AND HOW THEY CHANGED PADDLING FOREVER
ALEXANDRA FALLS TWIN FALLS TERRITORIAL PARK, NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
WHEN TAO BERMAN successfully cleaned Alber- ta’s 98.4-foot upper Johnston Falls in 1999, the paddling community perked up. Waterfall descents have increasingly gotten higher but this one not only gave hope the century mark could be broken, it was proof a 100-foot drop was really just a matter of the right river, the right levels and the right stuff. Although he was washed from his kayak, in 2002
Tim Gross paddled himself over Oregon’s 101-foot Abiqua Falls, setting a new limit to test. In 2003, sea- soned waterfall runner and extreme steep creeker Ed Lucero serendipitously discovered Alexandra Falls and all the pieces fell into place. Heading into the Northwest Territories for a few
days of surfing on the Slave River, Lucero, then 37, was shown the first major jewel on the fabled Water- fall Route, NWT Highway 1.
“I had no idea Alexandra Falls even existed so
I wasn’t heading out to break any records by any means,” Lucero explained. “Once I saw it, I almost immediately saw the perfect line. It became a cross- roads for me. I went there for a week and a half and plotted out whether or not I should do it.” Topping out at nearly 106 feet, Alexandra Falls
would have been the ideal location to plummet into fame for many paddlers. Lucero saw some- thing more; a 105.6-foot-high soapbox, the ultimate chance to make a statement. He would stand up to fear in the hopes others would too. “We were a country living in fear. We were at war,
people were afraid to live their lives. I stood there and said ‘I think I can make a statement. I think I can make this fall.’ The message was to overcome fear,” he said.
Although he too swam from his boat, the bar was
reset four-and-a-half feet higher. Lucero said he won’t look for a higher drop, but suspects waterfall running will spur on its own in- dustry and technology, pushing the vertical limits even higher. His own experiences led to the intro- duction of a specially armoured PFD, Stohlquist WaterWare’s Mark 1, which he designed for the im- pact of waterfall drops. “The response I got at the bottom of the falls was
incredible and I think a lot of people and manufac- turers are going to want to get in on that. It’s prob- ably going to take on an industry all of its own and who knows how high people will be able to go.” As of presstime, three and a half years later, Lu-
cero’s run on Alexandra Falls remains the highest waterfall paddled and survived. —Neil Etienne
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