INSIDEOUT 6C

Steamboat Pilot &Today

Outdoors

When you smack your face on a rock, the last person you

want to blame is yourself.This is the inherent flaw in

the master-student relation-ship in learning to kayak.

I’ve witnessed both sides of the teaching dynamic. The query, “teach me to kayak,” can become poison for the most sound relationships. I can still hear her my sister shrieking across Number 3 on the Arkansas River, as my brother-in-law tries in vain to explain how to surf a small wave. And this is a competent boater with a solid roll.

I took to the river long before I had anything close to a working roll. The first few trips were games of perpetual catch-up with friends that had skills honed — resulting in that humiliating swim in bor-rowed gear, draining the boat over bruised ego and knuck-les, and cursing the smug friend who rhetorically asks if you need any help between his surfs.

Eventually, you pick up the pieces you need, but you fig-ure out there are better ways to learn.

I’ve found the most pro-ductive sessions to be with peers of similar abilities. You push one another and bounce feedback of what works — being in the same boat, if you will.

Matt Hayne’s experience proved to me that the shared process can be more reward-ing than the frantic dash out from under the “beginner/intermediate” label.

The 24-year-old Yampa native was a standout three-sport athlete in his years at Soroco. Then Hayne was diagnosed with Burkitt’s Lymphoma and underwent six months of intensive che-motherapy during his junior year. Suddenly, Hayne was sleeping 22 hours a day and dropped 35 pounds. The Children’s Hospital in Denver suggested a Vail-based pro-gram called First Descents to get Hayne back into his active lifestyle.

Brad Ludden founded First Descents in 2001 as a free means of getting young cancer survivors to experience kayaking. You may remem-ber Ludden from his jaunt to Steamboat last May, when he took all of four minutes to blaze Upper Fish Creek for a race win at the Pro Invitational.

Hayne said it was, “intense-ly rewarding,” to learn from Ludden at the camps, but that it was the group aspect that brings him back for more.

“What draws me is the connection to the other survi-vors, you compare stories and they know exactly what you’re talking about and what you’ve been through,” he said.

Now Hayne plans to attend the advanced camp this summer in Montana and stick around to act as an instruc-tor: “The motivation is that you can instantly form a bond with the campers without say-ing anything.”

But before Hayne goes from student to master, he had to take a break from his master’s degree in Metallurgy program classes at the Colorado School of Mines to go play on the waves in Golden’s Clear Creek park.

“Boating’s like life — there’s rough water, you look for support, learn from what you did. Maybe you flip, maybe you swim, but you get right back in the boat and try again,” Hayne said.

A learning curve

DaveShivelyPILOT & TODAY

PAGE DESIGNED BY AMANDA FUERTE

Sunday, April 22, 2007 • www.steamboatpilot.comOutdoors Editor: Dave Shively • 871-4253/dshively@steamboatpilot.com

The bullet holes that riddle the lone “Moffat County 1” sign are about the only indicator the dirt road on

the windswept plateau has been traveled recently. There’s little non-antelope traffic

that comes off the northwest end of the Elkhead Mountains near the Wyoming border.

But there’s defi-nitely plenty of water that comes in the spring.

Few paddlers would have made the venture to scout for worthy whitewater had it not been for some technological assistance.

“I had a six-disc National Geographic CD-ROM Colorado region map,” local boater Adam Mayo said. “I just plugged it in on the highest zoom, clicked along the river bed and it builds a gradient pro-file and gives you a bar graph.”

What Mayo found was a particular upper section of Slater Creek of the Little Snake River that drops 275 feet in a mile.

Not that the falls are a secret.“You can find it in your gazetteer with

‘Falls’ written right there,” Mayo said.The Moffat County Web site (www.

colorado-go-west.com) also touts the falls on Slater Creek as a 1/2-mile hike “to a beautiful 30-foot waterfall,” and that “there is National Forest access to good fishing in Slater Creek and other smaller feeder streams and ponds in the area.”

But the question was, had anybody ever boated it?

Mayo and a group of seven other Steamboat kayakers decided to find out last May. Hitting the falls on the day Slater Creek peaked at an ample level of 400 cubic feet per second, each kayaker cleared the falls and, without word of any other boaters having accomplished the feat, claimed a first descent — awarding them the right to plant the name of their choos-ing on the cascade for all future water-fall huckers. The group went with, “A.C. Slater Falls.”

Having already made a name for them-selves in actual, calling themselves the Routt County River Enforcement, the group’s trip to Slater capped off a busy few weeks — which included a 17-mile first descent of the Upper Elkhead as well as a first crack at the remote Roaring Fork of the North Platte — and helped make a name for the RCRE in the broader state-wide cybersphere of kayak forum brag-ging rights.

This fall, a few of the “Enforcers” made a scouting trip back to the Slater to see how safe the unknown sections on either side of the Falls, which measure in at about 100 feet per mile, would be for paddling.

On Wednesday, with Slater reading just below 300 CFS at the downstream gauge, Nick Hinds, Kevin Fisher and Joe Carberry made the 220-mile round trip haul back to Routt County’s abso-lute hinterland. And it’s still Routt County — it just takes 100 miles of detouring west and north into Moffat County and back east along the Wyoming border before you return into the county boundaries and wind up the Slater Creek valley.

From there, you just follow the screams.A soulful howl bouncing off the walls

of the short and sudden canyon was the best way Carberry and Hinds could express the immediate feeling of lining up the 15-foot slide, hitting the rooster tail on the left and then dropping over the 30-foot vertical drop for the second time.

After assessing necks, vertebrae, knuckles and ribs for damage from impact, Hinds and Carberry paddled beyond the foot of A.C. Slater to find out what awaited them below. After a necessary scout of an unnamed Class V rapid, they found what Hinds described as more than a mile of, “manky Class III-IV stuff kind of like Lower Fish (Creek) and then it lakes out into a log jam.”

The only question now is, what to name the new drops?

“Who knows, ‘Goal Posts,’ ‘Stomp Pad’ or maybe just ‘Left, Right, Left, Left, Right,’” Hinds joked.

Whatever name is concocted or “Saved By the Bell” character immortalized, it probably won’t be the last as the creek-ing season hits full swing and the RCRE maps out its next first descent on the other extreme end of the county.

Steamboat kayaker Nick Hinds blasts over A.C. Slater Falls, in the northeast reaches of Routt County, on Wednesday afternoon.

Nick Hinds scouts the drop on Slater Creek from atop the canyon walls.

Slate-r diePaddling posse makes return trip to Routt County’s Slater Creek

STORY AND PHOTOS BY

DAVE SHIVELY

SUNDAY FOCUS

Joe Carberry takes the first strokes down an unnamed Class V rapid beneath A.C. Slater Falls on Slater Creek of the Little Snake River.

The long county road winds south and east up the pastures of the Slater Creek valley toward its headwaters and steepest sections of whitewater.