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Alyssn Barker, left, and her brother Brandon get pounded by a wave while at the U.S. National Whitewater Center.
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The author, second from top in the raft, valiantly tries to snap a photo of the moment his crew topples over Bull Sluice on the Chattooga River.
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The journey leading up to the falls takes rafters through beautiful scenery and a series of beginner-friendly class-II and class-III rapids.
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Charlotte's National Whitewater Center is an outdoor-adventure theme park, complete with man-made rapids as thrilling as any found in nature. It's also a training center where instructors teach beginners the art of white-water kayaking.
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Expert white-water paddler Andrew Grizzell leads writer Hastings Hensel through Mills Race rapids on the Saluda River.
We’re gliding along the Chattooga River through a scenic mountain gorge on the South Carolina-Georgia border, headed into the teeth of Bull Sluice—a 10-foot waterfall and class-IV-plus rapid—when suddenly the boat begins to pick up speed as the roar of the falls rises in our ears.
We all know this means we’re past the point of no return, and that realization causes us to grip our paddles with white-knuckled determination and strain to hear our river guide, Mia McDonald, who is grinning as she steers us toward our fate.
“All forward!” McDonald yells confidently. “All forward!”
We dig in, paddling furiously, trying to give our boat the extra momentum it needs to crash nose first into the frothy cataract of white water below without spinning and tossing us all into the drink.
At the lip of the falls, McDonald screams, “Get down!” and we fall backward into the raft, hunkering together so that we look, I think, like a frightened family in a tornado bunker.
For a moment, the roar of the falls deafens into a kind of silence, and the raft seems suspended in air. I know there are things happening—water splashing in sunlight, paddle blades scraping against each other, the thud of my knees against the neoprene raft—but it all seems to unfold in a languid slow motion.
And then we crash.
Rafting the Chattooga
When I began to map my summer road trip to explore the best white-water adventures within easy driving distance of South Carolina, rafting the Chattooga was at the top of the list. Made famous by the book and movie Deliverance, the river offers wet-and-wild adventures for everyone from the first-time rafter to the top kayakers.
When you sign up for a Chattooga rafting trip with Wildwater rafting company, of Long Creek, your adventure starts at their outpost on the grounds of the former Long Creek Academy. It is a rustic, scaled down summer camp with a canteen, a zip line, and two old, wooden houses that are home to some 35 river guides during the paddling season.
On the day I visit, customers are milling about, nervous and excited, including my rafting companions, the Cross family of Buffalo, N.Y. Rafting the Chattooga, mom Melissa Cross says, is “something we’ve always wanted to do. We’re Christmas-Day excited.”
Rapids in the eastern U.S. are classified on a I–VI scale, according to three criteria: the gradient drop, the technicality of making it successfully through the rapid, and the consequences if you don’t pull it off successfully. Our half-day “mini-trip” will take us 13 miles downriver through a series of beginner-friendly rapids but ending at the infamous Bull Sluice.
Rafting guides take pride in not dumping anyone out, and though we make it easily through the first two sets of rapids, bumping along through Swimmers and spinning through 8-Ball Ledge, 10-year-old Gabriel Cross goes flying out of the boat in 8-Ball Rapid.
“That was a bit scary,” he says later as we eat a rafting lunch—hummus, GORP, pita bread, cheese and juice laid out on an overturned raft. “Here I am holding onto the strap, and the boat is pummeling me. And I just jumped and flew back into the raft.”
“It’s all fun and games until the raft runs over your son,” his mother says, laughing.
But the thing about white water, like most adventure sports, is that you have to forget about the last challenge and concentrate on the next one. So we make our way after lunch through Kick in the Butt, Pain in the Butt, George Washington’s Nose and Surprise—the names of class I, II and III rapids passed down by guides of yore. Then it’s time for the big one.
Paddling hard toward the lip of Bull Sluice, my mind races through the worst-case scenario—the raft hitting an unexpected rock and launching me out as though I were on a spring. The cold water. The underwater panic. The dark current sucking me under.
But when the moment comes, we nail it. The boat launches over the edge and dives into the churn below, just the way McDonald told us it would. Cold water splashes across my face, and time begins to speed up again. There are cheers, high fives with the paddles, and a scramble to get the boat over to the shore and watch the next raft give it a shot.
Even though she does it every day, sometimes multiple times a day, the experience still gives McDonald a thrill.
“The river never gets boring,” she says. “When you’re out there, all you’re thinking about is the river. It’s really nice to be fully possessed by something.”
The National Whitewater Center
Rafting is the easy way into white-water adventure, offering all the thrills but also the security of a big, inflatable boat, a guide to do the steering and multiple hands to do the paddling. When it comes to white-water kayaking, however, it’s all up to the individual to read the water, steer a course and power the boat.
That’s why my trip included a day-long kayaking course at the National Whitewater Center, located just across the South Carolina-North Carolina border near Charlotte.
Part amusement park, part training center, part rapids factory, the center is a concrete behemoth that hosts 700,000 visitors a year and 4,000 visitors on a typical summer Saturday. It is, by all measures, a bona fide recreational compound, featuring zip lines, hiking trails, ropes courses, stand-up paddle boards, climbing walls and restaurants, all in addition to miles of man-made whitewater channels that snake around the place.
On most mornings, the channels are as still as puddles until 10:30 a.m., when they turn on 680 horsepower pumps to send water coursing throughout the park. Then a host of rafting guides begin shoving their boats into the water and taking throngs of campers and tourists on wet-and-wild rides.
Ah, those white-water guides—that special breed of confidence and arm tone, lovers of craft beer, drivers of midsize pickup trucks, debaters of the merits of new-school Chaco sandal versus old-school Teva—so often college-aged, dreadlocked, sporting worn-in and stickered gear. There is no group quite like them.
The National Whitewater Center employs about 200, and for my private white-water kayaking lesson, they give me the patient and skilled Jim Dandro, whose second job (you guessed it) is starting his own brewery, Rivermen Brewing.
On land, he gears me up—a brand-new Wave Sport Recon 93 white-water kayak, a snug personal flotation device (PFD), a 27-inch paddle, a red helmet, and a neoprene skirt that won’t allow any water into the cockpit. I’m not sure if I look like a paddler or a bumbling aquatic villain in a comic book.
In the water, we practice the basic white-water kayaking techniques, including wet exits (a maneuver that gets you out of the boat when it flips over) and edging (a technique that allows paddlers to cross a current without capsizing or being shot downstream).
The wet exit, even in the lukewarm water of the park, comes as a shock. You purposefully flip the kayak, experiencing for a moment something like underwater vertigo, but then you tap your hands on the boat, and, if no one is close enough to flip you over, you push yourself out of the boat and up to the surface, gasping for air.
Once you get all that down, well, then it’s time to shoot your first rapid. We portage our kayaks to a ledge overlooking the gentlest class-I run at the complex—Kitchen Sink. A group of kids in the water makes it look easy, edging out into the current and then peeling out and needling through the rapid like old pros.
Dandro scouts our line, the path we will take through the churning water, and then we swim it, feeling for where the current is going to take us.
“You won’t capsize,” Dandro promises, “as long as you put your paddle in the water.”
I make it through the first rapid just fine, but then I let my boat get too sideways, and I follow my instincts rather than my instruction. My instincts are to balance myself by rocking my torso, rather than digging in with the paddle.
Sure enough, I capsize.
“Despite that mistake,” Dandro says, grinning and helping me drain almost 90 gallons of water from the kayak, “you’re a strong paddler, and I still think you can make it through the Entrance Exam.”
Ah, the Entrance Exam—NWC’s class-II gateway rapid. Dandro points out the line we’ll take, emphasizing that we want to hit the water where it makes a V.
“You’ll need to put your paddle in the water this time and take strong strokes to get through it,” he says. Tucking in behind Dandro, following his lead, I hit it right on the V and paddle hard to clear the rapid with a sense of vengeance and triumph.
Kayaking the Saluda
For the last stop of my journey, I meet up with Columbia white-water enthusiast Andrew Grizzell, a Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative member with more than 20 years of paddling experience.
“I’m pretty much addicted to white water,” Grizzell says when we shake hands at River Runner Outdoor Center. “My life revolves around it. People will say, ‘Let’s go on a vacation to Europe,’ and I’m like, ‘What are we going to do there? Sip wine? Where can we go paddling?’”
He certainly looks the part—the long, black beard, the Costa del Mar sunglasses he wears even indoors, the pickup with the “Redneck Rafter” bumper sticker, and a truck bed full of white-water kayaks. He acts the part, too, hosting local kayaking competitions, including the Ice Man, a winter race, and the Saluda Shootout, a four-part series in the summer. The proceeds go to the local charity Canoeing for Kids. When he’s not paddling, he’s working for the City of Columbia as a park ranger, usually down on the canal, often in a boat.
The rapids of choice for Midlands white-water paddlers are called Mills Race, an extended stretch of class-II and class-III cataracts on the southern end of the Saluda River, located conveniently off I-126 in the shadow of downtown Columbia and across from Riverbanks Zoo and Gardens.
Although access from the zoo parking lot has been shut down, local kayakers like Grizzell have worked out a deal with a nearby law firm to secure private access near the put-in.
To paddle or float the Saluda is a special experience, because you get impressive views of the city skyline, as well as wildlife—bald eagles, ospreys, snakes, turtles. Its flow rate is determined by how much water gets released from the Lake Murray dam, and on the day we’re set to go paddling, the river is running around 2,800 cubic feet per second, a moderately good flow for a summer’s afternoon.
We shoulder our kayaks from the gated parking lot to the put-in, and as we shove off into the river, Grizzell offers a piece of familiar advice. “As long as you’re paddling, you should be fine.”
We paddle upstream and peel out, heading straight into one of the state’s best rapids—made so by an old cofferdam from the Civil War.
“All right,” Grizzell says. “Follow right behind me.”
He leads the way into the roiling water, and there’s an enviable smoothness in the way he zigzags through the rocks. I’m digging in, trying to follow his line, the spray hitting my face. I back paddle to pivot, scraping by a triangular rock jutting out of the water. The moment, as it was at Bull Sluice, is nearly hypnotic and slow, though
I can feel the rocks scraping the bottom of the boat. And then we’re through it.
Yes, by God, I’ve made it through the Mills Race rapids, and I’m smiling and nodding at Grizzell as we peel out into the flat water behind several large boulders. It’s a beautiful day, and this is just wonderful, but then it happens. I cross the eddy line of a current, the boat begins to tip, and instead of putting my paddle blade in the water to steady myself, I try to balance with my body, forgetting for a moment all that I’ve learned.
The next thing I know, I’m capsized and pulling another wet exit.
As I swim the kayak to shore, Grizzell muffles his laughter.
“That’s about the first time that boat’s been swimming,” he says.
When I ask him if that’s a bad thing, if my mistake has somehow cursed or tainted his boat, he laughs again.
“Oh, no, man,” he says by way of reassurance. “One thing about being a kayaker is that you’ve got to always be ready to swim.”
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Get There
- Adventure Carolina – 1107 State St., Cayce, SC 29033; (803) 796-4505
- Get Your Gear On – 208 Candi Lane, Suite A, Columbia, SC 29210; (803) 799-0999
- Nantahala Outdoor Center—Chattooga Outpost – 851 Chattooga Ridge Road, Mountain Rest, SC 29664; (800) 232-7238
- National Whitewater Center – 5000 Whitewater Center Parkway, Charlotte, NC 28214; (704) 391-3900
- River Runner Outdoor Center – 905 Gervais St., Columbia, SC 29201; (803) 771-0353
- Wildwater Ltd. – 1251 State Road S-37-14, Long Creek, SC 29658; (800) 451-9972
Related story
Man vs. rapids – Watch the videos of expert white-water kayakers as they shoot the rapids on the Saluda and Chattooga rivers.