It looks like Teva handed their AmEX Black to a group of six kayakers who headed into the rainforests of Mexico to paddle Rio Tulijá. They put together this video that will make you wish you were a pro kayaker, as opposed to always wishing you were a pro surfer. Beyond the Drop seeks to tell the story behind running some of these massive falls, and after seeing it you’ll want to look into how cheap flights to Mexico are right now.

Serrasolses Bros Productions began rolling out a 12-part series that follows some of the world’s most talented paddlers to remote locales. They begin with a two-day drive across Patagonia to reach the put in spot for the Río Baker. At least they had great scenery for the drive. If you want to repeat their whitewater trip, you better make it soon. Proposed dams would change the Baker and three other rivers in the region beyond measure.

Kayakers Rafa Ortiz, Evan Garcia, and Rush Sturges became the first people to run the series of five waterfalls on the Rio Santo Domingo in Mexico. See what peer pressure can make you do? The river sends you over five falls that are 80-, 90-, 60-, 20-, and 40-feet high, so you really want to [ more... ]

Kayaking over waterfalls is cool, but you know what’d be better? Going over headfirst. This must have been the logic of river boarder Josh Galt when he took the plunge over Gorilla on the Green River Narrows near Ashville, North Carolina. It’s a rather narrow part of the river, but he makes it look easy. Next up, going over in a barrel.

These shots hit the inbox (rthompson@backcountry.com) with the following fantastic note: With apologies to Jack Handy – If you drop your kayak paddle into molten lava forget about it man because it’s gone. A few kayakers more interested in thrills than self-preservation braved 190F water to paddle in and get these shots. The photo work [ more... ]

Photographer and filmmaker Tim Kemple takes you on a shoot with some of the mad kayakers he calls friends on a trip to Mexico. The man makes incredible images, and the video gives you an idea of the length he goes to getting them. Plus, the verdant forests of whatever part of Mexico they’re exploring is pretty awesome to look at, so it has that going for it, which is nice.

Mirror River // source to sea in 3 minutes from Will Stauffer-Norris on Vimeo.

 
Will Stauffer-Norris spent 113 days paddling down the Green and Colorado Rivers from source to sea. That seems like a long time, but imagine how much longer it would have taken if he’d gone sea to source. He also did us the tremendous favor of compressing his entire kayaking journey down to 3 minutes (we all know how some people can be with vacation photos…). I wonder what the customs officials are like on the irrigation canals in Mexico. This is his video, Mirror River.

Greenland won the PR war with Iceland centuries ago. Supposedly Iceland is a much nicer place to visit, but that name is something of an inhibitor. It looks like Greenland hired another PR firm to help try to convince tourists to spend their money in this remote corner of the world. There’s something strange and foreign surrounding the idea that we need to spend a lot of money to travel some place remote, somewhere we can unplug, which is why, I suppose, PR firms exist in the first place.

The world’s top kayakers converged on Chile to run some of the most challenging whitewater in the world for the 2012 Grand Prix. I have no idea who shot this segment, but you have to hand it to them for producing a piece of work that could stand on its own. So often these comp recap videos are boring montages of big hits and bloody faces.

Kayaker Dario Vanacore ran the Marmore Falls in Italy once without any documentation, and hungry for a bit of acknowledgement for his feat, he headed back into the fray with a photographer in tow. The falls are a set of three drops, with the largest standing 81ft high. Vanacore stashed his boat and gear in [ more... ]