| Summary | |
| Owner | MITOC Gallery Administrator |
| Creation Date | 2005-04-28 15:48:14 UTC-0400 |
| Description | Sam Holster, Darrel Robertson, and myself (Greg Wallace) went up to do some spring paddling in the White Mountains on Sunday, April 24. Everything was flowing at much higher levels than we've ever seen. We decided to run the Mad River, which parallels Rt 49 from Waterville Valley out to the Pemigewasset River. A nice couple helped run shuttle and offered to take some pictures of us along the way, as the road provides great photo opportunities along much of the way.
We had a great time for the first half of the run, happily flying downstream at 15 mph. There were many large waves and a few good size holes, but nothing too bad. Just after the halfway point, we encountered a section where there were some large boulders under the surface of the water. Normally these boulders stick out of the water and you simply have to thread through them, but on this day the water was flowing over them creating MONSTER hydraulics. I managed to pick a good line between the holes (which overlapped slightly side-to-side and were about 20 feet apart in the downstream direction) but Sam got stuck. Darrel tried to help the swimming Sam, but then he himself got stuck in a smaller hole downstream. I caught the first eddy available (about a mile downstream), but by this time both Sam and Darrel had made it out of the water. Unfortunately both of their boats and paddles were lost to the river gods. Some locals saw the empty kayaks floating down the stream and called the local emergency services, so we got to talk to them and let them know that we were OK. We heard that the missing kayaks had been seen going over the dam about five miles downstream. |