Winter surf: Spokane paddler hunts waves in high water

The Spokane River was loud and powerful at Corbin Park in Post Falls on Tuesday, roaring past at more than 20,000 cubic feet per second.

At the east end of the park, there’s a patch of whitewater and a big wave off the edge of an enormous rock slab angled into the river.

You’d be forgiven for thinking it looks terrifying at high flow. For people like Steve Bailey, however, it looks inviting.

Bailey spent part of Tuesday surfing the wave in his whitewater kayak, spinning and turning in place until he gave in to the current and floated downstream.

Then he’d paddle into the soft water behind the wave for a break before heading back for more.

It was cold and windy. Rain spat on him intermittently.

“When the river is good,” Bailey said, “you gotta just put up with the weather.”

Bailey, a 46-year-old county firefighter, has been kayaking since the early 2000s, and he kayaks year -round. Some years, he’s logged as many as 180 days on the water. Winter doesn’t bother him. He keeps a log of the waves he hits and the days he hit them and the flow in the river that day.

This wave, which he calls Corbin, isn’t normally in play in December. Before this week, he’d never surfed it in the winter. But so far this winter has decided to eschew the concept of normal.

Warm and wet weather brought destructive flooding in western Washington and North Idaho. Among the rivers that blew out and then some were the Coeur d’Alene River and the St. Joe River.

All that water flows into Lake Coeur d’Alene, and, eventually, the Spokane River.

The Spokane River started rising on Dec. 10 and kept climbing through the weekend. By Monday, at the Post Falls stream gauge, it had topped 20,000 CFS.

That sort of volume isn’t unheard of on the Spokane, which is part of the reason the area was spared the sort of damage seen in North Idaho and other parts of Washington. It just doesn’t usually happen in December.

“The flows we see right here we usually see in April,” said Jule Schultz, the waterkeeper at the Spokane Riverkeeper. “This is really, really high for this time of year.”

Thrill-seekers took note. Still, the river can be dangerous, and breaking out the raft or kayak in December isn’t for everybody. Regardless of whether they’re going to mess with whitewater or cruise a flat stretch, paddlers have to know what they’re doing, dress correctly and carry the right gear.

Those who can stand it, though, might have the water to themselves.

Some paddlers prefer floating downstream, cruising miles of a river and navigating complex whitewater sections. Others seek out spots like the wave at Corbin, where they can burn a full afternoon on one feature.

Bailey guessed there are roughly a half-dozen people like him who bother surfing these waves year-round in their kayaks. He can rattle off the names of nine natural features that they can ride throughout the year. Each one comes with a different range of flows where it’s “in play” – meaning there’s enough water for a paddler to avoid the worst hazards but not so much that the wave disappears.

Corbin, as he calls the wave he surfed this week, is best between 17,000 and 24,000 CFS. Normally that happens in April or May.

When the river hit 20,000, he decided it was time to go ride it. He surfed it Monday and decided to head back on Tuesday.

He made run after run on the wave. A big eddy formed off to the side of it, sending a sliver of upstream current up the side of the wave. Bailey used that current to push him to the top, then skated over to the middle of the feature.

The wave pushed him upstream while the rest of the river roared past, holding him almost stationary. There, he played.

He did spins and half-spins. He turned the boat backwards – the stern pointing upstream, him facing downstream. After a short while, he’d either make a small mistake or give in to the current and wash downstream.

On a few runs, the downstream pull tipped him over, dunking his upper half into the water. Within seconds, he was upright again.

He doesn’t think of this as an “extreme” sport, but a “flow” sport. He says the same of mountain biking and snowboarding.

It’s about feeling the flow of the river and making the right moves at the right time.

“It’s more about finesse than muscle,” he said.

If he wasn’t there, he’d have been paddling somewhere else. He’s been out on days when he needed to break ice to reach the wave, and on days when the wind chill was below zero.

Now, to the logical question: Why do this in the middle of December?

“Being in the river takes away the rest of the world,” Bailey said. “When I’m here, I’m just focused on surfing and having fun.”