Fluid Kayaks Team

For those of you that don't know, the Slave river is a gigantic river that flows into the Great Slave lake in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Near the Alberta/NWT border, it passes over a particularly hard section of the Canadian Shield (a big granite formation) and there it forms some of the best whitewater on earth. I have been going up to the Slave as often as I can ever since I first experienced it in 2004. The water is warm, the crowds are non-existent, and the paddling is the best that I've ever seen anywhere. This year, I managed to spend about a month and a half up there, paddling pretty much every day. There was a flood right when I arrived, so I got to experience all the water levels of a typical season, condensed into about a month. I saw it get too high for the conventional high water features, then too low for all but the lowest of the low water features. It was an amazing trip.

I have too many little stories to write down here, but I will talk about one thing that I started to notice. The Slave is big. Usually, at a wave in a normal river, getting onto the wave takes a couple strokes, getting back to the eddy takes a few more, and you can float right up the eddy to where you catch the wave again. Think honestly about the last wave that you surfed (Lachine doesn't count here. I'm trying to make a point). It probably took a maximum of about 30 seconds to go from flushing off the wave back to waiting in line. That was not the case on the Slave. Surfing Rollercoaster, it would take about 30 seconds to ferry out to where the wave was, at which point you probably wouldn't catch it anyway, then another 45 seconds to get back into the eddy, then another minute or so to paddle back to the top of the eddy. It's not unusual for an eddy on the Slave to be a quarter mile wide. The really big eddies are huge. At Pelican rapids, the river left eddy is literally about a mile wide (maybe two, depending on how you measure it). The whole river operates on a scale much larger than the human scale. Hard to believe that people could contemplate damming this river. But more on that at the end.

Well, enough philosophizing. Let's see some photos!

Here I am really excited about the 3 day drive, alone in the car.

This me making the first descent of Pony Monster, from my 2008 trip. Photo by Dave Gemmel.

John Blyth and I surfing Nigel's Wave during the first days of the flood. John Rathwell photo.

During the Slave River Paddlefest, a bunch of paddlers showed up.

During high water, but not super-de-duper high water, a wave called Sweet Spot comes in. Here are a couple photos of it.

One of the other classic waves is Rollercoaster, which comes in a medium-low flows. We spent a lot of time at this wave. Here are some of my favorite shots.

Photo by John Blyth.

Sometimes Rollercoaster would get a little out of line, and I would have to show it who was boss. Photo by Larry Sparks.

There were a couple other random playboating shots, from not-so-classic waves, like this one... ...which was taken by John Blyth when he got his new 600mm lens.

Or this one... ...which is "random" no matter what wave it was on. (I got my eye on you, left fist!)

And I suppose no trip would be complete without at least a little river-running. This is an entry kickflip into Rock 'em Sock 'em, so maybe it's not really river-running, but it's close enough for me. Photo by Larry Sparks.

I can't wait to get back up to this river. If you think that this looks like somewhere that you might be interested in paddling, then you should be aware that Trans-Canada and Atco power are in the very preliminary stages of making plans to dam this river! It's hard to pry solid information out of them, but the word on the street is that they're setting up plans to conduct a feasibility study. If the dam is going to be stopped, this is the time to do it. Either make a trip up there and show locals that there is a future in the tourism industry created by the rapids, or at least contact the companies and tell them your opinion.

Transcanada contact page

Atco Power contact page

But on a more cheerful note, you can see more photos on my blog, and it's fun to drool over the map of the rapids... made from SPACE!

NO DAM ON THE SLAVE!

And I just had to end with this beautiful shot of John Blyth making the 1.5 mile ferry over to the Cassette rapids takeout, on my last day on the water.