Monday photo feature

I mentioned yesterday that Conrad Anker was in town over the weekend.  That capped a pretty big week for Memphis in terms of entertaining significant outdoor-sports visitors.

Earlier last week a giant of paddlesports passed through my fair city.  Even though Andrew McEwan might not be the most famous name in the paddling world, I rank him right up there with the most accomplished paddlers I've ever met.

That's a rather bold statement, I know, seeing as how I'm acquainted with several world and Olympic champions, and Andrew doesn't have anything like that on his resume.  But the breadth of what Andrew has done is something I find truly impressive.  He's sort of like a world-class decathlete in our sport: not the best at any one discipline, but able to perform at a very high level in all of them.

Andrew is the son of Tom McEwan, a whitewater racing pioneer in this country in the late 60s and early 70s and, later, a leader of international paddling expeditions.  And he's the nephew of the late Jamie McEwan, the first Olympic medalist for the U.S. in whitewater slalom.  So it's no surprise that Andrew was paddling at an early age.

Andrew grew up doing some slalom and some wildwater racing, eventually becoming the top wildwater kayaker in the U.S. in the 1990s and 2000s.  He tried his hand at flatwater sprint racing in the early 2000s, and raced very well even though he fell short of his goal of making the 2004 Olympic team.  Though I'm not aware of him doing a huge amount of surf ski racing, he did manage to finish fourth at the U.S. surf ski championships in San Francisco Bay one year.  All the while, he was piling up wins in events like the Upper Gauley Race and the Cheat River Race.

In the mid to late 2000s Andrew followed his dad's path into expedition paddling, navigating the harsh sub-Arctic wilderness of the Back River in Nunavut Territory and the high-altitude streams of the Pamir Mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.  During that latter expedition he even helped start a camp for the youth of the region.

So it would seem that at the tender age of 38, Andrew has just about done it all.  And yet, he's still doing it all.  Just this past year he entered extreme races on steep whitewater like the Great Falls of the Potomac and the Green River Narrows.  Then, two months ago, Andrew finished first among solo racers (fifth overall) in the Texas Water Safari, a 260-mile ultra-endurance race down the Lone Star State's Guadalupe River.  Those two types of racing are about as different as it gets.

When I saw Andrew last week he was picking up a boat I'd been holding for him.  He'd left his Texas Water Safari boat in Texas and arranged to have it delivered to me so he could grab it on his way through Memphis.  From here he continued on toward his ultimate destination in the Pacific Northwest, where he and his family are moving from his native Washington, DC, area.  They will be living in White Salmon, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Hood River, Oregon, where I spent a week last month.  I don't expect it'll be long before I'm reading of Andrew's latest feats on the Columbia and its many whitewater tributaries.