Is anyone in California enjoying these storms? Yes. Kayakers

“It’s almost like life stops and you gotta work with Mother Nature and take advantage of it while it happens,” said Lindgren, a renowned 50-year-old professional kayaker.

Lindgren owns and operates Cosumnes River Ranch in Amador County. Even as floodwaters reached his property, he took time away from shoring up his business to kayak nearby rivers in their extraordinary states.

On New Year’s Eve, Lindgren met up with a few friends at Chili Bar, near Placerville, a standard put-in point on the South Fork American River for one of the most popular summer rafting and kayaking runs in the western U.S. Water was pumping at 38,000 cubic feet per second — more than 10 times its average flow during the height of spring melt — submerging the banks of what is normally a laid-back launch area, its level rising toward the span of a nearby highway bridge.

Paddles in hand, snug in insulated dry suits and clad in helmets, the men shoved off into a sea of roiling brown water and began whipping downstream. In ahelmet-cam video Lindgren posted to Instagram,you can hear his paddling buddies whooping as they pull into the main channel, wind pulsing in their ears.

A coupleof hours later, they’d churned 21 miles downstream, surfing up and over 20-foot standing waves and avoiding logs and debris zooming downriver. That section of the South Fork becomes a different beast at these levels — its moderate Class III features transformed into a barrages of rapids interspersed with sections of flatwater. Popping out of one’s boat and having to swim to safety could be extremely dangerous, and casual recreational kayakers should not attempt to go down these raging rivers.

幸运的是,一切顺利。在巴勒斯坦权力机构ddlers reached their takeout, near Folsom Lake, they estimated the combined flows of the South, Middle and North forks of the American River, which feed the reservoir, were pumping an astonishing 130,000 cfs.

Lindgren has been chasing flows almost every day of the past week — on the South Fork American, through the white-granite vein of the South Yuba and along the mighty free-flowing Cosumnes. He was due to fly to Colombia for a whitewater trip but postponed to enjoy the generational swell pumping through his backyard.

“这里有水时,这是最好的之一neighborhoods ever for paddling,” Lindgren said.

High precipitation sets the stage for these huge events, but they alone aren’t responsible for last weekend’s flow spikes. Coupled with intense rainfall, these occur when warm rain lands on deep snow high in the mountains, funneling blasts of meltwater down the Sierra’s steep drainages that multiply into super-charged torrents on main arteries like the South Fork American. These rare phenomena are what high-level kayakers like Lindgren wait for.

Lindgren likens these surges to the winter ocean swells that stir up monster waves at big-wave surfing spots like Mavericks. But that analogy is only so useful in accounting for their allure. Surfers can generally count on the Pacific to manifest at least a couple of great days at Mavericks each year. California kayakers, however, have watched climate change and drought whittle their passions down to a literal trickle at times, with fewer and shorter great paddling windows.

The peak periods for this style of high-water kayaking are ephemeral — often lasting only a day.

“It’s this fleeting thing where you have to seize the opportunities when you can,” said Carson Lindsay, a 30-year-old semi-pro kayaker and emergency room technician in Truckee. After paddling the South Yuba with Lindgren during a recent surge, Lindsay hopped a flight to Africa to run the Zambezi.

Within the Sierra foothills kayaking community, the past week is reminiscent of a notorious heavy-rain flood event on New Year’s Day 1997. Kayakers ran the rivers then too, but the experience was tainted by wreckage. Locals remember watching floodwaters suck away RV trailers and seeing 500-gallon residential propane tanks bobbing in the water amid fallen trees and debris. The South Fork American even swept a small cabin off of its pier blocks and carried it downriver until it smashed into a bridge.

“This time, there was more warning, people knew it was coming, so there were no RVs in the water or that kind of stuff,” said Jared Noceti, a 51-year-old kayaker from Placerville who paddled the South Fork American during its New Year’s Eve peak.

By and large, people living on the river were able to tie up their valuables or drag them out of harm’s way before the worst of the flooding, kayakers said. Still, many kayakers took time around their runs to help locals sandbag their homes and prepare for the deluge. Noceti and his team stopped at Camp Lotus, near Coloma, to help a friend haul benches and picnic tables out of the floodplain.

Even facing flood damage, some residents in the area took time away from defending their homes and businesses to enjoy the tumultuous event. Charlie Center, owner of Camp Lotus, said the flooding has caused “a ton of damage” to his property, but he went out kayaking near the height of the flow.

“A lot of the people around here sandbagging their homes were out paddling too,” he said. “We as kayakers appreciate that these events are all part of the process.

“It’s going to be a lot of work (to repair), but we’ll take it,” Center said. Amid years of historic drought, “I’d rather have the water.”

Gregory Thomas is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editor of lifestyle and outdoors. Email: gthomas@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @GregRThomas