Welcome To the Green: World’s Most Hardcore Whitewater Community
AS A PADDLER, YOU OPERATE ON FLOW. Your best lines come when there’s a certain effortlessness beneath all the adrenaline and movement. Where the river is turbulence and chaos, you find — you become — a point of stillness.
The
And so I dropped through the next couple of smaller rapids feeling relaxed, as if able to slow down the motion of the whitewater — the foam and colors, the deep forested gorge almost dissolving together into a single abstract and perfectly beautiful terrain. It was a June day with warm-enough water temps that you didn’t need a drytop. I was in the flow.
But somehow as I entered the next big rapid, Boof or Consequences, I missed a paddle stroke on my right side. The nose of my kayak rode up and “splatted” the wall of the narrow slot. This was a dangerous place to mess up. You had to pass through the entrance cleanly in order to “boof” (launch) over the six foot main falls. The “consequences” for a missed boof was (among other things) the shallow shelf below. A total headbreaker if you were upside down. This was what separated the Green from most of the other runs I’d done up until then. Whereas on most rivers boofing was just a fun way to get extra air, on the Green it was a mandatory skill — the difference between running rapids in or out of control.
Alec Voorhees boofing Scream Machine rapid. Photo by John Webster
In that instant of getting splatted up higher and higher — nearly vertical now — I felt a strange calmness. An instinct not to flail and force my boat anywhere. Since I’d already blown my line, I just let the flow take me up and over. I had a surreal view, looking up vertically now through the blue sky walled in on either side by the gorge. Then I flipped. I knew I was in a bad place.
I tucked as tightly as I could, but felt myself hit the lip of the drop with my shoulder (crunch!) and then go over the falls upside down.
I held my breath and — still in slow motion — waited for a huge impact, a crushing blackness, whatever was about to come.
Paddler going off Gorilla rapid. Photo by John Webster
Amazingly, I felt the kayak level back up to the surface in the pool below. I rolled up to big cheers and an overpowering sense of relief and calm. Somehow I’d escaped major consequences. But I was definitely woken up from my relaxed state.
This is what you learned to love about the Narrows. It demanded respect. It punished complacency. And yet you could (if you were lucky) get a second chance. It had never-before-run lines and moves that could fire up your imagination, and yet so many consequences that it kept you totally honest with yourself. Just being there was an honor, a reflection of years of skill building.
For most of us in the South, this meant progressing through roll classes in pools or lakes (and for me, this included summer camp days on Lake Summit, the very water which emptied into the Green). It meant class I-II runs on the Chattahoochee, then on to the
In the two decades since my first run, I’ve watched an amazing community build up around the Green. People literally move here (to the
Paddler boofing Scream Machine Rapid. Photo by John Webster
Perhaps more than anything, what’s made the Green famous is the
Each year sees epic lines as racers come through Gorilla, as well as terrible beatdowns. Check some of the footage from the 2015 race:
For the past four years, a new competition has emerged as well, the
The
For camping, the closest area is
