AMC Outdoors, March 2007

Rivers connect us with the natural world. But unnatural forces are increasingly dictating the experience.

I’ll never forget the first time I truly felt the power of a river. It was a perfect May day on Maryland’s Upper Youghiogheny River, at a place called National Falls. The guidebooks generously rate it a Class V, but negotiating the crux is relatively straightforward:  paddle hard and hit the weakest point of the hole, a recirculating hydraulic that can trap unwary kayakers. Six strokes into the rapid, I realized I’d missed my target. Now it was up to the river. I’d taken my knocks in bigger water than this. On numerous occasions, surging mountains of whitewater had flipped my kayak over left, right, and backwards. The trick is not to panic. Stay in the kayak. Don’t lose the paddle. I’d been sucked without warning into any number of whitewater maelstroms and spit out just as quickly. But this time the river wasn’t letting go.

I flailed aimlessly in the hole. Every few seconds the river would flip me upright, and I’d grab a breath and, bracing with my paddle, try to keep my head above water. I could hear nothing but the river, a sound so big it reverberated in my chest. Scenes flashed in front of my eyes: streaks of foaming white, sky and trees, my paddling partner, now out of his kayak and moving toward me with a rope. The situation wasn’t desperate. I was just getting worked, or as kayakers say, rag-dolled. I can wait it out. I repeated the mantra I reserve for such situations. “I am not going to swim. I am not going to swim.”

Then my paddle snapped in half, and I lost my edge. I pulled my sprayskirt and pushed away from my boat. The river yanked me under, held me for half a count, and ejected me forcefully downstream. I half-swam, half-crawled to the rocky shore— humbled, and newly aware of the river’s limitless force.

At that moment, exhausted, battered, and humiliated, with water pouring out of my nose, I realized why I love to paddle whitewater: to taste the river’s power. Most of the time I feel as if I’m dancing with it, tapping into nature’s primal force and turning it to my own uses. “When I’m on a remote river,” says expedition kayaker Todd Gilman, “I feel very small, insignificant, and yet totally a part of something a lot bigger than me. I get as spiritual as I’m ever able to be when I’m stuck in some gorge out in the backcountry. That’s when I’m the most alive.”

And that’s just how I felt: alive. Off the river and with a good meal in my belly, it was time to go home. Driving across the takeout bridge, something made me stop the truck and set the brake.

“What’s up,” my buddy asked.

“Look at it. It’s gone.”

“Yeah, they shut off the dam every day at 3.”

So much for primal nature. The limitless power I had tasted at National Falls had been neutered—controlled by a switch. Nature, for all its power, is still at the mercy of man. And nowhere is that more evident than on our rivers.  

Paddlers go to rivers to connect with the natural world. But increasingly, unnatural forces are dictating the river experience. Hundreds of dams, runoff patterns altered by urban sprawl, and the increasingly evident effects of climate change have conspired to give nature a lesser role in the river-running drama.

To those of us who spend our free time on them, rivers display the most salient signs of human interference in the natural world. Boaters are already noticing earlier and shorter runoff seasons, with greater extremes. These changes have the potential to profoundly affect the whitewater paddling experience during the spring runoff season.

“Rivers are a good barometer, but there are many indicators out there,” says AMC scientist Ken Kimball, who also kayaks. “To some extent rivers are an artifact of earlier growing seasons and snowmelt. Those are the drivers.”

Streamflow levels depend on a host of factors, including snowpack and rainfall, groundwater saturation, and vegetation. Thousands of waterways drain the New England high country.  Most are mere rivulets for much of the year, their dry beds exposed and overgrown. In late spring, when heavy rains fall on mountain snows, these brooks come to life. That’s when creekboaters— skilled kayakers who specialize in paddling small, very steep streams—enjoy their spring boating bonanza. Most years, that is.

This winter has been an anomaly. Unseasonably warm weather has meant that most of the precipitation falling on New England has come as rain. Rivers normally ice-locked from December to April were running in mid-January. “Last weekend we were up in the White Mountains, boating creeks above 2,000 feet and there was no ice in any of them,” Greg Hanlon says in January. In fact, the unusual weather hasn’t been all bad for kayakers, says Hanlon, a hydraulic engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“The last two years have been epic,” he says, recalling massive rain events in October 2005 and May 2006. “We’ve been spoiled. We found a lot of good rivers, but we don’t know if they’ll run in normal years because we haven’t had a normal year yet.”

The definition of a normal runoff year may be changing with New England’s climate. Though most  meteorologists blame this year’s extraordinarily warm winter on the El Niño effect—a warming of Pacific waters with far-reaching weather consequences—it serves as an extreme example of what may be on the horizon. A reduction in snowpack is more than just bad news for the region’s winter sports enthusiasts. Thomas Huntington, a  hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Maine, says it could lead to longer growing seasons in the Northeast, “but we will also likely see reduced total runoff and reduced summer flow rates with loss of cold-water fish and other species that are not tolerant of warmer conditions.”

The obvious result of warmer winters is that less water is stored through the winter as snow. But there’s more to it than that. Wet, frozen ground holds a tremendous amount of water. And when trees get their leaves in the spring, they absorb thousands of gallons of groundwater per acre, through a process called evapotranspiration. The earlier the spring thaw, the sooner the available moisture goes up into the forest, rather than down toward the sea. Spring has been coming progressively earlier to New England during the last few decades, Kimball says. Anywhere from two to four weeks earlier, depending on where you are.

The effect of these changes to kayakers is relatively insignificant in the grand scheme. But the fact that they’re clear enough for them to take note of has serious implications for the New England ecosystem—the native forests that have adapted over millennia to the established weather patterns, the wild animals whose life rhythms are based on those same patterns—and also human agriculture. Boaters  are just another canary in the climate-change coal mine.  

Whitewater Canaries, cont'd>>