![]() ![]() He made tiny adjustments during the 3.7-second free fall. ![]() On April 21, 2009, Bradt emptied his mind and paddled slowly into the river. “But,” Sturges admits, “if something really bad had happened, like getting pinned behind that curtain of water, he would have been on his own.” For the Palouse run, Sturges and eight others were at the ready should anything (concussion, broken back) befall their friend. “Honestly, I told him I didn’t know if it was the best idea,” says Rush Sturges, who followed Bradt down a 107-foot (33-meter) waterfall in Canada two years ago. But that didn’t allay the concerns of his fellow paddlers. In the spring of 2009, Bradt prepared by effortlessly knocking off a string of 70- to 80-foot (21- to 24-meter) waterfalls on Oregon’s Hood River. “There’s a smooth green tongue of water that carries about a third of the way down the falls. “The first time I saw the Palouse, I knew it was runnable,” he says. “Your rate of descent is multiplied, so the time you have to react plummets.”īefore the record-setting run, Bradt repeatedly visited Palouse Falls State Park to read the water and scout the descent. “The risks on a 180-foot drop are exponentially greater,” says kayaker and filmmaker Trip Jennings. The previously held record for kayak descents, set only weeks earlier, had been off a 127-foot (39-meter) fall in the Amazon. ![]() “Then an acceleration, speed, and impact unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. “There was a stillness,” says the extreme kayaker. There isn’t a lot that scares Tyler Bradt, so before he steered his kayak off the lip of eastern Washington’s Palouse Falls and dropped 18 stories amid water rushing at 2,000 cubic feet (57 cubic meters) per second, he recalls his mind running gin clear, just like the current. See 39 more trips on our Ultimate Adventure Bucket List > ![]()
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