It all started on July 5, on a sunny Friday afternoon as we flew into the Oslo airport in Norway. I wasn’t aware of the time or the weather, I was safely sleeping in a perfect crash position, as I had been for the last five hours.

   We soon had rental cars and embarked on our journey across Norway. It turned out to be just about as long a drive to Shua, our first stop, as was the plane ride to Norway (six hours). Shua had a fairly large kayak camp, where we met our first guide who would stay with us through out the rest of the trip.  

Just another beutiful view.

Morton, who would later save my life, took us up a winding dirt road up in to the highlands. About the only thing that grew up there were small grasses and a few trees that had somehow managed to brave the Norwegian winter. Rugged, jagged peaks surrounded us on all sides as we put on our clothing still wet from the play session the night before. We carried our kayaks down a winding dirt path to our first creek.

   The creek started out to be slow and winding with a few drops here and there. It slowly picked up volume and gradient about a half-mile down and we found ourselves raging over the mountain streambed. A couple hundred meters later we were sitting in a pool looking at a horizon line that made the creek seem as if it dropped off the face of the earth.  

   We dragged our kayaks out of the water and stashed them on dry ground. As we started hiking through the trees, the drop came in to clear view. It was a fairly steep slide, probably about fifty meters long, all piling in to a sheer rock wall, down another small slide over a 10-footer, into a small pool, then off a bigger falls with a very rocky landing.

   We watched as Morton, our guide, styled it and landed in the pool at the bottom, no problem. Then the rest of us then ran it without mishap.

   After running it, we all scurried up the rock trail for another shot at it. A mile downstream was the takeout where we were ended our first Norwegian creek descent. We didn’t know at the time that would be one of the only creeks we did without a serious injury. None of us what a carnage the rest of the trip was to bring.

From there we started north to Voss. Our guides, who would show us around Norway, would meet us there. As we were driving along the freeway we came upon an amazing double drop. The double drop consisted of a very large Class V rapid flowing over a 15- foot falls that landed mostly on rock. The river then went into a very large keeper hole, then into the pool directly above the second drop. The second drop was a bit more, with some very bad consequences. It was about a 20-foot falls that had a very serious slide leading into it.

Morton the faithful guide

   We ran both without mishap, again, and we were soon back on the freeway heading for our next falls. The Money Drop turned out to be the biggest falls we had seen yet. It was an amazing 40-foot falls with a very nasty entrance. The landing pool had undercuts on both sides, with most of the flow going into them. This would be the first falls we would walk away from.

    We set up camp that night near Voss in a meadow. We would base out of that camp for the next week, running some of the biggest stuff we ran in Norway, some of the biggest stuff most of the people in our group had ever run.

   The next day we came upon an amazing 15- meter drop, probably the cleanest drop we would run. Just downstream was the biggest, gnarliest, but still runnable rapid I have ever seen in my life. It was a combination of very steep slides, big-water holes, and an almost impossible must-make moves. My line would be the worst on this one. After pitoning on a ledge and getting stuck in a hole I just barely managed to scrape down it and into the eddy below.

   On our way back to camp, we came across an amazing high-volume falls named Nose Breaker ( Brad Ludden broke his nose there earlier ), with one of the worst entrances we had seen yet. Imagine a fairly good-sized river constricted into a 10-foot gorge all going off of 35-foot falls. The entrance to Nose Breaker consisted of a keeper hole at the top going through a very tight S turn with huge boils going off of the falls. The line on Nose Breaker was to just miss the hole at the top, bust through a very big lateral, get as far right as you could before you went over the falls, and hanging on. Nick Turner went first, flipping backwards going off the falls, just as he had planned in hopes of reducing the impact. Nick styled it and came up sporting a broken paddle. I went next; this would be the most serious drop I had ever run. I made it past the hole, punched through the lateral and found my self almost upside-down going off of the falls. I was able to power brace up just going off of the lip and looked down at the huge mass of confusion in the water below me. There was no initial impact as I had expected, but once I was down, I new something must be wrong. The paddle got ripped out of one of my hands and I took this opportunity to make sure that my skirt was still on. I found my skirt had popped and I knew that I was still very deep under water. Seconds seemed to go by before I saw the light above me. I was able to reach my head out of the water and get a breath of air. Luckily, I was floating towards Nick, and he grabbed the back of my boat and saved me from getting sucked back behind the falls. As it turned out, everybody that ran it either broke their paddle or popped a skirt.

All the kayakers on the trip show off for TGR

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