By Greg M. Peters
Photos by Andy Gagne
From our October 2025 issue
Tony DiBlasi’s voice boomed from the back of the raft: “Oh my god! We’re gonna die! Oh man, we’re so screwed!” A wall of water crashed over the bow. The raft bucked through a series of waves, and the nine passengers aboard erupted into a chorus of hooting and hollering. We didn’t die, and we weren’t screwed, but that didn’t stop DiBlasi’s yelling. “Right forward, three strokes!” he shouted, guiding us downstream, through rapids he knew like the back of his hand. “Oh my god! We’re dead!”
The bright-orange inflatable spun, and we plunged through another rapid, more water splashing skyward. All around us, a colorful flotilla of boats bounced through the turbulent water: blue kayaks, purple duckies (inflatable kayaks), red catarafts (small, twin-hulled rafts), and, of course, big paddle rafts like the one I was on, the type used on commercial trips, easy to spot by customers’ uniform lifejackets and helmets.
Every year on the first Saturday in October, the Last Blast on the Dead River is a season-culminating event for rafting outfitters and individual paddlers alike. It produces a mix of thrills, camaraderie, and Bigfoot sightings and always draws a crowd. Top middle: Tony DiBlasi and his wife and fellow whitewater enthusiast, Kate, have decades of experience on Maine rivers. Tony knows the ins and outs of the Dead River as well as anyone and used Google Maps to create a virtual guide to running its rapids.
It was Labor Day weekend, in 2023, and though I had years of whitewater experience, I was the new guy here, out with a cast of seasoned rafting guides for a pleasure cruise down 16 miles of the Dead River, one of Maine’s most well-traveled whitewater runs. Rapids are graded on a scale from class one to class six — ones are gentle ripples that anyone could float through, while class six are considered impassable to even the most expert paddler. The Dead River was serving up threes, with a couple of fours thrown in for good measure. When DiBlasi yelled a command, I was sure to follow it exactly. After all, he’d been leading trips on the Dead for decades. He had even built a custom map on Google Maps as a virtual guidebook to paddling the river, highlighting every rapid and the right lines for navigating them safely.
I’d only met DiBlasi the day before. He’s a friend of a friend, and in Maine’s tight-knit whitewater-rafting community, that made us friends too. I’d spent the night at his camp, in nearby Caratunk, and been invited to squeeze onto his raft, glad to have him introduce me to Maine’s whitewater scene. I wasn’t new to rapids, but I’d just moved back to Maine after living in Montana for two decades and needed to learn the terrain.
Based in Windham, DiBlasi works at AAA, where he trains the people you call when you need roadside assistance. On weekends, he makes a beeline for The Forks. He has a buoyant personality, but it’s balanced by a seriousness about navigating rivers safely. His knowledge of Maine’s whitewater runs — not just on the Dead — is encyclopedic. He knows every curve, drop, and eddy. He also seemed to know nearly everyone at the Marshall Inn, where we had spent much of the prior night.
Marshall’s, as the place is usually called, is a local institution. An old roadhouse in West Forks, it offers hearty food, billiards, live music, and a few rooms to rent for groups unbothered by the partying that lasts well into the night. It sits on one side of Route 201, and the Kennebec flows along the other. What the bar lacks in polish, it makes up for in charm and patina. Dollar bills are stapled to the walls and ceiling. The wooden floors and tables are all worn smooth. The timber-frame covered porch provides views of the river.
The evening started out mellow enough, but by 9, the place was packed with a motley collection of locals, rafting guides, and rafting customers. And soon, the sumo wrestling started. A woman wearing camo pants, with long hair set in twin braids, had been working the crowd, recruiting participants for the contest. Once darkness had fully fallen, everyone emptied out onto the side lawn, where a large vinyl circle was laid on the ground — the wrestling ring. Two puffy sumo suits appeared. Most of the wrestlers were guides or locals. Helpers strapped on the giant suits, first the bottom half, then the top, finally securing a Velcro crotch strap between the legs. Opponents waddled to opposite edges of the ring.
Techniques varied. Some wrestlers, able to gain purchase on the humidity-slicked vinyl, launched themselves across the ring, building up speed before crashing into the other person. In other matches, the wrestlers sort of shuffled around the ring before locking into an awkward tussle that usually ended up with both of them on the ground, flailing about. People flipped through the air. Raucous cheers and laughter spilled out into the warm night. At one point, DiBlasi, who’s 51, and his son, Jack, who’s 22, donned the suits and waddled into position. The elder DiBlasi won handily. An hour slipped by. Then another. Beers flowed like the river in the inky dark.
The epicenter of Maine whitewater paddling is the Somerset County town of The Forks (year-round population: 50), where the Dead River empties into the Kennebec River. Among the state’s summer scenes — the sun-drenched sailors and beachgoers down on the coast, the pontoon pleasure boaters on central lakes, and the backwoods hikers and flatwater paddlers communing quietly with woods and waters, to name a few prominent ones — whitewater paddling is something else, bringing together those who prefer to take their nature with a big ole dose of adrenaline.
The commercial paddling business started to take shape half a century ago, as log drives came to an end. In 1974, John Abbott became the first person to steer a group through the Kennebec Gorge, a section of the river below Harris Dam, a dozen miles downstream from Moosehead Lake. The following year, Wayne Hockmeyer started Northern Outdoors, a Forks-based rafting business, after he ran the gorge with a group of bear hunters who had never paddled whitewater before. Maine’s whitewater industry was suddenly underway.
Back then, flows through the Kennebec Gorge weren’t on the set schedule they are now. In the 1990s, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees hydroelectric dams in the U.S., relicensed the Harris Dam, Maine paddlers were able to secure regular releases for recreational paddling every morning, plus two releases on Saturday afternoons, all through the summer. No other river in the country has such consistent releases. When the operators of Harris Dam send thousands of cubic feet of water downstream, the river, otherwise sedate and cobble strewn, springs to life. Unruly rapids form. Paddlers flock, with license plates in the big parking lot above the dam hailing from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, North Carolina, New York, Quebec, Colorado, Oregon.
The next spring, after my Labor Day trip on the Dead River, I reached out to DiBlasi again to see if he’d take me down Kennebec Gorge. He suggested I come over Memorial Day weekend and stay at his camp again. That meant another visit to Marshall’s the night before our paddle. Same as before, DiBlasi knew almost everyone who came up the stairs. There were lots of hugs and handshakes as people caught up after the off-season: “How you been? Great to see you! How was your winter?” It reminded me of the first day of summer camp.
At the launch site the next morning, private rafters lined up along a chain-link fence, topping off their rafts with hand pumps, loading dry bags and coolers. Kayakers wiggled into spray skirts and fastened helmets. Commercial groups clustered around bigger rafts emblazoned with the names of the handful of outfitters that collectively bring tens of thousands of people through the gorge every year. I thought I saw a mix of excitement and nervousness on those paying customers’ faces as they queued up to heft their boats down the stairway to the river. Towering over the scene, the Harris Dam stood massive and industrial, the provider of the rapids we were about to run. In places, water sloshed over the top, turning the tan concrete shiny and dark. It was a stark reminder of how humans have shaped this place.
I saw a couple of game wardens, who are tasked with enforcing whitewater regulations, milling about in their tan-and-green uniforms. Registration is mandatory for private boaters on the Kennebec, and I had filled the form out online the night before. The process was quick and easy. In the past, rafters did this on paper, if they did it at all (and kayakers are exempt). Now, with the online system, some paddlers told me they were worried the state could start charging a daily fee, although as far as I could tell, there wasn’t any particular basis for the speculation. That morning, I didn’t even see the wardens checking anyone’s phone for proof of registration.
Before we climbed into DiBlasi’s two-person raft, we did a safety check, making sure we had our helmets and other essentials, like a whistle and a dry set of clothes. Then, we pushed off and the rapids started immediately. The first one is Taster, then Rock Garden, the Goodbye Hole, Sisters, Alleyway, Z-Turn. DiBlasi knew them all, and he knew exactly where we should be in order to thread through each of them. In between rapids, I tried to take in the scenery. The gorge was stunning. Dark-gray granite peeked out beneath a wall of vivid evergreen. The water itself, when it wasn’t foaming white, was stained amber from the tannins leaching out of wood and leaves. All of that was set beneath a cloudless blue sky. It was about as perfect a day as could be. DiBlasi broke my reverie at one point when he pointed out a spot on the water where an old sluiceway used to disgorge logs into the river. It was hard for me to imagine this channel choked with a sluggish jumble of timber.
A 16-mile section of the Dead River offers the longest continuous stretch of runnable whitewater in New England, but the dam that controls its flow only has eight scheduled releases per year, making the Dead a rare experience for paddlers. Bottom middle: Noah Hale, who organizes the annual West Forks Riverfest. Bottom right: Mikey McVey, who holds a world record for going over a massive waterfall on a riverboard.
As DiBlasi’s confidence in my paddling ability grew, we started taking alternate lines, punching up the excitement. “How fun was that?” he asked with a wide grin after we had gotten through Magic Falls, the largest of the rapids. He’d paddled this stretch of river many hundreds of times, guiding, training other guides, and going out on his own just-for-fun trips. Still, he seemed as genuinely thrilled as I was.
By the time paddlers reach Carry Brook, a small stream about six miles into the run, they’ve conquered most of the big stuff. Around there, each guiding company has its own lunch spot, for pulling off the river and serving clients a riverside feast. When Tony and I got out of the water at a spot where private boaters congregate, I recognized many of the faces from the night before. A fire blazed inside a ring of stones. The Grateful Dead wafted from a portable speaker.
After we ate, DiBlasi pointed out, sounding chagrined, where transmission lines from the New England Clean Energy Connect — the controversial power corridor carrying Canadian hydroelectricity to Massachusetts — will be routed under the river. Opposition was especially strong in the paddling community to the idea of lines going over the river, and pushback resulted in the plan to send them under instead. Two big towers on either side will facilitate the transmission lines’ passage, rising up above forest.
The gorge looked like such a remarkable natural space, and in many ways it is. I could understand why paddlers would want to save it from the visual blight of massive power lines. I also thought, though, about how without previous industrial impacts, the dam and its daily releases, there wouldn’t be thousands of paddlers passing through the gorge every summer, getting the chance to appreciate it or developing a desire to protect it. As we pushed off back into the current, I chewed on this paradox the river posed.
A few months later, in the humid heat of August, I was back in the area for the second-annual West Forks Riverfest. The festival grounds are the West Forks Ball Field, and the low chain-link fence ringing the outfield didn’t do a particularly good job of keeping freeloaders out. At the official entrance, I handed the guy staffing the gate the suggested donation of $15. Booths from local vendors circled the grounds, selling everything from food to custom-painted river helmets to handsewn clothes to cutting boards shaped like paddles. Some national gear manufacturers were set up in the infield, and attendees circled around the kayaks, paddleboards, life jackets, and dry bags on display. A stage sat empty, awaiting the night’s musical entertainment.
I bumped into some people I’d already met on my whitewater travels. One was Kristina Cannon, who’s the head of Main Street Skowhegan, a nonprofit group focused on revitalizing that town’s downtown. Cannon was at a table covered with posters advertising a project she’s spearheading: building a whitewater park in the section of the Kennebec that runs through Skowhegan, below the Weston Station hydroelectric dam. The park, in addition to riverbank trails, will have several engineered rapids, including one that can be adjusted to create a standing wave for surfing. The goal of the project is to connect more people with the water and to bring more people to the town’s downtown, she told me, and she figured the festival was an opportunity to build interest and support among Maine’s existing whitewater community. (As of this past summer, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection had approved permits, and work is likely to get underway next year.)
I also bumped into Noah Hale, the festival’s organizer and the owner of both Kennebec River Tubing as well as the West Forks Family Campground. He was busy orchestrating the whole affair, but I caught up with him again a while afterward. As a longtime paddler, he said, he’d been to river festivals in other states and thought Maine could use one too. “With Maine, in general, there’s the interior and the coast,” he told me. “The coast is beautiful and unique, but so is the interior. To have people come and experience it in the right way and share that experience, it’s really needed.”
Hale, a Jackman native, has worked in other ways to foster camaraderie too. The Guide Olympics started as an end-of-season party, with members of the rafting companies competing in lighthearted competitions, like seeing who could stack rafts on a trailer the fastest. The winning team got bragging rights as well as a toilet (which broke and has since been replaced by an old washing machine). In time, the olympics became more than just a season-capping bacchanalia. With Hale as president of the Dead River Outdoor Club, a local organization dedicated to the river community, the event morphed into a fundraiser, with T-shirt sales, donation jars, raffles, and sponsorships. The group usually brings in about $20,000 a year, to distribute to local families in need — after a guide has gotten injured, say, or after a house fire. The group has also helped fund river-rescue classes and purchased safety equipment like backboards, defibrillators, and satellite phones installed along the Kennebec and Dead each spring.
Among guides, a sort of earn-your-place ethos pushes individuals to prove not only their reliability on the water but also in the community. “If you spend any real time paddling whitewater, it’s not a matter of if you’ll need help, but when,” Hale said. “The rivers are humbling and that carries back to town. It’s hard here, not just in winter but all the time. People need help, and people do help. Guide Olympics is just a part of that.”
Later that night, I settled into my campsite and was invited to a fire by a family from Massachusetts that was set up at the site next to mine. As the teenagers toasted marshmallows and relived their day on a commercial run down the Kennebec Gorge, their father told me about his first Maine whitewater experience, during what’s known as the Last Blast, the final release of the year on the Dead River, every October. “It was back in the early ’90s, when we were in college,” he said, pointing to another guy who had joined the fire. “Man, it was cold, but we had so much fun. We kept coming back when we could, in the summer and in the fall.”
The Forks is hardly the only place in Maine where people charge down rushing rivers. There are rapids throughout the state, and they’re run by paddlers of all sorts, from canoeists to kayakers to rafters. For the most diehard, the three-part Maine Whitewater Championships are a highlight of every year, each race with a distinct personality.
Smalls to the Wall, in April, is the gnarliest, requiring kayakers to launch — one at a time — from a wooden platform perched above the snowmelt-swollen Sandy River before descending through six waterfalls ranging in quick succession. In all, it adds up to 65 feet of drop in only one-tenth of a mile. Last year’s winner completed the race in just over 30 seconds. The race on the Kennebec, in August, is generally considered the least intimidating. It too has an individual time-trial event, plus a mass-start race where the first person to touch the shore at Carry Brook wins. Later in August, on the West Branch of the Penobscot, there’s another time-trial event, plus a slalom run, with paddlers having to pull into the eddies behind five different boulders before spinning back into the current to continue downstream. Spectators like to gather on Turkey Rock and the Wailing Wall, both of which overlook the Cribworks, a rowdy section of class-five rapids that rafting outfitters tout as one of the most technical commercially run rapids in the country.
When I made my way from the gravel parking lot to the Wailing Wall, a small collection of onlookers had already gathered. Blueberry bushes and fir trees scented the air, and the sky was pale and hazy from wildfire smoke out of Canada. I’d just set my backpack down when Dave Wells and Jenny Stetson introduced themselves. Former rafting guides who are both from Maine but now live out West, they had long ties to the whitewater scene. Wells offered me a warm Pabst Blue Ribbon from his bag. It wasn’t long before the first kayaker flew headlong into the Cribworks, deftly weaving through the churning water, dropping through the last rapid of the course, and tapping the rock below, ending the run.
Safety volunteers stood on shore and hovered in kayaks at the bottom of the course, rescue lines at the ready. Several racers flipped their kayaks but were able to roll back up. One paddler couldn’t make the roll but managed to unfasten his spray skirt. The crowd gasped as he floated downstream,
his boat bobbing behind him, then cheered when he climbed onto the riverbank.
I chatted some more with Wells and Stetson, and it turned out that Wells grew up in Brunswick, same as I did, and lived for two seasons at the campground where I was presently staying, back when he was guiding on the river. The crowd of spectators ebbed and flowed as the afternoon went on. A group of private boaters, in town for a wedding, climbed up the rocks to watch, taking a break after paddling the Cribworks. When they got back on the river, they tried to surf Bonecrusher, the rapid below the Wailing Wall, but their raft flipped and deposited all of them into the churning water. The crowd gave their valiant attempt a good-natured cheer. Without a word, Wells, who I learned is known as “Danger Dave,” launched himself into a backflip off the cliff, gracefully arcing 20 feet into the pool below.
Later that night, a smaller group assembled on the rocks above the Penobscot. When I showed up, 15 or 20 people were hanging out, a modest fire spitting sparks into the summer night. Taylor Walker, a Stratton-based filmmaker, photographer, and longtime fixture of the whitewater circuit, was talking with a few others at the flickering edge of the firelight. Otherwise, everything was dark. The place felt wild and remote, even if the Cribworks themselves are manmade, created when loggers blasted a straighter route for their drives.
Walker’s little cohort was deep in a discussion about the relicensing of dams along the Penobscot. Here were people who had dedicated much of their lives to fun and thrills, as guides and on their own time, and who spent their summers living in campgrounds and bunkhouses, discussing in intricate detail the federal review process for dams, habitat needs for brook trout, and the volume of water necessary to generate a megawatt of electricity.
While the Kennebec and the Dead rely on intermittent releases of water for river runs, I learned in the course of the conversation, parts of the Penobscot have good flow all the time, thanks to constant electricity demands in Boston and Quebec that require a constant release of water through the turbines at the McKay Station. Levels fluctuate a bit based on weather and megawatt demand, but paddlers can pretty much hit the river anytime they want. That helps explain how guys like Mikey McVey, a local legend who is believed to hold a riverboarding world record for going over a 98-footwaterfall in New Zealand (a riverboard is basically just a beefed-up boogie board), have made the Millinocket area their home and the West Branch their playground.
During the Last Blast weekend, cold water is popularly chased with cold beers, and the Marshall Inn, in West Forks, is often at the center of the post-paddling festivities, with sturdy pub grub, live music, and more than enough kegs (plus a sumo-wrestling tournament). There are only a handful of bars and restaurants within a stone’s throw of where the Kennebec and Dead meet, but they all count on the rafting business to bring customers to the area.
The night deepened and the river continued to roar. I had to be up early to make my way to the New England Outdoor Center, where I’d join a commercial trip down this stretch of water I’d spent the day staring at. As I walked back to my campsite, I reflected on the earnestness I had found in the whitewater community. Everyone I talked with seemed genuinely eager to share these experiences and these places, even with a complete stranger.
The West Branch was an absolute thrill, undampened by the day’s gray, soggy sky. Afterward, when I clamored into my truck and headed south, toward home, I immediately began spitballing my next whitewater adventure. Maybe I could hook up with DiBlasi for a winter run somewhere — even though the commercial season comes to an end, some serious paddlers run rivers year-round. Or maybe I could try my luck standup paddling the Kennebec from Carry Brook to The Forks, pulling off right at Noah Hale’s campground. Even better, I decided, I could come up for Last Blast and get the chance to run the Dead on the final release of the season, beneath a canopy of fall colors, hooting and hollering along with everyone else. Yep, I thought, that sounds like a good time.
