After a few great days on the Raven fork Jared and myself checked the new playboats out at the eternity hole near Sylva NC. Big loops, crazy phonix cartnasty wheel things, and old school ends where thrown out there! Stoked to have good toyz!!!
Jed, Loki, demshitz Jared and Dave.. eternity hole from David Fusilli on Vimeo.
by Clay Lucas
We headed up to Fayetteville Thursday night, and after sleeping in the car all night, started on one of the best days of kayaking I can remember. We started the day early on Mill Creek as a warm up. After a quick bomb down with a bunch of sweet lines off the 20 footer in the middle, we headed back up top, only to find another group with a member with a hurt back below the waterfall. Determining they needed help, we quickly got across the river stabilizing the guy and calling in the paramedics for evacuation. It turned out he had severely broken back!
Not letting that incident damper our spirits, we headed over to Manns creek to meet up with Matt, Jay, and John. Manns was incredible and goes in my top 3 runs for sure! 5 miles of bombing non-stop boulder gardens with incredible boofs in every rapid led into the New River Gorge, where we ran 3 miles of the gorge at 40,0000 cfs!
By the time we reached the takeout, it was still only about 4:00, so we figured while we were there and had the chance, we might as well take advantage of the good water levels, so we headed down the road a few minutes to the New River Dries. Finding the huge waves at the put in, an epic surf session ensued, followed by running out the 5 mile big water run to cap the day off! Fayetteville is an awesome destination for kayaking when the water levels are right.
Enjoy the video!
A Day in West Virginia from Clay Lucas on Vimeo.
Getting ready for the tour that I have planned for this summer is stressful, getting all of our gear squished in the RV while training in the process. Its already mid March and we have competed in one event. The Alabama Mountain Games is a great trial run for the rest of the season. The event this year was awesome and it was more about hanging out and having fun then the competition, even though 10 extremely competitive paddlers can make anything competitive.
Once we hit Bama we took a tour of the Guntersville lake on our Boardworks SHUBU inflatable paddle boards. This was a great way to relax before the weekend of festivities began. On Friday we competed in the Short Creek waterfall Competition that had freestyle and boater-cross events. I attempted a few wave wheels and seat belt grabs off the water fall to impress the judges. The boater cross was a mass start with 3 ladies running the 20 foot waterfall and sprinting behind the curtain of the falls to touch a rock first. I played it safe by hanging back and avoiding the carnage by taking the path of least resistance to get behind the curtain. I ended up winning by playing it safe. The paddle out was entertaining with about 20 people paddling down a low water manky creek in playboats. Not to mention the four mile flat water paddle out.
When we got to the festival we enjoyed the bands, slacklined, and had a mellow night considering we all dropped over 100 feet and had a painful paddle out. Saturday was action packed with the freestyle event, SUP cross, and the 5-mile down river sprint. The event was held at Kings Bend which was a great location for spectators and competitors. We had space to hang out and enjoy the warm weather. The freestyle was fun with a different judging system than I am used to and a tricky feature. I got second place with throwing some big loops, godzillas, and cartwheels.
Right after the freestyle was the SUP-Cross, a mass start half mile sprint with three buoy turns. Emily Jackson and I were the only females to take on the ten other guys. I had a great time running over the event organizer Keith Yell. My Badfish MCIT keeps me dry and coming in 6th place and 1st for the ladies. After the event we had a impromptu to surf session. With warm water and good friends it was awesome getting some surfs and hanging out. The day was not finished…Emily convinced me to do the 5-mile paddle that was supposed to be some flat water and whitewater that took us back to the festival. Good thing Emily and I paddled together during the event because it turned out to be 6.5 miles of flat water and .5 miles of whitewater. So we chatted the whole time which made it less painful.
To finish the night off we all played on the slackline with some awesome music and had our awards ceremony. This event makes me realize that the reason why I compete and travel is not only about pushing myself to place well, but its about spending time with friends. Now I am super fired up to train for the next month before the NOC Shootout!
Well, we’ve now had a week straight of record high temps (in some places by over 20 degrees). Apparently we skipped right past spring (typically in April) to the hottest part of summer here in New England. Conveniently enough, I got the week off work, so I’ve been paddling every day since spring started 2.5 weeks ago. A solid week of training attaining the White River before melt got going was a good start to the season, but now we’re fully into creeking and I’ve been taking a lot of days off training. Going downstream is so much easier! Good thing the water’s running out or it’d seriously get in the way of my attainments.
Driving through the hole that’s been guarding the waterfall entry to the Birth Canal since Hurricane Irene.
In the last five days, I’ve run the Middlebury Gorge four times, the New Haven 3, the Sawyer, Johns Brook, the Branch, and the North Branch Winooski (two laps). For those that don’t know…the Middlebury, the Sawyer, and Johns Brook are three of the best runs in New England (and they’re damn good on a more global scale, too).
Ryan Mooney hits the elusive boof off Fallopian. First time anyone did this year.
The Middlebury Gorge consists of a 2-4 drop bedrock sequence (depending on how you define “drop”) with sheer, overhanging walls and big undercuts, followed by a mile and a half of excellent boulder gardens. The gorge itself is called The Birth Canal. The lines are surprisingly volatile as rocks seem to fall into the gorge with every big rainstorm. In the last five years, the entry waterfall has gone from beautiful water boof with optional rock-spin on river right to challenging but doable flake boof to near-impossible plug-and-aim-for-the-right-room-as-it’s-less-undercut. The second rapid, Cunnilingus, spent almost a year as a phenomenal 7 foot spout with a great boof into an eddy…and then turned back into a pile of rocks. The exit to the Birth Canal, Rebirth, has pretty much always been a piece of crap with a terrifying undercut in the runout called the Catcher’s Mitt. Hurricane Irene made the Catcher’s Mitt less of an issue, but the drop is literally a pile of rocks with just about no line and a sieve on one side. Drop in, let it do what it needs to you (usually something you don’t want to talk about later), and then surf out of the hole at the bottom into the light at the end of the gorge.
Dropping in. I try to block out the next 2 seconds from my memory…miraculously, I came flying over the bottom hole in a stern squirt this time.
The “runout” of the gorge is hardly that — it’s another mile and a half of great paddling, with hidden boofs all over the place.
The North Branch Winooski is another VT gem, often overlooked as its hard to catch with water. I was lucky enough to get on it twice in the last week, once low and once high. It’s a little bit of an anomaly for VT as it’s a pool drop waterfall run, much different from the standard steep, bouldery or tight-bedrock VT staples.
Christian Woodard running Double Drop on the North Branch Winooski.
Johns Brook in New York is another incredible run, one that I’ve been trying to get on for years but that has very touchy water levels (read: almost never high enough) and is 2.5 hours from my house. Matt Harrison and I headed over to Johns last Monday only to find it marginally low around noon…so we went and ran The Branch, another new-to-me and quite fun run in the Adirondacks. Upon returning to Johns a few hours later, we found a nice med-low level and put on from the Garden trailhead (you can hike further up if you want). Runs like this are my favorite kind of kayaking — super steep boulder gardens with lots of big boofs.
Put in, bounce down about 50 feet of shallow boogie, drop this Six Foot Boof (the namesake of the rapid), drive right into a slot, boof some other things…and keep boofing for the next few miles to the takeout.
The Sawyer in NH is very similar to Johns, although is a somewhat bigger riverbed and has more bedrock to it. I’ll forgo the lengthy description and leave y’all with this picture of Colby Cook on a beautiful 80 degree summer day (March 21, 2012).
Colby Cook finagling down the steep boulder garden that is the Sawyer River.
Nick Gottlieb
This Spring we are pleased to bring you two new Organic Cotton t-shirt designs from the Astral mothership.
Here’s the low-down:
1. Astral Perspective:
This design is a tribute to the style of the very first hang tags our now in-house designer, Kris collaborated on with Philip Curry back in 06.
The style itself was initially inspired by our designers love for weird quirky IDM music and the algorithmic design aesthetic associated with that community. A good example of this is Autechres’ CichiliSuite ep.
For the nerdy: each letter of the Astral logo is transformed and pattern blended over a specified number of steps. But fear not, you don’t need to speak weird techno-jargon in order to show your love for astral with this 100% organic cotton T.
color: black
sizes: men’s small-xlarge
$22.95
2. Since 1235
A slightly sillier shirt paying homage to those who earned their right to sleep in after a long day of play. The art was liberally borrowed from ‘ ‘ Das Ständebuch” or The Book of Trades a collection of 1568 woodcuts by Jost Amman showing the different trades available in 15th century Germany.
While riverplay and drinking beer isn’t acknowledged as a official profession by Das Standebuch with a little imagination you can create an alternate reality where this was not only a real trade, but also a really great idea!
color: white
sizes: men’s small-xlarge
$22.95
Process: These designs are printed on 100% organic cotton econscious t-shirts using discharge printing. Discharge printing is a specialty, water based process that deactivates the dyes in natural fabrics, similar to a ‘bleached’ effect. The result is a fully breathable, soft material which will not fade, crack, or peel over time (plus it looks really cool!). Discharge inks do not contain toxic PVCs or Pthalates found in traditional plastisol inks. Printing was done by our friends over at TeamScum.
