Keller Strikes Again
Notching the "Holy Grail of the Southeast," 100-plus-foot Ozone Falls
[url=http://www.canoekayak.com/videos/keller-strikes-again/]<full story>/url]There was good reason the triple-digit vertical drop had never been run. Arriving Wednesday to see the tiny Tennessee creek swollen, Keller and his small crew of friends began studying the entrance flow, putting together the “puzzle pieces” of the various hazards standing in the way of a first descent. “There’s a lot of factors that were really frightening,” Keller said.
{Video}
First was the high flow over a flat-to-vertical lip: “That makes it really hard to set your angle,” Keller notes. Then there’s the normal creek size to consider, which, “makes a pretty shallow landing pool.” Add in the sheer height to compound the landing risk: “The impact’s exponentially larger the higher you get … talking bone-breaking, face-smashing, any of the bad things—knocked unconscious, break your neck.” Oh, yeah, and don’t forget the rapid 100 feet downstream of the landing pool, blocked by a log and a nasty rock sieve: “There’s a lotta factors that stack up to why it hadn’t been run,” Keller concluded.