Well, I suppose I cannot wait for this weekend to pass before I pen another tale, so I begin to dig through the annals of my brain and into the file labeled Oh Be Joyful Creek. This summer I spent nearly a month touring Colorado and bits of Utah. It was truly epic. Crested Butte, Steam Boat, Copper, Vail, Durango, Moab, it was a pleasurful pilgramage to the holiest churches of outdoor adventure. There are many tales to be told, but I begin my Colorado dialogue with a little gem near the town of Crested Butte.
Oh Be Joyful Creek drops around five hundred feet per mile. It is fed by snow melt draining the steep mountains surrounding the town of Crested Butte. My soon to be bride, Shannon, was gracious enough to travel around the vistas of Colorado with me while my eyeballs were perma-popped out of my skull, and my jaw continually drug alonside the highway as we drove by the most serious whitewater I had seen yet. We slept in the back of the sea foam green Expedition in the town of Salida while attending Fibark, pounding a few blue moons, and watching some of the best playboaters around throw serious air in the town play hole. Salida is a sweet town, it has an authentic artistic tone, with an air that it exists on the edge of greatness. I look forward to future trips to Fibark, but this time, the only thing I had on my mind the entire time we were in Salida was the monster slides that were waiting three hours away.
The journey from Salida to Crested Butte wound over Monarch Pass. The region is remote, austere, and absolute bliss. The sunlight lilted among the aspen trees as their leaves danced with the wind. Aspen trees quickly became my favorite type of tree. The way they move in unison creates an ephemeral atmosphere with a signature of grace. At one point we stopped the truck on the side of the road. I stepped out of the car and stood in silence in a warm valley dabbled with grass and draped with puffy white clouds, just to breath in the purity of silence. In a world of constant calamity, it is not often one can stand in the shadow of silence and breathe a breath of stillness.
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Past Gunnison and straight into Crested Butte, my heart developed a condition of pleasantry as I stared at the incredible spires of rock rising about the horizon of town. The road to Oh Be Joyful was just outside of town, but it was getting dark and we needed sleep. We decided to rest our bones in an old inn, reminiscent of an old alpine tavern and the feel of a campfire toasted with warm marshmallows.
In the morning we opened our eyes to sunshine and crisp mountain air. I wandered outside in the chill of the morning and grabbed my toothbrush out of my pack. I noticed the orange glow of the sun, hidden behind a still snowpacked peak, about to show its face and grin at the sight of the world below. Shannon was excited about the prospect of a mountain bike ride in the hills.
We threw our stuff back into the Expedition and wandered off down the road to Oh Be Joyful. A trail of dust leapt in great travails behind our truck, the aspens shook, and we stared to our left, down a steep slope, into an alpine wetland sprinkled with big beaver dams that appeared like rustic cabins. It was original.
We pulled into Oh Be Joyful campground and parked beside the frigid Slate river. I got out of the truck and stared at the translucent black. I felt like I was finally home. There is a philosphical notion of home that transends human rationality on a metaphysical level. It is difficult to describe, and for all of us the notion of what home is appears different, but when we feel it, we just know. We know in a way that gives goosebumps and touches the depths of our soul. It is something that seems to reach out and touch the notion of our very existence, and if not just for a moment, make sense of the ever plaguing existential questions of humanity.
Just then, as if out of thin air, I looked up and saw Phil Porter. I met Phil a few days earlier on the upper reaches of the Eagle River. Phil was a soulful man, you could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. He had an alluring passion for the wildnerness and the rivers that breathed life into the landscape. His smile was contagious and he made his way toward me once he spotted me. Before we spoke, we already knew that we were partners in an epic endeavor, our journey down a mountainside, screaming along in frothy white foam, skipping over metamorphic rock and into the oblivion of concious thought. The conversation ensued, but when it comes down to it, in life, words are mostly unimportant. It is movement and action that defines us. We grabbed our boats, attached ropes to our grabloops and proceeded to tow our boats up the steep two miles of trailhead to the put in. Stephanie, Phil's girlfriend, and Shannon followed along in cheeful delight. I sometimes wonder about the female perspective of men in boats, especially those that do not participate in river running. When fully suited kayakers are reminscent of knights in armor, modern warriors off to battle the elements and follow a quest in their search for unrequited love. It is a romantic world, painted with paddles as swords, boats as horses, elbow pads as metal, and the riverbed the ever present element of suprise always ready to reveal the true nature of courage in the depths of a man.
We wobbled past an unbelievable steepness, a kind I never before laid eyes upon. The sweat dripped off our brows and we unintentionally kicked up clouds of brown dirt as the neoprene from our booties seemed to melt into our flesh. When at last we reached the put-in, I was shocked to find that our run would begin backwards, facing upstream, a mere ten feet above a twenty foot shear waterfall.
Phil slid into his boat, an intense look seared on his face. He knew the full extent of his actions. To paddle a river of this nature, you must believe you are a dragon rider. He took a wide right stroke peeled out into the main current and with a flash disappeared over the horizon line, off the face of the earth and into the abyss. It was time to face the beast.
My hands shook and my lips quivered. I searched for reasons, but I only came up with questions. The only answer... paddle like mad. I took a wide right stroke, the current grabbed my loins, squeezed my balls until they were the size of grapenuts. On line, I took a big boof stroke off the lip. There were no thoughts, only transcedental notions of God. I landed with a smack. The spray cleared and I saw Phil, a smile stretched from ear to ear. We pushed on. It felt as if the bottom of the world dropped out. The next big slide: high speeds, chewed plastic, gritted teeth, efervescent laughter, big bumps, grinding paddle blades, all in an instant. A large eddy at the bottom and we halted to a stop. The creek continued on like this for what seemed like hours, days, months, years, or perhaps something else entirely. The next big rapid, the second one of the big three that clearly stand out in mental imagery was just around the bend.
The approach was complicated. A thirty foot high angled slide with a right angle, a hard left turn between two rocks that resembled angel wings, a hard right through a bit of a boulder field, straight ahead, and just before taking the plunge, a wide right stroke turning your craft ninety degrees before falling thirty feet into a cauldron of bubbly nirvana.
The girls waited in view high on the cliffside, a surreal scene, smiling and waving, existing on an entirely different universal brane, exceedingly more complicated than the rivery world where I stood still, listnening to my heart thump inside the cavity of ribs, knowing full well that any quiver of hesitation, anything less than total concentration, would result in a broken ankles, a broken back, or worse a cracked skull and an untimely watery grave. I thought... be the dragon.
I moved out of the warm womb of my eddy and committed. Once you commit there is no going back. It is a beautiful thing really, unlike all other decisions one is faced with in life, completely uneffected by the pathetic indecisions of concious thoughts. You cannot go back, you cannot stop the desire of the river to press ever onward, motivated by gravity, with an unstoppable desire to reach the calm of the sea. Down the slide, bear left, through the angel wings, a hard right, straight ahead, and the crux of the move. I dipped my blade stared over the edge and pulled right. My boat twisted, my muscles twitched, my breath stopped, and for a moment I was able to warp the fabric of space. The nose of my boat pierced the surface of water and plunged deep. I was completely submerged, but hit the line perfectly. I turned around and stared at the falls behind me. The river growled and I screamed in delight. I had tossled its mane, but we were not yet finished.
Again, we pressed on into the unknown. The next series of drops: a twist, a right stroke into a steep face off an eight foot falls turning right while in mid-air, a boulder garden, a few more slides and into an eddy above a great precipice. Avalanche.
It is difficult to describe the enormity of Avalanche. When you begin the drop, you cannot see the bottom. Not only is it long, but it is steep, not quite vertical, but not far from it. The river is shallow and the rocks are sharp. The idea of losing control and flipping upside down was not fathomable. It would result in spilled blood. The stakes were high, but we were almost home. Avalanche empties into a large pool above a thirty foot before. There is a hole at the bottom and all of the outflow presses against a pile of logs that could build a home. It was time. Phil did not deliberate. He slid off into the distance, guns blaring, flags flying. It was impossible to see the outcome from my vantage point. I followed soon after, knowing that any notions of control were a mere illusion. I held my paddle ready to battle the rock beneath the watery veil. I skipped along at speeds that brought tears to my eyes. My paddle was reduced to half its size as I smashed into the first hole in the middle of the slide. I twisted sideways and the nerves felt like ice on my spine. I slammed my paddle against the rock to my left and straightened out. I began to fall down the final stretch when a tiny rock decided to once again reorient my boat. I crashed into the hold sideways and was immediately turned upside down. In a flash I was right side up and almost by intution reached for the eddy where Phil waited.
The smiles stretched wide across the skies and we slid through the treachery of sticks into river feed below and made our way to the far bank where we carried up a slippery slope and back to the safety of the girls.
That night there was talk of greatness and the unknown. There were visions of what lie ahead in the coming days on the creeks in the area. Oh Be Joyful creek is a bastion of sanity in a wild world. It is most notable how the world has changed since the days when the west was first settled. People lived to survive. They worried about food, water, shelter, the basic questions of survival. In those days, the world was wild in a way that pitted the survival of man against the elements. Today, the world is wild in an entirely new and different way. Our manipulation of the natural world, the taming of the great wild, has led to a society constantly connected with each other, but disconnected from the world around. Our worries about basic necessities are few and far between, just what we always wanted, but for some reason there is something missing. There is an internal desire in the human psyche that seeks to push itself, because in those instances of despair, it is then that we know life fully and completely. Only then can we fully appreciate the miracle of what we are.
As I lay in my sleeping bag that evening, safely curled next to Shannon, I painted pictures on the inside of my skull of what was waiting in the darkness, a rapid ready to demonize and mutilate us upon the eve of the morrow. Rip Your Head Off.
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