Recent content by eckilson

My favorite picture of Norm. Hope someone takes over the business.

On my tent I see staking up the end vestibule door as a canopy/awning more for convenient access and shade rather than for protection from the rain. My tent isn't that tall to begin with, so sloping it down isn't practical. In the rain I'll close the end door and use the door on the side of...

"Now or never" is another one that causes even experienced paddlers to make bad decisions.

Not ready to give up my small tripping tent yet, but now that I am retired I’ll also be able to do more base-camping trips. I had been using an old Eureka Mountain Pass 3XTE, but I dug it out a few weeks ago and found that the plastic windows in the fly had degraded and cracked. It's nothing...

There are a number of social factors that effect people's perception of risk. Peer pressure is definitely at the top of the list, but there are others that can influence people's decision making. Things like: Peer Pressure - The group is all here - I can't let them down (the one that effected...

I have two canoes in both Royalex and composite - a RX Yelowstone Solo/White Gold Wildfire and a RX Mad River/composite Milbrook Outrage. They are slightly different boats in RX and composite. I'd say that generally the composite boats are faster, turn crisper and are dryer than their RX...

Just like the dams are different in different part of the country, the solutions to dam removals will be different as well. Again, in New England every river is dammed, often multiple times. Most of those dams are relatively small and have been in place for hundreds of years. The backwater and...

I'll bet the answer differs depending on where you are located. I my area (New England), dams were built as early as the 17th century to provide power for sawmills, grist mills, foundries, etc. The dams were small initially, but once they were built the damage was done to the river ecosystem...

That angled curling wave at the bottom is pretty tough to get through if you are standing up - I think I'll continue to kneel. ;)

I have never seen anybody try to pole through the Gap, but someone must have.

One thing about our group - there is usually no shortage of video. Here is another video of our group going through Zoar Gap - 2 kayaks, a paddleboard and us. You can see us catch an eddy at the top and wait our turn. Here is the video from the boat. It is 6-minutes long, but here is...

Most people stay at Country Air Campground https://countryairecampground.com/ There is a long list of campsites on the AW Deerfield Fest page (scroll down) https://www.americanwhitewater.org/engage/events/deerfield-festival/ I did a swiftwater session at Zoar a couple of years ago - it was fun.

I know, I go here a lot, but it is fun to run whitewater in the summer. With all the rain we have had recently there were actually other rivers up this weekend (Westfield, Housatonic), but Fife was closer for me. I did another tandem run in my 40-year-old Mohawk Whitewater 16 with Aaron as my...

The good news is that I am a long way from needing a knee replacement. At this point about the only thing that I can't do is the one thing that I really want to do - kneel for an extended period in the canoe. The only surgery in my future short term is potentially an arthroscopic repair on the...

A few years - yikes. At seven months I guess I am well on my way to that now. I get that recovery times are longer as we age, but I don't want to wait that long, so I look for short cuts like NSAIDS. They are good at taking away the pain but not so good for the rest of the body when you take...