"Oci-One Kanubi" wrote in message
ups.com...
riverman wrote:
(This is a repost from another thread. I thought it might be worth
its own
discussion.)

...
What do you think:
a) Two identically skilled paddlers in the same type boat,
on the same day, paddling the same river together. One is dressed
appropriately, one is underdressed significantly. Is the rapid rated
the
same for each of them?
b) Two paddlers on the same river the same day, one is a novice, one
is an
expert. Is the rapid rated the same for each of them?
c) One is in a canoe, one is in a raft. Is the rapid rated the same
for each
of them?
d) A rapid is rated a class 5 (unrunnable) in 1992, but since then,
new
materials and techniques makes it quite runnable by advanced boaters.
Is it
still a class 5 rapid?
...

I say "No" to the fourth question; it does not retain its Class VI
rating. The formerly "unrunnable" Class VI rapid must now be rateds
Class V, but in keeping with AW's new rating system, the former Class
VI is now considered a Class V.1 or V.2, where V.1 is as much harder
than V as V is harder than IV, and where V is as much harder than IV as
IV is harder than III, etc., and, of course, V.2 is as much harder than
V.1 as V.1 is harder than V. What the actual degrees are is, by and
large, irrelevant. It may be that any grade is twice as hard as the
next lower grade, or 50% harder, or 3 times harder or 10 times harder.
The point is that the relationship of each grade to the grades above
and below are the same. The point of all this is that, as formerly
"unrunnable" rapids become run, they are added to the top of the scale,
such that nothing below them changes; a Class III will always be a
Class III, a Class IV+ will always be a relatively difficult Class IV.
Nothing changes except the number of grades inserted between V and VI.

The parallel with rock climbing rating systems is obvious and inescapable.
As the art advanced and more and more routes became 'climbable,' the new
routes weren't labeled 6s. They were stuffed into 5.X. When people blitzed
past 5.9, the mathematically offensive 5.10, and on were introduced.

The rock ratings are independent of such things as climber ability, weather,
hangovers, history of mind-altering drug use, etc. They do depend on
physical layout, sizes of features, separation distance between them,
exposure, difficulty of setting protection, etc.

The biggest difference between rock and river rating systems is that the
condition of a climbing route doesn't depend so heavily on the recent
rainfall. Within a day or two last week, my home stream went from
unrunnable low to in-the-trees flood with anything you'd normally call
obstacles far below the surface. The only thing worth rating would be the
total absence of eddies and the presence of strainers lining both banks.

...
None of this really matters a whole lot.

Finally, we get to the crux. :-)

Just accept that there can be
no absolute quantification of a subjective experience in a dynamic
environment. But it doesn't HAVE to be absolute! My needs are served
perfectly well with RELATIVE ratings. For e.g., if an unfamiliar rapid
is rated Class III relative to half-a-dozen other rapids that I know to
be rated Class III (at specified levels), then I have a good idea of
what to expect from this unfamiliar rapid.

The existence of a rating system erodes the fundamental idea of paddling.
We are each responsible for our own safety and the safety of our party if we
manage to get anyone to go with us. If I'm contemplating running a noisy
section of river for which the loss of the boat would mean a 25 mile walkout
through alder thickets, what I'd like most from someone who has been there a
description of a good place to scout from, maybe an estimate of the extent
of the run, the size of the features, the separation distance between them,
and the presence or absence of eddies or a pool beyond. The existence of a
published rating or description doesn't dilute my own personal
responsibility. Depending on the source, the report and rating might be far
worse than useless.

I avoid rating myself as a such-and-such boater. I might play (and swim)
happily in a warm VI within sight of the putin and there are a bunch of
kayakers around but walk around a III if I'm out alone in shebabaland.

Just my take,
Fred Klingener

"Fred Klingener" wrote in message
...
"Oci-One Kanubi" wrote in message
ups.com...
riverman wrote:

The parallel with rock climbing rating systems is obvious and inescapable.
As the art advanced and more and more routes became 'climbable,' the new
routes weren't labeled 6s. They were stuffed into 5.X. When people
blitzed
past 5.9, the mathematically offensive 5.10, and on were introduced.

The rock ratings are independent of such things as climber ability,
weather,
hangovers, history of mind-altering drug use, etc. They do depend on
physical layout, sizes of features, separation distance between them,
exposure, difficulty of setting protection, etc.

The biggest difference between rock and river rating systems is that the
condition of a climbing route doesn't depend so heavily on the recent
rainfall. Within a day or two last week, my home stream went from
unrunnable low to in-the-trees flood with anything you'd normally call
obstacles far below the surface. The only thing worth rating would be the
total absence of eddies and the presence of strainers lining both banks.

Another difference, I imagine (but am not at all certain about) is that the
hardest climbs were probably all rated by the same handful of leading-edge
climbers, while rapids are probably rated by lots of different folks in
different places, and at different times. Your point about rainfall is
important and well taken: imagine a climber getting to what he was expecting
to be a 5.4a walkup, only to discover that a recent storm has changed it to
a 5.8b. :-)


...
None of this really matters a whole lot.

Finally, we get to the crux. :-)

Just accept that there can be
no absolute quantification of a subjective experience in a dynamic
environment. But it doesn't HAVE to be absolute! My needs are served
perfectly well with RELATIVE ratings. For e.g., if an unfamiliar rapid
is rated Class III relative to half-a-dozen other rapids that I know to
be rated Class III (at specified levels), then I have a good idea of
what to expect from this unfamiliar rapid.

The existence of a rating system erodes the fundamental idea of paddling.
We are each responsible for our own safety and the safety of our party if
we
manage to get anyone to go with us. If I'm contemplating running a noisy
section of river for which the loss of the boat would mean a 25 mile
walkout
through alder thickets, what I'd like most from someone who has been there
a
description of a good place to scout from, maybe an estimate of the extent
of the run, the size of the features, the separation distance between
them,
and the presence or absence of eddies or a pool beyond. The existence of
a
published rating or description doesn't dilute my own personal
responsibility. Depending on the source, the report and rating might be
far
worse than useless.


Good point. Kanubi's point about rating systems being relative falls apart
right here. Being relative, and in the absence of an gubmint sponsored
rating team, its pretty inevitable that it will be locally relative, so
when you get advice from someone that a run is rated such-and-such, you have
to find out if that is a local rating, and if so, has anyone ever challenged
it. I remember oh, so well, when we were opening up the Penobscot in Maine
as a rafting river, and everyone rated the Cribworks as a Class V. Hell, it
was by far the biggest thing any of us had ever seen....but now, after 20
odd years of dozens and dozens of boats a day, tens of thousands of boaters
a summer, and not one fatality, not one serious injury, even among folks who
fell out of their boats, I gotta wonder if our 'locally relative' rating
system really was all that accurate, and if all those Carolina boys who
assured us that it was really just a bony class IV all along were really
right.


--riverman

"riverman" wrote in message
...

"Keenan Wellar" wrote in message
...
"riverman" wrote in message
...
To support my point, here is the AWA Rating scale. Look at how much of
it is subjective, without defining the subject. Terms like 'easy',
'difficult', 'easy to maneuver', 'easily missed', 'fast moving',
'complex'..... what boat are they talking about? And what boater? Even
reference to 'swimmers' leaves quite a few assumptions to be made. As an
open boater, I always am challenged by the reference to 'waves that can
swamp an open canoe'. And as a rafter, I can hardly imagine doing an
eskimo roll...

Read these descriptions, and imagine yourself in a huge raft. Then
imagine yourself as a novice in a squirt boat. The descriptions won't
fit the same river on the same day.

The Six Difficulty Classes
Class I: Easy. Fast moving water with riffles and small waves. Few
obstructions, all obvious and easily missed with little training. Risk
to swimmers is slight, self-rescue is easy.

Heh. Came across this:

http://www.wellar.ca/gokayaking/pics...tomofchute.jpg
http://www.wellar.ca/gokayaking/pics...endofchute.jpg
http://www.wellar.ca/gokayaking/pics...tecauldron.jpg

Was described as "riffles" in the guide.


grin Obviously, the guide was written by a rafter.

--riverman

Maybe! I never thought of that! Although I don't think you'd eve see a raft
on the Bonnechere, at least not in that location :-)

My wife and I actually tried to check with a local before heading out on
that particular trip. He seemed to know exactly what we are talking about,
and said that he thought if we found it too difficult to navigate we could
probably just get out and "wade down the riffles." Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Keenan
gokayaking.ca

I always thought river grade worked like this

Grade 1 take the mother-in-law / father-in-law
Grade 2 take the girl/boy friend
Grade 3 take the husband/wife
Grade 4 take the mistress/lover
Grade 5 take the photographs
Grade 6 take the mother-in-law / father-in-law.


By the way when I do my current lecture show about the trips I did in
Iran I describe the last few days on the Bakhtiari river as the hardest
grade 6 flat water I have ever paddled.

Paddling into vertically sided canyons with no eddies and no way of
seeing around the corner to the end of the canyon is incredibly
exhausting even when you are drifting on the flat.

The full report of the first two trips is on my web page - sorry I ain't
got round to posting the last years trip on the site yet. Got to find
time to unravel my Internet web page files - they got confused - don't
ask!

http://www.dmanby.demon.co.uk


--
Dave Manby
Details of the Coruh river and my book "Many Rivers To Run" at
http://www.dmanby.demon.co.uk

riverman wrote:
"Fred Klingener" wrote in message
...
"Oci-One Kanubi" wrote in message
ups.com...
riverman wrote:

...
None of this really matters a whole lot.

Finally, we get to the crux. :-)

Just accept that there can be
no absolute quantification of a subjective experience in a dynamic
environment. But it doesn't HAVE to be absolute! My needs are
served
perfectly well with RELATIVE ratings. For e.g., if an unfamiliar
rapid
is rated Class III relative to half-a-dozen other rapids that I
know to
be rated Class III (at specified levels), then I have a good idea
of
what to expect from this unfamiliar rapid.

The existence of a rating system erodes the fundamental idea of
paddling.
We are each responsible for our own safety and the safety of our
party if
we
manage to get anyone to go with us. If I'm contemplating running a
noisy
section of river for which the loss of the boat would mean a 25
mile
walkout
through alder thickets, what I'd like most from someone who has
been there
a
description of a good place to scout from, maybe an estimate of the
extent
of the run, the size of the features, the separation distance
between
them,
and the presence or absence of eddies or a pool beyond. The
existence of
a
published rating or description doesn't dilute my own personal
responsibility. Depending on the source, the report and rating
might be
far
worse than useless.


Good point. Kanubi's point about rating systems being relative falls
apart
right here. Being relative, and in the absence of an gubmint
sponsored
rating team, its pretty inevitable that it will be locally
relative, so
when you get advice from someone that a run is rated such-and-such,
you have
to find out if that is a local rating, and if so, has anyone ever
challenged
it. I remember oh, so well, when we were opening up the Penobscot in
Maine
as a rafting river, and everyone rated the Cribworks as a Class V.
Hell, it
was by far the biggest thing any of us had ever seen....but now,
after 20
odd years of dozens and dozens of boats a day, tens of thousands of
boaters
a summer, and not one fatality, not one serious injury, even among
folks who
fell out of their boats, I gotta wonder if our 'locally relative'
rating
system really was all that accurate, and if all those Carolina boys
who
assured us that it was really just a bony class IV all along were
really
right.

O Myron, my mistake; when I type "relative", I mean "relative to the
other classes", not relative to whatever other arbitrary criterion
(boater skill, craft, weather, geographical region) you might choose to
apply. The whole purpose and intent of the AW "benchmark" rapids is to
obviate the possibility of *local* relativity; to standardise the
system across the US. I should have typed:

AW has addressed this
problem, too. AW has set up a table of benchmark rapids. They list
several rapids in each class in each region of the US, to be used as
standards. Any writer describing any rapid in the US should rate it
by comparison with whichever of these benchmark rapids he is
familiar with; if he is not familiar with at least one of the
benchmarks in each class (up to his skill level) in the AW standard
table, he is probably not sufficiently experienced to be rating
rapids for others' use.

I s'pose I should have mentioned that a benchmark Class III in the
Rockies is judged, by people who have paddled both at the cited levels,
to be of the same difficulty as a benchmark Class III in the Southeast.
Here are the examples from the AW website for Class III:

north east
.. dimple-swimmers youghiogheny, lower pa 1.6-2
.. railroad esopus ny summer
.. slalom rapids tohickon cr. pa 1.8
.. entrance youghiogheny, lower pa 1.8'-2'
.. zoar gap deerfield, fife brook sect. ma 900-1000
.. railroad youghiogheny, lower pa 1.8'-3.5'
rocky mountain
.. raft ripper arkansas, browns canyon co 1000-3'
.. seven steps arkansas, browns canyon co 2500
.. pinball arkansas, browns canyon co 2500
.. government rapids san juan ut 5000
.. lunch counter snake, alpine canyon wy 10,000
.. split rock rapid yellowstone mt 3000-5000
south east
.. nantahala falls nantahala, gorge nc 3.25
.. double trouble ocoee, middle tn 1200-1600
.. diamond splitter ocoee, middle tn 1200-1600
.. narrows chattooga, sect. iii ga/sc 1.8'-2.3'
.. grumpy/snow white/ ocoee, middle tn 1200-1600
.. entrance ocoee, middle tn 1200-1600
.. double suck ocoee, middle tn 1200-1600
.. on the rocks nolichucky gorge nc 1500-2000 (2-2.2')
.. wooten's folly clear creek tn 2000-3000
.. dick's creek ledge (first ledge) chattooga, sect. iii ga/sc
1.8'-2.3'
west coast
.. meat grinder/quartermile american, s. fk., chili bar run ca 1800
.. wolf creek selway id 2.8'
.. railroad bridge drop (meadworks) green river gorge, upper wa
low-mod
.. trouble maker, s turn american, s. fk., chili bar run ca 1000
.. oak creek falls deschutes or mod
.. rubber salmon, middle fork id 2'
.. badger colorado, grand canyon az 15-22000
.. triple threat american, s. fk., chili bar run ca 900-5000
.. rock and roll/satan's eyeball wenatchee, lower wa 6000

Go to http://www.americanwhitewater.org/ar...y/Bnchmark.htm if
yer interested in reading the benchmark rapids of other difficulty
levels. You'll also notice all the *caveats* that you propose, already
propose by AW.

So. Is this perfect? Of course not. But it does mean that if I go
paddling in Colorado and Wyoming, knowing that I can effectively
navigate the Middle Ocoee (for which several rapids are listed here,
and several others in the Class III+ table), and knowing that Western
Whitewater describes Lunch Counter as clearly the most difficlt spot in
the Alpine Canyon of the Snake River, that I can be fairly confident in
taking a group of Ocoee-grade Eastern boaters down Alpine Canyon, even
if I have never been there before. I may read the book carefully for
indication of where and how to scout Lunch Counter, or I may keep a
probe team of my best boaters far enough in front to identify the
horizon line and pick a scouting landing, but at least I will know that
the trip is within the bounds of reason.

Fred, above, pooh-poohed guidebooks and rating systems in favor of
classic exploration. There is a lot to be said for that if you have
the time; I certainly love it when I have the opportunity to be probe
boat on a river I have never run, and I have run one or two with no
prior intelligence. But if you run rivers that way, you will run a
number of rivers that turn out to be too easy to be interesting, or
that contain portages-from-hell. It will be an adventure; it will be
worth doing; but you will not maximize yer whitewater jollies.

in July, 2000 I spent a month in the central Rockies the year after my
friends Jon and Karen moved from Washington DC to Boulder. The three
of us and a nice guy and good boater from Boulder named Steve spent 22
consecutive river days circumscribing Yellowstone. We started by
basecamping at Jackson, WY for the Gros Ventre Landslide section, Wind
RIver Canyon, Alpine Gorge, and the Snaggletooth section of the Grey's,
went southwest to Idaho (boring section of the Blackfoot; we called it
the Cow**** River), then north to Bear Trap Canyon, and east (Gallatin,
Yellowstone, Stillwater) and south again (Shoshone, North Platte) and
back to Colorado (South Platte, four sections of the Arkansas) -- and
I'm leaving out several. I was previously familiar with those around
Jackson, House Rock of the Gallatin, and the Arky, and my Boulder
friends were previously familiar with the Arky. ALL of the others we
picked out of the guidebooks. We made short lists of Class IV (or
nearly Class IV) rivers on our planned loop, consulted gauges and
release schedules, then Jon, Steve, and I took turns as probe boats on
unfamiliar water. We could have just picked rivers off the map and
explored, but I really wanted to get the most of my rare Rocky Mountain
paddling time, so the guidebooks and USGS gauges were a treasure to me.
It worked out fine. Occasional rapids (Kitchen Sink, and the Shoshone
at Cody) gave one or more of us a bit of trouble, but we never got so
far over our heads that we could not scout safely and perform safe
effective rescues when needed. In the Shoshone gorge we were pretty
much maxed out, but we had expected that when we put on, and we had all
made the informed decision to try the toughest thing that we would run
all Summer.

The guidbooks, USGS gauges, and a fairly consistent rating system
(despite tales we had heard about "Western Class IV" versus "Eastern
Class IV") served us in good stead and we were able to explore and to
have fun, without undergoing undue risk. The only time we were burned
was on the Cow****, and in that cass it was because an easy river had
been overrated; we never encountered a difficult river that had been
underrated (iow, where Western Whitewater erred, it erred on the
conservative side). It was up to us, however, to assess the weather,
remoteness, water level, and my ability to run in a canoe nearly
anything Karen and Jon could run in their kayaks.


-Richard, His Kanubic Travesty
--

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rhopley[at]earthlink[dot]net
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