Paul Palmer was at the lip of the 60-foot Tomata 1 waterfall on his first day kayaking in Veracruz, Mexico in December.
His crew of expert kayakers was planning to paddle some less daunting, but still demanding, drops downstream when one of them spotted something moving in the pool below.
“We were at the lip and someone says ‘There’s a dog down there,’” said Palmer, a professional kayaker from Colorado Springs who won a national freestyle kayaking title in 2017.
The black pup was perched on a mossy rock shelf on the side of a pool that spilled into Tomata 2, a narrow, rocky cascade that plummets 90 feet and is renowned by top paddlers as one of the gnarliest waterfalls on the planet.
If the dog was swept into Tomata 2, “it was gonna die, for sure,” Palmer said.
So the group — including paddlers Beckham Bayreuther, Gav Barker, David Mitchell and Sofia Reinoso — changed their plans. They would run Tomata 1, rescue the hound, navigate a consequential small waterfall to the very lip of Tomata 2 and climb out with the dog. (The group had ropes to rappel over the falls to reach a series of cascades in the inner gorge of the Rio Alseseca below Tomata 2.)
“I said we have all the gear. Let’s go get this dog out and we can do a different mission. A dog rescue mission,” said Palmer, who grew up with dogs. “There was no way that dog was going to survive a night in that cold gorge. And no way it would survive those downstream drops.”
Palmer rappelled into the pool and watched as his partners paddled over the 60-foot Tomata 1.
And then the real work began.
The only way the dog entered the gorge was over that 60-foot Tomata 1 drop. So she was rattled. Palmer spent about 30 minutes talking sweetly to the trembling, waterlogged pup. She eventually approached him. He held her for another 30 minutes.
“And she realized, ‘Yeah, you are my lifeline here,’” he said. “That was a big concern. Once we got down there we were just hoping that it wasn’t a feral, pissed, bite-y, mean dog.”
Portaging Tomata 2 is a sketchy endeavor. First paddlers need to drop a 7-foot waterfall and take out in the tiny swirling eddy above the lip of the rarely run, 90-foot Tomata 2 drop. Then they have to use ropes to scale wet rock to get to a safer place to rappel with their boats into the lower gorge. Doing that with a dog amplified the sketch factor.
Palmer loaded the dog on his sprayskirt — essentially on his lap — and wrapped his quick-release safety cord around her neck, like a leash. And he paddled over the 7-footer.
The dog stayed aboard over the drop. Palmer paddled to the shore and they set up safety ropes and began scaling the drenched cliff.
“We would climb 6 feet and hand the dog up to the next person and they would climb 6 feet and hand the dog up,” Palmer said. “If we fell, we were running Tomata 2 without a boat. It was a pretty stout little extract.”
Up top, the landowner and his workers watched the whole process. They had never seen the dog before. So the rescuers brought the pup to the Adventurerec hostel, a headquarters for kayakers exploring the rivers of Veracruz.
“She walked in there like ‘This is my hostel. These are my people,’” Palmer said. “Everyone there loves her. She loves it. Now she’s the dog that ran Tomata 1.”
Palmer says the pup already is motivating kayakers who ponder the classic Tomata 1 waterfall.
“Everyone can say ‘Come on, don’t worry about it. A dog ran it!’” he said.
Oh yeah … the name of the adopted waterfall-running pup: Tomata.