We gathered in an eddy, craning necks toward the whitewater below. The run was billed as a float trip, but the splashy river before us was class III or IV—we would see—and it vanished swiftly around the corner. Nobody uttered a word. It was all business. “There’s a good eddy on the left,” Lisa reported from her precarious talus stance.

I wasn’t surprised by the stoic aplomb of my 3 companions. Their statistics might give pause; 60-something women who hadn’t paddled kayaks in months, perhaps years. Still, there was enough muscle-memory in those sage bodies to paddle blindfolded.

When prodded, Karen Wattenmaker shared stories of early Futaleufu runs and Himalayan expeditions. [She and Greg Moore ran the Futa in 1987, just 2 seasons after Phil DeRiemer and company’s first descent. The 2nd descent of Nepal’s Arun was likely done by Wattenmaker and Arlene Burns in the late ’80s.] Even if she had to clear spider-webs from her long-buried Diablo before our launch, Karen didn’t seem too concerned with the class IV-minus Gros Ventre.

Jocelyn Slack-Wasson (yes THAT Jocelyn – creator of the Patagonia label, married to John) claimed the oldest boat of the group—a Perception Overflow from 1994—proving, again, that it’s the boater not the boat which makes smooth lines.

Rounding out the all-star crew was my wife, Lisa Gelczis. I learned to paddle by chasing her down rivers that were over my head. I never caught up in time to follow her and Karen down the North Fork of the Payette, their early-90s playground after photographing raft trips all weekend.

But that was all last century. Today, we had a new river before us, with unexpected rapids. There was even a portage—a class V that we’d probably call class IV after a dozen runs, but still…

With a little rope work and boat abuse, the landslide drop was behind us and camp time had arrived. The sound of moving water soothed. River current bent out of sight. Tomorrow we would follow it again, wherever it might lead.