Several years ago I stood high on a scouting rock next to the Rogue River looking over the rapid that would, from that day forward, run through my daydreams and nightmares. The Rogue flowed gently around the corner after the constricted and chaotic Mule Creek Canyon and fanned out at this deceivingly beautiful point where autumn’s splashes of red and burnt orange were dabbed among dark green trees lining the steep banks. The water pooled above the rapid was peaceful and serene until it dropped over the entry point and tumbled hard and fast through a complicated maze of boulders the size of trucks, jagged rocks that rip open rubber rafts, and narrow chutes that break boats. It was Blossom Bar, a Class-IV rapid just beyond the halfway point on the 36-mile Wild and Scenic section of the Rogue in southwestern Oregon. It has been flipping rafts, smashing drift boats, sinking kayaks, and terrorizing boaters for decades. Blossom Bar was once so strewn with boulders that boats had to be portaged across it, but Glenn Wooldridge, an early river runner on the Rogue, dynamited a passage in the 1950s (see video: Blossom Bar Blasting). While Blossom can now be run, it has claimed several lives in recent years.When I stood on that rock for the first time, I was surrounded by a crew of experienced river runners, watching as the group right before us struggled to hoist an 18′ rubber raft off the Picket Fence, a line of jagged rocks it had hit when it missed the first turn to the right. While they hauled on an elaborate rigging of ropes and pulleys, one crew member sat off to the side, alone, with his head in his hands, and his arm in a makeshift splint—a casualty of a river mishap that had occurred just prior to our arrival. My freshly varnished hand-built mahogany-plywood drift boat barely had a scratch on it, and I was as worried about what the rapid might do to it as much as what it might do to me. I’d been told so many times that rapid and the whole lower Rogue is no place for a boat made of wood that I’d started to believe it.I made it through the rapid that first time without a scratch, but that was a thousand river miles and several thousand rapids ago. I’ve been on many of the rivers in Oregon, chasing fish, and running rapids in my wooden drift boat, and each river has a distinct personality. Some are fussy, some are sophisticated; others are fickle, elegant, classy, and even sacred. But the Rogue is a breed apart. It’s the river where Zane Grey did his best writing, where John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn, Merrill Streep and Kevin Bacon made movies; it’s a river where famous athletes and dignitaries have fished. And it’s a river that doesn’t suffer fools lightly. The Rogue is rowdy. Rough and rugged, it represents the American West when it was wild. The Rogue brings out the best in me as a river runner, a fisherman, and an outdoorsman. I’ve run the lower Rogue in every season of the year, in a wide variety of weather conditions, always with the same wood boat and mostly with the same river crew.

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