Three years ago, he descended the 134-foot Salto del Maule waterfall in Chile, the second-highest waterfall descent in history and an experience he likened to “falling off the face of the earth.” Jackson kayaks the Angel Wings falls in the Santo Domingo Gorge. The 29-year-old Jackson is as comfortable kayaking down an isolated gorge as he is competing internationally, having won four freestyle world championship titles since 2013. “It is a very remote spot,” says Jackson, “so you really have to make sure you trust your decision to run it and also the people there to help you.” Rush Struges, Rafa Ortiz, and Evan Garcia were the first people to run the waterfalls from top to bottom in 2013. Jackson and his friend Bren Orton became only the fourth and fifth people to ever complete the entire sequence, according to Jackson’s representative, due to the potentially dangerous nature of having such big waterfalls so close together. With one waterfall running straight into another, even a small mistake at the top of the descent can create problems later on. The whole section is high-risk, especially as the nearest hospital is nearly two hours away by car. “You have to really make sure you’re on line, which is why we really prioritized getting as much safety around that particular waterfall.”Īs part of those safety precautions, Jackson and his team checked the water levels and studied the surrounding area, then fitted ropes on either side of the river to help with any extraction if anything went awry. “They’re very uniquely-shaped,” says Jackson, “particularly those first two waterfalls – they’re very close together, which means from that first big, more challenging waterfall to the next, there’s almost no time. This section of the Rio Santo Domingo has been compared to a double black diamond ski slope. The first two are the tallest and therefore the most challenging Angel Wings drops about 80 feet and runs almost directly into The Dome, which is 85 feet. The run drops more than 300 feet in the space of 0.2 miles and is broken up into four sections: Angel Wings, The Dome, Toboggan, and Raw Dog. “It’s one of those sections that you just cannot believe even exists,” he tells CNN Sport, several weeks after descending the whitewater section in March. ![]() ![]() The American has taken his trademark pink kayak to some of the most remote waterfalls in the world, but few, he says, compared to the Santo Domingo Gorge in Mexico – home to the steepest, runnable section of whitewater in the world.īuried deep in a jungle in the southern state of Chiapas, the four tightly-packed waterfalls are well secluded from civilization, as hazardous as they are paradise for kayakers like Jackson. ![]() When Dane Jackson turned around and looked back at the tower of frothing water above him, he could scarcely believe what he had just experienced.
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