Down the Creek, cont'd

AMC Outdoors, March 2006

Creeks tend to be steep, constricted and inaccessible. On the international scale of river difficulty, most rate a Class IV ("intense, powerful but predictable rapids requiring precise boat handling in turbulent water") or Class V ("extremely long, obstructed, or very violent rapids," requiring "a very reliable Eskimo roll, proper equipment, extensive experience, and practiced rescue skills"). On such rivers, there is no greater currency than trust: Trust in one's ability, in one's judgment, and especially in one's companions. Kayakers almost never paddle alone, because they must rely on one another for rescue if anything goes wrong.

"One of my favorite parts of boating, and especially creeking, is how willing we are to help each other see new places," says Urban. Adam Craig, an internationally ranked mountain bike racer and one of New England's most accomplished creekboaters, guided Urban on his first Gulf Hagas run. In most sports a 24-year-old hotshot sharing an adventure with a 50-something dilettante would seem an oddity. In kayaking it's only strange because the roles are reversed- more often it's the older paddlers dispensing river lore to the young bucks. Urban started paddling at 46 with his son Dustin, then 12. The younger Urban has gone on to become one of the world's premier kayakers, paddling professionally for Dagger Kayak's Team D.

For those with the requisite skills, creek boating grants access to some of the most secluded and beautiful landscapes in the Northeast. These streams traverse areas with no trail or road access, often-as is the case with Gulf Hagas-at the bottom of dramatic, steep-walled gorges. These streams become like trails open only to those with the skill and daring to traverse them.

At its best, creekboating also challenges kayakers to interact with nature in its purest form. A creek in flood is a force of nature; the payoff for kayakers who venture onto these streams is to sample nature's humbling, impersonal power-a reward paddlers only can obtain if they work with the river's tremendous force rather than against it. "What do I get out of it?" asks J.J. Valera of Windsor, N.H., a kayaking pioneer who was pictured running Billings Falls on the cover of the May 1994 issue of AMC Outdoors. "I get a rush. It's like going into combat, but nobody's shooting bullets at you."

Paddlers who venture onto the Northeast's most challenging creeks assume isolation, exposure, and reliance on their teammates as a matter of course. But just as there is a mountain for every mountaineer, there's a stream to fit every paddler's skill and ambition. Most climbers would have considerably more fun on Katahdin than on K2, and many kayakers eschew the steep creeks in favor of playboating and the ample middle ground that downriver runs like Maine's Class III-IV Kennebec Gorge provide. Urban, a skilled paddler who is capable of paddling Class V creeks, chooses to paddle them only occasionally. Yet he's a creekboater because he relishes paddling narrow, technically demanding streams and hiking the backcountry to scout them in the off-season.

Creekboaters are indeed a breed apart, and never is the dichotomy more acute then when spring precipitation lashes the mountains for days on end. When hiking trails run with muddy water, the snow is too rotten to ski and even the hardiest outdoorsmen hunker in front of the cabin fi re, creekers' ambitions become charged with possibility. Predicting which streams will come alive with just the right amount of water is a cultish obsession among kayakers, says Hanlon, who as a flood-control specialist for the Army Corps of Engineers was once the best-informed creeking enthusiast in the Northeast. Now that USGS streamfl ow data are available online, all boaters can draw on the same wealth of information, he says.

The improved information hasn't put an end to the practice of driving the back roads for hours in the pelting rain to find a creek at just the perfect level, but it has refi ned the process considerably. Each creek without a web-enabled gauge has its own arcane formula, passed down from one generation of creekers to another like the star songs that guided Polynesian mariners across the Pacific. (According to the lore of Gulf Hagas, the creek becomes passable when the water is four inches below the river-right abutment footing of the put-in bridge.) Like many Northeast runs, Gulf Hagas not a creek, often runs in late spring or after heavy rain. Paddlers have developed a correlation with the nearby Piscataquis River, which boasts a web-accessible gauge. When the Piscataquis is high or rising, the streamflow gurus tell us, the Gulf Hagas is likely to have water.