Whitewater

LEE'S FERRY, Ariz. - Commercial companies that sell whitewater rafting trips through the Grand Canyon call them "an adventure of a lifetime." But for do-it-yourself river runners, the slogan is more reality than hype. Whitewater enthusiasts today face a 20-year wait if they want to navigate the Colorado River on their own, mostly because a decades-old National Park Service formula gives 70 percent of paddling permits to commercial outfitters. The system is set up to benefit the rafting companies, complains Tom Martin of the Grand Canyon Private Boaters Association: "This is not a private business, it's a national park."

GOLDEN, Colo. -- A mile downstream, the Coors Brewery taps the water burbling up from springs adjoining Clear Creek, adds barley and hops, and turns it into beer. But kayaking fanatics upstream are putting the fabled Rocky Mountain waters to another use. From miles around, they are arriving to play in Clear Creek Whitewater Park, a quarter-mile stretch of rapids, engineered with gaping holes to create foaming white caps and maximum thrills right in the middle of town. Whitewater parks are popping up in cities all over Colorado.

IT WAS BACK in 1978 that a 31-year-old Arkansas attorney general and his wife were offered an investment that was too good to be true, and wasn't. For nothing down they got a half-interest in a land speculation deal called Whitewater, which failed. Their partner, James McDougal, borrowed his stake from a thrift he owned, which went belly up at a cost to taxpayers of $73 million. For such matters, some people in Arkansas never accepted Bill Clinton's election as governor. U.S. voters heard about this in 1992 and elected him president anyway.

WASHINGTON - It went into the history books as "Whitewater," the name of a peaceful river in the Ozark mountains on which Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton and their business partners hoped to sell dozens of rustic home sites. As the name for one of the murkiest and most complex scandals in political history, it should have been called the "Big Muddy." By the time independent counsel Robert W. Ray wrapped up the loose ends and closed a six-year investigation into the Clintons' activities, the details had become so clouded that almost no one could remember what the original issues were.

WASHINGTON - The Whitewater independent counsel concluded yesterday that an investigation that consumed six years and $52 million had found insufficient evidence to charge President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton with any criminal wrongdoing. The anticlimactic conclusion to the inquiry into a 12-year-old Arkansas land deal removed a black cloud that had hung over the president almost from the moment he took office. It comes just four months before his term ends - though for the first lady, who is in the midst of a Senate campaign, the report may be far more consequential.

Fourth in a series of profiles of local Olympians. He dances on the water, the churning froth around him supplying the melody. It's a tune Lecky Haller has known his entire adult life. It seduces him, tortures him, rewards him. Haller, 43, the world's premier tandem slalom canoeist, hopes the whitewater in Sydney will play him a victory song. This is not the first Olympics for the Glencoe native - he finished fourth in 1992 - but in all probability it is the last in a career that began in the early 1980s.

MOST PEOPLE would not call it great fun, thrilling even, to spend an hour and a half getting from Lake Avenue to 30th Street down the Jones Falls Expressway. But that's only because most people haven't tried it by canoe and kayak, as about 80 of us did on a pleasant Sunday last month. "How many other places could you do whitewater paddling through a city?" mused Michael Beer, co-chairman of the Jones Falls Watershed Association. Until recently, you could do it here only opportunistically, rushing out right after a rain rendered the urban stream's rocky, shallow channel floatable - but not too big a rain, which can turn the Jones Falls' concrete gorges deadly.

Maybe you've seen him chugging along the streets of Catonsville. Or perhaps you've noticed him paddling furiously on the Patapsco. Craig Law hopes the next time you see him he will be in Sydney, wearing the red, white and blue of the U.S. Olympic team. To make it to Australia, the Baltimore County resident will have to beat as many as 45 other competitors this weekend at the Olympic trials in whitewater slalom kayaking on Tennessee's Ocoee River. Law is a geezer on a mission, battling paddlers half his age. "At age 40, this is it. This is the twilight.

FRIENDSVILLE -- This place gives life to the phrase "golden October day." The sun is little more than a sliver over the top of Elder Hill at a rocky bend of the Youghiogheny River, making the bright yellow and burnished orange leaves of the oaks and maples lining the west bank glow as if they were lit from inside. Trails of mist rise from a pool where the river slows, then drift off on a light breeze toward the black of a mountain facing away from the sun. It is one of many postcard scenes in the 783 acres on the wild and scenic portion of the Youghiogheny (pronounced "YOCK-a-gainy")

After more than a decade of trying, the state has struck a deal to acquire the last large tract still in private hands along its premier stretch of whitewater river. The $2.7 million contract to purchase 783 acres on the wild and scenic portion of the Youghiogheny River in Western Maryland is scheduled to go before the Board of Public Works today. If approved as expected, the acquisition will substantially complete the state's program of preserving one of the nation's most famous stretches of whitewater.