‘This is exactly what we wanted’: Whitewater course turns 4

A lot of water has flowed out of the North Highlands Dam, rushed through the rocks and gone under the bridges since Columbus’ whitewater rafting course opened on Memorial Day weekend in 2013.

It was not the same course then. The launch below the dam near 35th Street in Columbus didn’t exist. Rafts launched from a flat, open spot in Phenix City. Some of the current rapids weren’t there – such as “Ambush” and “Jaws,” on the course’s north end. Others had different names, and some, such as “Pemberton Falls” – which wasn’t named “Pemberton Falls” then – were yet to be improved.

It was not what it is now, but after a $25 million investment and years of planning, engineering and construction that included dynamiting two dams and installing a “waveshaper” machine for the signature rapid now called “Powerhouse,” it was open, and people were in a rush to try it out.

Working that course has been a rush ever since, outfitter Whitewater Express owner Dan Gilbert said Tuesday while looking back over the past four years.

“It has been the most fun I’ve ever had in the outdoor business,” said Gilbert, who started in 1980.

The Chattahoochee River here was unlike long-established whitewater courses such as the Ocoee River in Tennessee and the Nantahala River in North Carolina, he said: “We created the venue.”

Meaning not that Columbus created the river, but the whitewater course on it, building rapids to make the most of the drop in elevation here that marks the Fall Line, the remains of a prehistoric sea coast across Georgia from Columbus to Augusta.

Building the course was one challenge, a milestone marked with a grand opening on May 25, 2013. Learning to use it was another, as illustrated in a video posted to YouTube on May 28, 2013, after nine rafts spilled their crews going through Cut Bait, the rapid just west of Powerhouse.

Cut Bait was a natural rapid that had to be modified so it wouldn’t trap people in the hydraulic. It was engineered to spit swimmers out so the current would carry them downstream.

It spit out rafters who went overboard, but empty rafts stuck.

In a five-minute, 39-second video Chuck Cumiskey shot and posted, the first in a set of rafts shoots right through Cut Bait, as does a second, but a third is moving too slow. The hydraulic holds and flips it, slamming the guide head-first into the rapid.

In the “pileup” that ensues, nine rafts spill their crews in Cut Bait, with some blocking the channel. Five make it through, including the two that preceded the initial mishap.

Maybe the video didn’t “go viral,” as we say now, but it sure got people’s attention. “That got us more publicity than anything,” Gilbert said, though initially no one knew whether that was good or bad: Would it scare people or thrill people?

The outfitter briefly stopped running Cut Bait while re-evaluating the approach. Gilbert said they retrained guides on going through the rapid and set a pace to avoid pileups. A guide now stands on the riverbank to monitor the run and signal colleagues upstream if a raft overturns and blocks the channel, Gilbert said.

He thinks two aspects of the operation have helped grow clientele: He hasn’t raised prices since the course opened, and he hasn’t turned anyone away.

“We’ve never said we can’t take more people,” he said. If after filling all the other rafts on a run, the guides have just one customer who wants to go, they get him a raft, Gilbert said. That one customer may be so appreciative that he or she persuades 20 more to run the course.

He started with 35 guides and five to seven people working full-time. Now the course employs 175 guides, most of them seasonal workers, with 50-60 employees working full-time, he said.

In the early days, it wasn’t clear whether the Chattahoochee course would have a “season,” as the weather this far south is so much warmer than the mountains, where the Ocoee and Nantahala courses close each winter.

It’s clear now: “We are year-round,” Gilbert said, with rafts running four or five days a week in the winter. “It’s rare that we don’t have something going.”

A seventh-generation Atlantan, Gilbert recently decided to move here. “I have really fallen in love with this community,” he said.

He appreciates not only the support his business gets from the city, Uptown Columbus and the W.C. Bradley Co., but from regular, everyday people: “The community support down here is fantastic.”

He can’t go anywhere here in a Whitewater Express shirt – out to eat or to a gas station – without someone asking how the business is going or what’s new, he said: “They’re all excited.”

But he can go out of town, even just to Macon, and find people who still are surprised to see his shirt says “Columbus, Ga.” He said they read that and ask, “What, you have whitewater rafting?” The company has expanded its advertising to try to remedy that.

He looks forward to expanding the Whitewater Express Blue Heron zipline, which will be extended so customers can zipline from a tower by the Phenix City Amphitheater to a landing just below the splash pad on the Columbus side.

That work is expected to be finished in about a month, so the new line should be ready by July 4, he said.

Now that he’s a resident, Gilbert can spend more time down by the river, where he loves to stroll along the RiverWalk watching rafters running on the course, people doing yoga on surfboards in the flat water, zipliners zooming overhead and bicyclists pedaling by, a whir of activity.

He remembers how it started, marvels at what it has become, and thinks, “This is exactly what we wanted.”

This story was originally published May 31, 2017 at 2:36 PM with the headline "‘This is exactly what we wanted’: Whitewater course turns 4."