Jeff Bennett Wrote the Whitewater Bible.

By Tammy Batey

The first kayaker blew out his eardrum.

The second swam and got pounded between the Class V waterfall and a cavern.

Third up was Jeff Bennett. In a pool at the lip of Spirit Falls, Jeff waited in that exhilarating limbo between “extreme confidence and abject terror” to plunge his kayak 33 feet off the waterfall.

 His brain whirred as he considered each move needed to get him off the Little White Salmon’s Falls upright and intact. Stay in the center. Avoid the right wall. Angle the landing.

He began paddling toward the Falls and his brain sharpened. The roar of the churning water and of his heart quieted. Instinct kicked reasoning to the curb and his mind peacefully observed his body hit all the right moves.

At the bottom, Jeff – upright and intact – pocketed another story to add to a growing collection of rapid-running yarns that would fill “A Guide to the Whitewater Rivers of Washington.” What he learned on that Spirit Falls trip in 1996 ended up in the second edition of the book he wrote and self-published.

“Everybody loves the proverbial campfire story,” Jeff says. “And everyone had one. The only thing that made me different at the campfire is I had a lot more of them.”

Many kayakers own dog-eared copies of the book that details Jeff’s kayaking adventures in the late ‘80s to late ‘90s in Washington state. Or they own one of his five other whitewater guides – all edited by his wife, Tonya – and available from Amazon.com and bookstores.

When Jeff – now an attorney living in Portland, Ore. -- began researching his first book, the paddling world was very different than it is today. Not as many people ran Class IV and Class V rapids, and the definitions of Class IV and V were more conservative. Running a 30-foot-high waterfall was considered crazy. Higher? Impossible. Running a drop like Crack in the Earth on the Top Tye was considered suicide.

Jeff helped establish kayaking as an exploratory sport. He thrived on running unexplored sections of river. He gave paddlers many more options than they’d had previously. Even if they stuck to their comfort zone of running just a few favorite rivers, those paddlers now could be much more selective.

Inflatable kayaker Scott Timmer, who lives in Beaverton, Ore., met Jeff shortly after the 1^st edition of “A Guide to the Whitewater Rivers of Washington” was published in 1991. At a kayaking get-together, a friend pointed Jeff out – “Jeff was like movie star status to kayakers.”

Scott, 50, considered himself a fan of Jeff’s before he became a friend and kayaking buddy. With the accuracy of his information and his attention to detail, Jeff set the pace for kayaking’s next stage of evolution, Scott says.

“We use his book literally as a bible. Jeff’s book gave you information you could actually use and run rivers,” Scott says. “You never want to run a river without being with someone who has run it previously but with Jeff’s book, you could get away with it.

“His book, it really opened the door. ‘Gosh, maybe we can run this and this and this because he had already run it.’ You trust it.”

Long before he wrote the book that helped boost kayakers’ confidence, Jeff began his lifelong love affair with water.

Born 45 years ago in Boston “with one toe in the water,” Jeff loved water from an early age. He explored Cape Cod during trips to visit his grandparents. He explored lakes in New Jersey. He collected water-related monikers – beach bum, surfer, lifeguard -- the way other boys collected model airplanes.

In the mid-70s, Jeff found a way to marry his love of adrenaline and water when he took a rafting trip down the Snake River. The group put in before Lunch Counter Rapid at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Jeff remembers being awed by the Class IV waves. Having never seen a river with big waves before, Jeff was smitten.

“I knew I wanted to do it again,” he says. “It’s hard to figure out how to get an adrenaline fix from a Class I river.”

Jeff soon began paddling inflatable kayaks. The Snyder brothers of West Virginia were challenging what paddlers could do in an inflatable, running Class IV and Class V stretches when most “duckies” stuck to Class III.

Better designed inflatable kayaks enabled paddlers to challenge the limits. If hardshells are what Bennett calls “the sports cars of the whitewater world,” inflatables are the jeeps. The Snyders descended rapids that were too bony, too low and held too much pin potential to do safely in a hardshell.

Jeff moved to Seattle in 1983 for law school. The 21-year-old quickly found kayaking buddies. On one trip on the Clackamas River east of Estacada, he and his buddies rented inflatable kayaks for the day. Another paddler had a hardshell so Jeff – always up for an adventure – asked if he could jump in.

“He showed me how to get in the kayak, which I did with my tennis shoes on,” he says. “Everyone was staring at me laughing because they knew I’d last about 10 seconds. Sitting in the eddy, I took one stroke toward the main current, went upside down, struggled to get out and finally made it to the bank.”

His tennis shoes floated on without him. He had pushed his way out of them.

But Jeff was undeterred.

“It made me want more.”

Three years later, Jeff had become so proficient in a hardshell that he was guiding kayaking trips throughout Washington and kayaking every day. “Soggy Sneakers: A Guide to Oregon Rivers” by the Willamette Kayak and Canoe Club was the only Northwest guidebook at the time. The 1^st edition described 32 trips.

Jeff wanted to explore more rivers so he talked with people to learn about ones he found on topographical maps. He paddled those rivers as well as those he crossed on his way to the 32 detailed in “Soggy Sneakers.” He loved to write so he jotted notes on everything he ran. He soon realized he had the makings of a book.

There was method to his exploration. He started with a major river – such as the Skykomish River in Western Washington – and worked his way upstream, exploring every tributary he passed on his way down. On some days, he paddled 30 miles of river, clinching a waterproof ammo can between his knees that protected his camera and tape recorder.

Floating in eddies between rapids, Jeff dictated into his tape recorder the specifics of the run. He took photos of his paddling buddies running the rapids and they shot photos of him. On solid ground, he added funny observations about the run.

Often, he explored new stretches with friends or people he met at rivers. With solo trips, he and then-girlfriend Tonya left about 5 p.m. on a Friday and arrived at the takeout late that night or early the next morning. No matter what hour they arrived, they whipped out a pad of paper and detailed mileages, observations they could make out in the dark and access points.

At first light, Jeff and Tonya drove to the put-in. He threw his kayak on the ground, grabbed a muffin and told her to meet him several miles downstream at the take-out. He started paddling alone and hoped he and Tonya would end up at the same place at the same time. At the take-out, he tossed her the tape he’d recorded. She gave him more food and a fresh tape and he was onto the next run.

He cautions against solo kayaking trips – “They are by their nature, dangerous and stupid and I don’t recommend it to anyone.” But he relished the thrill of knowing he was completely self-reliant on those solo trips.

On group exploratory trips, the camaraderie was intense.

“We were in canyons we should not have been in,” he says. “We got stuck and had to figure out how to get each other out. There were always close calls. Lots of vertical pins. It was almost a military experience, like the band of brothers.”

His first descents number between 20 and 40. He destroyed many cameras and wore out many tape recorders in the process. He had to hike out of canyons when he encountered unrunnable stretches. Even when he ran into problems, experiencing a run nobody had ever experienced thrilled him.

“Everything you know about whitewater and everything you do is based on your ability to control your environment,” he says. “If you don’t know what your environment is about to be, you better be up to that task.

 “If we were sitting around a campfire and someone told me about a run, I felt like I’d already experienced it. If you don’t know what’s coming up, you have that new sense of exploration.”

Kayaker Dan Jursnick, who lives in West Linn, Ore., understands why Jeff’s stories of exploration are so popular. Dan, 41, met Jeff when he was working on the  2^nd edition of “A Guide to the Whitewater Rivers of Washington.”

He wrote a thorough, interesting guide to the rivers in Washington and Northern Oregon that showcases his fun-loving personality, Dan says.

“He tells a good story. He gives you enough detail. There’s a passion. You put yourself in the situation that he’s telling you about. There are people who tell stories and hand down stories and he’s one of those people. He has a wealth of information.”

Paddling evolved again in the late 1990s. That’s when creek boating took off. Young paddlers with impressive rodeo skills were stretching the boundaries of the sport. Kayak manufacturers shrunk their boats to accommodate them. Jeff’s trusty 10-foot Corsica had become a behemoth.

By 2000, paddlers were going off 60-, 80- and 100-foot waterfalls.

“You had a young crowd of people with extraordinary skill and the right equipment at the right time,” Jeff says. “They started to do stuff that we had never dreamed of. We weren’t passed by. We were blown by. We became the old guys on the block.”

Jeff admits it’s been tough when his head is willing -- “Every synapse in my head wants to go bomb off big waterfalls.” But his body – several shoulder and back surgeries later -- is no longer forgiving of regular kayaking runs.  

So he tests that body every few years with a Class V run and his body reminds him why he gave up the sport. The rest of the time, he cherishes his memories and appreciates the irony of his generation being surpassed by a new generation of sport-challenging paddlers. After all, he spent his kayaking career pushing the limits of what had previously been paddled.

“You smile and pass the baton.”