Leif and Natalie

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...