Extreme Off-Site

The Portage

The part of the adventure in which you ask yourself, "Is conflict resolution all that it's cracked up to be?"

Day Three, Wapshilla Rapids sandbar. It's dawn, and the temperature is already nearing 100 degrees. We have 24 hours to reach the take-out -- which is 30 miles away. A few miles downstream is the notorious Slide. But first, a potentially backbreaking portage awaits us. There's no real reason for the portage; it's a team reason, says Carrick. The idea: Put the decision makers in a tough spot, and see how the group responds.

The tough spot is this: Run Wapshilla Rapids, take out at the nearest sandbar downstream, then carry two of the boats and the gear back to the original starting point, upstream of the rapids.

The team's run-through of Wapshilla is textbook. The rest is anything but. The disagreement kicks off when Shannon Stowell, 31, and Chris Doyle, 34, the day's designated leaders, return from scouting a portage route. Stowell and Doyle announce that they've hatched the safest, most viable plan: The team will bushwhack with the boats, heading briefly inland through briar and prickly pear cactus back upstream. They say the other option, lining the rafts upstream with ropes and scrambling across the boulder-filled shoreline, is too risky.

Morford catches Chris Quinn, the head guide, rolling his eyes at the plan. So Morford tells Stowell that he doesn't have the team's buy-in. But no one else is criticizing the plan. For Stowell, what's missing is what's always missing when push comes to shove: Morford's buy-in. The mood sours; the battling starts in earnest, first about the portage, then about deals gone bad.

"This is just like that cable-channel deal,'' says Stowell, starting to boil over. "You said I had decision-making authority. So you let me get 99% of the way to closing it, and then you said it wasn't my decision to make, and you killed it.''

Morford retorts that he did what he had to do, and that if he'd been kept in the loop, he wouldn't have had to put the last-minute kibosh on the deal.

"Kept in the loop?" Stowell fumes. "You gave me every indication that you didn't want to be kept in the loop." In the case of the portage, Stowell continues, "we told everyone that we were going to scout and that all were welcome. You could have come with us, but instead you chose to sit on the beach.''

"The way I see it, you didn't come back to discuss what you found,'' Morford responds, wondering whatever happened to consensus. "You came to tell us what we were gonna do.''

Now the rest of the team jumps into the fray. Don Pickering, 28, who never favored the overland plan and wanted the leaders to line the rafts up the shoreline, backs Morford. Debbie Steinberg-Kuntz, 29, VP of merchandising, tells Pickering to butt out. Steinberg-Kuntz isn't one to get in someone's face, but Pickering, himself, raises sore issues. His exact role at the company -- he's coprincipal with Morford and his title is executive strategist -- is a tension-loaded mystery.

"You went on the scout, you made your case to Shannon and Chris, and you were overruled,'' Steinberg-Kuntz tells him. "You agreed to the decision, but now that there are others who agree with you, you want to reopen the discussion. And that's not right.''

Round and round they go. They're not really arguing about the portage; the quarrel is about who leads and who follows. It's about delegating versus consensus building. It's about their inability to trust one another fully. But at least -- at last -- they're not holding back.

Ultimately, the matter is left to the day's leaders. After consulting with guide Chris Quinn, who says they'll have to deflate all of the boats to prevent a potential puncture in the scrub, Stowell and Doyle decide that half the group should hike the luggage, and the other half should line the boats upstream. Ironically, the portage is a cinch, taking only 30 minutes.

As for the blowup, nobody knows exactly what to make of it. People are sure that it needed to happen, but it's impossible to say how and when the roles and leadership issues will be addressed. They certainly don't have the luxury of dealing with it right now. The Slide is only 30 minutes away. "We can't close the loop on everything,'' says Carrick, "but we can keep moving.''