The Motivation for this Journal

My name is Matt and I play in West Virginia. Actually, I'm addicted to the state.

Living inside or within a few hours of a WV state border for all of my life, I've had plenty of "West Virginia Moments," a characterization that could range from WV stereotype reinforcements of the cultural (could be bad) to the natural persuasion. Fortunately, the number of the latter is far greater than the number of former.

I wish to document with this blog these "West Virginia Moments." If you're reading this, then you are a friend or family member, or have stumbled upon this blog, and I thank you for reading and hope you'll get a laugh, discover a new natural place in WV, or gasp at the thought of it. However, the real reason for this blog is personal. I will consider this blog an archive of these moments for a man with a poor memory.

Enjoy!

06 May, 2007

CheatFest 2007


What may sound like a carnival of infidelity ("What happens at CheatFest stays at CheatFest") is actually an event held at the put-in spot for Cheat Canyon each year to raise awareness for various Cheat River watershed conservation advocacy issues, and to bring hundreds of paddlers together for a lot of fun. This second agenda was spot on this year, starting with a downriver race through the class 3/4 whitewater on Friday evening. I arrived on Wednesday and commuted from Morgantown while working through the day and paddling the race course in the evenings. I camped with an acquaintance from DC who seemed like a relatively normal guy until the party on Saturday night, when he arrived under-dressed.

Friday came, the race went on without a hitch (I placed somewhere around 25th of 150), and the crowd grew to capacity by Saturday evening as live bands like Stewed Mulligan kept us dancing all night. On Saturday afternoon, I was lucky enough to have some friends show me down the Upper Yough (Yes!! New Run!!) , but that's in Maryland (eeewwwww), so I won't say anything more about it, other than I did it again on Monday and swam!

On Saturday night, perhaps in a state of inebriation, a friend suggested to me that I give my credit card to one of the kayak vendors in return for a tandem whitewater kayak. The credit card part was only collateral because we were just using it for the day. Oh my was it ever worth it.

Safety issues aside, my decision to "borrow" the boat was one of my better ones. At least a half dozen of us ended up paddling some part of the canyon in it, and some even surfed it at two favorite playspots called Typewriter and Cue Ball. If you were REALLY unlucky, you got to swim out of the thing after flipping, like I did twice.

Addendum: The aforementioned swim was declared a HALF of a swim, so my Upper Yough record is 1/2 swim for two runs, for a 25% record. That's not so bad, but I intend to decrease that number. The reason it was declared to be a half swim is because my friend Dan was stuck in a hole when I came upon him. So, it's Dan's fault, and he gets 1.5 swims for the day. My momentum knocked him out, which left me in the hole. I held on for a while and side-surfed on both sides before my only option was to flip to see what happened. What happened was that I swam.

Gittin' 'r Dun.
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