Here we have a before-and-after pair of photos--well, actually it's after-and-before, since the newer picture is on top. We're looking at the famous Gorilla rapid on the Green River near Saluda, North Carolina.
When I was first learning to paddle at summer camp in nearby Brevard, the Green was one of the staples of the canoeing program--not the part of it that includes Gorilla, but a section a little ways downriver. Here we had a lovely Class II stream that was ideal for doing lots of ferries and eddy turns, and also for learning the right way to swim in a river. Green Cove Road ran alongside the entire run.
The putin for this section was the Fishtop access. To get there we had to ride in the camp bus, canoe trailer pulled behind, down a harrowing set of switchbacks. Seeing as how we essentially were descending the Blue Ridge Escarpment, it stands to reason that the river must have some steep gradient upstream of Fishtop. When I was a camper back in the early 1980s we occasionally heard gossip about "unrunnable" waterfalls up there, and an old guidebook said something about rock climbing equipment being required for a paddler to get down that section. But honestly, we didn't give it a whole lot of thought. To us, the Green was a place to go and work on the basics.
By the late 1980s, techniques and materials had advanced enough that a few pioneering paddlers began to believe that this section of the Green above Fishtop, known as The Narrows, might not be unrunnable after all. Then they went in there and proved it, running every last one of the rapids, including the raucous Gorilla and the frightening Sunshine. Before long a couple of videos, Green Summer and Gorilla, were commercially available on VHS cassette. Steep creeking had truly arrived. With Lake Summit Dam providing frequent flows, more and more paddlers sought to get in on the action.
I have never run The Narrows of the Green myself. I can cite a short list of reasons, and yes, fear of the place is one of them. I simply couldn't imagine myself running something as bodacious as Gorilla. But since the late 80s many people piled up dozens and even hundreds of runs on The Narrows and could do it in their sleep. Since the early 2000s there even has been an annual race on the Green Narrows.
The Green is one of the rivers that got positively hammered by Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago. Green Cove Road, including the switchbacks, sustained tremendous damage, and many houses along the road were swept away. I've seen some photos and video footage of this section of river that was such a part of my early paddling education, and it looks completely scoured out. It remains to be seen whether it will ever again be the ideal whitewater training ground that it was before.
Upstream in The Narrows, the rapids have changed radically. The word on the street is that nothing is the same as before. Pictured above is the "new" Gorilla rapid on top and the "old" Gorilla (during the 2017 edition of the annual race) on the bottom. The camera angles aren't quite the same, and the upper photo is closer in to the rapid than the lower photo, but it's pretty clear that an impressive amount of rock got washed away from the river-left bank. The early assessment of the few paddlers who have ventured into the gorge since the storm seems to be that Gorilla is no longer runnable. I won't be surprised if somebody puts that to the test before long, however.
Both the photos above are screen-grabs from videos on You Tube. The top one is from a drone video posted by a Wesley Shelmire, and the bottom one is from a video on the Kayak Session TV channel.
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