rob lesser’s return journey marks the anniversary of expedition kayakaing’s benchmark run
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s t i k i n e by eugene buchanan
Erik Boomer
Thirty years ago, Idaho’s Rob Lesser led one of the more audacious whitewater feats of all time: the first descent of the Grand Canyon of the Stikine. This summer, at the ripe age of 65, he’s going back—not necessarily to run the tortuous rapids of the 45-mile-long canyon, but to pay his respects.
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“It’s not exactly my intent to go run the canyon again,” Lesser says. “I’m old enough to realize that just because you feel like doing something, it doesn’t mean that when the shit hits the fan you’re ready to deal with the consequences.” There’s plenty of that on the Stikine. Located 1,000 miles north of the Washington border in British Columbia, the river drains 20,000 square miles of wilderness in its 350-mile course to the ocean north of Wrangell, Alaska. The crux: the 45-mile-long Grand Canyon, a cataract of massive, Class V-VI rapids surrounded by inescapable, 1,000-foot vertical walls. Even on the 30th anniversary of its historic first descent, it’s still considered the benchmark of big-water boating and remains one of whitewater’s biggest prizes. And this means it still lures the sport’s best every year. Last fall, Erik Boomer, Jeff West and Todd Wells paddled it in a single day. They were only the second group to do that, ever. In mid-September, Maxi Kniewasser, Ric Moxon, Ben Howthorne, Cody Howard, Taylor Cavin and Daz Clarkson ran it on Kniewasser and Moxon’s Triple Crown tour, also knocking off the nearby Alsek and Susitna. “The run was perfect, but still it’s the Stikine. We still had some big trashings,” Kniewasser says. “Ric’s skirt blew and he had to swim for his life upstream of The Wall and I got stuck in The Hole That Ate Chicago.” Indeed, even though its siren call still lures kayaking’s upper echelon, the list of those willing to attempt it is small. To date less than 100 people have paddled it, and in the three decades since Lesser’s first descent in 1981, only 15 teams have repeated the feat.
“Lesser accomplishing the first Stikine descent was truly epic. It’s hard to imagine what it felt like to be the first people paddling through there,” says Boomer, who claims five and a half Stikine runs—the “half” coming when limit-pushing high water forced him, Tristan McClaran and Ryan Casey into an grueling bushwhack out after paddling roughly one-sixth of the run. Abandoned Stikine runs are commonplace, despite the committing canyon walls that make escape a dangerous and arduous undertaking. The reason is simple: The Stikine has dealt some of the world’s best boaters the beatdowns of their lives. There was John Wasson’s brush with mortality in 1981, resulting in the name of Wasson’s Hole; Bob McDougall’s near-death swim and epic cliff-scaling escape in 1989, recounted in his essay, “Drowning;” Jay Kincaid and Taylor Robertson’s quickly aborted highwater attempt in 2000, leading to a two-and-a-half-day hike out; and Austin Rathman’s life-altering swim at Site Zed, the run’s one consistently necessary portage, during a high-water attempt in 2007. “The Stikine will change how you view yourself, the world and everyone in it,” he says. And that’s exactly why Lesser is returning to the Stikine for the first time since 1998, when he ran it at age 53. This time he’ll be accompanied by a top-notch camera team filming Lesser: A Life Less Ordinary, which focuses in large part, on his five trips to the Stikine and historic return. He’ll be in good company. Joining him on the 350mile, source-to-sea expedition will be filmmakers Anson Fogel of Forge Motion Pictures and Bryan Smith of Reel Water Productions, as well as National Geographic cinematographer Skip Armstrong.
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