Close Call

Frank, a friend, recently posted a nice article about his white water rafting trip on the Lower New River in West Virginia, including photos.

His post reminds me of a time about 8 years ago when I floated down the Youghiogheny River (the "Yough") in southwestern Pennsylvania with friends. One of the friends was kind enough to arrange the trip, including lodging us in his vacation house (which he built!), and hiring a rafting outfitter. Unlike Frank's experience, our outfitter simply provided us with rafting equipment, a short safety talk, and then we had to prepare for our two minute time window at the put-in site. No guide. And all equipment was optional, including helmets. Guess which option I chose.

We had a lot of fun on the upper part of the run. A few of us fell out on some of the more challenging rapids, but we stayed safe. Then we came to Dimple Rock. The outfitters had warned us about Dimple Rock during the safety talk. Basically it's a small rapid with a large rock at the bottom. If you don't approach at the right angle, it's easy to hit the rock and flip your raft.

Well, we definitely did not approach at the right angle, and we definitely flipped our raft. It was a little bit eerie to hear people from the shore trying to coach us, "stroke, stroke! STROKE!" but as we approached the rock, the coaching subsided to, "UH OH!" We bonked into the rock, tossed over, and the whole crew fell into the drink. (The safety instructions we were given about the "high side" technique were forgotten.) I actually fell into the water on top of our host. I popped up after a few seconds, and the host did a few seconds later, and we both scrambled out. Some of our raft crew actually floated down river over some more rapids without a raft!

I realize now that there was a significant chance of me or someone in my crew dying. I could have hit my head and been knocked unconscious, or I could have been pinned under a rock, and drowned. Those few seconds underwater, at the mercy of the currents, seemed like forever. I will never take something like that so lightly again.

Here are two videos on YouTube showing the rafting wrecks at the same Dimple Rock. However, one difference is that the year we ran it, the water was much lower, and there was actually a small falls approaching the rock. I found out later several people have died there. There's a hollow below the rock which sucks people under.