Flutterby™! : Ashlu Box Canyon

A few weeks ago, prompted by Tracy Clapp posting pictures from his recent Gauley trip (my notes from the Gauley back in the day) on Facebook, I went searching for a few old whitewater buddies online. I found 'em, but only after several clicks of "gulp" when their names showed up in incident reports. They were the lucky ones, or perhaps the skillful ones but I'm not so sure, they were on the scene Z-dragging the bodies of their paddling buddies out from undercuts, not the ones who'd gotten pinned.

At any rate, it's fairly clear now that back in the day, before that fateful day on the Ocoee when I was running with Travis and Norman and some guy we met at the take-out from Knoxville and I decided that it wasn't my limit but I no longer needed to find where that limit was that it was just a matter of time before I was part of one of those operations. That's when I started paddling an open boat.

Having said that, however, stuff like this still gives me one hell of a raging hard-on: Fred Norquist and Evan Garcia bring you the sights of Ashlu Box Canyon (video).