Everything Is Just Hunky Dory Plying Nw Whitewater Special Thrill In Wooden Boat

Survival is the bottom line for running rapids in Hells Canyon.

Style comes later, after a river rafter has put enough whitewater encounters under his bow to confidently look down the river and say, “Hey, I’ve got to row a dory.”

A boater’s yen to handle a dory’s oars is a matter of feel like a car buff’s thrill to drive a 1965 Corvette hardtop convertible or a hunter’s preference for walnut gunstocks over more practical synthetic versions.

You might liken it to the woodsman who cooks over an open fire rather than succumbing on the more efficient but less flavorful cooking of a propane stove.

Each boat in the tiny fleet of dories that run the big waves from the Grand Canyon to the Salmon has a flat bottom that sweeps up at both ends. Bow and stern are sensuously upturned. The craft, with their splayed sides designed to shed water away from the inside, can be made of materials such as aluminum and fiberglass. Most guides prefer the feel of wood. Dories don’t crash into waves. These descendants of the Portuguese fishing boat rock over the big rollers with a grandmotherly grace.

Dories are more responsive than rafts, but their rigid materials are less forgiving should a boatman make an error.

“It’s not good form to slam a dory into rocks,” said Rondo, trip leader on a recent commercial raft and dory trip down the Lower Salmon River. “Rafts bounce off rocks. Dories break.”

The hard-bottomed dories aren’t practical for every whitewater enthusiast. But they have a feel every river runner can appreciate.

“You can get attached to a dory,” said Rondo, who fastened a planter of blooming flowers on the bow of the Tenaya before he launched his trip. “That’s why each of our boats has a name. They have a personality.”

“People who’ve been around rivers for a long time can’t help but notice the dories,” said Curt Chang. “The boats are dramatic to look at and a blast to row. Sooner or later, guides have to try one out.”

Chang was 22 years old in 1972 when he and three other guides hauled a couple of dories from the Grand Canyon to scout the Snake River. Chang had been guiding with Martin Litton, the pioneer boatman and conservationist who helped design whitewater dories and give them a legendary presence on the Colorado River in the late 1960s.

No whitewater dories were working the Snake when Chang arrived. Local boaters weren’t sure the frothing fangs of Northwest spring runoff were an appropriate venue for a wooden boat.

The Snake, locals pointed out, has twice the water volume of the Colorado.

“It’s healthy that local reaction was skeptical,” Chang said. “That’s a survival instinct. It shows their respect for the water. These are big rivers, no place to experiment with toys.

“But coming from the Grand Canyon, where we had experience on much bigger drops and whitewater, the Snake was a vacation.”

Chang and his family put down roots in Lewiston, managing and later buying the dory-based river trip business that split from Grand Canyon Dories to become Great River Journeys, then Northwest Dories. Four years ago, they reunited with Grand Canyon Dories in a business sense by merging into a larger company called Oars and Dories.

“We run rafts and inflatable kayaks and paddle boats, but the dory is the center of our universe,” Rondo said.

Oregon guides had been plying the steelhead runs of the Snake and Salmon in McKenzie River-style drift boats long before Chang came to Idaho. But the McKenzie drift boat design that began to evolve in the 1920s was geared to fishing. It was a compact and open inside, with blunt upswept ends designed for minimal water resistance. This allowed a guide to inch his anglers down through a fishing hole, and even row upstream for another pass.

Litton and others modified the McKenzie design for whitewater.

While retaining the maneuverability, they expanded the dories, fine-tuned the angles at the bow and stern and adding a deck and hatches.

While every piece of gear must be piled and strapped onto a raft, a dory’s load is stowed neatly out of sight and out of the way.

Should a dory flip upside down in a monster wave, the crew can right the craft by crawling onto the bottom and grabbing the flip line attached near one oarlock. Then they “walk it over,” in a log-roller’s interpretation of the Eskimo roll.

“Even experienced guides occasionally find more than they can handle in a dory,” Chang said. “We’re getting real good at repairing them.”

Each of the 40 dories in the Oars and Dories fleet based out of Lewiston and the Grand Canyon is named in memorial to a naturally beautiful place that has been ruined by man.

“Martin Litton was into making a statement from the very beginning,” Chang said. “The first boats - Glen Canyon and Marble Canyon - were named after magnificent places on the Colorado River that had been inundated by dams. That concept expanded to include other environmental disasters.”

The Orca Bay commemorates a pristine area in Prince William Sound fouled by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The Tenaya is named for the peak and dome in Yosemite marred by road construction.

The Little North Fork (of the Clearwater) commemorates the world-class salmon and steelhead spawning area totaled by Dworshak Dam.

And there’s the Coeur d’Alene.

“Some people might consider it bold and brazen to point out trouble in your own backyard,” Chang said, “but the mining pollution in the Coeur d’Alene makes it a pretty obvious choice to me.”

Indeed, the dories were barely wet with Northwest waters in the early ‘70s before the company plowed bow-first into the battle to stop a dam from being built on the Snake between Hells Canyon and Lower Granite.

“Without the river, the dory is nothing,” said Rondo.

The appeal of dories doesn’t end with the men and women at the oars.

“Some clients get attached to them, too,” Chang said.

Last week, Oars and Dories ran a trip on the Salmon River specifically for clients who want to learn more about rowing dories. Some of them have purchased their own boats.

“This isn’t a guide training session,” said Marty Wellman. “These people have been on dory trips and want to learn more about them. About 80 percent of our dory bookings are repeat customers.”

The Oars and Dories whitewater season winds down this week.

The thrillseekers are fading away with the waning daylight. Fishermen tend to be the most common group to book trips in fall, when the parched slopes of the Salmon strangely come alive again with the orange and reds of autumn sumac.

Many of the sportsmen will chose dories, too.

No inflatable chamber to puncture with an errant hook. Maneuverability to get to the smallmouth bass, cutthroat trout and steelhead. Hardsided, hatched compartments to protect expensive graphite rods and the bottle of dinner wine.

To some people, a dory is the croissant of river running. An inflatable raft is the doughnut.

“Like life itself,” says an old Dories brochure, “the point is not whether you’ve been there, but how.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 color photos