 and only worked for 10 minutes on day 2 but we got enough footage that Raoul* made a little video of the event. I ended up taking the camera back as it wasn’t reliable. anyway 1 nice thing of having the camera on is when I got home I could look at the footage and see where I was doing good or making mistakes. It really helped correct some errors I was making without realizing.
*not his real name