200% GREEN RIVER HIGH TIMES ON A SOUTHEAST STAPLE

"THE GREEN AND THE DAM HAVE CREATED A COMMUNITY HERE"

I'm sitting above Gorilla, on Western North Carolina's Green River, and although I've run this rapid a few hundred times, my heart is racing at the prospect of peeling out. Both generators on the Lake Summit Dam are running full bore for what feels like the first time in ages, and it's 19" on the stick gauge, or a little more than double the normal flow.

At 200%, Gorilla is known as the Silverback, and it's a beast. Instead of five distinct moves with eddies between them, it turns into a single, stacked sequence—a rushing highway of whitewater where every feature flows straight into the next and mistakes anywhere will cost you. I haven't run the Silverback in seven years, and my appetite for a beatdown in either of the holes at the bottom isn't what it used to be. I take a walk.

It was May 2020 when Steve McGrady called me about heading down to the Green. Kayaking hadn't been taking up as much space in my life as it usually does, but when you've done hundreds of single-unit runs down the river, a 200% release is special. It's heavier and hungrier, and the river is much more eager to boss you around if you let it. A few of the rapids get easier, and a few others get significantly