Leif and Natalie

It seems like it's becoming a tradition for us to collect a bunch of nice mwave photos, then sit on them until almost the end of the year and publish a huge group of them at once. Here is a link to our similar post from 2010 . I guess it's not much of a tradition if we only did it twice. But twice is more than once. It's interesting to see the progression in paddling and photography, and just sort of see the changes in emphasis between the two posts. It looks like we went bigger in 2010, (maybe different levels) but the tricks and photos may have been better this year. And in our defense, the 2010 post was a collection of all our best photos from a two or three month Mwave season, whereas the photos in this post were taken over the course of two weekend trips, before the levels dropped unexpectedly. Here are a few of my favorite shots, and there is a slideshow at the end with a lot more photos. First, one of my absolute favorites, which had almost nothing to do

This year at the Slave river Paddlefest, we introduced a new event: the GIANT SLALOM. It's not just giant because it's on the Slave river, but it certainly helps. Giant Slalom from Leif Anderson on Vimeo . The course was on English channel, which was awesome. English channel is one of the smaller channels, but it's steeper, and because it's so little, all that gradient is much easier to handle. We started river left, above the main hole. There is a line to the left of the hole, which is faster because you don't have to ferry all the way out into the current before starting to move downstream. After the main hole, the rapid necks down a little and loses a lot of elevation as it drops into a big V wave. The "gate" was in the river right eddy. You had to circle around a rock outcropping over there. The V wave in the fastest part of the course was not playing nicely. It tended to toss people back to the left, away from that crucial eddy. T

I'm in a bit of a hurry here, so first off, here's a slideshow of all the photos: Right around the historic flood that hit the front range of Colorado, there was some sick paddling. We missed out on a lot of it, since that was the weekend that our friends Alex and Alex got married in California, but we got a few runs while the water was on the way up and back down again. First, as the water was rising, Spencer and I got in a run through town on the Poudre. There were a few dams, but nothing that we ended up having to portage. It was pretty weird finding a whole new run right there in our home town. Somehow we ended up getting lost, missing takeout, and paddling to within sight of I-25. We eventually hiked out and found ourselves in a natural area all the way down by Horsetooth, which was impressive since we put in above Shields. (These are streets. If you're not familiar with Fort Collins, I guess that made no sense at all.) After that was the wed

This post is a little overdue, because I've been focusing on facebook publicity lately and letting the blog fall behind. We have a new facebook athlete page (you should go "like" us). The objective is to have a way to share stuff with all those people that sent me friend requests even though we have never met. We set a goal of getting more likes than Todd Wells' facebook page. He may be a bigger deal (maybe), but there are two of us, so... I'm not sure Todd knows about this. I mean, we're not really super close friends or anything. But I'm getting off track. The Gore race is one of my favorite events. This is the sort of race that I seem to be able to do well at. Small mistakes have a minimal impact on your time. It's really more about endurance and some flatwater technique. Apparently I tend to average out better than a lot of other paddlers in that arena. For a few years now, the Gore race, for me, has been all about me versus Conor Flyn

This March-June, we both entered Darin McQuoid's March Madness photo contest. This contest is based on an old online photo contest that The Range Life blog used to host. I remember seeing the original once or twice and wishing I was cool enough to have something to enter. Well, years have passed, and now the contest is revived and lo and behold we are cool enough to have a ton of photos to enter. Throughout the competition, Darin provided commentary on the photos and results. The decisions were based on five votes: four judges and a popular vote. Darin was not one of the judges, so his commentary is unbiased and very interesting to read through. I've included links to his commentary at each stage of the competition. It's worth checking out. I've also linked to the site so that you can see what photos we were competing against. I can't repost the other people's photos without permission, of course, so you have to visit the original contest site to see