Not so very long ago, nobody thought it was even possible to run the upper yoke.
Dave and Dan Damary pretty much bridged the dark ages of upper yoke river running with modern times.
They brought a lot of people down here, showed a lot of people the way, helped a lot of people survive.
Back in those days, I used to say there's two ways to run the upper yoke.
One was to go on your own with your usual gang of boating buddies and plan on losing a boat,
plan on hiking out through the rattlesnake infested countryside, or go down with the Damary brothers.
When I started running the upper yoke in 1971, my sense was there were no more than 40 or 50 people that had run it at all.
I think the legends and stories had kept a lot of people off of it, and plus the plastic boats didn't exist.
So if you weren't skilled, you figured you were going to trash your boat.
Ohio Pile was sort of downtown Whitewater City. That was the destination and sort of the hub for that region.
But Sangron and Frensville were way out there. They were down country roads out in the middle of no place.
Most of the guys who did the river regularly were people who worked either for wilderness voyagers or mountain streams and trails.
We tried to coordinate it with several of the other guides and make a trip over to the upper yoke.
We were all improving our boating just by doing it so much, and over here was a way to do it.
When Wild Water West Virginia book came out, it had an account that said,
the raft guides in Ohio Pile run this on their day off every week. If you want to run, call David and Dan Damary.
People would come to the wilderness voyager store and camp out waiting for everybody to gather so they could tag along and go.
I would wind up taking groups of people down from Michigan, from New England, from all over.
Every week, once a week, I was taking groups of people down.
There was always a buzz about that. It was a big deal.
During that period of time, we saw the upper yoke sort of gain in popularity.
We started seeing more and more people coming, vans showing up with people.
At the time where Pizzeria Uno is now was a thing called the Glenhaven Pizza Pub,
and we'd go there and drink beer and have pizza.
And of course, in the summer, they had a little honky-tonk guy playing the piano or a little folk band singing,
and they would turn into a pretty loose evening.
Because here are these young guys full of adrenaline, having just had a wonderful day on this piece of water,
and you feed them a little alcohol and a little food.
And hey, there's girls here too, you know?
That was a typical upper yoke day every Wednesday, so that went on for years.
Music
When I started the sport, it was really early when a lot of the sport was based on kayak clubs.
And a lot of them would sponsor races and go attend other races.
And that's basically the structure of the sport.
With the onset of raft guides and guiding, then a different culture developed
where the top-skilled paddlers weren't racing anymore.
They were working at Ohio Powell and working on the raft trips.
And then they started discovering creeks.
Music
It was a paradigm shift in the sport.
I think it was a fantastic period of adventure and exploration in kayaking.
We went far and wide and running bigger and bigger drops.
Because this is the dawn of creaking.
You know, this is when the real small creeks were getting opened up.
For the 200 plus feet per mile, like we did Corey run, it was 686 feet per mile.
We did that in 77.
And even though Phil almost got killed on that run.
I took that boat that was in pretty good shape.
And it just, it was 100% destroyed by the end of that trip a couple hours later.
This year, adrenaline rush of being out there on these steep rivers and creeks at high water
with your best friend who you knew were capable of taking care of themselves
and really just laying it out on the line was many, many unforgettable moments in my life.
Music
