SOUTHEAST | W EST V IRGIN I A
Wild Ride
Fall is prime time for whitewater rafting in the Mountain State
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shout from our guide to keep paddling — hard f you fall in, swim like hell to forward. the left. You want to stay as With renewed motivation, we paddled on, far away as possible from the extricating our raft from the rapid’s hydraulic undercurrent beneath that grip, some well-deserved high-fives waiting for large rock over there.” us on the other end. So came the My eight-person crew was sanguine advice of our rafting heading down a 12-mile stretch guide as we prepared to paddle of the Lower Gauley, one of the into a mosh pit of white water country’s best stretches of Class on West Virginia’s Lower Gauley IV-V white water. The course WEST River. For a brief moment, I is riddled with more than 35 VIRGINIA imagined myself locked in rapids with names such as Pure Gauley some sort of hellish underwater Screaming Hell and Heaven Bridge Gauley rinse cycle before our guide’s Help You. River Charleston cry of “Let’s do it!” refocused my Fall is prime rafting season New River attention. in West Virginia. The SumSeconds later, we were mersville Dam, about 77 miles bouncing over the lip of a southeast of the capital city of roaring wall of water into a hole big enough to Charleston, schedules releases for this time of swallow a small car. The rubbery raft lurched year, turning 24 miles of the Gauley River into a back out, tossing me and my raftmates around paddler’s dreamland. as if it was trying to lose its lunch. Over the Experienced rafters can tackle the river on clatter of our out-of-sync paddles, we heard a their own, or choose from a number of
118 GO ESCAPE | SUMMER 2015
WEST VIRGINIA DIVISION OF TOURISM
BY ALISTAIR WEARMOUTH