An adrenaline-starved adventure traveler looks back at five close calls

During the covid-19 travel shutdown, I’ve spent a lot of time mentally revisiting some of the closer calls I’ve had while out seeking thrills, which, frankly, is my main impetus for traveling. Sure, I appreciate culture, art and architecture, but it’s the adrenaline rush of, say, rafting the Zambezi River, skiing the Canadian backcountry or surfing a South Pacifc reef that keeps my money flowing to the travel industry. And reflecting on my close calls has helped me see that my enjoyment of those experiences often rises in concert with the consequences of things going wrong — until, of course, they actually do go wrong.

It’s partly, I’m sure, about conquering fears, but this is also about escaping the trappings of modernity and escaping the constraints of society. Yes, I see my hypocrisy — mountain bikes, skis and airplanes are all pretty modern — but I can’t help how I feel. Below are five of my close calls, and while none rise anywhere near the level of an Everest survival epic or losing a ship to an Antarctic ice floe, each has at least a moment where I fear for my life. Recounting them surfaces all that suppressed fear, anxiety and embarrassment (most are traceable to user error) but also makes me feel lucky, as if I needed another reason, to still be dancing on planet Earth.

Buzzed in the Flatirons

Boulder, Colo., summer of 1984. Like many incoming college freshmen, I am drawn to the Flatirons — three massive slabs of sedimentary rock that loom from the foothills west of town. And as an impulsive 18-year-old with zero mountain experience I figure I can amble right up there and scale those rocks.

My friend Jeremy Bic, from San Diego and also lacking technical climbing skill, agrees, so amble we do, through the wildflowers of Chautauqua Park and up to the base of Flatiron No. 1, which juts 1,000 feet skyward like a giant diamond of petrified sand. The rock features ample hand- and footholds along with ledges wide enough to accommodate a lunch break. But it also has numerous pitches where falls can — and occasionally do — prove fatal.

I am sweating up one such section, suspended hundreds of feet above the forest by a three-finger grip and half a foothold, Jeremy 15 feet above me, when a hornet divebombs my face. It’s worth noting that I grew up unnaturally terrified of bees, and throughout my childhood even the most harmless flyby from a honeybee would send me in to a wind-milling disco move.

So that hornet triggers a spike in fear and allows me to realize for the first time that day how easily I could plummet to my death. As I’m processing this more hornets appear, and the party is on.

Stings light up my neck, arms and face. With only one hand to defend myself I slap ineffectually, trying to kill them against the rock or my body. I am also calling out to Jeremy for help, as if he could just hopscotch down and cast the hornets off. Instead, in what he later claims is his natural reaction to crises, he starts laughing manically.

I eventually kill enough that the survivors head back to base. Ten minutes later, after I’ve stopped hyperventilating and Jeremy has ceased laughing at me, we finish the climb, our mountain education officially underway.

A tree hugger skis Japan

In January 2016, on a ski trip with friends in the Japanese Alps, we road-trip from our base in Myoko Kogen to Charmant Hiuchi, a tiny resort high above the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea. Charmant had been closed for days because of a windy storm, which left two feet of powder for the taking. After a morning of fresh tracks beneath the main chairlift, my friend Ted Purcell and I start seeking new lines near the resort’s boundary line. Ted carves his snowboard over a rise and drops out of sight while I blow through billows of untracked snow to his right. I’m certain I’m paralleling his route but, alas, I’ve veered straight out of bounds.

Small trees beget bigger ones, and soon I’m bounding through a forest, and snow so good that all I can do is ski — and, apparently, fly: I unexpectedly vault off a 20-foot drop and straight toward one of the great hazards of backcountry skiing in Japan, a volcanically heated creek. These waterways spider throughout the country’s geothermally active mountains and, unlike streams in other cold Alpine environments, they don’t freeze. Falling into one in ski gear leads to all manner of annoyances, not least drowning under the weight of your equipment to dying of hypothermia on the hike out.

Fortuitously, an evergreen tree sits directly between my launch point and the creek and — in what I’d like to think was an athletic move but really was just inevitable — I bear-hug the conifer, kachunk down its branches and land in a heap.

Thus begins the hard part. If you’ve never tried to walk up a 20-foot wall of powder, well, you’re smarter than me. I hold my skis with both hands and use them like a movable rung on a ladder, punching into the hill, kicking two steps with my boots and repeating.

I conquer that pitch in 30 minutes but then, seeking a shortcut back to the slope, waste 20 minutes trudging through chest-deep snow to a dead end: another steaming, un-crossable creek. A surge of panic is overcome by the dreadful realization of how much walking stands between me and my next powder run.

The road to nowhere

On a crystalline afternoon in June 2008, cheerful puffy clouds and the distant, snow-laden peaks of the San Juan range beckon me up an unpaved road near Ouray, Colo. My plan, based on the vague guidance of a guy in a bike shop, is to pedal up this cliffy escarpment, locate a mountain bike trail and ride it six or so miles down a valley to the town of Ridgway, where I’ll rendezvous with my wife, Cathleen.

I spin up from 7,250 feet, exhilarated in the crisp air, crest the ridge and enter what I assume is my target trail. A descent takes me through a forest of spruce, pine and fir, around banks and over minor creeks as planes of sunlight layer through the canopy.

Junctures are passed, decisions made, instincts followed, and I’ve stopped paying attention to anything but the trail when it spits me onto a steep gravel road — a feature the bike shop dude hadn’t mentioned. I pedal uphill, hoping to regain the ridge, as a cold breeze sweeps down from the high mountains. The road tops out — still no ridge — and snakes back upon itself in a ripping downhill and then another long, punishing uphill. This, I assure myself, will deliver me to the trail, and it better: The sun is dropping and I have no light and little water, just a flip phone with no reception. I want to assume I’m headed toward civilization, but America’s public lands are mazed with old roads that peter out far from anything.

Soon I come to a fence with a stately gate and, far beyond, a massive house. Salvation! A burly Akita trots the perimeter barking belligerently as I yell and wave my arms, hoping to draw an occupant out to offer directions. Nothing. After 10 minutes I give up and ride on, giving myself 15 minutes to find the trail or turn tail and backtrack.

A couple of miles later I find an unmarked trailhead, take it and feel like I’m back on track, until the trail grows thin and then stops at a cattle gate. Anxiety becomes panic: The shadows are lengthening, I can feel the cliffs pinching in from my right and conclude (wrongly, I later learn) that this route leads only to a sheer drop. “Next time,” I mutter to the trees as I turn around, shaking and cold despite the exertion, “ask the dude for a freaking map.’’

Using my fractured memory and the rapidly setting sun as a compass, I make my way back and find Cathleen sitting in our rental car in Ridgway at dusk, reading a book and oblivious to my ordeal.

Potomac swirl

“Whoa, dude!” Rich exclaims. We are standing on a beach along the Potomac River, just downstream from Great Falls, with our white-water kayaks on our shoulders on a brilliant October Sunday in 1995 preparing to run Mather Gorge, a normally unthreatening stretch of water with only a few minor rapids.

But today isn’t normal. Rich, an acquaintance I had met through the local kayaking scene, and I had checked the river level in the manner of the era — by consulting The Post weather page — and had expected a flow of around 15,000 cubic feet per second (4.5 feet on the gauge at the Little Falls dam), robust but within my skill set, despite the fact that I’d learned to kayak only months prior.

Instead we find a swirling, swollen beast galloping down the gorge. And this isn’t even the Potomac’s main flow; we’re on an elbow of the river that diverts around Rocky Island and is often so placid one can float in place without paddling.

Discretion, so they say, is the better part of valor. I should walk back to the car without a second thought. Instead, we put in, ferry into the current and are immediately whipsawed to the bottom of Rocky Island, where Rich pulls into an eddy. As I join him I narrowly miss getting sucked into a boat-size whirlpool that had formed spontaneously off my starboard bow. I am certifiably horrified, just in time to peel into the main flow. I follow Rich out of the eddy and into another league. The current, in full tantrum, flips me like a bath toy.

This is the moment when mind must conquer emotion, when the kayaker must trust his training. Yes, I’m upside down, but my boat is floating and, with the proper combination of positioning, motion and focus, I can roll upright. And I try — once — before abandoning hope, pulling my spray skirt and emerging into the sunlight in even bigger trouble. I now have multiple pieces to worry about — my boat, my paddle, me and Rich, who is furiously paddling toward me while shouting for me to collect my gear. The current rips my boat from my grasp and, for good measure, yanks me under a couple of times, despite the life jacket I’m wearing (without it I’m dead). I surface, gasp, find my kayak and Rich’s stern loop and kick for shore.

He labors us into an eddy, where I announce that I’m going home. Except I can’t. We’re still near the top of the gorge, where exiting on foot with a kayak is all but impossible. I never learned the precise river level that day, but got a fair idea when we passed another group of kayakers at a popular surfing hole called Dead Cow, which forms when the Potomac flow hits 58,000 cubic feet per second.

Across the great Parnaiba

By the time I start the hardest part of the day I’m already shot. I’m on the northeast coast of Brazil in October 2018, about to attempt a kitesurf crossing of the chaotic waters where the Parnaiba River pours into the Atlantic Ocean — the centerpiece of one of the largest river deltas in the Americas. I had started 10 miles up the coast with a group, almost all of whom are now well ahead of me and out of sight. It’s Day 1 of a week-long downwind kite journey.

The morning had started with a series of anxiety-inducing events — the temporary disappearance of my bag (not my fault), which contained my passport, money and camera; a broken foot strap on my board; the crashing and ripping of a $1,000 loaner kite (my fault).

I spent my first 90 minutes struggling to kite through a relentless, pounding beach break before finally reaching the river. One of our guides is behind me, a safety sweeper, but he stops to help another kiter who had beached his gear and waves me on to cross the river alone.

Ten-foot swells converge from all sides, like drunks in a mosh pit. Overly focused on my kite and surfboard, I inadvertently tack well offshore, and while trying to correct course I lose my board to a breaking wave. In the ensuing frantic search my kite pops off my harness and dives toward the water, dragging me through this maelstrom like a rag doll.

I recover and, somehow, hold it together for the second half of the crossing, even finding a moment to appreciate the bulbous, meditative hue of the haze-softened sun as it sinks into the horizon. Who ever said adventure can’t be fun?

Briley is a writer based in Takoma Park, Md. His website is johnbriley.com.

Source:WP