Walt Blackadar

In 1970, Walt Blackadar opened the pages of Alaska magazine and stared wide-eyed at a photo of a massive, glaciated mountain towering over the Alsek River, a silt-filled maelstrom of icebergs and whitewater. Less than fifteen years later, that mountain bore his name and the small-town doctor and legendary whitewater kayaker was dead.

Walter Lloyd Blackadar Jr. was raised in New Jersey, educated at Dartmouth College and then Columbia University medical school, and in 1949 moved west to Salmon, Idaho, a timber-and-ranching town tucked against the River of No Return Wilderness. He chose the place to be near good fishing and hunting. He was a surgeon by profession and spent nearly three decades serving the people of Lemhi County, often traveling long distances across backcountry Idaho to reach his patients. He first put a kayak on the water in 1965 at the age of forty-three, and over the next decade pushed the boundaries of whitewater kayaking more than any of his contemporaries. Blackadar eschewed the typical