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Held the weekend before the GoPro Games in nearby Vail, Colo., allowing professional paddlers the opportunity to swing by and paddle the Yampa River, the Yampa River Festival, SUP Cup and Paddling Life Creek Race is a fun-filled paddling event held in downtown Steamboat Springs, CO, on the Yampa River, the last remaining free-flowing tributary to the Colorado River system. Hosted by local river advocacy group Friends of the Yampa, the river festival is an annual event based around the Yampa River that draws paddlers from across the state to Steamboat to participate in canoe, kayak and raft races, stand-up paddleboard events, river dog contests, fishing demos and more.

Putting up with epic amounts of brush portaging, this summer Hyperlite Mountain Gear Ambassadors and adventurers Brad Meiklejohn, Roman Dial and Mike Curiak completed a two-week pack raft descent of Alaska’s Pile River through Lake Clark National Park.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s the mantra of Ben Orkin, 25, who, after coming up a few hours short due to repairing his partner’s sea kayak last year, went back to the Grand Canyon drawing board this January to set a new speed record for paddling the Big Ditch at 34 hours, 2 minutes. And get this: his record came just a day after Matt Klema, who launched Wed., Jan. 20, in a party of four, bested the previous mark in 35 hours, 5 minutes.