By Corran Addison
Photos:
Matt Gaynes
Paul Brossard
Graeme Addison
Corran Addison is a regular contributor to the Paddler magazine and owns Soul Waterman
Addison’s scale
I had concluded that there were three critical aspects to understanding a river before going there. How hard is it? How dangerous is it? And if you get into trouble, how long will it take to get help?
In 1985, sitting on the side of the UmZimkulu River in South Africa with my mentor Jerome Truran (the 1981 world silver medalist in downriver racing), on a section called Thrombosis Gorge, we were looking at a rapid and discussing how dangerous it would be to run it. Or how hard it would be. Or both.
We disagreed. Despite being only about 15 at the time, and him being a world champion, we diverged on the rapids rating. After a while, it occurred to me that we were not talking about the same thing. He talked about how dangerous it was if you messed up, and I talked about how difficult it was to make the move.
There was a really nasty undercut in the middle of the river, with most of the water pushing towards it. There was a clear line to the right of that over a ledge that wasn’t that hard to get to. Sure, if you went into that undercut, you were all but a goner. That makes the rapid a class 5.
But I reasoned, why would you end up there? It was easy enough to miss. Sure there was a little manoeuvring above, and you certainly didn’t want to blow it, but I said it was basically a challenging class 3 or easy four move.
We went on with our day, but that discussion stuck with me.
In 1986, I went to Corsica with one of the AKC’s premiere kayakers, Markus Schmidt. There, we met two famous American paddlers, John Wasson and Matt Gaynes. On one drop on the Liamone River, there was a drop with a nasty hole at the bottom. A really nasty hole. There were some other AKC paddlers there that day, and the drop spooked everyone. I insisted that it was straight forward. Just don’t blow it. Because on top of the hole being nasty, we were a long way from any help if something went wrong, John insisted that the rapid was a class 5. I thought it required class 3 skills to run it.
I ran the drop without any problem, but several other people got seriously mauled in the hole. Without the use of throw bags and ‘live swimmer’ rescue (with the newly AKC designed rescue harness vest), one of those swims could well have been fatal.
So who was right? The experienced John Wasson, or the little whippersnapper?
Green River
Now let’s roll time forward to the summer of 1990, to the Green River in North Carolina, USA. It was recently rediscovered; it became the ‘go-to’ run for anyone wanting a dam-controlled challenge. Rated as serious class 5, the Green had claimed one life and paralyzed one other. It was steep and serious.
Driving to the put-in with Woody Calloway, I argued that the Green was, in fact, not that hard. It was scary. It was dangerous, but it was not hard. He thought I was nuts. Everyone did. After all, it was proven the Green could kill you.
So I switched tactics. “What do you think is the hardest creek you can run without a paddle?” I asked. A brief discussion later, and they come back with “class 4 at most.”
“So if someone hand paddles a river, it’s class 4?”
They agreed. I agreed too. I really don’t think you can make the technical moves without a paddle on a rapid that is technically class 5.
I put my paddle back in the car and said, “let’s go.”
On that day, I made the Green River’s first hand-paddle descent, not for bravado, but to prove a point: the Green might be scary and dangerous, but it is not hard.
I was lucky that Wayne Gentry was there filming and captured the descent on his video ‘Green Summer’. I ran everything, and I ran them clean.
“But,” argued Woody afterwards. “If you’re saying it’s class 4, how do you justify that with the fact that it can kill people?”
“Because,” I thought, “our system confuses danger with difficulty. It is inherently flawed as a way of rating rapids!”
Back to the 40s
Let’s travel back in time to the late 1940s, when kayaking saw growth after the war. Paddlers had canvas canoes and kayaks, no life jacket or helmet, and few skills (by today’s standards). What we call a class 3 today took the skills of a ‘class 5 paddler’ at the time to descend, and the consequences for a mistake without a life jacket or a helmet could be deadly. When the grading system was invented, there was, in fact, a direct correlation between a rapids difficulty and its danger.
So why does it matter? If someone is invited to a new river run or is reading a guide book, knowing what you’re getting into before it happens is useful.
Let’s say Joe McPaddler is an up and coming intermediate. He’s progressing fast and is eager. Last weekend Joe ran a river that was basically a straight shot down the middle kind of run, with some nasty whirlpools and a few undercuts on it. He’d been told it was class 4 (rated like this because of the undercuts that have taken lives in the past). Now he’s invited to another river. There are no undercuts or anything like that, but the entire run is a series of critical must-make moves stacked on top of each other. Failing to make the moves is not likely to kill you, but you’re going to spend your day upside down, swimming, and you could get severely injured. If you do not have the skillset to make move upon move upon move, you’re going to have a very bad day.
So how does Joe know that today’s run is nothing like last weeks? After all, they’re both ‘class 4 creeks’. Well, you have a long discussion about it, that’s how. But wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could garnish the big picture of how those two runs are entirely different in a simple graded number?
Over the decade from that fateful day in 1985 to about 1995, I formulated a system that would separate the divergent and confusing aspects of difficulty and danger into a more coherent and meaningful grading system. I finally ‘put pen to paper’ with a new system I had devised on an internet discussion in a rec group, calling it at the time ‘Rated Scale’. People simply referred to it as ‘Addisons’s Scale’, and so a year or two later, in a video where I explained how it worked and called it that.
My goal was to create a short, easy to understand, informative system that gives enough information to make some basic decisions (such as “that’s not for me, I’ll paddle somewhere else this weekend”) without there being so much information that it gets cluttered.
Essentially, the goal was to paint in broad strokes what you’re getting into. Once you’ve decided yes or no, you can then have a more in-depth conversation about what’s about to happen.
I had concluded that there were three critical aspects to understanding a river before going there. How hard is it? How dangerous is it? And if you get into trouble, how long will it take to get help?
You could spend all kinds of time adding to that, of course. Are the rapids volume or rock induced features, for example? But this begins to stray from keeping it simple.
If we were building this system completely new, with no other system having been in place, I’d probably use a ‘metric’ system of 1-10. But since the 1-6 system has been around for so long, I concluded it would be easier for people to come to grips with the new system if there were at least some similarities they could relate to.
how hard?
The first thing to address is how hard the river is. What are the minimum boat handling skills I need to have to run this river or rapid successfully? Using the existing system, this is set from 1 to 6. A grade 1 is essentially moving water, some ripples and waves, with no boat manoeuvring necessary. A grade 6 is the most insane series of ‘near impossible to make’ moves that a handful of the worlds best can pull off. Everything else sits between those two. I wanted to keep this open-ended so that as more challenging rapids are run, as skills and equipment improve, the lower level rapids are not demoted to allow for the inclusion of ‘once unrunnable’ rapids into a capped rating system.
So the 1-6 is a starting point for this, not the end game. As needed, a 7 or 8 or 9 can be added and so on.
Secondly, you need to address the danger. What is the most likely scenario of what will happen to me if I don’t successfully pull off the technical move? 1, you’ll be fine. 6, you’re dead. Since dead is dead, there is no need for this to be open-ended. Everything else in the way of injury falls between these two extremes.
Lastly, what is my exposure? Will it take me less than an hour to get medical help, more than an hour but less than 24 hours, or more than 24 hours. I classed these as A, B and C, respectively.
Why does exposure matter? Well, if you bash your head and give yourself a concussion or get a compound fracture in a leg, and you’re an hour away from a hospital, you’re going to be fine. If you’re in the middle of Patagonia and you do that, it could be fatal. Those are extreme examples, but even in North America, some rivers are easily a day away from getting real medical help (unless you have a way to get a helicopter).
So the exposure rating has a significant effect on the seriousness of the danger rating as it can amplify it. Likewise, the danger rating has an effect on the technical rating, as it will influence your decision on whether this is a “step-up in difficulty you want to challenge yourself with” or one that you should avoid.
Let’s try this out
Joe stands above a rapid that has three ‘hard’ moves in it. A left ferry to boof, then a right-angled charge past a big rock that you miss to its right, that has most of the river pushing against it, finally to a second left charge to another left boof at the bottom. Let’s call this a class 4 difficulty given the moves and the time you have to make them: challenging but not impossibly hard.
Joe is just starting to challenge himself with moves like this. He feels that he most likely has the skills to pull it off, and if he does, it would be a confidence-boosting step for him and his progression.
What will happen to him if he doesn’t make that move right of the rock and gets pushed up against it or fails to make the second charge left and ends up in the hole?
Well, if that rock is just a big boulder with a pillow on the face, and the drop on the right after it has a hole that’ll give you a working and then spit you out, the rapid has a danger level of three. You ‘could’ break an arm on the rock if you slam into it upside down, or you could get a bit of a trashing in the hole and swallow some water, which is polluted and nasty. Still, neither are going to seriously injure you – IN THE MOST LIKELY SITUATION (This is important – you can slip and fall in the bathroom and hit your head on the shower corner, but it is not the most likely outcome of every bathroom visit).
This sounds like a good rapid for Joe to challenge his skills and progress. It’s a 4/3.
Now, let’s make that rock in the middle of the river a really nasty undercut; that’s a known killer. Let’s throw a log sticking out of the drop on the bottom right that could pin your boat underwater.
The technical skill required to run this rapid correctly has not changed one bit. But it just went from being innocuous to deadly if you mess it up. These two rapids should not have the same rating despite being equally technical to run. This is now a 4/6.
This is not the sort of rapid that Joe should be practising his skills on and challenging himself with, despite being the same technical challenge.
Away from medical help
OK, so let’s go back to the first 4/3 example and transplant this rapid from northern Wales to the middle of Pakistan, in the Hindu Kush. You are days away from medical help, and that medical help is likely to be very rudimentary at best. If you break an arm on that rock or get dysentery from the water due to drinking it in a hole recirculation, you’re going to be in serious trouble. This 3/4A just went to a 3/4C, and the consequences of relatively innocuous injury have become serious, possibly life-threatening.
It’s still a ‘3’ danger : the most likely consequence of a mistake is a minor injury, but that minor injury could become a real problem because of your exposure. The rapid is back to being something our friend Joe wants to think long and hard about before running. Perhaps it would be wiser to challenge himself technically closer to home and stay on the easier rivers while visiting Pakistan.
So why not call the first 4/3 a grade 4 and the second 4/6 a grade 6 and call it a day?
Well, Joe does not have a grade 6 skill set. So he should be nowhere near that river. But let’s say Joe is a comfortable and accomplished grade 4 paddler. He’s not a technical grade 5 paddler, but he can comfortably pull off grade 4 runs with little problem. Let’s place this rapid in a river run that is otherwise littered with 3/3B and 4/3B rapids. This is certainly somewhere he would be comfortable. It would be a fun and challenging day and probably very rewarding.
But halfway down is one 4/6B, in a ‘must-run’ canyon. Should he go?
This is, of course, a personal decision that only Joe can make. If you say there is a ‘must-run’ grade 6 halfway down the river, then Joe is not going to that river. He doesn’t have the skills to technically navigate a grade 6 rapid. But if you say there is one rapid that is well within his skill set, a grade 4, but it is very dangerous, he might decide to go.
Technically, he can run it. He has run harder. Now he knows what he’s getting into before he goes because there is one rapid that he must run. Under any circumstances, he cannot make a mistake: he can make a good decision based on sound judgment, relying on useful information to make it.
So what is Niagara Falls? Any fool can paddle over it, but your chances of survival are slim. On the flip side, help is right there. That’s a nice little 2/6A.
How about the Lachines in Montreal?
Massive volume with stuff coming at you from all sides, exploding, crashing wave holes, swirly eddylines, all dumping into a massive pool at the bottom. It takes solid class 4 skills to paddle down that successfully, but if you fail and swim, you roll onto your back and float down until you come out the bottom. That’s a class 4/2A. There are similar rapids on the Grand Canyon that would be 4/2B.
Today I wonder how that conversation back in 1985 with Jerome would have gone, sitting on the side of the river, the wise sage and the young whippersnapper, if we’d had this system. Would we have better understood what we were getting into? Would it have changed our decision? Because in the end, we both ran the drop without issue and carried on down the river. Until we got to the big falls and Jerome wouldn’t let me run it. As the adult in charge of someone else’s son, he said it was a class 5, too dangerous, and we were not running it.
Three years later, a Durban lifeguard and kayaker, Marco Begin, intentionally swam off the lip on a boogie board.
Change is not easily adopted, especially in something so entrenched as the grading system is in paddlesports. But like with anything, if we want to progress, we need to make that effort to let go of the past and embrace ideas that will, collectively, help our wonderful sport progress. Is this one of those things? Well, you decide. If you like it, start using it. Please explain it to your friends when you do so they understand what you’re on about, and above all, stay safe out there.
