Archive

With its low water through much of the season, fewer paddlers than normal got to run Yampa Canyon in Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument, and dodge the giant hole at the bottom of its signature Warms Springs rapid. Those who run it next year might want to give the rapid a second look while scouting. In early August, a flash flood, rock fall or both cascaded down the canyon, altering the landmark drop significantly.

Phelps, schmelps. World Freestyle Kayak Championships? Even that's small fry compared to the stage the sport played out on in August. Yep, at this year’s London 2012 Olympic Games, freestyle kayaking made its biggest appearance ever when six athletes from five continents were chosen to present freestyle kayaking to the Olympics...

You could hear a pin drop when he took the stage. Thankfully for Martin Litton, 95, winner of Canoe & Kayak magazine’s Lifetime Achievement award at this summer’s Outdoor Retailer tradeshow, it wasn’t a thole pin from his dory-rowing days on the Grand Canyon. The silence came out of sheer respect for one of the world's top river environmentalists...

The U.S. team’s paddling medal hopes evaporated after the sprint team left the water in London, with three-time Olympian sprint paddler Carrie Johnson of San Diego placing 6th in the K1 500m Semifinal, unable to advance to the finals, and Tim Hornsby finishing 15th overall in Men’s K1 200m. But it was a grand Games nonetheless...

Penalties again were enough to prevent Women's K1 Caroline Queen (Darnestown, Md.) and the Men's Double Canoe tandem of Eric Hurd (Woodstock, Ga.) and Jeff Larimer (Marietta, Ga.) from advancing.

Come on...we’re all boaters, so we all know what Cliff Notes are. So here’s your cheat sheet on paddling events at the London Games, including the inside take on the 2012 USA Canoe and Kayak Team, whose seven members in sprint and slalom represent our country’s only hopes for a paddling medal...

He’s baaaack. Decades after founding footwear giant Teva in 1984, a born-in-the-Grand-Canyon brand that has since become synonymous with river running, Teva founder Mark Thatcher is at it again launching a new footwear company called Sazzi...

Despite the year's rebound in the paddlesports sales -- Leisure Trend’s Paddlesport RetailTRAK reports January through May paddlesports sales totaled $177 million, a 20 percent increase over 2011-- Johnson Watercraft, a division of Johnson Outdoors, has announced plans to shutter its marketing and R&D offices in Bellingham, Wash., and move the departments to its facility in Old Town, Maine...

The $5,000 REP Whitewater Challenge, a series of events held at river parks designed by Boulder, Colo.’s Recreation Engineering & Planning, wrapped up on the weekend of July 7-8 at Kelly’s Whitewater Park in Cascade, Idaho, with familiar names on the podium and grand plans for an even bigger and better series next year...

When slalom paddlers descend on the newly completed Lee Valley Whitewater Centre course for the London Olympic Games in a few short days, they’ll do so knowing they’re in for some serious whitewater -- the course has been proclaimed as the best and most challenging Olympic paddling venue to-date...

Believe it or not, in this year of historically low runoff in Colorado, the state's main artery, the Colorado River, is running higher than average in Class V Gore Canyon and Class II Lower Gore Canyon downstream (1,150 cfs), and perfect for rafters in Shoshone Canyon near Glenwood Springs. And paddlers owe it all to something called the Shoshone Outage Protocol...

Dagger, the premier designer and manufacturer of high-performance whitewater and recreational kayaks, today announced that longtime team paddler Chris Gragtmans has been named the new Team Dagger manager after Andrew Holcombe exited his role at the end of June.

While the world waits for the London Games to begin, a host of Juniors strutted their slalom stuff at the U-23 Canoe Slalom World Championships in the good ol’ USA in Wausau, Wis. In all, the event drew more than 300 young athletes from 27 nations, including three 2012 Olympians, to test themselves against the world’s best. The highlight for the U.S.: Rick Powell's bronze...

The North Fork downstream had its chance with a blow-out extreme race a few weeks earlier. Now it was the North Fork’s chance to show freestyle kayakers what it could offer. And it offered plenty at the U.S. National Whitewater Championships July 6-8 at Kelly’s Whitewater Park in Cascade, on what competitors called “possibly the biggest loop spot on Earth...”

Row, Row, Row Your Boat. That's what Americans Paul Ridley, Collin West, Neal Mueller and Scott Mortensen will be saying this month when they embark on a rowing voyage they're calling one of the world's last great firsts: a non-stop, unsupported row across the Arctic Ocean. Sponsored through Eddie Bauer's Be First program, the four will travel 1,300 miles from Inuvik, Canada, to Provideniya, Russia, arriving around Aug. 15.

They’re at it again, this time exploring new realms of verticality. First Ascent expedition kayakers Ben Stookesberry and Chris Korbulic recently returned from a first descent of the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River in Sierra National Park, testing ropes as much as their adrenaline glands on a five-hour descent into a never-before-run, 2,000-foot-deep canyon....

In an effort to tie in more people in the town’s own backyard to the world-class river park amenity they have coursing through downtown, the city of Wausau, Wis., recently followed the path of other whitewater park townships by hosting a summer festival based around the river. The result: the 2nd Annual Wausau RiverFest, drawing over 100 paddlers to the town’s park as well as a few cheeseheads along for the ride...

If only the gold rushers had stand-up paddleboards and Ben Friberg’s stand-up stamina. On June 27, Ben Friberg set a new SUP Distance World Record on Canada’s Yukon River by paddling a whopping 238 miles in a single 24-hour period. All we can say is that’s a lot of standing and paddling. PL checks in with the record-setter...

With the Lyons Outdoor Games and FIBArk wrapping up in Colorado, and river fest followers now flocking to Gunnison, Festival season is in full swing in Colorado, with familiar names on the podium. A quick wrap PL-style on who’s done what where...

While creek racers in the Rockies and elsewhere are busy chalking up results domestically, a crew of kayakers overseas recently battled for top bragging rights in Italy at the unofficial Teva Extreme Kayaking World Championships...

This is a must-hit event for whitewater paddlers and river lovers of all persuasions, featuring new events this year in an action-packed one-day format. And according to American Whitewater, for whom the annual event is a major fundraiser, the Deerfield Fest is the largest whitewater event in the northeast. It’s also one of the longest running, coming together back in 1994 to commemorate and celebrate the successful dam relicensing process that took place on the Deerfield in 1993.

Talk about a race down a badge of courage. Last weekend, Idaho’s North Fork of the Payette drew some of the best kayakers in the world to Idaho for the first-ever, large-scale kayak race down the notorious stretch of Class V. In the end, local Ryan Casey took top honors, followed by Tyler Bradt and Mikkel St. John-Duncan.

While Great Britain’s David Florence made history at this weekend’s Cardiff World Cup in Switzerland, winning his second gold medal of the weekend in C2, for the U.S. all eyes were on who would make the final cut for the five-spot Olympic team heading to London. In the end, it was Scott Parsons (K1), Caroline Queen (WK1), Eric Hurd/Jeff Larimer (C2) and Casey Eichfeld (C1)...

You've heard of the Bermuda Triangle, the demise of countless ships. Hopefully, the same fate won't befall stand-up paddlers Bill Whiddon and Thaddeus Foote who are planning the first-ever attempt to stand-up paddle (SUP) over 48 miles across the Gulf Stream, from Bimini, Bahamas to Miami, Florida.