THE BESTWHITE WATERRAFTING

Best by Lauren may earn a commission when you shop through certain links. Every product here was bought with my own money or tested for at least six weeks. No brand has paid to be included, and nothing is ranked higher because it pays more.

The Rogue is the one I grew up on, and it is still the first river I would put anyone on. It is the rare run that is genuinely beautiful and genuinely exciting without being frightening — you can take a family down it and you can also spend a week studying one rapid.

The other four are here because they are each the best at something: the biggest, the hardest, the easiest to actually do, and the most remote. Between them they cover almost everything rafting in this country can be.

What nobody tells you is that the difficulty is only half the problem. Three of these rivers are permit lotteries with worse odds than most universities, and the applications open in December for the following summer. That is the part to read first.

How the lotteries actually work

Three of these five — the Rogue, the Grand Canyon and the Middle Fork — are allocated by lottery through Recreation.gov, and two of those open the same window: 1 December to 31 January, for the following summer. Put a reminder in for the first week of December and apply for all of them in one sitting.

The Grand Canyon runs on its own schedule, drawn each February, and it is weighted — applicants who have not been recently, and who have never been, are favoured. That is worth knowing because it means applying every year is not wasted effort even when you lose.

If you lose all of them, commercial outfitters hold separate allocations on every river here. Going guided is not the consolation prize; on the Middle Fork and the Grand Canyon it is how the large majority of people go.

Reading the class numbers honestly

Class III is where most people can have a very good day with a competent guide. Class IV is where the consequences of a bad line start to matter. Class V is a different activity and the river does not care how fit you are.

The numbers also move with the water. A river at June snowmelt and the same river in late August are not the same river, and a Class III in high water can be harder than a Class IV in low. Ask an outfitter what the flow is, not just what the rating is.

And the rating describes the hardest rapid, not the day. The Rogue is a Class IV river that is mostly calm; the Upper Gauley is a Class V river that is mostly Class V.