what if…
YOUR TRIP MATE IS A DANGEROUS LUNATIC? I
c a s e s t u d y HELL IN HIGH WATER sWimming above a WaTerFall
Seconds can feel like an eternity in moments of adversity—a phenomenon that’s usually a stroke of luck for those involved. In the spring of 1996, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario-based boaters Jorma Paloniemi and Mike Petzold, Czech ex-pat Stan Chladek and two Americans had a close call on the Dog River, a remote, 40-kilometre-long class IV-V overnighter that flows into Lake Superior west of Wawa. Chladek, now 72, was tripped up by a boiling eddyline, leading to a harrowing rescue above a powerful waterfall. Petzold tells the story better than anyone.
mense. We couldn’t recognize any of the rapids or the portages because it was so big. We made it through the first day, and on the second day we hit some of the bigger stuff in the section we call The Canyon. “I was leading, being carried downstream by massive wave trains, knowing that there was something really powerful just downstream. I ed- died out right above a big, billowing drop; imme- diately below there was an even bigger falls. I sig- nalled to the guys upstream to eddy-out or die. “Everyone made it into the eddy above the falls
“W
except Stan, who was the last in line. He hit the ed- dyline and flipped, tried to roll, missed and came out of his boat. We had seconds to rescue him. “Jorma tossed a rope and missed. I wound up,
threw and hit him dead-on. But I made a huge mis- take: I dropped my paddle. Stan started hauling on the rope and I prepared to swing him in to shore. Then I looked down and noticed my paddle was gone. I thought, this one stupid mistake is going to kill me. I dropped the line and somehow man- aged to hand-paddle my way back into the eddy.
e got to the put-in, gauged the water level and realized that things were im-
I remember watching Stan obliviously pulling in the now free-floating rope like a cartoon character, drifting closer and closer to the falls. “Somehow, Jorma had also drifted out of the
eddy and was floating downstream towards Stan—a fortunate accident. Stan grabbed onto his back deck and Jorma muscled him to shore, right at the brink. “So far we had escaped death. But the weather
was cold, foggy and raining; Stan’s boat was long gone (we later learned that its disfigured hull was discovered weeks after by a fisherman on Lake Superior); and we still had kilometres of difficult whitewater and portaging ahead just to make it to Lake Superior, where we’d arranged to be picked up by a powerboat. “I hurried ahead of the group but we’d missed
our pick-up so I paddled 18 kilometres on Lake Superior in fog, darkness and two-metre waves to get to the nearest road. Jorma and Joe [an open- boater who was also on the trip] rigged a quick- release catamaran with their boats to float Stan down the easier sections, but for the most part Stan bushwhacked his way to the river mouth. The shuttle boat picked up a near-hypothermic Stan and the others the next day.” —As Told to Conor Mihell
» analysis: Chladek admits that he was prepared to die when he was
drifting towards the falls, and the fact is the rescue threatened the lives of both Petzold and Paloniemi. Though Petzold was familiar with the river at typical water levels, flood conditions had rendered it virtually unrecognizable, pushing everyone to their limits. Survival was the result of skill and a healthy amount of luck.
f you trip in the wilderness for long enough, you will eventually encoun-
ter the Hazardous Trip Mate (HTM). The HTM can include, but is not lim- ited to, epic-collectors, self-seekers and sociopaths. Oblivious neophytes on wilderness river trips test more than the patience and mettle of their trip mates; they jeopardize the safety of the whole group. Wilderness survival is 20 per cent
hard skills and 80 per cent psychol- ogy. If you don’t pick up on the tiny nu- ances—the painful grimace, the fuck- you smirk or the “Please help me I’m gonna die” look on the faces of your friends, trip mates or clients—you’ll have trouble brewing in no time. And like an untreated blister at the begin- ning of a trip, it will blossom into a trip- and group-imperilling disaster if not dealt with swiftly. After more than 300 expeditions,
I’ve had to deal with every imaginable phobia and psychotic dysfunction and I can attest that the only difference be- tween a guide and a psychoanalyst is the paycheque. Put people who are not accustomed to isolation, hard physical labour, danger, fear, bugs and unpre- dictable elements on a river 300 kilo- metres from the nearest road and these phobias will surface faster than you can say “There’s no place like home.”
deal WiTH iT: So what do you do with a hazardous head-case on trip? Well, if psychotherapy fails, a satellite phone and GPS can make evacuating the challenging individual an option.
avoid iT: Of course, all this ignores the number one wilderness river trip- ping rule of thumb: don’t trip with people you don’t know. If you must, try to take a short test trip before the main event to see how your prospec- tive trip mate behaves on the river and in the group.
HAP WILSON is the author of Trails & Tribulations, a compendium of mishaps spanning a 30-year wilderness guiding career. He’s also researched, penned and illus- trated several paddling guidebooks and lives in Muskoka, Ontario. His latest book, Grey Owl and Me, is available from Dundurn Press.
www.rapidmag.com 33
PHOTO: RYAN CREARY
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