Posts Tagged incline train

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Boy Gorge- The Final Chapter (10)

Sep17
by on September 17, 2011 at 9:36 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

So I climbed out.  The old guy working on the train, or at least working on the overworked mechanism that dragged trains up and down the crack track, said I was the only one who’d done what I did.  It’s very possible he didn’t know, though.  I mean, if someone else lost a boat under the bridge, chances are he or she could have just ridden the train back up.  My failure was in waiting around until the train was broken before losing my paddle and my boat.  The story would not be so entertaining or as long, if only my timing had been better.

So the word goes out that some idiot has appeared in the little theme park out of, well, not NOWHERE, but I didn’t come in through the front door.  Where, importantly, I guess, the ticket booth is.  In the time it took me to stagger off of the track and get my bearings (meaning to see where the nearest water fountain is- I was dying for water) the management sent a flunky.  I thought “Oh, what’s this kid here for?  To make sure I’m alright? To see if I need assistance?  To offer food or rest in an air conditioned medical office before sending me on my way?”

No.  He watched me like a hawk without saying more than “Hey.”  He watched as I got my long drink of water.  He watched as I scanned the area for the exit.  He followed me as I slogged out of the little theme park.  He was there to make sure I didn’t have any fun or ride any rides or purchase any souvenir candles after having sneaked in the back door.  As I walked out into the parking lot, he turned and went back to whatever his usual job is- sweeping, dishing out ice cream, and sprinkling kitty litter on toddler vomit… or something.  I DO hope that playing Sergeant At Arms for seven minutes was the highlight of his theme-park career. Punk.

So.  The parking lot.  It’s a nice one.  There’s landscaping and the typical (for the time) faux-carved-wood signage.  I looked around, hoping to see not only a truckload of my friends, but lots of boats strapped to the top of the truck.  LOTS of boats, including one mottled white Perception Corsica Matrix.  No luck.

Honestly, I had no way to gauge how long the rest of the trip was for anyone in a boat.  This was my first trip into the area, and I’m one of those tagalongs who doesn’t look at the maps so much.  So I could only hope that they didn’t finish the run an hour ago, come by here looking for me, decide I’d already gotten a ride somehow, and taken off to the campground.  Surely, if they got here and didn’t find me, they’d have asked someone if a kayaker had ridden the train out of the gorge and come through the park.  They’d have then been told the train wasn’t working, and they’d have gotten concerned… you get the idea.  Things might have gone differently.

So I sat on a large and generally well-placed rock to await my friends, and to get news of my stray gear.

This might have been boring, except there were fraternity boys in the parking lot, too.  They had a big white Econoline van.  Never a dull moment with a bunch of fraternity brothers and their van to watch.  I need to mention the deer, too.  As with a lot of rustic tourist destinations, deer wander around the parking lot of the Royal Gorge Bridge and Theme Park.  Black tail deer, I think, but you’d have to ask someone who can tell one deer from another to know for sure.  I would have asked Dennis, but he was driving the truck that was… not here.  You get the idea.

Deer in public vacation spots learn to think of people as sources of tasty tidbits, and probably as sources of eye-stinging flashes as everyone takes photos of deer taking tasty tidbits from vacationers.  Fraternity boys are NOT like other vacationers.  Other vacationers do not try to offer tasty tidbits to deer while luring them into vans.  There are people who use treats to lure animals and other people into white econoline vans, but the six-o’clock news usually calls them something other than Fraternity Brothers.  And the photos of such people are usually taken in front of courthouses while officers shove the photographers out of the way.

But as usual, I digress.  I sat serenely, quietly, and happily as I speculated what would happen when the guys got that deer into their van.  There were three or four guys in the van holding out chips and things. There were two other guys (presumably the driver and the shotgun) who were luring the deer closer to the wide van door.

I figured that if the first part of the Frat Guys’ plan worked out (“Dude, WE just hold out food until it gets in the van, then YOU close the door, dude”) then the second part of their plan (“And we just drive away with our own deer, dude”) would not come off so well.  I assumed that if the deer went in, and the driver got the sliding door shut, that the van would then rock, roll, and generally be kicked into pieces from the inside, and then I could watch as the driver and shotgun piled in to do something about the blood, hair, teeth and limbs that were flying around inside the van. …Then I could tell the police what happened.  That was MY plan.

Neither my plan nor their plan worked out.  Their plan depended on the deer being hungry, gullible and docile.  My plan depended on the deer being hungry, gullible and homicidally panicked.  The deer, being none of those things in particular, took one look at the van full of grinning guys holding out Doritos, then turned and left.

Nuts.

I was very grateful then, when the truckload of my friends came for me. Good timing.  I don’t know the odds of another vanload of guys showing up to entertain me with their untimely demises were, but probably not so hot.

My boat wasn’t on the truck.  Damn.  Now, I’d have to get another one- either borrowing from someone else on the trip or buying a new one outright, which is an expense I hadn’t budgeted on.  Oddly, I worried that I could drown on such a trip. But knowing the expense would be paid by life insurance, the money didn’t worry me.  Being alive and needing a new boat worried me, though.

I lamented the loss of the boat out loud a couple of times on the way to the restaurant, until Dennis broke down and admitted that they were playing a joke on me.  He then told me of the sharp-eyed find of my boat, wedged on a rock- the white bottom of the boat nearly lost in the white froth covering it.  They’d loaded it on the OTHER truck and were going to spring it on me later.  I laughed, relieved… and happy to be part of a gag.  After the day I’d had, I was happy to be part of anything fun- meaning anything that didn’t involve finding my way out of a gorge.

My paddle, it turns out, had been spotted too, though not retrieved.  Dr. Alan ‘Sonny’ Salomon, who hadn’t felt up to paddling on flood-stage water that day (the man’s a genius), was the one to spot it.  He was at the take-out awaiting us.  He said it went by, out in the middle of the river, turning end over end .  Waving buh-bye, as it were.

It has been uncharitably speculated that it’s probably holding up a clothesline in Mexico now.

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Boy Gorge- Part 9

Sep04
by on September 4, 2011 at 9:17 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

The tough part is pretty much over. I’ve done all the confusing, frightening, stupid, dead-ended things that can be done, and now, I’m ready for the part that, while maybe not EASY, is at least straightforward. Climb a ladder. Out. No more questioning the options. This was it. Just one long climb and I would be out.

So I climbed.

The Royal Gorge Incline Train’s incline is, I see at http://royalgorgebridge.com/about/facts.php, 1,550 feet long. I had to have been a little better than halfway up after all this nonsense, so let’s say I had maybe 700 feet to go. 230 yards or so. Rounding up, maybe a quarter of a football field.  It seems like longer in my memory, but you know how I exaggerate.

I would now like to point out that the tallest ladder you’re likely to run across in your life, or more specifically in MY life, is one of those 24 foot jobs that reach to the top of your two-story house to let you reach, say, the wasp nest that has been built in some inaccessible and frankly vertiginous corner where you wouldn’t normally go on a bet, especially since it’s full of wasps. But I digress again and the commas are getting plain silly. You ever climbed on one of those 24 foot things at full extension? No, because at full extension, they bounce like trampolines. But that’s not the point. The point is 24 foot ladders.  What about 29 of them, end to end? Right. You haven’t climbed 29 fully extended 24 foot ladders because you’re not an idiot. Hardly anyone is, or could even imagine getting oneself into the position to climb that far. But let me tell you that such a climb uses muscles that boot camp workouts don’t reach. You use neglected, dehydrated, twanging muscles that are wobbly from bathing in old adrenaline that went sour in your bloodstream four or five chapters back.

But there is very little incentive to stop, because numbers of feet and dehydration aside, you’re nearly OUT.

My wish for you and your life is that one day, you can have a task that has such single-minded purpose and such dawn’s-awakening results. I won’t say it’s like seeing a child born because saying so can get you killed by some woman who remembers her own purpose and results and knows damn well if you try to equate climbing a ladder to it, she’ll kill ya. And because it’s not really the same anyhow. Frankly, though, it’s affirming to just climb along as best you can,counting missing bolts on the ladder (98 in case you’re wondering) and knowing that you’re on a straight road out of Dodge.

By the time I got to 98 missing bolts that should have been holding my ladder in place, it was no longer my ladder.

It now belonged to the guy whose face suddenly popped over the end of the ladder as I approached the top.  I was now the interloper and I was on HIS ladder. He had a genial face, a work-smudged face, a suspicious and a baffled face. He said, “What was you doing down THERE?”

“Kayaking.” I said, “I lost my boat.” After a brief thought I added, “Please don’t tell me that I’m the first dumb son-of-a-bitch to have to climb outta here.”

Without missing a beat, he said, “Well, son, I got bad news.” And he grinned.  Ass.

 

That wasn’t adding insult to injury.  That came a few minutes later, and we’ll get to it in the Conclusion Of Boy Gorge, next time.

 

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Boy Gorge- Part VIII

Aug23
by on August 23, 2011 at 10:50 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

Because of the stupidification of the United States, we no longer use the word ‘protagonist’ much. Unless you’re an English Lit major or just want to be made fun of for knowing words, I guess. Anyhow, it is completely useless to call me the ‘hero’ of this story, even if the general population now calls any main character of any story the ‘hero’.

So our intrepid PROTAGONIST is now climbing out of an incline train, clinging like an insect (a sweaty, nervous, panicky, non-hero insect) to the cage walls with a grip that could have cracked walnuts. I didn’t want to swing out all gracefully, miss my footing, and fall twelve feet or whatever it was that looked suspiciously like fifty feet at the time. So I clung like one of those slow-motion stickbugs the kids find in the yard and call their friends and parents over to see. You know the ones. They spend hours laboriously navigating some hosta while the kids “Oooh” and “Aaahh.” Then the kids move them right back where they started and they begin thinking of suicide just for the relief of it.

I digress, but now you get the feeling of the situation. There was a footstep mounted on the rear of the train. I got a foot on it. I reached my hand around and found firm grip. I went around the end of the train and found myself standing on that wire-grate foot tread, looking down through the tracks, past the cables and past the ladder I’d now have to climb. I would, once I started, be staring down at a drop below me for the whole climb. Or I could crank my head back and look up the ladder, risking neck strain.

I chose the neck strain, perfectly happy in that decision.

Now we all must digress for a moment to discuss Dry Tops. Mine was new. I got it because I don’t usually paddle in Colorado. I had always made do with a few layers surmounted by a splash jacket. For this trip, though, I whipped out the plastic borrow-money-from-the-evil-corp card and got me a Dry Top. It was (and is) a Stohlquist jacket in the godawfullest purple and teal colors. The colors I assume they don’t make any more because everyone finally wised up and realized that the Eighties were, at the time, a decade past and we should retire those colors forever. That’s not important to our story, though. What’s important is that
1) The top was, as stated, a dry one. Meaning it has rubber gaskets for the neck and wrist holes. The upshot of this is that you stay dry on splashy rivers, even when upside down. The downside is that you must hold your breath while struggling out of it at the end of the day, because the insides of the top smell like the insides of a marmot that have been outside the marmot for too long.
B) The top also sported a natty collar lined with fluffy polartech. This has come in handy since, but only in the water. Never climbing up a ladder in full sunlight on a warmish day.
III) It was expensive.

The drytop in question, still extant, though gorilla tape is currently holding the neck gasket in place.

I hadn’t wanted to tie the top around my waist or anything for fear that it’d work itself loose and fall where I couldn’t retrieve it.

Now, I didn’t want to keep dragging the sleeve along a gritty, greasy cable and mess it all up, while simultaneously straining myself to the point where I was probably sweating a prehistoric ocean into the thing. Primordial Soup and the inevitable results were cooking up inside this thing, while on the outside the Primordial Goop that resulted were smearing on and piling up. I was a history of biology lecture in action.

No way Colorado Kayak Supply was taking this thing in as a return, y’know wha’m sayin’?

My exertions partly came from the fact that I was hurrying. Gollum’s voice echoed in my cooking brain, “Less haste, more speed, my precious.” I had to get some distance between me and that damned train in case it fired up again. There was plenty of distance to be had, if I could only make use of it. There was a long climb to go, and it wasn’t the kind of climb you can make with your head cranked back to watch for helpful faces at the top of the gorge, as it turns out.

Looking down at the track (“Look at the track, not at the drop. Look at the track, not at the drop”) I couldn’t help but notice that there were, every so often, missing bolts. The first time I noticed, it was a little funny. “Oh, there’s a bolt missing there. Glad they didn’t miss any more. The ladder might not be sa… oh, there’s another missing bolt. Three… four. %$#@>” After a bit, it was easy to see that the ladder didn’t actually NEED all its bolts at the moment. Even with my two-hundred-plus weight on it, it wasn’t moving around or sagging or anything alarming at all. Which isn’t to say that I wasn’t INTERESTED in the missing bolts. What kind of penny pinching misers had made the decisions on this ladder? Enquiring minds want to know.

I’ve read that there are a great many activities you can do while counting. Counting is a job that our brains can carry on while our bodies do any number of familiar tasks. You can, for instance, climb a ladder while counting. And if, while counting missing bolts in a very important ladder, you reach 36, and find that you’re growing tired of limb, and no longer climbing over a drop, but are very close to a rock shelf, you stop and rest.

Which is what we’ll do here. I did, and you can too. We’re a little over halfway to the top. We’re standing on a handy boulder right beside the tracks, we’ve counted 36 holes where bolts should have been that some accountant somewhere was glad to have provided me, and we’ve wrecked the right sleeve of my formerly very nice dry top. I’m keeping a wary eye on both the top of the gorge above and the immobile train below, knowing that I’ll soon have to get back on the ladder where it leads up and away from my boulder while outpacing that train if it starts moving again.

And so, I’ll meet you here for part 9.

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Boy Gorge- Part 7

Aug14
by on August 14, 2011 at 2:39 pm
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

I could make a long story short, but then I’d never squeak this many chapters out of this story. So rather than just tell you that I did it- that I got onto a moving incline train- I need to tell you that I plonked by butt down firmly onto the I beam that jutted out away from my pylon (I can call it ‘mine’, there wasn’t anyone there to argue the point.) and though I didn’t actually have a suction fit to the beam, my butt did its best.

Did you know there isn’t a really good word for working your way out along I-beams over a drop with your legs dangling and your brain jangling? I’m using the word ‘scootch’. Sherpas might have a word that would fit the mood. I imagine that the guys in those old black and white photos of skyscrapers being built had a good word for it, maybe twenty. None of them have a word, though, that would shade it with the proper nuance to imply that you’re trying to catch a train on the other end of the I-beam. Odd.

Once the scootching is done, you have to clamber. ‘Clamber’ in this context, means to cross your body over a set of railroad tracks at a steep incline that are mounted to some trusses all of which are between you and a totally different other set of trusses and tracks that you need to get to without 1) falling through and 2) getting anything pinched off by a train being pulled up the track by big ol’ greasy cables.

Now that the clambering and scootching is all accomplished (without falling or severing) I still had a little time till the train got to me. The train, unburdened by passengers or anything, is taking its own sweet time. Obviously not a swiss train nor nothin’. Don’t think I’m complaining. If the thing had been chugging merrily uphill, I might have used more haste than speed and done something truly stupid. I’m good at stupid.

This story takes place a few years ago. At that time there was a Snickers bar commercial that said “Not going anywhere for a while? Grab a Snickers.” You may not immediately see why I bring this up, but me? I have, at this point in the story, not only scootched and clambered my way across all the trestles, tracks, trusses, ladder and cables to find myself on the teeny little bit of I-beam left on the far side of the whole mess, but I have heaved myself onto the creeping incline train, not even finding myself plastered to the outside of the train cagedoor, wondering how to get in. I got in! So, there in the top ‘seat’ of the train, grinning, I have taken a Snickers bar out of my PFD pocket and would now nourish myself. I also plot how I would tell this story to the Snickers people in a letter, and possibly get a box of free Snickers out of the ordeal. I wasn’t “going anywhere for a while!” I “grabbed a Snickers!” Just like the commercials told me to! Booyah! That’s gotta be good for a box of gratis candy any day. So I was tasting not only my melty Snickers of today, but all the snacky wonderfulness of those future Snickers to come.

Then the damn train stopped.

No kidding.

Anyone with questions as to whether this is a true story can now give them up. Nobody making this up would DARE to put in this many savage assaults on Human dignity. This is getting absurd.

It was, too. This was just nuts. I stood there, wondering. I was wondering if the train would start back up. Or worse, start back down. Or maybe hold still or… I don’t know. I just didn’t know any more. An hour earlier, Greg Raymond had said, “Go over there, and take the incline train to the top. We’ll meet you in the parking lot.” That sounded EASY.

But here I am, still not even half way up this hot, God-forsaken crack in the wall on a broken train with a half-eaten, totally melted candy bar. A minute earlier, I had the ending to this story all ready. “And when he got the truckload of free Snicker bars for being in the new commercial, he shared them all with everyone on the trip, and they all lived happily ever stinkin’ after.”

And NOW, I’m leaning out of the train, staring up at the place where there should be workmen and there aren’t. And I’m looking down out of the train at where I WISH there was still an I-beam to stand on. When I got ON the train, the I-beam had been truncated and slick, but it had been THERE. Now, the side of the train opened onto a considerable drop. I don’t want to drop.

Of course, I also don’t want to wedge my fingers into the steel cage of the train walls and swing myself out and around onto the footstep platform I know is on the end of the train (I had seen it on my way in, of course) and then lower myself under the train onto the ladder that’s bolted to the tracks’ underside.

But I do it anyhow. There was some cussing involved.

Now, all I have to do is climb to the top before the train starts up again and I go the way of a possum on the highway. But that’s for Part Eight.

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Boy Gorge- Part Six

Aug06
by on August 6, 2011 at 7:39 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

I made a few more abortive attempts to get past the boulder and its attendant thorn bush. No go. So I started working my way up the Right Hand Wall again. I was kissing this stupid wall enough to think we’d have to marry. My skills were not up to getting up this thing, so I eventually found myself standing next to one of the pylons that supported the I-beams that supported the tracks. There was a little shade, and a little place to stand and time to reflect on what it would take to get onto the tracks from here.

The tracks, you remember, are easily got onto down at the train station. They touch the ground, there.

They don’t touch the ground here, they’re suspended well over the ground. Heck, I’m way up on this stupid rock wall and they’re still above my head. So, from the look of things, if I decided to take my last option and climb the ladder bolted up under the incline train tracks, here’s what I’d have to do: Belly up onto the top of this pylon I’m in the shadow of now. Get my balance. Walk, run, crawl or scoot out along an I-beam. Work my way over the tracks. Get onto the ladder, avoiding the big greasy cables that run along with it. Climb all the way to the top of the gorge.

Both simple and complex. The simple part is climbing a ladder. We’ve all climbed a ladder. It’s easy! Why wouldn’t I climb a ladder? Well, this one’s at a hard angle. I’d have to support my weight on my arms and my legs. Still, I could stop and rest along the way. But I’d have to GET there, and that involves scootching out along an I-beam that’s well off the rocky, thorny, rotten, stupid, WHERE THE HELL IS MY BOAT, MY PADDLE AND MY FRIENDS? DAMMIT, THIS IS NOT FUNNY!

After calming down, I more calmly and carefully explained to God (The great cartoonist in the sky) that THIS isn’t funny. Badly written. I said all this out loud to Him, and why not? I said all this very calmly and carefully because you don’t want to upset Him, not here and not now. So. Having said my say, I did what most people in a hard spot do. I climbed up onto a pylon to get a better look at what kind of gag he’d written me into. Okay, not what most people do in a hard spot. I’m just pointing out how hard a spot this is.

From the top of the pylon, the fall off the I-beam was looking pretty inevitable. Plus, my luck wasn’t going so well. Plus, there was a hell of a lot of track to crab-walk up even if I scootched out to the ladder, which looked farther away than ever, anyhow.

On the other hand, I thought, I can see up along the crack a lot better up here, let’s pick a route and see… Ahhh, nuts. The climb up this crack on terra firma (terra sonofabitcha) looks bad. Really, really bad.

So. Vertigo and head injury, or twisted ankles and broken limbs?

I had nearly decided to take the slow, painful death by rock wall, when the unthinkable happened.

The train started to ascend the track.

Okay. Train is moving. If I quit pissing and moaning, crawl out onto this I-beam as fast as I can, I can meet the train going up, grab on, swing myself onto it, and ride in comfort all the way to the top. Heck, this may even be that someone at the top has seen me and they’re rescuing me! This is GREAT!

Does this sound too good to be true to you?

Yeah, we’ll discuss that in part 7.

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Boy Gorge- Part V

Jul23
by on July 23, 2011 at 9:31 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

From the bottom of the tracks again, I started up what I will call the Right Hand Wall. There wasn’t anything you would call a footpath along this wall, but there was uneven rock that had split away in the past, leaving “shelves” or “extended ledges” or some other word that people who hike and climb a lot would know. You can probably picture it- scrambling and inching and climbing and backing up and advancing up and along a rock wall.

Then, every so often, there’s another level-ish place to stand out in the middle of the crack. After all, workers had had to scramble all over this place when they were installing this incline train, dirty broken useless thing that it was. There were pylons holding up I-beams and cables and wheels and stuff making up the track. While all this stuff was being built, I imagine guys were up and down this crack all the time like billy goats, right?

So every few yards, I could step out onto a broader place, catch my breath and look up at the next obstacle.

The next obstacle I now saw was a boulder, just over head height. By grabbing the top and planting my feet on other protrusions, I could belly up and onto this thing. I thought. When I tried it, I found myself going face first into what we in the South call ‘Sticker Bushes’. There is, no doubt, some gratifyingly fancy scientific name that’s in Latin (A dead language, I’d like to point out) for this vicious plant, but I don’t know what it is, and don’t need it. I have said “Sticker Bush” and I bet that whatever that conjures up in your mind is precisely what I needed to conjure. It was a big, rolling, healthy, full, green bush. Full of thorns, or as Southern vernacular so aptly call them, “Stickers”.

Face first, as I say. So I tried some workarounds. The boulder just wasn’t that daunting, and the Right Hand Wall was getting particularly nerve wracking, so it seemed like there had to be a wall to roll sideways onto the boulder or inch up onto it or something that didn’t involve possible eye injury.

But let me tell you, that bush had no courtesy. It used up all the space available to it. I mean, seriously, what if a little bunny rabbit had wanted to burrow at the base of it? That’s a cute environmentally friendly thing, right? No, this bush wanted only blinded bunnies with scars living near it. It didn’t want anything larger than an insect burrowing in its grounds. So there. So no rabbit-sized space for me to aim my face into. Considering my clothes, I could have rammed my helmet into said bunny-sized space, but no.

So after trying a few options (there are always options… ever-narrowing, worse and worse, options) I was stuck with what my best choice could be. The left wall looked impossible, the boulder was getting frustratingly out of bounds, and the Right Hand Wall was looking better. All things being relative “Better” still wasn’t “Good”, but meant, “Better than standing here starving and dying of thirst.”

I peeked up over the boulder. I hadn’t covered nearly as much ground as I’d hoped. Frankly I was still very much in the bottom third, if not the bottom fourth of the slot. And day was getting on. I didn’t know how much of the run on the river was left for my friends, but if I kept getting delayed, they might come to the parking lot above before I did. If they didn’t find me there, would they assume I’d gotten a ride out an hour ago and head themselves for the campground?

Flustered, hot, thirsty, baffled, losing time, and now starting to see scenarios in which I don’t get out of here before nightfall, I start looking at the other option which has always been there, but I’ve been avoiding.

I could wrangle my way up one of the pylons I mentioned earlier, do a tightrope walk out along an I-beam to the train tracks that were fifteen or twenty feet above my head, and start climbing the ladder up the tracks themselves.

Oh, man. When I tell you that THAT was starting to look like the best option… what does that say?

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Boy Gorge- part 4

Jul02
by on July 2, 2011 at 9:55 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

Where was I? I was at the bottom of a crack in a gorge wall. I shared the crack with an incline train… quietly sitting in its little station. Traitorous damned train. Anyhow, what’s a guy to do but climb? So I started off on the direct route and got a pretty good way along.

The natural world is an inconveniently arranged place. I mean, occasionally it works out- the way that wind and weather caused the heads of four presidents to erode right out of a mountainside in South Dakota. And a parking lot to form on the other side of ice cream vendors from the heads. Now that’s miraculous. The pyramids, forming right where the Egyptians needed them. Lucky chance, there. But normally, the Earth and all its forces are out to get us. Like, say, Winter. Or in this case.

I don’t know how to climb. I’ve been to climbing walls since this happened, as if that was going to help retroactively. But while I was down in this huge crack in the rock, I discovered that comparatively smaller rocks were wedged between the walls. Now, when I say “comparatively” I’m saying that this was a 1200 foot tall crack. “Comparatively small” can mean a rock the size of a storage building. And in this case, does. I couldn’t climb past it. Didn’t have the skills. Going to climbing walls in a few months wasn’t going to suddenly teach me to get over this boulder right now. Something to do with time and space. I dunno. %$#@.

I turned around and looked back down the way I came. I could go back and start all over, as there seemed to be a high ledge that’d get me past this boulder. Did I mention that I was hot, sweating like a potato in tinfoil and that my head was cooking? In that condition the idea that I was going all the way back down to the train station and starting over didn’t sound like a great option. There was a tiny little ledge going up from where I was, though, It angled back down the crack, but up toward the ledge that I wanted. Cool!

So I started inching my way up this little ledge, belly pressed to the wall, toes tight in my little river shoes. ‘Bout halfway up, the little ledge was playing out quick. I was trying to recall anything I could about climbing, which is a natural thing to do when you’re sticking like a treefrog to a massive rockface and you’re out of handholds, toeholds and skills. I got a memory of a panel in a Huey, Dewey and Louie comic book about toeholds and not relying on your hands and arms. I got a memory of my brother talking about climbing and how you could lock your thumb over your fingers in a hold to strengthen it. I got a memory of that dumb-assed Sylvester Stallone movie where he loses his grip on an actress and she falls about a bazillion miles to her messy death. I got nothing about being halfway up an actual ledge on an actual rock wall and what to do about it. Comic books, movies and my brother’s inexplicable failure to teach me everything I would ever need to know in an emergency had let me down.

Back to the bottom for ol’ Greg. I inched back down the little ledge and returned to the spot where I could have, should have, decided to start all over, and I started all over. I shlepped back down to the bottom of the crack, giving a dirty look at the dead train and another hopeful glance to the top. I was up there a year ago, and dammit, it was crawling with tourists. Crawling with themepark employees and all. Was there REALLY no one up there? The heat and the distance was still keeping me from making out anything particular up there, and looking straight up was only going to give me a view of the bottom of the Royal Gorge bridge- not a view of a helpful face looking downward, locking distant eyes with mine and mouthing “They’re sending a helicopter… wait where you are!” Nope. Nothing. There could be a circus going on up there, and down here I was getting lonely, overheated and possibly trapped.

Trapped. Well, there’s a happy thought.

More on that next time.

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Boy Gorge- Part III

Jun15
by on June 15, 2011 at 10:53 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

So…There I am on the side of the Arkansas river. My friends are paddling downstream (hopeful of finding, retrieving, and returning my boat and paddle). Standing dripping onto the railroad tracks, wearing splash pants, a spankin’ new drytop, helmet, pfd, neoprene skirt and a nice-ish pair of 5•10 shoes called ‘Nemo’s. Now, all I had to do was turn, walk to the base of an incline train track, wait my turn to be taken to the top of the gorge 1200 feet above me, and wait in the parking lot for my friends to come and get me. Easy.

So I walked to the incline train station. There’s probably a better name for it. Think about it for a minute- it’s this cute little area at the base of the incline tracks with striped awnings and painted railings and loading platforms so narrow because the angle of the tracks means they are, essentially, steps. What do you call a fun, bustling little loading/unloading area full of tourists?

Only it wasn’t full of tourists. Not one. In fact, the train was there, but it, like me, all its friends had gone. The train should be going up and down full of tourists every few minutes, and instead, here it was sitting derelict. I should be riding it back up to the edge of the parking lot to await my friends.

There hadn’t been any tourists here for a while. ^%$#! Betrayed by a cheerfully painted incline train. Or Fate. Whichever.

I stood on the leaf-strewn platform and looked up. I had 20/15 vision back then. Darn useful when you wanted to look 1200 feet up and spot some helpful soul peering down at you waving a hand as if to say, “We’ve spotted you and we’re here to help.” 20/15 vision, it turns out, is insufficient to the task, especially when the son of a bitch isn’t there. You start looking at gears and motors and things that, from 1200 feet away, look ALMOST like a helpful soul. But only if you’re still in a hopeful mood.

Ten minutes later, they look like gears and motors. Dirty, stinking, non-working, lazy, punk-ass gears and motors.

The aforementioned ten minutes was taken up examining options. I was at the bottom of a gorge, but by gum, I had me some options. Waiting on help was one, but it stunk. Or rather, I stunk and I wasn’t in any hurry to hang around down in this overblown gully til the sun wasn’t shining down into it. I was already hot and sweaty. Did I mention I was wearing a drytop? In the sun? I might as well get myself to the top of this thing and buy a gelatto or an ice cream or slush puppy or whatever the vendors had up there. That meant closely examining my other options.

The incline train was in a crack in the side of the gorge. I could probably make my way up the crack, right? It wasn’t nearly as steep as the gorge walls. I mean it was still an incline, obviously, but there were rock outcrops and various ledges and intrepid-looking pathways. Nice. I could climb.

Or! Or! There was a LADDER! A ladder bolted to the underside of the incline train’s track! So far as I could tell, it went all the way to the top of the gorge in one straight climb! Niiiiiiice. The only issue was the location of that ladder. I mean, it’s on the bottom of the tracks, so climbing it meant that you were straddling a couple of big, greasy cables all the way to the top. Not the best thing if you needed to stop and rest. Or if the train started moving.

That one got me. I really didn’t want to be 6 stories up and look over my shoulder at an advancing incline train. Even if it wasn’t working properly, I didn’t want to get run over by it.

I survived drowning, which is a forgivable demise on a high-adventure kayaking trip, but I couldn’t go home in a box with people explaining that I had died, hit by a little train. The heat of the sun cooking my shiny black helmet (and thus my head) wasn’t doing my cognitive skills any good, but even I knew I didn’t want to get hit by a train on a river. That’s just embarrassing.

So I squared my sweaty shoulders, cursed the luck that sent my boat, and more importantly now my damned water bottle, spinning down a swollen river, and stepped off the top of the loading area for the trains onto rock, dust, dirt, and thorny bushes.

More about the thorny bushes to come.

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Boy Gorge Part two

May02
by on May 2, 2011 at 8:33 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

So there I was, on my back and feet out in front of me (like you’re supposed to be when lost in the whitewater) My buddy Greg Raymond is shouting something at me from behind me. Greg is one of those amazing paddlers who can do everything. I’m concentrating on keeping relaxed, moving to the left bank of the river, and hanging on to my boat. I could have sworn Greg yelled to forget the boat and as it was slowing me down, I let it go. That’ll be important later.

Before we talk about later, we should talk about earlier.

That morning, as we were preparing to get on the Arkansas river, we watched as the commercial raft companies piled all their stuff onto their trucks at the put-in. You read that right. Put all their stuff ONTO their trucks at the put-in. Instead of, as usual, taking it OFF the trucks to PUT IN to the river. You see, the Arkansas had JUST hit flood stage or whatever they call it when commercial rafts can no longer legally put a boat in the river. We were private boaters, and we weren’t covered by such rules. There was a park ranger there, and she explained that she couldn’t tell us not to get on the river, but she just had to ask what our level of experience was. Greg Raymond assured her that we’d all been paddling for ten years, more or less.

Before we go on, we should talk about earlier. Two or three years earlier. When I first got in a kayak. You get the idea.

Anyhow, Greg knew the park ranger’s father somehow- the connection between this girl in Colorado wearing a uniform and Greg Raymond’s Memphis TN life is something I don’t remember exactly, but I think it had to do with the Bluff City Canoe Club. This reassured the ranger. It didn’t reassure me one damn bit.

The river was big and pushy and we got out a lot to scout and set up throw ropes and it was great. I saw big honking waves that were daunting. I saw big holes that you paddled up the following wave to exit, and then slid backward- returning to the hole you were trying to leave. I saw waves form and explode. It worked on my timing, you bet. I paddled the biggest stuff I’ve ever paddled, possibly even counting a 16 day trip down the Grand Canyon- a trip where I was sure I’d find my boat slipping backward down waves, but never quite got stuck the way I did on the Arkansas at flood.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, I’m on my back in the water, keeping relaxed, and watching Greg come up on my right, ready to drag me to river left. It needed to be done quick-like. I remember there were more waves to be dealt with just downstream of us, and I didn’t want to deal with them out of a boat. I grabbed the stern of Greg’s boat and kicked, he got us into what was left of an eddy. I gasped and gargled and did all the usual things I do when I’ve been dumb enough to exit my boat and had to vigorously swim in stuff that isn’t designed for swimmin’ in. Greg kept yelling at me to get all the way out of the water (there are cases of people who get to shallow water and stop working to save themselves, only to be swept back out. I could easily have been that stupid, considering) but I was planted pretty good in a couple of inches of water and just sat gasping and shooting dirty looks at the downstream waves. You couldn’t see anything beyond the nearest waves. That had been my biggest worry on the river that day- you couldn’t see past the next wave- they were honkin’ huge! Now my biggest worry was where I would go from here. My paddle, then my boat had gone on to enjoy the river without me. Even if Greg or anyone else had retrieved my gear close by, the chances of getting it back to me were slim and would only put someone else in a tight spot.

But I was just a bit downstream of a concrete wall, remember? That was was the base of an incline train that travels… up to a theme park! Ah. Greg and Dennis Rhodes, if I remember rightly, did some head-to-head figuring (It had to be head-to-head, you couldn’t have heard thunder in that river. Speaking of which, Greg had NOT been telling me to forget the boat. He’d been telling me not to give up, to keep my head in the air… lots of good advice. The bit about the boat might have been in there, too, I dunno. Like I said, you couldn’t hear thunder.)
and Greg came back up to me, parked finally out of the chilly water on the bank. “You can go up the train and wait in the parking lot or follow those train tracks into that tunnel and downriver to the take-out.” There was, of all things, a set of train tracks a couple of feet higher than the water. They went along the river. Downriver, they went into a tunnel. “Which… ah… which way do you suppose the train goes on these tracks, and when do you suppose it might be running?” I asked, looking down the tracks. I could picture a train on them coming at me pretty easily. I could not, however, picture where the heck I could go to avoid such a train. Greg looked down the tracks, too. Then he looked back at the jauntily painted lower end of the incline train. “It’s your choice.”

So. It was either walk an undetermined distance down some dangerous railroad tracks, hoping that my gear was retrieved somewhere downstream and I could rejoin the run. Or ride a carnival colored tram a thousand feet or so up a crack in the side of the gorge and wait patiently in a parking lot while my friends finished the run and came to retrieve me.

I didn’t know it yet, but my boat would be found a mile or so farther down the river, and my paddle was shortly to be seen by one Dr. Alan ‘Sonny’ Salomon as it end-over-ended down the river past the take-out and on toward the far South.

I also didn’t know the damned incline train wasn’t working.

I’ll get to that next time.

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Boy Gorge, Part I

Apr11
by on April 11, 2011 at 9:43 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

The Royal Gorge, in Colorado, is home to, I think, the highest suspension bridge in the U.S.
http://www.royalgorgebridge.com/
The bridge is over the Arkansas River.
I lost a paddle there, mostly because I’m stupid, but that’s another series of stories.
I kept my life, though, and got a story out of it. You get to decide if the story’s worth telling.
I once told it around a campfire for an hour or more. The story was aided by others around the fire with me- folks I can’t ask to come here and help me type now. Maybe I can keep you as entertained as they seemed to have been with tales of scootching and cussing and swimming and all. It involves kayaks, a hat, a paddle, some fine friends, a flooding river, a black tailed deer, an incline train, rocks, a ladder, and an expensive dry top. Ready? Here we go:

On a motorbike trip around the West, I watched my father’s favorite hat sail off his head and drift aaaaaaaall the way down from the Royal Gorge Bridge to the Arkansas river far below. I timed it. It took 91 seconds. I’d like to point out here that throwing things off the bridge would get you a $50 fine. Losing your $50 hat off the bridge to a rogue breeze is free. The few of us on the motorbike trip watched carefully until the minuscule black speck hit the water far below. I was the youngest in the group and had 20/15 vision back then, and I was the only one comfortably able to still point to it as it hit the water and was instantly gone.

A year later, I was back, only I was in a kayak and looking up at the underside of the bridge. I thought it would be funny to go back and tell my father that I had been right there in the spot where his hat hit the water, so I was looking off to the river-right hand bank, scrutinizing the area for the spot where the black hat hit the white water. That’s why I didn’t see the diagonal wave. That was the wave that shunted me to the left bank and smacked me up against a concrete wall. The concrete wall was the base of the incline train that travels from the river to the bridge and the theme-park area that snuggles parasitically up to it.

When your boat is being shoved sidewise into a concrete wall (especially if it’s a flat bottomed boat like, say, Perception’s Corsica Matrix…) and then becomes upside-down, you discover that rolling up on the open side of the boat makes the flat bottom slap uselessly into the concrete wall, whereupon you flop back over into the water- a classic low-oxygen environment. The ideal thing to do would be to, of course, roll up on the OTHER side of the boat, thus using the direction of the rushing water to help you right the boat and you can then paddle away into the frankly disturbingly large rapids that you’re about to sweep into. But I did mention that big concrete wall, right? Rolling up on the left side of the boat would have been ideal but for the vertical concrete slab. If I were one of those hotshot boaters we’ve all seen, met, and wished we were, I’d have calmed down, wedged my paddle between the wall and the boat, and muscled the boat upright until the force of the water ceased working against the boat and suddenly would work in my favor. I didn’t do that. I floundered around, trying to get the paddle turned correctly for another right-hand-side roll, lost the paddle, got seriously concerned about whether or not the boat was now headed for the rapid and not at all pinned against the wall any more, and I did that thing I usually do in the worst situations. I came out of the boat.

Now that I’m sweeping powerlessly and breathlessly down a flooding river toward a largish rapid without the aid of a boat or paddle… I’m going to take a break. We’ll come back to the exciting part in a day or so…

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