by Jay Young
The rafts Moore taught the Rodmans about were odd boats, indeed. There were few, if any, companies making rafts specifically for whitewater at the time, so they cut their teeth in jury-rigged army Air Corps surplus boats. The boats were twelve feet long, six feet wide and designed to be paddled by six people. The Rodmans glued flexible oarlocks midway along the outer tubes and adopted a western style of rowing. As with most things jiggered, the boats needed repairs often. The Rodmans reportedly went through more than their share of glue and duct tape. Without a rigid rowing frame attached to their boats, they soon added their own techniques to their repertoires, bouncing off rocks to change direction and even tipping boats onto their sides to slip through some of the narrower channels.
Doug Proctor inflates Jean Rodman’s Gauley raft, Hard Hoe. J. Young.
The Rodmans rowed their boats into more history than just the Gauley River, by the way. Boaters also credit them with first descents on the Youghiogheny and early descents on the Cheat River.
The group put in at Route 39, east of Summersville, and encountered its first serious whitewater at the old Route 19 crossing, which is now submerged permanently under the waters of Summersville Lake. “The river was sort of high; out of its banks,” said Rodman. “We soon were in the woods, lining around rapids, laboriously roping from tree to tree in water over our heads. The owner of a house along the river took pity on the sodden group, and sheltered us for the night. He talked bitterly about the proposed dam, which would one day drown all his land.”
“We made a few more miles the next day, but it wasn’t much fun,” Rodman continued. “One shaken man said that his big raft did an ender cleanly over his head. Fortunately, Ray’s guys were good at re-entering their rafts via the bailing-bucket roper. Totally exhausted, we camped just above the dam site.” Except for Ray—and he only halfheartedly—the group was ready to call it a weekend. The going was simply too rough, and the next day, Rodman bushwhacked, hitchhiked and finally returned with their car from the proposed takeout point. “I’d already learned that, on Ray’s exploratory runs, you bring topo maps and pack frames. With enough psychological drive, you can hump out two deflated rafts per trip. Ah, youth. Gauley: 1, boaters: 0.”
Rodman thought of the magnificent Gauley River often over the next two years. Then, one dreary day in May 1961, he and Jean, plus Ralph and Kay Krichbaum and Ken Hawker, returned to try again. Simply getting to the river proved to be no mean feat. “We had shuttled a car down near Swiss somewhere,” said Jean. “Ralph and his wife, Kay, had forgotten their PFDs and had to find a store that sold the old horse-collar orange life jackets. There were no interstates or three-lane roads in those days, so it all took a lot of time.”
Someplace high upstream from the current Summersville Dam site, the crew from Pittsburgh prepares to put in on the first descent of the Gauley River. Sayre Rodman.
The group sat out a brief snowstorm under the Route 19 bridge and then set out in water Rodman estimated to be in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred cubic feet per second, or cfs. Rodman described that momentous day in nearly giddy terms. The group, he wrote, “ran superb water the rest of the day, and camped precisely under the present dam. Not many people have run that part. Take the best of the rapids on the Cheat run below Albright; add many more; pack them into shorter distance. A few gentlemen’s Class V’s, nothing really hairy. I remember it as much better than the part below Sweet’s Falls. We enjoyed it, immensely.”
The next day dawned sunny, and “the run to the Meadow River was just fun. We’d earlier scouted a big one below Carnifex Ferry, big waves but no problem. Below the Meadow, we quickly saw things were getting more interesting. The first serious rapids ate one of my oars.”
On the first descent of the Gauley River, 1961, Sayre Rodman lines up for an unnamed rapid that is currently submerged under Summersville Lake. Ralph Krichbaum.
Sayre Rodman hits the meat of an unnamed rapid currently submerged under Summersville Lake. Ralph Krichbaum.
In his Highland Voice article, Rodman described what happened to Kay Krichbaum at a rapid now known as Iron Ring. Of course, modern Gauley boaters probably aren’t too surprised to read that it was the hairiest moment of the trip. Though most people don’t find the standard line through Iron Ring to be especially difficult, many feel the consequences for blowing it are some of the most severe on the river. A lot of water flows into a cave formed by a large, overhanging slab of rock on the right bank, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that that’s a bad, bad place to go.
“Kay’s boat stalled upstream,” Rodman wrote,
and vanished, like a fly taken by a trout, in mid-river. A remarkable lady, she dove, making the snap decision that going thru a hole ahead of a big raft is better than the alternative. We, including her husband, watched the downstream [sic], as did her 6 by 12 foot raft with oars still intact in the oarlocks. Twice she had come up in the dark, and grabbed a breath. Behind the long slab leaning on the bank, river right, flows a lot of water. In hindsight we might have read the surface currents better.
Ken Hawker all turned around at Iron Ring rapid. Moments later, the same squirrelly water that spun Hawker would pull Kay Krichbaum under and into the cave on river right. Sayre Rodman.
Kay eventually floated out from the cave, but shaken by the events at Iron Ring, the group decided to walk past what is now called Sweet’s Falls.
They camped on a sandbar downstream, and Rodman wrote:
The last day was brilliant and clear, and the purple rhododendron was in bloom along the canyon walls. For a while, we had good fast water to enjoy, with nothing to worry Kay, who felt a tad cautious now. When we hit the quieter water above Swiss, we knew we’d had three memorable days.
Jean and I have had worthwhile outings in nice places. Consider first seeing the tip of Mount Everest by moonlight on New Year’s Eve from Tyangboche Monastery. The first Gauley run was about that good.
WILDWATER UNLIMITED
In 1995, at the peak of West Virginia’s commercial whitewater activity, 225,000 raft customers whooped and hollered down the New and Gauley Rivers with steely-eyed raft guides behind them pushing rubber. There were days that year when a person could almost cross the river walking on rafts and never get wet. It was hard to believe that at the start of 1968, the number was closer to zero.
We can trace the roots of whitewater rafting in America to the 1800s, when the first rubber boats hit the water. While the earliest known commercial whitewater trips occurred in the latter part of the century, John D. Rockefeller Jr. created the first real river outfitter in 1956 on the Snake River under the shadow of the Grand Tetons. The public met his Grand Teton Lodge Company with a resounding yawn, but within a handful of years, they warmed to the idea. Following the lead of Rockefeller Jr., commercial river runners sprang up all over the western half of the United States. The East was soon to follow as outfitters appeared along the banks of a handful of rivers, including the Youghiogheny in Pennsylvania.
It is there where the story of commercial rafting in West Virginia really takes off. In November 1968, an unassuming but ambitious young couple moved from the Youghiogheny to the New River Gorge. Jon Dragan and Melanie Campbell would go on to birth an industry.
In one of his summers away from college, Jon worked for the Red Cross in Pennsylvania, teaching canoeing in its whitewater safety program. “That was where he really decided that he wanted to spend most of his life around water,” said Tom “Slick” Dragan, Jon’s younger brother by six years. “We were very fortunate, in that our parents traveled. They took us different places. We were just into canoeing and swimming, hiking and all that other stuff, and it was the natural progression over to whitewater rafting. There was no lightning bolt. It was a very slow progression over time.” Eventually, Jon found his way to Wilderness Voyagers, an outfitter on the Youghiogheny River, where he worked as a guide and helped the owners, Lance and Lee Martin, run their business.
Jon Dragan sets shuttle for a run
on the Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania. Butch Christian Collection.
Lee Martin was also a Girl Scout canoe instructor. She had taught Melanie to paddle and invited her to join the organization, where she met Jon. “He was my knight in shining armor,” said Melanie. The two worked together often and grew fond of each other quickly.
An athletic, sandy-haired young man with an iron will, Jon soon became restless working for the Martins. He wanted to start his own company. It was the popular wisdom, however, that the “Yough” was full. “People didn’t feel that there was enough there for another family to be included in it,” said Melanie. In addition, though Jon and Lance worked together well enough, they were sometimes at odds.
Melanie Dragan, wife of the late Jon Dragan and mayor of Thurmond (population six), at her home next to the river that drew her and Jon to a depressed little corner of West Virginia to birth an industry. J. Young.
“The way I knew Lance,” said Tom, “he was laid back.” Both men were heavily into the outdoors, adventuring and having fun, but
Jon was aggressive. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just that when he saw something, he went after it. He did it as well as it could be done, and he did it because he made up his mind to do it. It’s as simple as that. They were two different people without a doubt.
That’s probably one of the reasons he ended up coming down South. I don’t think they would have ever worked well together long term. Short term, they both liked the river. Both were into good times. But as far as their business plans went—much different.
In 1967, Jon asked Melanie if she wanted to have a look at a river in West Virginia. Jon remembered running one a couple years earlier with John Sweet and a group of old C1-ers. “The Olympians,” Melanie called them. The group may have included John Berry and Bob Harrigan. “I said, sure, why not? What have we got to lose?”
The pair set out for the New River in southern West Virginia, but Jon wasn’t exactly certain where to put in or, for that matter, where the river was on a map. They drove into Fayette County on State Route 19 and finally entered the New River Gorge near the town of Prince. Jon pulled out his map, but the two still didn’t get their bearings until they spied a sign that said, “Thurmond 16 miles.” Still not entirely certain of whether or not they were even close to an appropriate put-in, but enjoying the adventure nonetheless, Jon and Melanie bumped their way down a dirt road in his pickup truck through the town of Thayer.
“On the other side of Thayer,” said Melanie, “we met a man named Shorty. He was a little guy. He lived in Thayer, and he was making his way to Mr. Pugh’s Grocery Store, which was in the Dunglen building,” on the other side of the river from Thurmond. From his grocery alongside the New River, Mr. Pugh sold basic food and fishing supplies and had a number of small shacks, which he rented to anglers.
Jon Dragan on the New River, 1969. Dragan Collection.
Jon and Melanie realized that the town was about midway along the river. “Jon went in and talked to Mr. Pugh and came back out and said, ‘Hey, he’ll rent us one of these little fishing shacks for five dollars a month.’ I said, ‘Take it!’ and we paid for a year’s worth.”
The next summer, Jon brought Tom, who was fresh out of high school, down for a look and “just to run the river and have fun,” he said.
“I think in the back of Jon’s mind, he had every intention of coming down here and doing something,” said Tom. “He was looking for someplace to go, where he could do a whitewater raft trip.” However, “I don’t know that. This is all hindsight, because we never talked about it in our family. We just did things.”
“I really thought the Upper New was boring and almost didn’t come back,” Tom continued. Then, they ran the Lower New. “I said, okay, this is good.”
Jon was hooked on the water in the New River and the wild area through which it flowed. He was also entirely smitten with the area’s unique coal history. The very next winter, Jon and Melanie came back for good and incorporated Wildwater Expeditions Unlimited before the New Year.
Wildwater bought two rafts, which were manufactured in West Virginia by a company called Rubber Fabricators. “There was no special design,” said Tom. “There were two Green River boats. We called them One Paw and Two Paw, because we took them up to my dad’s shop to paint them, and Jon had a St. Bernard. He stepped in a paint can, and put his paw down on the boat. Jon’s boat was One Paw, my boat was Two Paw and that was it.”
In their first season of operation, many of their customers were friends and relatives. It was also easier to get customers from the Pittsburgh area because, one, Jon and Melanie knew people there and two, Pittsburgh people knew about the Youghiogheny River. Many had paddled with Wilderness Voyagers and were looking for something bigger and better.
“But the numbers weren’t there,” explained Tom. “A trip with ten people…there were four of us as guides—Jon, myself, Chris [Jon and Tom’s younger brother], Mel and friends; Mel’s brother and sister. We probably had more guides than we did customers.”
Wildwater Expeditions Unlimited guides prepare near the foot of the Summersville Dam for a Gauley trip, circa 1971. Dragan Collection.
“We weren’t in it to make money.” continued Tom. “We weren’t in it to lose money, but it was more of a summer thing to do. You cut grass and run raft trips. You put a couple bucks in your pocket. We were also working for my dad during the school year. He had a construction company, so we were making money there. It was never about the money.”
Jon soon made friends in the West Virginia Department of Tourism, however, and managed to tag along with members of that office to several tourism expos. Jon and Melanie would pay their own way on the trips but could hand out Wildwater brochures, which at the time were simple mimeographed sheets. “We had nothing fancy,” said Melanie. “In 1970, my mom was the director of the Pittsburgh vocational schools, so they printed our first color brochure. It was something for the kids to experience.” Melanie also found work as a teacher north of Pittsburgh, and between that and help from their families, the Dragans were able to support themselves through the leanest times.
Wildwater built its tiny business around a two-day New River trip. The excursionists put in at Prince and rafted the relatively mellow water of the Upper New on the first day. They took out that evening at Thurmond, where they camped. And then the next morning, they floated the warm-up rapids into the bigger, heavier water of the Lower Gorge. During the week, Wildwater ran its office out of Thurmond.
Tom Dragan: “Wildwater boats rarely touched the ground.” Guides would lift them from the trailer and set them directly in the water. Dragan Collection.
The second year they were there, Mr. Pugh asked Jon and Melanie if they were interested in buying a home. “We thought it was really a great deal, because it had all these antiques in it,” said Melanie. Unfortunately, the antiques were gone when they moved in. Melanie still lives in that house.
Soon, Jon’s fascination with the area’s coal history made it into the trip itinerary as well. As time went on and customers began to show, Wildwater bought more boats, and the Dragans delved deeper into the abandoned towns that dotted the riversides. “We decided to make history as much a part of our raft trip as the whitewater was,” said Tom. “We started naming our boats after towns and people in them.” They began to require such knowledge in their guides, as well. “In order to work at Wildwater,” said Tom, “every year, you wrote a five-page, single-spaced paper on some facet of the history of the New River. Over the years, they did a lot of research. And our guides were just as much a part of the river trip as the river itself.”
“Jon loved history,” agreed Melanie. “We went to Williamsburg on our honeymoon! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to colonial Virginia!”
Melanie and the Dragans were the first Wildwater guides, but it wasn’t long before they needed help and began to seek out others. Jon was again taking college classes, this time at California State Teacher�
��s College in Pennsylvania. He found other boaters there and convinced them to come down. “We also had a lot of weekend warriors,” said Melanie. “Jon would meet people and say, ‘Hey you want to be a river guide?’”
“They trained all the time. They trained in the evening when they came off the river. They did throw ropes. They did knots. We used to go through a whole week of training classes,” remembered Melanie. Jon even brought in a snake expert to lecture and teach the guides to identify snakes. A rope-access expert, Bruce Smith, taught all the knots, ropes and z-drags. Jon even anchored a tire tube in the middle of the river for guides to practice with throw ropes. “If they got it right in the middle,” said Melanie, “they got a beer or something. There was always some sort of incentive.” Guides learned first aid and CPR, too. Wildwater hired EMTs to come and teach.
One of the first local West Virginians to become a Wildwater guide was Bob Underwood, who had spent lazy summer days as a boy floating down the New River in homemade wooden boats. “I heard they were running the New River,” said Underwood. “I just said, well, I think I’ll go down and talk to them, since I grew up down there. I said, ‘I’d like to run the rapids with you two guys.’ I explained that I grew up here, and that I knew some about the river. So, Jon said sure.” Dragan told him a time and place to meet, and before he knew it, Underwood had run farther downstream than he ever had before.
