Aspen whitewater guides on rapid ascent
Team Riff Raft, made up of Aspen-area rafting guides, competes in Cañon City on Saturday in the United States Rafting Association’s national championship. The team swept each of the four events and beat longtime national champions 9-Ball Watermen in a mass start race.
Photo courtesy of Ground2Air Productions
Published in the Aspen Daily News, June 28, 2023
Local rafters are on their way to a yet-to-be-determined location to pit their paddling skills against the best in the world after winning the national championship in Cañon City last weekend.
Four Aspen-based rafting guides — Tyler Aikens, Trevor Fredrickson and Conrad Niven of Blazing Adventures and Curtis Berklund of Elk Mountain Expeditions — secured the national title in the United States Rafting Association’s men’s whitewater open division over one other team, assuming the role of the national team in the upcoming world championships. They bore a name — albeit a placeholder one — that should strike a chord with longtime local rafters, calling themselves “Riff Raft.”
The event marked a changing of the guard as the longtime top team in the country, the 9-Ball Watermen of Vail, moved to the masters division for competitors aged 40 and up. Still elite in each of the races, Riff Raft managed to best them in the Downriver race.
“It’s awesome, especially beating the outgoing U.S. team because they’re beasts,” Niven said. “They’re usually ranked in the top three or four in the world, so to beat them in a race was really sweet. It’s kind of been a dream of all of ours on the team for the last three or four years since we’ve been gunning for this. To be like, ‘Oh, now we’re the U.S. rafting team,’ is weird to say without (beating them).”
The downriver race included a mass start of all teams regardless of classification, and Riff Raft edged out 9 Ball by just over half a second. The defending champs, however, proved their dominance with a better time in the sprint race by just .02 seconds, even if the two teams didn’t directly compete in that leg.
The 9-Ball Watermen will still represent the U.S. as its masters champion, but will have the Riff Raft in center stage as the open division representative.
“For team Riff Raft to beat the 9-Ball men’s team is a pretty big deal,” Chris Moffett, president of Royal Gorge RIO and the organizer of the national championship competition, said. “9-Ball usually wins every time, so that’s pretty momentous. It’s a big deal.”
Riff Raft bested their in-class opponent, Old School, in each of the four competitions: slalom, head-to-head, sprint and downriver. Niven said that the sport took a stumble with COVID-19 and is looking to rebuild its competitor numbers in its aftermath, and there would typically be more than two teams competing for a national championship.
Members of team Riff Raft, from left to right, Trevor Fredrickson, Conrad Niven, Curtis Berklund and Tyler Aikens, pose in front of the Arkansas River in Cañon City. The team won the men’s open division national title and has assumed the role of the U.S. National Whitewater rafting team.
But, being national champions, Nivens said one of the things he’s excited about is getting to play a role in that rebuild: Members from championship teams serve on organizational body boards and will get to assist in attempting to organize more events around the country.
“You’re just the face of U.S. rafting, kind of,” Niven said. “You’re trying to promote participation in raft racing and make it accessible and easy for people to get into and try to make it approachable. … After Covid, everything kind of imploded, so we’ll try to get more events around the country, get participation up because that’s when it’s the most fun — when you have like 30 teams altogether trying to fight for it.”
Niven said the quartet has benefited from having challenging rafting routes like Slaughterhouse immediately available to them for training. The team came together, Nevin said, by balancing some of the world-class talent in the area with chemistry. He said Fredrickson has been his racing partner for the longest period of time, while Aikens is the newest competitive rafter who has taken to rigorous training. Niven called Berklund the “glue guy” who brings humor with his accomplishments as a rafter.
The team is still deciding on a permanent name but wanted to pay homage to their roots in the meantime. Riff Raft was the name of a local rafting company that was founded in 1979 and bought by Blazing Adventures in 2004.
Locals also had success on the women’s side, with Blazing Adventures guide Tess Howland and Elk Mountain Expeditions guide Casie Hancock representing half of the Red Ladies roster that finished second in the women’s open.
For the new national champs, it’s undecided when and where they’ll compete on the international stage. Last year’s competition was held in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2019, the second-most recent competition due to COVID, the championships were in Australia. The U.S. last hosted in 2001 in West Virginia.
Blazing Adventures will tie some fundraising efforts for travel expenses and gear into some of their 50th anniversary celebrations, Niven said.
In the meantime, Riff Raft will be competing in Slaughter Fest this Saturday and will return to Cañon City for the Royal Gorge Whitewater Festival on July 21-22.
Rich Allen, rich@aspendailynews.com
