“Determined to have my friend’s back in whatever the hell was going on, I leapt into the current intent on doing what ocean surfers call a “duck dive” under the primary wave. That didn’t work and I found myself hung up in the wave hydraulic for a long moment or two. When I got loose and crested the secondary wave, I could see Seal pushing the surfboard with one hand toward the guy now floating toward the flat water section the rapid empties into well downstream. Seal clearly had everything under control, so I punched the eddy line and climbed back out of the river.

It turned out that the guy had tried to jump out of the raft and catch the wave, but he had no leash and absolutely no floatation, which river rafters are supposed to wear at all times. Seal told me later that the guy just disappeared below the surface immediately. With no floatation of any kind, he was clearly going to drown. It had almost been a life-ending mistake for this man.”

“My grasp of the kid’s circumstances following that wipeout ended up saving my life. Well, Seal saved my life. Only weeks later, I too found myself separated from my surfboard after the ankle attachment on my surf leash failed. We are aware of current discussions here on the Riverbreak website detailing the dangers of leg ropes in wild rivers and we support that new knowledge, but that hadn’t been our experience up to that point. Life vests back then were very bulky and absolutely interfered with a surfer’s ability to remain stable on our boards while we paddled. The ability to paddle was critical to a surfer’s control and safety on the water, so we relied on our surfboard leashes.”

“I am a very strong swimmer, and every year for several months leading up to the river surfing season, I would swim laps to train for the hazards of the river. I swam 1,000 to 1,200 yards every weekday before lunch in our University swimming pool. That fact made absolutely no difference whatsoever the very instant my leash detached and I went one way while my surfboard went another. Without floatation I was completely at the mercy of flood stage currents that were vastly stronger than me at my very best. The currents seemed intent on dragging my sorry ass down for good. After struggling for what seemed like a very long time, but probably wasn’t that long at all, I ran out of the energy necessary to fight it. At that moment I looked up and saw Seal coming downstream pushing my board with one hand toward me. By then I was completely exhausted and my only thought was to fight to stay afloat until he gets here, and live.”

“Kahuna would start to break just when the surfing wave on the Counter started to back off. It would suddenly get big, inviting, and it was always easy enough to catch the soup or white water of the wave. But there was almost no wave face to stand and surf on. I appreciate your trash can analogy, as I am only about 5′ 7″ and on Kahuna I just wasn’t tall enough to see much of the upstream traffic coming at me. I remember trying to guess roughly how long it would take an upstream raft to reach Kahuna. I would jump in hoping to surf the wave just a little less time than that. More than once I was suddenly looking face on at the bow of a huge raft dropping into the same hole I was standing in. It could get heavy just trying to get the hell out of the way.

Surfing Kahuna is a good example of how we as surfers were continuously ferreting out new waves to surf. The search for new waves is as old as the sport of surfing itself. As a river runner, I would explore for surfer friendly waves any time I floated an unknown section of river. I still kayak a lot in the ocean, but at that time I discovered I could get invited on permitted river trips if I was willing to act as a raft captain. It wasn’t a bad gig, really. Everyone wanted to kayak, and I was willing transport the gear, beer, and significant others. The 1992 photo is of one particular float trip deep in Idaho wilderness on the wild and scenic stretch of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. That is Seal’s twinfin closest to the rafts in the black and grey board bag among all the kayaks and river gear. I don’t have pictures of the few small waves I tried to surf on that trip, but I have a vivid memory of one particular two meter haystack of unbroken wave face mid-river not far upstream from the Salmon River confluence. It was big water on that trip. One of our kayakers dislocated his shoulder and had to be helicoptered out, and then another kayaker very nearly drowned in a recircular only a quarter mile upstream of the wave I am thinking of. With all that drama playing out, it would not have been an appropriate time to insist that we all pull out and scout, let alone unpack and let me take a crack at surfing it. Rivers change after 24 years, but in my dreams I will always wonder if it’s still up there.”

“The news spread quickly on the river one Saturday afternoon in 1992. Toyota Corporation was going to film river-surfing at the Lunch Counter rapid for their upcoming Toyota Trucks TV commercial! It looked like something akin to the Mountain Dew commercial was about to repeat itself. Interested river surfers needed to be at Lunch Counter two weeks later for the big audition. I remember reminding the person who shared all this with me that the river was already in decline from flood stage. The wave was well past its yearly peak, and if they didn’t film very soon the surfers they selected would be trying to rip on ripples. The audition day came and because we were comparatively few, I recall maybe a half dozen of us or so, it didn’t last very long. Their representatives watched each of us surf, took a few pictures, wrote down our contact information, and told us they would be in touch with whoever they selected. Weeks ticked by and river levels continued to drop, and then my phone rang. It was fellow river surfers Mike Morganson and Tony Jovanovic from Jackson, Wyoming calling to let me know that Toyota had chosen the two of them to star in the commercial. Though I was not selected, my consolation was insider information on the day they planned to hold the shoot and an invitation for me to attend as their guest.

I have still pictures and a few stories I will share from that day, but the whole account has to be Mike’s and Tony’s to tell. There is so much more to that day than just the brief and blurred footage that Toyota used in their commercial. Big media doesn’t scrimp, and the array of people, equipment, and amenities that spilled out onto that pristine bank along the Snake River was like nothing before or since. Their small army of personnel included the director, film and still camera people, media consultants, food service workers, seamstress, hairdresser, water safety specialists , “roadie” type laborers (maybe that’s “riverie” type laborers), and many more. All those hard working professionals certainly couldn’t go hungry, so the buffet table that the caterers set up along that isolated river bank was first rate.

All of the equipment and people were ferried across to the wave side of the river in either a pontoon or McKenzie boat piloted by skilled operators. Kayakers were in place along the downstream eddy lines for safety back up. The river surfers were not allowed to paddle across the river because they might tear all the patches the seamstress had carefully hand sewed onto their wetsuits to cover up any company logos that might be visible. The guys were not to surf until the cameras were rolling because in addition to safety concerns their hair might get wet! The hairdresser was nearly beside himself towel-drying their bushy, bushy blonde hair after each take. There was a lot of down time while they discussed or set up different takes or camera angles, which I used to surf the wave all to myself. Their director and camera guys took advantage of my surfing to frame the image of the surfer and wave that they wanted and to focus their cameras.”

“Later, when they were all briskly shooting take after take and reviewing footage on the riverside portable monitor, I warmed up and rested on the nearby rocks. One of their guys who had been at the auditions mentioned that he thought I should have been chosen, because I was the best technical surfer on the river that day. I don’t know that Mike and Tony would have shared his opinion, but one of the photographers overheard him and, leaning in carefully to make sure the director couldn’t hear he whispered to me, ‘Next time dye your hair blonde.’

The details of that day are well documented in a video that Tony’s and Mike’s girlfriends took from the riverbank. I have a really poor copy of that video, but Mike and Tony’s original needs to be dug up and digitally archived along with copies of the resulting Toyota commercial that aired for the first time that following season during the annual championship World Series of Major League Baseball. As the sport of river surfing continues to gain traction, similar historical footage ought to be ferreted out and digitally preserved before time takes an even greater toll on whatever is left. The video cassette technology from those years is already well past it’s chemical shelf life, assuming those who took video actually held onto them this long. How Tony and Mike spent the money that they made from the commercial is a surfers’ tale in itself, so I am hoping that one or both of them will surface soon to share their own river surfing story.

“I came up with the slogan “Surf Wyoming” as a spinoff of a popular “Ski Iowa” tee-shirt from the mid-1980s showing a skier crashing through flatland cornfield rows. To this day you can still find that same tee shirt as vintage clothing on EBay sometimes. The “Surf Wyoming” slogan caught on with the half dozen or so Snake River surfers and became part of our lexicon in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Seal still has a “Surf Wyoming” “Lunch Counter Local” photo tee shirt that I had made for him as a gift back in 1991.”

“The backstory is that after all those years of river surfing I came to realize just how important surfing really was to me, so I moved to Hawai’i in 1993. While watching America’s Funniest Home Videos (AFV) on ABC TV one night, Bob Saget, the master of ceremonies at that time put out a request for videos of “strange or unusual sports.” River surfing clearly qualified, so I sent a 1992 video clip of me surfing Lunch Counter to the address provided. On the video cassette label I wrote the words, “Surf Wyoming.” AFV kindly returned my cassette a short while later with a letter noting no immediate need for it, but that they would hold onto my footage in their video archives.

Four years later in 1998, my home phone in Hawai’i rings, and it’s an AFV representative. They selected my river surfing footage, which they had kept all those years, as one of the three $10,000 semi-finalists for an upcoming AFV episode. They offered to fly me from Honolulu to Los Angeles, where I would appear on the show and the studio audience would vote on my clip to see if I would win the $10 K first prize.

Plans were made and flights were arranged, and then just weeks before I was due to depart for the March 11, 1998 taping of my episode (# 922), trailers for the March 27, 1998 release of the latest Disney movie began airing on television. The Disney comedy “Meet the Deedles” was the story of brother “surf dudes” from Hawai’i headed to a boot camp for wayward youth in of all places, Wyoming. The movie trailer (US, other countries) shows the main characters surfing Wyoming river waves, and just prior to their river surfing scene in the movie, one brother turns to the other and says, “Whoa, dude! Surf Wyoming!” The parallel story line, the timing of the movie’s release, and my invitation to be on the show all happening at the same time felt surreal.

As far as the AFV experience, it was great fun. They picked me up at the airport in a limousine. The driver took me on an hour long limo-tour of Hollywood before dropping me off for my stay in a rather nice Hollywood hotel. All expenses were paid, including a $50 per diem. Copyrights prevent them from showing my appearance on the show here, but you can watch a copy of my clip which has been graciously provided by the Vin Di Bona Productions/Cara Communications Corporation affiliated with AFV. On the show the AFV host Daisy Fuentes introduced my clip as “Surfs up: River” and made a joke, noting “No he’s not lost. This is actually the opening sequence to a new cop show, Denver 5.0”. At the end of each show, members of their studio audience review the three finalist’s video clips and vote for their favorite. When the camera zoomed in I smiled and flashed an “I love you” hand sign while mouthing those same words and my wife’s first name. I didn’t win the $10K. My video never really was funny, plus I was competing against puppies, babies, and genuinely hilarious little kids. I came in second place though, which netted me $2 grand in prize money. That’s not a bad take in 1998 dollars to go along with a pretty good story, and as Seal and I know well, those who die with the best stories, win.”

“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.”

“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.”