A crew of eight Wired staffers — writers, photographers and videographers — has head up into the hills of Northern California to test a fresh crop of this season’s outdoor apparel and gear. For the finale, the group climbs in a raft to hit the whitewater rapids in gold country. Nathan recounts the day’s events for us.
Adieu, Wired Spring Camp, adieu. Saturday, on top of our regular scramble to get out of the house, we had to pack up the cars and eat as many leftovers as possible before heading back toward San Francisco. But we had one important detour: Placerville, gateway to the rapids on the south fork of the American River.
I’m an outdoorsy person. I’ve lived outside for literally months at a time. But I’ve never been whitewater rafting until today. The closest I’ve come was an ill-fated trip down a Class 3 on a $5 Wal-Mart inner tube. So when I learned we’d be dropping in to class 4-plus river rapids, I was stoked to rage some white water.
We bussed up the river to meet our guide, Margaret, who showed us how to paddle and how to tuck our feet into the yellow rubber rafts so we wouldn’t fall out. Eight of us, plus Margaret, packed into the raft, decked out in PFDs, hats, glasses, swimsuits, waterproof cameras, and enough sunscreen to drown a small river town.
Drama struck early, as oft-beleaguered reviews editor Michael toppled out when we struck a rock in our first class 3 rapid, a section named “Meat Grinder.” Margaret grabbed his life jacket, I grabbed hers, and we tugged him back in — minus his Oakland A’s cap — before we’d made it back to calm water. I have no idea what everyone else in the boat was doing, but I imagine they were paddling furiously to avoid the rocks, holes, and standing waves.
In between whitewater, Margaret told us about the river. She’d interrupt with stroke calls — “forward two times,” “left side, back one” — or to identify birds. This is where gold was first discovered in California, kicking off the 1849 rush, and we spotted some other tourists on the shore, panning. Nowadays, the river is controlled by a dam owned by Pacific Gas & Electric, the regional utilities company. Sometimes, Margaret says, when people come home on a hot evening and turn on their air conditioners en masse, PG&E pushes more water through the dam’s turbines to meet the increased demand, nearly doubling the typical 1,600 cubic feet per second of the river’s flow. It’s tough to imagine what these rapids would look like, but she says some sections get rougher while others are more submerged and become less challenging.
Meat Grinder was the lesser of our two big rapids. From the front of the boat, Bradley and Adam pulled us into the next, Troublemaker. It sounds more like something your mom called you when you got your nice clothes dirty by climbing a tree, but we were already a bit on-edge. Margaret walked us through the plan: Lean into the first rock at the corner, or else we’ll ride up on it and tip over. Then, steer the boat around the rock sticking out of the water right in the middle of the run (the rock’s name is “gunsight”) and you’re home free. Easy.
This time, it worked. I wouldn’t call it easy, but I’d like to believe we made it look that way. The biggest of the rapids behind us, it was time for lunch on shore.
After lunch, the river chilled out a bit, and so did we. Michael bumped some funky soul out of a waterproof Bluetooth speaker. We focused on the sun and the water, trying not to think about driving back to the city.
And then, too soon, it was over. Sun-kissed (or burned), drained, and a bit dehydrated, but not yet ready, we split up into our cars and said goodbye. Over the last three days we’ve been burned, soaked, scratched, scraped, and bruised. Hopefully we learned something along the way — if not about ourselves, then at least about the tools you take on a river-rafting, mountain-biking, hiking adventure.
