![]() ![]() "The boat was cleared that day," he says, using rafting-guide talk for the unfortunate and unintended dispersal of all humans. Adams contends Soares stayed in the boat - "He had the only seatbelt," he jokes - but Soares says no. "I had these two ripped, strong guys," Soares says, "and the moment I needed their power the most, they weren't there."Īdams was the first one to fall completely out of the raft, followed by Derek and Heather. "I stop paddling as soon as we get through there because - literally - we were going down."Ĭarr stopped paddling, too, which left it to Soares and Heather, whose outdoor - and listening - skills far exceeded the men's. Adams spits out a brittle laugh and says, "We don't whitewater raft in East Palo Alto."īut on that river with Carr all those years ago, with Banzai Hole thundering ahead, he caught the urgency in Soares' voice, though, and thought, Hold on? Hold on for what? What's about to happen? "So what do I do?" Adams says. #Call to arms gates of hell windows#As the windows were rolled down and someone began firing a gun at the house, Davante sprinted out the door and pulled his younger twin sisters back into his grandparents' house and to safety. (Menlo Park, right next door, had a per capita income of more than $88,000.) He was 14 when he looked out the front window of his grandparents' house and watched a car creep along the street and stop in front of the house next door. Just before they entered the rapid, the biggest on the Upper Kings, Soares screamed over the roar of the water, "Hold on and don't stop paddling! If you stop, you'll flip the boat!"Īdams grew up in East Palo Alto, California, a city of roughly 30,000 with a 2020 per capita income of $32,000, a stark contrast to its Silicon Valley neighbors. "If you fall out and end up having to swim, you're not going to die," Soares says, before rethinking it. The water is just part of the problem with Banzai Hole, though the 75-foot rock face on the other end of it is another. ![]() Banzai Hole is a Class III rapid that can ascend to a Class IV when it's flowing like it does in the prime of late-spring snowmelt, at roughly 6,000 downhill basketballs per second. We won't bore you with all the technical talk of cubic feet per second, but one CFS is colloquially described as the water equivalent to one basketball rolling down a hill. "That's when their eyes got big," Soares says. ![]() The sound of Banzai Hole came first, the roar of angry water Dopplering toward them, louder and louder, an enveloping sound of pending doom. It started easy enough - "a lazy river," Adams says - before everything changed about a quarter-mile into the run. Soares kept repeating one rule, over and over: They looked at the raft and the relatively calm waters at their feet and listened as Soares laid out the dangers that lie ahead. It started with Carr and Adams, a record-setting quarterback-receiver combination with obscenely lucrative careers ahead of them, standing on the shore, struggling to sausage themselves into too-tight wetsuits. ![]() This adventure - with a four-person crew of guide Ryan Soares, Adams, Carr, and Carr's girlfriend/now-wife, Heather - took place on the notoriously turbulent Upper Kings River in the southern Sierra Nevada. Adams' life experience to this point, it should be noted, had better prepared him for a trip to the moon than whitewater rafting. ON A FINE spring Saturday about a decade ago, Derek Carr asked his friend and Fresno State teammate Davante Adams if he wanted to go whitewater rafting. ![]()
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