Remembering a river runner: Klickitat rafting accident killed one of Washington's finest

Editor's note: As the Pacific Northwest's river-rafting season gears up for the summer, an accident on southern Washington's Klickitat River last weekend killed two rafters. Jeff Driver, a top guide who ran the White Salmon-based All Adventures Rafting, and passenger Rollin Schimmel, a veteran wrestling coach from Pendleton, Ore., died when two of the three rafts hit a logjam on a remote stretch of the fast-running river and overturned. The other 16 rafters on the guided trip survived. Here, outdoors writer Scott Sandsberry of Yakima remembers his trips with Driver.

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I didn't know Jeff Driver well enough, really, to call him a friend. But I liked his company, I valued his judgment and I respected his professionalism. I also trusted him with that which I hold most dear — the life of my wife. Twice.

And I'd do it again.

Even knowing that two people drowned on a raft trip he was guiding last Saturday on the Klickitat River, I would take my wife rafting with Jeff again. I know he would protect Rhonda with all the wisdom, skill and instincts honed over a 25-year river-guiding career during which — until last weekend — not one of his thousands of passengers, negotiating some of the state's wildest whitewater, had drowned.

I can't do that now, of course.

Because one of the two people who died Saturday on the Klickitat was Jeff himself.

River runners are a lot like mountain climbers — an apt comparison in Jeff's case, considering that he had worked as a mountain guide, too. Risk is such a part of their daily existence that it is accepted. Embraced, even, because it sharpens the senses, the focus, the concentration. Inherent risk demands that you be at your best. And Jeff always was.

I'm what you might call a marginally experienced recreational paddler. I've whitewater-rafted maybe 18 or 20 times, usually with professional guides; most of them were pretty good, a couple of them were shaky, and a handful of them were excellent.

Until 2001, though, my wife had never rafted, and her feelings about joining me on a trip were somewhere between tepid and terrified. So when she said yes, I wanted to go with the best guide I could think of.

My first choice would have been Bruce Carlson, the Cashmere-based guide whose All Rivers Adventures pretty much set the standard for outfitters in this state. But Bruce had retired, so I chose Jeff — for years one of Bruce's top guides, a highly reputable guy with search-and-rescue experience, and the one to whom (along with Jeff's wife, Karen, a top-notch guide herself) Bruce chose to sell a chunk of his business.

Jeff, as lead guide for All Adventures Rafting (the company he ran with Karen), took us down the White Salmon and over the 14-foot drop at Husum Falls, after which my wife — emboldened by Jeff's patient guidance — immediately wanted to do it again. He took us down the Wenatchee during 2002's biggest flows, giving Rhonda the honor of a being a front-row paddler on the river's toughest rapids. Like all great guides, Jeff engendered confidence within his clients.

Even the ones who, last Saturday, were reminded so cruelly that even the best and strongest among us will fail when Mother Nature demands the last word.

The 14 Oregonians on Saturday's tragic trip knew Jeff well. For years, many of them had scheduled an annual raft trip with Bruce Carlson, and after Bruce retired, they had simply switched over to rafting with Jeff and Karen. It was always a great time.

Last weekend, though, they encountered a logjam — one that hadn't been there on Jeff's previous trips downriver — and the river's flow forced the three All Adventures rafts into the debris. Two of them capsized. Jeff drowned. So did a Pendleton wrestling coaching icon named Rollin Schimmel. The other rafters, many of whom had to be pulled from the water by Jeff's guides, were left stranded for hours on the river island behind the logjam until they could be rescued.

One of those pulled to safety was Eileen Marshall, a 62-year-old from Pendleton who had been on Jeff's raft. Her primary concern, when I spoke with her on Tuesday, was not her own horrifying experience, her own close call. She simply wanted to know if a memorial service for Jeff had been set yet. Because she wanted to go.

"I'd go out (rafting) with Jeff again," she told me. "This was just an accident. It was something nobody could have prevented. I think we all feel that way. He had just super guides; those guys went above and beyond, those that were remaining. They had to be so devoted to him — because here they knew he was dead, but they went on doing what they could for the rest of us because that's what he'd want. How many people could do that? They obviously loved him. And you have to trust somebody to love somebody like they did.

"He was such a professional."

Mike Mikel, another veteran guide from Cashmere, remembers the first time he met Jeff — for whom he would later work — about 15 years ago on the Tieton River. A guided raft had flipped. Another rafter — not someone working that day, just a guy out rafting with a friend or two — had pulled all the swimmers out of the water. The guy was Jeff Driver.

"He's the finest man I've known," Mikel told me. "In so many ways."

Carlson, a Vietnam veteran, told me once that he lost God in Vietnam, where he had lost so many of his own comrades. But he found Him again in the outdoors — in the bracing feel of a cool breeze, the whirring gurgle of river whitewater, the spectrum of colors in a sunset.

Sometimes Bruce finds himself revisiting those fallen comrades in his mind as he gazes at such a sunset, essentially bringing them back to share the beauty with him. In his mind, Carlson said with a little smile, his old 'Nam buddies tell him, "That's real nice, Bruce — but just so you know, the view's a lot nicer where we are."

I'm guessing that the view's a lot nicer where Jeff Driver is.

And I'll bet there's a river.

Yakima Herald-Republic outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry can be reached at ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com

A memorial service for Jeff Driver will be held at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 30, at Husum Community Church, located in Husum on State Route 141 north of White Salmon.