Rainy November days in Slovenia… Most people seem to not enjoy this time of the year too much. Us kayakers are a bit special. For me, the best part of realizing that I was going to spend this fall back home was the expectation of this wet weather. Idrija is a creek on the border of Slovenia and Italy that needs a lot of rain to become runnable for kayakers. Not many people know of its existence but it is only one of many little streams in the area that bring so much joy to us kayakers. Locals like to swim in Idrija in the summer but when the water rises it turns into a roller-coaster-like kayak run through a beautiful forest. I only had a chance to run it once before and I didn’t know I was going to run it this time until a morning phone call to my buddy who lives close to it, on the day we ran it. That is how unreliable it is and I feel very lucky to have been able to enjoy it again.
I recently spoke to someone about a flood of poorly edited GoPro videos on the internet these days. I am guilty of putting some of those on the interweb myself. I am not sorry for that, instead, I am sorry for a lot more footage that is lost somewhere in my old hard drive collection. You see, before the boom of small action cameras, these experiences would have been reserved only for people, who get to go there. Nowadays, when someone wants to look a river up on the internet, they get to see it through our (kayakers’) eyes. They get to see the beauty of the landscape and experiences these special places provide for us. If by doing this, you end up “educating” someone new about the exceptionality of these places, maybe hydropower is not the only value our future generations will see in them.
Please enjoy my “poorly edited” footage from Idrija. It has a lot of value for me and I hope you get to visit it one day as well.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.