The River Wild : After an Unusually Wet Winter, the Death Toll Mounts on the ‘Killer Kern’

Don Brown learned his lesson the hard way, after paddling out into the river with his grandson in a cheap rubber canoe.

“We got about a half-mile downstream and it got wrapped around a tree, and we had to get off and head to shore,” he said.

They are fortunate to be alive.

The mighty Kern River, born high in the southern Sierra and grown to a torrent raging down the canyons toward Bakersfield, isn’t always so forgiving of those foolish enough to go in ill prepared.

There are those who would attest to that if they were able. Three have recently been presumed drowned, their bodies still in the river, lost in the brush or held on the rocky bottom by the river’s notoriously strong currents.

When those bodies are eventually recovered--sometimes it takes weeks for bodies to surface--it will increase the summer’s death toll to five. Two bodies, one of an 8-year-old boy, have been found.

“It seems every time we come up here, there’s somebody in the river,” said Tamara McConnell, sipping a soft drink at a riverfront campsite in the canyon.

Since 1968, according to a somewhat sobering warning sign, clearly visible to travelers entering Kern Canyon via Highway 178, south of Isabella Lake, the number who have lost their lives in the river is 178.

The sign needs updating. The body of the boy, recovered Monday, brought the total to 180. And the three missing persons will probably bring it to 183.

Since May 28, search-and-rescue crews have carried out 47 rescues on the upper and lower Kern.

The river is even more dangerous this year, experts say, because of high flows caused by the stormy winter and the melting snow that still blankets the higher reaches of the southern Sierra.

The Kern’s banks are swollen to the point that bushes and even trees, high and dry in previous summers, are at least partially submerged. Their branches can be deadly, trapping and drowning swimmers.

Isabella Lake, which divides the upper and lower sections of the river, is full for the first time in years. Officials have been releasing water into the lower Kern constantly to keep it from spilling over the dam and the massive plume shooting from the base of the dam is an impressive sight.

Consequently, the lower Kern is nearly as wet and wild as the upper. In recent summers, its July flow has averaged about 1,200 cubic feet per second. Currently, it is running at 2,900 c.f.s. and has been as high as 4,000 c.f.s.

“I have a 13-year-old son and I allow him to swim in only two places on the river, and only if it’s at 700 c.f.s. or below,” said Donna Landry, a lifelong area resident and a ranger for the U.S. Forest Service, which monitors activities on the vast Sequoia National Park, through which much of the river runs. “That’s what I tell people when they ask me how safe it is. The river doesn’t jump up and grab you. It takes going in.”

Then it grabs you. Fierce, swirling currents and strong undertows pull people into cracks and small underwater caves.

And every time someone dies, the mighty Kern becomes the “Killer Kern.”

It’s a label many in this region aren’t happy with, one it wouldn’t have if people treated the river with the respect it deserves.

“The only reason it’s called the Killer Kern is because Kern begins with a K,” said Fred Roach, a fire-management officer with the U.S. Forest Service. “They wouldn’t call the Stanislaus River the Killer Stanislaus or the American River the Killer American, and they claim lives, too.”

Commercial rafting companies, in particular, despise the label. There are six of them headquartered in such small river towns as Kernville, Wofford Heights and Lake Isabella. They carry hundreds of passengers each week and bring in hundreds of thousands of tourist dollars every year. Rafting is far and away the most popular activity on the river.

And, despite misconceptions some people might have, rafting with a commercial company is a safe and enjoyable endeavor.

Owners and guides of all six companies point out that in the years they have been running the Kern, not one of them has lost a passenger to drowning.

“The only one I know of who died while on a rafting trip was a guy who had a heart attack on the bank during a break, and that was years-- years --ago,” said Jon Harned, river manager for Outdoor Adventures, one of California’s largest rafting companies.

Guides are well trained and know how to read the water for signs of danger. They require customers to wear life jackets--believed to be the key to staying alive in a river with such strong undertow--and instruct them before every outing how to get out of trouble should they fall in: to go downstream feet-first to avoid hitting their heads on rocks and to pick the proper moment to try to swim to the bank.

“If you know the trees are a danger, you stay in middle of the current until you see an open spot to get out of the river, and that’s what we do and what we teach our customers to do,” Harned said. “And the life jackets keep them from going under.”

Rafters are occasionally spilled into the river during runs on the stronger Class IV and V rapid sections of river, and are either retrieved by a “throw bag” attached to a line, by another raft, or make it safely to the bank.

In fact, many consider this to be part of the rafting experience.

“Commercial rafters take no risks,” Harned said. “We will judge whether to run the harder rapids depending on what type of customers we have.”

Said Patty Bates of the Forest Service’s Greenhorn Ranger District, at the base of the canyon, “It’s almost sad. People don’t want this to be known as the Killer Kern. And it’s sad that they associate that with rafting. If you go with a guide, you’re probably safer on the river than you are driving down the road.”

Landry said commercial guides actually help monitor the river, and because they spend so much time on it, they occasionally help rescue private rafters and other river users who run into trouble.

Even private rafters, she added, are for the most part safety conscious. “They do scout the river to see what rapids they can run and they usually travel in groups,” she said.

All rafters require a Forest Service permit and must file a manifest, showing the number of passengers on every vessel.

It is the swimmers, waders, inner-tubers or solo rafters on cheap craft with improper equipment--and as is often the case, people who have had too much to drink--who get into trouble.

Neither practice is illegal, but neither is advised and there are numerous warning signs to that effect posted along the river.

All three of the missing people ignored the warnings and went in for a swim, only to be swept away by the fierce currents.

One of them, according to Sgt. Marty Williamson of the Kern County Sheriff’s Dept., “went swimming right in front of the ‘Stay Out, Stay Alive’ sign.”

On weekends and holiday weekends, people are out in force. Most of them think rationally and stay out of the water, or go to Isabella Lake if they intend to swim. Some don’t.

Landry told of an incident two years ago involving a man whose cousin had disappeared in the river after taking an ill-advised swim.

“The man had been up at the river every day, looking for him with his family,” Landry recalled. “Well, on one of those days, a very hot day, he got drunk. He could not swim, had no life jacket on. He went into the water with friends and drowned that night. And his cousin was found the next morning.”

The man who had been looking for him surfaced two weeks later.

“How do you reach those kinds of people?” Landry asked.

Last year, Landry said, a woman was dropped off at the river by a friend, who drove back to Bakersfield “to pick up his little floatie toy.”

“She got hot and decided to go in and she was swept down onto a rock surrounded by Class III waters,” Landry said. “Well, I saw her sitting out there when I was driving by, so I stopped and as I was walking downstream I happened to notice a towel sitting there and a bottle of vodka and a lemon. No one else was around.”

The woman was rescued after a six-hour effort.

Landry spends her days traveling up and down the river, talking with rafters and patrolling campgrounds for signs of others who might get into trouble.

On a recent patrol, she pulled into Sandy Flat Campground in the middle of the canyon and saw a man and woman carrying a small rubber raft and an even smaller plastic raft, both made for swimming pools, not rivers. Neither had a life jacket.

Landry couldn’t legally keep them from entering the river, but she was able to convince them that although the river looked inviting and calm on the surface, it was moving swiftly and would quickly carry them downstream into dangerous rapids.

She pointed to branches protruding from the surface that would shred their rafts and leave them stranded in the chilling, unforgiving river.

The would-be rafters changed their minds. At another campsite, Brown, the man who had had the unhappy experience in the rubber canoe, was relaxing at a shaded picnic table. Brown, 54, a retired Los Angeles area policeman living in Garden Grove, was watching his young grandson, Daniel, and a couple of friends swinging from a rope onto a floating yellow platform tied to a tree on a slower section of the river.

The children were wearing life jackets and weren’t venturing far into the river. Brown, after his experience in the canoe, had become an expert on the dynamics of the river.

“There’s quite an undertow right here and you don’t have to go too far and you’re out in the rapids out there,” he said, pointing to the churning water. “And there’s no tomorrow at that point.”

Fortunately for Brown and his grandson, there will be a tomorrow.