After my first year of grad school ended, I gathered up my hairy posse and headed up to Wyoming. We spent about a week there, playing, running the shit- Oops. Running the poo all around that area, generally just having a great time. I won't bore you all with the details, but we surfed a lot at King's Wave on the Snake below Jackson Hole, we headed over into Idaho to run Cave Falls and Lower Mesa Falls (which was sweet), and we ran a waterfall in someone's backyard.
The backyard waterfall was an interesting adventure. We met some people at King's wave that told us about a small waterfall that happened to be running at the time. I'm afraid that I won't give too many details, but they told us how to find it, and said that it was clean if you boofed on the right. The catch was that it was in the middle of some private property, so to scout, you look downstream from the putin and try to guess what's over the horizon line. Well, I'm a sucker for adventure, so we decided to fire it up.
As we were "scouting" i.e. looking at the horizon line from the road, the landowner showed up and took a few pictures of our licence plates. A little curious as to his intentions, my friend Conor and I went over to converse with this fine gentleman. The conversation was quite civil, but I think that it could be summed up by the first and last few seconds of dialogue:
"Hey there. You live around here?"
"If you boys are thinking of running that there waterfall, you should know that no trespassing means no trespassing."
"Um, I thought that there was some sort of law that if you stayed below the high water mark, it was ok."
"Nope."
"Uhh..."
... five or six minutes later...
"...Are you totally sure? Because I didn't hear about anyone dying lately."
"Well, fine, maybe I can't force you not to do it, but if you are going to go in there, maybe I'll just go call the cops, so that they can have a head start on you."
"Actually, that sounds like a great idea. Thanks."
And with that he drove off.
Conor and I were a little peeved. Well, Conor was downright pissed, and I was amused, so we averaged out to a little peeved. We walked back to Natalie and Ty over by the cars.
I looked at Conor.
Conor looked at me.
I looked at Ty.
Ty looked at Natalie.
Natalie looked at Conor.
I looked at Natalie.
Ty looked at me.
Conor looked pissed.
Some passing motorists looked at all of us... a little funny.
Ty looked at my cellphone.
Natalie looked at the waterfall.
The waterfall looked at me.
Conor looked at Ty.
I was still looking at Natalie.
Alright, this is getting a little confusing. Long story short, we called the cops.
After several minutes of negotiating, we were finally put in contact with a specialist. I believe that his name was Gary Shaw, should any of you fans find yourselves debating access issues in the greater Jackson Hole area. Mr. Shaw was an exemplary official, and informed us that indeed, we were guaranteed access so long as we stayed below the high water mark, didn't touch the banks, didn't make a lot of noise, and didn't cross private property getting into the water.
So, Conor and I shimmied down the bank while still on the easement for the highway, got in our boats, and ran the poo. We decided that I would go first. Conor has larger testicles, so he usually ends up running scary drops first. This means that when we come to an easy drop, I have to rush to run it first, in order to make it seem that I am less of a wuss. Since we hadn't been able to scout this drop at all, we didn't know any of the potential reasons to be scared, so it was my turn to probe.
It was a fast 100 yards or so to the lip, and sure enough, the boof right was super clean. The drop had a perfect little bit of cave behind it, and was the perfect height; high enough to be exciting, but short enough to boof strongly. The landing looked like you wouldn't want to pencil in, but it was plenty deep if you styled it, like Conor and I did.
I saw immediately why the landowner hadn't wanted us to run it. The waterfall was right there in his backyard. He had some little lawn chairs set up on the bank. It looked like a great place to kick back and get away from it all. I realized that I was a jerk. Imagine that you have a really scenic tree in your backyard. You like to go there to relax. You might try to climb it, but you know, the branches are pretty thin, so that's dangerous. Then one day a bunch of people show up and want to do a first ascent on your tree. What would you say? You'd probably try to convince them not to do it. I mean, it's dangerous and it's a private place of yours. Furthermore, imagine that the law is on their side, and they climb the tree even though you try to stop them. I think that that's the feeling that causes belligerent landowners to try to deny boating access.
So I guess that the moral here is that just because it's legal doesn't mean that it's polite. We didn't break the law, but we ended up intruding in a pretty cool private place. In our defense, the landowner could have been a lot nicer when he tried to stop us. Also, I heard secondhand a few months later that he fired a shotgun full of rock salt at another kayaker. Holy crap.
Since the waterfall was surrounded by private property, we weren't able to get any pictures of it. But enjoy the pictures from the rest of the trip.
Rock on
-The Famous Leif Anderson
