W
e haven’t been on the river two hours and things are already bor- derline unmanageable.
With the level at a raging 20,000 cfs, ed-
dies have disappeared and the rapids flow one straight into the next. Austin Rathman, my good friend and sole partner in this ad- venture, and I somehow make it to camp one, over-adrenalized but safe for the time being. We pitch our tent just as torrential rains be- gin that will dump through the night. The next morning we face a tough deci-
sion: Continue downstream on one of the continent’s hardest rivers at a level that is already too high and surely rising fast, or at- tempt a three-day hike out through northern Canada’s remote, grizzly-infested wilder- ness, where we may get lost, frozen or eaten.
• ••
When I started kayaking and first heard about the Grand Canyon of the Stikine, considered by many the Everest of rivers, my imagination ran as wild as the class V rapids I made my goal to one day challenge. I be- came captivated—friends and family would say obsessed—with the river. I learned about every trip down the canyon. Rob Lesser led the first team into the gorge
in 1981, running most of the river at a very high level but pulling out short of a complete descent. Four years later, Lesser
returned
with a smaller team and helicopter support to realize the descent. In 1990, Lesser, Tom Shibig and Doug Ammons made the first self-supported descent, redefining expedi- tion kayaking. Then, in 1992, Ammons completed a daring solo run, a feat often compared in paddling circles to Reinhold Messner’s solo of Everest. Thirty years and over 30 expeditions on,
Stikine trips still face only about a 50 per- cent success rate. Many crews have been forced to climb out of the gorge, sometimes in the most dramatic manner. In 1989, a barefoot Bob McDougall free climbed hun- dreds of feet up the vertical walls above Entrance Falls after nearly drowning in the rapids below. These stories gripped me. I studied topo
maps of the area and berated friends with tales of a canyon so deep that almost no sun reaches the bottom. A canyon where the only way through is to survive 100 kilome- ters of some of the most treacherous, most remote whitewater on earth. As I grew better and more experienced,
the trip migrated from distant fantasy to real possibility. After three years gaining ex- perience in multi-day expedition boating, I thought I was ready.
• •• »
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