Playground
WHEN LOVE COMES TO TOWN, I’M
GOING TO MCNASTY THAT TRAIN. PHOTO: MIKE LEEDS
THE BEST HOLE IN AMERICA
“IT’S THE SICKEST PLAY HOLE probably ever built,” says Ju- nior World Champion freestyle kayaker, Jason Craig. “At least, that I’ve paddled in—and I’ve paddled in a lot.” He compares the top feature
at Kelly’s Whitewater Park to the Ottawa River’s world-class waves, but at Kelly’s, there’s never a line in the eddy. It’s a ghost town a lot of the
time says Craig, who spent a month at the Cascade, Idaho, park last summer—an eerie emptiness that you’d expect to see bustling with big-name boaters
and beginners alike,
based on the quality of white- water. There are four main waves at
Kelly’s and the biggest is Craig’s secret training ground, a hole he says is the best in the country for boosting freestyle scores. The bank is landscaped with boulders that form amphitheater-style
24 | RAPID
WORLD-CLASS WAVES AT KELLY’S WHITEWATER PARK Mark Pickard is the man re-
seating for more than 3,000 spectators near this feature alone, benches that are packed on event weekends when people flood to Kelly’s to join or watch high-level competition. Since it opened in 2010, the
park has hosted two National Kayak Championships and the 2013 Payette River Games, which drew 14,000 people, including a long list of world- class kayakers, to the park for a weekend of SUP and kayak competition. The 2014 Payette River
Games are from June 20 to 22 and have a prize purse of over $100,000, with $10,000 top prizes in both men’s and wom- en’s categories—the biggest money weekend in whitewater history. The events are booming busi-
ness for Cascade, a single-store town that only 1,000 people call home.
sponsible for plopping this world-class whitewater on the map in the middle of Idaho. A retired Wall Street hedge-fund founder, Pickard and his wife Kristina poured funds into the park as an act of philanthropy— a memorial to Kristina’s late sis- ter, Kelly, and an economic jolt for Cascade, a town the New York-Miami Beach couple had fallen in love with. “We’re not paddlers,” says Pick-
ard, who transplants to the area for a few months each year. But a whitewater park was a long- time dream of the community so Pickard worked with a team of engineers to blast through its planning and construction in a matter of months, turning a donated abandoned sawmill site into what he hopes will become a national tourist attraction. Everything at Kelly’s is com- pletely free, and Pickard didn’t
stop with whitewater. Beach vol- leyball courts, an outdoor con- cert area, horseshoe and bocce ball pits and an extravagant visitor’s center are all part of the plan to bring more people to the not-for-profit park, on more than just competition weekends. Between events, the site is
scattered with small groups of local kids attending Kelly’s Acad- emy—a program where fifth- to twelfth-grade students from the area get free lessons from world champs like Craig, who agrees that it’s just a matter of time before the park catches on as a whitewater hotspot. “It feels like paradise. Every
level of paddler would love that whitewater park,” he says, add- ing that it’s only a short drive from Kelly’s to the legendary 15 miles of Class V on the North Fork of the Payette River. It’s “an incredible place to be a kayaker,” he says. EMMA DRUDGE
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