To Willamette Falls & Back Again
Looking out my window, while rain pelts the Willamette River, I’m glad to be nestled into my hotel room and not out in a kayak, as I was a few hours ago. It’s tricky business kayaking in the Willamette Valley in the spring. Best advise: layer up, wear quick-dry clothing, prepare for the worst, and delight in the best.
The best was what we got today, on a kayak tour to Willamette Falls (second largest falls by volume in North America), courtesy of newly opened eNRGY Kayaking in Oregon City.
eNRGY is the brainchild of Sam Drevo who leads a team of world class paddle sport professionals in an effort to provide individuals with the “knowledge, exceptional skills, and judgment to become a life-long paddler.” Yes, there’s a new breed of sportsmen in Oregon City, and they are young and strong and daring and wildly passionate about rivers.
Our guide for the hour-long tour to the base of the thundering Willamette Falls was Ben, and he gave us a geological and cultural history of this patch of the river: including sacred Native American fishing grounds (with the petroglyphs to prove it), the hundred-year flood that wiped out the city if Linn, the volcanic basalt that lines the river, and the power and paper companies that turned the mighty flow of the river into a gilded age of progress and profits.
The Willamette River is high in the spring, and under the mellow appearance on the surface runs a swift and powerful current. We battled this tide upstream to a little inlet just downstream of the falls. The juxtaposition of the natural world against the machinations of industry was startling, drawn even more so under a dramatic, rumbling sky of clouds.
Truth be told, two middle-aged women with desk jobs, in a tuna boat of a tandem kayak, threaded an ungainly pattern of weaving up and down the river. We’d get too close to the middle, over-correct our course, turn sideways, right ourselves, and paddle like hell against the current, only to find ourselves sideways again. Our path from a bird’s eye view must have looked like a zigzag, bob-and-weave maneuver: all 50 minutes upstream and ten minutes back.
I wouldn’t have changed a single minute of it. We paddled against a stronger current, against the constant flow that whispers in a woman’s ear, “Stay home, take it easy, don’t be too big or go too far.” Yes, we are mild-mannered women of a certain age with a call home and hearth. Running deep below the surface, however, we have another voice, our own powerful current, saying “Go. Stick your oar in the water and row like hell.”
Photo by Brenda Barnes
Travel Information: Mt. Hood Territory
Read: "Oregon City: Tide and Tradition" here.
