Stepping Up: Jason in therapy at the CR Johnson Healing Center.
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Scott Sady
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n the morning of March 21, 2011, Dr. Barry Chehrazi, a neurosurgeon at the Sutter Medical Center in Roseville, Calif., assessed the devastating injuries sustained by the handsome 17-year-old lying in front of him. The X-rays already showed that the kid, Jason Craig, had shattered his pelvis, broken his back, ruptured his dural sac and dislocated both femurs. A few minutes into the assessment, Jason politely asked, “Excuse me, doctor, am I going to experience
any paralysis?” “Son, you already have,” Chehrazi responded. Jason didn’t realize that the doctor had been poking his legs with needles for several minutes. Jason Craig is whitewater kayaking’s golden boy. If that statement sounds like hyperbole, you don’t know Jason. He’s full of pleases, thank yous, eye contact, and joy. His smile engages every muscle in his face. He graduated high school with a 3.95 GPA and holds the door for strangers. And he is one of the best freestyle kayakers in the world. In 2009, at 16, he won the junior men’s title at the ICF World Freestyle Kayak Championships in Switzerland. At 17, while still eligible as a junior, he stepped up to the adult men’s division and had an impressive run of second-place finishes in three of the sport’s biggest competitions—the U.S. Freestyle Team trials, the Reno River Festival and Teva Mountain Games. Jason would never tell you any of this unless you asked. I once watched a 50-something Tahoe local ask Jason if he was a whitewater kayaker. “Yeah!” Jason replied. “Where have you boated?” The grizzled outdoorsman asked, sizing him up. “Oh, you know, all around,” Jason said, leaving out details like his trip to Prague for the freestyle world cup when he was 15, or the two months he spent kayaking Africa’s White Nile during his junior year of high school. “But I really love the Truckee!” Jason said of the mellow town run in his native Reno. Jason was nearing the pinnacle of freestyle kayaking when he decided to run a nameless and, as far as 30-foot waterfalls go, innocuous-looking drop near Auburn, Calif., on March 20, 2011. A series of powerful storms had caused river levels to spike throughout the West, and Jason heard that a huge, playful and extremely rare surf wave was coming in on the American River 100 miles from Reno. He traveled eight hours through a heavy snowfall to get there, imagining new trick combinations as he made the slow drive west. He had no intention of running a waterfall. Jason, in fact, is not a waterfall hucker. “He’s not a particularly hanging-on-the-edge-kind of kid,” says Jason’s mother, Karen. She didn’t worry about Jason’s paddling trips because, she says, “My kid is really good at what he does, and stays really grounded.” But when he
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