Rocky Contos is director of SierraRios, a non-profit organization that offers rafting trips down big, Grand-Canyon type rivers around the world.
These include rivers in Canada, South America, China, Africa and Mexico.
Contos is known for his pioneering first descents of numerous Mexican rivers. I asked him what first set his eyes on waters south of the border.
“I started paddling in 1990, when I was at UC Davis,” he told me. “At that time there was a lot of exploration going on, new rivers being opened up by new technology in kayak development, and I could see that the New Frontier for white water was going to be rivers in Mexico. Other paddlers had explored the area and run some of the rivers, but they had done it in the wintertime, which is the dry season in Mexico. When I went there, basically none of the rivers that drain into the Pacific had been run or paddled. So I went down pretty much every one of them. I was there for three full summers starting in the year 2000, whenever I could get time off from my studies working towards a PhD in neuroscience.”
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