Bull Canyon Provincial Park entrance.

“There will be no lily-dipping in Lava Canyon!”

It’s a firm rule and good to remember—especially when delivered by a veteran river guide prepping paddlers for what may be the most intense rafting experience of their lives.

“Lily dipping,” for the uninitiated, is river-speak for pantywaist paddling. Imagine nudging a lily pad out of the way with the tip of a paddle. The term is more broadly applied to slackers in a raft doing anything but paying attention. To use another term of the trade, Lava Canyon is a “high consequences” stretch of whitewater that extends no mercy to those not fully engaged in navigating it.

In British Columbia’s Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, Lava Canyon is a major claim to fame with more than 24 miles of continuous Class III and IV (and, in high water, a couple V) rapids on the Chilko River. It barrels through remote wilderness and produces sustained adrenaline surges in even the most calloused paddlers. It’s billed as the longest continuous stretch of navigable whitewater in North America. The last time I ran it, 10 years ago, our center-mounted guide lost one of his oars on Lava’s first major wave train. The storm of worry that blew into his eyes put the other four of us in the raft on red alert.

“Paddle as if your life depends on it!” he shouted over heaving rapids, leaving out the obvious coda, “Because it f****ing does.”

I’ve thought a lot about that razor’s-edge run down Lava Canyon over the past decade, even dreamed about it. I’ve come back to B.C. to do it right this time.

Bear Camp

Bear Camp and Tullin Mountain in background.

To get me and my nephew Jacob down Chilko River, I’ve signed on with a B.C.-based adventure outfit called ROAM (Rivers, Oceans and Mountains). Started in 1986 as a local river-guiding operation, and still run by co-founder Brian McCutcheon and his partner, Ashley Scanlan, the company has become a global leader in outdoor adventures that offer real challenge along with bush comfort.

McCutcheon is a big personality who knows his market: adventure travelers who like comfort, but don’t need coddling. When someone mentions the air conditioner in the shuttle from the airport pickup in Williams Lake wasn’t very strong he deflects the comment with a smile. “That’s part of our program to make Americans tough again,” he says, getting a good laugh.

“Ninety-nine percent of people want leadership,” he tells the group. “One percent of us are willing to give it to them.”

ROAM’s best trips are able to ride the line between boutique adventure and “this ain’t no joke,” because the company has built a culture that attracts top guides from around the world. Our Chilko descent is steered by an all-star team. Jared, our trip leader, is a Quebec native with decades of experience on the Ottawa River, B.C.’s Clearwater River, and Tasmania’s famed Franklin River. The crew includes two Chileans, Carlos and Valentin, competition kayakers with experience on the Rio Futaleufú, Chile’s whitewater nirvana; Lovro, a native Croatian who’s spent years leading big-water trips in Canada and Australia ; and Jimmy, a jack-of-all-trades water-safety instructor with more than 20 years of Chilko experience.

Guide Jimmy, right, instructs Jacob.

“Guides from around the world want to come here,” Jimmy tells me. “This is one of those places where you prove yourself as a guide.”

We all convene at Bear Camp, a permanent tent setup revolving around a log-cabin lodge. At the base of soaring peaks on the flanks of the Pacific Coast Range, the camp sits at 3,845 feet elevation on the northern end of Chilko Lake and the headwaters of its namesake river.

This is the place to do day hikes, canoe around the lake and get to know fellow paddlers. On our trip, this means four other pairs, from California, Washington, Montana, and Wisconsin. Between them they’ve run most of the world’s best whitewater. Conversations immediately turn to comparing rivers in New Zealand, Norway, and Africa.

“My name is Jacob and I’ve never been in a raft before,” my nephew interjects, drawing blank stares and concerned chuckles.

Rapid Fire

The Chilko River offers a rare source-to-confluence trip. This means we’ll float the undammed river without portaging all the way to its confluence with the mighty Fraser River, the life force of British Columbia. The trip will take six days and five nights, each through a different ecosystem, from evergreen forest to high-desert plateau. The river will drop 2,000 feet along the way, about half of that in Lava Canyon alone, which in part accounts for its outrageous profile.

Day one on the river is more or less a shakedown cruise. Scattered Class II and III rapids are fun, but mostly this is a sunny day to drift, get comfortable in the boats, and check the gear.

Day one on Chilko River.

“Today was a warmup,” Jared says over a camp dinner of risotto with grilled shrimp and scallops. “Tomorrow is Lava Canyon. Everyone needs to paddle hard to help the rafts. The guides can’t do this alone.”

This feels like a good time to share a little more about my first Lava Canyon run. Obviously, I survived. In fact, everyone did. But at times it felt like a near thing. Not only did our guide lose one of his oars right off the bat, he lost the use of the other just a few minutes later when its mounting bracket mysteriously froze.

This left him with four inexperienced goobs with plastic paddles to navigate 24 miles of nonstop whitewater. And a chance to put his leadership skills to the test. None of us had ever done time on a Viking galley so it was startling when he started wailing at us like a bunch of conscripts.

“Back paddle, back paddle, Jesus fucking Christ, can you back paddle?!”

Chilko Lava Canyon rapids at their frothiest.

Twice the raft taco’d in sinkholes and launched one of us into the air, five feet or more. I went airborne for a couple seconds and came down sideways on top of the guy next to me. At one point we zoomed through a slot canyon so narrow you could touch either side with a paddle. Or so I was later told. I was so stoned on adrenaline and anxiety I don’t recall doing it.

“For continuous, big-water feel, there's nothing comparable,” Jared tells me. “There are other stretches of whitewater that are also fairly long, but not big water like Chilko. They would be Class II with a couple of IIIs at most, but no river names are coming to me now. Lava Canyon does stand on its own for rafting.”

Lava Canyon

Day two dawns bright and warm. After the requisite safety briefing and passing out of helmets, wetsuits, and splash jackets, we float for 20 minutes to the head of Lava Canyon, then pull into an eddy and hop out of the boats. Jared tells us to chill while he and the guides walk down the riverbank to scout a monster Class V drop called Bidwell Rapid. Bidwell formally heralds entry into Lava Canyon. Once you commit to it, there’s no stopping for the next 90 minutes, even for trouble. This is where we lost our first oar 10 years ago.

“The continuous aspect of Lava does make it incredibly difficult to stop the fully loaded gear rafts,” says Jared. “There are no good eddies to catch and wait for others or even to do safety from shore. Regrouping is very difficult but not impossible.”

We 10 paddlers mill around on the bank exchanging nervous glances and gallows humor. The guides are gone for a long time. At least 45 minutes. When they return, Jared has one of those we-need-to-talk expressions.

“There’s a new hazard in the rapid that wasn’t there the last time we ran it,” he says. “A large log is cutting across the left side of the rapid at about a 20-degree angle. We really need to avoid this.”

Chilko River's Lava Canyon.

Jared explains the line the guides have agreed upon for the descent. Two of the guides later confide in me that they’d all gotten mildly tweaked during the scouting trip.

“As a guide, if you’re not a little nervous about doing Lava, you’re either crazy or you’re Brian,” Jimmy says, referring to the ROAM founder who’s likely run the river more times than anyone dead or alive.

“We’re going to need you to follow your guide’s instructions and really paddle,” Jared adds.

Jacob and I are in the forward positions in Jared’s raft, meaning we’ll be the first to hit Bidwell’s entrance, a rapid descent of 10 feet which leads into a 40-foot drop that forms a series of big waves and laterals with a pair of boulders at the bottom that need to be threaded like a needle.

We push off the bank, round a bend and the beast is upon us. I see the drop and more or less enter a fugue state as the bow of the boat—Jacob and I with it—disappears beneath a barrel of the wildest whitewater British Columbia has to offer.

One of the happiest moments of my life was when I looked up to see the parachute opened on my first skydive. The euphoria coming out of Bidwell is the same. I’m thrilled to be alive.

With Jared calling out commands—“Forward paddle!” “Back paddle!” “Left paddle!” “GET DOWN!”—I sneak a look at Jacob. He’s leaning over the side of the raft working like an Amish butter churner. Whatever nerves he had coming in have disappeared, probably because they have to. Lava Canyon forces you into action; forget contemplation; forget fear.

After Bidwell, we gain speed and head into another huge drop. It has a name, but I never manage to get it—which wheels us sidelong toward one of those raft-eating boulders. Jared shouts. There are logs in our path. We paddle like pistons, spin into a wave train, somehow reorient the bow downriver, then take five or 10 direct hits of water as we bounce through the mayhem.

Recreation without a paddle.

The next hour and a half is some version of this. Jared calls out river features as we blast through them—Green Mile, White Mile, Miracle Canyon. They blend together. Basalt columns are the primary geographic feature on this part of the river. But it’s a challenge trying to appreciate them while swinging your gaze between the riverbanks and the rapids beating you in the face. I fleetingly spot a lone bear cub on shore and wonder where its mama is, but we’re gone in seconds.

Whip out a phone or camera in Lava Canyon and you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose it, so no one gets photos. Instagram’s loss. The lack of photo ops makes running Lava Canyon special—there’s no way not to “be present”—and also more fun to debrief fellow paddlers once we’re able to pull out on a gravel bar and have a snack.

All our rafts made it through safely, though one woman was ejected half out of the boat back at Bidwell Rapid. With her butt in the water and clinging to the gunwales with her ankles, her husband leaned over and hauled her back into the raft. She lost her paddle but wasn’t the first to suffer that indignity. Within seconds a replacement was in her hands and she was obeying an urgent order to back paddle.

Staying Geared Up

Lava Canyon is the highlight of Chilko, but it’s hardly the river’s only rush. For the next four days, we bash through chunky whitewater, kick back on flat stretches, and scan hillsides for bighorn sheep, black bears, deer, eagles and other wildlife. After Chilko converges with Chilcotin, the water turns to that dramatic glacier green-blue as we drift through the majestic bluffs and rock walls of Bull Canyon Provincial Park.

Though the trip began at Bear Camp in 85-degree July heat, by night four prevailing winds have brought thunderclouds, steady rain, and plunging temperatures. Clutching a medicinal mug of ginger-lemon- bourbon tea after a steak dinner in camp, I fall into conversation with another paddler, Jenny, who’s spent the day in the back of Lovro’s raft, a sodden, knit cap bunched beneath her helmet dripping misery onto her face.

“I packed horribly for this trip,” she tells me. “I’m so unprepared.”

Jenny and her husband came up from California’s Central Valley, where it’s been triple-digit temps and dry as a box of instant oatmeal .

Bull Canyon Provincial Park.

It’d be easy to dismiss Jenny as a dilettante, but the fact is a lot of people who should know better underestimate British Columbia. It doesn’t matter if your phone shows sun balls and 90-degree days all week in Vancouver, Williams Lake, or whatever town is nearest your backwoods entry point. The wind is gonna blow, the temperature is gonna drop, and it’s gonna rain. I’ve seen the same mistake made over and over in this part of the world.

“I wouldn’t beat yourself up,” I tell her. “I brought all the stuff on the gear list and then some, and most of it’s soaked beyond use anyway.”

Yes, we have dry bags . Yes, sometimes I don’t secure mine properly.

We go back for bourbon-tea refills. ROAM provides an open bar on the river, keeping everyone happy and astonishing the river-rat guests.

Unexpected Ending

One of the pleasures of extended backcountry trips is unplugging from the world. In six days on the lonely Chilko, we encounter other parties on just two occasions.

The first is two rafts of locals—old friends who have a tradition of paddling the river every year. The second is a First Nations fisherman standing on a platform with a dip net. He looks as surprised to see us as we are to see him, and we both smile silently and wave as we float past.

In the wireless wilderness of B.C. you remain happily unaware of major events. You might worry about things at home, but then you return and realize the world has gotten along fine without you. Usually.

When we hit the final pullout, McCutcheon and Scanlan are on the riverbank greeting us with smiles and high fives. Then they quietly take Jimmy aside and inform the veteran guide that while we’ve been away his home near Jasper has been completely destroyed in summer fires that swept through the famed national park. His wife and three children are among the more than 20,000 people safely evacuated.

The news hits hard. Jimmy speeds off for the airport in Williams Lake to catch the next flight home. The paddlers’ two-hour shuttle ride to the airport is a quiet one. Each of us is stunned by the tragedy that’s hit one of the world’s most beautiful places, as well as one of the most popular figures on the trip. I recall something Jimmy said to the group on the last night in camp.

“Each of us on this trip has a different background, but we’re all here because we love the river and cherish this environment,” he said. “That common ground is so important. Connecting with that is my favorite part of trips like this.”

I exchange a silent nod with Jacob, then glance around the bus and think, “And here I’d thought it was just Lava Canyon I’d spent 10 years wanting to experience again.”

Chilko River Trip map.

How to Get to Chilko River

Beginning in June, ROAM will operate multiple Chilko River trips in summer 2025. Cost is about $4,000 per person for five-day, four-night itineraries starting from Bear Camp. Shorter Lava Canyon itineraries are available for $1,995. Trips begin with an early-morning flight from Vancouver Airport’s domestic terminal to Williams Lake.

Rather than spend the night in downtown Vancouver, you can spare yourself an hour of morning traffic by overnighting in nearby Richmond. Located 10 easy minutes from the domestic terminal, the newly opened Versante Richmond Hotel is a luxury boutique property that offers, among other features, soaking tubs with views of the Vancouver skyline, terrific breakfasts and complimentary airport shuttles. It’s located near Richmond’s Dumpling Trail, a walkable area that links 17 authentic Chinese and East Asian restaurants. Dinesty Dumpling House is our recommendation, but it’s tough to make a bad choice at any of the places on the trail. This is the place to fill up before or after an adventure into B.C.’s rugged backwoods.