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Outside Magazine October 2001
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That's Entertainment
Scenes from the Gorge Games, and looking for the new face of adventure

By Mark Jenkins

Kid rock: budding climbing superstar Tori Allen at the 2001 Gorge Games
ONE A.M., THE RIVER City Saloon, Hood River, Oregon, fifth night of the 2001 Gorge Games. The band finishes blasting its cover of "Eurotrash Girl," the drummer throws his sticks, the applause dies out. I'm standing near two conspicuously fit and blond young women.

Blonde One to Blonde Two: "God, it was nuking today! Did I spy you up at Rufus, pulling a vulcan on your 4.0?"

"Musta been another watermama," Blonde Two replies. "I was at the Hatch with my 4.3 getting slammed just duck-jibing. Saw a homeboy out there though. Ummm-ummm! He stuck a Spock once and the willy-skipper twice. Even tried the worm-burner, but augered bad."

They toss their hair back and glance over their shoulders to check if I'm listening. They must have mistaken me for a local. I am utterly perplexed. They start laughing and admit they have no idea what they're talking about.

"We're from Portland. We come out to Hood almost every weekend. Neither of us windsurf. We just know the lingo. It's good for guy-trolling."



"THE WORM-BURNER is something I picked up just before this competition," says Nathan Mershon, 19, winner of the Gorge Games men's freestyle windsurfing event. "I didn't invent it." (The worm-burner is a brand-new, 360-degree mast-swinging maneuver performed on the tail of the sailboard.)

Mershon is handsome, husky, polite. His grandmother sits on a rock, clapping, next to his mom, who cheers him on with one eye against the video camera.

"I started windsurfing when I was nine. My dad's a commercial salmon fisherman. We lived in Homer, Alaska, in the summer and Hawaii in the winter. Wave-sailing was all I knew until I heard about the Gorge Games and started to train really hard. I got fourth last year. This year I've competed in Austria, Spain, all over. I think it's the young guys who are really going to shine in this discipline. They're the ones inventing all the new moves."

PAT KELLER,15, youngest competitor in the Gorge Games' head-to-head white-water kayaking competition: "I've been kayaking since I was six years old. But I was also doing other sports. Downhill skiing, gymnastics. Then I hurt my knee real bad skiing, totally tore my ACL, so my dismounts in gymnastics really, really hurt. I was like, well, can't ski anymore, can't do gymnastics anymore, I'll just go full-time into kayaking. "The hard part was doing school and kayaking. But then when I was 13 I went to Adventure Quest. It's a school where you travel all around the world kayaking. I left my family and went to Canada to train. I competed in the Ottawa rodeo and got tenth place; then we flew down to train in New Zealand. Then we flew up to Vermont to train, then down to Chile. After doing rodeos all over the East Coast, I went home to North Carolina.

"My mom home-schooled me over the winter so I could keep kayaking. I have the youngest descent of two really hard creeks at home, the West Prong of the Pigeon and the Raven's Fork, both Class V. I'd like to be the world champion in rodeo. I'd like to put my name out to all the extreme creek boaters, like Tao Berman."

Carrie Keller, 49, Pat's mom, former rafting guide in the summer, ski instructor in the winter: "Adventure Quest is like a prep school for the best up-and-coming kayakers. Pat had the drive and the talent and he loved it. But he missed his family. I'm glad he did it. But it was expensive. Very expensive.

"I don't watch him when he goes over the falls anymore. I watch the videotape after it's over and I know he's OK."




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Mark Jenkin's first collection of Outside columns, The Hard Way, will be published in the summer of 2002 by Simon & Schuster.