Beware of southwest paddler

[JB2012]

I always appreciate the voice/es of moderation, and the ideas for constructive change. Thanks, Gents.

[texasannie52]

I do know Marc MaCord being a Texan and all... I will say the one trip I took with him was memorable on the Rio Grande... probably wouldn't do it again with him, but on the other hand was in short supply for paddling buddies when living in Big Bend National Park. Paddling with a kayak paddle is common and one that I think is a good idea especially if you break your own canoe paddle.. don't you think? Just saying...

[A Savage spanke]

[quote="texasannie52"]I will say the one trip I took with him was memorable on the Rio Grande... probably wouldn't do it again with him, but on the other hand was in short supply for paddling buddies when living in Big Bend National Park. [quote]

Since I already stirred up one thread today, I figured I might as well do two (and just when some of you thought I was finally done posting). This has got to be the funniest reply to a two year dead post that I have ever seen. It has it all

[okieboater]

Being a fan of Big Bend National Park and boated out there a few times,
Texas Annie is correct.
Unless you go commercial, you better bring your own boat and boating buds.

Big Bend is one of those places where you need to be pretty much self sufficient in all areas. Gas and water (drinkable and boatable) being in the park but not easy to find.

I always felt kind of weird pulling into the border patrol check point in the middle of all you can see is rock and sand pulling a trailer with a raft!!!

Awesome beauty out there.

[drc]

As the AW streamkeeper for Texas, I have spent many hundreds of hours in the last year updating beta on Texas whitewater rivers and creeks and trying to make our AW page actually useful and current, so I can definitely appreciate how difficult it must be to try to maintain a web site like SW Paddler (AW at least provides a wiki-like platform that makes it easy to make changes to the beta.) But SW Paddler is not useless-- you just have to read it with the appropriate context, understanding that it's the product of one person's experiences. In some cases, I found Southwest Paddler to be a useful resource for things like figuring out where named rapids were along a particular stretch of river (so I could correlate those to exact GPS coordinates using Google Earth.) Like most canoeists, he over-inflates the difficulty of a lot of rapids (for instance, Dolan Falls on the Devils River is by no stretch of the imagination a Class V+, and there is only one rapid on the Guadalupe that is deserving of a Class III-- Hueco Falls), but if you talk only to whitewater kayakers, many of them will tend to under-inflate the difficulty of the same rapids. That's why AW follows the International Scale of River Difficulty and sets up certain rapids on well-known runs as "benchmark" rapids for various difficulty classifications. I make it a point to run as many of the AW benchmark rapids as I can in order to get a visceral feel of what Class II, II+, III-, III, III+, IV-, and IV rapids actually feel like, so I can extend that to rapids in Texas (usually after debating the matter at length with other paddlers over a beer or two.)

So in short, yeah, give the guy a break. SW Paddler is not a go-to guide for whitewater paddlers (at least for Texas, I'm trying to make AW the go-to guide for that), but it has its uses.

[panicman]

Yo, last post on that was 2012. Don't think anyone has even paid any attention to it.