“TO SUFFER NOW MEANS GREATNESS LATER”

comforts necessary for a luxurious overnight trip—a dry bag with spare clothes, tent, and sleeping gear; a dry box filled with a two-burner stove and fuel, an iron skillet, French press, and many other camp kitchen accoutrement; a collapsible table on which to place said gear; two camp chairs; a backgammon board; and a cooler filled to the brim with you-guess-what. As Nikki and I hoisted The Booger and waddled it to the put-in, we exchanged nervous glances. The sage advice of my friend Owen rattled in my skull: If the rio is low, you can still go. Leave the luxury items at home and go ultralight backpacking-style.

The first rapid, usually a fun train of small-but-splashy waves, looked like a trickly riffle that would undoubtedly be a bony, bumpy ride—if we even made it through to begin with. Naturally, with our boat sitting low and heavy in the water, we hit the first visible rock and stopped completely. We sat there and sighed as our wise friends who run the Smoke Hole in canoes sent the riffle clean with maybe a few scrapes. We huffed and got out of The Booger, grabbing the webbing tied along the pontoons’ length and started yanking it along the rounded river rocks. In case you didn’t know, rubber is sticky and doesn’t like to slide along anything with ease. The canoeists drifted ahead, getting smaller and smaller as we reached the end of the riffle, defeated at the thought of 15.8 more miles of hell.

Fortunately, big, deep pools punctuate the benign rapids and riffles of the South Branch Potomac, providing easy passage and rest between bouts of taking The Booger for a walk. We munched snacks and sipped adult beverages in the flatwater, gazing up at the towering limestone cliffs as members of our crew cast lines from their canoes. All was well on the Smoke Hole.

Right before one particularly spectacular bend in the canyon, the river splits into two parallel channels and drops in elevation over a 100-yard-long boulder garden, offering paddlers a choice. We eyed up the options; the right channel appeared to have less water and more pointy rocks to contend with. Knowing we’d probably end up walking either way, we decided to test our luck on the left channel.

Navigating an extended rocky riffle requires intense substrate scrutiny for choosing an optimal micro-line. When you enter a combat situation like that, a clean line is no longer an option. You’d best strap your seatbelt on and put that tray table in the upright position, cause it’s about to get turbulent. The fine line between success and failure boils down to possessing supreme boat awareness. You must be able to immediately identify which rocks you can straddle between the pontoons and which rocks you can successfully bump to set you up for the next hit. Because once you get off-line, there’s no recovering. Beyond your water-reading ability, advanced maneuvers are often required. You might have to intentionally snag a tube on a rock, bounce up and down on the tubes to induce temporary buoyancy, and take the requisite paddle strokes to throw a full 360-degree spin before breaking free—anything to avoid getting out of the boat.

Into the cascading riffle we went, utilizing every low-water paddling skill in the toolbox. We maintained laser-focus as we bopped down the fork, relying on our fine-tuned rapport to operate as a team without saying much. Each successive rock bump and spin move inched us closer to the big pool below—we started to think we might actually have a chance. Left here! Backstroke there!

Watch out for that rock! Hit this one! Lift yer ass up to unweight the pontoon! As we scraped off the final rock and entered the eddy of the big pool at the bottom of the slide, we whooped and hollered as if we had just successfully survived a class V rapid on the Upper Gauley, despite a near-zero chance of death.

Miles later, still very much at the back of the pack, we approached the Landslide rapid. I stood up in the floor of the boat to get a look and gulped as a jumbled maze of jagged boulders lay in place of what, in previous years, had been a river-wide rapid. There was but one navigable path through the jumble, and it barely looked wide enough for The Booger. Over the incessant white noise of the whitewater, I shouted commands at Nikki to take a backstroke, rudder, and paddle hard forward as I echoed the sequence of paddle strokes. We slotted into the drop perfectly and immediately heard the familiar squeaky, smudgy sound of rubber on rock as we wedged between two boulders. We sat there for a moment before the surge of water behind The Booger—now serving as a cork for a majority of the river—popped us out into the swirling pool below. Thrilled that we made it through without having to exit the boat amid the biggest rapid, we tapped paddle blades before eddying out and mooring The Booger to a tree at our riverside campsite.

The next morning, I woke with a pounding headache from the night’s revelry and stumbled down to the cobbled shore to dip my face in the cold water. The Booger, which most definitely had not moved on its own volition, was significantly more beached than when we first parked it. My heart dropped, but not nearly as much as the river had overnight.

But the inevitable trials and tribulations would have to wait— we were still enjoying the high vibes of river camp and had a hearty meal to enjoy. Our friend Geo cheffed up his classic Smoke Hole breakfast of freshly harvested ramps, morels, and trout. We brewed pot after pot of coffee, sure to make heavy use of the heavy kitchen gear. Some things, like a riverside breakfast with your favorite people, can only be accomplished via arduous effort. Another one of Owen’s aphorisms drifted through my blissed-out brain: To suffer now means greatness later. Lounging in the sun under the neon-green sycamore leaves, I thought about how we sat in the calming eye of the storm between bouts of suffering.

As we broke down camp and secured our gear in The Booger, anxiety crept back in as the second bout of suffering was about to begin. We knew we had about 11 miles of paddling—and boat dragging—between us and the take-out in Petersburg. By now, you can guess how the remainder of the trip went: blissful periods of floating through pools punctuated by fuming bouts of taking our fully loaded boat for an aquatic hike. After one particularly long schlep, we made the executive decision that, to reduce weight, we had to drink and eat everything left in the cooler.

The highpoint of the day was our famous charcuterie lunch, an annual tradition that is presented and enjoyed at the confluence where the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac River (affectionately referred to as the NoFoSoBraPotomo) joins the South Branch proper. As each member of the flotilla added delicacies like cured meats, smoked oysters, and fine cheeses to the spread, the sense of camaraderie that comes standard with group outings grew with the smorgasbord. We joked that the only reason we go and do these hair-brained adventures is to enjoy classy meals in pristine locales.

Once the NoFoSoBraPotomo adds its crystalline waters to the South Branch, the river swells in size, meaning that the tortuous part of the journey was (mostly) over. While we still bumped and scraped along several shallow riffles, the experience was closer to a traditional rafting trip. As we pulled up to the take-out and broke down The Booger, we experienced a familiar emotional paradox, simultaneously elated that the hard work was done but deflated that another glorious journey down the Smoke Hole had come to an end.

When we got home, I checked the USGS gauge records to see just how low the South Branch Potomac had fallen. By the time we took off, the river had dropped to 1.9 feet, smashing our previous low record and setting an absolute minimum level at which we would most definitely, positively, never, ever run it again… or would we? w

Dylan Jones is publisher of Highland Outdoors and would like to publicly apologize to our beloved Booger for all the aquatic abuse we’ve put her through.