Author Christian McKnight in circle, measuring Metlako Falls. Photo courtesy of Christian McKnight.

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My job, local extreme kayaker Dave Grove tells me, is to carry the climbing rope the remaining 20 feet to the lip of Metlako Falls, which is not too absurd since I had already walked a mile and-a-half up the Eagle Creek trail, then turned a hard right at an old growth cedar and dropped with dirt and gravity another 500 feet to where I am crouching right now.

But here is where the job gets a little dicey. The "trail" ends at a 20-foot medieval stairway, composed of slick basalt and unstable moss. Down there, Grove tells me, is a nub I can stand on, inches above Metlako's lip and at least a hundred feet above the next pool into which Metlako's white curtain falls. I mention the pool, because that is where I'll end up if I trip, slip or God-forbid, step on a piece of moss.

We don't know exactly how far I'd fall if I slip. In fact, that is why we're here: to measure it.

One month ago, Grove fell from the lip of the waterfall to the pool far below. It wasn't an accident. He had scouted the waterfall scores of times over a course of two years. And he didn't really fall. He sat in his kayak, waited for the thumbs up from the filmers and photographers, before he squeezed through the four-foot-wide notch and fell for 3.25 seconds. What he wondered when he was scouting and what he's wondering now, is do those 3.25 seconds add up to a world record.

Three years earlier Grove kayaked over the 83-foot Coosa Falls near Eugene, the biggest waterfall he had run in his four years of kayaking. He had scouted that waterfall for three years before he finally slid off the slick basalt and into the MacKenzie River just above the horizon line.

"I ran that waterfall and realized there was potential for running big drops," Grove said. "Really big drops. 100-feet big."

Grove decided then that he wanted to break the world record Tao Berman earned in August 1999 when he probed a 98.42-foot waterfall in Alberta's Johnston Canyon.

In the next two years, Grove kayaked off British Columbia's Mamquam Falls, where he spent four hours stuck inside a frothy cave and then broke his hand on 88-foot Bridal Veil Falls.

"That and Mamquam were the only two falls that really throttled me," Grove said. "But those are the ones everybody remembers."

By the time Grove found the waterfall that would break Berman's record, two other kayakers had already done what Grove had intended to do all along. Portland kayaker Tim Gross dropped Silverton's 101-foot Abiqua Falls in April 2002.

And then in August 2003, New Mexico's Ed Lucero ran the 105.6-foot Alexandra Falls in Northwest Territories' Hay River.

But there's a hitch: Both kayakers - Gross and Lucero - swam out of their kayaks upon impact, beckoning the age-old question: Do you have to stick it for it to count? Grove did stick his first descent of Eagle Creek's Metlako Falls so that technicality doesn't matter to him. What he needs to know is if it measures up.

Back at the Hood River News, Grove stretches out the climbing rope on the pavement, from the knot that indicated the waterfall's lip to the connected orange Nalgene water bottle that indicated the pool.

"I hope it's 110 or 120," he says before measuring it. "But if it's 90 I'll still be stoked. My goal was to be the first person to run a 100-footer and keep everything intact."

With a 10-foot tape measure, he measures eight, nine, 10 lengths before the rope runs out.

"We better measure it again," he says. "Just to be sure."

The second measurement renders the identical length: 101 feet, the third highest waterfall ever descended, the highest waterfall a kayaker ever descended without swimming.

"Cool," Grove says. "It's not the highest, but I still accomplished my goal."