Over the edge and 30 feet down

There are a lot of questions that go through your mind when you are paddling the last three feet toward the edge of a 30-foot waterfall in an 8-foot, 6-inch-long kayak.

Three feet from the edge: “How do I avoid that rock jutting out on the left near the bottom of the drop?”

Two feet from the edge: “Is that rock on the left or the right?”

One foot from the edge: “Definitely on the left.”

No feet from the edge: “Nope. Oh crap, it's on the right.”

30 feet later: “Bump! Splash!”

In all actuality, while I should be asking all of those technical questions that will keep the experience from becoming a painful beating, all I can do is hum.

Yup.

Three feet away from a torrent of rock and pounding water and all I can do is whistle a happy little tune. I can never even manage to hum a song that I like. This time, for reasons that are beyond me, I'm rocking out to “Red High Heels” by Kellie Pickler.

The song grates on my nerves more than nails on a chalkboard or some yahoo on a cell phone in a restaurant. Still, as I descend into the tiny crack and slip into the few seconds of chaos and clarity that exist between the lip of a waterfall and the pool below I hear Pickler singing in the back of my head: “I'm about to show you just how missing me feels.”

I'm pretty sure that is the only line of the song I know.

But the second the chaos hits, I stop humming. My body leans forward, my left arm juts out and a paddle blade braces off a rock wall keeping me on course. Less than one second later I am sitting at the bottom of a waterfall laughing and grinning from ear to ear.

All that build-up, all that fear and elation, all of it really only amounts to around three seconds of time falling, and the process that brought me there took months.

It all started when a friend of mine, who we will only refer to as Mike, flashed me a picture of someone running a waterfall in the Mountains of Western Montana and my heart immediately started to pound out of my shirt.

I am a new resident of Montana. I spent much of my free time while attending college at Appalachian State University in North Carolina (and some time when I should have been in class) looking for waterfalls and rivers to run and perfecting my kayaking technique, something which I admittedly am still working on.

But as the tiny pixilated snapshot flashed across the digital camera screen, I could not help but smell adventure.

Flash forward a few weeks: I discussed the chance of going out to the waterfall with paddling buddy Patrick Hooper and it only took him a few seconds to sign on for the chance to hunt the drop down.

We called Mike for directions and much to our dismay he didn't give us the advice we so desperately needed.

“You'll never find it, it took us hours,” Mike said.

So we had no directions and things looked pretty bleak when we took off for the hills in a car packed with Patrick, fellow kayaker Shevy Schmaus, my girlfriend and photographer on this adventure, Jamie Doran and our fearless eight-week old puppy, Sammy.

Patrick has only been kayaking for about a year, and Shevy has been paddling for even less time, so much of the weight of our foolish expedition rested on my shoulders because when and if we found our towering waterfall, I would be the one that would have to run it.

Shevy and Patrick really only tagged along for the opportunity to see me drop. I am quite sure that some deep-seeded part of them would have liked to see me roughed up a little bit. We had also planned to paddle the Buffalo Rapids of the Flathead River near Polson later that afternoon, barring a trip to the hospital, and Shevy and Patrick were ready to search out their own adrenaline rush.

My girlfriend was decidedly vexed about watching me plummet off the edge of the drop and Sammy was irritated that she would have to sit in the car for an extended period of time.

So there we sat, packed into my car careening “Dukes of Hazzard Style,” as Patrick put it, down dirt roads in the backcountry of Western Montana, following a map scribbled on a piece of notebook paper by a friendly grocery store manager at 9:30 a.m., after driving for the better half of the morning.

Without going into too much detail about the time we spent sliding down gravel roads in the wrong direction, after a surprisingly few number of directional errors, we found ourselves parked at the edge of a creek listening to the sounds of rushing water.

As we excitedly looked over the edge, we saw something that both raised and lowered our spirits at the same time.

“A waterfall, hooray!” I thought.

“It's full of logs, crud,” I said. We all gazed with disappointment at the beautiful, log-choked cascade before us.

Not to be disheartened, we remembered that our friendly grocery store guide. He had no idea what we were planning but knew we were looking for waterfalls and suggested that a short hike from the parking lot would take us to another waterfall that we might find interesting.

So we took off down the trail, puppy dog in tow, with no map or real idea where we were headed. Had we either of those things we would have noticed the inconspicuous trailhead leading downstream.

However, we had no map and did not really care where we were going as long as there was a waterfall there when we arrived. So we took off on the larger and much more obvious trail that went upstream.

About a mile-and-a-half later we realized that not only were we not going to find a waterfall up this trail, and even if we did find one, we would have to hike all the way back to the car to retrieve heavy kayaking safety equipment, a helmet, elbow pads, life jackets, a skirt, paddle and a 50-pound kayak.

So we abandoned our hike, and any hope of kayaking tom-foolery, and decided to go back to the car in search of lunch and a few choice beverages when out of nowhere I heard Patrick cheering.

He had found the trail that lead downstream and was standing on a rock beneath the first waterfall we had from the parking lot grinning from ear to ear.

Apparently, by heading upstream we had missed a set of four 25- to 40-foot drops right under our noses. After some careful scouting and consideration, I decided that only one of the four drops was worth risking my neck for.

The log-filled drop looked like a painful experience. One drop cascaded off into a crevasse and looked like complete and utter death. A third drop looked manageable, but it was squarely aimed at an undercut rock and was more risk than I felt like taking with only Patrick, Shevy, Jamie and Sammy to save my butt if things went awry.

Luckily for me and my often misplaced sense of adventure, there was a tight, technical looking drop of around 25- to 30-feet in height that landed safely in a relatively calm pool.

So there I was, perched at the edge of a waterfall in a kayak with thousands of thoughts rocketing through my head, but when I reached the bottom of the falls I could only think of one thing.

I am the luckiest man alive.

Not so much because I made it down the waterfall relatively unscathed, but because I had seen the world from a vantage point that few others have.

For the sake of how pristine and virtually untouched the streambed we found was, as well as the kindness of our grocery store guide, I am withholding the name of the waterfall.

I am also withholding this not-so-secret waterfall's location because if the adventure I went through that day taught me one thing it is that Montana is full of some of the most beautiful and untouched country in the nation.

While people all over the our country struggle to escape the daily grind of the nine-to-five, those of us who are lucky enough to live here are never more than a quick drive to an amazing experience and an incredible adventure.

While I cannot in good conscience suggest that anyone go out and kayak off a waterfall I have to say that the next time you have a full tank of gas and a day with nothing to do, go explore Montana, you will not be disappointed.