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Gauleyfest
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I’d
never been to Gauleyfest before but it turned out to be
everything I’d been warned about and hoping for: a
madhouse of all-day debauchery, both on the river and at
the festival. From Thursday through Saturday, cars and trucks
with kayaks and canoes poured into Summersville from both
directions, day and night. There were boaters filling all
the restaurants, boaters filling all the hotels and motels,
boaters filling all the parking spots, and boaters filling
all the eddies. And there were boaters filling the festival
grounds until 1am, drinking, telling stories, laughing and
carrying on. It’s safe to say I wasn’t prepared
for any of it, but I had a fantastic time. |
I learned
how to boat in Idaho, and haven’t really strayed too far
from home since. In all my experience, I’d never seen so
many people try to get down the same river in a day. I’m
trying not to exaggerate when I say that more people ran the Upper
Gauley in that one Saturday than ran the Lochsa here in Idaho
all last season. There were a hundred people standing on the shore,
watching people run Pillow Rock and cheering when anyone botched
a line and got stuck in the Room of Doom. These were non-boaters,
who’d hiked in, just for this. There were 20 kayakers in
an eddy, lined up to surf a half-decent wave at Insignificant.
I saw someone or another swim through every major rapid except
Sweet’s Falls.
Just madness.
And
despite the spectacle, or perhaps because of it, I got to see East
Coast river running at its finest. Squirt boating is still a fairly
rare occurrence where I live, but it seemed like every third car
had an Angst or a Bigfoot strapped to the top. Ditto for open whitewater
canoes. I could feel the air of history as I floated down through
the rapids that so many people had run before me. William Neely
and the Snyder brothers had been here. And Chris Spelius and Pablo
Perez. I was following Corran Addison through Iron Ring and Brian
Kirk through Lost Paddle. The traditions of boating out there are
much older and more developed. The Gauley is the river
on the East Coast, and people flock there just to be part of the
history, especially when American Whitewater is handing out free
beer at their festival booth.
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There’s
less of that on the rivers where I’m from. (The history
and the free beer.) We have the solitude of the NF Clearwater,
where on a fine blue Saturday in May, a group of three can
find themselves the only boaters on the water. We have world-class
creeks that see maybe ten or twenty boaters in a season. We
also have the relative crowds of the Lochsa and the SF Payette,
but they haven’t become institutions the way the Gauley
has. I can’t feel the heartbeat of the whitewater culture
out here in the West the way I could just in my short time
in West Virginia. In Idaho we’re out on the fringes,
getting our correspondence and updates via the Pony Express
and by reading BoaterTalk.
It’s
a trade-off, I guess. There’s a lot to like about the
vast, under-populated state of Idaho, and I doubt I’ll
leave anytime soon. But the Gauley River opened my eyes to
a part of the whitewater world that I’d only read about,
and couldn’t really imagine. I’m glad to be home,
but I’ll remember Gauleyfest fondly. There was something
about being that close to whitewater Mecca that made me feel
a part of something important. |
Ellis
Cucksey
NRS Customer Satisfaction and Team NRS Kayaker
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