had twenty more years on that stretch of river than any of the rest of us, and had rowed through more than anyone else. My first scouting look at Whitehorse rapids was certainly daunting. You hear the roar as you walk to the lookout, then come upon it. That year, wrapped cleanly about the right hand entry rock at the top, was a brand new and brand useless Grumman canoe, giving no hints as to the fate of the occupants. Fifty feet below in the wash of a backwater was the barely recognizable pieces of a driftboat. Halfway down the dividing island lay a dead brown horse, presumably drowned in the rapids, the submerged portion of the carcass turning fuzzy fungal white to rename the rapids, and the smell of death easily jumping the river. I couldn't see it yet but there was another driftboat carcass further downstream, testifying too late as to the impassability of that particular channel. We all stood there for about an hour, kicking the dirt, pointing out all the land and water marks, the entry point, the line through the top, THAT ROCK, which really looks benign from the bank, and so forth until a guide party came by and we watched him start through. It did not look easy. In those days there was only one line to run through Whitehorse. You backrowed frantically down to the upper lip of the rapids, searching frantically for that ten foot wide space way out in the middle between the two entry rocks that looked so obvious from the bank, but were perfectly invisible from water level. Once you found the right space, you pushed hard to hit the gap through a crosscurrent, lifted your oars to clear both exposed rocks, then immediately took a hard stroke on the left oar even as you bounced through the first standing wave to turn the boat near sideways in the heavy water. That was the key. You had to expose your flank and take water so you could make strong progress towards the right hand bank. Or Else. You had somewhere between two and four strokes, hard backbreaking strokes if you were in a packed boat with a weeks worth of gear, to pull out of the drift line of......Oh Shit! (rock). Suck air with one stroke at the peak of a wave and it would be very close. Straighten the boat once to ward off a big standing wave and it would be all over. John used to score his passages through Whitehorse in gallons of water shipped, anything less than a fifty gallon passage being good to excellent. I carried a bilge pump, and right there it was the envy of the party. After OhShit!, if there was an 'after OhShit', it was a relatively straight, if lumpy, waterslide down to the big bertha standing wave at the bottom. That was made interesting by the need to pull over into a backwater to bail out and pick up one's passengers walking around.
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