Carlos Larson
Job: Raft Guide & Teacher
Primary Outdoor Sport: Rafting
Favorite Beverage: Coffee
Non-Outdoor Hobby: Card Games
Favorite Season: Late Spring/Early Summer
Guilty Pleasure: Video Games
Favorite Camp Game: Trout
Hot Take: Regular oar locks are better than Cobras
Book Recommendation: Indian Creek Chronicles
Three Words to Describe You: Rambunctious, Slightly Annoying, Gregarious
“My mom took me camping when I was three months old and then backpacking when I was 16 months old or just over a year. Then, my dad would take me canoeing on the Willamette. We did a lot of canoeing growing up, doing family camping trips, and stuff like that.
Then my English class in high school was an integrated outdoor program and we went rafting for one of the trips. One of my teachers tore his knee and they had an extra boat so they were like, ‘Hey, do you want to try? Try guiding tomorrow?’ And I was like, ‘Sure.’ The guy that was supplying the rafts said, ‘Do you want to guide this summer?’ and I said, ‘Sure.’ And he hooked me up with HDRO a couple years later and I bounced around after that.”
“Freeman River sports in the valley is where I started, but I didn’t run a whole lot of trips. Really, HDRO was where I like went from working maybe a dozen trips a summer to almost 100 trips a summer.
There’s a large learning curve to commercial boating and from canoeing to rafting. I’ve always really enjoyed water. So I would just swim through rapids when I was a kid. Being around water was really normal for me and felt pretty natural so translating that to boating seemed like a fairly simple transition. I just tried to be as creative as I could and tried things. Sometimes they went great and sometimes they really didn’t, but most of the time it all ended up working out. Learning to raft was one of the most fun times ever. And HDRO really provided a space for that which was cool.
We were all learning together. We had trips twice a day going down the lower Deschutes. There's boats everywhere and you’re all trying to learn new things and learn from each other. You watch each other and just get really playful in trying to do silly things on the river. We got really good at moving our boats around that river.
It was really fun and it was a really good community for a long time. We were all on the same team. It kinda felt like summer camp a little bit, just a bunch of young adults coming to hang out for the summer.”
“You’re trying to work with something natural and navigate it. Hopefully the river allows you to complete your trip. It’s pretty spectacular when you go to bed and the river comes up two feet in the middle of the night. All of a sudden, your kitchen is underwater. You’re thinking about how much harder the rest of the trip is going to be because the water is way higher or the opposite. The water drops out halfway through and you’re trying to make it to the takeout when you’re scraping on rocks.
We’re so dependent on water and have no control. You can make your best guess. You can try really hard to work with the historic models and whether or not there is going to be enough water. You do have to do a lot of research, especially on the more remote trips. You have to do a lot of research on whether or not it's a good idea to even start driving. You do that weeks/ months in advance and you have to get to the put in and decide if it's a good idea. You’re just trying to keep going until you should stop.
If you introduce cold and water together, that’s a recipe for a really bad time and so you have a lot less margin for error that you do on a 100 degree trip. When mother nature decides to show up and add difficulty, your margin for error goes way down. You have to be way better and so you have to look inward and just not make mistakes.”
“There’s no pause button. The river doesn’t stop flowing for you so once you’ve committed to something. You have to get to shore or an eddy to stop so you have to make the next right decision all the time. It’s a dynamic environment versus a static environment. Climbing is a very dynamic sport, but if you just want to stop for a moment the rock is not moving. Even at the base level for rivers, everything is moving.”
“The most memorable trip I did was the Rio Marañon in Peru. It’s the hydrological source to the Amazon. I went down there on a dam protest trip.
My understanding is that there were 20 proposed dam sites and some of them were 200m tall and they were gonna flood out hundreds of miles of this river that dumps the most water into the Amazon. And, it is such a turbid river. You put your hand two inches below the surface and you can't even see it. There's just so many nutrients going into that river and it was really going to change the ecological environment.
Some of the dams had a 30 year lifespan and it was all for hydrological power, but the power was promised to Brazil and it was going to be Chinese corporations that were building the dams. There wasn’t a whole lot of benefit for Peru it seemed.
So we went on a trip down there. It was like a half Peruvian crew, half international crew. We just kinda went along and tried to educate people in the river valley on what there rights were. That if dam surveyors came out, they shouldn’t sign a sheet of paper no matter what the surveyors are telling it is if you can read it. Because the surveyors were saying they were attendance sheets but really it was a waiver of rights.
We spent 17 days on that river. It was my first real experience with big features in rivers and I was kayaking that trip. I was there as a safety kayaker. I was really fun, but really scary. That trip was spectacular, memorable, powerful, and great.
From what I understand, it was really high volume for that river. We were supposed to be in Class II on day one and it was the biggest Class II I'd ever seen. Twelve foot waves. Catching air off the backside of the waves without trying to in a kayak. Boils that were four feet tall. It was a little scary. A three mile long Class IV rapid in there.
We lost a boat at one point. We went on a side hike up one of these slot canyons to go look at some ruins. Somebody didn’t tie up the boat and the river came up while we were gone. We lost one of our three 16ft rafts which had a third of our stuff on it. Then, we found that boat later that day eddied out in that three mile long rapid. Just eddied out flat, totally fine. The only thing we lost was a small watershed purse. But, we found that 100 yards later. We got all of our stuff back. I’m not sure how we got that lucky.
We would stop in these villages and do homestays. It was an experience of the culture and learning from these Peruvian guides who were these absolute studs. It was a special trip.”
“I’ve changed from chasing whitewater to chasing the feel of wilderness. The trips that I enjoy the most are when I feel like I'm in the middle of nowhere with preferably just my group there. That’s what I enjoy the most. Anything new is really exciting. Read and run, that’s my favorite kind of boating, not knowing what's around the corner.”
“Outside is where I feel most at home and alive. It’s where my brain is the quietest, when I’m just focused on the task at hand. There’s not a whole lot of space for thinking about everything that’s going on in the world when you’re running a river. My brain has to focus on just the water in front of me and I find it very meditative. It’s where I recharge to go back into my ‘society world.’ I think more people would be more balanced if they spent more time outside.”
“My best friends have come from outdoor experiences. It’s probably because of trauma bonding, to be real. It’s a high stress environment and you really learn who you’re trusting. You really learn about these people and if you can trust each other in such a high stress environment than you can probably trust them to bring over a side dish for dinner. They become people that you share these really stressful and meaningful experiences with. It’s really hard to describe that to your next door officemate.
Also, it’s a lot easier to have your guard down when somebody is saving your life. We can open up a lot more. Whenever you joke around and are silly with each other, that brings a lot of barriers down too. If you're willing to look foolish in front of someone, then you implicitly trust them. A lot of our job is to be foolish and fun and bring a light heartedness to some stressful times.
The trauma bonding is kinda tongue in cheek because not every trip is overtly traumatic. But, they all involve some sort of stress. When you work with people that can decrease that stress, that can’t help but give you a boost of serotonin. You’re working with people who are making your life easier in a stressful environment and you try to do the same for them. You all support each other. It’s a teamwork aspect. You have to be willing to be a part of a rescue at all times, because you’re on the same team.”
“Every time I get to the takeout, I turn upriver and I say, ‘Thank you. Thanks for letting me get down.’ It doesn’t take much to have a bad end to a trip. So anytime you’re able to have a successful trip, it’s magical and wonderful. It's a feeling of blessing.”
