A recent motorcycle outing (see last post) took me out Route 123 and through Alstead, where the scars from last year's flooding remain raw.

The Cold River doesn't look all that threatening, most of the time, but when a river rises it can etch its fury into the landscape. The view brought to mind a recent e-mail from my cousin Steve, who shared his account of running the Chama River, near his home in Santa Fe, NM. Steve is an experienced canoest, and well aware that Grumman aluminum canoes weren't actually designed to ply Class III rapids, which makes the following story all the more amusing:

I borrowed a friend’s 17' aluminum Grumman canoe and ran about 35 miles of the Chama River just a bit north of here. There are many long stretches of river
in this state that seem to me to be totally neglected because everyone is
focused on white water.
I was right, the trip was great: fast running on a big meandering river in a
slowly widening canyon. Every few miles we came to a diversion dam for the
local ditch system, but as long as you keep your eyes and ears alert you can
spot these before you get in trouble. The trouble came at the very end of
the trip, not more than 2 miles from the take-out.
This is a big river, meandering across the floor of a wide canyon. I was
able to scope out occasional stretches from the road, but there was a lot
that was unknown. I asked a few river runners, but most had never been down
it (no white water to speak of). Eric and I were having a blast just
discovering everything as we came upon it. We ran the occasional rapid,
portaged around the dams. Finally though, we came to a faster, straighter,
rougher stretch somewhere around class 3 white water. It extended about 2
tenths of a mile, after which we could see clear water. The banks were
steep, over grown on one side and difficult going on the other. We decided to
run it without giving it that much thought.
There was no slack water, so I took us right out in the middle and plotted
the straightest course I could. We didn't last long. A big haystack on the
right rolled us over and we were filled by a standing wave on the left. The
boat just sank. I've swamped canoes before, but this one sunk. I could see
Eric in the bow, and the top of the cooler in the center of the boat, but
the boat was scraping and bumping along beneath us hitting rock after rock.
For a moment I thought we'd be able to ride it out, but suddenly we hit
something ahead and the boat swung sideways and flipped. It lodged there,
perpendicular to the flow, with water pouring over the top like it was a
giant rock. We both hung on and stayed with it, but even that was a
struggle.
We could not move the canoe. The force of the water coming over the top was
too much. Eventually we realized we'd have to give it up, and started trying
to rescue gear that was strapped to the boat. Everything I've learned about
whitewater is based around boats that are unsinkable. You stay with your
boat and tie your stuff to the boat and generally that's the best bet. We had a
hell of a time getting anything off this boat though.

Eric finally ran out of strength and was washed away. He's much smaller than me, and was shivering badly by that time. I tried twice more to move the boat, but couldn't do it. It shifted a tiny bit each time, and each time it shifted I
got swept away. There was a long webbing painter streaming off the bow and
another on the stern. I caught onto it and worked my way back to the boat,
but the second time I was too tired to do it again. I came to the end of the
painter, let go, and did my best to keep my head up and feet down stream as I
shot the rapids without a boat.
It was a grisly odyssey after that; Eric had lost his wallet, keys,
eyeglasses & one shoe. We were both bloody from the knees down from bashing our shins into the canoe trying to stay with it. We had 20 miles to hitch back to my truck, and then we dealt with Eric's key-less truck. We later found out that the Army Corps of Engineers (that controls the dam we were running below) had begun reducing flow from a peak of 14000cfs when we ran it down to 850cfs by the following Saturday. That gave us a lot of hope for the
prospect of retrieving the canoe, but when we arrived we found it had spent
a hard week moving from boulder to boulder as the water came down. It was
folded and torn beyond any reasonable hope of repair. I got $28 for it at the
scrap yard, and now I'm shopping for a replacement to give to my friend
Jack who loaned the boat to me.

After I get that replacement boat, I might be in the market for a good river
canoe though. Something tough and unsinkable, V-hull and perhaps a cover. It
was a really cool trip until the end, and since neither of us died I consider it an adventure.