The tongue carried them between enormous boulders washed down the Crystal Creek tributary over three decades ago. In the bow, the impact with the first standing diagonal drenched John and Caitlin with frigid water. The raft pivoted off the diagonal as Glen struggled with the oars to keep the bow downstream. They struck the second diagonal before they were straight. It absorbed their momentum and cast them off toward the right shoulder of New Wave.
They were drenched, again and again, as Glen struggled to keep the raft to the right of the channel.
The raft shuddered as it collided with a boulder. Chilling water cascaded over the side striking John with tangible force. He held his breath and squeezed his eyes shut to clear the water. The front of the raft rose out of the water for a moment before plunging down into another trough. Frothy water spilled onto John’s legs and pooled around his sandals. A boulder loomed to his right. The raft compressed against the rock’s smooth side, bounced off, and continued into the next slot.
John held tight to a rigging strap and wondered what he was doing there.
They skirted the edge of New Wave barely avoiding its dangers. The raft surfed sideways into the Slate Creek diagonal. The impact threw Caitlin from her seat; John caught her arm and held her upright until she regained her balance.
“Forward!” Glen yelled.
John and Caitlin scrambled onto the lip of the bow as the raft pivoted. Their weight helped pull the bow off the wave, and they swept on.
“Hole!” John shouted and pointed toward the trap.
“I see it. Hold on, this is going to be close.”
The raft swept toward the hole. Glen rowed furiously. They inched right, away from danger. John relaxed; they were going to make it past.
Then some variation in the current moved them too far right. A moment later they crashed into a granite outcrop. The jarring collision sent them spinning back left.
Before Glen could straighten the raft, the current forced them sideways into the massive standing wave of Crystal Hole.
The force of the impact nearly threw John off the bow. He clutched at the rigging strap while the raft spun into the hole formed by an enormous boulder hidden just beneath the water’s surface. The raft slammed into the wave again, and the river sucked the rear end under the surface, only to spit it out moments later.
They bobbed up with teeth-jarring acceleration. For a second, John thought they were going to pull free, but the vortex sucked the rear of the raft back down. It was the absolute worst situation on any run. The other raft might be able to toss them a line and pull them free, but there wasn’t time. They had to free themselves before the churning water ripped their raft apart.
Everyone hollered at once. Glen shouted instructions, but the two men in the stern had enough trouble just staying in the raft.
John grabbed his paddle and turned to help Glen push away from the hole.
He froze. Caitlin wasn’t sitting next to him.
She wasn’t anywhere on the raft.
His first thought was that the hole had sucked her into its maw. It happened sometimes. And sometimes the hole would bounce a person in and out for hours before some slight deviation in the current would spit their lifeless body free of the trap. No. Not the hole. She couldn’t be there.
He saw a flash of color in the water a hundred feet down river. The bright orange of a life vest rapidly receded through the rapids.
Without thinking, John yelled to the others and dove in after her.
He didn’t know what compelled him to dive in, she’d been on as many raft trips as he had and she seemed able enough. If he’d stopped to think about it, he probably would have stayed in the raft. That was the logical thing to do. Let the other raft recover any swimmers. But John reacted without thinking.
The force of his leap had carried him beneath the surface for a moment before the buoyancy of his life vest popped him up. Being splashed by fifty-degree water is not the same as being immersed in it. It was a numbing cold.
Twenty yards downstream, he could see Caitlin. She had remembered the drill and had lined up properly, but to catch up with her John would have to swim.
She was already entering the Bone Yard. He couldn’t swim in there. He’d have to hurry.
The life vest impeded his movement, and he was still far from her when he reached the first rocks of the Bone Yard. The river looked like a liquid version of the moguls on the extreme slopes at Copper Mountain. John stopped swimming and brought his feet around in front of him. His sandaled feet struck something unseen, compressing his knees back against his life vest and spinning him sideways.
The current forced him under, and an enormous impact against his chest forced the air from his lungs. Swimming hard, he tried to reach the surface, but the spinning, agitated current disorientated him. Several more impacts left him battered and barely conscious before he finally broke the surface. Oxygen starved, he gasped while swirling into another crest and inhaled almost as much water as air
The rush of air brought a stabbing pain to his chest. He coughed out water and inhaled again.
He floated lower in the water now, and bits
