By Jay Young

Not many companies in the rafting game stand out as much as Songer does. I could roll off a litany of reasons, but I’ll just stick with the most visual of them—purple boats.

A couple days ago, I was posting away on the Songer Facebook page, and I posed a trivia question—how did Songer get its name? It was during the course of people trying to answer that question that another popped up…

Why the purple boats? Songer’s Len Hanger explains.

]]> http://www.songerwhitewater.com/raftingblog/why-purple-boats/feed 0 http://www.songerwhitewater.com/raftingblog/timbertrek-aerial-adventure-park http://www.songerwhitewater.com/raftingblog/timbertrek-aerial-adventure-park#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:10:51 +0000 Songer Whitewater http://www.songerwhitewater.com/raftingblog/?p=1459

If you’re a fan of TreeTops on Facebook or Adventures on the Gorge on Google+, you’re already well aware of what we’ve been building here this winter.

If you’re not—if this is the first you’ve heard of TimberTrek Aerial Adventure Park—prepare to be blown away. TimberTrek is best described as a system of obstacles, bridges, swings and zip lines between tree platforms at heights as high as 50 feet above the forest floor. It is comprised of 5 courses of varying difficulty levels: 1 yellow course, 2 green, 1 blue and 1 black, each incrementally harder than the last. Children as young as 7 are welcome on the yellow course—and the greens, too, as long as they have an adult with them.

How about a tour? Songer’s Len Hanger leads the way!

With the addition of TimberTrek, Adventures on the Gorge is now the most extensive selection of aerial adventure in the world! We’ll be booking TimberTrek in 3 and 6-hour blocks at $79 for 3 and $109 for 6. Call now to book!

By Jay Young

Renowned for its world-class whitewater and rock climbing, not to mention hiking, fishing, mountain biking and a whole lot more, the New River Gorge becomes a virtual ghost town in the winter.

There exists, however, a hearty local community of outdoor enthusiasts who don’t let little things like snow and cold keep them down. In fact, a subset of the outdoor community here comes alive in winter to ski and snowboard and, in the meantime, bides its time for the eventual gift days—those afternoons when, between snowy bouts, the sun shines strong and temps rocket into the 40s and 50s.

Invariably, we see a few them every winter, and when they pop up, climbers by the Subaru-load head for Summersville Lake. A popular water-soloing location in the summer, Whippoorwill, for example, dries up in the winter, the bottoms of climbs poke out of the lake bed and a surreal climbing environment enjoys its day in the sun. Even with temps only in the high 30s, it’s not uncommon to spend several hours of the day at Whippoorwill climbing in short sleeves on rock that radiates warmth.

Though it was first visited by climbers in the 80s, Whippoorwill didn’t really rise to prominence until the middle 00s, when local climbers began a renaissance of sorts of new climbs and winter recon trips. In those years, Whippoorwill yielded a host of moderate climbing, and word soon spread of its easy access, short walk-in and warm, sunny cliffs. When Mike Williams’ guidebook, New River Gorge Rock Climbs, hit shelves in 2009, the new Whippoorwill was in it and the floodgates opened wide.

For non climbers, the lake bed also offers once-a-year hiking opportunities with outstanding fossil hunting!

To get to Whippoorwill, head north from Songer/Adventures On the Gorge on Route 19, as though you’re headed for the Gauley River. Go past the turn for the Gauley, and then begin looking for Whippoorwill Rd., which is not much more than an inlet of asphalt on the left. After turning left, hang an immediate right and follow the roadlet downhill until you see a dirt road leading left into the woods. Park here and hike the dirt road to the top of a gully that will lead you to the lake bed.

By Jay Young

A bucket boat, circa 1970s, does what bucket boats did best: hold water. Photo: Butch Christian Collection

Imagine you’re running the Upper Gauley on a sunny autumn afternoon. You come around the bend where the Meadow River adds its weight to the trip and stroke into First Drop of Lost Paddle, the longest rapid on the river. The waves are big and fun, and everybody in the boat is soaked. “Stay ready!” yells your guide as you float into the set-up for Second Drop, AKA, Hawaii Five-Oh. “Forward,” she roars, and you plow into the biggest wave on the Gauley with reckless, giggly abandon.

Boom! The front of the raft points skyward and spume fills the air as you punch a hole through the wall of water. The bottom of the world falls out as you crest the wave and drop into a 30-foot-long slide. Boom! You hit the whitewater at the bottom and again the water flies. The river is around you, above you—in your lap.

“One back,” yells your guide. The crew dutifully complies and the boat slips into the current that brings you around Indecision Rock, AKA, Six Pack. A short float later and you hammer into Third Drop, sliding right and into slower moving water. A cheer escapes your guide’s lips and you hoist your paddle for a celebratory high five with your crewmates. You glance around. Smiles fill the raft.

Now imagine that instead of smiles, a half a ton of water fills your boat… and it’s not going anywhere unless YOU bail it.

The rafts we use today are pleasantly self bailing. The boat fills with water, but gravity drains it through a ring of small holes all around the floor, like a floating colander.

Things, however, were not always thus. In fact, the self-bailing raft is a relatively recent innovation, and on the Gauley, you would have been hard pressed to find one prior to 1987.

Len Hanger, who manages river operations for Songer, recalls those days not so fondly.

“When you ran Lost Paddle in a bucket boat,” says Len, “the biggest difference was the weight. Each gallon of water weighs 8 pounds. So, if you took on 100 gallons of water, you just took on 800 pounds that you had to deal with as a guide, but also as a guest in the boat. They had 3-5 extra people worth of weight that they had to move. You had to be stronger, you had to be quicker—and it was difficult!”

Perhaps nowhere on the Gauley is the difference felt so acutely as in the nearly 1/4-mile-long class V, Lost Paddle.

“In Lost Paddle,” says Hanger, “there are four major drops, and after the third major drop, there’s a place to eddy out.”

While you might take a few moments to catch your breath and celebrate in a self-bailer, in a bucket boat, respite was no place to be found. Even in the eddy, the game was still very much on. “In a bucket boat, you stopped and you took a 5 gallon bucket and you bailed the water out, so you could run the fourth drop, which was affectionately called Tumble Home.”

“If you didn’t bail the water,” explains Len, “all you got to do in that fourth drop was tumble home to the bottom of the rapid. That’s how it got its name.”

By Shea Anderson

“I’ll never get out of this world alive,” sang the country star known as the “Hillbilly Shakespeare.”

He was known for his honesty, and these lyrics rang true. But he left behind a legacy. Hiram “Hank” Williams, a country music revolutionary, is honored in nearby Oak Hill, West Virginia, with a road that carries his name.

Why Oak Hill, a mere 10 miles down the road from Songer Whitewater? The still mysterious death of the young rising legend unfolded in 1952 at a gas station in the town. While on his way to a show, he was discovered dead at the age of 29 in the back seat of his ’52 Cadillac after an alleged cocktail of drinks and medication. The gas station is gone, but a bar that claims it was Hank’s last stop still stands just down the road in Hilltop.

His heart stopped—just called it quits and stopped beating. That was the conclusion from the official autopsy. But for many, it’s not a satisfying enough answer for the sudden loss of a musical mainstay.

Details of Williams’ death are disputed, but one thing was certain: it did not stop his music’s momentum. His sincere and passionate songs continued to top the charts after he passed, and he set a foundation for country music that still endures. (And gets copied in homage—icons like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan have covered Hank Williams tunes.)

He topped the charts at number one 11 times in his career, establishing himself as the father of contemporary country and setting a new standard for stardom. More than half of his recordings rocketed to the top 10, ensuring him a permanent place in country music history. In fact, in 2010, almost 60 years after his death, his influence earned him a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize board. They recognized him as a “songwriter who expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity and played a pivotal role in transforming country music into a major musical and cultural force in American life.”

His heartfelt tunes were accompanied, however, by a reputation for rough living. Though he showed early talent, picking up a guitar when he was 10 and teaching himself, he still had to leap the hurdle of stage fright. And his struggled rise to fame was always at odds with his recklessness and drinking, which crumbled his first marriage.

In many ways, these hardships made his music more authentic and relevant. He thrust his deepest feelings out for the world to see and share, and that’s what people loved about him.

His legacy is apparent within the whole of the country music genre, but it is also carried on by his son and grandson, Hank Williams Jr. and Hank Williams III, who have added their own talents and styles to the country scene. Junior incorporates Southern rock and blues, while Hank III dips into punk and metal styles.

While you’re visiting Adventures on the Gorge for a rafting trip or a TreeTops Canopy Tour, you can take the quick spin to Oak Hill to drive the road and see the memorial dedicated to him. Perhaps you might stumble upon his hat, which was reported missing after his death. Residents tell stories of the hat, as well as other former possessions of the superstar, still floating around the town. One former owner of the supposed hat even called it cursed after his hair started falling out.

This video of Hank’s “Lonesome Whistle,” includes more information about Hank’s career. If you haven’t given country’s cornerstone musician a listen yet, take some time to appreciate his music and the way he transformed the genre and popular music in general, and let us know what you think in the comments below.

By Jay Young, Photo: M. Lewis Collection

As a tow boat pulled his flotilla of rafts across Cheat Lake following their run down the Cheat River, raft guide and trip leader, Mark Lewis, surveyed his crew with tired eyes. To a person, they were silent. “There was just a lot of quiet reflection,” said Lewis. He and thousands of other guides and guests had just spent the overcast day literally deeper than neck deep in a day of chaos and terror that would eventually be known as Black Saturday.

Flash back a year previous. In spring of 1985, the Cheat River was in the throes of a super flood that would kill 54 people, demolish townships and rearrange the very topography of the river bed and the rapids that flowed over it. Some say the previous highest-recorded flood volume on the Cheat was in the neighborhood of 80,000 cfs, or cubic feet per second, but the 1985 flood crested at close to 250,000. It erased entire raft-company operations—tearing open buildings and spilling equipment like eviscerated guts into the raging torrent—and on April 12, 1986, when Lewis and his Rivers trip put in for a day of fun, “there were still wetsuits hanging 40 or 50 feet up in the trees.”

Most guides knew that the flood had rearranged some furniture, so to speak, but the winter had been uncharacteristically moderate and the spring flows to date atypically low. By Black Saturday, however, the rain had returned and the water was back up. It was the first day most guides saw “the new Cheat” at respectable flows, and unbeknownst to them, they were woefully underprepared.

Lewis had his first inkling that things were awry as he floated into a rapid called Big Nasty. Previously little but a wave train down the center, Big Nasty was one of the most changed by the flood. “I look downstream,” said Lewis, “and I see the company ahead of me has flipped either five out of six or six out of six boats.”

He knew immediately that there was something new to the right. Lewis spared a brief moment to signal his boats behind him to get left as fast as possible, but for many of them—and certainly for his raft—it was already too late. He drove left as hard as his crew could manage, but every time he made progress, a series of diagonal waves coming off the left bank pushed him back to the center. “At some point I realized there was no getting left,” he said, “and I look downstream at this monster hole.”

The hole, a pile of aerated, recirculating whitewater twice as tall as his loaded raft and almost three times as wide as his boat was long loomed ahead. It was a leviathan—an unrunnable wall of water—which Lewis was about to attempt to run. He turned his boat in to it and yelled, “ALL AHEAD!” But even as he dropped into the unavoidable, he knew what the result would be.

Their flip was fast and Lewis surfaced a few meters downstream of the hole. From the water, he watched as three more of his seven remaining boats also capsized. Still in awe of the dramatic change in Big Nasty, he finally managed to eddy out on the bank, where he and his guides began to collect themselves and their gear. Once ashore, it dawned on Lewis that he and his people were a tiny piece of a larger story unfolding around them. “I look back upstream and I watch the trip behind us,” he said, “which I believe was MS&T [Mountain Streams & Trails], and they flipped… every… boat… in their trip. I’m looking out on this and there are people all over the banks just walking up and down. There are guides walking around with, like, this 1000-yard stare.”

“The carnage just kept coming,” Lewis recalled with a sort of flashback faraway look in his eye, “‘cause this was the first busy day of Cheat Season, and there were trips lined up to run the river.”

Mark Lewis—and likely every other person on the Cheat that day—would love to be able to say Big Nasty was the worst of it. The river had other plans, however, and Black Saturday had only just begun.

Adventures On the Gorge digital marketing manager, Jay Young, recently authored Whitewater Rafting on West Virginia’s New & Gauley Rivers: Come On In, the Water’s Weird, an objective history of the area’s commercial rafting industry. In his second book, tentatively titled The Rubber Room, Young will attempt to paint a portrait of the business from the perspectives of those who created it and lived it day in and day out—the raft guides—by retelling their terrifying and often hilarious tales, be they true or tall. The complete hair-raising story of Black Saturday will be one of the chapters.

By Shea Anderson

Deep in the woods at a secluded cabin—in a fit of passion—a man allegedly slays his wife. The terror of that violent moment leaves an imprint on the cabin, and to this day the ghoulish presence of the murder still makes itself known.

The chilling story was sparked only a few years ago in 1996 at Babcock State Park, where a minister’s wife was found beaten to death with a piece of firewood in Cabin #13.

The minister claimed they were attacked by a masked man. The intruder sliced the pastor with a knife, he said, and knocked him unconscious in the struggle. He awoke to find his wife’s body the next morning.

But the case was not so cut-and-dried. Investigators couldn’t find evidence that anyone other than the minister and his wife had been on the property, but they did find pictures indicating the minister was having an affair with another man at the church. Further digging confirmed his wife had been aware of the affair, and just before the deadly trip to Cabin #13, the pastor had taken out a life insurance policy on her.

People report spotting a ghostly woman in a nightgown stalking across the grounds outside the cabin. Her apparition has been seen staring out of the cabin windows and heard sobbing in the night.

The pastor was sentenced to life in prison, but he appealed on grounds that the cabin was searched without a warrant. As he fought to conceal the evidence that implicated him in the brutal deed, the ghost of his wife still wandered outside Cabin #13, perhaps to stand as a chilling reminder of a life forcibly taken and a price yet to pay.

If you’d like to see more of Babcock State Park’s Cabin #13 try this…

As Marcus Ellison stood rigged and ready for his first ever BASE jump from the 876′ New River Gorge Bridge, he thought, “This is kind of ludicrous.” But as he has many times since, he parked his toes an inch from the ether, breathed in the enormity of it all and jumped.

(Want to jump virtually with Marcus? Just hit play.)

“Not only was it my first Bridge Day,” said Ellison, “but it was my birthday, too, and I’m in front of my hometown crowd, if you will. I had hundreds of my friends cheering for me.”

Though, yes, the notion of standing atop some giant object and leaping from it may seem absurd, when you add a parachute and the skills of human flight to the mix, it puts a sort of acceptable twist on the whole thing. “The fear and anxious stuff is still there,” explained Ellison, “but as soon as your feet leave the edge, all the those are gone. You’re in this complete moment. It’s the freest feeling I’ve ever had in my life. You’re just flying.”

“I’m excited the night before Bridge Day, but I don’t lose sleep or anything,” he continued. “There are 450 jumpers from all over the world and we’re hanging out. It’s kind of a brotherhood sort of thing—lots of banter, people telling stories. It’s different for alpine jumps. You’re by yourself or with a small group of people. There are no crowds.”

However, “The lower stuff gets your nerves going, because there’s less time to deal with problems. But again, once your feet leave, you’re just surviving.”

Just before his second Bridge Day jump, Ellison again toed up to the brim. “Yup. This really is kind of ludicrous,” he thought.

West Virginia’s majestic hemlock trees are under attack by a tiny enemy.  The Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (HWA) is an invasive species that traveled from Asia to the U.S. in the 1950’s on imported Christmas trees. As it’s name implies this insect is has a white, fuzzy appearance like a tiny puff of cotton.

These bugs suck sap from young twigs on hemlock trees causing the hemlock needles to dry out and drop. Tragically, this defoliation can cause the hemlock tree to die in only a few years.

What is the range of the HWA?

Lacking natural enemies in North America, HWA has spread throughout the eastern United States via wind, birds, mammals, human activities, and the transport of infected nursery stock. The Hemlock Wooly Adelgid is prevalent in about half of the hemlock range in the eastern U.S. and has killed about 90% of the hemlocks in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

Why are hemlocks so special?

The stakes are high: the hemlock tree provides habitat for dozens of mammals and birds. Arching over streams, it creates deep shade critical for the survival of trout and other fish. Some scientists think the hemlock is a so-called keystone species, holding up a whole ecosystem.

• Nearly 90 species of birds can be found in hemlock forests. Several species are significantly associated with hemlock forests, including the black-throated green warbler, Blackburnian warbler, and the Acadian flycatcher.
• A wide variety of aquatic species is more likely to be found in streams sheltered by hemlock than streams sheltered by hardwoods. For example, both brook trout populations and macroinvertebrate diversity are greater in hemlock streams.

What is Adventures On The Gorge doing about it?

To assist in the long-term preservation of the hemlock we are establishing our property, along the Mill Creek watershed and Tree Tops Canopy Tour in West Virginia, as a Hemlock Preservation Site. As such, our Canopy Tour staff will implement a long range treatment plan. Every hemlock over 6” in diameter has been surveyed and labeled for treatment.

The trees are treated using insecticides and predator beetles that munch on the HWA. The insecticide that we are using to treat our hemlocks is a neonicotinoids. This acts similar to nicotine in cigarettes by suppressing the bugs’ appetites and causing them to starve themselves to death.

A dollar from every canopy tour participant’s fee will be donated to a hemlock preservation fund to assist in the funding of this costly treatment plan and we will match those funds, dollar for dollar. Take a trip on TreeTops and you will officially become a tree-hugging hippie!

For more information on the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid problem in our US hemlock forests, visit the US Forest Service HWA Resource site.

You’re not going to have any mail delivered to you while you’re rafting the Lower New River these days, but if you just happened to be running Double Z in 1873, you could have stopped mid-rapid to mail a postcard. Located just above the railroad tracks on the river right side of Double Z (one of the Lower New River’s largest rapids), lies the old coal town of Nuttallburg.

Nuttallburg Mine Tipple

In 1910, Nuttallburg’s population peaked at 410 people. As one of the earliest mining operations in the New River Gorge, the Nuttallburg mine opened soon after the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) railroad was completed in 1873.

A family operation for several decades, the Nuttallburg mine was sold in 1920 to Henry Ford. The world’s most famous automaker used our recreation area to supply high quality steam coal to his automobile plants. After a few more owners the mine halted operations in 1958 and the forest began to take back the town.

Can you see it from the river on your next rafting vacation with Songer Whitewater? Good luck, because in the middle of Double Z you’ll have to peer through the trees to catch a glimpse of the giant coal tipple that still resides next to the railroad. Another option (available in the near future) is a new series of hiking trails the National Park Service is building near the town.

Check out this link for a gallery of Nuttallburg photos taken in 1899.