Adirondack Life, Inc. - May/June 2009: Rapid Transit

Rapid Transit

Each year more than 50,000 vacationers careen down Adirondack rivers in rafts. Can white water keep our tourism industry afloat?

by Michael Hill

photograph by Melody Thomas

Even before the dam gate below Lake Abanakee was raised at 10 a.m., before the “bubble” of water surged down the Indian River to the Hudson Gorge, giving a turbo boost to white-water rafters, Nate Pelton knew it would be a good day. Heavy summer rains had recently ripped through the mountains, roiling the rapids to a froth well before the release. Plus, his old school bus with “North Creek Rafting Co.” printed on the side and inﬂatable rafts lashed to the top was full. It would be a day of fast water and lots of customers.

As Pelton drove the bus to the put-in below the dam, his fellow guide Noah Howard talked up the trip to the parents and kids from New Jersey, California and Belgium. “The water is running really good,” Howard told them. “We’re going to have a big cushion of water to work with today!”

“Cushion” is maybe not the right word. In the eight-person raft we were wobbled, whacked by walls of rushing water and thoroughly soaked. A few were ejected from the bucking boats—becoming “swimmers,” in guide parlance—and all of us would see one of the prettiest and most remote sites in the Adirondacks from the inside out.

The Adirondack Park is among the few spots in the Northeast with the requisite rivers, rapids and beauty to maintain a healthy rafting industry. While the tourist trafﬁc is a fraction of some of the big rivers out West, there are still more than 50,000 people a year who pay $70–$100 to ﬂoat down our wild waters in inﬂatable boats. Most of the commercial white-water action is on the upper Hudson and the Sacandaga Rivers, though some experienced paddlers love the spring rush of the Moose River. Ausable Chasm offers milder rides, and outﬁtters also operate just west of the park on the rugged Black and Salmon Rivers.

The Sacandaga draws plenty of tourists, but the longer ride on the upper Hudson is widely considered the signature ﬂoat trip in the region. The winding 17-mile journey starts on the Indian River and picks up the Hudson a few miles downstream for a series of bumpy cascades and views of the gorge’s towering limestone cliffs. The elevation drops 650 feet from put-in to take-out. Even veterans of the great western rivers, like tourist Paul Totah, think the Hudson measures up.

“It’s more action, more often,” said Totah, a San Francisco teacher who rafted the Hudson last summer with his wife, Kathryn, and their two teenagers, Lauren and Michael.

Families like the Totahs fuel an outdoors business that has quickly grown from a hard-core niche to a crucial cog in the Adirondack tourism economy. Proof comes every spring weekend plus summer Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays at the put-in in the town of Indian Lake, when the dam gate is opened for about an hour. Hundreds of riders in crash helmets and life vests create an Adirondack wilderness version of rush hour, queuing up with self-bailing rafts in colors—purple, blue, yellow, red—that give a clue to which outﬁtter they are riding with. It might be Pelton’s North Creek, or Middle Earth Expeditions, or Adirondack River Outﬁtters or one of eight others. The river becomes clogged with a ﬂotilla of tourists, many who laugh and chatter as they paddle tentatively toward the rough water ahead.

Commercial white-water rafting was a relative latecomer to the Adirondacks. After World War II, when entrepreneurs out West were charging for trips in old military rafts, prime time on the Hudson was dominated by paper companies ﬂoating their logs downriver.

Ask ﬁve pioneering Hudson guides who did what ﬁrst and prepare for ﬁve different answers. The consensus is that commercial outﬁtters showed up by 1979. Joe Kowalski, of Wilderness Tours, based in Ontario, recalled that he was already running rafts on the Ottawa River when he came down that April to scout the Hudson. Trudging through the snow with a raft to the put-in, a pickup truck pulled beside him and the driver unleashed an expletive-laced tirade about having to share the river. The driver was a Maine river runner named Wayne Hockmeyer who had already scouted the Hudson in a kayak and had his own commercial designs. The two became friends and, along with local Pat Cunningham, formed part of the nucleus of outﬁtters who grew the business over the 1980s.

It was different then. Rafters ran in April and May and, to a lesser extent, the fall, when water ﬂowed fast and cold. Most of the clientele was what veteran guide Peter Hunkins called “young, testosterone-ﬁlled males.” Wet suits and quick reﬂexes were required. Former guide Jay Schurman would ﬁx up steak and coffee for his customers, a red-meat banquet by the river that reinforced the camaraderie.

The town of Indian Lake helped early on in two crucial ways. By timing releases on the municipal Abanakee Dam, ofﬁcials ensured a good bubble to provide adequate water levels. By selling a ﬁxed number of “slots” to outﬁtters, the town managed how many riders could go down the river each day (there are now about 1,100 slots, which cost companies $57 each). This helped upper Hudson rafting grow like gangbusters in the 1980s. Rafting on the Sacandaga River also caught on with Lake George visitors and other tourists in that decade.

The big game-changer on the Hudson came in 1997, when Indian Lake began timing dam releases throughout the summer. Not only did this extend rafting through the lucrative vacation season, it also made white-water rafting more family friendly. Summer offers a warmer, gentler trip. No wet suits are required, and eight-year-olds can ride along. No more steak and coffee. Pelton serves veggie wraps and cookies. The old Hemingway crowd now looks more like a group headed to Disney World.

The demographic shift shows in the larger number of riders: There were 23,662 people who went down the Hudson with commercial outﬁtters in 2008, more than double the number of rafters before summer releases, according to town records. Ridership numbers were up for four straight years through last summer, a nice, wet one.

People who compare white-water rafting to a roller-coaster ride have it half right. You don’t get drenched on a roller coaster and you certainly can’t climb back in if you fall out. But I felt that same coaster-like sense of anticipation and adrenaline when I shared a raft with Pelton and the Totah family on a warm, cloudy day last summer. The ride started smoothly on the Indian River and picked up a little speed when we merged with the Hudson. Sitting on compressed air, ﬂoating on water, it really did feel like a cushion. Then the rapids approached, a soft waterfall sound quickly getting louder. “Everybody brace yourself,” Pelton said matter-of-factly. “It’s going to get sticky.” And then—whoosh—we were in it.

Water chopped over the side. Pelton yelled, “All forward!” A friendly spray over my face was followed by the hard slap of a wave that soaked me through. The raft undulated with the water and bent like a taco shell. I thought, There are boulders in the water somewhere. We paddled like desperate Vikings, but I mostly scooped the air. A few ﬁnal thunderous splashes rocked the raft before it leveled off into calm water. We were all dripping wet. Kathryn Totah was laughing. Pelton, perched on the stern of the raft like a gondolier, somehow managed to avoid catapulting off.

At age 34 he has done this trip about 700 times and knows every boulder and eddy. Dragging his paddle through the water like a tiller, he will reel off the sites, like the Gooley Steps and Blue Ledge, as they drift by. For many years Pelton managed the biggest raft operation here, Hudson River Rafting Company, for Cunningham. He bought his own slots from a departing outﬁtter in 2006 and is now the newest operator, with his wife, Becky.

Pelton wears his long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and plays Grateful Dead in his barn before the trips. The relaxed presentation belies the intense preparation Pelton puts into the excursions, but it ﬁts with the idiosyncratic nature of the business. Beaver Brook Outﬁtters, based in Wevertown, promotes splash ﬁghts between rafts on its Web site. Wayne Failing, of Lake Placid’s Middle Earth, meets his charges for breakfast at a diner in Indian Lake and plays his ﬂute on trips.

Though guides show some superﬁcial differences, they tend to be hardy, non-mainstream types who love the wilderness and a good thrill. Think of ski bums with rushing water instead of snowy slopes. In fact, some of the guides span both subcultures.

With so much in common, guides have always enjoyed camaraderie along with the competition—from trading war stories at Indian Lake’s Oak Barrel Tavern in the ’80s to potluck dinners today. Veteran guide Gary Staab, of Adirondack River Outﬁtters Adventures, said that at the end of a trip, he will sometimes pop in and say hello to one of his competitors along Route 28.

“We’ll stop in,” he said, “and have a beer or two.”

A bond among many guides, aside from a love of the river, is that rafting allows them to make a living in the tourist trade almost year-round. Pelton, for instance, grooms trails in the winter at nearby Gore Mountain and designs Web sites. Failing is a wilderness guide. Cunningham owns ski shops. The 11 outﬁtters employ dozens of people in season, but the economic effects ripple out beyond the business owners and employees.

“Rafting comes at a time when you need a shot in the arm: right after winter,” Indian Lake supervisor Barry Hutchins said. The $51,000 a year the town earns by selling slots is the least of it. On a good day the river will bring up to 1,000 paying paddlers. Many, like the Totahs—who stayed two nights in the Adirondacks between visits to New York City and Montreal—will spend hundreds of dollars at local restaurants, shops and motels.

Add to the mix the 27,000 to 30,000 rafters each year who take the 3.5-mile trip down the Sacandaga, according to John Duncan, owner of Sacandaga Outdoor Center, in Hadley. Duncan is hoping to lure even more river trafﬁc with a proposal to strategically place boulders in the streambed to add new waves and holes for a white-water park. The daunting Moose River west of Old Forge has far less commercial action because of its difﬁculty.

Many rafters come to the Adirondacks for what Pelton calls the “natural amusement park.” But they get something more. For those without a kayak, commercial rafts provide the best way to see the tenacious cedars and rocky ledges of the gorge. Like skiing, rafting can satisfy both the thrill seeker and the aesthete.

A light rain fell during a slower stretch of my Hudson trip, and I vividly recall the sizzling sound on the river as we languidly drifted by the green shores. This wild, twisting river is a revelation for many people who know the Hudson only as the stately, if slightly soiled, river that ﬂows by New York City.

“I was actually kind of surprised that the Hudson had white water on it,” Ken Weiss, of Clinton, New Jersey, said after a trip. “You get the impression that it’s a wide, tidal river.”

It sounds like an insurance nightmare: families from New Jersey careening down wild, boulder-strewn rivers in an inﬂatable boat. Standard liability waivers include ominous sentences noting the risk of injury, paralysis or death. Outﬁtters stow backboards along the shore for emergencies. And rafters have died, like the 44-year-old church-group chaperone who wedged his foot between two rocks on the river bottom in 1996.

But there hasn’t been a commercial rafting death in years. New York State requires that Hudson guides be licensed. Guides give pre-trip instructions on how to ﬂoat if ﬂipped off the raft (feet ﬁrst, like you’re driving an invisible car). Riders thrown overboard in rough water are pulled back aboard quickly.

It’s controlled to the degree that a trip down rushing water can be. Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) forest-ranger reports over the last several years show no major incidents involving rafting companies, though a 28-year-old man ﬂoating with friends in the Ausable died in rough water in 2006.

The most persistent complaints against rafting revolve not around safety, but dam releases. It’s not a big issue on the Sacandaga, where recreational dam releases from the lake of the same name are written into a federal hydropower license. It has been a lingering issue on the Indian and Hudson Rivers.

Some anglers complain the surges on the Hudson are ﬂushing away river plants and animals and question the ethics of disturbing an ecosystem for recreation. James Nash, who ﬁrst ﬁshed the gorge in 1957, blames the releases of the lake water into the rivers for turning a good ﬁshery into a lousy one.

“You’re talking about brown trout being hit in the face with a wall of water,” said Nash, a retired engineer from Queensbury. “They’ve got to hide under the rocks.”

Rafting supporters counter that surges are natural occurrences in rivers, like during ﬂoods, and do no harm. Outﬁtters are especially passionate on this point. Failing said unlike, for instance, a hike through the woods, rafting leaves a “net-zero” environmental impact. “You didn’t bend a ﬂower, you didn’t leave a footprint, you didn’t break a branch.”

The DEC is looking at the Abanakee water releases as part of a long-awaited Unit Management Plan for the Hudson Gorge Primitive Area. No publish date has been set for the plan. In one study conducted for it, Bethany Boisvert, a Cornell University graduate student, implanted transmitters into abdominal cavities of 77 hatchery-reared brown trout over two summers to investigate whether the releases of Lake Abanakee water affect the ability of the ﬁsh to ﬁnd the pockets of cool water they need to thrive.

Boisvert concluded that the warm waters of the Indian and the Hudson are not a great summer habitat for trout even without the releases. It’s possible that the surges exacerbate already unsuitable conditions, she said.

“Teasing apart whether the releases actually cause mortality is something I can’t say,” explained Boisvert, now an environmental consultant. “I think even if the releases weren’t there, you would see a high mortality.”

It’s conceivable the state could seek to halt the Abanakee releases. That seems unlikely, and not just because of an unresolved ﬁsh controversy. Few, if any, interest groups in the Adirondacks seem eager to lead the charge to shut the valves on an increasingly popular stream of tourist dollars. The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, for instance, claims the water releases violate conservation law. But the group has not taken a stand against rafting; they presented the evidence to argue against a proposed hydro project upstream at Indian Lake. Even the New York State Council of Trout Unlimited, while concerned about the releases, has stopped short of opposition. DEC supervising forester Rick Fenton was not exaggerating when he called water releases “a very complex and extremely politically sensitive subject.”

For better or worse, rafting is an established way for Adirondack residents to make a living from their rivers in the 21st century. Think of the guides as modern-day rivermen and -women. Instead of ﬂoating logs downriver, they are carefully ﬂoating tourists from California and Europe. Pelton, in a neat bit of symbolism, serves lunch for his customers at Carter’s Landing, a shady spot on the Hudson where loggers once gathered.

Stop rafting on the Hudson? Pelton believes the business is now so marbled into the local economy, it could never happen. “It would be like saying you couldn’t ski at Gore anymore.”