The Lunch Counter Trilogy, Part 2: Camping, Big Waves & Bikinis

“Evenings were spent sitting around a campfire with whoever happened to be camping nearby. Strangers would share food and drink, break out instruments and play music together, read books under camp lanterns, or curl up under warm blankets and sleeping bags to talk story late into the night. I remember one trip when my troubadour musician buddy, Ardy Michaels and his dog Bojo showed up in his built for traveling pickup truck. I drifted off to sleep in my tent listening to the two of you night owl musicians types blowing harp and playing guitar until the very wee hours.

The camp spot had a discrete trail leading at an angle down-canyon along the forested cliff from the campsites right to where the surf break viewing and cheerleading rocks were. Directly above that was the highway pull-out where the buses let tourists off to walk down the myriad crumbling tracks that had been worn down the bluff over many years. We laugh about all the 35mm film photos taken by the tourists that are decaying in dusty old photo albums across the planet. We are also quite sure that the vast majority of pictures were absolutely the worst possible surf shots ever taken.

There was wildlife in abundance – deer were common. Bobcats would appear every now and then. Kingfishers, ospreys, and eagles nested in nearby cliffs, and they would regularly swoop down on the river to grab at fish. We saw moose across the river walking with their newborns, plus the big guys with huge racks on their heads. We heard the screams of cougars in the dark of night coming from somewhere across the river. Maybe there was more wildlife on that side since there wasn’t any human habitation or a road. Luckily we never encountered a bear, but we were told that it had happened to others who camped there. You just did not leave food in tents, because if it wasn’t a bear, it would be a mouse, squirrel, Jay, or some other ‘camp robber’ quick to capitalize on an opportunity.”

“It got very cold down by the river at night with 39′F water and the wind whistling between the down canyon cliffs towards Alpine Junction. Being at the bottom of a narrow river canyon meant night came on quickly and the sun came up late. Mornings were frosty and nights could be downright cold as air drained out of the surrounding snow-covered mountains. We tended not to get up too early – no dawn patrol surfing here. There was never a rush to surf, because long rides guaranteed leg muscles would be transformed into wet noodles or cramped beyond use by the end of the day. Once the sun dropped behind the canyon walls in the late afternoon, you were out of the water.

Wetsuit technology wasn’t anywhere near where it is now. Surfing the Snake River with the wetsuits that we had back then was just barely adequate compared to the high tech wetsuits surfers can wear in subzero temperatures now. We were often cold and it was always a challenge to warm back up between waves, even when you could lie out on the sun-heated rocks. Any little hole or worn spot would let in freezing cold water, so in many of our pictures and video clips you see we are wearing board shorts on the outside of our wetsuits. It looks a little funny, but you had to protect your wetsuit from all the wear and tear of the sharp rocks that we rested on along the riverbank.”

“As the flows came down and the temperatures came up later in the season, Lunch Counter transformed into a hub of activity. Because it is roughly half way between the put-in and take-out points, it is a natural spot for recreational river runners to pull out their kayak, raft, rubber ducky, canoe, McKenzie boat, or whatever they floated down on to watch the Lunch Counter scene play out. Kayakers sat behind the eddy lines, punching out to grab turns in the secondary waves, or portaging their boats upstream for repeated runs through the gauntlet. What we pulled out, much to many people’s surprise, were surfboards.

The wave side of the river is only accessible to people by boat or board, so it often carried the vibe of some kind of adventurers’ club. If you were on that side of the river, you were a player, not just another tourist. Truthfully, at times it could sort of segregate people, since the river folk didn’t go over and mingle with the tourist crowd much. We were all there mostly for that wave. Okay, maybe the occasional chance to chat it up with a potential love interest sitting on the rocks across the river might draw somebody back over, or we would ferry across for lunch or an afternoon break back at the camp spot between sessions. It was always fun to catch the Lunch Counter secondary wave on your paddle back across mostly to see how long you could stay standing before the pulsating nature of that wave inescapably brought you down.”

“During early summer, it evolved into a very different place. That was the absolute party time to be there. The now long-gone parking lot along the highway side would overflow with tour buses and big RVs full of families during the day. Each disgorged hordes of camera-ready tourists that either hung over fence on the rim or hiked down the access trails to capture images from the riverbank. Women in bikinis, and those guys who were interested in women in bikinis, would be there laid out on their towels, beach chairs, or claiming the very best sitting rocks for the afternoon. It was quite the happening place by midsummer.”

“Videographers hired by the major rafting companies were positioned strategically on the banks to document raft passenger’s grand adventure through Alpine Canyon. Raft captains spent the upriver sections verbally pumping up their passengers for the Lunch Counter Rapid. Passengers primed for adventure made for better end-of-float tips for some commercial rafters.

When the rafters floated through Lunch Counter, they would sometimes find a surfer already up and riding. We were constantly checking upstream for approaching rafts. –they had just one shot at the wave, so we did our best to move way aside to give them the right-of-way. We’d either move way over or often just kick out entirely. All the same, a minority of the commercial rafters began to think that having a surfer on the wave took away from their passenger’s exhilaration. We made it look too easy. I recall that one out-of-control commercial raft guide who took it upon himself to try to make an example out of you, Seal.”

“It would have been hard for a raft guide on company time with paying passengers to pull out downriver, so it was all over pretty fast. About an hour later, he suddenly reappears on the river bank of the parking lot side. He’d gotten rid of the raft and his customers, and come back seemingly intent to settle the score. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, pounding his chest and swearing he’s going to kick ass, but he had no way to get across the river. He was at least thinking clearly enough to know that swimming was not an option, only we recognized we had all the time in the world and he likely didn’t. We just smiled, waved, and waited for him to blow himself out and leave, which eventually he did. I was one of your adult students in the martial arts classes you taught at the local community recreation center back then. I thought you showed a fair amount of practice-what-you-preach self-restraint by opting not to lose your temper and go toe-to-toe with the guy.”

“It’s interesting to see all the video clips being posted these days of mega-surf stars trying their hand at River Surfing.  The struggle for acceptance now seems to be paying off.  The major surf publications rarely gave river surfing even the least bit of press back then.  When we shared what we were doing with our contacts, the sport was habitually dismissed as a “novelty.”  Well this “novelty” is now getting legs under it.

Dodging ski poles was a minor reflection of how the ski industry at first tried to write snowboarding off as a novelty when that was first starting.  In winter of 1973 Seal wasn’t allowed to take his Snurfer up onto the lifts in Tahoe, California.  In 1985, I was one of five snowboarders in the whole county where I lived in Northern Utah.  We were all displaced surfers and called it “Snow Surfing.”  The last paragraph notes that Beaver Mountain Ski Resort was the only mountain in Utah, the same future home of the breakout 2002 Olympic half-pipe events, that allowed snowboarders onto their lifts. Seeing all this progress brings us no small bit of satisfaction.”

“Rivers can and do kill. To this very day many river surfers treat wild rivers like they are some of kind of waterpark, which they are absolutely not.  A flood stage river at high water levels is gnarly, and people can and did die on the Alpine Canyon stretch of the Snake River during those very same years that we surfed there. We were continuously checking upstream for approaching rafts, but in big water somebody was ALWAYS assigned to act as a sentry. When we were there by ourselves, that individual also doubled as the de facto lifeguard.  Sentries were charged not only to watch upstream for all the little bits of crap and board damaging debris, but more importantly to shout out a warning when logs that had been dislodged by the flood waters came around the bend.  Someone would scream “LOG!” and everybody: kayakers, rafters, surfers, or whoever would scramble the hell off the wave and get out of the way. You didn’t wait. You moved when you heard that warning. The trees often got pushed directly through the center of the surfing wave into the same downstream eddy that we relied on to exit the river. Waterlogged trees were the worse, because they might not rise to the surface until they hit the stone ledge that creates the very wave we rode. That would shove them sometimes brutally to the surface, and to avoid that happening right in front of the surfer or kayaker who was up and riding, everyone kept a very close watch.”

“On one big water occasion, I recall that a family’s closest companion followed its masters into the flooded river when their raft upended on the very same wave we surf.  The young black Labrador had no flotation and was immediately swept into the eddy line that we punched each and every time to get out of the water. The dog went directly into the whirlpool that circulates there in big water. Seal pointed out the carcass when it finally resurfaced a solid forty-five minutes later. Not surprising to some of us, it came up in the exact same spot where it went down.  One of the kayakers went after the poor pooch and pulled it across the front of his kayak to take downstream to where the rafters had pulled out downriver.  Everyone was shedding tears when the body finally surfaced.  It was a really sad moment and gave us all serious pause, because we wipe out immediately into that same spinning vortex that had held him down for so very long. And we didn’t wear life vests either.”

“On another big water day I was standing on a ledge just upstream of the primary wave waiting out a passing raft. I noticed one of its occupants was another surfer wearing a wetsuit and with a surfboard under his arm. “Cool.  Another surfer!” was my passing thought. I returned my gaze to whatever might be coming at me from upstream, because I was next on deck to surf the wave.

A couple of river runners were sitting on the bank just upriver of me watching the goings-on, when suddenly a look of terror and concern flashed across their faces. I spun around just in time to see the same surfboard from the raft now separated from its owner and cartwheeling through the air above the river. In that same instant I saw Seal leap off the six-foot rock embankment clear out onto the secondary wave, something anyone intent on river surfing had no cause to do.  From water level I could not see what was happening downriver at that point, but I surmised that he was in some kind of big trouble.”