FIRST (?) DESCENT OF THE GENOA RIVER IN FLOOD

By Jeffe Aronson

The second phone call interrupted my reverie from a long put-off reorganization of old photos from years of adventures. Paul’s voice again. “I just phoned up a local ranger At Genoa. He says he’s hiked and air-mattressed down the whole length of the Genoa River and doesn’t believe there should be any “show stoppers."

I’d already said no on the first call about an hour before. I’m getting too old for this kind of stuff. The butterflies are turning into Bogong moths. “Hmmm. I dunno. What did you say the guide book says?”

“Three to five day trip in canoes. Grade 2-3, with “numerous” 3-plus meter drops, which might be runnable with enough water. Usually run at the tail end of floods. Look, I know it’s an old guide book, but we need a third kayaker for safety.”

I heave a deep sigh. It feels like déjà vu all over again. Too many epics based on well I think I heard that so-and-so thought that somebody …

You know the routine. The testosterone, and ego, and thrill of potential adventure, all combine into an irresistible potion.

“Okay. Okay. I’ll meet you in Bruthen tonight and we’ll throw my kayak on your rig and go from there.” Fate, once again, was now in charge. The momentum building exponentially from the instant of commitment. Thumbs up. Thumbs down.

“Ah….mate!”

……………………………

We awake next morning to the hundredth semi roaring down the Princes Highway not fifty meters from our impromptu camp on the cement veranda of the local community center. Over coffee, we praise the community for the rain protection and head off to the proposed take out to scout a bouldery rapid said to well represent what might be in one of the many upper gorges. (Sort of an oxymoron, isn’t it? Something well representing something that might be…). It turns out later to be the wrong rapid, the right one being much bigger and more hidden from view, just downstream. And yet, it’s big enough, at this high and muddy flood looking more like a Grand Canyon rapid than something belonging to Victoria.

We then return to Cann River and meet up with the other three kayakers who’d joined up from a message from Paul left on their answering machine. All are in their twenties and thirties, all professional guides, and all, it seems at first glance, foaming at the mouth to get their boats in the water. I keep my own mouth shut.

Julien and Jen flip a coin to see who takes care of their baby, and who gets to paddle. Jen will drive the shuttle. Julien’s famous smile brightens noticeably. We then take off to the assumed put-in just past the NSW border along the Cann Valley Highway, two vehicles with 7 people and a baby and six rather colorful and bizarrely shaped Tupperware plastic kayaks perched on the roofs. The locals are shaking their heads.

Paul has been studying the maps. We’ll take the one to fifty thousand topo along, which has the bottom part of the river on it. He’s guessing that the upper part from New South Wales to the Victorian border is maybe a few kilometers, and the whole trip will be about two days and thirty two k’s. That will change.

We jam and stuff and grunt just enough camping gear into the tiny rodeo boats to rough it. I’ve got the most room, with the biggest volume kayak, which I like just fine. I like comfort nowadays. I also like not having to worry about edges getting caught in weird currents and noses getting pinned deep under the bottom of waterfalls. We christen it “The USS Eisenhower.”

………………………………………..

As usual, the instant we hit the water, my anxiety disappears, the old calm surfaces. It also helps, in a weird sort of way, that Simon and Tanya seem a tad anxious. I can focus on someone else. Not two kilometers downstream, we see our first cliffs bordering the river, and a clean horizon line. No view below. Mist rises into the air. That wonderful and classic rock-echoed roar. We get out on the left cliff bank to view our destiny.

I guess about a 4 meter drop, plus or minus. A clean looking run either right where the water sweeps along the cliff in a lovely arc, or maybe along that diagonal in the middle. The trouble with the right side is that all the water goes into a backwater that is clearly sucking back underneath the base of the falls. I am averse to sucking back-eddies. Julien is smiling broadly, as usual, and gets into his boat to run the right wall. We’re all going to watch. Paul will take photos.

The thing about waterfalls is that it’s what’s underneath the surface that’ll get you. Julien has a beautiful run over the falls, whooping, hits bottom a bit too relaxed, and gets sucked back into the middle of the falls. The entire little rodeo boat disappears, along with our hero. The nose pokes back out of the water vertically for a while, the rest of the boat well under. Then Julien’s helmet, thankfully attached to Julien, appears below. He swims to the right shore, all of us unable to assist due to the fact that we and our boats are still above the falls. The boat finally floats free, to the left shore, of course. Julien dives back in and does a self rescue in the long slow moving stretch below. Half our group is now in mid-portage.

Paul and I discuss the possibilities, and I say; “If I don’t go now, I ain’t gonna go. I think I’ll take the middle diagonal, since that’s where both Julien and his boat seemed to float out at the bottom.”

“See ya.”

My run’s clean, followed by Paul who “boofs” off a ledgy spot in the middle onto the diagonal wave. I note to Paul, safely below the falls and floating in the eddy next to me, that I think that was the biggest waterfall I’ve ever run. I’m chuckling to myself. We name the drop “Spank Me Falls”. We’re all thinking to ourselves…”This is only the first of “numerous three to four meter drops?” It’s still raining.

But it doesn’t work out that way, at all…half of us portage the next one on the left, but just because it’s a rather rocky ledge with no real clean line. All the rest of that day’s four hours of paddling turn out to be read and run, hilariously fun, solid-steep-high water class four, non stop. One after the other, three of our little assembly taking turns being “the probe”, moving carefully towards the lip of the next horizon, backwards and looking over their shoulder, giving the okay signal, gracefully carving a turn and dropping from sight.

There is the sense all around us of true wilderness. Unspoiled. No willows to be seen. No blackberries. No roads, even unpaved, on the map. Border country. Water is cascading from every notch, down every gully, joining our flood every few hundred meters. One particularly spectacular cascade over a vertical hundred meter cliff face is named “Anniversary Falls”. More on that later.

At the bottom of one drop, the ever present foam from this rare flood passing through so much organic matter is so thick and high it buries us. All you can see is the tops of our helmets floating in foam.

At the top of another drop, Julien gets out of his boat on a rock at the lip and peers over. He turns back to us after what seems to be a little too long of a pause, and gives the okay signal, with a little shrug. I look at Tanya, she at me. Chris goes over to the lip, raises his paddle high over his head with a whoop from both him and Julien, who’s still on his rock perch, and disappears. Five seconds. Ten seconds go by. Nothing. Then Julien gives a great whoop. We’re wondering…what took so long? Was Chris stuck in a hole? Was he plastered on a rock? Paul takes off, same results. Then Simon, then Tanya. Now me.

It becomes clear just at the brink. There is fifty or seventy five millimeters of water cascading over a fifty meter wide slab of exquisitely glistening rock, angled steeply like a slide for maybe thirty meters down to the calm eddy below. I just slowly slide down the rock and gently hit the water at the bottom. None of us can stop grinning. I keep looking back, and up, at “Slide Rock” as we paddle towards the next rapid, wanting to engrave it in my memory.

A little after four, we check my altimeter, which shows us dropping about a hundred seventy meters in four hours of paddling. The gathering side streams noticeably add to the turbulence of the rapids. Paddle blades are harder to control, waves are starting to launch our boats. We’ve all been giggling and smiling and whooping till our faces hurt. We name the gorge “Sex On Drugs Canyon”. I just know the name won’t last, but who cares?

Sitting round the fire that night, out comes the map again, with much musing and mumbling and fiddling with pieces of twine and sticks to measure out the distance. Well. Maybe it’s more like fifty two kilometers left tomorrow, not thirty two in total. How many we’ve done today is hard to tell, as most of it was off the map. The camaraderie of boating a wild river, one of the main reasons I turned from mountaineering to river running so long ago, brings us together. Quiet conversation and steam from hot mugs of tea mingle with the mists rolling up from the river. A stick is placed at the water line on the sandy beach to gauge the water level’s drop or rise in the morning. Thankfully, the barometer is rising. Well, maybe not. After all, this high water has been a blast.

………………………….

Except for Chris’s snoring, the night passes well. We’re off just after nine the next morning after porridge and leftovers, the exodus slowed by the warming fire.

The water has dropped three or four hundred millimeters overnight. So, the higher volume that we gained from the several side river floods pouring into the Genoa yesterday is now mitigated and we’re on, more or less, about the same amount of water that we started on.

The first three hours or so go pretty much the same, whooping and fun and concentration and blasting through waves and over falls and avoiding the now more numerous rocks. A minor pinned boat or two, quickly recovered. Tanya says to me while we sit in an eddy below a particularly fun drop; “I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s really fun!” Her broad smile says it all. Chris later confides that he’d been getting a little jaded on river running lately, but that this run has reinvigorated his love for kayaking.

The character of the canyon changes, with lower hills on either side. Fewer of the colorful and wind-pocked cliffs which foretold a significant drop meet the water’s edge. We see the first of our class two-three’s, which continue for the next three or so hours, with long flat stretches in between. Apparently, it’s now a run-out, with an unknown distance yet to go. We’ve dropped another hundred fifty or more meters, but the weather has changed so much from when we put in that it’s hard to tell the barometer’s, and thus the altimeter’s, accuracy. So we yak while talking, or talk while yakking, telling stories and jokes and sharing the comradeship that comes with such shared adventures until the first farm country appears and home feels close. We take a wrong turn through a braided area of the river and end up paddling through stands of brush.

Then, the rock garden.

By now, after having the entire run but the last rapid being read and run from the boats, the probes have perhaps gotten a bit lax. Maybe a tad complacent. The river gods just might be considering a little humble pie.
I glance downstream, as Julien, again on a rock to scout, turns to wave his arms for us to hurry down and disappears into the rocks to get into his kayak. Arm waving is the river hand signal for emergency. As I round the bend, Simon is also on a rock, waving. I catch an eddy just through a turbulent slot between two huge boulders, and look over my shoulder to see the tip of the nose of Chris’s boat standing straight up in the air just over the next lip of a fall. It bobs as if empty. Then I notice Chris himself, on a rock at the bottom of the rapid, about a hundred or more meters downstream. Thankfully, as he’s obviously not in any clear and present danger, I can take a look around for myself. Julien passes me up and takes a left-hand chute he’s scouted from his former rock perch. Simon motions to me from his rock to a right hand slot, which I follow down to Chris below. Jen’s there on shore. It’s over. Chris is cold and his ego nearly as bruised as his shins, but otherwise he’s fine.
As we pop the spray skirts and emerge from our tightly fitted kayaks, legs asleep and wobbly, I glance over at Paul.

“Hey, amigo…ya know, if you ever hear the Genoa’s in flood again and decide to kayak it, and you don’t invite us, we’ll just have to kill you.”

……………………

While Paul and Chris and I share a beer and some peanut butter and jam on bickies on the dirt road awaiting the shuttle, some locals pull up and introduce themselves. Peter and Margeret Allard saw us from their beautiful little property up the road as we went by two nights ago to scout the boulder rapid. They invite us over for tea rather than wait in the drizzle for the shuttle. How can we refuse? Chris, barefoot and with a bit of ratty old tarp draped over his shoulders to protect him from the drizzle, hops out of their ute to open and close their gate. I yell out to him, barefoot and splattered with mud, “Hey, Jethro!” He laughs, admitting that actually is a nickname of his.

Thus the rock garden rapid becomes “Jethro’s Folly”.

It appears that the Allard’s have been here eleven years, and Peter’s been in the area for thirty. They’ve seen a couple of vehicles over the years with kayaks on the roof go by their place. They’ve always seen them come back, boats still on top of the rig. They figure we’re the first to run the Genoa at flood level, and to run all the drops. The gauge has dropped from about a three meter high to one point three meters today. I sigh.
Thumbs up, after all.

It also appears that we missed a bit of the river, as the river gorges up one last time, and drops quite a bit more, on it’s way to the town of Genoa and the Princes Highway bridge, another dozen or so kilometers downstream. Peter warns us that there’s a mean looking rapid down there, but we can take a gander at it if we turn off at the side road with the plastic pipe. We do, of course, and it looks thrilling. It’s getting dark, though, so we can’t go see the bottom bit, where a very wide and rocky stretch funnels into a very narrow channel between cliffs. Julien, Simon, and Tanya are planning to camp out and run that stretch tomorrow. We’re jealous. We then manage to get the car stuck in the mud to the axles while turning around. Hey, what’s a shuttle without a breakdown? We ring up Peter Allard with the mobile and embarrassingly ask for a tow. Graciously, he accepts, and we embark on our homeward trek.

…………………………….

I arrive just two minutes before midnight to kiss my wife awake. Our eighth anniversary. Just made it. She smiles and drops right back off to sleep, with me not far behind. As I drift off, I’m hoping Paul’s photos come out, and mentally begin adding them to the others, still all piled up in that box I’d left behind three days ago.

Jeffe Aronson
June 13, 2001

Epilogue: That bottom stretch remains, it seems, unpaddled, as the next morning’s light displayed what seemed to be a solid class 5, and home, and life, beckoned.