Swiftwater Skills and Professionalism
PROFESSIONAL GUIDES NEED SWIFTWATER INSTRUCTION
As a professional guide, you don’t want your first emergency encounter and comprehensive rescue to feel like a situation you’ve never come close to experiencing, and you certainly don’t want to cause further harm due to a lack of knowledge. In that instant, you want to realize that you’ve seen something like the predicament in a swiftwater rescue scenario, and you want to understand how to initiate the rescue process. Swiftwater rescue scenarios are purposefully realistic in order to prepare for the physical aspect of dealing with an emergency as well as the mental exhaustion and emotional toll that a traumatic crisis can cause. Safety and preparedness provide confidence in a guide, and a confident guide is a successful guide. This is why it is important for guides to be swiftwater or river rescue certified, so that they can learn to manage a scenario on their own as well as with a team, analyzing the situation from a variety of perspectives and gaining hands-on experience of crucial skills. When guiding on the river, you might never encounter even the tamest of scenarios practiced in your swiftwater course, but it is professional and responsible to be prepared for the wildest of emergencies.
RECERTIFY YOUR SKILLS ON A REGULAR BASIS
Because of the rarity of extreme catastrophes on the river among well-trained guides, it is imperative to recertify your Swiftwater Rescue or River Rescue course when the time comes. This course is often the only time you are faced with the worst of the worst situations. Complacency is dangerous for an active guide, because certain skills, such as knot tying and creating z-drags, are easily forgotten if not consistently practiced. One of the last situations you want to find yourself in is struggling with pulleys on shore to create a strong enough mechanical advantage to unpin a boat while passengers are trapped atop the raft. Refreshing these practical skills in a recertification course will also introduce you to other guides and new mentors, as well as the new technology and methodology that crops up every couple of years as advances are made in the rescue world. Continuing education also leads to advances in your field and towards becoming an expert within the community.
During a swiftwater recertification course, you will have the chance to discuss and reenact actual emergency situations you or others have been involved in since your first course. In that safe and controlled environment, you can analyze your past response and learn what could have happened differently if certain factors were changed. You will surprise yourself with forgotten skills that might have been game-changers in the original scenario! The development of muscle memory and the repetition of unique rescue skills can help your response become immediate and second nature the moment a crisis arises. An expert handling of gear comes with patience and practice, and is essential when a high stress predicament occurs so that you can trust your hands to do the work on their own.
MY SWIFTWATER TOOL KIT
As a professional raft guide, there are certain pieces of gear that never leave my PFD. Strapped to a shoulder strap is my whistle, easy to sound without having to fumble with zippers. Also attached to outer fastenings are my four carabiners I use to secure my boat at night, connect boats to one another, and create Z-drags. Within the chest pocket of my PFD I keep practical personal items, such as sunscreen and lip balm, extra sunglass croakies, a waterproof notebook with river and WFR notes, and my flip line. I also somehow manage to store prusik cords and two pulleys in the same pocket to enhance the mechanical advantage of the Z-drag systems I can create. A convenient standard to follow when selecting gear for your PFD is the 4-3-2-1 system - four carabiners, three prusik cords, two pulleys, and one piece of webbing or a flip line. With these pieces of gear you can build a simple and adaptable 3:1 mechanical advantage system to aid with almost any boat pin or flip, and you can conveniently complete a myriad of other more basic tasks. The last items that can be found in my PFD are stray bits of trash that I’ve recovered from various lunch beaches or campsites along the river, easy to discard once at camp or the ramp. Micro trash is a macro problem! This may seem like an excessive amount of gear to have on hand in a PFD, but once you master the use of this gear, rafting and rescues become infinitely more straightforward.
LESSONS LEARNED ON THE RIVER
As you will learn with experience, straightforwardness is to be desired in any rescue attempt. But, as you will also come to realize, the ever-evolving characteristics of nature define any outdoor scenario, and complications are more likely to arise than easier paths. On my first trip down the fabled Grand Canyon, our group of sixteen consisted of experienced river guides as well as passionate private boaters. We were confident in our combined rafting and rescue skills and of our ability to assess the risk of every scenario and make the safest calls. It was a winter trip, with clear but cold weather and short days with little sunlight deep in the canyon. We approached Crystal Rapid at mile 98 in the late afternoon, hoping to run the rapid and camp directly afterwards. We scouted the rapid from high above and from the shoreline, sensing the building anticipation as we observed the mess of whitewater from every angle available. As a group, we decided the best course of action was to hug the right shore, pulling away from the notorious mid-river hole and skirting the majority of the rapid to make it to camp just below the nastiest of the waves. The sun had long since dipped below the rim of the canyon walls and we knew night followed swiftly. It was imperative that we made it to the mid-rapid camp, as there was just one more camp after Crystal before the rest of the Gems - a series of large and exciting rapids that closely followed one another and would best be run in the light of a new day.
I was among the first boats to push off from shore and float anxiously towards the roar of Crystal Rapid, eagerly searching for my pre-specified marker rocks that told me when to make critical moves. Three boats and one stand-up-paddleboard managed to skirt the recirculating hole and make it to camp, but not without extreme effort - the maneuver was much more difficult than we anticipated as the majority of the current ran directly into the hole. I pulled my boat to shore and was just about to secure it when I watched the next boat float into the hole sideways and flip, spilling both its passenger and guide into the current. The following boat, one of our monster 18-foot gear haulers, was close behind and met the same fate. Within seconds we had two flipped boats and three swimmers in the frigid waters of the Colorado River. The rest of us were quick and efficient in our rescue, as several of us are Swiftwater trained, and we retrieved the swimmers within a minute and had the boats to shore directly after the rapid. Little time was lost, but we were left with fading daylight and one option for camp before the Gems. The current was fast and the eddy line was strong and resistant, making the move into Tuna Camp particularly difficult. Half of us made it into the choppy eddy and watched as one of our group members pulled on her oars to no avail and was carried past the camp, into the first of the Gems.
We were exhausted and frustrated, running on expired adrenaline and forced into a series of massive rapids that we had no chance to scout or read about in our guide books. It was dusk and the next camp wasn’t for several miles. By the time we made it, we were dangerously cold and utterly spent. It had been a calculated risk to run Crystal Rapid at that late hour, and we assumed too much of ourselves and too little of the power of the river. It was a situation that escalated quickly and led to even further endangerment. We should have prepared for the worst and camped above Crystal. This was a situation in which over-preparedness and extreme caution would have prevented the spiraling scenario that followed instead.
A professional attitude is the best way to navigate real-life emergencies involving any kind of passengers, especially if friends or family are included. Once an accident occurs, more are likely to follow in response to elevated emotions, high adrenaline and rushed reactions. A composed, level-headed, and clear head space provides separation from distractions and emotions that can be overwhelming.
This past summer, I was lucky enough to join a group on a trip down the Selway River in Idaho. Thirteen of us set out in thirteen inflatable kayaks fully loaded with gear. The Selway is famous for its beauty and its whitewater, as we quickly came to realize. Within the first two days, most everyone in our group capsized and swam in multiple rapids. The only ones who hadn’t swam were myself and two others as we approached the most notoriously difficult stretch of whitewater on the Selway. We scouted the first of the class IV rapids, named Wa-poots, that came around a sharp bend just before the biggest of the rapids in the section, Ladle. Our lead boater was one of the few who hadn’t yet swam from his boat up until that moment - he was caught by a surprise lateral wave and swam the entirety of Wa-poots. Following him was our trip leader and permit holder who had no previous rafting experience. He was able to rescue the swimmer but unable to retrieve the boat, and one of our inflatable kayaks floated into Ladle and out of sight. We had two more swimmers in Wa-poots, but were able to ferry the people and their boats to shore before the next rapid.
Along the Selway is a trail that is used by hikers and by boaters to help scout the rapids. We hiked to several different vantage points above Ladle and the outlook was the same - the field of house- and car-sized boulders that lay strewn in the river could hardly be envisioned as a readily runnable rapid, and our stray boat had found its way to the dead center of the mess. At this point, we made a conscious effort to step back, weigh options, create a dependable and step-by-step plan, and accept or reject certain consequences. We decided that we would make our best effort to rescue the pinned boat, but also acknowledge the fact that we would not take any risks too drastic in such an effort. People are more important than gear, even in the case of an entire boat, and no one should ever risk their life to unpin a boat. Having scouted and discussed every viable line in the rapid, half us headed back to our boats to run the rapid. The other half were setting safety and watching to see if our chosen line - far left and partially out sight - was the best choice. Our trip leader (TL) who had failed to retrieve the boat initially was with the first group and had been frustrated with himself and was rather worked up. In his distracted state of mind, he stumbled and fell while rigging his boat. I looked up from my preparations to see another unmanned boat floating innocently into Ladle. It looped around the first giant boulder and disappeared from sight.
We found our TL in shock and in pain - he had fallen on his wrist and was shaking with pain and exasperation. The situation had just become immensely more complicated because one of our group members had let emotion get to his head and he was now injured and boat-less. He must have had a wealth of unused river karma, because his boat had tucked itself in a small eddy between two giant boulders above the rapid and was patiently waiting there. We sent three people in two boats to the larger of the boulders and they lowered one person via throwbag to the expectant raft. The three rescuers then paddled back around the boulder safely to shore. At this point, we had been above the rapid for well over an hour and not one boat had even attempted to run it with a person on board. Four of us, myself in the lead, took the left line and ran Ladle. The last two pinned on a boulder at the bottom of the rapid and both swam, making it to shore just a few feet from their pinned boats. One boat came un-pinned and they were able to grab it in time. The rest of the group was on the right side of the river discussing our plan, watching as two of our group members attempted to rescue the most recent of our boulder-pinned boats. This took at least another twenty minutes of arm-in-arm wading across currents, throwing ropes, and shouting matches. At one point I noticed that there was no longer a boat stuck on a rock in the river, but a person in its place. Our day was devolving quickly as emotions became strained and further predicaments followed. The group had become separated on different shores, and those of us on the right side were left with the original task of retrieving the mid-stream raft.
Three people launched and took a different line down the middle of the rapid, quickly paddling into small eddies behind rocks to make their way safely to several rocks just above the pinned boat. What we hoped would be an easy rescue turned into three more hours. We were hot, dehydrated, hungry, aggravated and downtrodden as we watched attempt after failed attempt to free the mysteriously pinned raft. As five o’clock approached we gave our crew of mid-river rescuers another half hour before we would have to abandon the boat and continue downriver. We had only made it two miles since pushing off that morning and had several more class IV rapids to run directly downstream. Only four boats had made it through Ladle at that point, and due to his injury our TL felt unable to paddle confidently. I led the second group of five down the left line in his boat, with no further swimmers or pins. At 5:30, twelve boats continued past Ladle, having abandoned the unlucky thirteenth.
Our day at Ladle was the most intense and complicated river situation I have been involved in, and a majority of the crises stemmed from elevated emotions and rushed reactions. We did well in making a clear, concise, and safe plan of action, thinking critically and rationally, but realized that even the best laid plan can be led astray when emotion and adrenaline run rampant. I was incredibly appreciative of the fact that myself and three others had had swiftwater training and were able to lead the group to the best possible outcome of a worst-case scenario. It was our professional skills and clear-headed mentalities that saved the day.
For more information on River Rescue courses for professional river guides and recreational river runners, see our list of available course dates and schedule an open course for yourself, or a private group course for your organization or business.
For more information on Swiftwater Rescue courses for professional rescuers, see our list of available course dates and schedule an open course for yourself, or a private group course for your organization or business.
Blog content provided by guest author and professional river guide, Bridget Guthrie, (RRC).