New England’s summer paddling season, which is based primarily on scheduled releases from hydroelectric dams, has seen far less change. So far. Though global warming grabs the headlines, the corresponding change in precipitation patterns will likely have the greater effect—both on New England boaters and human civilization at large, Kimball says. “We’ll see warmer summers and we may see less rainfall, which could change the amount of water available for scheduled dam releases,” he says.

Dams have been a mixed blessing for whitewater boaters in New England. The region boasts a number of excellent dam-fed rapids, providing everything from relatively easy Class II whitewater to powerful Class IV sections. And you can set your watch by any of them. This abundance of reliable and predictable whitewater during the warm summer months has been instrumental in the growth of whitewater kayaking, says Northeast kayaking  pioneer J.J. Valera.

The abundance of rapids in New England is the result of efforts by a coalition of paddlers and nonprofit groups. AMC has worked hand-in-hand with the river advocacy group American Whitewater since 1988. Using the federal dam  relicensing process, the groups secured whitewater releases on such rivers as the Deer- field, Penobscot, and Kennebunk. Their efforts have secured 642 guaranteed “paddling days” each year on six different river reaches and protected 49.5 miles of waterways and more than 20,000 acres of riparian land. The agreements also provided more than $1 million in enhancement funds and an additional $600,000 worth of improvements for paddlers.

Come mid-summer, dams are often a paddler’s best friend. But that doesn’t mean boaters like them. On the contrary, almost every whitewater enthusiast also practices the indoor sport of bad-mouthing dams and those who build them. The reason goes back to my experience on the Upper Yough, and the sight of the de-watered river just hours later: that tremendous force of nature emasculated by the press of a button. That’s what dams do. They take away the wonder of rivers, so much of which is rooted in their unpredictability, in their wildness.

Paddlers love to say you can’t paddle the same river twice. But that old cliché falls flat when applied to dam-controlled streams, on which the flow is regulated to the last cubic foot per second, scheduled years in advance, and reported on the Internet. And that means crowds. “You can plan a trip around a scheduled release. Go to the Deerfield any weekend in the summer, and there are hundreds of people there,” the Army Corps’ Hanlon says.

Though dams sometimes make rivers more accessible to whitewater paddlers, they also bury portions of the rivers under their reservoirs. And once you drown a river gorge, you can’t ever get it back. While the American love affair with dams is ending, the world is now experiencing the greatest dam-building boom in history. China, laced with great rivers comparable to our own Colorado, is leading the charge. The Three Gorges Dam is already finished; its reservoir will drown 350 miles of the Yangtze River, displacing more than 3 million people. All across the vast Tibetan highlands, the great canyons of the Himalaya are steadily being stopped up with billions of tons of concrete.

In the last decade, whitewater boaters from around the world have begun to descend on China, seeking to make the first—and often the last—descents of China’s great rivers. A young adventurer named Travis Winn has been in the vanguard, notching several first descents in China, and more important, learning to navigate the Chinese bureaucracy to protect the remaining rivers. “My Chinese partner Na Ming Hui and I have started a company in China called Last Descents, with the intent of raising river conservation awareness in China through river running,” says the 22-year-old, who is fluent in Chinese. “The hope is, of course, to work to make sure that these rivers aren’t last descents, but that may be more of a dream than a reality.”

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