Lafayette
Any day now Darryl Brown and Rick Leitner will scream and throw themselves face-first into the biggest, meanest, coldest and most treacherous stretch of river Colorado has to offer. They’ll do this because:
A) They just found out Colorado made a John Denver tune its second official state song, and they’ve lost the will to live.
B) They are pioneers in the adrenaline-rush sport of river boarding.
C) They’re trying to get the jump on the rest of the Rockies’ baseball fans, people who typically wait until the all-star break to scream and fling themselves into a river.
The answer is B, of course. Brown and Leitner, friends and neighbors, are leading the charge into some of America’s wildest rivers, lying on their stomachs on high-tech boards they make in a garage.
How much fun is this thing? Well, it’s so much fun you have to wear baseball catcher’s shin guards to protect your legs from rocks.
“And, of course, you always have to worry about Jimmy,” said a smiling Brown, using a biologically incorrect reference to an area of the male anatomy that is just as important, if not more, than the shins.
Brown could have used a more scientific term. The 42-year-old has studied medicine and is an administrator at Boulder Community Hospital. Brown oversees the cardiac, respiratory and neuro-diagnostic departments of the hospital.
“You could say I’m the administrator of the heart, lung and brain departments,” he explained Monday night.
It should be noted that seconds after he explained his professional life, Brown threw himself onto one of the river boards on the floor of Leitner’s garage. Then he rocked from side to side, pretending he was riding down a river and narrating the fictional journey with sound effects that included “sploosh” and “ka-voooom.”
“It’s hard to describe the rush of river boarding,” Brown said. “It’s about pounding down some serious rapids on, like, a surfboard. In France and New Zealand, it’s huge.”
Then he looked at his buddy, Leitner.
“That dude right there, he’s a national rock-climbing dude,” Brown said. “He’s in all the books.”
Leitner, 52, is indeed a rock-climbing god and a lifelong Boulder-kinda-guy. You could say he has spent a lifetime hitting the crags and putting on some serious crank to hit the deadpoint of, like, an Egyptian. You know, if you talked like that.
In his real job, Leitner produces electrical processors and such. But in the fall of 2003, he and Brown made something else: their first river board. The idea came from a conversation about ways to go down a raging river. River boarding, they discovered, was big in places other than America.
Today their Rocky Mountain RiverBoards company (rockymountainriverboards.com), with its manufacturing plant in Leitner’s garage, knocks out about 30 boards a year. They are slick-looking sleds of 4-inch-thick polyethylene foam bolted to sections of quarter-inch plastic with nylon-web handles. There are two models, each selling for around $400.
In the spring of 2004, Leitner and Brown went together on the maiden voyage. This consisted of each of them with a river board, wet suits, helmets and swim fins chucking themselves into Clear Creek near Golden.
“It was like christening a ship with champagne,” Leitner said.
“Yeah,” Brown said. “But we didn’t have champagne, so we just spilled some beer on the boards.”
They’ve been river boarding spring, summer and fall ever since. Spring is the coldest.
“Water gets into a wet suit and warms up, but before it warms up, well, all kinds of things happen,” Leitner said.
They’ve sold some 70 of the river boards, to adventurous souls in California, Oregon and Canada who found the watercraft on the website. Only three boards have been sold in Colorado. Brown and Leitner figure that will change.
“Two years ago, people would see us in the river and yell ‘Dude, what are you doing?”‘ Brown said. “Now rafters and kayakers see us and yell ‘Wow. I’ve gotta try that.”‘
They said that by 2012, they hope to sell 2,000 boards a year. There are three other makers of boards in the U.S. None, Leitner said, are as good as theirs.
“Some of the others,” he said, “aren’t long enough for any, uh, protection.”
And in the fluorescent light of the world headquarters of Rocky Mountain RiverBoards, the two guys laughed.
“Yeah,” Brown said. “Some of those other boards don’t even cover Jimmy.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
