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After almost forty years, Tom Kemper is still passionate about guiding on the Snake River
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The boat is wending its way through the bends of the canyon, bobbing like a cork in the waves, as the passengers crane their necks and listen. The guide, Tom Kemper, is holding court like a professor, pointing out natural features like erosion, rock ledges, and the osprey nests topping power poles high above the river.
Mesmerized by the lesson, one of the clients asks Kemper what sort of schooling he did to accumulate so much knowledge.
“I’ve studied hydrology, geology, biology, zoology, meteor-ology, entomology, ornithology, and ichthyology,” he says. The tourists clearly are impressed. Kemper pushes on the oars to steady the boat, then deadpans: “I’m working on a B.S. in scatology at the moment.”
So it goes in the life of a Snake River rafting guide, as much a showman as a drill sergeant barking paddling commands. A good guide is part comedian, part teacher, and part psychologist. It takes the tourists a few seconds to realize the joke’s on them.
No one is more skilled in this profession than Kemper, the grizzled, fifty-six-year-old boatman for Jackson Hole Whitewater. With thirty-six years of guiding under his belt, he is the elder statesman of the Snake River Canyon. At a time when many of his contemporaries have settled into less demanding pursuits, Kemper still guides up to five trips a day from late May to early September. Remarkably, he hasn’t gotten burned out, and he maintains an enthusiasm as effervescent as Champagne Rapid. It’s as if the rushing, ice-cold waters of the canyon have been his fountain of youth.
“I wouldn’t know what else I’d be doing if I weren’t doing this,” Kemper says. “You might as well do what you enjoy. Rafting is the best way to travel I know.”
The son of a preacher from Nebraska, Kemper first came to Jackson Hole on a family vacation in 1964, when he was ten years old. He returned in 1973 to visit his sister Beverly, who was waitressing for the summer at Jackson Lake Lodge. He took his first trip down the Snake, a scenic float in Grand Teton National Park.
The next year, he dropped out of college and moved to Jackson Hole to become a guide. He landed a job as a bartender in the lodge’s employee rec room, called “The Whistle Pig” (the hoary marmot’s nickname), and was lucky to snag the last spot on the river crew. He was the rear boatman on the thirty-foot-long “sweep” boats, Army surplus bridge pontoons with a rudder on each end. Working with a lead boatman up front, he navigated twenty miles of tight, braided channels from Pacific Creek to Moose.
Learning how to read water in this fashion is “a real art,” he says. “You have to know what the current is going to do before you get there. It prepared me for any whitewater I’ve ever run.”
Today Kemper mans a lightweight, eighteen-foot raft with a rear-mounted oar frame. The passengers carry paddles and do most of the churning. As we round the last of the bends known as the S Turns, the boat slides through a tight spot, but Kemper makes it look easy. “The longer you’ve been out here, the more you know what’s going to happen to the boat, and you can plan for it,” he says. It helps that he has every mile, every wave, every last hole memorized by heart.
Kemper has spent countless tranquil days on the Snake in July and August, when the hot sun and low water typically make for a fun, safe, and comfortable trip. But he also has seen the Snake’s more violent moods, in late May and June, when the chocolate-brown torrent of runoff makes for powerful waves and a thrilling, fast ride. The water temperature in spring is about forty-five degrees. “You’d get an ice cream headache if you stand in the water up to your ankles for a minute or two,” he explains to a younger passenger.
On this day the river is flowing at about five thousand cubic feet per second. By comparison, in June 1997 the runoff peaked at thirty-eight thousand, Kemper recalls, pointing to a spot on the bank some twenty feet up where the water crested. “Have you seen The Perfect Storm?” he asks the clients. “Well, this was The Perfect River.”
