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The Little White Salmon, with its clean waterfalls, beautiful gin-clear water, and continuous rapids, is one of the crown jewels of whitewater kayaking in North America. Flowing into the Columbia River on the Washington side, just across the water from Hood River, Oregon, it’s a place where expert kayakers come to live, to take up residency so they can paddle it everyday. From the looks of his Instagram account, James Shimizu is a very capable kayaker and spends plenty of time on the iconic Little White. But he recently posted a terrifying video of himself drowning and essentially being brought back to life by the swift-thinking team that was on the river with him that day.
In the video, Shimizu paddles into a rapid called Chaos, a dangerous drop just below the uber-epic Spirit Falls (below), a clean 30-foot waterfall made famous in countless videos, magazines, and posters through the years. In the old days, paddlers would portage around Chaos, a powerful hydraulic that sits just above a wood-choked rapid that can be chaotic to navigate in its own right and has killed other kayakers in the past. It’s a high-intensity section of river, especially given that it must be navigated after running Spirit. But now, as skill levels have vastly increased and equipment has improved, many kayakers choose to carefully run it to avoid the long hike.
As Shimizu enters Chaos, his tail catches in the current, sending him into a “stern squirt,” where the front of the kayak actually lifts up vertically in the water. It’s a “freestyle” move in less innocuous places, but in a rapid like Chaos, less than ideal. That’s where things got scary.
“A week ago today I had my closest call kayaking,” he wrote on Instagram. “I flipped in the seam (current) above Chaos on the Little White and got knocked out. I floated around unconscious in Chaos until Andrew Morrissey, Spirit Hiker Michael, Mary Morgan and Gavin Jostad pulled me out, gave me CPR and brought me back. Were it not for their swift actions I would not be here today. 🙌🏽🙏🏽⛪️ Happy to be alive and to get back on the water in the coming weeks!!!”
During the video above, you can see what an amazing job the team of paddlers did that day, saving Shimizu’s life in the process. A reminder that, no matter what you’re doing outside, it pays to have a stellar team around you.
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