Adventures in Unfamiliar Mountain Sports

I'm a big believer in being largely self-taught when it comes to mountain activities - a few harrowing outings can teach you so much. So when a friend invited me to go white water kayaking, I never gave any thought to taking any lessons before hand. Reece had only actually been white water kayaking once himself, but he'd done a lot of flat water kayaking so he knew how to handle a boat (in case you can't tell, this is me rationalizing why I don't need to worry about lessons). I'd never been in a kayak, but I figured "what the hell, I'm a general purpose weekend-warrior type mountain guy, I'll figure it out as I go". I wing a lot of stuff. Sometimes it doesn't really work out.

A rare shot of the legendary Ghost Reservoir Dam Flying Kayak

We rented all the required gear and headed out to the Ghost Reservoir Dam on the Kananaskis River. We parked up top and began hauling our kayaks down into the river valley. We descended a series of steep embankments, broken up by short flat sections, to make our way down in order to reach the river. On a particularly steep section I found myself walking down sideways with one hand on the uphill slope and the other holding my kayak which I was allowing to gradually slide down ahead of me. Reece was doing the same thing when suddenly something went wrong - his kayak escaped him like a dog bolting from his inattentive master. It shot off down the slope, building speed, and whistled out across a big flat section, soared off the edge of the embankment and vanished. Seconds passed in silence while we both stared expectantly.

"I think it must have stopped," Reece said somewhat optimistically. Suddenly the kayak roared back into view, screaming along on the next flat section, well below us. It slid up to the edge of the next ledge losing steam, ground to a crawl, stopped and teetered on the brink momentarily, and then vanished over the edge. I started to snicker - Reece stared quietly into the valley below us. Suddenly, a streaking missile of brightly coloured plastic roared into view again. This time the boat was airborne and arcing menacingly towards an electrical power station. A vast bank of high tension lines, transformers and assorted big-juice electrical equipment glittered menacingly in the sun, ready to devour the kayak and cause a power-interrupting, police-summoning, law suit generating, incident. The moment of alarm passed when the kayak, still airborne, struck the security fence surrounding the power station and crashed to a halt. Reece stood staring worriedly at his rather expensive piece of rented equipment lying in the distance. I fell to the ground laughing, nearly losing my own kayak. Karmically speaking I was probably just asking for a re-balancing of accounts.

We put our kayaks down on the riverside directly below the dam, then hiked back up to the cars. We drove my car down to the point in the river at which we would be getting out, then took Reece's truck back to the dam. We hiked in, working our way down the series of embankments until the river came into view. The problem was, it shouldn't have been in view from where we were. Slowly, and with a creeping certainty, something very upsetting became obvious to us - while we were moving the vehicles the dam had been opened. In a sense, we should have been pretty happy to have not been standing there when it opened and the river suddenly rose by about six feet (I later met someone who had - he didn't endorse it). The thing was, we couldn't really get past the fact that about $3,000 worth of rented equipment was no longer where we left it. We began to run (an unpleasant thing to do on a hot sunny day when wearing a black wetsuit). We ran along the riverside for a few kilometers, looking for signs of the kayaks, without luck. I was thinking a lot about what kayaks cost - they aren't cheap. Eventually we arrived at a small waterfall called The Widowmaker - in an eddy just beyond The Widowmaker were our kayaks!