ThePADDLER 28
So why does it matter ? If someone is invited to a new river run or is reading a guide book , knowing what you ’ re getting into before it happens is useful .
Let ’ s say Joe McPaddler is an up and coming intermediate . He ’ s progressing fast and is eager . Last weekend Joe ran a river that was basically a straight shot down the middle kind of run , with some nasty whirlpools and a few undercuts on it . He ’ d been told it was class 4 ( rated like this because of the undercuts that have taken lives in the past ). Now he ’ s invited to another river . There are no undercuts or anything like that , but the entire run is a series of critical must-make moves stacked on top of each other . Failing to make the moves is not likely to kill you , but you ’ re going to spend your day upside down , swimming , and you could get severely injured . If you do not have the skillset to make move upon move upon move , you ’ re going to have a very bad day .
So how does Joe know that today ’ s run is nothing like last weeks ? After all , they ’ re both ‘ class 4 creeks ’. Well , you have a long discussion about it , that ’ s how . But wouldn ’ t it be so much easier if you could garnish the big picture of how those two runs are entirely different in a simple graded number ?
Over the decade from that fateful day in 1985 to about 1995 , I formulated a system that would separate the divergent and confusing aspects of difficulty and danger into a more coherent and meaningful grading system . I finally ‘ put pen to paper ’ with a new system I had devised on an internet discussion in a rec group , calling it at the time ‘ Rated Scale ’. People simply referred to it as ‘ Addisons ’ s Scale ’, and so a year or two later , in a video where I explained how it worked and called it that .
My goal was to create a short , easy to understand , informative system that gives enough information to make some basic decisions ( such as “ that ’ s not for me , I ’ ll paddle somewhere else this weekend ”) without there being so much information that it gets cluttered .
Corran Addison 1989 - Hell Hole on the Ocoee South Carolina . An easy rapid to run , with a nasty ledge hole with rebar in it just after this wave . Class 2 / 4A
Essentially , the goal was to paint in broad strokes what you ’ re getting into . Once you ’ ve decided yes or no , you can then have a more in-depth conversation about what ’ s about to happen .
I had concluded that there were three critical aspects to understanding a river before going there . How hard is it ? How dangerous is it ? And if you get into trouble , how long will it take to get help ?
You could spend all kinds of time adding to that , of course . Are the rapids volume or rock induced features , for example ? But this begins to stray from keeping it simple .
If we were building this system completely new , with no other system having been in place , I ’ d probably use a ‘ metric ’ system of 1-10 . But since the 1-6 system has been around for so long , I concluded it would be easier for people to come to grips with the new system if there were at least some similarities they could relate to .
Corran Addison on the Dwaars , South Africa , 1984 . A straight forward 10m drop with syphons in the entry , and on both sides of the landing . Class 3 / 5B Photo Graeme Addison