Yahoo!

Or How to Rate White-Water Rapids

There’s the Yahoo System (rating rapids based on how loud people scream when they go through them). There’s the campfire-story method (rating rapids based on how many tales around the campfire come out of disasters that occurred there). And there’s the name game (rating the danger of rapids by their names, such as Widow Maker, Slice-n-Dice, Disaster Falls, and Sock-Em-Dog).

But there has to be a better way. And there is. The American Whitewater Affiliation’s International Scale of River Difficulty is a widely recognized method of classifying rapids based on their difficulty and potential danger to the boater. This six-point scale, with higher numbers denoting more difficulty and often more danger, gives river runners a general scale on which to measure a rapid and against which to measure the level of their own skill and experience. Boaters learn on Class I, II, and III rapids before tackling rivers with higher rated white water.


 
 
 
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