A New Guidebook for the Rockies
By Otterboy
It's not unusual for someone who has paddled for 10 or 15 years to rack up a
list of impressive stories and the assorted kayaking-related injuries. It's
somewhat less common to reach this stage in your paddling career in your
mid-20s.
A paddler since he was a kid, Kyle McCutchen of Grand Junction, Colorado,
has more river experience than many kayakers twice his age. He's also the
co-author (with Evan Stafford) of the most comprehensive
Kyle started paddling at age 11 after his dad, Lee, put him in a kayak
during a family vacation. Kyle took to it immediately, and was rolling
within six months. "It was a natural sport for Kyle,” Lee says.
Life as an 11-year-old paddler can be complicated, what with the lack of a
driver's license. Unable to go out with his dad every weekend, Kyle had to
find other ways to log paddling time. And since he couldn't always be there,
Lee made sure Kyle learned from the best, introducing him to
Erica Mitchell and other then-members of
Team Wavesport.
"My friends definitely didn't baby sit me,” Kyle recalls. "I learned to grow
up fast.”
Kyle soon discovered creeking, paddling his first class V at age 16.
"I'd tell my dad I was going to do a play run and then hit some class V".
Kyle soon chalked up descents down classic
"I tried hard to keep him in freestyle rather than creeking,’ Lee says, “but
I couldn’t keep him away from it.”
Kyle’s mother, Mary, shared her husband’s fears about their son’s hobby.
"For a couple years I didn't want to hear anything about it,” she says.
The focus on creeking earned Kyle a compressed T11 vertebrae, the result of
an accident on Wall Check, a 40-foot slide on Yule Creek.
The four-and-a-half-month recover didn't slow him down though. That river
experience turned into "Whitewater of the Southern Rockies,” a 2007
guidebook that details runs in
The only other guidebook to the area -- “
"We stood on the shoulders of others,” Kyle says. "But a lot of the stuff
wasn't cutting edge."
At three pounds and over 600 pages, "Whitewater of the
While they retained the standard Class I-V river rating system, the authors
made their own modifications. They replaced the Class VI rating with a
simple "not recommended.” They also didn't use the perceived consequences of
a swim or missed line in their ratings.
"In the most benign rapid someone will get a foot entrapment and die,” Kyle
says. "Rating consequences is impossible because you just don't know what
the consequences are no matter how good or bad it looks.”
Instead, the book only rates the difficulty of a move. Finally, the book
shows the correlation between a river's difficulty throughout a range of
flows.
A
"You just cruise out with a couple friends and go exploring. You end up the
cracks in the earth in the most interesting places the earth has to offer.
That a lot better than going to the freestyle hole."
Whitewater of the Southern Rockies