The Cali Burn Fest

Three C&K staffers come back burnt

Words: Joe Carberry
Photography: Robert Zaleski & Brandon Gonski

Somewhere among the empty Gatorade bottles, bad man jokes and the hum of the open freeway, you realize it’s less about where you’re going than who you’re going there with. That revelation strikes me the third time Canoe and Kayak Art Director Robert Zeleski and I try to save the world in conversation. We’re so focused on the subject–and trying to keep our eyes open–that we don’t notice the dark highway wrap around the mountain outside of Redding, Calif., the Subaru screaming around the corner loaded with four kayaks and every other piece of camping gear imaginable.

“Sorry, where were we?” Robert asks casually after unwinding the wheel. Our intern, Brandon Gonski, passed out in the back, doesn’t budge.

It takes easy conversation to make it 11 hours, 53 minutes and 12 seconds on the open road. We decided sometime the week before, in the middle of shipping another magazine to print, that it’d be a good idea to drive the 600-odd miles from San Clemente–between L.A. and San Diego–to the Cali Burn Festival on the Trinity River’s Burnt Ranch Gorge. We bust out of the office on a Thursday afternoon, and after suffering through a blustery night’s sleep somewhere off the highway in the Trinity National Forest (where we’re jostled awake for good by a Forest Service work crew cleaning up an old burn) we end up in Arcata on Friday morning, gateway to the Pacific Northwest and only 110 miles south of Oregon.

The Cali Burn Festival consists of a surf contest in Westhaven on Friday and a river race Saturday in the gorge. Calling it a festival is stretching it. More like a gathering of like-minded homies looking to rip it up before winter sets in. Just our style. We geared up and paddled out into the Pacific, the wind whipping off the lips of the waves with gale force. But the surf was primo, the expression session going off like beads at Mardi Gras.

Boise, Idaho’s Will Parham shredded, throwing pan ams, back stabs and the occasional airscrew. “We’re just out here to have a good time,” organizer Paul Gamache told me before our epic drive. “We may not even name winners.” We will. Parham goes big. So did the party. If there’s one thing a bunch of college students, dirtbag boaters and dreadlocked hippies can do, it’s throw a shindig. Gamache rounded up enough beer to keep everyone happy the entire weekend. And hungover.

Race day at the Burnt Ranch put-in looked something like the day after a wedding, when everyone has finished their respective “walks of shame,” cleared their eyes and found a way to move forward. We collected our bibs and walked down to the put-in. Gonski and I are running the river for the first time and discussing “stragedy.” “Just follow whoever’s in front of you and make your move at the end,” I advise...