“I WAS CLUELESS. I HAD TO FIGURE IT OUT.THAT’S PRETTY MUCH HOW I LEARNED TO DO SPORTS.”
CHARLIE THOMAS
THE RUMOR AROUND JACKSON HOLE IS THAT CHARLIE Thomas, who is now 62 years old, has used up a few of his nine lives. Thomas first came to Jackson Hole in 1978 to do a senior project for high school that he says was mainly about staying out of trouble, and he admits he had some close calls in his early days in the outdoors. Most of those near-misses stemmed from ignorance. He learned his outdoor skills through trial and error. “I was clueless,” he says. “I had to figure it out. That’s pretty much how I learned to do sports.”
On his first climbs, he used seatbelt webbing for his anchors, tying straps together with overhand knots that often came loose. Eventually another climber took pity on him and showed him how to do it right. His first kayak adventure included an unplanned scoot over a riverwide ice shelf, his hands in dishwashing gloves and a garbage bag over the boat’s cockpit. He dropped his only flashlight after getting benighted on the descent from Teewinot. Despite his ignorance, he always landed on his feet and, in the process, became a skilled outdoorsman—so skilled he was one of the early kayakers to paddle the Box Canyon of the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River, which is still one of the most challenging multiday whitewater runs in North America.
But he almost didn’t land on his feet on one of his descents of the Box. In 1993, he was with a group of Jackson kayakers in the canyon. They were in a celebratory mood after figuring out a way to paddle through a section no one had boated before. With that piece of the puzzle in place, the run, which had originally required as many as 17 portages, was down to five spots where you had to get out of your boat and walk (or climb) around. Thomas missed one of the five. “I was fighting the flu,” he says. “So, I wasn’t operating on all cylinders. I pulled into an eddy above one of the portages, and I guess I forgot where I was. I pulled out and suddenly it was like I was going over the edge of the world.” Water yanked Thomas out of his boat immediately. He remembers flashes of light and dark. Later he realized the light came when he tumbled over waterfalls, and the dark was when he was pulled underwater. Then he popped up. He was totally unscathed. His boat, however, had been torn in half.
In the second miracle of the day, there was an abandoned kayak on the shore nearby that Thomas and his friends had found the year before. That boat—and a roll of duct tape—allowed him to paddle safely out of the canyon. “That was a bit of an awakening,” Thomas says. “I remember thinking, I have kids. I can’t do this. I never took risks like that again.”
Thomas has been married 35 years and has two adult children, both of whom share his passion for the outdoors. For his day job, he’s a woodworker and makes beautiful fine furniture, but all his spare time is spent exploring. Over the years, he’s collected countless first ascents of peaks and first descents of rivers in the Greater Yellowstone area, although he says his name isn’t always linked to those objectives because he and his friends often didn’t bother to record their accomplishments. To Thomas, first ascents are all about the adventure, not the glory. “I don’t think it’s an adventure if you know what is going to happen,” he says. “With real adventures, you don’t know the outcome.”
“I DON’T THINK IT’S AN ADVENTURE IFYOU KNOW WHAT IS GOINGTO HAPPEN.”