White-Water Kayaking in Winter: a Chilling Sport for the Daredevil

White-water rafters and boaters tend to practice their sport in the summer, when the sun warms the rivers to bath water and hardship is little more than sandy sneakers.

Not so for hard-core kayakers, who defy convention and comfort in the pursuit of faster, bouncier and more exotic waters to navigate.

While the average rafter is warming his toes in front of the fireplace, these acrobats are taking advantage of the expanded selection of southern Oregon waterways in the rainy, winter months.

Hikers can virtually step across some of these waters in the summer--the South Fork of the Coquille River, the Middle Fork of the Applegate River, the North Fork of the Smith River, Jump-Off Joe Creek and Grave Creek. In the cold, rainy, winter months, however, they are left to these thrill seekers.

“A lot of us live for the winter; that’s when all the small rivers are running, and that’s when you have your best water,” said Debra Whiting, secretary-treasurer of Southern Oregon Assn. of Kayakers, a 52-member club based in Medford.

‘A Gnarly One’

“Last year we ran the South Fork of the Coquille. That was a gnarly one,” recalled Greg Ramp, who used to make inflatable kayaks in Grants Pass and recently moved to Boise, Ida. “It was only about 350 cubic feet per second and it was tight and bouncy. That was the closest I’ve ever come to dying.

“Everybody else was out in front of me, and I went through this innocent-looking swell and my boat flipped over. I went down, and the entire river was running under a rock, and the next thing I knew I was under it and trying to get out the other side. I’m sure I was under water about 40 seconds. It was long enough to think about what it would be like to die.

“I finally just bobbed up on the other side.”

Rivers are rated for difficulty in navigating by raft or kayak, from Class 1 for flat water to Class 6, which is life-threatening.

“You might have a Class 3 river in June that is a Class 5 in the winter,” said Kirby Schmidt, president of the kayakers’ group. “That’s the charm of winter boating, there’s water everywhere, and the harder it is the more fun it is.”

Although most kayakers use hard-shell craft, there is a small number of boaters, such as Ramp, who have found the inflatable more appropriate.

These aren’t your average “Tahiti” style kayaks commonly seen floating down southern Oregon’s rivers in the summer. Ramp uses durable, custom inflatables.

“We definitely do a lot of rock-bouncing and hard-shells couldn’t take that kind of abuse,” said Dennis Putnam, an inflatable-kayak user. “We don’t see too many hard-shells where we go. We are nuts, but we have a good time.”

Putnam became interested in the sport a few years ago through Ramp, a former butcher who began making custom inflatable kayaks and formed R&R; Outdoors.

Once Ramp began cranking out his craft full-bore in the summer he found he didn’t have time to hit the typical summertime white water anymore. That left the slow months of winter, and Ramp’s winter kayaking adventures began.

“We started trying some rivers in the winter, and we found out that there are a lot of rivers you can run in the winter that we’d never noticed before,” Ramp said.

120-Foot Drop a Mile

He also found that his inflatable kayaks were perfect for boulder-strewn challenges like the Middle Fork of the Applegate River, a twisting, churning gorge above Applegate Reservoir and just across the California border. It drops 120 feet a mile, and is a rated Class 4 when running high.

Most hard-core kayakers have defied death at one time or another, as Putnam did recently in a trip down Deer Creek and part of the Illinois River.

“I got eaten by a massive hydraulic and my rain slicker got wrapped around my ankles,” Putnam said. “I couldn’t get it off, and I couldn’t move my legs. I was just lucky I grabbed my boat, or I might be dead.

“There’s no time to think about anything but what you’re doing when you’re going. It’s just a rush.”