Meet Charlie Walbridge, an avid kayaker who’s dedicated his life to advancing whitewater safety
Established in 1903 in Hebron, New Hampshire, Camp Mowglis is named for the human protagonist of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. The camp’s logo, a wolf, is a nod to the animal that raised the young boy in the story, teaching him pivotal lessons including a respect for the immense powers of nature.
True to its promotional imagery, Camp Mowglis served a similarly edifying role for Charlie Walbridge, who grew up in New York City, not knowing if there “was dirt under the concrete,” and his summer camp experience laid the foundation for a lifetime of outdoor adventure. Camp Mowglis was where Waldbridge got his first taste of whitewater, on Walker’s Falls on the Saco River, and where he began honing his storytelling ability, around campfires and in his cabin. These two pursuits, paddling and storytelling, would serve as the catalysts toward Walbridge’s unique career that included runs as Safety Chair for both the American Canoe Association and American Whitewater. Today, more than six decades removed from his summers at Mowglis, he is still considered a preeminent voice in whitewater safety and is using his unique skillset to improve awareness and knowledge in the paddling community.
Walbridge attended Bucknell University where, along with his roommate, he started the school’s outing club. It was a different era of paddling, and he remembers that nobody wore life jackets during his first collegiate trip on nearby Penn’s Creek with some friends. It wasn’t the cleanest run, and one member of the party lost his camera, “but nobody got too beat up.”
Walbridge graduated from Bucknell in 1971 and in the coming years more slalom events and competitions began to take shape, providing a means for paddlers of all skill levels to meet people and find community. Paddling was still seen as relatively safe because, Walbridge says, “the people who did it were very conservative.”
Everything changed for Walbridge, and subsequently for the sport, on the morning of October 4, 1975. Ahead of a scheduled race, paddler Gene Bernardin was working his way through a practice run of the slalom course on Ouleout Creek in New York when he capsized, failed to roll up, and caught his foot under a submerged boulder. He was held under by the current for more than six minutes and died.
The incident served as the subject for Charlie Walbridge’s first published report, which ran in the November/December issue of The American Whitewater Journal. In addition to laying out the facts of the event, the report included an Analysis section, and a Comments section. It’s a mix of first-person reflection and journalistic reportage: informative, empathetic, and highly accessible.
Two years later, Bob Taylor, a top paddler in West Virginia, drowned while paddling the Upper Gauley. His death served as the subject of Walbridge’s second report, published in the same journal. It included detailed descriptions of the rapid to which Taylor succumbed, his athletic prowess, and a hand-drawn map.
The popularity of the two reports yielded an invitation for Walbridge to serve as Safety Chair for the American Canoe Association in 1977. At the time, the ACA was trying to turn back several proposed Coast Guard regulations like the use of level flotation in whitewater boats. The problem was that the proposed regulation was formulated from the Coast Guard’s observation of large boats on large bodies of water, rather than small boats on smaller, moving water. Walbridge and his paddling comrades stepped in to lend their expertise.
“And they listened to us,” says Walbridge of the Coast Guard.
As Safety Chair of the ACA, he also expanded his efforts to include people outside of the paddling community, giving swift water training demonstrations for fire academies in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and putting on large, public safety symposiums on the Potomac and James Rivers in the late 1970s. ACA Commodore Merle Garvis asked him to put together a new river rescue course in the 1980s, and Walbridge, along with collaborator Wayne Sundmacher, developed the course that was ultimately adopted by the ACA, focusing on in-water skills and techniques. In 1986, he took on the role of Safety Chair, the same title he held for ACA, for American Whitewater.
All the while, he continued to publish reports. In the 1990s, American Whitewater created a database as a means of collecting the raw, public-provided reports that Walbridge ultimately shaped into his Journal stories. Now, he primarily receives reports through Facebook and email. His skill is using his expertise and knowledge of rivers and safety measure to imbue cut-and-dry information with narrative texture.
“He’s a storyteller,” says Kevin Colburn, the National Stewardship Director at American Whitewater. “He tells the stories of what happened, I believe, because he thinks that it gets deeper into our psyches, and it just has more of an effect on helping the paddling community learn by telling somewhat evocative—short, concise, but evocative—stories of these experiences that people had in our community.”
Walbridge has flirted with writing fiction on occasion, but the forays always garner two quick truths: he was no Kipling, and “reality is so much more interesting.” At age 77, his work isn’t finished. He still gets out on the rivers near his home in West Virginia and is still using storytelling to promote water safety. While many of his previously published reports detail water fatalities, his newest book, “Whitewater Rescues: True Stories of Survival, Bravery, and Quick Thinking,” published in 2024, is a compilation of the “Near Miss” incident reports he has compiled over the years in his database.
“These are pretty inspiring,” he says of the stories in the newest book. “They’re pretty good, pretty uplifting stories.”
As the sport grows in ambition, Walbridge hopes that, through telling trues stories, he can help foster a buffer of awareness between paddlers and complacency.
“Face it, paddling is so much fun, it’s easy to forget what we’re dealing with,” he says. “The forces are incredible.”
Cover photo: Walbridge boating in cheat canton. photo by Jeff Macklin
