Bryce Whitmore (USA)

Bryce first entered the world of boating on an ice floe at the age of 12 or 13 in 1938. This evolved into a large apple crate, and then finally a Klepper kayak. After numerous “upgrades”, Bryce decided to make his own fiberglass mold from a wooden cradle and aluminum newspaper crates. This was likely the first fiberglass kayak on the West Coast, and perhaps in the US. He built and sold about 15 boats to his friends in the river touring section of the Sierra Club in Berkeley, CA. This was 1956 and the beginning of first descents by Bryce all over CA; including the Kings, SF Eel, San Lorenzo, Truckee, Upper Sacramento, Merced, Kaweah and others.

Bryce excelled at slalom kayak competitions in the sixties. He placed first in slalom at the Salida, Colorado races in 1960, was chosen to represent the United States at the 1961 World Competition in Dresden, Germany, and placed first in slalom at the National Kayak Championships on the North Fork of the Feather River in 1962. He was disqualified, however, because the judges decided he was a “professional”, because he had founded the rafting company Wilderness Water Ways.

In 1960, before starting his own company, Bryce led kayak trips with Lou Elliot for the Sierra Club River Touring Section. They ran trips on the Salmon River, the Columbia River, the rapids below Niagara Falls and on the Colorado River in Glen Canyon. This included a trip with David Brower and Eliot Porter. Bryce purchased a pair of pontoons and an aluminum skiff and recreated a version of Lou’s raft. He named his company Wilderness Water Ways and began offering trips on the Sacramento River. He motored the 57-mile stretch of the Sacramento River between Redding and Red Bluff. For $20 you could spend two days fishing and sun-bathing on his 20 by 24-foot raft. This price included two lunches, a breakfast, a steak barbecue, and a campfire sing-along. Of course the huge pontoon/John boat rig was much too large for this small Sierra river, so he found four WWII surplus basket boats in Seattle, took out the inflatable floors, and cut off the over-arching tubes that were designed to support a sun awning. They were dubbed 15-mans because they were engineered to carry that many servicemen when used as life rafts, in case a German U-boat torpedoed their ship. In later years Bryce added a few surplus 10-man assault rafts to his fleet. They’d been built for amphibious landings during the war. Bryce broadened his trip offerings to the Stanislaus, and soon added the Tuolumne, Klamath, Trinity, Clear Creek, Owyhee, Feather, South Fork of the American and Eel, Illinois, and the Rogue River to his line-up.

In August of 1968, Bryce and Sonora resident Donald Segerstrom completed an exploratory run on the Tuolumne, rowing a Super Sport, Bryce’s first iteration of his series of self-bailers. Putting in at Meral’s Pool just below Lumsden Falls, this dynamic duo took two days to traverse the 17-mile reach. Because Bryce’s Super Sports proved a bit short for class IV whitewater, he asked Rubber Fabricators out of Maryland to make several tubes. Each tube had a two-inch, vulcanized seam along each side with grommet holes spaced about six inches apart. They could be rigged four across, to resemble a pregnant air mattress (what was called a Huck Finn) or with two tubes spaced a couple of feet apart, making what later became called a cataraft (a configuration designed by Marty McDonnell). The Huck Finns’ thick rubber almost never developed a leak, but they were extremely heavy to load onto a truck at take out. When they crashed through a wave, the water drained off between the tubes and, therefore, never needed bailing. To prevent other outfitters from copying his design Bryce applied a stencil that read “Bridgestone Rubber”— a red herring.

The following year, using the newly minted Huck Finns, Wilderness Water Ways began their first Tuolumne trips with paying passengers. Commercial rafting started to take off in the early 70’s and there were now 8 outfitters. Bryce sold his California operation and moved north to Oregon where he would be an outfitter on the Rogue River until selling his operation in 1986. From 1973 until 1986 he personally ran the Saturday and Wednesday trips. He was on the water Saturday through Monday, and Wednesday through Friday. On Tuesday, his only day off the river, he bought and packed food, repaired equipment, ran errands, etc. That’s seven work days a week, and river days are at least 14 hours long. A brutal pace by any normal standard, but he loved being on the water, and he was far from normal.

Bryce was a true pioneer in the early 1900’s of both kayaking and rafting and revolutionized the sport on the West Coast!