The Lunch Counter Trilogy, Part 1: In The Beginning

“You and I met surfing the sandbars of Mission Beach, California in the mid-70s while I was still a teenager and you weren’t very much older. Our shared passion for surfing and skateboarding in empty swimming pools started a friendship, and then the passion shifted into snowboarding before that sport became popular. I do remember your stories about snowboarding in South Lake Tahoe back in the early 1970’s, though. Then we got into something completely new and different, river surfing the Lunch Counter standing wave in Alpine Canyon section of the Snake River in Wyoming. The attitude was always the same, only the medium changed.”

“We have a host of stories from the mid-1970’s outlaw skateboarder era that we won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that trespass was the name of the game. This started before skateboard parks, so when someone discovered an exceptional pool, bowl, or drainage ditch the word got out. We have back issues of the now defunct mid-1970s Skateboarder Magazine, and they are rife with pictures of that era’s apex skateboarding professionals riding the very same San Diego hotspots that we did, many pictured in this montage. Having a pro show up at your spot was common place, and in a few cases they were there because we were close friends.

We weren’t making the magazines, but we skated on par with well-known friends who were. That is significant because other modern board sports trace common roots right through the mid-1970’s outlaw skateboarding movement. Riversurfing belongs on that exclusive list. Regrettably all the period skateboard pictures of Seal have been lost over the years, so we’re adding in just one of him taken on September of 2014 dropping a bowl at Hillyard Skatepark in Spokane, Washington. At 60 years old, no doubt he was the only skater there in vintage 1970’s Rector Skate Wear Pads.”

“We wonder who the first person to river surf the Lunch Counter was. I had heard tales about the first guy circulating among fellow river runners who knew I was a surfer. The story goes that the very first person to take a surfboard out onto the face of the primary wave at Lunch Counter was a displaced California surfer and skier who came up with the idea while running the Snake River during the spring runoff. We have no idea what year or years he was there or what his name was, but if it was in the 70s he likely was riding a single fin and maybe even a longboard …”

“When Seal joined me in Northern Utah for the 1987 winter snowboard season, he brought along his wetsuit and three of the surfboards he shaped and glassed. I borrowed a river runner’s dry suit from the University recreation center and suddenly we had all the equipment we needed to follow through on the old stories of a land-locked standing wave only three or four hours to the north somewhere near Jackson, Wyoming.”

“There had to have been others like the original surfer on the Snake River elsewhere. Mavericks who were the first in their regions of the world to literally plunge in head first. Progressive men or women who thought just enough outside the box or who had heard the stories or saw the same images that brought us to the edge of the Snake River with our ’80s short boards tucked firmly under our arms. We sincerely hope that very first Wyoming surfer will resurface again someday, because that individual was our true pioneer whose lead we followed that first spring run-off day in 88.

River surfing an unfamiliar spot for the very first time was and always will be a pretty harrowing experience. We found ourselves face-to-face with so many unknowns. The water was ice-cold and, because our timing was good, we caught it rising into flood-stage. We had smaller and bigger days over the next few years but that first day of our initiation was both intimidating and exciting. There were no other surfers around to show us the safe places to ferry across, how to get in and out of the water, or how to react after the inevitable wipe-out.

The couple of kayakers that were there guided us with basic suggestions for what had to be in place to ensure one another’s safety, but their systems weren’t always practical for a surfer’s needs. For example, life vests back then were so bulky that they interfered with a surfer’s ability to be stable and stay on top of the surfboard while paddling in a torrent of whitewater. Our solution was for our surfboards to act as our floatation, and we relied on being tethered to them. We’d both surfed big waves where surf leashes worked, and they were what we knew. They were not the right solution, and as a result several surfers very nearly drowned when we became separated from our surfboards.”

“You were usually a bit more gung-ho, and I a bit more cautious. I always preferred to learn from your mistakes. Vicarious learning was significantly less painful, although I made more than my own share of mistakes.”
 
 
 

“Seal’s last season on the river was in 1991. He kindly left me one of his surfboards. I was able to squeeze in one last, but very eventful season in 1992. The board that worked best for both of us was your old school 5’10″ single-winged swallowtail with V in the tail that was based on the Mark Richards twin fin template. It was a Clark Foam green blank, and had 6 oz. glass job with a 6 oz. deck patch which made it kind of heavy compared to modern surfboard designs. Still, it had solid outlines and was really functional. We both made it work reasonably well. It is the same board I am surfing and loving in all the 1992 video segments. It was a magic board that seemed to work in just about everything.”

“The heavy fiberglass job of your twin fin is probably the only reason it survived a particularly horrendous wipeout of yours that I witnessed on the river in 1989. Kayaker Dennis wanted to try surfing the wave on his kayak with one of us board surfers sharing the wave, which he didn’t think anybody had ever done before. He paddled into the wave first in his 13 foot Perception kayak. It was a contemporary kayak design for the times, but by today’s standards it was very long and heavy. You floated into the wave laterally from the river bank. Oops, big mistake. He took your butt right out, as you can see in the video sequence. He flipped you up and over the back of the wave and your leash held just long enough to pull the surfboard over his bow for a second assault, spinning it once before the leg rope came off and you completely disappeared underwater. I’m stoked you were able to stay the hell away from the whirlpool in that downstream eddy, but none of us knew that at the time. It wasn’t big water, but we all knew that spot was gnarly without floatation and you had completely disappeared into the torrent. Everyone was scanning the river and calling for you, but you were nowhere to be seen or heard above the surface.”

“Dennis and I had another go at sharing the wave together just a week later, but we had learned a thing or two from all that earlier drama. I jumped onto the wave first, and Dennis slid onto the bank side of the wave where he couldn’t run anybody over again. We were pretty focused on what we doing at the time, trying our best to avoid repeating the same mistakes.”

“River surfers were few and far between in the 1980s. That’s less true now with an entire online magazine and scores of U-tube videos dedicated to and promoting the sport. We saw only a handful of other surfers pass through in all the years we surfed the place together. Most weren’t even able to get to their feet much less ride with any style. A common mistake for many people was to look down at the water screaming by underfoot triggering instant vertigo, and down they’d go. That changed just a bit in 1992 after Seal had left. Maybe it was all the press we were getting in the local newspapers and sports rags, but there were suddenly a handful of reasonably decent surfers that showed up to ride the place that last year I was there.”

The Lunch Counter primary wave had a window above or below which the wave is more or less not surfable. Too low and there’s not enough wave face to keep the current from whisking you downstream. Too much water and the wave will flatten into a pulsating hydrodynamic sculpture that is genuinely beautiful but is essentially useless from a surfer’s perspective. A typical surf season would have us monitoring the river run-off telephone update recordings starting in early April when the snowpack was deep, but melt-off was slow. Our plans were typically to start surfing in May and throughout the whole of June into July. We were there every weekend when it was breaking as time allowed, during the week as well. April was just too cold to deal with most of the time, although we did surf it a few times that early in the season.

What we referred to as “big water” was 10,000 to 14,000 Cubic Feet per Second (CFS). Big water was when the wave was the most challenging, but also the most fun to surf. We could ride the wave as low as 4 or 5,000 CFS, but below that there wasn’t a wave face. It was little more than a line of soup. River flows naturally depended on the weather, melting snowpack, and the whims of the Teton Dam operators upstream. Local knowledge mattered, combined with a good bit of guess work.”