Whitewater Rafting on West Virginia's New and Gauley Rivers

by Jay Young

  Some CFGR members, including Kim and Aggie Casto, were not happy at all. “Everybody wanted Cunard left alone but the outfitters,” said Aggie. To them, it looked as though their partners on the Gauley—outfitters, the NPS and the DNR—had made a deal without CFGR input to improve Cunard and up the outfitters’ quotas on the New River while keeping them low on the Gauley. The deal also cemented a system that exists nowhere else in America, whereby the state DNR maintains control of licenses rather than the NPS. This is huge for outfitters because they don’t have to operate as park concessionaires, which carries a responsibility to comply with a host of federal regulations.

  The Castos felt the New River was already crowded enough and didn’t trust the outfitters to be happy with low numbers on the Gauley. “Our issue was, you don’t know these guys very well, do you? They’re capitalists. It’s okay that they’re capitalists; it’s just that they’re businessmen and they’re going to want both. It’s just a matter of time.”

  By the time the 1985 appropriations bill hit President Reagan’s desk, much to the chagrin of the Castos, increased outfitter numbers on the New River and development of Cunard were in it.

  Eventually, in 1999, the corps did get a hydroelectric plant at the Summersville Dam, but it did not include a long tunnel. The Upper Gauley run still begins at the foot of the dam. The project did physically change the way the corps releases water, however. One of the eighteen-foot Howell-Bunger valves, which previously shot water in a torrent from the base of the dam, was shut permanently. The water was diverted, and now it bubbles up from under the surface. Though the project had no practical effect on those plying the Gauley, it forever changed its put-in from a clamorous monster to a silent one. Rafters still leap from land directly into Class-IV water, but now, for better or worse, they can hear themselves think while doing it.

  The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the permit for Summersville Dam hydroelectric in 1992, and as public hearings progressed for it, the Nicholas County sheriff, a man known as Sarge, again wielded a heavy hand against the whitewater industry. Sarge owned a dive shop on Summersville Lake, and the Gauley Season autumn releases muddied his water. The last thing he wanted was for the outfitters to somehow finagle extra scheduled releases in the spring and summer.

  Sarge invited Class-VI’s Jeff Proctor into a dark, smoky back room at his dive shop for a talk. He made it very clear that if the outfitters made any attempt to gain scheduled flows other than what they were already getting, “we were toast,” said Proctor. Sarge went on to explain that if the outfitters maneuvered for anything other than what they already had, his deputies would begin to apply the entire 181-page West Virginia vehicle inspection book to every single raft bus that turned in toward the dam.

  “It’ll take three or four hours per vehicle to get to the dam,” Proctor reported Sarge saying to him.

  Today, there are still no scheduled spring and summer releases on the Gauley River.

  THE RUBBER ROOM

  There exists a fellowship of raft guides that is largely unspoken and ill defined yet ever-present nonetheless. Sometimes friendships grow gradually over the course of working many trips together. Other times, respect between guides is forged in foam and hammered out upon an anvil of stone, all in a matter of minutes. One such story took place in 1998 at the Keeney Brothers rapids, where Larry Nibert and Doug Ludwig became fast friends.

  When the water on the New River is high, the three Keeney rapids merge into one and become the longest and arguably most dangerous rapid on the river. Boats begin on the right side at Upper Keeney, where they float past Whale Rock on the left. If the water isn’t too high, and Whale Rock isn’t Whale Hole, there’s an eddy behind it. It can be difficult to break into that eddy, but the pool of slower, calmer water can help guide a boat leftward to line up for Middle Keeney, which is choked with huge, surging, irregular waves, even on the cleanest line. The one wave most people try like mad to avoid is the Pipeline, aka the Mouth Wave. It’s steep and massive, and if you catch it at the wrong moment, it is also quite mean.

  If a boater swims in Middle Keeney, he doesn’t have a lot of time before the current pulls him into a jumble of rocks at center right at the top of Lower Keeney called the Meat Grinder. There may not be a worse place to be on the New River at high water. Those rocks, the angriest of which is Flint Rock, form several cracks that are large enough to let water through but small enough to trap a person. It has been the site of at least one death.

  The cleanest line there passes the Meat Grinder well to the left and into Lower Keeney. That doesn’t mean the left is completely safe, however. At the bottom of Lower Keeney, just when you think everything will surely turn out okay, there’s a massive wave called Lollygag. It’s possible to run Lollygag cleanly, but out of a boat it would be a horrible, terrifying swim, after which the swimmer might very well meet his dead ancestors waiting at the end.

  Most people call Larry Nibert “Redneck.” Note the capital R. The moniker is not an insult, however. It’s a nickname, and Redneck wears it as well as a West Virginia boy can. That is to say, it fits him, and it’s neither good nor bad that people call him that. They just do, and he answers to it.

  Nibert makes an odd pairing with Doug Ludwig. Ludwig doesn’t look big until you get right up next to him, and then he’s larger than life. His brown hair falls past the middle of his back, and his beard is wild enough to look longer than it actually is. He’s the spitting image of the southern white Jesus.

  Nibert was working for Rivers at the time, where very few people had advanced swift-water rescue skills. “We had the basics,” he said. “CPR, first aid. But I was considered pretty much the senior staff.” This got a hearty laugh from Ludwig.

  “I was leading a five- or six-boat trip that day,” continued Nibert, as he ignored Doug. “My next experienced boater was a two-year guide. So, I had a bunch of first- and second-year boaters. The river was probably seven and a half feet.”

  “Eight and a half is what I remember,” said Ludwig.

  “It was big water,” agreed Nibert.

  “In my boat, I had a group of three and some family members, who worked at a restaurant,” he continued. “And needless to say, they quit growing up a long time ago. They’d been growing out for a while. I took a load of nine people, which happened a lot in those days.”

  Nibert was running first, which is common among trip leaders at many raft companies.

  Several times over the years, other more experienced boaters had attempted to teach him the standard raft line at Upper Keeney, but “all I’d ever done was just go left,” said Nibert. His approach to it had always been successful before, and indeed, “just go left” is pretty much exactly what the standard line is. That time, however, the angle of his boat was a hair off, and such things are not typically trivial in big, pushy water. Nibert moved to put the nose of his boat into the eddy behind Whale Rock to slow things down and move him left for Middle Keeney, but the eddy had other plans. “I go to break into the eddy behind Whale Rock, and it knocks me out. I keep trying to break into the eddy, and each time, it knocks me out. I’m like, ‘I’m not going to make this move.’”

  A borrowed army-surplus bridge raft carrying twelve men and maybe three paddles barely survives a run-in with Flint Rock in the Meat Grinder, Lower Keeney rapid on the New River, 1972. No beer was harmed in the making of this photograph. Butch Christian Collection.

  “So I thought, ‘Okay, what do I do?’”

  Nibert yelled to his crew, “Alright guys, hard forward! Hard forward! Get ready for a get down! Get ready for a get down!” Nibert squared his boat up on the towering Mouth Wave, and just as he plowed into it, he shouted “GET DOWN!”

  “And I ain’t kidding you,” said Nibert, “that boat stood up as vertical as it could. It kicked around in the air like a musky trying to kick a plug, and everybody left the boat but me. God kept me in that boat. There must have been stick ’um on my butt.”

  About that
time, Ludwig’s trip came into view, and he saw what had happened downstream. “It looked like he was flipping,” said Ludwig. “It did a big kick up. It kicked to the left, and everybody went shooting that way.”

  “There’s probably only been about three times or four times that I’ve ever hit something, where I felt like it was running into a brick wall,” pointed out Nibert for effect. “That thing couldn’t have broke on me more perfect.”

  “So, I’m screaming every expletive known to man to get my point across to people swimming right, people swimming left, and believe it or not, I picked up somewhere around six or seven people myself,” beamed Nibert. He couldn’t get them all, however, and there was nobody downstream to assist him. He and his crew were on their own.

  The boat and its spilled cargo rapidly approached the Meat Grinder, but Nibert was hardly green himself, and he thought quickly. “I make a move around to the right of Flint Rock into an eddy and go down backward,” he said. “My head’s going a hundred different directions. I look around, and somebody swam through Lollygag. Another raft picks them up.”

  Nibert’s flotilla spent the next quarter mile picking up people and equipment and finally pulled over for a breather just before the next big rapid, Dudley’s Dip. “And that’s when I realize,” said Nibert, “I’m missing someone.”

  “I had a boatload of weak paddlers, too,” said Ludwig, “with one strong guy. He’s riding front left for me, and I’m rowing. I’ve got all greenie raft guides behind me.”

  Ludwig saw Nibert’s boat spit out its crew, but he wasn’t initially close enough to help. However, “we come through past there, and I look right and see somebody hanging onto Meat Grinder. This dude is hugging it.”

  One of the Meat Grinder rocks has a small lip on the top of it, which, at eight and a half feet, is just under water. The man had somehow managed to grab the lip as the current raked him over it. After a few tense moments, he hoisted himself up, climbed atop the rock and stood there with the water at his ankles, surging to his knees. Since it was just under the water, the rock was not, technically speaking, even an island. Class-V river raged all around him for many meters in every direction. He was desperately stuck, a sopping and forlorn near-victim of the New River.

  Ludwig caught the same eddy that had just pushed Nibert’s boat to the right of the Meat Grinder, but he had never been there before and didn’t know what to expect. It is common wisdom that if you’re in this particular eddy, you are going to the right of Meat Grinder, whether you want to or not. But then, rules are meant to be broken.

  Ludwig examined the situation. He looked back upstream to see where his other guides were and if they could offer any assistance. No luck. All three of the other boats had committed to Lower Keeney and were either on their way into it or already there. Ludwig spared a moment to see if they would be okay…just in time to watch one of them flip in Lollygag. “I’m in a bind, you know? I don’t want to commit to Meat Grinder to get this guy, but I know my trip is getting trashed.”

  He decided on the only course of action that didn’t involve abandoning Nibert’s crewman to the Meat Grinder. Ludwig cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “Hey, I’m gonna come get you! When I come by, jump in the boat!” He turned his boat diagonally upstream, got his oars moving at a furious pace and ferried out sideways in front of the carnage, intending to stay just upstream of it while fighting fast water all the way.

  “I passed that boat so close, he could have just stepped onto it. I took it right past that lip. And he didn’t move. And I was like, well, this is it, dude.”

  At the last moment, his already risky plan falling apart at the seams, Ludwig caught the man’s eye and screamed, “JUMP! JUMP!”

  The man leapt for the boat, caught the raft’s outer tube in the chest and barely hung on. One of Ludwig’s guests leapt into action and grabbed the soaked man, pulling him the rest of the way into the boat in the nick of time.

  His boat, however, was not out of trouble. The Meat Grinder is a third of the river wide, and it was obvious to Ludwig that he was not going to make it safely around. “At this point,” said Ludwig, “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, this is bad—sideways in an oar rig.’” He cranked his oars franticly—back on the left and forward on the right—to turn the boat just enough to get a forty-five-degree angle. Miraculously, they made it past the pour-overs without losing anybody. Inches made the difference.

  After all that, “my next thought is, where is everybody?” said Ludwig. “I look down the river, and it’s like a ghost town. There’s nobody. No helmets, no paddles floating, nothing. I had a three-boat trip; Redneck had four or five boats. Nothing. Finally, we come around the bend.”

  Nibert spent several minutes coming to grips with the fact that one of his guests was missing in the river. For a raft guide, the only thing worse would be two missing people. His stomach was in his throat. He thought he had killed somebody.

  “Then, here comes Jesus around the corner, with these oars,” laughed Nibert, remembering both what he saw and his relief at seeing it.

  Ludwig yelled out, “Hey, you missing something?”

  “And just about that time,” said Nibert, “Jesus realizes I’ve got something that belongs to him.”

  “He’s got my whole freaking trip,” said Ludwig. “I cleaned up his stuff. He cleaned up mine. And ever since then, we’ve been cool.”

  Dragan developed a method for his huge New River rafts that involved a guide at the stern and one at the bow. Here, Butch Christian draw strokes from the stern, while Hillary Jones pries from the bow on Pillow Rock rapid, Gauley River. Butch Christian Collection.

  In this photo, the raft falls neatly into the Toilet Bowl at Pillow Rock rapid, which is actually a good thing. Butch Christian Collection.

  It may very well be that raft guides are the lowest-paid professional athletes anywhere, but the promise of Doug-and-Larry-style adventure—sometimes delivered, sometimes not—drives no small number of people to give up all semblance of a normal life and settle into one of backbreaking work for little or no money. It’s like seeing the cartoon version of an insane person wearing a ball gag and chains and thinking, “I want that!” They even get a rubber room of sorts—a raft—in which to spend their days.

  Even at the dawn of the industry, many raft guides were born and bred West Virginians who grew up around the river but never ran it—that would be plum crazy—and didn’t know the first thing about guiding a raft when they started out. They just saw a bizarre new thing that people were traveling from all over to do on a river, and that their parents told them could kill them, and they wanted more than anything to be part of it.

  In 1979, one of them was eighteen-year-old Michael Ivey. “It had started to impact our psyches even in high school,” said Ivey. “We pretty much knew it was the place to be, because these people always had a party going on, and there were always women showing up from out of state who had valid plastic.”

  The raft industry boomed at least in part because the West Virginia Department of Commerce brought in journalists by the truckload to write about it. Here, Butch Christian (front row, second from right) poses with a team from National Geographic, 1975. Butch Christian Collection.

  Ivey started out with a friend, Danny Ballard, whose brother, Randall, owned a small raft company called Drift-a-Bit. They did not, however, begin their whitewater careers on the river. Ivey and Ballard worked out of an abandoned bank building in Glen Jean, printing T-shirts to sell to outfitters. “We were hustling around, trying to make some money, both artistic kinda guys,” said Ivey. He is one of four children in his family. Two of his siblings joined the military. “It wasn’t like there was opportunity in this part of Appalachia,” he said. “It was sort of like this permanent recession. I saw it as an opportunity to make some money and get a job. I’m sure we would have been coal miners had we the opportunity to make that 60k a year at the time. We tried to do something with art, which wasn’t the worst decision, but we really weren’t
businesspeople.”

  Their biggest-selling T-shirt said: “Wet Your Pants in the New River.”

  Ivey first ran whitewater in 1980 with New River Scenic Whitewater Tours, a company based in Hinton, West Virginia. It was something he might never have done were it not for various forces of nature, namely being nineteen and wanting to hook up. He had never been on the water before. “I was pretty terrified of it,” he said. “Luckily, you wore a life jacket, and nobody ever asked me if I could swim. It was a motivating factor: to party with the tourists.”

  Soon enough, he was guiding for his former partner’s brother.

  Ivey became addicted to the freedom inherent in the job, and he was not alone. “That freedom of being your own boss,” he mused, “’cause once you’re in that boat alone, you’re your own boss—I think that’s kind of what these West Virginia people liked.” Plus, with Ballard, he was in a fledgling company, which was just plain fun. “We would actually have ‘work parties,’” he said, “which I think now is hilarious. You got paid in beer and hot dogs, and you built stuff. You built the equipment the business used.”

  Some guides loved the river life but either grew tired of guiding or just never saw the allure. Many became video boaters, a role that got them paid to paddle but didn’t require them to be people persons. A whole segment of the industry grew up around providing videos and photos of guests in major rapids, with faces either aglow from the rush of adrenaline or awash with spume.

  Ivey soon learned a lesson that the vast majority of people who join the rafting industry to make money learn: they would never get rich doing it. He had no idea when he started out that in his best year, he would barely crack $10,000, half of which were tips.