Leif and Natalie

Not only did the Slave claim my pants today, but also my boat and my paddle.  But loyal fans, the mighty river did not eat me and so I live to tell the tale. So, the Slave is very high right now, the highest we've seen it and I found this new epic epic epic wave with John Blyth.  Fast big and furious. See below.  Yet unamed.  (options: intimidator, medusa, fear itself, terror, hyra, leviathan, the punisher, panty snatcher) This wave actually has eddy service, which is odd for such a large feature.  If you flush it just takes about 10-20 minutes to navigate back to the wave depending on how many times you mess up the multiple ferries.   To get on the wave, you just have to enter surfers right through that big aerated pile of goodness. Like this (see above).  I was able to get on the wave with no problem about half of my tries with the other half starting and ending rapidly in some nose flushing.  Unfortunately, on one of thos...

This post is long overdue, and I am not going to do this run any justice, but here is a video and some photos of our Boxelder season from this spring. Boxelder Creek, Wyoming from Leif Anderson on Vimeo . Boxelder is a strange little creek near Casper Wyoming. It has sort of a Cali feel, with a fair amount of exposed granite, but at the same time, it keeps that manky feel that Colorado is famous for. This year, we completely missed the good flow window because we were gone for a competition in Montana, so all we got was the ultra-low water shoulder. However, even at low water, Boxelder is a fun run, and we had a blast mobbing down this creek. There are a lot of challenges associated with Boxelder. The first is access. In the past, we have been able to use a nice easy putin at a bridge across the creek. You had to hop a fence and take about 10 steps over private land to get back to the river, and as far as I know, this was pretty much ok. However, somewhat recently, the...

So, I actually thought that I had posted this back in March, but I just realized that it never go put up! This Spring I was invited to speak at Colorado Whitewater's Fundraiser dinner. I'd never been invited to speak before so I really took it seriously. Since I was invited to speak because I competed in the Whitewater Grand Prix (see our past posts in November through January 2013 ), and because I’ve noticed a more popular interest by more people in “running the gnar,” I took the opportunity to share with everyone my two bits about how one gets to the level of boating you saw in the WWGP and more generally, What Makes a Great Kayaker. This talk was really geared towards class III-IV and new class V paddlers, but I think that everyone got something out of it, whether you didn't kayak at all, or already considered yourself a badass. I ended up putting together a talk that I'm pretty proud of. It was quite fun to actually sit, think, write down, and speak about s...

I've been feverishly slaving away at the editing machine, turning the cracks, pulling the levers, and taping all that footage together, and the tireless efforts have finally paid off. It was worth the three weeks spent without any sleep and the hundreds of dollars spent. With no further ado, allow me to present the fully edited Spring Break video to go with this story . At the end of the video is Jakub Nemec's hail mary to beatdown at Celestial falls. Shit gets intense for a while, and may not be appropriate for younger viewers (Finn... Ollie...). However, Jakub came out of it ok, and we did find that paddle that everyone was yelling about so loudly ("Katrina! Get the paddle!"). Mostly it was Galen yelling, because it was his paddle that Jakub was borrowing. I debated leaving out the beatdown, but decided to stick it in there for a couple reasons. The rest of the video is good clean fun, since I carefully removed all appearances by anyone associated with BDP. ...

Last weekend, Natalie and I got to go on a trip to the Southeast US for a Fluid kayaks team trip. This may surprise our more astute fans, because I am constantly making fun of paddlers from the southeast. Well, having taken a trip out there to experience their rivers for myself, I will say this: I was totally right. Everything that I said about the east seems to have been completely verified by my trip out there. Paddlers from the east are giant babies about cold weather and cold water, because it seems to always be warm there. Paddlers from the east are terrified of normal rivers because all their rivers are incredibly tiny and have no water in them. And don't try to tell me about such and such from the east who is the greatest big water paddler in blah blah blah. If that person is good at big water, I bet that they are FROM the east, but they did their big watering somewhere else and they now live in Canada or the northwest. Paddlers from the east have bizarre attitude...

This spring break, Natalie had to do some research setup in the Northwest Territories (that's a state in Canada) and couldn't come paddle, so Spencer Mauk, Josh Oberleas and I loaded up and headed out to the Pacific Northwest (that's those states in the US). I had a great time showing the boys down some of my favorite runs around the Hood river area. I'm putting together a video of the trip, but for now enjoy some of the photos we took. Spencer creepin on my long exposures We started out by driving through the night and sleeping for about 3 hours in the car in order to make it to the Wind River race. None of us had ever done the Wind, but we knew it was a pretty mellow run. I still had to lobby pretty hard to get Spencer and Josh to register for the race. In the end, I think it was the fact that entry fees covered beer at the takeout that really tipped the scales. The race was a ton of fun, and about the difficulty I had imagined. It was a mass start, so ...

It's amazing how my life just seems to go on hold whenever we come back from a trip. Since returning from Chile, I have felt like I have barely had any time to edit photos or video. However, by assigning smaller homework assignments and skipping out on my research, I finally managed to put together a little video with the footage from our Grand Prix trip to Chile. Chile Grand Prix trip from Leif Anderson on Vimeo . While on the final push of editing, I couldn't quite find a spot for the GoPro footage from the day where I swam on the Nevados. I wanted to sort of show the mini-story there, but there just wasn't a good place for it in the song, so I slapped together a short video of just the swim itself. Thus far, the video of the swim, which I spent about 10 seconds assembling, has been more popular than the main Chile video, which I worked on over the course of several weeks. Hopefully this says more about the paddling public than it does about my editing skills. ...