PIONEER PADDLER.

Byline: Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

In 1945, Rob Blickensderfer covered the wooden frame of an old homemade kayak owned by a high school friend's uncle with canvas, then sealed it by rubbing a mixture of clay and oil into the surface and painting it. With a paddle made out of "a stick and some plywood," he carried the kayak to a rain-swollen river near his home in Ohio and began paddling upstream.

"It was very tippy," he recalls. "It's a wonder I didn't drown - I was all by myself."

For more than 20 years, that was Blickensderfer's one and only kayaking experience. But the adventure left a strong impression.

"I've always had this vision in my mind of myself going down a river in a kayak," said Blickensderfer - now 77 years of age and with hair as white as the froth in a Class V rapid - who is the dean of Oregon kayakers.

Blickensderfer was in his late 30s when he came to Oregon to work as a research metallurgist in Albany and rekindled his kayaking interest. He wound up helping pioneer whitewater river running in this state, and helping write the book on kayaking here.

"As far as I know, I'm the oldest whitewater kayaker in Oregon," Blickensderfer says.

And he ought to know, having watched first-hand as kayaks evolved from canvas to fiberglass to high-impact plastic, and as the sport grew from a handful of river fanciers.

Blickensderfer was not the first river kayaker in Oregon. But he was part of the first small wave of boaters exploring gentler whitewater sections of various Oregon rivers.

Among the others were Scott and Margie Arighi of Portland, who had learned to kayak at the University of Wisconsin. They helped organize the Oregon Kayak and Canoe Club (OKCC) and gave Blickensderfer paddling lessons.

"Rob was a good a student," Margie Arighi said. "Very enthusiastic, very disciplined, and very determined."

Soon, other kayakers were following Blickensderfer down unfamiliar runs.

"He was a little taller, and that was helpful in being able to see what was coming up," she said.

At the time, anglers in drift boats were the only other people on most rivers. River rafting had not yet emerged.

"If we went out with the OKCC, we were probably the only people in kayaks on a river in Oregon that day," Blickensderfer said.

He alone among the pioneer paddlers is still running whitewater.

"Some of the people younger than I that I used to boat with don't boat anymore," said Blickensderfer. The Arighis, for example, now limit their paddling to flat-water seakayaks.

But even a bout with lung cancer (part of his left lung was surgically removed in 2004) couldn't force Blickensderfer to hang up his dry suit.

In fact, when interviewed at his home in Albany, Blickensderfer was looking forward to the delivery of a new, shorter kayak better suited for running "creeks" in the winter. It will be the fifth kayak he owns.

"Kayaks are like a bag of golf clubs," he said. "Each one has a different purpose ... they're kind of specialized."

In the beginning, however, they were all the same - flimsy.

"Any capsize became a near-disaster, because it meant not only getting very wet and cold, but usually damaging the boat," Blickensderfer wrote in an essay on the history of the Willamette Kayak and Canoe Club (WKCC), which he co-founded in 1974 with Chuck Leach.

By that time, fiberglass kayaks were well-established. A used "glass" boat Blickensderfer purchased in 1969 "was the first hard-shell kayak in the Valley," he said.

He had that boat two years before - with the help of Arden Cory, a Washington Kayak Club member who moved to Corvallis - Blickensderfer learned to "roll," or right the kayak after being tipped over.

"Oh, it took me forever to learn to roll," Blickensderfer said. "I didn't have any teachers, for one thing. And trying to learn in the cold river ..."

Cory, however, "told us that in Seattle they learned to roll in a swimming pool, so we set up the first pool session in the area at the YMCA in Corvallis," Blickensderfer recalls.

After Cory demonstrated how to do the extended paddle (Eskimo) roll, Blickensderfer pulled off the maneuver on his first attempt.

"I was so surprised that it's still one of my best memories of kayaking accomplishments," he said.

Not only could they be rolled more easily, but fiberglass kayaks "changed the whole sport because it meant boats were so much more durable than the canvas type," he said.

However, the first hard-shell boats were far from indestructible.

"We did a lot of repairs," Blickensderfer said. "We'd boat on the weekends and spend a couple days mid-week patching the cracks."

Most of the early fiberglass kayaks in Oregon were homemade, using "pirated" molds based on European-made boats. People made their own paddles and used hockey or bicycle helmets to protect their heads. Wet suits purchased at dive shops helped fend off the cold.

Members of the WKCC continued to explore new places to kayak. Eventually, club President Bill Ostrand suggested that members' "river notes" be compiled into a booklet. "He thought it would be real useful for all of us in the club and maybe some other people, too," Blickensderfer said.

Thus was launched "Soggy Sneakers," a booklet that would eventually become the bible of whitewater boating in Oregon.

The first edition, with 106 stapled pages, featured short write-ups on about 80 "runs," each prepared by the club member most familiar with that stretch of water.

Blickensderfer's contributions included chapters on the Mollala, South Santiam and John Day rivers. A second edition, published in 1986, had 208 pages and included photos, maps, and "river mile" logs.

The Mountaineers Books in Seattle took over publication of Soggy Sneakers for the third edition in 1994. By then the book was 304 pages and included dozens of runs that the pioneer paddlers would not have dreamed of trying.

The fourth edition, published in 2004, is 384 pages and lists 220 runs.

While Blickensderfer would have tackled just about any of those runs in his paddling prime, he now generally limits himself rapids rated Class III or easier.

"I don't have near the nerve or daring anymore," he said. "I can definitely tell I'm more cautious ... I've gone down the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River four times in kayaks, but the last time (in 1999), I got kind of nervous. I wasn't comfortable on about three of those big rapids and I said to myself, 'I don't think I'll come back again.' "

Kayaking, Blickensderfer said, "is about half mental and about half physical. ... and I've lost a lot of each."

Be that as it may, the dean of Oregon kayaking - like Old Man River- just keeps on rolling along.

- To read Rob Blickensderfer's essay on kayaking in Oregon, see: www.wkcc.org/general_info/history.htm.