A Whitewater River on Top of a Mountain
Near Wisp, Maryland
Just above the ski slopes at Wisp sits one of the strangest pieces of engineering in the Appalachians, a whitewater river running across the top of a mountain. It is called the Adventure Sports Center International, and every rapid you see is fake in the most impressive way. Opened in May of two thousand seven at a cost of around twenty four million dollars, it was only the third pump powered artificial whitewater course ever built in North America.
Instead of relying on a natural river, giant pumps lift water to the top of a concrete channel and let it come roaring back down through rapids that engineers can dial up or down like a volume knob. The gamble paid off in a very big way. In the autumn of twenty fourteen, this mountaintop course hosted the International Canoe Federation Canoe Slalom World Championships, held from the seventeenth through the twenty first of September.
Athletes from many countries came to paddle here, and the racing was broadcast to an international audience. For a few days, one of the least populated corners of Maryland was the center of the whitewater world.
