Barely an hour into the first descent of the Box Canyon of Wyoming’s Tongue River, kayakers Erik Boomer, Nouria Newman, and Ben Stookesberry were ready to bow to the inevitable. In just four miles, the river drops 2,600 feet through the Bighorn Mountains, a region that has produced generations of outstanding paddlers, but none who’d even attempted the Tongue’s nonstop succession of sheer drops, constricted slides, and blind horizons. Now, bolstered by recent rains, the river was surging through an impossibly steep gorge mined with hidden sieves and fallen timber. Newman had a bad cough and they couldn’t see a clear line through the falls immediately ahead, let alone those still to come.
It was time for a picnic.
Stookesberry reached into his kayak and pulled out an avocado. Newman, a 27-year-old former slalom racer from France, sliced as Boomer stacked tomato, avocado, arugula, and cheese onto slabs of Dave’s Killer Bread. The three sat in a patch of sun, chewing slowly,
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