For those of you who read the last installment of Balls to the Wall, let me clear something up, Earl Parsons and I do not share shorts. I know there are some suspicious similarities between our choices in swim wear, but let me assure all of you that we are just two men with similar highly developed fashion senses.
That said, for the final feature in this series, we decided to pay homage to the upcoming summer season with some white water rafting. To do so, we embarked with Darren Nelson and his corp of instructors and trainees on an old bus loaded up with three rafts and one inflatable kayak.
The Rip staff for this mission, which included myself, online editor Michael Plaza, and staff writer Kyle Beall, jumped in the third raft with our instructor Justin Thomas and his younger brother Garrett.
As we floated through the choppy “wake up rapids” at the beginning of the run, Justin explained how the rapids were classed.
“Class one is pretty much a normal current, and class six is a waterfall. The rest of the rapids fill in the rest of the numbers accordingly.” He went on to tell us more about the Kern, which is rated among the top five rafting destinations in the country. The course we were taking was from the mouth of the Kern Canyon to Lake Ming, which is almost four miles. All the rapids in this run are generally class two to three, but the rapids above the canyon reached class five level.
The next major rapid we hit was the Bridge Rapid. As we were coming out of this rapid, we spied two fishermen standing on a rock which jutted out into the river. The oddest thing about this pair was that they were wearing life vests, which Justin commented on by calling them “dorky.”
As we drew closer to them, it was obvious that they were not fishermen at all. They were two more of the guys who were supposed to be rafting with us, which prompted me to wonder, “Why the hell are these two guys just standing here on a rock in the middle of the forest?”
I soon learned that this was irrelavent. This was Jimmy Bunting with his friend Brandon Hess. Jimmy didn’t need a reason to stand on a rock in the middle of the Kern River.
Never has there been a person more appropriately named than Jimmy Bunting. For anyone who has ever heard a “Little Jimmy” joke, Jimmy is the grown-up version of that kid.
Almost immediately after joining our boat, Jimmy set about entertaining us with his paddle tricks. At first, I thought these were going to be crazy MTV Sports caliber moves, but somehow balancing a paddle on your hand or spinning the paddle across the bowline of the boat aren’t the kinds of things to make Dan Cortese throw up the extreme metal sign.
Most of the rapids were pretty tame. I never really got a good adrenaline rush worked up. This was not the fault of the rafting guys, though. I blame the engineers at the Isabella Dam for throwing salt in my Kool-Aid. The water was just too low for the rapids to properly form over the rocks.
After Justin explained this to those of us in the raft, Jimmy gives his opinion of what the three real threats to white water rafting are: “Environmentalists, liberals, and beavers.”
He illustrated his third example by pointing out how the beavers had gnawed down one of the trees where a rope swing used to hang. A short while down the river he points out some small caves on the bank and says, “That is where the beavers live, like the Taliban.”
He never really explains how the other two are harming the sport, other than giving a conspiracy theory about how the deer are predators to rafters.
Justin had told us about a rope swing farther down the river, and I was pumped to use it. But we got to the tree, and there was no swing. I was pretty disappointed until Justin suggested that I jump out of it.
My only suggestion when anyone is thinking about jumping 20 feet from a tree is that they do not tuck their knees into the cannonball position. My improper form led this to be the most “balls to the wall” experience of this entire series.
Luckily, the water was cold enough to numb down the pain in my man area, so I only had to take a minute breather before I got out to photograph Michael, who was a bit more graceful in his jump.
We were shivering, but the sun was out by this time and we warmed up before we got back to the bus after a few more rapids. We were all smiles as we navigated the minefield of cow chips leading to the bus. Darren gave us all high fives and we set about planning out our next trip to the lower Kern rapids.