Roiling on the river

“FORWARD!” screams rafting guide Keith Stephens, his voice hoarse from barking orders over the roar of the white water.

Stephens’ crew, including four boisterous Russian tourists, responds to the urgent command by furiously paddling headlong into a Class IV rapid called Joe’s Diner. Though the classification is easily explained -- Class IV means it’s potentially hazardous for novices -- no one can account for the name.

The raft jumps into a liquid hole, and the surface of the water -- emerald green and quick-moving -- is suddenly out of reach. A foaming wave devours the front of the raft, striking out like a prizefighter with an icy jab.

The Russians, wide-eyed and drenched, holler and cheer. The guide maneuvers the boat into an eddy and takes in the scene.

“We’ve been waiting for water like this for eight years,” says Stephens, a guide and rafting outfit manager for nearly 20 years. “And here it is.”

The Kern River rises from a series of small lakes in the southern Sierra Nevada, where the wettest winter in more than 100 years has produced snowpack levels that are nearly three times the norm. One drip at a time, these mountains of snow are setting the stage for a Big Water Year on the Kern -- and just about every other stream, creek and tributary in the state.

Along the Kern, the excitement is as palpable as the cold spray of the crisp, white waves. The swollen river isn’t just a financial boon for river-related businesses. Kayakers, canoeists and white-water rafters utter the term Big Water Year with the enthusiasm of astronomers awaiting Halley’s Comet. Forget about rafting in Oregon or kayaking in Washington -- states known for thrilling rapids and robust rivers. An unusual weather pattern has maintained drought conditions in the Pacific Northwest, pushing California to the center of the white-water universe.

California’s last Big Water Year followed the winter of 1997 when El Nino storms swelled rivers and lakes to near capacity. Kayakers and rafting guides on the Kern still recount the way the river overflowed its banks that year, roaring like an airplane engine and turning riverbed boulders into adrenaline-pumping wave trains that tossed boats around like socks in a washing machine.

“I’ve been waiting for it to be like that again,” says Steve Rasmussen, a veteran rafting guide who, at 43, has worked through years of drought and deluge. “We are getting really pumped.”

A mighty overflow

From just west of Mt. Whitney, the Kern twists and winds for 155 miles to the Kern River Valley, where the frigid waters flow into Lake Isabella. A dam releases a measured flow to the lower Kern and from there, into the San Joaquin Valley.

North of Kernville -- a 1,700-population burg of mom-and-pop diners, souvenir shops and B&Bs; -- the wild river crashes and descends between towering canyons. On the banks of the upper Kern at a rock-strewn campsite called Chico Flat, Paul Macey, a 36-year-old UCLA researcher, and six of his kayaking buddies have just rolled up their tents and are getting ready to take on Brush Creek, a lean, mean tributary of the Kern that dive-bombs through narrow gorges about 11 miles north of Kernville. One of Macey’s buddies busted an inch-long gash over his right eye after flipping his kayak in Brush Creek a day earlier, but he is ready to go again.

Kayakers take the river’s pulse by measuring the flow in terms of cubic feet per second, or CFS. (A pony keg of beer -- perhaps the most appropriate unit of measure around here -- holds a cubic foot of liquid. Apply that to the Kern, and that’s a whole lot of foaming brew.)

This spring, the Kern has been flowing at nearly 3,000 CFS, compared with 1,200 CFS last May. Next month when the summer sun beats down on the snowpack, hydrologists and rafting outfitters expect the river to surpass 8,000 CFS.

Macey, a 15-year kayaking veteran, relishes telling his friends at the campsite about the conditions during the last big year when the summer temperatures pushed the river to about 7,000 CFS.

This year will be even better, he assures them.

“The snow melt fills the river and makes it faster and the water becomes more dynamic,” he says. “It makes the whole river into white-water.”

Other boaters, including the college student with the bloody eyebrow, thrill to the thought.

With that, the kayakers speed up to Brush Creek, where they slip into wetsuits and crash helmets before plunging in. The water, loud and swift, shoots over mossy boulders and pushes through slender chasms. The kayakers paddle furiously, fear etched on their faces. At the end of the run, they drop through a narrow chute no wider than a bathtub into a foaming pool of ice water and emerge grinning and shouting triumphantly.

Liquid treasure

The tiny towns along the Kern River -- Kernville, Wofford Heights, Keysville and Lake Isabella -- are white-water playgrounds for Southern Californians who thirst for a thrilling river ride that’s a mere three hours from L.A.’s arid gridlock.

Things have changed since the days when prospectors ventured to the river’s muddy banks in search of gold. Today the Kern’s water -- not the gold -- is the lifeblood of the Kern River Valley, where 75% of the local economy is dependent on tourists, rafters, kayakers and anglers.

Chart the income that these river towns collect from a local room tax and it follows the ebb and flow of the river. During the last eight low-water years, income from the tax dropped by a third.

But hotels and rafting outfitters are already getting a taste of what a surging river will mean. Stephens, who manages Kern River Outfitters, has already seen a 170% swell in booking over last year, forcing him to add 10 rafting guides to his usual staff of 20.

Guides are typically local teens and college students who start at $6.75 per hour or get a modest daily stipend during a three- to four-month season. To live on such meager pay, they sleep in tents on the riverbanks or pile into a “guide house,” a sparsely furnished rental that resembles a frat house.

Many guides follow surging water levels from river to river, the way fans used to trail the Grateful Dead across the country. Last year, the snow melt and the rafting jobs on the Kern dried up in early August. Rafting outfitters think this year’s snowpack could push the season a whole month longer.

Drawn by the prospects of a longer season, some guides abandoned the Green River in Arkansas, the San Juan River in Colorado and the Buller River in New Zealand to work the lines, holes, haystacks and back rollers of the Kern.

Jenny Arkle, a recent graduate of Cal State Fullerton, knows the guiding circuit and has bounced around from river to river in Arkansas, Colorado and California. In March, she was leading rafting trips in New Zealand when she was deluged with e-mails from friends about the Sierra snowpack. She immediately decided to pack her bags, flew to California and landed a guiding job with Stephens.

“Rafting was good in New Zealand,” she says. “But it sounded better here.”

On the river, rafting guides are in the thrill-ride business. When water levels are low and rapids are docile, placid moments are filled with history lessons or stories about wildlife. But when the water is raging, the river becomes the star. The guides’ only worry is getting their charges back to shore safely. Says Rasmussen, with relief: “Now I’m not going to have to talk about beavers for two hours.”

To the water born

After a daylong rafting trip, Stephens is back at his company’s spacious white warehouse where his guides store the 200-pound rubber rafts.

He was once like them. In 1986, he was a recent college graduate and avid surfer, not sure what he wanted to do with his life. A friend suggested raft guiding. Soon, he was hooked. Back then, the entire operation ran out of a rental space in an industrial strip mall.

Over the next 19 years, Stephens worked his way up to become general manager of Kern River Outfitters, which now has a business office, changing rooms for customers and the warehouse for storing its fleet of 42 boats. Stephens still has the wavy, strawberry-blond hair of a California surfer, but at 44, with a mustache and sun-baked face, he looks more like the Marlboro Man in a wetsuit.

And the work is more difficult than it seems. First, lives are at stake. Since 1968, 216 people have died on the river, and no one wants to be responsible for the 217th. There’s a payroll to manage, equipment to maintain, an inventory to monitor and lots of young employees to supervise. His days begin at sunrise preparing for the trips and end nearly 12 hours later when the rafts and oars are stacked away.

But he says the river washes away the stress. The swells are like a baptism that cleanses the soul and rejuvenates the spirit. Even when he’s away from work, he can’t stay away from the water: When the season ends on the Kern, he kayaks off Baja.

Stephens sees how the river changes his clients too. They get into a raft, leery at first of confronting a raging rapid, but they come out soaked and exhilarated.

“There is something that just changes the soul,” he says, his voice rising with excitement. “I come out there and I feel renewed.”

School of rocks

During one put-in, Stephens and his guides bring the group of rafters to a scenic section of the upper Kern known as the Limestone Run.

There are two dozen people in the party -- including the Russians -- crammed into four 14-foot-long rafts. The Russians, mostly young professionals who emigrated with their parents when they were teenagers or kids, now live in West Los Angeles, where some of their children attend the same schools. One couple tried rafting last year and persuaded the rest to give it a try.

Most of the canyons bisected by the Kern are lined with granite boulders, but a volcanic displacement millions of years ago pushed tons of limestone into this run, creating giant staircase walls along the river banks. This 2 1/2 -mile stretch is a series of intermediate and difficult rapids.

The thing to remember about a river, Stephens says as he steers the raft around boulders and swirling whirlpools, is everything changes with the rise and fall of the water. A boulder that protrudes from the water one day can be submerged by the current the next day, forming a new drop or wave in the river.

Guides constantly warn each other about such changes: “Careful of the new hole at Big Daddy.” “Follow the line on the left at the Sidewinder.” “Don’t get caught in the strainer at Ewing’s.”

But even Stephens has a hard time keeping up.

During the Limestone Run, his crew twice paddled furiously to avoid dangerous rapids only to steer into overhanging branches that raked their faces.

After the run, guides and clients drag the rafts out of the river and gather around Alex Panin, a stout Russian expatriate and MBA student who had the distinction of being the first one of the party to get tossed out of the raft. Panin, still wet and wide-eyed, recounts how the raft bounced off a rock and flung him into the foam. The current, moving like an angry stampede, pulled him under the raft and then swept him about 20 yards downstream before a guide could catch up to him.

“My first thought was that I had lost my paddle. My second thought was not to panic.” Then a broad smile breaks across his round face. “It was the best part of the ride.”

Stephens directs everyone into a 1960s-era school bus, one of many the outfitters use to shuttle tourists up and down the river. The bus is noisy as some of the young rafters in the back chatter about the last set of rapids. Sitting quietly up front is Diana Thornton, a retired airline worker from Inglewood, who, as it turns out, is perhaps the most adventurous one of the group.

Thornton turned 60 this year and decided it was time to do all those things she’s always wanted to do but never had the chance.

Soft-spoken and polite, she made a list that includes visiting South Africa and the Great Wall of China. She had already been hang gliding and plans to water ski in Hawaii soon. For Mother’s Day, her 21-year-old son, Chad, brought her rafting so she could check another activity off her to-do list. But it wasn’t what she expected.

After a guide rescued Panin from Joe’s Diner, a monster wave shoved her over the raft’s edge. The river was about to swallow Thornton when her son and several other rafters grabbed her by the life preserver and heaved her back in the boat.

“I’m now a member of the Kern River swim team,” she jokes. “They should give me a plaque or something.”

At the end of the daylong rafting trip, the crew rumbles down-river in the old school bus, the rafts following on a trailer. The Russians were in the back of the bus with Stephens and a few of the other guides.

As the bus rounds a bend in the road, everyone goes quiet. From the windows they can see Thunder Run, where water crashes violently over boulders the size of refrigerators. The din rises above the growl of the bus’ motor.

“Wow! Yeah!” the Russians and some other rafters shout, rising from their seats to get a better look at the rolling rapids.

Then Steve Rasmussen delivers a jolt of reality: This is Class V water, the roughest ride on the river, way too much for these novices to handle. But Panin, still water-logged from his earlier plunge in the river, presses his face against the window, eyeing the rapids with a mischievous grin.

“Next time,” he says. “Next time.”

Hugo Martin can be reached at hugo.martin@latimes.com.