{"id":16489,"date":"2018-05-23T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-05-23T17:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/community.nrs.com\/?p=16489"},"modified":"2018-05-21T17:05:11","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T00:05:11","slug":"lochsa-river-madness-whitewater-and-debauchery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.nrs.com\/duct-tape\/2018\/05\/23\/lochsa-river-madness-whitewater-and-debauchery\/","title":{"rendered":"Lochsa River Madness: Whitewater and Debauchery"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Sunday morning camp Oracle, coffee in hand, stopped in front of my raft.\u00a0He shook his morning mess of grey hair and muttered something. \u00a0Then he looked at my raft and looked at me.
\n\u201cThe falls,\u201d he said, \u201chas a huge refusal wave. Huge!\u201d
\n\u201cWhat if we ask nicely?\u201d I asked.
\nThe camp oracle was in no mood for jokes. His voice dropped low and conspiratorial\u2026\u201cThe only way to run Lochsa Falls\u00a0is to….\u201d<\/p>\n

Sorry, I can\u2019t give you the secret. Who knows what kind of bad river karma that could bring; it might be as simple as making it less fun for you, or it might be disastrous to all of us. In any case, nobody should ever put a river\u2019s secrets in print. Besides, as we all know, it\u2019s never the same river twice, so it probably wouldn\u2019t do you any good anyway.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Saturday morning, my friend Justin Gonzales and I left South Dakota at 5 a.m. and drove 750 miles to arrive at the Lochsa River for the 2017 Memorial Day Lochsa River Madness.<\/p>\n

Somewhere beyond Lolo Pass, Highway 12 met and paralleled the Lochsa River, which, at first, appeared to be a large creek. But it picked up water mile after mile as the snowpack slid off the mountains in roaring gushers and joined the creek, which at some point became a river, and then became a big ass river. And then became a scary, big ass river. In fact, the Nez Perce recognized its \u2018big-ass-ness\u2019 by naming it Lochsa, meaning rough water in their language. A fact also noted by Lewis and Clark who decided that this was not the best route to the ocean.<\/p>\n

This rough water has become the impetus for one of the more (irresponsibly) fun whitewater festivals in North America\u2014Lochsa River Madness, second only (probably) to West Virginia\u2019s Gauley Fest.<\/p>\n