| Otter Bar Kayak School |
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Page 1 of 5 Mix a few guys, kayaks, amazing food, a remote location, and some of the best water in North America, and what do you get? OTTER BAR. 
Steve Lynch executes the perfect Eskimo roll
To a man floating toward it in a small boat, Bloomer Falls looks impressive. As the usually loquacious Paul Johnson eyes the drop on his final day at Otter Bar Lodge Kayak School, he has gone silent. Here the banks of the Salmon River narrow to red-and-black stone pillars that rise from where the water disappears into a roaring void. Johnson sits up straight, cranes his neck, then swivels to make eye contact with his 19-year-old son, Sean.The current sweeps over the ledge, falls some four feet, and slams into the rock outcropping. It looks ugly. Sean paddles upstream, then pivots and charges the horizon line. His boat arcs gracefully off the drop and shoots through the chaos at the bottom. Paul follows. His stroke at the lip is tentative, and his line is not quite as pretty, but he stays upright. Better than last year, when he hiked his boat back up twice to try (unsuccessfully) to complete a run without executing any inverted maneuvers. That evening, when they walk back into the front yard of Otter Bar Lodge to sample the beer and margaritas, their friend Bob Ferguson meets them halfway. “How’d you do in Bloomer Falls, Sean?” he asks. Paul slaps his son’s back. “He’s a stud.” The elder Johnson has been coming to Otter Bar annually for the past seven years, bringing with him an assortment of friends and family. As children have grown up and obligations have drawn others away, the cast has shifted. Now it’s down to this group of men and their nearly grown sons. The years of building families have brought them full circle to this week of easy, bacheloresque self-indulgence. |
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