In addition as an event to learn freestyle canoeing, the Midwest Canoe Symposium was a good place to meet interesting paddlers from other parts of the country. One such individual who I was lucky to meet was Wick Walker, a C-1 slalom boater who competed at the highest levels of the sport in the 1960s and 1970s. Wick was the national C-1 slalom champion in 1968, represented the U.S. for several years in the world championships, and placed 11th in C-1 slalom in the 1972 Olympics. He also has participated in whitewater expeditions in other countries and was one of the first to run Great Falls on the Potomac River in the 1960s.
Wick is also an author and a retired U.S. Army officer. One of his books,
Courting the Diamond Sow, tells the story of an expedition to Tibet's Tsangpo River. He is now writing a book entitled
Torrents As Yet Unknown: Exploring Earth's Great River Gorges. Wick posts
occasional updates on the progress of the book in the blog section of his website. He hopes it will be published in the fall of 2023. From reading the blog, it appears this will be a fascinating account of expeditions to some of the world's most challenging rivers and the intrepid paddlers willing take such enormous risks to run them. It sounds like
Torrents will be an essential addition to a paddler's library.